Liberal England in its decadence is more likely to turn on the enemies of repellent religion than the creed itself. The University of West London's censorship was hardly a one-off. The authorities at the London School of Economics punished atheist students for wearing T-shirts with a cartoon of Jesus saying "hey" and Muhammad saying "How ya doin'?", taken from the online "Jesus and Mo" strip. The sight of a cartoon image of Muhammad was too much for the university to bear. The LSE students union egged the administrators on, and passed a motion saying that it was "racist" to fear Islamic culture, even if that culture included variants of sharia law that mandate unequal treatment for women, Christians and Jews.



So deep has the rot set in that the National Union of Students decided that it was "Islamophobic" to support the Kurds fighting Islamic State, even though most Kurds are Muslims (although, admittedly, some are Christian and some — shockingly for the British Left — don't believe in a god or gods at all).



One can see in the universities and outside a left-wing version of radical Islam developing. Or if that is too strong, a culture which behaves as if it were controlled by radical Islamists. Like our supposedly alternative comedians, the middle-class left will satirise Christianity, as any Islamist would. Like the newspapers and television stations, it will not allow any satire of Islam even if the satire is as toothless as a cartoon of Jesus saying "Hey" and Muhammad saying "How ya doin'?" It will ignore the crimes against humanity of Islamic State while condemning every Israeli crime. For all its supposed feminism, it will behave as any Islamist would, and allow religious speakers to segregate audiences with men at the front and the seductive women who might drive them from the path of purity at the back.



As with the schools, it was easy to think that the dominant left-wing culture would take decades to shift. As with the schools, those who thought that their little world would never change failed to see themselves as others saw them. The state, and the rest of society, could see the hypocrisy and the dangers of giving extremism a ride so easy extremists did not even need to argue their case.



Last year, in the first sign of new times coming, Labour and Conservative politicians slapped down Universities UK, the quango that represents all institutions of higher education. It had ruled, without a blush, that it was a breach of an Islamist cleric's human rights to deny him the power to segregate women at public meetings. This year, as young British men flood overseas to commit crimes against humanity, the state has gone much further, and already you see institutions scrambling to fall in behind the new party line. Last month, a London university banned an Islamist speaker, who had blamed "Western culture" for allowing "obscene, filthy, and shameless" homosexual impulses. On the same day, the Law Society withdrew its staggeringly sexist guidance that solicitors must tell their Muslim clients that women should receive only half as much as men in sharia-compliant wills.



I am sure the government has overwhelming public support, but fear that an oppressive culture imposed from above is no substitute for a genuine anti-fascist culture bubbling up from below. But then I must face the fact that there is a vast woozy mass of liberal-leftists who will never change, and would not fight back even if a bomb exploded in their own back yard.



I will oppose the state's attempts to restrict freedom of speech, as I hope you will too. But I will not let supposed liberals forget that, by their own cowardice and lack of conviction, they have brought this dismal moment on themselves.





Here, in their own words, are the views of the leading lights of one of the many groups of inflammatory speakers, the Islamic Education and Research Academy (iERA): "If someone's going to fight against the [Muslim] community they should be killed"; "sexual relations were permitted between a man and his female slaves"; "adultery is punishable by death, and a slow and painful death by stoning." And on the Lawyers' Secular Society report goes, listing every variety of prejudice and every exhortation to young Muslim men to avoid the corruption of Western life.Their appeals are not quite the incitement to violence they seem. The iERA may have once had on its board hate preachers now banned from the UK for preaching hatred of gays and Jews, supporting child-marriages and calling for the death penalty for "apostates". Its speakers have certainly spent years touring universities and Muslim communities, largely unopposed. Earlier this year — and again no one disputes this — young men in Portsmouth, who had been distributing Islamist material while wearing iERA T-shirts, went off to Syria to fight on behalf of the Islamic State. Nevertheless, the iERA can claim that it has stayed on the right side of the law by saying that the bigotry it endorses and punishments it dreams of will only come in an ideal future Islamic state. Its speakers are not inciting violence in the here and now.I accept that, technically, they may be telling the truth and this is why the state is tearing up the old laws to catch them, but I still need to ask why these legal technicalities should bother the Left. That an extreme-Right group is just about within the law as it now stands does not stop protests against the English Defence League, British National Party, or indeed, UKIP and assorted priapic males. Leftists say that their ideas are poisonous and must be countered before the poison spreads. The law is an irrelevance.The only left-winger I have seen attempt to explain the double standard is Nick Ryan of Hope not Hate. He deserves credit for his frankness, but his argument had no coherence. He said that Muslim communities were "immature" — thus infantilising Muslims and treating them with a condescension he would never apply to whites. He said that Muslim ultra-conservatives should be our allies if they are against violence — thus abandoning all who suffer because of ultra-conservative ideas. He said that if anti-fascists tackled Muslims whose ideas mirrored those of the white far-Right, "we're just going to end up pushing all Muslims further away" — thus aping the arguments of Islamophobes who treat Muslims as a monolithic bloc. And disgracefully but predictably, he dismissed liberal and left-wing Muslims and ex-Muslims as an unrepresentative minority it was a waste of time supporting.I could continue, but in its hypocrisies Hope not Hate's response illuminates a wider cultural crisis. Teachers, musicians, comedians, authors and liberal-left intellectuals and politicians ignore the Islamist far-Right. They are frightened of accusations of racism. They think the cause of liberal Muslims hopeless, and not worth arguing for. As a result, the young men who end up killing, enslaving, raping and dying in Syria and Iraq — and maybe soon in Britain too — have not grown up hearing arguments against extremism. British culture has presented them with racism on the one hand and silence on the other. A potentially violent young man attracted to neo-Nazi extremism will take a cultural battering. But when it comes to the equally fascistic doctrines of radical Islam, fair-weather feminists and pseudo-leftists don't want to argue. Hope not Hate and part-time anti-fascists will protest only if extremism topples over into violence, by which time the battle of ideas has been lost and the time for protest gone.