Telegraph Comment of the Week (#22)

If it’s one thing the Right loves to do it’s to claim that it’s philosophically and epistemologically superior to the Left. Yet its constant rewriting of history actually demonstrates the opposite. In recent years, many on the Right have claimed that the Nazis are ‘left-wing’. Why? Because they can’t cope with the idea that the Nazis (and fascists) occupy a space further along from them on the political Right. They do this for two reasons: first, to smear the Left and second, to claim a tenuous moral superiority over them. The Nazis are ‘socialists’ they will exclaim because the word ‘socialist’ appears in their name. There can be no more a feeble rationalization. For example, the Australian Liberal Party, in spite of its name, is not a centre left party but a right-wing party. If you tell them that, they start hurling insults. Names count for nothing but try telling them that.

This week’s comment was found on a Delingtroll blog, which makes the same tired claims about how Nazis aren’t really right-wing. In this blog, he attempts to create a space between Nigel Farage and the Front National’s Marine Le Pen but ends up making himself look foolish and ignorant in the process. No mean feat for Delingpole or Dan Hannan, who is cited in this hilarious piece.

To lump together fascist parties (Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, Jobbik in Hungary, the BNP) with bellicose but essentially constitutional anti-immigration movements (FN in France, PVV in the Netherlands, Freedom Party in Austria) is clumsy. To add in eurosceptic parties of the democratic right (AfD in Germany, Mouvement pour la France, Danish People’s Party, Ukip) is deliberately tendentious.

When someone groups all these parties together under the label ‘extreme right’, he is telling you more about himself than about them. Parties like Golden Dawn are not right-wing in any recognisable sense. They favour workers’ councils, higher spending, state-controlled industries; they march on May Day under red flags. They could just as easily sit at either end of the European Parliament’s hemicycle (our closest equivalent, in its combination of mystical nationalism and loathing for capitalism, is Sinn Féin). Calling such parties right-wing isn’t intended to make anyone think less of them; it’s intended to damage mainstream conservatives by implying that the difference between them and the Nazis is one of degree.

Hannan’s article for The Spectator Dictator is desperate as well as intellectually dishonest. UKIP have, through Godfrey Bloom, established friendly relations with Le Pen’s FN. Moreover, the FN recently met with Geert Wilders PVV with the intention of forming an electoral pact in the European Parliament. There’s nothing ‘clumsy’ about those connections. They are real.

The above quote is preceded by a characteristic whinge from Delingtroll:

Yet our lazy and parti-pris media – even many newspapers notionally on the right-wing side of the debate – continue to do the liberal-left’s dirty work for it by labelling any party with instincts which are nationalistic, anti-immigration, or anti-EU as belonging to the “far-right” – and therefore automatically beyond the pale of reasoned political discourse. The loons of the green-left, on the other hand, get a more or less free pass to spout their anti-democratic drivel at will.

The nationalism that is expressed by the likes of the PVV or the other parties mentioned here, belongs on the far-right. There can be no question about it. Furthermore, there is nothing ‘reasoned’ or reasonable about the shrill paranoia that dominates the Right’s anti-immigration discourses. Words like ‘floods’ and ‘tides’ are constantly used alongside exaggerations like ‘mass immigration’ which is itself a euphemization of the phrase ‘floods of immigrants’. These words are often joined by hygiene metaphors like ‘contamination’.

Now to this week’s comment. This one comes from ‘eufreedom’. Yeah, I laughed at that name too.

The key to this comment is “ALL British born” and in spite of “eufreedom’s” claims that no distinctions will be made according to colour, creed and denomination, questions are invariably asked by such parties regarding one’s right to claim national identity – particularly if they look different. Kippers often claim that they are “neither right nor left” but given their nationalism and obsession with difference, this is evidently dishonest. ‘eufreedom’ also takes umbrage with the fact that people disagree with his/her drivel and pronounces them “neo-fascist-marxist-EU drones and trolls”. This comment may look like a self-parody of a Kipper, but this is how they really think and talk.

For more hilarity, have a look at Toby Young’s feeble attempt to unite the Tories and UKIP under the “Country before Party” banner. 

The Immigration ‘Debate’

We need to do something now or we’ll end up with someone like Geert Wilders as Prime Minister

Every time I hear the words, “Let’s have a debate on immigration”, I wonder if that’s what the speaker actually wants. What I’ve found, more often than not, is a desire on the part of the speaker or speakers to control the discourse on immigration. All too often, there is an ugly discourse lying behind the façade of this apparent ‘need’ to want to ‘debate’ the subject of immigration.

What’s worse are the numbers of self-described ‘left-liberals’ who are prepared to countenance some pretty appalling views for the sake of ‘free speech’. These people are willing to listen and even respond – albeit feebly – to the discourses offered by the anti-immigrationists, whose speech has not changed one iota since the 1970s. Yet, the left-liberals seem to sincerely believe they can have a rational and sensible dialogue with people whose views on minorities, women and the disabled are frankly obscene. To adapt Fanon: if they’re talking about immigrants (or Muslims), then they’re also talking about you. While our ‘left-liberal’ friends are politely debating Nazis and other hardcore right-wingers, attacks against minority groups including the disabled are on the rise in Britain.

And now we hear the old hate speech again, the talk of ‘floods’, ‘invasions’ and being ‘swamped’ are  joined by  familiar words associated with hygiene like ‘contamination’. Other emotive  phrases like ‘mass immigration’ are deployed to appeal to people’s emotions. More recently, I’ve seen words like ‘genocide’ and ‘treason’ being used on public internet fora. Take this example of a comment left on Douglas Carswell’s nit-picking diatribe against the recent UCL study into immigration on Telegraph blogs:

“Genocide”. Yes, this is the kind of language used by those who want a ‘debate’ on immigration.  The definintion of the word ‘genocide’ is:

noun

[mass noun]

• the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group:

Hysteria, hyperbole, histrionics, paranoia and playing the victim are all part of the right’s strategy to control the discourse on immigration and the liberals fall for it every time.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard or read, ‘Our voices aren’t being heard’. Utter rubbish. Nigel Farage has appeared on Question Time 25 times since 2009 and the views that are expressed by these vile simpletons grace the comments threads of the Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express every day of the week.  Articles with sensationalistic titles, such as the one cited by our racist friend here, help to reproduce the poisonous discourse of nationalism and its fixation on a pure, but nonetheless, constructed ‘British’ identity.

Even the supposedly ‘left-wing’ Labour Party has taken the bait and pandering to the Tory-supporting press, UKIP and the notional but bloodthirsty man-on-the-street, it too wants a ‘debate’; its spokespeople admitting that Labour ‘got it wrong’ when it was in power. What seems to have escaped the Fabian Party’s attention is that these anti-immigrant discourses have only become more vocal since the Crash of 2008.  If there’s a problem with the economy, then in the minds of the racists and the gullible it’s the fault of the immigrants. It was like that in the 1930s and 1970s and its come back with a vengeance.  It’s as though the events of history have been wiped from the collective memory of these postmodern politicians as they pursue the grand prize of everlasting political power. What do they care beyond paying lip service?

Any mention of racism to these people is greeted with ‘anti-racism is a code for anti-white’. How on earth can you reason with people like this? You can’t. If gullible liberals believe they can have a polite discussion with these extreme nationalists, then they are deluding themselves. This is no time for cordiality.

If you want to see what could happen in Britain in 10 years time, look across the North Sea to the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders racist PVV party is currently ahead in the polls.  On Wednesday, Wilders is due to meet Marine Le Pen of France’s racist Front National. Two years ago, UKIP’s then leader, Malcolm (Lord) Pearson, welcomed Wilders to the House of Lords to show his film, Fitna. Be in no doubt, these parties enjoy the warmest of relations in the European Parliament and for all their talk of freedom, they want to enslave those of us who are different.

Britain, it’s time to wake up. We need to respond to the attacks on our communities and we need to hit the anti-immigrationists hard.  These people cannot be reasoned with. If you turn your back to them, they will plunge a knife into it. You have been warned.

UPDATE 13/11/13 @ 0941

David ‘Shoot the Bastards’ Blunkett channels Enoch Powell in this article on the BBC website.

Tensions between local people and Roma migrants could escalate into rioting unless action is taken to improve integration, David Blunkett has warned.

The former home secretary fears a repeat of race riots that hit northern cities in 2001.

His concerns centre on the Page Hall area of Sheffield, where Roma migrants from Slovakia have set up home.

But he also accused the government of “burying their head in the sand” over the scale of Roma settlement in the UK.

In an interview with BBC Radio Sheffield, he said the Roma community had to make more of an effort to fit in with British culture.

“We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming community, the Roma community, because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise. We all know that.”

It’s hard to believe that Blunkett was once the leader of one of the most left-wing councils in Britain. Now he earns praise from Falange.

Mr Blunkett’s intervention was praised by UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who campaigns against the ending of border controls for migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, both countries with significant Roma populations.

“The fact that he is talking of the significant difficulties with the Roma population already in his constituency should be taken seriously by the likes of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.

“My question is if they won’t listen to the dangers of opening the door to Romania and Bulgaria next year when UKIP speak out on it, will they listen to David Blunkett? I certainly hope so.”

Look at Blunkett now, doing the dirty work of the right.  Shame? He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

Life on Gilligan’s Island (Part 30)

Within days of Anders Behring Breivik’s attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, Kennite wrote this article for the Telegraph,

I wouldn’t suggest that anyone was actually pleased by the horror in Norway. But within hours of the gunman being identified as white, certain British Islamists and their sympathisers were behaving as if they had caught a lucky break.

So what is he saying here? Surely those who identify with Breivik’s notions of ‘cultural Marxism’ are no doubt pleased. It’s patently misleading to say otherwise.  Gilligan also appears to be suggesting that we “ignore the extreme right, it’s the Muslims we need to worry about”.  Regardless of who they are or what they do, Kennite gives all Muslims the broad brush treatment. He is indiscriminate. Those who work to promote tolerance are also similarly attacked. He doesn’t use the word “Dhimmi” but doesn’t mind much if his commenters use it.  One such person is Robert  Lambert of Exeter University, whom Kennite reports as saying, “Nationalists pose a bigger threat than al-Qaeda”. Gilligan adds,

The Islamist threat, he said, was “minimal” by comparison. Ibrahim Hewitt, the head of a charity called Interpal, wrote that “the new Right is on the rise across the West” thanks to “the collusion of Western governments”.

Any group or academic school that researches Islam or its relations with other religions is wrong in Kennite’s mind. Furthermore, most security commentators agree that Al-Qaeda is not the threat that it once was. Here, Kennite says,

Clearly, the number killed by Anders Behring Breivik is greater than in any single Islamist terror attack in the UK; and equally clearly, the murderer was motivated by hatred of Muslims. This cannot, however, have been his main motive, or he surely would have taken his assault rifle to an Oslo mosque, rather than an island of white teenagers. To even suggest equivalence between years of Islamist terror and the far Right, based on a single, awful case, is deeply dangerous and false.

Who said anything about “equivalence” but I would put it to him that terrorism and spree killings are abhorrent no matter who carries them out. What he seems to be suggesting is that ‘Islamist’ terrorism is somehow worse than any other form. It’s the way he reminds us how Breivik didn’t attack a Mosque but instead killed – and notice how he says this – “white teenagers” not only misses the point but indicates a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of his writing. If Muslims aren’t part of a race, then why mention these “white” teenagers at all? In fact, one of the youths who was murdered by Breivik was

Ismail Haji Ahmed, 20, was a talented dancer who had appeared on Norway’s Got Talent, using the name Isma Brown.

Ismail was dark-skinned and a Muslim.

While nobody should deny that there is anti-Muslim hatred in Britain, and it’s disgraceful, nearly all the available evidence shows that it is not “rising” but diminishing.

Naturally, Gilligan offers no evidence for his assertion that Islamophobic attacks are on the decline. Furthermore  who or what is the source for this earth-shattering  information? Daniel Pipes? Pamela Geller?

The Tory chairmanship, once home of Norman “Cricket Test” Tebbit, is held by a Muslim woman. The number of Muslim MPs doubled at the last election, some elected for entirely non-Muslim seats (Bromsgrove, Gillingham, Stratford-upon-Avon) with no backlash whatsoever. Continental moves to ban minarets and the niqab have gained no political traction at all in Britain.

The current Tory chair is Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who is often lambasted on the pages of the Torygraph. Only last week, this blog from Nile ‘Moonie’ Gardiner appeared.

If she does make an exit from Millbank to Islamabad, Baroness Warsi will leave behind a remarkably undistinguished track record, peppered with a series of distinctly un-conservative outbursts, which were frequently at odds with the views of her own prime minister. Only time will tell if she proves more successful in the realm of international diplomacy. One thing is certain though: her contribution to the cause of British conservatism has been practically non-existent.

“Islamabad”?  Yes, I wondered why he said that too. She’s from Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, why wouldn’t she want to go back there or live in Chelsea for that matter?  Back to the article,

The English Defence League, although vile, shows the British far Right’s weakness, not its strength. Two years ago, haters of Muslims had at least a semi-credible political party, the BNP, with serious hopes of winning one or more councils. Now the BNP has lost nearly all of its councillors, it has effectively collapsed, and the anti-Muslim Right has been reduced from political office to a street rabble.

This is misleading and dishonest. Kennite claims the far-right’s strength has diminished  because of the EDL’s increased profile and the decline in the BNP’s fortunes. It wasn’t that long ago when the Daily Star openly encouraged the EDL to organize itself as  a political party.  But  Gilligoon also tries to put some distance between himself and his fans from the EDL.  But it’s all for show. His thinking is muddled, he doesn’t know whether he wants to offer praise to the EDL or condemn them.

Over the past decade, half a dozen or so white British Right-wingers have been convicted of possessing explosives and other weapons. But all were loners not acting in concert with any group. Breivik appears, for now, to be the same. Links to a global fascist conspiracy have so far proved elusive.

No one has ever suggested that there was a “global fascist conspiracy” but there are plenty of neo-Nazi, fascist and openly racist parties on the continent and some of them are in government. Italy’s MSI party, for example, is in coalition with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Belgium’s Vlaams Belang is gaining support and Geert Wilders PVV has 24 seats in the Dutch House of Representatives. Should we just ignore them? Gilligoon doesn’t say as much but that’s the message that Nowhere Towers is receiving. It’s almost as if the 1930’s never happened. Then, Jews were being scapegoated for the social and economic problems in many European nations, including Britain. The lessons of the past clearly have not been learnt and now, we have a situation where some lazy journalists happily and irresponsibly churn out scare story after scare story abut “Islamic extremists” and “Muslim terrorists”. Gilligan thinks he’s found a rich seam of stories, but he’s extracted them from a fool’s goldmine.

Kennite popped out two blog posts yesterday. This one tells us that “East London Mosque has bagged itself a Bishop”. Notice how he suggests that Tower Hamlets is some sort of nest of vipers.

The Islamists of East London, led by their flagship the East London Mosque, have been loudly condemning a proposed march by the English Defence League through Tower Hamlets on September 3. Actually, of course, they are thrilled.

Pray, tell us Kennite, why are they thrilled?

The EDL is wrong in so many ways – look at this video for how one of its previous marches, in Leicester, ended – but not least because they hand their supposed enemies, Muslim radicals, the perfect way to build support and legitimacy. The Islamists’ attempts to blame the EDL for the Norway massacre are perhaps a bit of a stretch – but who could dispute that the EDL are a racist rabble? Who could possibly object to campaigning against them?

That’s a bit of a stretch. Once again, he’s seems to be spending a lot of time on Mars. Did he not hear that Breivik had met and marched with the EDL as recently as March of this year?

The mosque has duly placed itself at the head of a campaign to resist the march – called, with beautiful irony, “One Tower Hamlets – No Place for Hate.” I think they must mean “No Place for Hate – Apart From The East London Mosque.”

He doesn’t miss an opportunity to take a cheap swipe at his opponent, does he? Say, wasn’t this blog supposed to be about a “bishop” being “bagged”? Not until the fourth paragraph from the end is the bishop in question actually mentioned. On the way, we are treated to the usual piss and vinegar about Ken Livingstone.

And there are those Ken Livingstone/ Lee Jasper creations, One Society Many Cultures and Unite Against Fascism (Jasper’s typically measured intervention in the Norway killings story yesterday was to compare Boris Johnson to Anders Behring Breivik.)

So who is this “bishop”?

The new bishop of Stepney, Rt Rev Adrian Newman, will speak at a “No Place for Hate” pre-rally at the East London Mosque on Friday, his first public engagement since taking office.

So what’s bugging you, Kennite?

The Bishop is the mosque’s most important recruit so far to what appears to be its new strategy of legitimisation. After they were thoroughly exposed by this newspaper and Channel 4, the mosque and IFE have realised that they can no longer simply rely on lies and empty threats of legal action to see off their critics.

This reeks of paranoia. He even manages to get in a pre-emptive threat.

I say the Church is untainted – but if it starts mixing with people like Azad Ali that won’t last long. There are plenty of far more representative Muslim groups to work with.

I thought you hated all Muslim groups. Aren’t they all “extremists”?

By all means protest against racism, bishop. But don’t do it through the East London Mosque – you’re in danger of making yourself look ridiculous.

Not half as ridiculous as you look, Andy baby.

UPDATE: 19/3/12

It seems that Bob Lambert is another former police spy.

The new crusaderism?

The crusader mentality never went away. By ‘crusader’ I am not suggesting that there is necessarily an active desire on the part of Islamophobes to reconquer the Holy Land. No. What I am talking about is the way in which certain politicians, journalists and others seek to produce scare stories for popular consumption; these are scare stories that have a particular historical precedent. These myths have been systematically inserted into public conversations on Islam for the last 9 years. But stories, myths and tropes are only part of it. The English Defence League (EDL) has  articulated its discourses around the alleged ‘Islamification of the country’ and have formed themselves into a sort of mass lynch mob ready to crush anyone who dares to get in its way.  We see countries like France banning the burqa and politicians like Geert Wilders declaring the Koran to be ‘evil’.

Given the Vatican’s blatant refusal to come clean on the child abuse scandals that continue to dog it, Wilders and others have deliberately blinded themselves to the reality that all mass religions from Catholicism to Hinduism have a great deal of explaining to do vis a vis their methods of social control and the secrets that they keep. No mass religion is free from these sorts of scandals but in the Catholic church such abuse was institutionalized; the perpetrators shielded from investigation by the current Pope. Yet not a word about this from the likes of UKIP, Wilders or the EDL.

The Islamophobia we are currently witnessing has its roots in events that took place over 1000 years ago: the Crusades. While many Muslims have pointed out this fact to their detractors, Western neo-conservative journalists like Douglas Murray have sidestepped the issue. But they can do this no more. The current opposition to Islam is part of this new crusaderist mentality. The comments on this blog sum up this mentality. The issue of the building of a mosque called park51 (in fact a community centre) near  ‘Ground Zero’ has got American right-wingers foaming at the mouth. Of course, they conveniently and deliberately ignore the fact that Muslims were killed on 9 September 2001 along with Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus and others. Death doesn’t discriminate.

To ensure their opinions found purchase in the public mind, the neo-cons coined a word for Islamist fanatics: Islamofascist. The word is a portmanteau of  ‘Islam’ and ‘fascist’ and is designed to conjure up images of Hitler and the Nazis, who are a sort of touchstone of evil – true demons. Whenever a new enemy comes along, it is only a matter of time before he is compared to Hitler. Gamal Abdel Nasser found himself labelled as “another Hitler” by British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden during the Suez Crisis of 1956.  In truth Nasser wasn’t even a Mussolini yet this comparison found favour with diehard militarists, right-wingers and Daily Mail readers.  It was, after all, only 11 years since the end of WWII and memories were of Hitler were still fresh in the mind.  In the 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte was used in a similar way. Parents would threaten their children by telling that ‘Boney’ would ‘get them’ if they didn’t go to sleep. An effective weapon to keep children in line for sure but what about the adults?

The title of Glenn Beck’s programme has the words “Jihad. Mein Kampf” as if to suggest that the fundamentalists constitute a form of Nazism, complete with its own uniforms and regalia. Somehow I doubt Beck has ever read Mein Kampf...

Funnily enough, Beck has a disclaimer: “I am not a journalist”. That’s all right then. He also ‘reminds’ us of how these fanatics use the “weapon of propaganda”. A bit like Fox News?

Christopher Hitchens has  declined the credit for the appearance the word Islamofascism – that’s big of him. The Popinjay says

The term Islamofascism was first used in 1990 in Britain’s Independent newspaper by Scottish writer Malise Ruthven, who was writing about the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power.

Is that so? That still doesn’t make it right. How would one define Francoist Spain? As Christofascist? We know that Franco was a staunch Roman Catholic and placed the church at the heart of the state yet Franco wasn’t fascist; he sympathized with the fascists and the Nazis. He allied himself with the Spanish Falange, though did not join the Falange until the early 1960’s. In his attempt to explain away the term, Hitchens doubles back on himself,

Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the “pure” and the “exclusive” over the unclean and the kufar or profane.

Clear as mud, but that still doesn’t make them ‘fascist’, my former Trotskyite friend; it makes them either religious fundamentalists or religious purists; reactionary conservatives to be precise – not unlike the Generalissimo himself.  David Horowitz, another former Trotskyite, came up with the idea of an Islamofascism Awareness Week (sic). Steven Schwartz of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Bog Standard claims that

I was, as I will explain, the first Westerner to use the neologism in this context.

Good for you, Steve. Schwartz does his best to defend the term, going so far as to offer badly drawn connections between the use of state-sanctioned violence and the activities of Al Qaeda to make his somewhat tenuous point.

Fascism was paramilitary; indeed, the Italian and German military elites were reluctant to accept the fascist parties’ ideological monopoly. Al Qaeda and Hezbollah are both paramilitary.

There is a major difference between the two: Islamic fundamentalists do not roam the streets looking for non-believers to beat up nor do they attack political meetings. Both Hitler and Mussolini used gangs of thugs to smash printing presses and offices of newspapers that opposed them. I see none of this in the cities of the so-called West. Where is the Al-Qaeda equivalent of the squadristi or the Sturmabteilung? They are nowhere to be seen. There are no Islamic fundamentalist equivalents of the Blackshirts, Brownshirts or any other colour of shirt…though the likes of Hitchens would have us believe that these religious fanatics have formed themselves into the kinds of paramilitary units that operated in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

A lot of the mutterings and op-ed pieces on ‘Islamofascism’ are redolent of the rantings of the evidently mad Peter the Hermit who propagated the will of Pope Urban II by claiming Muslims had committed a variety of unspeakable acts against Christian pilgrims. Never mind that Christians had, for centuries, subjected Jews to the very thing that they were now accusing Muslims of – the Hermit wasn’t interested as he was most probably a raving anti-Semite – like most Christians of the period.  It was partly because of Peter’s efforts that the Peasants Crusade attracted so many volunteers (Urban II had declared that anyone who took the cross would be given a remission from all sins. A very tempting offer to the superstitious medieval mind). Things haven’t changed  great deal since 1096, we may have more advanced technology but our attitudes and our way of thinking is, more often than not, rooted in the past. It is easy to accuse ‘Islamic extremists’  or Islam itself of being mired in the medieval period but our thinking, which we like to think of as ‘enlightened’ is mired in exactly the same place, if not an earlier time. This is particularly the case when one hears  Douglas Murray talk about the ‘creeping Islamicization of Europe’. These ‘warnings’ are medieval in their style, tone and delivery.

Islam is often accused by western commentators of treating women as second class citizens. What these commentators ignore is the fact that women, particularly in this country and elsewhere, are paid less than men and are objectified in the media. Feminine traits are ridiculed, sidelined and devalued, while masculine ones such as war-making are celebrated.  In the home, women do all, if not most of the work while the men do as little as possible.  Then there’s the issue of marital rape, where the husband believes it to be his conjugal right to violate his wife if he so chooses – a pater familias for our time? Perhaps.  In the light of this,  how are women freer in the west than in Muslim countries? They aren’t and it is a simple matter of cultural relativism that prevents the Islamophobes from seeing the truth. The Patriarchy is near-universal and doesn’t make distinctions between religions.

The way in which the word ‘Islamofascist’ has been used reminds us of how the western political pundits saw Saddam Hussein: as a new Hitler. The construction of demons seems to rest on the last great demon of our recent history. This laziness in thinking exists for a purpose: to convince the gullible and the illiterate that Hitler had been reincarnated in the body of a contemporary figure and, as such, had to be stopped. In the 19th century, the bogeyman was Napoleon Bonaparte whose name was used to keep children in line if they did not say their prayers or go to sleep when told to do so. “Boney will come and get you”!

I am not a Muslim. In fact I do not belong to any religion, mass or otherwise. These mass religions are not concerned with spirituality, rather, their focus is on blind faith and submission. What they all have in common is their vertical structures of power, where an educated (educated in the religious sense) elite controls all aspects of the spiritual as well as the temporal (your body and its needs). It is only The Religious Society of Friends – The Quakers – who have a horizontal power structure.

Finally, here’s a blog from Damian Thompson in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. The title is interesting and demonstrates how Islamophobia has percolated through each level of our society. The misguided belief that Muslims are being ‘pandered’ to for the sake of ‘multiculturalism’ has become a form of universal truth among Daily Mail readers, who were never predisposed to Others of any creed or colour.

In 1977, The Jam declared that “This is the modern world”! Today I would ask “Is this the modern world”? It doesn’t look like it.

UPDATE:

Here’s a wind up blog from Andrew Gilligan. If this kind of article was written about Jews and synagogues, there would be trouble. Yet, because it involves Muslims and a mosque that was, allegedly the place where various bombers worshipped, it is ‘fair game’. In this blog, Sunny Hundal of LiberalConspiracy asks “Why is Gilligan still taken seriously”? Good question.

Gilligan wrote an earlier blog about an “Islamist press release” from The Guardian.  For Gilligan a small group of cranks becomes a mass movement,

Perhaps it’s because Mr Ali is a senior official of the fundamentalist Islamic Forum of Europe – which works, in its own words, to create an Islamic state under sharia law in Europe. The IFE and the MSF share the same offices.

I won’t happen anymore than I am likely to become President of the United States. Gilligan lives in a fantasy world that is populated by fools, ignoramuses and sockpuppets.