Prince Charles is right to raise the alarm over Islamic extremism says LEO MCKINSTRY
WESTERN leaders are working themselves into a frenzy of indignation over the crisis in Ukraine. But all their excitable posturing and bellicose rhetoric against Russia cannot hide the reality that by far the greatest threat to our civilisation remains militant Islam.
In the Middle East and Asia, Muslim dominance spells oppression and persecution. Across Europe the advance in the Muslim population has brought friction and extremism.
For too long our rulers have been in craven denial. Even when confronted by problems such as the rise of homegrown terrorism or the abuse of vulnerable white girls by predatory Pakistani sex gangs they continue to spout the deceitful mantra that this growing catalogue of menace has "nothing to do with Islam".
But now a surprising voice has spoken out against this culture of institutionalised cowardice. In an interview for BBC Radio 2 yesterday Prince Charles used frank language to highlight the destructive impact of Muslim fundamentalism both at home and abroad.
Describing the radicalisation of young Muslim men in Britain as "alarming", he said that "people who have come here or are born here" should "abide by the values and outlooks" of British society.
In addition to this challenge to Muslim separatism within Britain, the Prince of Wales also strongly condemned Islamic tyranny abroad. In his own powerful words, Christians living in the Middle East are now "intimidated to a degree you can't believe".
News outlets reported yesterday that the Prince's interview had caused a storm. That is just an indicator of the grip the twisted doctrine of multiculturalism has on our public life.
There should be nothing remotely controversial about an expectation from the heir to the throne that British citizens should respect our values of pluralism, democracy, equality and tolerance.
Yet in the bizarre inverted moral universe created by the politically correct brigade criticism of Islamic bigotry is presented as an attack on Muslims just as demands for action against Pakistani child abusers in Rotherham are seen by some as a form of racism.
'Destructive impact at home and abroad'
But the Prince of Wales could never be accused of prejudice against Islam. Indeed, his comments yesterday had all the more resonance precisely because he has long been deeply sympathetic to the religion.
He has studied the Koran in depth and is renowned for his love of Islamic architecture.
In 2004, he won an international prize from the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies for his contribution to the understanding of Islam in the West.
Two years later, he was the first westerner to address the Islamic University in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. It could be said that like many others, the Prince has been forced by recent events to deepen his understanding of radical Islam.
For all yesterday's supposed controversy this is not the first time he has spoken out on this subject.
In December 2013 he warned that Christians in the Middle East face "intimidation, false accusation and organised persecution" at the hands of "fundamentalist Islamic militants", a warning he repeated last November.
He is absolutely right about this savage theocratic oppression throughout the Middle East and Asia. Christians are now the most persecuted believers in the world.
In Iraq, for instance, 70 per cent of the Christian population has fled since 2003 while 700,000 Christians have left Syria since 2011.
Further east, Pakistan has rightly become infamous for its climate of barbaric sectarianism. In one harrowing incident last November a mob of around 1,200 burnt to death a Christian couple for alleged blasphemy by placing them in an industrial kiln.
The woman, a pregnant mother of four, was wrapped in cotton to make sure that she would be quickly incinerated.
Prince Charles is equally correct about the need to uphold our own liberties at home. It is grotesque that, after centuries of social progress, parts of our society are now scarred by religiously–inspired misogyny, violence, corruption, superstition and division.
Female genital mutilation would have been unthinkable here only a few decades ago. Today there are estimated to be 137,000 women who have endured this torture.
Similarly around 3,000 women suffer socalled "honour" attacks every year, hardly a surprise given that, according to one poll, 20 per cent of young Muslim men think that physical "punishment" of women is justified to protect a family's honour.
The rise in the Muslim population, now numbering almost three million in Britain, has also meant growing radicalism in schools, anti–Semitism, ballot box fraud, exploitation of the welfare system and dangerous criminal behaviour.
Almost half of Muslims over 16 are economically inactive while 21 per cent of prisoners in our high–security jails are Muslims.
The Prince's concern about the failure of too many Muslims to integrate is reflected not only in the disturbing number of British–born jihadists fighting in the Middle East, whose total may be as high as 2,000, but also in other factors such as the adoption of alien dress codes or demanding sharia law.
Over the years the Prince of Wales has been proved right on a host of issues such as traditional education or the dire aesthetics of modern architecture. Yesterday he again showed that he is more in touch than many of our politicians about our country's future.
