I don’t understand right-wingers who spend most of their time on the internet. Often they’re found tut-tutting over what they view as the haughty refusal of Muslims to integrate into British society. And yet when it is proposed that we build a monument to the Muslims who fought with us in two world wars – surely the ultimate act of integration into a nation’s values – they spit out their tea in fury. They’re hopping mad when Muslims don’t integrate, and ticked off when they do. What gives?

Some keyboard warriors see it differently

This is the news that the government will give £1 million towards a memorial for Muslim soldiers. Jeremy Hunt announced it in his Budget speech. ‘Whatever your faith or colour or class, this country will never forget the sacrifices made for our future’, the Chancellor said. The monument will honour the 750,000 Muslims from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and North Africa who threw their lot in with Blighty during the darkest wars in history.

Sounds good to me. At a time when our young are incited by popular culture and the activist class to view British history as one long litany of crimes against humanity, any new monument that tells a truer story gets my vote. And with the left recklessly telling Britain’s Muslims that the country hates them, that we’re a structurally Islamophobic hellhole, what better countercultural blow could there be than a stone tribute to Muslims of old who believed this nation was worth dying for?

Some keyboard warriors see it differently. There’s a social-media storm over Hunt’s promise of a million quid. It’s special treatment, it’s appeasement, it’s political correctness gone mad, yada yada. Most of the complaints can be swiftly dispensed with. What about a monument to Sikhs or Catholics, some have cried in an embarrassing combo of kneejerk fury and historical illiteracy. We already have monuments to the adherents of those faiths who fought in our wars. And for the Gurkhas too, of course, our valiant friends from Nepal.

My favourite clash involved Tom Tugendhat. ‘Any statues for Catholics??’, a tweeter asked him when he gave his backing to the memorial. Came his delicious reply: ‘Yes. There is. In Westminster Cathedral and my great grandfather’s name is on it.’ Ouch.

Look, the ideology of multiculturalism can be incredibly divisive, there’s no question. But celebrating the varied cultural groups that fought on our side in existential wars over liberty and democracy is the opposite of such fashionable disharmony. It emphasises our common sacrifices, our common convictions, what has bound us so tightly together rather than what threatens to tear us apart. Life-or-death devotion to British ideals is a wonderful thing to celebrate in an era when we’re constantly and boringly invited to ‘celebrate our differences’.

It seems to me that sections of both the right and left view Muslims as forever outsiders. Some on the right are convinced that Muslims’ religious beliefs make them incompatible with a modern nation like ours. The left, meanwhile, noisily slams such claims as ‘Islamophobic’ while promoting their own, equally paternalistic view that Muslims will never really be at home here because we’re a racist dump that hates them.

Both sides are engaging in what I might call ‘othering’ if I was the kind of person to use such academic-speak. Muslims are seen as either too exotic or too victimised to be normal British citizens. I bet you that the left will soon start complaining about the Muslim memorial, too. Only they’ll say it’s a cynical Tory effort to co-opt Muslims into the warped values of Empire rather than condemning it as PC on steroids. Both the right and left handwringing over the memorial will have the same result, though: British society’s desire to pay tribute to the Muslims who fell for the nation will be damned as ‘problematic’.

Radical Islamism is a serious problem in 21st-century Britain

Of course it is true that radical Islamism is a serious problem in 21st-century Britain. And of course it is profoundly concerning that large numbers of young Muslims have hit the streets in recent months, not only to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza but even, in some cases, to express something like sympathy for Hamas. We need a serious reckoning with all of that. And we need more healthy scepticism of the idea of ‘Islamophobia’, a word that seems to have the singular aim of discouraging and even demonising perfectly legitimate commentary on radical Islam and Islam in general.

But there is no need, surely, to cave into cultural fatalism. That is what I see on both the Muslim-sceptical right and the Muslim-pitying left: a despondent politics that views integration as a fool’s errand. To some on the right, it’s a moral lack in the Muslim community itself that means they’ll never really be part of us, while to the left it’s the unwashable sins and bigotries of Britain more broadly that means Muslims will always be outsiders. Both sides are united by a gloomy, misanthropic loss of faith in the great modern project of building a nation whose ideals might appeal to people of all faiths and none.

That’s another reason to put up the Muslim memorial, then: it will stand as a stone rebuke to such dejected thinking, a permanent reproach to the ugly identitarianism of our age. A reminder of a time when people of all heritages were invited to align with our values? Build it.