There was a unique and utterly unremarked feature of an anti-US government demonstration in Dublin last March: a group of Muslim children was put at its head. So when did we in Ireland start giving precedence to people of one religion over others in political protests asks Kevin Myers.
And was this gesture not thereby explicitly supporting the contention of the suicide bombers of London and Madrid that the US war in Iraq is one against Islam?
As it happens, the people of Iraq have just had a mini-referendum on the US presence in their country. Despite the calls from Islamo-Nazi terrorists for them to boycott it, and in appalling circumstances, a majority of the electorate voted. Sixteen of the country's provinces approved the constitution, the most enlightened and pluralist in the entire Arab world.
Yet the Irish left still campaigns for the closure of Shannon airport to the very forces which made that election possible, and which alone can guarantee its successful implementation.
What can one make of the mentality of "anti-war" protesters such as Senator David Norris? If the insurgents won in Iraq - the certain outcome of a US defeat or withdrawal - peace would not follow, but a genocidal religious war against the infidel. Almost everywhere would then enjoy the glories of Sharia law, under which fundamentalists would do interesting things to homosexuals like the good senator, such as toppling walls on them, though none would include even medium-term survival.
Despite the fact that the Iraqi people have gone to the polls twice, the Irish left denounces the consequence: the invitation from the democratically elected representatives of the people of Iraq to the US-led allies to remain in their country. Yet the Irish left would apparently prefer the Iraqis be abandoned to Fourth Reich cut-throats of Zarqarwi - and most scandalously of all, they choose to showboat their anti-democratic opinions with a parade of Islamic children through the streets of Dublin. This is grisly stuff: for it effectively declares that the voice of Irish Islamic children is more important than the voice of other children here.
Worse, it contemptuously ignores the opinions of the children of Iraq, whose parents heroically risked their lives in recent days to vote in a poll that the left in Ireland, in effect, opposed.
It is as if we have nothing to learn from the experiences of other countries, where some Muslim males clearly feel free to decide, "if we as individuals don't like our government's policies, we'll blow up a few hundred innocent fellow citizens". Except, of course, they don't say "our" government or "fellow citizens" because such Muslims don't identify with the state they have been raised in. They belong to the superstate that is Islam, as no doubt the children at the head of the anti-US march have been encouraged to do. So is this multiculturalism? Is it a question of: We're all equal here, but if you're Muslim, you get pride of place in our demo? Well, never in the deepest darkest days of Catholic Ireland did a political demonstration give precedence to one religious group over another.
In it own modest way, this column recently tried to get a debate going on the issue of the burka in Irish life; the exchange, such as it was, soon fizzled out into a posturing morality contest about who could shower the most approval upon the Islamic state of Andalusia of, no, not the year before last, but of six centuries ago. This is as witless as discussing modern Ireland in terms of the 15th-century Geraldine barons, even as the rest of Europe is waking up and smelling the ground has-beens of fundamentalist coffee.
For ordinary, unquestioning Euro-decency is now dead. Two weeks ago, Utrecht City Council discovered that under the cover of such benign unscepticism, some Muslim women had been claiming €550 a month in social benefits, while insisting on wearing their burkas for job interviews. They never got the jobs, of course, and continued to draw the dole from the infidel state for which they presumably felt utter contempt. The Dutch government is now going further: it has announced that it is banning the wearing of the burka in certain areas, and education minister Maria van der Hoeven is to ban it from all schools, as is already the case in French schools, and throughout certain Belgian towns.
This is the lesson so far. The fatuous tolerance shown to Islamic fundamentalism by post-Christian secular European societies has merely earned them contempt, terrorism and murder. France, Spain, Britain and Holland have all felt the lash. Hundreds have died in the first three countries, and in Holland, Leo van Gogh is dead, two MPs are in hiding, and 12 Muslim men are on charges of conspiracy to kill politicians.
Instead of heading these warnings, our media - RTÉ in particular - have indulged in a degrading I-feel-your-pain submission to the Islamic extremists in our midst. Muslims who support the freedom of Iraq, as clearly sought by the majority of Iraqi people, are hardly ever heard, while the vicious lunatics who hate freedom, civil law and democracy are grovellingly feted as "spokesmen" of their people (and for once, we really can dispose of that tiresome and precious neologism, "spokesperson").
Worse, the Irish entire left, the self-styled guardians of secular freedom and public conscience, have in effect aligned themselves with the Islamo-Nazi murderers of Margaret Hassan, the beheaders of Ken Bigley, and the slaughterers of tens of thousands. The Hitler-Stalin pact is thus back in business. Were it not so utterly contemptible, it would be almost funny.