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There are other insidious aspects of multiculturalism. Behaviour becomes a mere expression of difference rather than of right or wrong, better or worse, civilised or backward, attitudes which have led the police and social services to turn a deaf ear, even towards children being tortured to eject evil spirits, or women facing murder for defying arranged relationships. This policy was most comprehensively pursued by centre-left governments in Britain and the Netherlands, with the passive acquiescence of centre-right opponents terrified of being accused of racism. Centre-left governments have long since walked quietly away from it, but multiculturalism is the bridge between reactionary Islamists and the anti-Semitic and anti-US far left.75 Only France, with its republican insistence on equality, integration and secularism, was conspicuously opposed to this divisive philosophy. Instead of giving immigrants the training to pursue an economic vocation, this creed actively encouraged a soft form of apartheid, whether by providing translations of official documents, making it unnecessary to learn the dominant language, or actively encouraging welfare entitlement among populations with low levels of educational attainment. Whereas many earlier immigrants, like the Jews, Indians, Greeks and Chinese, regarded welfare payments, assuming they existed, as demeaning handouts, they have now become part of a culture of rights, responsible for such extraordinary facts as Denmark’s 5 per cent Muslim minority receiving 40 per cent of its welfare budget. A phenomenon called Islamophobia invented in 1998—which perhaps should be called ‘terrorophobia’, or the fear of being killed by Islamist bombers—spares anyone the need to examine what has gone so radically wrong within these communities. BBC news services reflexively help by never connecting terrorists with the constituency they operate in, even when the bombers are last heard crying ‘Allah, Allah,’ while nervously monitoring its anxieties about a purely hypothetical nativist backlash.76

Adolescence and young adulthood bring unique tests for those from a traditional family background who have to make their way in modern, liberal, Western society. Chinese, Indians and Turks seem to have negotiated this very well. Being suspended between Britain and Pakistan, Germany and Turkey, or France, Italy, Spain and North Africa is the common lot of many second - and third-generation Muslims in Europe. Cultural rather than economic issues become hugely significant, for there are no major obstacles to social mobility among South Asians. Do you retreat into the close village your parents have replicated in a suburb of Leeds, Lille or Limburg or do you immerse yourself in a majority society whose mores you find bewildering, decadent and tempting? There seems to be a gender problem too. Whereas Muslim girls toe the line at home, study hard and then rise through work or marriage, Muslim males, cosseted as the ‘little prince’, seem frequently to go off the rails, with violence as an outlet for pervasive sexual repression in their communities. No wonder they are hell-bent on blowing up scantily dressed ‘slags’ in British nightclubs, by which they mean young British clerks, nurses and teachers having a night out in clubs and discotheques. Partly by way of generational revolt, many second - or third-generation Muslims turned to Islamism, where they found brotherhood, identity and respect, thereby solving their own existential crises while imbibing a worldview with a clear definition of good and evil. Paradoxically, as Shiv Malik has shown, the ultra-reactionary could be strangely liberating. In addition to rejecting the innocuous piety of their parents, they could also slip free of such traditional practices as arranged marriages with faraway cousins, claiming that this was a Hindu custom falsely adopted by Pakistanis, turning their attentions to the large pool of pious females who donned the hijab, in itself allegedly a form of liberation from the predatory eyes of men.