The following, to believe Wikipedia, is an ‘oft-quoted excerpt’ illustrating the ‘rhetorical strength’ of its source:

Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbachis, their Kaimakans and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in a European jail, there is not a criminal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world.!

Let me endeavor, very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild Mohammedans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization vanished from view. They represented everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law.-Yet a government by force can not be maintained without the aid of an intellectual element.- Hence there grew up, what has been rare in the history of the world, a kind of tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny and rapine. Much of Christian life was contemptuously left alone and a race of Greeks was attracted to Constantinople which has all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of Turkish Islam in the element of mind!

Gladstone’s concession to basic decency is particularly interesting: in it, he assures an audience more sensitive to matters of religious freedom than our sorry century that he meant no offense against Islam per se, but rather the pernicious and disgusting dusky race of Turks. Of course, this kind of thing has gone over quite poorly since the Holocaust - but even as the offenses scale down and the perpetrators lose power, the rhetoric remains the same - to the point that people almost certainly quote Gladstone in support of what they imagine a noble crusade against a group of people without a UN-recognized state or any weapon stronger than an AT rocket.

Each is defaulting to the hate spoon-fed them by their nannies (in Dolan’s beautiful idiom); Gladstone to the time-honored narrative of the rapine Turk oppressing the doughty little peoples of Europe, and the modern antigastarbite to the same narrative - with the rapine Turk changed out for a more general, race-neutral rapine Termagantian. To be fair, the level of diction is often much reduced - but in part this is a consequence of the natural evolution of culture. Gladstone had to read extensively to pick up the nuanced but profoundly biased and hateful picture of the Turks he did; the nuanced but profoundly biased and hateful picture of the Muslims our contemporaries speak of and act on is a moving one, inculcated by generations of cinema for which the Arab has been a glib caricature of savagery.

The unfortunate part of it all is this: just as no countervailing force to the racist assumptions behind Gladstonian interventionism* existed, no real countervailing force to the racism inherent in the War on Terror** exists, or at least not in the public sphere. The debate on the war, such as it is, has only recently begun accepting arguments to the left of ‘those crazy Arabs’ immature sectarian squabbling are their own problem, and we should take care of our own instead’; in the wake of 9/11, it has become inappropriate for the targets of such venom to raise their voices in public. There’s a war on, don’t you know - or are you one of those anti-human specimens?

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*While he was opposed to the Conservatives’ military adventures, it seems near to certain he would have supported a colonial adventure against a more ‘deserving’ target, just as the ‘humanitarian’ interventionists today do. On the other hand, it would have disgusted him to simply go along with the party line on whatever war-drums were being beaten - and as much as I resent the man, he did stick his neck out to deny the imperial loon Gordon the human toy soldiers he wanted to play with. It seems the awful old low-church pissant would have taken one look at today’s liberal hawks and taken them gently by the hand and encourage them to reform in their ways before it was too late.
** The next post goes into greater detail on this.