From Clive Christie Sir: I can quite believe Rod Liddle's
suggestion (Fear, loathing and respect', 20 March) that the Western Left sees Islam as the great new anti-capitalist hope. In the global competition of ideas and values, however, the West is already winning hands down. From the Strait of Gibraltar to the Timor Sea, Muslims are risking penury, barbed wire, drowning, asphyxiation in containers, imprisonment and humiliation in order to get out of the Islamic world and into the West.
It is this unpalatable fact — that a neverending flood of Muslims would rather live under Western than Islamic values — that has unleashed Muslim rage among some Islamic thinkers and encouraged a serious reappraisal of Islamic relations with the West and bourgeois liberal democracy among others. How typical of the Western Left that it should jump on the Islamic militant bandwagon just as it is about to topple into the nearest ditch.
Clive Christie
University of Hull
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