Christopher Hitchens returned to the neighborhood of his youth, Finsbury Park in London. The neighborhood of his youth was gone, replaced by "burkas and shoe-bombers". In a must read column, Hitchens asks the question: "How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?"
They say that the past is another country, but let me tell you that it's much more unsettling to find that the present has become another country, too.
Hitchens paints a disturbing and depressing picture of present day London and Great Britain as a whole. Others have been preaching the same message: Melanie Phillips author of Londonistan, Mark Steyn author of America Alone, and the late Oriana Fallaci, author of The Rage and The Pride and The Force of Reason among others. Christopher Hitchens adds his unique voice to the argument in Vanity Fair. Politically correct multiculturalism is destroying Europe. Will America be next? Fallaci pleaded "Wake up! Wake up people! She described The Rage and The Pride, written just after 9/11, as "That scream of pain".
Hitchens closes his column with this grim truth:
It's impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie's death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims (see photograph), the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god. Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as "magnificent" and proclaimed that "Britain belongs to Allah." When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari'a, he replied: "Who says you own Britain anyway?" A question that will have to be answered one way or another.
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