Nigel Farage: ‘If we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose’

No. Farage isn’t up for the job.


Nigel Farage: ‘If we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose’

This means that Farage will not be discussing the jihad threat, or how jihad is central to Islam. He will instead continue to pretend, like all other politicians, that Islam is peaceful, benign, and fully compatible with free societies.

Farage has been useless for years. Several years ago, Australian human rights activist Avi Yemini interviewed him, and Farage revealed his abject ignorance of Islam and the jihad threat. Farage made an absurd moral equivalence in claiming that the Old Testament was incompatible with Western values in the same way that the Qur’an is. The difference is that the Old Testament has been part of Western culture since there has been a Western culture, and interpretative traditions are mainstream in Judaism and Christianity that mitigate its violent passages and other aspects that are not in accord with modern understandings of human rights. There is no such tradition in Islam.

Farage insists that the vast majority of Muslims are assimilating and accepting Western values; he lacks, however, any coherent idea of how to deal with those who aren’t. Farage makes the familiar conflation of Islam and Muslims, arguing that if one finds any problem with Islamic texts and teachings, one is condemning all Muslims. There is no reason why that should be so, and if he would foreclose upon any discussion of the motivating ideology behind jihad terror and Sharia oppression, how can he confront them?

Farage insists that we must not think that we are at war with the entire religion. But what, Mr. Farage, are we to think about the Muslims who consider themselves and their religion to be at war with us?

Nigel Farage has become just another mainstream hack politician.