By Tony Curzon Price
Abu Izzadeen is frightening. He is a rhetorically gifted Islamic extremist. When he says (jokes?), as he did in a gladiatorial combat with John Humphries, the BBC interview animal this morning, that if you push muslims too far, "they will explode ... and I am not talking about self-suicide"
you feel that you are hearing a threat and an exhortation as much as a prediction.
But the interview was more worrying, in a way, for John Humphrys' failure: the great slayer of politicians, the swinger of syllogism, was knocked onto the defensive by Izzadeen's radicalism. "Why don't you go to where the sharia is respective and leave England?" asked John. "I see. So now we are talking about mass deportations ... You must realise that I and Allah love the UK" retorted Izzadeen.
Whenever Humphrys tried to argue that "there is a British way of doing this, which involves democracy," Izzadeen countered that there was nothing sacred in that way. But Humphrys was vulnerable because he nationalised the issue, rather than moralised it. The democratic way is right not because it is British - the relativising corollary of Humphrys' appeal for the visitor to Rome to do as the Romans - but because of the lives it permits. I feel we are back to the themes of my post on Julia Pascal. Bringing "Britishness" into the defense of Enlightenment values seems wrong and counterproductive.
