“progressive”.^134 So, what does that say about the future
of Britain, where the Muslim population doubles in size
every decade, and where what was considered “extreme”
one year starts to seem “moderate” a few years later?
What does it say for the idea of Islam-lite, if what is
extremist one year is considered moderate ten years
later? If we listen to Muslim leaders like Erdogan, the
Prime Minister of Turkey, we are told “These
descriptions [such terms as ‘moderate Islam’] are very
ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is
no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and
that’s it.”^135
What is truly shocking, is that the 2015 speech by PM
Cameron was supposedly his landmark intervention on
Islamic terrorism, the first major intervention in a decade by
the politician who had previously compared Islamic
extremists to Nazis. Yet this later speech is obviously feeble,
stuttering, a nonsense of an intervention, showing less
clarity of vision than he showed a decade earlier. Nobody
who studied his later speech would be any the wiser about
the connection between Islam and Islamic terrorism, nor
what (if any) steps could be taken to stop this terrorism.
When The Rushdie Affair began in 1990, there was more
public debate about the nature of Islam than there is now.
Indeed, if one looks at articles from the BBC website in
2005, it is clear there was more debate then about the nature
of Islam than there is now. And if we look further back into
the twentieth and the nineteenth centuries, we would find
educated people were far better informed about Islam
than they are now. With each new terrorist attack or