Roger Scruton on Jews, identity "and getting fired
THE ACADEMIC who was fired from his role as a government housing adviser over controversial comments about George Soros and Islamophobia has told the JC: “I don’t think the attack on me on the grounds of antisemitism has any foundation at all.”
Sir Roger Scruton — dismissed last month as chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission over repeated controversial comments — disputed claims that his use of phrases such as the “Soros empire” were a coded attack on alleged Jewish power.
“They pick up things, words you have used wrongly,” the right-wing philosopher said of those mounting the attacks on him.
“How can you answer something like that? You have to say what you are referring to.
“There are people who define their loyalties in global terms — like the multinationals and so on. And there are people who don’t.”
Sir Roger, a friend of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, for over 30 years, was equally dismissive of claims that his ideological stance leads him towards conspiracy theories about Jews and questions over their loyalty to the countries they live in.
“The whole point is they have given themselves a national identity in Israel, and anyway, have been first among those who defended national identities in Europe,” he opined.
“And the tragedy is that they identified with the German nation building process, and also with the Austrian one, and were punished for it.”
Sir Roger spoke to the JC after delivering a speech to the Europe at a Crossroads conference of right-wing thinkers in Westminster on Monday.
In another controversial address, he singled out the positive influence of Judeo-Christian ethics and the Hebrew Bible on Western society, which, he said, helps us “confess our faults and try as best we can to atone for them”.
But once again, Sir Roger was less charitable about the influence of what he described as “radical Islam” on European culture.
Reflecting on what he said was a need for an urgent debate on national identity, he argued: “Radical Islam has brought that multi-faceted question into the open and been greeted by a predictable silence from the new political class which is entirely without the means to answer it.
“It is this silence of the political class that provoked the Brexit vote in my country. As the day of the vote approached, it became clear that people were beginning to see the referendum as an opportunity to express feelings that had been largely excluded from the political process.”
He added that the political elite had “systematically overlooked” the question concerning most people which was “who are we?” and “where are we?”
Attacking what he described as the “isms” and “phobias” he said “to racism, sexism, ageism and the rest we now must add transphobia and Islamophobia.”
He said those words only succeeded in reducing freedom.
“Radical Islam of a reactionary Sunni kind is able to claim the privilege of a rival identity — a challenge to our rooted ways of people belonging,” he said.
“The response of Western liberals is that nothing should be said, nothing can be said against this way of life.
“It is a way of life that challenges our way of belonging, so it only proves the problem is our way of belonging.
“If customs of certain Muslim communities seem to violate every precept of feminists for example, this is an illusion born of Islamophobia.
“And every feminist knows the culture of male domination is the preserve of the white male in Western democracies.”
Sir Roger added: “All this reminds us of a remarkable truth — which is that ordinary people in Europe are less afraid of Islamists then they are of liberals who police their language and their thoughts.”
Sir Roger said the question of identity was high on the agenda of ordinary people throughout Europe.
He claimed people were unable to question “unprecedented levels of migration of people with other languages and other customs, other traditions and other loyalties” without the charge of “racism and xenophobia”.
Sir Roger was sacked by the government after fierce political criticism over an interview he gave to the New Statesman. “Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts,” he was alleged to have told the magazine’s interviewer.
Many of the quotes in the piece were later disputed.
People are less afraid of Islamists than liberals who police their thoughts’