This is the moment the mask slipped

An Oxford Union debate exposed Islam’s outsized influence in Britain

It’s a bad time for British academia. The University of Cambridge faces a credibility crisis after its faculty was taken in by what appears to be a serial fantasist.

The plagiarism allegations that have dogged Jason Arday, formerly the youngest Black professor ever to walk these hallowed halls, reveal the extent to which woke ideology has corrupted Cambridge’s hiring practices.

Is academic rigour merely a charade? How could these academics be so incurious? Is equality of opportunity now secondary to identity and victimhood? Unsettling questions abound.

The outrage is, therefore, understandable. That being said, the Arday affair was not the most chilling revelation to emerge from Britain’s elite institutions last week.

The Oxford Union finally released its debate on Islam following months of pressure, which, before it got drowned out by the Arday affair, exposed the religion’s insidious influence in Britain.

The particular moment I’m referring to was made all the more shocking because it was antithetical to the Union’s professed belief in the right to express one’s opinions freely and have them challenged – a guiding principle that the Union is keen to stress at every opportunity.

Sitting proudly on its website is Harold Macmillan’s proclamation that the debating society, which was founded in 1823, is “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world”.

The quote’s attribution reads, or rather shouts: ‘PRIME MINISTER OF THE UNITED KINGDOM 1957-63, LIBRARIAN OF THE UNION, 1914’, making the point that freedom of expression and independent inquiry are central pillars upon which human greatness rests.

The Union’s commitment to free speech has nonetheless been scorned and scrutinised over the course of its 200-odd-year history, not least because it has tended to only reflect the views of a cossetted and craven elite.

The most infamous example of this was in 1933, when students voted 275 to 153 to pass the infamous motion, “That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country”.

The resolution ignited a national firestorm, with Winston Churchill going as far as to say it revealed Britain had lost its moral courage to fight Adolf Hitler’s aggression.

The charge that the Union is stacked with progressive appeasers is therefore not new, but it arguably found its most toxic expression this year when leaked WhatsApp messages revealed the president of the Oxford Union debating society described Hamas’s murderous assault on Israel on 7 October 2023 as “proportional” and said groups branded as terrorists were often later “lauded as heroes” in a student group chat.

Let’s also not forget that her appointment followed George Abaraonye, the previous president-elect, who was ousted for celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk (he posted a message on Instagram which read “Charlie Kirk got shot loool”).

As odious as I find their positions, I defend their right to hold them. I’m reminded here of what the great novelist Salman Rushdie once famously said about freedom of expression, that “Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist”.

I find it sanity-restoring, then, that in the spirit of free speech, the Union’s first Palestinian president – the one who previously appeared sympathetic to a Jihadi death cult (Arwa Elrayess said the allegations made against her were “categorically untrue” and that her comments had been taken out of context) – invited Tommy Robinson to debate the motion “This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam”.

More admirable still is that she faced a barrage of hate for doing so and defended her decision in an article in The Telegraph.

You can imagine my complete disappointment, then, that Elrayess and the other speakers opposing the motion were all too willing to violate the very principle they professed to uphold for fear of offending Muslims.

I’m referring to the moment the Chamber descended into chaos after Laurence Fox, who was arguing in favour of the motion, brandished an envelope purportedly containing a cartoon picture of Muhammad.

You can feel the temperature rising in the room as Fox says the cartoon picture in his envelope “instills in me feelings much more worrying than suspicion” and “My wife asked me not to show this for fear of repercussions for my family” but “I will not be commanded to love or submit to ideas or ideologies”.

That same president who’d shown a rare flash of bravery leading up to the debate suddenly leapt out of her chair and attempted to cut the speaker off in a fit of panic.

“Is it not enough that half the team that invited you to this debate were Muslim women who wanted to hear your expression and your arguments? Is it not enough that I, as a Muslim president, have invited you to this Chamber to give your arguments? Is it not enough justification and evidence for you to believe that we do believe in free speech?,” she cried.

Even Jacob Rees-Mogg, who, like Macmillan before him, was elected Librarian of the Oxford Union, joined the rising chorus, wondering aloud whether the ban on using props in the House of Commons somehow extends to the Union in a desperate attempt to stall Fox.

His ploy was ultimately dismissed after a point of order ruled that there’s no ban on using props in the House and a young chap in the audience rather brilliantly made the point that no such prohibition was applied to PLO flags that had been flown in previous debates.

When it came to the grand reveal, a collective terror paralysed the debating chamber. It was as if Fox was about to utter Voldemort’s name and trigger the Taboo curse to summon the Death Eaters.

Instead, he opened the envelope and unveiled a cartoon picture of Rees-Mogg. It was a stroke of genius that proved his point and, to my mind, instantly won the debate.

Although it got a few laughs, the reaction to the mere suggestion was no laughing matter and there are serious lessons that need to be drawn from it.

In many respects, the collective hysteria was understandable. From armed Islamists storming the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and murdering 12 people to the beheading of the French teacher Samuel Paty and the Batley school teacher who, at the time of writing, is still in hiding, showing depictions of what Laurence Fox provocatively called the “very oversensitive sky wizard” can put your life in grave danger.

“Oversensitive” being the optimal word. How can a free and democratic society founded on enlightenment values live alongside a group of people who are uniquely combustible?

Before the usual suspects pile in, I’m not saying most Muslims are not Islamists. I draw all the necessary distinctions between moderate adherents of the faith and its radical arm.

I also acknowledge that there’s no way of knowing exactly what percentage of the two billion Muslims worldwide are sympathetic to extremists or are in fact extremists.

But there are some concerning data points. In 2006, as thousands gathered across the Muslim world to burn European embassies, issue threats and even take hostages in protest against 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper, a February 2006 Ipsos poll of British adults found that 62 per cent agreed that Muslims were right to be offended by the cartoons, while 22 per cent disagreed.

More concerning still, in a survey of 1,000 British Muslims undertaken for the BBC by the polling organisation ComRes in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack, four-fifths (78 per cent) of respondents found it ‘deeply offensive’ when the Prophet Mohamed was depicted in images, while almost one-third (32 per cent) of British Muslims said they were not surprised by the attacks on the magazine offices.

However, more than two-thirds of those polled said violence against the cartoonists and publishers behind the cartoons was unjustifiable. Almost all (95 per cent) described feeling loyal to Britain, while 93 per cent believed they should obey British laws.

Extrapolating the results of these surveys on a global level nonetheless suggests there are potentially millions of Muslims who are to varying degrees sympathetic to the motives of terrorists, even if they wouldn’t carry out these attacks themselves. This presents a moral challenge to the West.

One theory as to why this religious intolerance has resisted modernity is that it has found strange bedfellows in the modern age. Attributing a mystical power to words and images is central to identity politics, or what its critics refer to as the new religion.

Infantilising adults by treating them as if they are too fragile to be exposed to certain words and images is a common tactic among identitarians. It’s both a pathology and a power play.

The rub is that human flourishing requires constant inquiry and error correction. Identity politics isn’t interested in either. It’s all about hiding behind protected characteristics and finding sacrificial lambs.

The most absurd example of this came in 2018, when Netflix’s top spokesman Jonathan Friedland was fired by the streaming giant after using the N-word during a PR meeting about sensitive language, where he was discussing why certain offensive words should not be used. Apparently, his good intentions counted for nothing. The mere utterance of the word made him disappear.

Whether it be Islamism or anti-racism, no set of ideas or system of beliefs should go unchallenged. We desperately need the adults back in the room. The future of Western civilisation depends on it.