Ani O'Brien: The Paradox of Tolerance and the Islamification of the West

We are running out of time to change course

Note: this Substack is mostly written with a New Zealand lens and a sprinkling of international stuff. For context, I was born in the UK and moved to New Zealand as a four-year-old. I still have family in London and stay pretty plugged into the politics over there. I am very concerned about several issues in my place of birth currently and will write about it from time to time. Free speech (or lack thereof), the migrant crisis, and the Islamification of Britain are top of mind.

If Karl Popper were alive today, he’d be branded an Islamophobe by the very people who claim to revere his intellectual legacy.

The Paradox of Tolerance, Popper’s most misunderstood contribution to liberal philosophy, is now more relevant than ever. In short: a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance, or it will be destroyed by it. Sound obvious? You’d think. Yet we’re watching the West tie itself in knots trying to accommodate ideologies that openly despise the freedoms and rights that have underpinned our civilisations.

Let’s not beat around the bush: Islam, in its most orthodox forms, is not compatible with Western liberal democracy. That’s not bigotry. It’s a fact. Name a single Islamic-majority country that upholds the values of free speech, women’s rights, safety to be gay, and secular law to the same degree as even the most fraught European democracy. I’ll wait.

But here in the West, we’ve become so high on our own supply of moral relativism that we’ve convinced ourselves that tolerance means tolerating everything, including the intolerable. We’ve welcomed in waves of migration from countries where religious fundamentalism isn’t fringe; it’s law. And then we act surprised when those values come with them.

This isn’t about race. It’s about ideology. And no ideology, whether it’s Islamism, fascism, or woke totalitarianism, deserves protection when it undermines the pluralism that lets it exist in the first place.

What Popper warned us about was simple: if a society allows itself to be endlessly tolerant, even of those who would use that tolerance to destroy it, then it won’t survive. The irony is that liberalism, when taken to its extreme, becomes a suicide pact.

Look at what’s happening across Europe. In parts of Sweden, France, and the UK, parallel societies have emerged; ethnic enclaves ruled more by Sharia norms than the laws of the land. Women are harassed for not covering up. Gays are attacked. Jews are abused, intimidated, and synagogues vandalised. But the politicians? Still waffling about “diversity is our strength” and “community cohesion.”

No other religion gets this kind of deference. Try preaching Catholic doctrine in a public school and see what happens. But imams calling women who don’t wear hijabs “whores” or advocating for punishments for apostasy? That gets brushed off as “cultural nuance.”

We are tolerating the intolerant. In fact, some are promoting intolerance. Worse, in Britain they’re being funded with taxpayer pounds through multicultural grants, special exemptions, and publicly funded mosques that have never once had to answer for what’s preached behind their walls.

Let’s talk about Britain for a moment. Because if there’s a case study in how a liberal democracy can completely lose the plot, it’s the UK.

Right now, Britain is spending billions housing illegal migrants in hotels while British families wait years for a place to live. Elderly pensioners are choosing between heating and food, but men who broke the law to enter the country are given three meals a day and a warm bed, courtesy of the taxpayer. And they are men. Very few women and children can be seen on the boats crossing the channel.

Most of these migrants are never going back. Once they’re in the system, they’re in for life. Appeals drag on for years, during which time they receive free accommodation, legal aid, healthcare, and in many cases, benefits. And even when their claims are rejected, barely any are deported. The British welfare state has effectively become a permanent safety net for people who’ve contributed nothing and may never contribute anything.

Local councils are quietly prioritising “asylum seekers” over citizens for social housing because they’re under pressure from central government quotas. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s happening across England, while single mums and struggling families are told there’s no housing available. This isn’t compassion. This is institutionalised betrayal.

And we cannot pretend that all of this is harmless. Crime in migrant-heavy areas has skyrocketed. We’ve seen grooming gangs, knife attacks, sexual assaults, even terrorism all swept under the rug in the name of “community relations.” Police forces are terrified of being labelled racist, so they turn a blind eye. Politicians tiptoe around the truth. Meanwhile, ordinary people are left to deal with the consequences of a political elite completely divorced from reality.

We’re told we must be tolerant. But tolerance doesn’t mean rewarding law-breaking. It doesn’t mean sacrificing national identity. And it certainly doesn’t mean silencing the people who dare to question any of it.

This is what Karl Popper warned us about. If we continue to tolerate the intolerant and worse, subsidise them, then the values we claim to protect will vanish. Slowly at first. Then all at once.

And before someone shrieks about “free speech”, Popper never said don’t allow the intolerant to speak. He said don’t allow them to destroy the tolerant using our own freedoms as weapons. That’s exactly what’s happening.

This doesn’t mean banning Muslims or turning Britain into a generally intolerant country. It means having the guts to say that societies are better when they are freer, fairer, and more equal and that we will defend them. That means being intolerant of ideologies that want to roll us back to the 7th century.

Tolerance is not weakness. But tolerating everything? That is. And it’s time we remembered the difference.

Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.