Yikes! First Kathryn, now Mark…

Mark, to take some of your points in some sort of order. Nowhere do I argue that one is ‘otherwise’ defenseless against Muslim demands. What I do argue is that, as things now are, further balkanizing the British legal system according to confessional loyalty is a dangerous mistake. That said, this is one secularist who is a supporter of the idea (if not all its clerics or beliefs), and privileges of England’s state church, but this, of course, is not what is being discussed here.

France. For what it’s worth, the French did not ban the veil from all schools, only from state schools. The voters approved. Pay the piper, call the tune. Equally not all crucifixes were banned, only “excessive” ones. A contortion, of course, and a seemingly absurd one, but who said that the fight against Islamic extremism would be straightforward? Put another way (and to mess with the words of wise old Henri IV) : for Paris it’s worth giving up a mass or two.

On honor killing and so on, you are, of course, completely right that this, and other horrors, ought to be far, far more of a priority than the adoption debate. That they are not is a disgrace. That they are not is storing up terrible trouble for the future. But again we have to deal with the world as it is, not as you might like it to be. As Cameron has again demonstrated, Europe’s governing classes are far more likely to be prepared to take up the cudgels against some far-from-imagined generic religious ‘privilege’ (I’ll stick with the term) than the more specifically-targetted approach that you and I might want. That’s far from perfect, but if that is what it is going to take for them to be comfortable to even begin to confront the encroachment of fundamentalist Islam in Europe, so be it, at least for now.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali (not someone who I believe you would describe as a propagandist for multiculturalism) are, I believe, now arguing that there should be no state support of parochial schools of any description in Holland. Her reasoning? The avoidance of state-funded madrassas, a nightmare that is undoubtedly approaching ever closer. What would you say to her on that topic?

Finally, in your final paragraph I think you throw too many nasty words at the problem.

Hyper-secularist progressivism! Wow! I think that the explanation for the rise of extremist Islam in Europe lies in a rather more complex mix ranging from sheer numbers (I suspect you won’t disagree on that point…) to (just check out the way that the notion of the EU has evolved) a profound discomfort among Europe’s elites with expressions of national identity, to the terribly disfunctional politics of many Muslim nations to, well you get what I am driving at. As to the role that secularism has played in all this, that’s complex. I’d agree that many secularists are unwilling to, as it were, pick and choose between religions, but the same could be said of the clergymen who seem to spend their time stumbling from ‘inter-faith’ conclave to ‘inter-faith’ conclave. Yes, there’s no doubt that many secularists seem obsessed with their silly crusade against the remnants of Europe’s Christian heritage but is it fair to blame secularism for the kid-glove approach many European states have taken to dealing with expressions of Islamic extremism? I don’t think so. Beyond the usual explanations (multiculturalism and so on), I’d look for another explanation: cowardice.