And after the lunacy we heard earlier in the day from Pamela Geller, here’s a piece about Islam from a right of center author who has his head screwed on straight. No blanket condemnations here, just honest observation. The last part is especially good:

A few days after reading Le Soir, I happened to take a taxi from Welwyn Garden City—a town, about 20 miles north of London, built as a planned community in the 1920s—to Heathrow Airport.

The bearded driver was in full Muslim dress; he could have come from Pakistan, were it not that he spoke English that was obviously native. En route, his wife called him several times. She was a day trader, and asked his advice on her “positions.” He spoke in a technical language that I hardly understood. I asked him whether his wife had profited from the extreme volatility of the French banks (she made, in American currency, about $1,000 per week on average, which she used for her pocket money). He said that they did not buy bank shares for ethical reasons.

We talked of other things. I asked him about social problems in Welwyn Garden City (taxi drivers of small towns are often informative on these matters). He said that they were comparatively slight and then went on to describe small pockets of illegitimacy, dependency on social security, criminality, drug-taking, and drunkenness—what for him constituted British culture. Except that he took the part for the whole, his criticisms were precisely mine.

I mentioned that, not so long ago, people in Britain were extremely reluctant to take public charity: they found it humiliating and demeaning. My driver said that he had been unemployed a few years ago for two months, but had declined social welfare for precisely this reason. “They treat you like scum, you start to behave like scum,” he said. By the time we reached Heathrow, his wife had lost $4,000. He took it in good stride. “She made $10,000 on her best trade,” he said.

Integration, it seems, is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. (Emphasis mine)

Of course for having dealt with a Muslim man as a human being and having tried to honestly depict him, Pamela Geller will no doubt denounce Theodore Dalrymple for “SUBMISSION TO ISLAM!!1”.