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In a fiery exchange recorded in 2014, Brigitte Gabriel took issue with a student hijabi wittering the usual fatuous nostrums about the “peaceful majority of Muslims”. Gabriel responded that the peaceful majority are irrelevant.
After all, the majority of Germans were not Nazis and, even among Nazis, only a hardcore minority were fiercely anti-Semitic. Academic Peter Merkl wrote an exhaustive study of the history of hundreds of foundational Nazis. He found that 33.3 per cent of them showed no interest in anti-Semitism, 14.3 per cent expressed “mild verbal clichés” regarding Jews, 19.1 per cent displayed “moderate” disdain for Jewish cultural influence in Germany, while only 12.9 per cent advocated “violent countermeasures” against Jews.
So, the really violent anti-Semites were a minority of a minority. The majority didn’t matter.
The same story goes for communists (Russian and Chinese), fascists, and so on. The vast majority of folks were uninterested in political activism and peaceful. It didn’t matter. Margaret Mead was right, if not for the reasons she probably thought, when she said that small groups of committed people changed the world.
We’re failing to learn that lesson to our peril, again, as Islam suffuses the West.
Across the West, Muslims wield a political clout, occupying positions on councils and in legislatures, seemingly far outsizing their three per cent of the population.
Lest anyone dismiss the potential political influence of a million Muslims (or about four per cent of our population), consider what has just happened in Britain, where “Gaza candidates” have just won more than 40 of the 2000 seats up for grabs in last week’s English local government election. This has been driven by a campaign very similar to the one now running here.
The Muslim Votes Matter website, here in Australia, is attempting to mobilise Muslims to vote on Muslim issues, in the seats where Muslims are five per cent plus of voters.
As it happens, the seats with the largest percentages of Muslim voters are all Labor seats, including several ministers. Pure political selfishness has undoubtedly skewed the Albanese government’s agenda. These are voters who will put religious allegiance ahead of politics.
There’s an almost exact parallel in Britain, a website called The Muslim Vote, with a very similar format, that’s equally trying to get Muslims to vote as a bloc, especially over Gaza. This political mobilisation of Muslims must be taken seriously, with the BBC reporting: “in the 58 local council wards … where more than one in five residents identify as Muslim, Labour’s share of the vote was 21 per cent down”. What this suggests is that many British Muslim voters were punishing the party they usually support, even though it has been somewhat more pro-Palestine than the Tories, on the basis that it hasn’t been sufficiently pro-Hamas.
A particular grievance, it seems, is the fact 80 per cent of British MPs, including most Labour MPs, voted against a Scottish Nationalist resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, on the grounds that they didn’t want to give victory to Hamas.
The primacy of Islamic allegiance is shown by the fact that the Muslims elected to British councils campaigned – not on traditional local government stuff but foreign policy.
Put simply, they weren’t interested in domestic policy at all other than as it impacted on Gaza, meaning it was a win built on a platform that had nothing to do with the country in which they live.
In Leeds, the successful Greens candidate, Mothin Ali, dressed in Palestinian robes, celebrated his victory shouting “Allahu Akbar” and declaring “this is a win for Gaza”.
And having won political clout, Muslims are determined to wield it.
In the wake of the council elections, The Muslim Vote is now making 18 demands of British Labour, including the immediate recognition of Palestine, ending all military ties with Israel, permitting Muslim prayers at schools, ensuring Sharia compliant government benefits and dropping references in legislation to religiously motivated violence.
In response, British Labour leader and likely next prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has promised to win back the trust of Muslims alienated by his stance on the Middle East conflict.
In other words, he’s going to give Muslims exactly what they want.
Before concluding that there could be no similar capitulation to Islamist pressure here, note Education Minister Jason Clare’s (whose electorate is 30 per cent plus Muslim) hard-to-credit statement this week that “from the river to the sea” is not objectionable because it means “different things to different people”.
The Australian
With Labor absolutely depending on Western Sydney to even hope to hold on to government, nobody should kid themselves that the Muslim lobby in Australia hasn’t been handed a massive political bludgeon. Nor should anyone be under any delusion that they’ll use it.
The majority is irrelevant.
