Signs of the times

Good lord, what on earth is happening in Britain? Some schools refuse to teach about the Holocaust for fear of upsetting Muslims? Just how badly do the British people want to be dhimmis, anyway? Because that's where they're headed.

On the other hand, if there were no Muslims to speak of in Britain, there would be plenty of reason to worry about Britain's future. There's been lots of blogging today on the NYT story about a Methodist church building in a British market town which is now going to become a mosque. As I read the piece, I got uncomfortably in touch with my inner Dinesh D'Souza, and realized that if I lived in this town, I might welcome this turn of events. The church was turned into a factory in the 1960s, when its congregation had dwindled, so it's not like Christians were worshiping there last week. And consider this:

In working-class neighborhoods, the differences are stark between white Britons and immigrant Muslim Asians, who began arriving in significant numbers from former British colonies in Pakistan and Bangladesh in the 1970s. The whites are less likely to marry, and they bear more children out of wedlock, trends many Muslims, who put stock in intact families, find disturbing.

The high rate of alcohol consumption among whites sets the groups apart, too. In Blackburn and Preston, increasing numbers of neighborhoods have become exclusively Muslim, and the growing influence of the conservative Wahhabi school of Islam is more and more apparent among women who wear black robes and cover all but their eyes.

In Blackburn, the constituency of Jack Straw, the leader of the House of Commons, there are 30,000 Muslims among a population of 80,000. But in a telltale sign for the future, the number of children 10 years and younger is evenly divided between Christian and Muslim.

It is those demographics, and the visibility of Blackburn’s 40 mosques alongside the ancient Christian church spires, that frightened the mosque opponents in Clitheroe.

The white Brits are increasingly a dissolute mob of drunkards who wallow in bastardy. Don't believe me? Read Theodore Dalrymple, the British prison doctor. Or see this report from the Telegraph:

Half of all babies will be born to unmarried mothers by 2012 if present trends continue, says new research that suggests the rapid erosion of moral and religious taboos.

Moreover, fewer than half of families will consist of married couples and up to a third could be lone parents, said Dr Peter Brierley, a former Government statistician now specialising in religious trends.

Dr Brierley's projections followed the publication of official figures yesterday showing that the number of births outside marriage has almost quadrupled in recent decades.

And check out this report from The Independent:

Doctors warn that conditions such as cirrhosis of the liver are now starting to appear in people who are still in their teens, prompting calls for special detoxification clinics to be set up around the country for teenage drinkers.

Dr Sarah Harris, an expert on alcoholism at the Royal College for General Practitioners, said: "There is currently no national provision for youngsters addicted to drink but it would be entirely appropriate to have some adolescent clinics for alcohol abuse."

Dr Claire Casey, head of a new youth detox unit at the private Priory Group, said: "We have children presenting with all the adult symptoms of alcoholism. Some are so addicted that it is actually dangerous to get them to stop drinking straight away.''

New figures reveal that Britain's teenagers are drinking twice as much as they did a decade ago, with half of all 13-year-olds consuming more than 10 units a week. The amount being consumed by 11- to 13-year-olds has gone up almost threefold in the same period, with doctors citing the cultural shift towards 24-hour drinking.

Given the moral and civil disorder overtaking Britain, and the weakness of the state and cultural institutions in dealing with it (a dismal fact exhaustively chronicled by Dalrymple), one fears that Britain is rapidly approaching a condition in which the only source of order and stability in some neighborhoods and towns will be ... the mosque.

But what kind of mosque will it be? I've mentioned on this blog on several occasions a conversation I had with an Arab Muslim journalist living in Britain, who said that she and her husband feared for their children. On the one hand, she and her husband just wanted their daughters to be good Muslim girls, but they were afraid the girls would get caught up in hard-line Islamism. On the other hand, Britain's irreligious mainstream culture, with its sex, its drinking and its materialism, was no alternative. They were trapped. I imagine there must be many Britons (Muslim and non-Muslim) who feel that way. Who speaks for them?

Anyway, if I lived in Clitheroe, and yob culture ruled my streets, chances are I would take my Christian self over to the mosque and see if we could stand together against the barbarians among us. But if the mosque were in any way Wahhabist ... what, then? Emigration?