GORDON BROWN IN 2005: "MUSLIMS ARE OUR MODERN HEROES"

The kind of blindness that allowed some of the world's most vicious Islamists to take root in the very center of one of history's greatest civilizing empires - that doesn't happen by chance. You have to try to be that myopic. Luckily, say what you will about the British, they do have a kind of gritty determination to achieve their goals. In this case, their achievement might be cultural suicide:

Brown said at the Board of Deputies dinner: "With others, including the Portland Trust, we are ready to underpin a political road map with an economic road map." When Gordon Brown was guest speaker at the Muslim News Awards for Excellence dinner in London in March 2005 he praised the "huge contribution" British Muslims make to Britain's success. He described British Muslims as "our modern heroes; standing for the highest ideals, bearing burdens, and bringing hope to us all in Britain."

All of that is obviously nonsense, but let's bracket most of it. After all, things like "ideals" and "burdens" are ethical issues, notoriously tangled and subject to relativist arguments. Fair enough. But is there any defensible argument for describing the thrust of contemporary Islam as "modern"? Really? There are undiscovered tribes of pygmies in the African rainforest who have a better understanding of biological science than Islamic scholars guided by sharia law. That is, unless you really believe that a baby can stay in the womb for five years. In which case you are an idiot.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]