Passive Tolerance

Never too late to awaken to the situation one has helped develop by indulgence toward the entitled demands of those who succeed in gradual advances overtaking a receptive country's culture and values and politics and social structure, to exchange it for another.

This is a phenomenon being seen all over Europe, as open-minded, generous and not-too-perceptive governments reflecting the progressive attitudes of those who elect them to high office, saw fit to infuse their nations with a wealth of immigrants incapable or refusing to assimilate.

Living in their separate and separated enclaves by deliberate choice through rejection of prevailing social mores and cultivated political values, a stealth campaign was mounted to assert the rights of immigrants to special dispensations, recognition that their culture, the
ideological, political and judicial demands of their religion be paramount to the prevailing national constants of values.

See no evil, hear no evil, but evil was being spoken and it was being picked up and echoed and embellished and claimed as a right too, through the merits of multiculturalism, and the acceptance of cultural relativism. Which bred a hearty share of home-grown jihadists soon enough mounting violent attacks on the very institutions and populations which had so generously welcomed them to find refuge on their shores.

But no more. The Islamists living so comfortably within Britain that they feel confident enough to preach their incendiary messages on public street corners, not needing to be confined to fundamentalist mosques have been placed on notice. Which will help their studied defiance no end, since they feel entitled to believe it a mere matter of time before Britain is theirs.

But Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron has seen that hand writing its message on the wall that seems to have escaped his predecessors whose faint-hearted responses were deplored as being too onerous and unfair. Like other countries of Europe who have enacted some fairly innocuous laws like banning hijabs and minarets, Britain has now declared itself to have ended its 'passive tolerance'.

Freedom of speech and religion, democratic and equal rights regardless of creed, gender, sexual orientation is a verity, and those who insist on their right to express and to spread extremist views, as it is put, will be actively confronted. Isn't that so quaintly British? Actively confronting extremists. Is this a war of words, of ideas, of values, a rejection of fundamentalism?

A confrontation with those for whom the white British protestants opened their hearts and minds to admit dark-skinned, tradition-bound, culture-obsessed, religion-biased refuge-seekers who then turned around and spat on them and their vaunted freedoms?

Ah, there's the explanation: no more public money, no sharing of political platforms for those who degrade democracy, equality and integration.

That'll do it.