Rev.Dr.Peter Mullen
The following is a talk given by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen BA, PhD - Chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, at Chichester UKIP Public Meeting held on 24th March 2010On the platform with Peter Mullen, were Lord Pearson of Rannoch - Leader of the UK Independence Party and Andrew Moncreiff - Prospective Parliamentary candidate for the Chichester constituency. About 200 people were in the audience with, at a guess, 35% UKIP members and the remainder members of the public who had attended in response to the meeting being extensively advertised.
My Lord, ladies and gentlemen, it is a privilege and a delight for me to have the opportunity to address supporters of the only party with the character and will to rouse our country to face the existential dangers which threaten us. I must begin by saying that, although I am Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, I am speaking for myself this evening and my words will in no respect present the views of the Church. The hierarchy will surely be rather relieved to hear this!
Before we can overcome the problems we must, of course, understand precisely what these problems are. Again, UKIP seems to me to be the only party with the wit to identify these great dangers and to explain their nature without woolliness or that cowardly evasiveness based on the deadly euphemisms of political correctness. Twelve years ago, when totalitarian regimes were falling in the east - falling faster even than today's Conservative party in the opinion polls - the distinguished poet and administrator C.H.Sisson said to me, "It is a pity that, just when the tyrannical bureaucracies of Eastern Europe are collapsing, we are so keen to construct something very like them in the West". He was talking, of course, about the burgeoning of authoritarian power in the EU.
At this point I must insert a disclaimer. I am not anti-European. So often our party is sneered at as being full of little Englanders, but I am sure most of us are not such backwoodsmen. I love the Europe of Montaigne, Pascal and Immanuel Kant, of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; of Goethe, Schiller, Rembrandt; the Europe in which the great philosophical theologians Aquinas and Anselm felt at home in monasteries and universities that were truly international and fraternal. I am talking about European culture and civilisation which, for fifteen hundred years and more, has been one of the greatest achievements of human endeavour.
They try to sell us the EU as if it were this European heritage. It isn't! The EU is the opposite of civilisation. The EU is the enemy of Europe. It represents Europe in its decadence and its death throes. Whenever a civilisation is in decline, it does what the EU is doing today. Instead of creativity and bold involvement with the world, it turns inwards upon itself and becomes obsessed with its own structures. It begins to despise its own history and tradition and so, instead of being confident in its historic culture, it becomes paranoid and nit-picking, setting up what are called 'systems' and 'structures' - in T.S.Elliot's phrase,..."dreaming of systems so perfect that no-one will need to be good". We are dying because the elites which control us actually hate what we have achieved, all the good things we have fought for over the centuries.
But, of course, the systems it invents are not perfect. The labyrinthine, Kafkaesque nightmare of EU procedures is one monstrous lie. And upon this lie, all other lies are constructed like some modern version of the Tower of Babel;. The lie that people of Europe have democracy, when actually we are all dominated by the diktats of a corrupt and self-serving elite. The lie that we shall have a say in governance of our continent, when actually all the plebiscites and referenda which go against the wishes of the lying elite are cancelled or re-jigged until they produce the required result. The lie that the business of the super-state is being conducted efficiently and honestly when, in reality, it is a continental bureaucracy run on a system of bribes, with proper accounts neither produced nor audited for decades. The lie propagated by the bureaucratic elite that European culture and values will be preserved - while what they are really up to is fixing immigration policy on a model which will create a Europe essentially Muslim within a generation.
The terrifying prospect for Europe is a take-over by an Islamist barbarism, which will reduce the glittering achievement of 2000 years of Judeao-Christian civilisation to the chaos and desolation of Muslim-dominated states throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and much of Africa. When you mention this apocalyptic prospect to the apparatchniks in the EU, and their toadying followers in all the main British political parties, you will be condemned as 'Islamophobic'. Good, I say! When something is fearsome, the right response is first to fear it, so that you can then turn to overcoming it
There is a worldwide jihad. It is not the so-called "clash of civilisations". It is a life and death struggle between our dying civilisation and Islamist barbarism. Listen to the words of Professor Marcello Pera, former President of the Italian Senate.
"Is there a war, perhaps? I answer yes, there is a war, and I believe that the responsible thing to do is to recognise it and to say so, regardless of whether the politically-correct thing to do is to keep our mouths shut.
In Afghanistan. Kashmir, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Palestine Territories, Egypt, Morocco and much of the Islamic and Arab world, large groups of fundamentalists, radicals, extremists - the Taliban, Al Queda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brothers, Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Armed Group and many more - have declared a holy war jihad on the West. This is not my imagination. It is a message they have proclaimed, written, communicated, preached and circulated in black and white. Why should we not take note of it?"
Islam is a militant faith. From the start, Muslims believed in expansion by conquest. Efraim Karsh's recent book, Islamic Imperialism, described this policy in detail and he quotes the Founder Mohammed: "Fight all men until they say there is no God but Allah". As Charles Moore has pointed out, Osama bin Laden quoted these words immediately after the attacks on the twin towers. In the face of this, we are expected to believe that "Islam is a religion of peace and love". Yes, that's what they say - and if you don't believe them they'll come round and kill you.
Militant Islamic expansionism has operated in surges over hundreds of years from the earliest days of the Caliphate, and it has been heroically resisted by such as Charles Martell and at the siege of Vienna. In 1565 there was a notable confrontation. The Muslims were besieging the island of Malta and they captured and killed some of the Christian Knights of St.John. Suleyman the Magnificent beheaded them and floated them across the harbour on crosses. The Grand Master of the Knights of St.John, Jean de la Valette, cut off the heads of many Turkish prisoners and fired them back at the enemy like cannon balls. Gosh - whatever would the General Synod say! Six years after this, 197 ships of the Muslim fleet were destroyed by Don John of Austria at Lepanto, and the Muslim insurgency was diminished. It was at the height of the Reformation, yet Catholics and Protestants were briefly united in thanksgiving for what was definitely seen as a marvellous deliverance.
The British press and the BBC continually upbraid European nations for our history of conquest and "imperialism" but they, and the poisonous history in our state schools, make no criticism of Islamic imperialism. And while the slave trade, along with "Hitler", is a favourite topic in that history syllabus, there is rarely mentioned the fact that the biggest slave-traders of all were, in fact, the Muslims and that their operations were brought to an end by the British Navy. Heathen Africans counted as less than human for the Muslims. British colonial rule actually replaced the Muslim slave trade in Africa. Muslims are bad minorities in any country, continuing their violence against Hindus in India and Buddhists in Thailand.
One of the most intelligent and cultivated Englishmen of the 19th century was the poet and critic S.T.Coleridge. He described Islam as "...the most extensive and complete despotism that ever warred against civilisation and the interests of humanity". And one of the most intelligent and cultivated Englishmen of the 20th century, R.G.Collingwood, said, "With the logic of its position as a barbarism, Islam had no option but to aim at the conquest of the world. No other agreement with any other body politic was possible. It craved to be surrounded by a completely empty world: a world containing only itself and God".
Some fathers of Muslim households kill the daughters they love rather than lose what they call "honour" through her fornication. Many women and girls have been killed for trivial offences such as speaking to an unrelated man. Truth-telling is not an obligation for Muslims in their dealings with non-Muslims. For example, Hamid Ali, head of the Al-Madina Masjid mosque in Beeston, Leeds, publicly condemned the London bombing of 2005. But later, speaking to a Bangladeshi reporter, he said that the bombings were "a good act" and praised the bombers as "children" of the militant cleric Abdullah-al-Faisal who had already taught young Muslims to believe, "The only way forward is for you, the Muslims, to kill the kufrs" (that is the non-believers.)
Certainly non-Muslims are regularly cursed in public as part of the Islamic prayer sequence, especially in the night prayers prescribed to be said during Ramadan. For example: "Oh Allah, destroy the kuffar who are trying to prevent people following your path, who deny your messengers and who do not believe in your Day of Judgement. Make them disunited, fill their hearts with terror and send your wrath and punishment against them. O God of truth."
The grand mosque in Yemen has issued this prayer: "O God, destroy the Jews and their supporters and followers. O God, destroy the ground under their feet: instil fear in their hearts and freeze the blood in their veins".
Now I must insert a further disclaimer. Most Muslims are not barbarous. The majority live the faith and live in peace with their neighbours, they pay their taxes and are generally good citizens. These good people are not the problem. The threat comes from the minority of militants and fanatics. Of course there are not many of them. But how many does it take? I have been criticised by my ecclestiastical superiors for speaking out against Islamic militancy - and am accused of jeopardising sensitive talks which are ongoing between our senior bishops and the leaders of moderate Islam. These talks are a waste of time, because the moderate Muslims are despised by their fanatical co-religionists. And it has to be understood that, even among moderate Muslims, there are many who prefer their militants to Westerners.
Time is running out for the West, and the same defeat has happened before: 1600 years ago, the Roman Emperor summoned the philosopher Sidonius and told him he was going to shut the gates of Rome against the enemy. Sidonius replied, "But it's too late, Sir. The enemy is within". And the reason the enemy is within is that the government has for years arranged its immigration policy in the interests of the idealogical social-engineering known as "multiculturalism". Of course, when multiculturalism - really the ghetto mentality of Apartheid - was practiced in South Africa, it was condemned over here as racist.
There are about 2,000 mosques in Britain today and more than twice as many Muslims as Methodists. As Melanie Phillips demonstrated in her timely book Londonistan and, as Philip Bobbitt reminded us recently, "We must accept that the global centre of Islamic terror is in Europe, not in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. The most important cell, for 9/11, wasn't Jeddah, it was in Hamburg. And I think this will only increase".
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in London, the senior military strategist Admiral Chris Parry said, "Western civilisation faces a threat on a par with the barbarian invasions that destroyed the Roman Empire. At some time in the next ten years it may not be safe to sail a yacht between Gibraltar and Malta as pirates attack holidaymakers from fast boats."
You wonder how The Guardian and the BBC restrain their usual zeal for human rights, and the rights of women in particular, in the face of well-documented truths about the public morality of Islam - where a woman's testimony in court is explicitly regarded as worth less than that of a man, when a woman gets less compensation than that of a man for similar injury, when there are child marriages, forced marriages, female genital mutilation, rape, honour killings, and violent abuse by husbands. The Sharia Council of Darul Uloom in London has issued a set of rules on divorce and remarriage which clearly envisage the possibility of pre-pubescent girls being married. What would our famous champions of liberal enlightenment say if Christian British people were to behave anything like so disgracefully? Instead, our elites turn a blind eye and our resistance has failed and become what Charles Moore has called "pre-emptive self-abasement".
These are severe criticisms of Islam, and we have to be able to submit them to the standard of truth. The tragedy of our time is that this is not allowed. All criticism of Islam - prominently that of Geert Wilders - is rejected as "Islamophobic" and "offensive to Muslims". That is not the point! The point is whether the criticisms are accurate and true. For if truth is no longer the ultimate standard of discourse in Europe, then European civilisation is dead in the water.
Meanwhile, you can tell that Doomsday is just around the corner when the drowsy sophisticates at The Spectator use an editorial to speak of "western Christian nations". And to urge, "We must defend our own traditions and our own religion". There are only two possible comments on this: there are no western Christian nations - not in Europe anyhow - and consequently we have no Christian traditions. The reality is as follows:
Devout Muslims in Britain desire to promote their own moral and religious standards among us. We say, "It's kind of you, but actually we have our own standards".
And the Muslim asks, "What are they?"
And we reply: "Take a look for yourself. Practical atheism in our schools...where teachers are bound to teach that any god is as good as any other - or none. Anarchy in personal and sexual morality, as any coupling between any two (or more) pieces of flesh is celebrated. A brief, furtive exchange between (or among) strangers, without either commitment or affection, ascribed the same value as Christian marriage. The consequent near-abolition of marriage and family. What were once mortal sins are now only lifestyle choices.
Abortion used as a form of contraception and amounting to 200,000 every year. A mass media which sexualises young children. Casual fornication taught to junior school children as part of the "diversity" agenda. But what is the difference between "diversity" and perversity?" A debauched customer culture of mingled celebs, Big Brother - who would have thought Orwell so right and yet so wrong? - cocaine, heroin, a government that declares a "war on drugs" and the hands out knighthoods to drug-crazed rock stars. Clubbing, TV nuts'n'sluts shows wall-to-wall, and hyper-shopping.
All this uneasily hitched to a totalitarianism and bullying political correctness which everywhere seeks to curtail our natural freedoms - from foxhunting to smoking, from the sorts of games allowed in the playground to what's written on packets of sweeties. And - have you noticed? - we have complete freedom of speech - only you're not allowed to say anything. Yes, we say, Britain has standards all right. And if your Muslim hordes attack our way of life, be certain we shall fight back. We intend to fire salvos of condoms and identity cards at you.
The decadent godlessness we now inhabit is generally agreed to have begun with the permissiveness of the 1960s when we sang "All you need is love" and let it all hang out, debauching our institutions in the process. There is some truth in this and certainly the 1960s was the decade in which the Church of England effectually resigned - throwing out the real Bible and the real Prayer Book and replacing them with unspeakable modern parodies which obscured the fact of sin and so rendered all promises of redemption worthless.
Sin is not something mystical and so old fashioned you couldn't believe it: it is just the old religious word for a constant human characteristic - that we have a capacity to foul things up, to act against our own best interests. If anyone doubts that the notion of progress is just plain stupid, let them look at Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia - take your pick from the repertoire of genocides. The mass media loves to derogate the middle ages and everything in the past as medieval, but there were many more slaughtered in the wars and genocides of the 20th century than in all the previous centuries put together.
Marcello Pera says again:
"A foul wind is blowing through Europe. I am referring to the idea that all we have to do is wait and our troubles will disappear by themselves, so that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us. This same wind blew through Munich in 1938. While the wind might sound like a sigh of relief, it is really a shortness of breath. It could turn out to be the death-rattle of a continent that no longer understands what principles to believe, and consequently mixes everything together in a rhetorical hodgepodge."
In reality, we face not one enemy but two: militant Islam is the alien peril; valueless secularism is the decadence within.
I am not here to ram religion down your throat or to try to insert it through any other orifice, but I will say this: what has befallen us is our being persuaded that we can ditch traditional English Christianity and the traditional English values which are part of it, and yet everything else - all the good things - will stay the same. They will not. Thrown away our Judeao-Christian inheritance and the lot goes with it. Every intellectual standard of excellence. Every moral imperative. All etiquette, politeness, chivalry. Well, you only have to take a walk through the streets of our towns and cities to see that this has happened already. But again, T.S.Elliot puts this a lot better - and these words were written in 1948:
"An individual European may not even believe that the Christian Faith is true, but what he says and makes and does will all spring out of this history of European culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Nietzsche or a Voltaire. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready-made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren and, if we did, not one of us would be happy in it".
END.