Hitler Bad. Islamism Complicated.
The cowardice and confusion of our progressive elites endanger us all.
If a fundamentalist Christian or a radical Hindu massacred a group of innocent civilians, would the first instinct of politicians be to protect churches or temples? Of course not. The ideology would be named and condemned. Apologists for religiously inspired terror would be sidelined and treated as morally adjacent.
So why, when the violence is inspired by political Islam, is the reflex always to protect mosques, draft laws on “Islamophobia”, and resurrect the looming threat of the “far right”?
It’s because Western liberalism has been captured and deformed by a progressive ideology that treats plain speaking about political Islam as the cardinal sin. To judge is to imply hierarchy; to imply hierarchy is to admit that liberal values might be superior – something now utterly taboo and status-destroying among those with institutional and cultural power. This doctrine is so internalised among the progressive class that it functions like a substitute religion. Naturally, it’s ruthlessly exploited by our enemies.
In theory, liberalism is perfectly capable of moral discrimination. It emerged from the Enlightenment precisely to allow members of society to assess competing beliefs, criticise some, adopt others and, through arguments and persuasion, reject those beliefs that seek to undermine these same rights. It assumes that ideas matter, that some are better than others, and that individuals have the right – indeed the duty – to defend the conditions that make liberty possible.
Progressivism has gradually and almost imperceptibly rewritten that agreement. In its current form, it treats all cultures as morally equivalent, while moral judgement is almost exclusively reserved for the West. The result is a ruling class that no longer understands what liberal principles are for and has lost the language to say that certain belief systems are not merely inferior but incompatible with a liberal society.
Islamism isn’t morally complicated, any more than fascism is. What’s complicated is the West’s refusal to judge it.
This strange development – to see Western culture as uniquely guilty, and therefore uniquely undeserving of defence – is one of the great moral errors of our time.
It’s an intellectual failure as much as a moral one. Western liberal societies are increasingly governed by people with only the most basic understanding of the civilisation they have been entrusted to protect. Beyond the crudest moral shorthand – Hitler bad, tolerance good – their grasp of history, philosophy and our cultural inheritance is alarmingly shallow.
How many senior civil servants in the UK could explain what the Magna Carta actually constrained? Who among our governing class has heard of John Stuart Mill or could say what the Enlightenment was about? Could any articulate how Christianity shaped Western ideas of rights, duty, and human dignity? These are not pub-quiz questions. They are foundational to the order our leaders are meant to protect.
Instead we are served by a managerial class reading from a competence worksheet put together by McKinsey. They mistake box-ticking for wisdom and DEI protocols for moral precepts. Intellectually incurious and historically illiterate, our leaders imagine that what matters above all else is process, media training and fluency in the language of risk management. These are technocrats presiding over institutions whose moral and cultural logic would baffle them if they bothered to look into it.
It’s this combination of ignorance and hubris – ignorance of what liberal civilisation is, hubris about their right to redesign it – that makes the progressive ruling class so censorious, brittle and profoundly unlikeable.
For decades now, Western institutions have treated certain belief systems as exempt from serious scrutiny, provided they arrive under the banner of cultural sensitivity. Political correctness turns ideological critique into a moral transgression and disagreement into bigotry. Once that move is accepted – through decades of institutional messaging from universities, NGOs, and diversity consultancies – the public conversation becomes fraught with anxiety and policed by busybodies who derive enormous satisfaction from others’ breach of etiquette.
Language above all is where these distortions play out, and there’s no better example than with the charge of “Islamophobia”. The word functions like a magic incantation. Emotionally charged and strategically deployed, it collapses distinctions between people and ideas, specifically between Muslims as people and Islam as a system of beliefs. To be accused of “Islamophobia” is to be excommunicated from the cultural establishment and made a pariah from polite company. The substance of the argument is irrelevant.
Crucially, the term “Islamophobia” doesn’t exist to protect Muslims from violence or discrimination (a legitimate concern), but to insulate a set of ideas from scrutiny. And because progressive elites have made non-judgement a moral absolute, the tactic works, promising moral purity, high status and – as we are all now very tired of seeing – the opportunity to signal virtue.
Many of our current cultural problems stem from this same pathology. Identity narcissism, cancel culture, a far-right backlash and, above all, the persistent threat of Islamism – all of them are enabled by progressive ideology and its attendant moral confusion.
Breaking the spell doesn’t require hostility to Muslims. It means recovering moral clarity and being willing to say that liberal societies are worth defending, that some values are non-negotiable, and that not all belief systems are compatible with freedom of speech, equality before the law, or the right to leave one’s religion without fear.
Until our elites are willing to understand and defend these foundational liberal principles – rather than their progressive distortions – the enemies of civilisation, and the useful idiots who enable them, will remain an existential threat to our way of life.
This is my final post of the year. I’ll be taking a short break and will return in 2026 with more essays in the same spirit. Thank you to everyone who’s read these articles, shared them and argued in good faith. I really appreciate it.
Wishing you all a peaceful Christmas and a clear-headed New Year.
You might also like:
Thanks for reading. Good-faith comments are always welcome.
A brief note of credit: this essay was inspired in part by an excellent comment from @cleverpseudonym2 on my previous post. A link to that discussion here: https://www.gadflynotes.com/p/8-lies-about-islamist-violence/comments
It is depressingly appropriate for our uniquely stupid age that the ultimate taboo is pointing out the identity of the murderous maniacs in our midst.