Dreaming of an Islamist Ireland by Ruth Dudley Edwards May 2010 in Standpoint

Posted on April 30, 2010 by dialogueireland

Dreaming of an Islamist Ireland by Ruth Dudley Edwards
May 2010 in  Standpoint
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/2937

It is a dispiriting business trying to convince the Republic of Ireland’s politicians or liberal elite that trouble lies ahead if they fail to avoid the mistakes made in Britain regarding Islamism. Due to my well-known track record as a virulent critic of Sinn Fein/IRA, I am typecast as unhelpful. In most debates in Ireland, I am Cassandra to my opponents’ Pangloss. “Why do you always have to be so negative?” they say when I speak of dodgy mosques, hidden agendas, dangerous fundamentalists and worrying precedents with headgear. “There’s no problem. Our Muslims aren’t like those Muslims you have in England. Our Muslims are lovely.” This blithe belief is based on a vague assumption that homicidal Muslims in the UK are all illiterate unassimilated Pakistanis who have been understandably radicalised by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The perception has been that all our nice educated diverse domestic Muslims would understand that the Irish people as a whole were fervently anti-war and therefore remain content and anxious to integrate.
Radical Islam is producing a variation on Ireland’s long history of being an unwitting pawn in Continental wars. Over the centuries, French, Italians, Spaniards and Germans have been dispatched for wholly cynical reasons to aid uprisings against English rule. Now Islamic jihadists are using the Republic as a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the West. Dublin is a centre of Muslim Brotherhood activity, zealots are pushing the familiar policy of exceptionalism to encourage the separation between Muslim and kuffar (non-believing heretics) that is a vital stage in Islamification. There is plenty of Arab money to finance Sunnis and promote Wahhabism, and niqabs and burqas are beginning to appear in public places. Shias number only about 5,000, and whereas a decade ago they were stressing a common faith with Sunnis, since the war in Iraqi started there is a sectarian divide emerging which is reminiscent of the Irish Catholic versus Protestant past.