Dave Weeden surfaces, with this excellent quote: “I wonder if anyone’s told the Palestinians who’re proposing to boycott Danish goods that they mostly export bacon and lager?”
Archive: Islam
They said it themselves: It’s hogwash. The Daily Express, that is.
Comments closed
Following on from my post from a couple of days ago, there is more on proposed citizenship ceremonies at Blood & Treasure.
Meanwhile, Lenin has a look at Boris Johnson.
Johnson’s piece is quite ridiculous. It is under the headline, “The British dream: we must all speak the same language.”
That’s a pretty rubbish dream if you ask me. The Americans have a dream aswell. It’s known as “rags to riches”. The idea is that anybody from any background can aspire to greatness. Boris Johnson’s big idea is to turn us all into clones.
We’ve all got to be as British as Carry On films and scotch eggs and falling over on the beach while trying to change into your swimming trunks with a towel on. We should all feel the same mysterious pang at the sight of the Queen. We do indeed need to inculcate this Britishness, especially into young Muslims, and the problem is how.
Johnson hasn’t a chance, of course, since no one is British in the way that he would like them to be. I hate Carry On films, scotch eggs and the beach. I especially hate the fucking Queen.
Except I do like scotch eggs, but that’s not the point.
Back to Boris. Amazingly, he cites that far superior American Dream to back up his idea for a British Dream.
Americans all understand instinctively that they are equal citizens of the greatest country on earth, and they all have an equal chance of rising to the top of that country.
That is the idea of America, the American dream; and we have been comparatively hopeless at communicating any sense of the British dream, or the British idea. So what we must now do is begin the immense task with a few practical steps.
We should teach English, and we should teach in English. We should teach British history. We should think again about the jilbab, with the signals of apartness that it sends out, and we should probably scrap faith schools. We should forbid the imams from preaching sermons in anything but English; because if you want to build a society where everyone feels included, and where everyone shares in the national story, we cannot continue with the multicultural apartheid.
But what about those British people who speak Welsh, or Gaelic, or Scots, or Kernewek? What about those whose primary language is BSL? Shall we force them all to speak English now?
As an Englishman, I’ll speak any language I damn well please in my own home. In fact, I’m going to start learning Urdu tomorrow. Stubbornness: how British.
Worse still, check out what Boris says before he suggests that everybody should become a robot.
It was not so much the horror of what they said on Newsnight, those Islamic wackos, one of whom, Abu Uzair, announced: “Even if I am British, I don’t follow the values of the UK. I follow the Islamic values. I have no allegiance to the British Queen whatsoever, or to British society.”
No, what was shocking was the unmistakably English accent in which they said it, the voices that marked them as complete products of our primary and secondary systems.
So hang on a minute. We’ve got to get everybody speaking English, to prevent people from having the sorts of views that the person with the “unmistakably English accent” has. So Boris demolished his argument in his own article.
I’ve not managed to read all of this. But I’ve read the first half or so and it’s really good, so why don’t you give it a go? (Via.)
Comments closed
This is a bit of a thought-splurge of little things that have been going through my mind since the London bombings.
I was surprised that some people felt that they had to change their political views in the aftermath of the London bombings, seeing it as a wake-up call. It is, though, different for me. As I explained on the 7th, the bombs in London felt as distant as the ones in Madrid last year. (Perhaps if, say, Edinburgh were to be bombed by terrorists then I would maybe feel different, but I can’t tell.) And I didn’t have any reason to believe that London wouldn’t be a target for terrorists. I mean, London is a very high-profile city in an important western country — it’s surely bound to be.
I watched Straight Talk over the weekend, where the only topic of discussion was the London bombings. At one point they were discussing what Charles Kennedy had said — that Iraq was surely a factor. All of the panellists agreed that he had a valid viewpoint but that the timing was wrong. What a bunch of wusses. Surely the aftermath of a major event like the London bombings is the time to be forthright and honest about your views?
I am not saying, of course, that Iraq is the only factor in bombers’ minds. If Britain hadn’t gone into Iraq, Britain wouldn’t be exempt from terrorist attacks, for the same reasons I outlined above. But when the intelligence warned about the potential for Iraq to increase the threat of terrorism in this country, it’s difficult to just say that Iraq has nothing to do with it.
Here’s what they said in June this year:
Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist related activity in the U.K.
That was in the same report that prompted the government to decrease the threat assessment traffic lights of doom level. So if that bit of the report was right, how come the other bit of the report, about Iraq, is meant to be so wrong according to the government?
Ask the public (via Chicken Yoghurt).
Only 28% of voters agree with the government that Iraq and the London bombings are not connected.
Okay?
I also reject the idea that the mere suggestion that Iraq might have been reason why the London bombings took place is somehow making excuses for the bombers. Pure rubbish. I’ll say this: the London bombings were the fault of the bombers, and their accomplices, alone. Disagreeing with the war in Iraq is no reason whatsoever to go about blowing even more people up, and I would think that most people — whether they were for or against the war — would agree with that.
I was against the war in Iraq for a variety of reasons, one of which was that I thought that it would increase the threat of terrorism. The thing about the London bombings is that it gave both sides of the increasingly tedious pro- / anti-war debate more ammunition. Those who were in favour of the Iraq invasion say, “Look, we told you so, terrorists are everywhere, so we need to go get ‘em!” Those who were against say, “We told you so, Iraq increased the threat of terrorism.”
One last thought about it all. The revelation (one that reminded me so much of Monkey Dust) that the bombers were British born and bred, and most of seemed to be, on the surface, normal everyday people, to me kind of debunks the idea that all Islamic terrorists are the sort of people who you can’t have a discussion with.
Update: I like this post from Nosemonkey.
Of course, what this could be an indication of (my personal favourite theory) is merely that it’s a piece of piss to conduct a terrorist attack. You don’t need some vast intergalactic conspiracy of bearded men in caves. All you need is some desperate, stupid and psychotic people, access to the internet, and someone with the balls to track down some explosives. Or has every single suicide bomber on the West Bank or in Iraq since the occupation (yet more today, surprise surprise) been part of some vast, James Bond style organisation?
Update: Singing ‘la-la-la’ with fingers in their ears.
3 comments