I don’t understand right-wingers who spend most of their time on the internet. Often they’re found tut-tutting over what they view as the haughty refusal of Muslims to integrate into British society. And yet when it is proposed that we build a monument to the Muslims who fought with us in two world wars – surely the ultimate act of integration into a nation’s values – they spit out their tea in fury. They’re hopping mad when Muslims don’t integrate, and ticked off when they do. What gives?

Some keyboard warriors see it differently

This is the news that the government will give £1 million towards a memorial for Muslim soldiers. Jeremy Hunt announced it in his Budget speech. ‘Whatever your faith or colour or class, this country will never forget the sacrifices made for our future’, the Chancellor said. The monument will honour the 750,000 Muslims from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and North Africa who threw their lot in with Blighty during the darkest wars in history.

Sounds good to me. At a time when our young are incited by popular culture and the activist class to view British history as one long litany of crimes against humanity, any new monument that tells a truer story gets my vote. And with the left recklessly telling Britain’s Muslims that the country hates them, that we’re a structurally Islamophobic hellhole, what better countercultural blow could there be than a stone tribute to Muslims of old who believed this nation was worth dying for?

Some keyboard warriors see it differently. There’s a social-media storm over Hunt’s promise of a million quid. It’s special treatment, it’s appeasement, it’s political correctness gone mad, yada yada. Most of the complaints can be swiftly dispensed with. What about a monument to Sikhs or Catholics, some have cried in an embarrassing combo of kneejerk fury and historical illiteracy.

QOSHE - Who could object to a Muslim war memorial? - Brendan O’Neill
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Who could object to a Muslim war memorial?

17 1
07.03.2024

I don’t understand right-wingers who spend most of their time on the internet. Often they’re found tut-tutting over what they view as the haughty refusal of Muslims to integrate into British society. And yet when it is proposed that we build a monument to the Muslims who fought with us in two world wars – surely the ultimate act of integration into a nation’s values – they spit out their tea in fury. They’re hopping mad when Muslims don’t integrate, and ticked........

© The Spectator


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