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I think this is the third time David has said he would no longer dignify my ‘bigoted’ posts with a reply. Oh well.

Anyway I’d like to thank David for his contribution to this debate. Not because he has added much of substance to the discussion – he has not.

What he has done, however, and this is valuable in itself, is exemplify to perfection the techniques used by the modern identarian ‘left’ to misrepresent, smear and silence those who dissent from their narratives and worldview.

Take his latest post, that quotes a character called Tom Buchanan in the Great Gatsby raving about the demise of the white, Nordic, dominant race, supposedly under threat from ‘coloured’ races.

The implication, in David’s mind anyway, seems to be that to express any concern about the rise of militant political Islam, a deeply reactionary, intolerant, potentially violent and overtly supremacist ideology, is comparable to being a white supremacist – practically a Nazi!

At least, that was the implication when David posted it earlier today. He subsequently modified the post by adding ‘I’m not saying Peter is identical with Tom Buchanan, far from it, my point is that there is a long lineage to his “civilizational challenge” mode of thought’.

I guess I should be thankful that he concedes that I am ‘not identical’ to Tom Buchanan. That’s very decent of him. But in what respect is it ‘apposite’ to quote this, if not to bracket me or anyone else who talks about the potential for civilizational conflict with the most obnoxious kind of racist?

Do I have to spell out that this is an obvious non sequitur? At least David was honest enough in the early version of his post to make the ‘racist’ implication clear, before he added the snide evasion in the edited version.

All manner of scholars talk about civilizational conflict and civilizational fault lines. Among the most prominent are the American political scientist Samuel Huntington, who started an ongoing international debate with the publication of his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order in the early 1990s, and talks about the potential for ‘torn’ societies to emerge. Maybe he’s a racist and white supremacist too.

Then there is the Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson (now with the Hoover Institute), author of Civilisation: The West and the Rest. Here is an interesting irony – in his revised post David cites a review of this book that appeared in the London Review of Books by one Pankaj Mishra, to which Ferguson replied as follows:

‘It is not my habit to reply to hostile book reviews, but a personal attack that amounts to libel is another matter. Pankaj Mishra purports to discuss my book Civilisation: The West and the Rest, but in reality his review is a crude attempt at character assassination, which not only mendaciously misrepresents my work but also strongly implies that I am a racist’.

Sound familiar?

This is obnoxious, and profoundly dishonest. I suspect David knows this, but he, and countless others in the universities, on social media, and elsewhere resort to this tactic time and again.

Why? Because it works. People are silenced. A recent YouGov poll showed that in the UK around one third of the population feel they cannot speak freely, especially on matters to do with religion and immigration.

So legitimate concerns held by many are not reflected and addressed in public debate – and then there is astonishment when, in the privacy of the ballot box, people do unexpected things.

And pity the victims. In several posts I raised developments in the UK - the tens of thousands of girls subjected to female genital mutilation, and the utter failure of the justice system to respond. I also mentioned the Sharia Councils allowed to operate in that country that apply Sharia law to British citizens. And the many thousands of white and Sikh girls targeted by sexual ‘grooming gangs’ on the basis of their race and religion, and the long failure of the protective services to act out of fear of being accused of racism.

David has nothing – absolutely nothing – to say about any of that. In David’s worldview, these victims don’t count, they are invisible. His view seems to be that everyone should just be quiet about these things, like Naz Shah, the notorious MP for Bradford West, who re-tweeted and ‘liked’ a Twitter post saying the victims should shut up in the interest of ‘diversity’.

This is the dishonesty, hypocrisy and sheer moral rottenness of modern day identitarian ‘progressivism’.

I would remind David of the Oxford dictionary definition of a bigot: ‘A person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions’.