Or, to put it another way, is there such as thing as an unbelieving Believer? One of the great fallacies of Western Europe’s multicultural fantasy is that the children of imported Musselmen will become less Muslim and that, eventually, their offspring will become more like their nominally Christian but in fact entirely secular hosts. Accordingly, the British and others now dealing with the consequences of their willfully ahistorical blindness regarding the true nature of Islam, have assumed that “radical” Muslims are the exception rather than the rule, and so have treated them as aberrational.

This, however, flies in the face of no less an expert on Islam than Turkey’s would-be caliph, Recep Erdogan, who famously denied that any such thing as “radical” Islam exists — because, to be a Believer, is to believe in the faith in its entirety. The idea of “cafeteria” Muslims, he has said, is totally wrong:

In a 2010 interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Obama referred to Turkey as a “great Muslim democracy.” Obama should have seen that a democracy is a democracy — without any religious prefix. He would see in later years the difference between a democracy and a Muslim democracy. Seven years after Obama’s pathetic diagnosis about the kind of democracy Erdogan brought to an otherwise secular country, the Turkish president said that “There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. There is only one Islam.” Worse, he claimedthat the term “moderate Islam” had been fabricated by the West in order to weaken Islam. From the Muslim democracy to the former U.S. president, with love…

Comes now a report in the Times of London that ought to give pause to anyone still deluded by the idea that a religion that defines itself in opposition to Judeo-Christianity is suddenly going to “moderate” once exposed to a spiritually bankrupt Western democracy.

More than 95 per cent of deradicalisation programmes are ineffective, according to a study commissioned by the Home Office that raises questions about the government’s Prevent programme. The study revealed failures in the approach to deradicalisation in schools, youth centres, sports clubs and English-language classes. The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), the so-called nudge unit formerly part of the Cabinet Office, examined 33 deradicalisation programmes across the country designed to safeguard vulnerable people from far-right and religious extremist threats. The Times understands that most were funded by or fell under the label of Prevent. The study found that only two programmes were effective and that some projects were counterproductive. Some participants said that they restricted their freedom of speech. Until the BIT study, the 33 projects claimed a success rate of more than 90 per cent because they evaluated themselves. On Monday Sajid Javid, the home secretary, reaffirmed his support for Prevent. He said that he recognised criticism of the programme but added that “misapprehensions around Prevent are often based on distortions” and “I absolutely support it”.