That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore
A couple of weeks ago I read a piece in the Times by the regular Saturday columnist Matthew Parris. Perhaps I didn’t pay very close attention, but the theme of the piece seemed to be this: look at the number of people who die on roads or in all kinds of accidents each year and compare it to the number of people (in the West) who have been killed by Islamic jihadis over the past years, including the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, and you will see that it is statistically irrelevant. A few nutters going mad is not a big deal. Shit happens. So, get over it and don’t get into a tizzy about it and throw the baby out with the bath tub when it comes to concerns about civil liberty. I hope I haven’t misrepresented Mr. Parris, for whom I have great respect as a man, and a thinker and writer, but that is how it read to me.
If so, it is an utter misconception.
First, we are all subject to the vicissitudes of life – and death. I accept that I may have a heart attack, or walk under a bus, or be diagnosed with terminal cancer, or even murdered by a mugger tomorrow. It is how it is, and it can be random and even murdered in a robbery. That is life, and it can be horribly unjust. But I know that I will die some day, and whilst I would be sad if any of these events happened, I am going to die someday.
What I do not expect is to be forced to jump whilst on fire from the 100th floor of a New York skyscraper, plunging for long seconds to my death as my friends and colleagues burn alive, or to be blown to pieces whilst riding to work on the underground, because some religious psychopath has a grudge about a cartoon. I suggest that the statistically irrelevant observation will be of little comfort to the family who miss the late policeman, wounded, putting his hands up in surrender, and shot in the head at point-blank range. It will be one of the images of 2015, sadly, and it breaks my heart. It, and all the other murders, were evil acts. Evil as opposed to calamitous, or random.
Second, it is naïve. One of the problems surrounding terrorism is that it works. It is highly effective. I can’t remember the exact provenance of the quote, but “kill one, frighten a thousand/million” comes to mind. This is true. Everything is context. This is an attack on satire and free speech. That right to free speech is the product of more than 2,000 years of history, countless atrocities and a fumbling towards democracy. It is not possible to have democracy and freedom of thought without satire. Satire offends. That is the point, really. And it works. I am looking forward to Frankie Boyle’s routine “the prophet Mohammed” and Islam. I won’t hold my breath.
By the way, please feel free to mock my “religion” – Christianity – if you will. It’s OK. I may take offence, but on the whole I won’t care, really. I might even agree with you. If I don’t, I won’t kill you. You are entitled to your view and I might change my mind. In fact, it is pretty open, and if a “religion” (I f*****g hate that word) can’t cope with mockery, what does it say? It says: it is crap.
Third, this is just one of the straws in the wind. It won’t stop here. It will get more frequent. There are already parts of the UK that appear to be self-governing Caliphates in which anyone who deviates from Sharia Law is unsafe. At the same time, these areas appear to be extraordinarily corrupt. Tower Hamlets appears to be part of 7th Century Saudi Arabia, for example. By the way, Saudi Arabia has one of the highest rates of downloading porn, particularly “gay” porn in the world.
I invite a perusal of what the excellent the excellent Cranmer has to say.
Sigillum
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January 8, 2015 at 9:46 am -
There was an interesting comment from a French journalist being interviewed in Paris by Radio 5 this morning. To paraphrase her, she was remarking that until this she hadn’t really regarded these cartoonists as “journalists” and had regarded them as inciting Islamophobia with their constant cartoonery. Speaks volumes about the average modern journalist perhaps.
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January 8, 2015 at 9:51 am -
Presumably she also mentioned their ‘anti-catholicism’, their rampant ‘anti-Buddhism’, their….do I need to go on? Bet she didn’t.
Hebdo is an equal-opportunity offender. Always has been – Dawkin is probably the only person it hasn’t offended.-
January 8, 2015 at 10:01 am -
“Dawkin is probably the only person it hasn’t offended.”
To be French is to offend evolution. *insert good old British prejudice here*
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January 8, 2015 at 9:49 am -
Of course no Brit newspaper led with a Hebdoesque cartoon this morning. The Daily Mail however did include some fabulous new fast diet recipes for her and HIM, so that’s alright.
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January 8, 2015 at 9:52 am -
The Independent did – I’ve decided to forgive them for employing Jerome Taylor.
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January 8, 2015 at 9:55 am -
I stand, knee high to an Action Man, corrected. Who’d have thought it though…The Indy grew some bollocks .
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January 8, 2015 at 10:17 am -
January 8, 2015 at 11:17 am
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January 8, 2015 at 10:11 am -
The problem is rooted in Islam.
There. I’ve said it.
Any religion that espouses peace, love and the right of all to hold their beliefs, whether they concur with the religion in question or not, is probably, on balance, a force for good in the world. A religion that deems all others inferior, and makes it a religious duty to convert or kill the unbeliever, is sooner or later going to become a force for evil in the world.
Islam needs to take a long, hard look at it’s core values. I accept that many Muslims have, and either ignore or discount the bits about ‘jihad’ and all the rest – it’s the fairly substantial number of Muslims that don’t that are causing a awful lot of strife in the world.
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January 8, 2015 at 10:18 am -
The problem for Islam in this respect is it has no central authority. It has no Pope to excommunicate those who are deemed beyond the Pale. There are Imams but they are Legion. It may be of note that in the same Radio 5 segment it was stated that Imams in France were all speaking out in a disapproving manner, but I daresay we’ll the only Imam we’ll really hear about, by hook or by crook, is the odd one out. At the end of all of that though, the average Jihadi is probably about as Muslim as the average IRA terrorist was Catholic.
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January 8, 2015 at 10:49 am -
It’s all very well for Imams to ‘speak out’ in public. They may well have their fingers crossed behind their backs when they do. It’s what they preach in private that’s the problem.
I may be wrong, but somewhere or other I read that for a Muslim to lie to an unbeliever is not a sin, if the greater aims of Islam are furthered by it. If that’s the case – why should any of the rest of us believe any condemnatory statement about Islamist violence by any Muslim?
I’ll say again – I think there are many Muslims living in the West who just want to get on with their lives in peace, and who have no truck with the Islamists. However, that doesn’t change the basic teachings of Islam – and we in the moderate West need to be rather more insistent about the lessons of our history that Sigillum sets out in his post, and how the we don’t want the benefits of our hard-won freedom eroded by the teachings of Islam or any other religion (or rampant secularism).
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January 8, 2015 at 11:06 am -
* I think there are many Muslims living in the West who just want to get on with their lives in peace *
Even more of them who are living in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Libya feel the same way I imagine.
Perhaps instead of apologising for slavery and institutional child abuse our politicians should try apologising for invading countries and blowing them up in the name of Freedom and Democracy.-
January 8, 2015 at 11:18 am -
Agreed.
Take Afghanistan. Size of Europe. Population of 40+m And we and the Yanks send what is, in effect, a tiny army to help them out. Now, if they were all raving jihadists, don’t you think that they couldn’t have wiped the floor with us, regardless of the Allies superior tech and weaponry? Or that there wouldn’t have been thousands of Allied troops die in ‘blue on blue’ incidents, if the local Afghan recruits were all 5th columnist Muzzies?
It’s just not credible
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January 8, 2015 at 3:24 pm -
Well, then, Ho Hum, it’ll take no time at all for all those ‘moderate Muslims’ to offer up the two murderers.
Won’t it?
*crickets*
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January 8, 2015 at 4:33 pm -
It is very doubtful that the whereabouts of these men are known to ‘moderate Muslims’.
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January 8, 2015 at 8:14 pm -
I agree, only radical muslims would have that information, which rather makes JuliaM’s point.
There are far more radical muslims than European politicians wish to admit to.
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January 8, 2015 at 11:11 am -
Not sure about the validity of the ‘central authority’ argument as there are millions of Christians in churches which don’t – and, on principle, wouldn’t – own any allegiance to any Pope, archbishop, vicar, or priest
As to the rest though, spot on. Was talking to my B-i-L over the New Year. He has worked for many years, and still does, in the Middle and Far East and he has was saying that the common fear of his Muslim co-workers out there is that of their radicalised lunatic fringe. A group of very nasty oddballs which in no way typifies them, and probably sees them as more apostate than us. But it’s as difficult for them to speak out against this there, as it is in places here, for a whole raft of cultural and other reasons
Overall, a lot of the hype this is, and will be, getting reminds me most of the efforts of the sort of loonies who drivel on in the Guardian, Mail and whatever part of the MSM will accept their demented witterings – as well as the dafter parts of the blogging fraternity – whose line of reasoning is that, taking something out of place time and context, ‘it says this in the Bible, Christians believe in the Bible, therefore all Christians must be ….baby killers, rapists and child molesters’, or whatever they want to smear us with that day. And of course, the papers need to make money, don’t they?
The really scary thing is that most of those reading seem to be of very limited intellect, and apparantly incapable of subsequently looking out at the real world with their own two eyes and exercising their own cerebral faculties, and then, after some practical observation and real thought saying ‘Hang on a minute, something doesn’t make sense here…..’ A bit like Savilification, isn’t it?
So, from a practical standpoint, the only sensible advice one can give to one’s Muslim neighbours, is to remember that the Haters are going to hate hate hate. Just let’s hope that the more sensible folk out there can ‘shake it off’
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January 8, 2015 at 11:19 am -
* Not sure about the validity of the ‘central authority’ argument as there are millions of Christians in churches which don’t – and, on principle, wouldn’t – own any allegiance to any Pope, archbishop, vicar, or priest *
The point would be that “the organisation” could be deemed to have express disapproval at a corporate level. Thus it is no longer Muslims, it is terrorists.
The other point is, did the Pope ever state IRA terrorists were excommunicated? No he did not, so in that sense the Christians had the perfect mechanism to signal disapproval of organised slaughter of innocents by guerilla-fighters in Britain and they did not, so why are Muslims suddenly so wicked because they follow the same Christian principles? And let’s not mention Boston Oirishmen’s role in the fight for Oirish freedom in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
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January 8, 2015 at 1:18 pm -
If I recall correctly, the pope recently excommunicated anyone in the mafia…
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January 8, 2015 at 3:27 pm -
Along with the NHS presumably…
“… some sins incur automatic excommunication. These traditionally include abortion (the woman who has it and all accomplices)”
http://time.com/2912251/pope-francis-mafia-excommunicate/-
January 8, 2015 at 6:32 pm -
“Along with the NHS presumably”
In Germany, where many of the hospitals are Church led/affiliated, it is a perennial problem- the whole “that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues”. Only a couple of months ago some rape VICTIM was turned away from an A&E, cast out of the garden weeping and wailing, delivered unto Sodom and Gomorrah because she’d requested the Morning After Pill -which , I think (although I will stand correction) is still indexed as an abortion by that nice old man in Rome.
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January 8, 2015 at 7:30 pm -
I reckon that Jesus would probably have told them, in pretty harsh terms, that they were the sort of donkeys who would let their own die.
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January 8, 2015 at 8:58 pm -
I am wary of the whole ‘WWJD’ (What Would Jesus Do) rubber-bands around wrists thing and also of making pronouncements about how our Saviour might have reacted in any given situation. Not only do we create God in our own image but his Messiah too, it seems to me.
That said, I reckon Jesus would have employed some weaponized, lorica segmentata piercing Talmudic reasoning (like with the ‘Render unto Cesear’ incident). As a rabbi who was also the ” the eventuality of an anomaly” of the Judaic legal Matrix , Jesus would been trapped between two of the most ancient Jewish religious precepts; Firstly that all laws may be broken, all sin committed, if it is to save a life and 2. secondly the sanctity of the (unborn) life.
My shekels would be on Our Lord going for a parable leaning on the story of ‘Tamar’ and rounding on the hypocrisy of both the doctors and the ‘rape’ victim. But that’s just my guess.
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January 9, 2015 at 9:57 am -
Nice analysis. Made me laugh, thanks.
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January 8, 2015 at 7:51 pm -
Actually, I’m not so sure that the average Jihadi is about as Muslim as the average IRA terrorist was Catholic. The jihadis all seem to be very willing to quote ‘the Prophet’, sometimes at some length, and they all seem to accompany their terror acts with cries of Allu Ackbar (or however it’s spelt). I don’t recall anything similar from the IRA thugs.
No – it’s down to interpretation of the Koran. Parts of it can be interpreted very easily as “Go forth and kill the unbeliever”, ” Thou shalt have no law but Sharia” and similar. That sort of interpretation is so far removed from British values (and French, and American, etc, etc) that it needs to be challenged directly. We’re already having to – remember the Trojan Horse plot in Birmingham schools? Remember the Left’s outrage about ‘teaching British values’? Who got that one right, Michael Gove or the political Left?
Well, what do we want in Britain? British values (that is more than happy for Muslims to worship and follow their faith without let or hindrance, provided they uphold the British values common to us all), or Sharia law? Jihad?
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January 9, 2015 at 9:16 am -
@Engineer
That’s true. The IRA guys were more likely to be quoting Karl Marx.
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January 8, 2015 at 10:18 am -
It seems of all the European Newspapers only the BZ (Berlin Newspaper) has had the actual guts to publish hebdoe’s most offensive cartoons on it’s front page this morning.
http://www.bz-berlin.de/welt/attentat-in-paris-b-z-est-charlie-
January 8, 2015 at 10:26 am -
Perhaps they don’t have the same sort of “vicarious liability” laws that we do, so the newspaper doesn’t have to check with the lawyers on their exposure to possible compensation litigation if their publishing decisions provoke a further outrage and the consequent death/injury of their employees.
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January 8, 2015 at 10:53 am -
I have no idea about the German liability laws but I do know that Berlin is wall-to-wall in prayer mats these days and next Monday’s Pegida demo in Dresden should prove interesting…Angie is probably having her 2nd fit of vapours over her mid morning Kaffee right about now (or did she kip on Dave’s couch last night?)
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January 8, 2015 at 11:00 am -
Excellent point Moor – Negligence law is the root of all evil at the moment.
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January 8, 2015 at 11:37 am -
One suspects that actually it is the love of money, by negligence specialist lawyers, that remains the root of all evil ?
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January 8, 2015 at 12:51 pm -
“In 2009, when Brandeis professor Jytte Klausen wanted to publish a book about the controversy titled The Cartoons that Shook the World, Yale University Press refused to publish the cartoons and other representations of Muhammad out of fear for the safety of its staff”
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January 8, 2015 at 10:49 am -
This site is still up and has been going for four years (coming up to five now).
http://drawmuhammad.tumblr.com/
Some are funny, some are silly, but the comments are entertaining.
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January 8, 2015 at 10:24 am -
Very good article, I agree with it generally, but have you a source for the assertion about the amount of porno downloading in Tower Hamlets? I did not know that internet usage could be localised to a specific geographical location with that kind of accuracy. POssibly by Google Adwords I suppose, but if someone’s actually researched this I’d be interested to see it. Certainly wouldn’t surprise me.
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January 8, 2015 at 10:31 am -
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January 8, 2015 at 3:43 pm -
Gotta love that this Christian website quotes the Daily Beast…
A survey by Canadian researchers shows that U.S. states with the greatest religious and politically conservative affiliation are apt to search the most for sex online… The Daily Beast, October 11, 2014
http://www.roadtograce.net/current-porn-statistics/-
January 9, 2015 at 10:00 am -
Maybe running VPNs in Utah is cheap…. LOL
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January 8, 2015 at 5:41 pm -
@Gildas ….Muslim Porn Searches
Gosh one of the most interesting unexpected and disturbing bits of info I have seen in a while but there often appears to be a link between those who seek to repress what is claimed to be a vice and yet indulge in it but frankly this info is more than a little frightening really ….not because I worry about my kitties/son the next time a Muslim visits (seems my wife and daughter are likely to be safer) but the rather obvious conclusion about the potential for hypocrisy within the Muslim community
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January 8, 2015 at 10:26 am -
My apologies for some poor grammar in the early paragraphs. I was in rant mode!
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January 8, 2015 at 10:51 am -
Entirely understandable…both the post and the emotion!
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January 8, 2015 at 11:17 am -
Indeed, the IRA is a perfect example of the “terrorists” being able to bomb and shoot their way to the ballot box…
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January 8, 2015 at 12:31 pm -
I haven’t read the Parris article so can’t comment on it but, assuming you have represented it correctly, does it make any sense to argue that because deaths caused by deliberate malice number fewer than those caused by accident, we should react less vehemently?
The statistic which is relevant for me should surely be *how many deaths caused by deliberate acts are acceptable before we restrict liberty?*
Does it help in deciding what that number is to know how many deaths result from accidents? I don’t believe so.
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January 8, 2015 at 12:53 pm -
So, wars of religion return to France – must get out my Montaigne, except there is no war and I doubt that there will be. Perhaps I would do better reading the clasicist Powell.
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January 8, 2015 at 1:38 pm -
Surely the extension of MP’s logic is that it is OK for me to murder someone because as a percentage compared to road accidents etc it is minutely insignificant. If that is an acceptable defence can I pick the politician of my choice?
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January 8, 2015 at 1:41 pm -
Am I being overly cynical, or is it more than likely that it’s not just Islamic power-mongers that, whether they admit it or not, would consider satirists & others who don’t ‘tow the line’ fair game for annihilation?
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January 8, 2015 at 3:13 pm -
I wonder how long it will be before wearing a T-shirt or carrying a placard with “Je Suis Charlie” on it will become, according to Tell MAMA, an anti Islamic hate Crimea?
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January 8, 2015 at 4:06 pm -
Not for the first time, M. Parris is fundamentally wrong.
It’s one thing to take to the road and be one of the 2500 or so who die here annually as the result of an accident, avoidable or not.
We’re trying and succeeding in reducing that toll.
Entirely different for one person to be murdered- the deliberate act of taking a life; worse, not in hot blood, but a cold act of extermination based on religion or ideology. Undergoing training just for this purpose
Some years ago I & my late wife did an intensive residential course on Arab culture. A sympathetic attitude to Islam was presented, and as others have said, most believers just want get on with their lives.
Unfortunately, even at this relatively benign level there is incompatibility with our culture which our ‘inclusive’ politicians support or ignore.
At the more extreme level is a threat that has to be challenged, and there’s zero inclusiveness in some of the Arab states.
Within Islam too there has been division since the death of the Prophet; Shias & Sunnis at each other’s throats; enormous casualties.
Clever man Mr Parris, but wrong I think. It’s not about percentages. -
January 8, 2015 at 4:14 pm -
The new ‘Anna Raccoon’ masthead seems to have an added air of poignancy today.
“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”? Let’s hope so… -
January 8, 2015 at 5:22 pm -
“By the way, please feel free to mock my “religion” – Christianity – if you will. It’s OK. I may take offence, but on the whole I won’t care, really. I might even agree with you. If I don’t, I won’t kill you. You are entitled to your view and I might change my mind. In fact, it is pretty open, and if a “religion” (I f*****g hate that word) can’t cope with mockery, what does it say? It says: it is crap.”
I wonder if the Christian principle of turning the other cheek would be dismissed as religious claptrap by the same people who would say they like feeling spiritual in a non-religious way but think that religious tolerance is a very good thing.
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January 8, 2015 at 5:37 pm -
I presume you include in that dismissal ‘forgiveness’ for one’s enemies, ‘loving your neighbour as yourself’ and all that other mamby-pamby Christian crap?
It’s so much better to have the non-retributory dialogue and threats that go along with this sort of thing…apparently, those seem to be the new sort of ‘good behaviours’. At least the vindictiveness of the New Right, Left and Centre Puritans is now an honest one
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January 8, 2015 at 5:54 pm -
Ho Hum. “talking to my B-i-L over” (talking to my bilover); caught my eye. Shame on me, I really must try harder to keep up with web acronyms and netspeak. However it did make me giggle when I realised my stupidity.
More seriously, I agree with your observations. Sadly I fear that my grandchildren will be faced with these problems long after I have died. I would do anything, lay down my life, to spare them the coming conflict that my generation is doing little or nothing to resolve. I recall how few terrorists in Northern Ireland held the UK Government at bay, and now are the government. Within a very few years most of Europe will be collectively experiencing a terrorist insurgence of similar proportions. At the height of the Northern Island crisis 27,000 military personnel were policing a population of less than 2,000,000. The EU alone has a population circa 500,000,000. That would require 5,000,000 military personnel. I’m guessing the current EU total is in the region 1,500,000.
Our incumbent crop of politicians needs to get their thumbs out of their bums and their minds out of neutral. We need a coalition of the best of the best to start to resolve this before it engulfs half the planet. We have a tiny window of opportunity to get this sorted, after which it will follow its inevitable course towards a bloody and heartbreaking bloodbath. -
January 8, 2015 at 6:10 pm -
When one hears of another Muslim atrocity, it is very tempting to blame Islam in general for fomenting an atmospheric brew in which terrible crimes are fantasized about and sometimes carried out, and yet when one looks at the history of actual and attempted assassinations of US presidents and other important figures like Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, or John Lennon there is nearly always a common pattern of an unhinged drifter or borderline mentally ill person (or people) picking up on common grievances or grumbles and committing atrocities as an act of desperation or in a desperate attempt to achieve personal recognition through notoriety.
In terms of sheer destruction the warriors of 9/11 achieved the worst result, and yet to me there is something very pathetic about the fact that only a few days before the atrocity they were spending one of their last evenings on planet Earth whiling away their sponsor’s cash in a sleazy strip club in Florida ogling white sluts wiggling their skanky bottoms on a low stage under dim lighting.
Probably the second-worst terrorist act, though largely forgotten already, was the Oklahoma bombing of a federal office building by Timothy McVeigh (deceased), a disillusioned Operation Desert Storm veteran, and his co-conspirators who apparently believed that such an action would spark off a general uprising to overthrow the federal government of the US (that had originally trained him to kill–some irony here).
All of these people are losers and bear no resemblance to a Muslim who is a good friend of mine who is a medical doctor, and a very good one, or the Muslim guy who has done the maintenance and repairs on my cars for the last 20 years and never ripped me off.
It makes me think that perhaps the UK with its restrictive laws on free speech, Comment Is Free, etc. perhaps do have a point that it is best to accept that there are lunatics among us and that it is best not to do or say anything to set them off unnecessarily, even if it means the rest of us having to keep our mouths zipped at times and not state the obvious aloud. Having spent much of my life working with the mentally ill, I have gotten rather used to not being able to say what I really think anyway and, yes, it is frustrating, but it doesn’t kill you.
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January 8, 2015 at 6:31 pm -
“All of these people are losers and bear no resemblance to a Muslim who is a good friend of mine who is a medical doctor, and a very good one, or the Muslim guy who has done the maintenance and repairs on my cars for the last 20 years and never ripped me off.”
From the view point of their parishioners some catholic priests have been wonderfully supportive and Christian. Some child victims of the abuse metered out by some of the said priests wouldn’t agree. What does this proof? Not much of value, it seems.
“It makes me think that perhaps the UK with its restrictive laws on free speech, Comment Is Free, etc. perhaps do have a point that it is best to accept that there are lunatics among us and that it is best not to do or say anything to set them off unnecessarily, even if it means the rest of us having to keep our mouths zipped at times and not state the obvious aloud. Having spent much of my life working with the mentally ill, I have gotten rather used to not being able to say what I really think anyway and, yes, it is frustrating, but it doesn’t kill you.”
Do you really believe that people so inclined will not find a reason to justify their own extreme actions, really? The voices they hear telling them to do this and that aren’t actually God you know? They are just the excuse they invent for doing what they will. Treading softly around them will merely ensure that they have to think a nanosecond longer before inventing another cause to justify their obscenity.
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January 8, 2015 at 6:43 pm -
Yes, but often they do latch onto whatever ideas are around at the time. For example John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Abraham Lincoln was clearly a lunatic, but the atmosphere of political fervour in Washington at the time may have exacerbated his tendencies.
It seems that the two young men who are now being pursued in France fit into the classic pattern of being societal misfits, orphans raised in the care system, petty criminals, gang members, showing a general failure to adapt to societal norms, but gaining acceptance in radical Islamic circles without any evidence of them being personally devout. Born under different circumstances they could have been IRA gunmen.
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January 8, 2015 at 8:07 pm -
Your contention that these atrocities are often carried out by the mentally ill is persuasive. Given that the mentally ill are now “treated” in the community, that by definition raises the potential for more terrorist attacks and murders. It should also be recognized that in-breeding within the islamic community is producing very high numbers of mentally-retarded offspring. Your contention then seems to support that a very high number of dangerous islamic individuals may be (I would say are) circulating in the UK. That should be of very great concern to all inhabitants.
Further, these mentally unstable individuals are being radicalised in islamic madrassahs and schools and would be susceptible to radicalised propaganda.
The fact that there are “good” muslims in the world is pertinent, however the fact that they are taught to lie to non-believers certainly should raise the spectre of untrustworthyness.
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January 10, 2015 at 3:12 am -
While its true that Pakistani Muslim families in Britain have double the national rate of children with genetic defects because of cousin marriages, the defects cause physical disabiluties leading to a shortened life, often in tandem with mental retardation; none of them cause murderous jihadism.
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January 10, 2015 at 5:26 am -
How can you be so sure?
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January 8, 2015 at 6:17 pm -
Given my views on all forms of religion, I guess I need to go into hiding…
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January 8, 2015 at 6:26 pm -
Pariss would probably say “don’t poke the tiger” and if one were to do that in the jungle he would be right. What sort of idiot brings the tiger out of the jungle and lets it loose on our streets?
The numbers game is an interesting one. There are, say, 2.4 million Muslims in the UK now. Supposedly there are around 1000 ‘Jihadists’ known to the authorities. “No problem”, says Pariss, “that is only 0.04%”. But the ‘silent majority’ has never been a problem in any rogue society; it is always the minority ‘activists’ who cause the trouble. I suggest that 1000 Jihadists is a problem and it is a problem because of their numbers.
Suppose that the number of ‘moderate’ Muslims in the UK was to double, wouldn’t the number of Jihadists be expected to double too? Suppose that the number of ‘moderate’ Muslims in the UK was reduced to 2,400, we then might reasonably expect just one Jihadist on our shores. Just as dangerous, it just takes one to plant a bomb? No. Most likely the individual sits in his bedroom and rants on the Internet. A collection of 1000+ organizes and acts.
Why does the US always seem to be home to ‘nutters’ of all types? Perhaps because there are five times as many people? One UK ‘nutter’ is an eccentric; five US ‘nutters’ are a problem. It all comes down to numbers.-
January 8, 2015 at 7:24 pm -
For goodness sake. Given those sort of numbers, have you ever wondered how many locally generated assorted loony toons and other fruitcakes there might be in the UK? And the problems those will cause your kids and grandchildren?
Or, for that matter, why the RedFems campaign seems to be for a blanket ban on bazookas? LOL
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January 8, 2015 at 7:55 pm -
Any serious attempt to reduce the number of moderate Muslims on our shores would inevitably increase the number of Jihadists. The reality is that it’s probably too late to remedy the problem and it’s now downhill all the way.
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January 8, 2015 at 7:51 pm -
“It makes me think that perhaps the UK with its restrictive laws on free speech, Comment Is Free, etc. perhaps do have a point that it is best to accept that there are lunatics among us and that it is best not to do or say anything to set them off unnecessarily, even if it means the rest of us having to keep our mouths zipped at times and not state the obvious aloud. Having spent much of my life working with the mentally ill, I have gotten rather used to not being able to say what I really think anyway and, yes, it is frustrating, but it doesn’t kill you.”
Jonathan, you are so utterly wrong about this- fortunately the Gods I worship don’t require me to kill you for your errors, but I will argue with you. I too worked with severely mentally ill people for many years (RMN), and had to obviously regard my interactions with my patients as a part of their treatment, like their medication, and therefore judge my conversations with them in terms of what would calm them down and not exacerbate their psychosis. And I was pretty good at this (management of potentially violent patients was one of my special skills, did the ENB 955 course etc etc) WHILE I WAS ON DUTY AND GETTING PAID FOR IT.
However, once I went off duty I expected to be able to express myself, verbally and in writing, as I pleased, because this was in those days regarded as an inalienable right of all British people, for which many heroes fought suffered and died. I do not want to live in a country where the whole population is expected to mind their language for fear of provoking some arrogant sexually-frustrated jerk to massacre his fellow citizens in the name of his God and Prophet.
For sure, keeping your mouth shut may not physically kill you- but it will kill your self-respect, your identity, your European culture that was created over centuries by countless intelligent men and women- from heroes like Giordano Bruno and Tom Paine to every ordinary unknown person whose ever enjoyed a reasonable discussion with his neighbour and agreed to disagree.
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January 8, 2015 at 11:18 pm -
No, but if the newspapers are full of adverse reviews of curry houses, there will always be some humorless twat who will take it to heart and try to avenge the good name of the prophet by doing something more brutish than British. Anyway, as the law stands in the UK there is precious little freedom of speech and your kiddies are trained to spy on you.
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January 8, 2015 at 8:11 pm -
Furthermore, Jonathan, your approach would make this OUR problem, ie a problem for the 95% non-Muslim majority in the UK (including Hindus, Sikhs, Africans and East Europeans who in my experience are all much more hostile to Islam than are the white indigenous population).
But it’s not OUR problem, see- it’s the Muslims’ problem. They are the ones who have to find a way to square the traditions and history of their own religion, and the reported behaviour of their Prophet, with the values acceptable in a Western society to which they or their parents or grandparents have freely chosen to emigrate. Most of them seem to manage this. Those who don’t need to be dealt with in the same way that anybody else would be dealt with if they perpetrated horrific crimes (here or in Syria) or encouraged others to do so.
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January 8, 2015 at 8:47 pm -
Pete,
Yes it is our problem. It’s our children and grandchildren that face a future of never ending bloodshed. The IRA is our problem. The Nazis are our problem. How we resolve it will determine the future we hand to our children. We need people of good will and huge resolve to lead us out of this mess. If you wake to find your family being threatened by an intruder, you will achieve little by assuming that the intruder has a problem. It may not be your problem, it very definitely is my problem.
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January 8, 2015 at 8:38 pm -
And by the way, until a few years ago they had no problem doing this. What ought to worry people is that surveys show that attitudes among young UK Muslims born and educated in the UK are much more intolerant than among their parents’ generation.
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January 8, 2015 at 10:10 pm -
And as their numbers increase they will use our freedoms against us. How long before a local authority decides to revoke all licences to sell alcohol? How long before a Muslim prime minister proposes that Islam be the established religion? All very democratic, except that “do you want your homeland and culture given over to aliens?” never appeared in anyone’s manifesto.
Of course all this can happen long before there is a Muslim majority, all it needs is for the rest of us to ‘accommodate’ – let everyone eat Halal meat, it’s edible; make all schoolgirls cover their hair and legs, it’s just a uniform; English isn’t even legally our national language so let’s ‘accommodate’ and adopt Urdu or better yet, Arabic!
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January 9, 2015 at 7:13 am -
With regard to: ” How long before a local authority decides to revoke all licences to sell alcohol?” Tower Hamlets in London tried its damnedest to get a gay pub/club re-classified as a sex venue (on the grounds that it held a once-a-week amateur strip contest). That would have meant colossally increasing its license fee and the pub’s inevitable closure as a result. Enough gays protested and as far as I know, the pub continues. But there will come a time where some people will try to use the laws we have made against us.
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January 9, 2015 at 9:45 am -
Sheesh! I grant that their ‘anti-gay’ use may have resulted from an oversight by our legislative overlords but look, these laws you refer to were made here, homegrown, by some of us to use against the rest of us. They were put into place by people whose mindset has more in common with any authoritarian repressive thinking which might emanate from East of Suez, than that which you might expect, or hope, to find in a liberal western democracy. The reasons may be different, but the end outcomes are depressingly similar.
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January 9, 2015 at 11:14 am -
I totally agree. Many of the laws we have are so vague and obscure they can be dredged from the dustbin of history and used where authorities think they can get away with it – common purpose prosecutions being a recent example. I just used this Whitechapel case as it was germane to the conversation, but I agree, we should scrutinise our law makers and law enforcers and courts – no matter their religion or origin – at all times.
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January 8, 2015 at 10:45 pm -
Normally this site if full of sense but here it is Matthew Paris who has it right. You are as likely to be killed by the mext Denis Nilsen or Peter Sutcliffe as by a terrorist in the UK. So let’s not make this a bigger issue than it is. The vast majority of British muslims don’t support this. No more than did Catholics the IRA back in the days where there was a real terrorist threat to British lives. The idea that we are ‘at risk’ has been whipped up by the same fearmongers that are behind the paedopanics. We have never been safer so don’t let’s confuse a couple of nutters with a real threat.
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January 9, 2015 at 10:01 am -
The reason that we’ve ‘never been safer’ is as much down to hard work by the security services as anything else. They can’t always spot every possible outrage (Lee Rigby’s murder being one example) but it does seem that they have managed to head off others, maybe many others.
We are ‘at risk’. The risk to each individual may be small, but the risk of an outrage of some sort being perpetrated somewhere is fairly considerable. However, the best way for us ordinary folk to foil terrorists is to have some trust in the security services, and not to be individually terrorised.
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January 12, 2015 at 3:53 pm -
The threat is not to individuals’ lives.
It is to our way of life.
Each time we retreat from the right to say and do as we please, we lose.
Unfortunately we’ve been doing it to ourselves for the last fifty years without the help of Jihad.
I can’t talk about my (Really very moderate, if anti) views on homosexuality, rape, abortion, to name a few, without attracting the attention of the many metrosexual, bien pensant (including, for *** sake, the Chief Constable of Scotland.*** = insert the name of the deity of your choice.
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January 9, 2015 at 2:17 am -
Henry the Horse
I think you are right, for now. You mention the IRA. They likely had less the 150 active terrorists at any moment in time. Yet they managed to tie down up to 27,000 military personnel in Northern Island. It’s guesstimated that 1,000 positional terrorists could be active in the UK within 5 years. Were that to be replicated across Europe, then “We have never been safer so don’t let’s confuse a couple of nutters with a real threat” might bring to mind, for us wrinklies, “you’ve never had it so good” and “the pound in your pocket…”. You are right, and insightful, to see the current situation for what it is; however if we fail to address the developing threat we will hand our children a dreadful legacy.-
January 9, 2015 at 8:49 am -
“It’s guesstimated that 1,000 positional terrorists could be active in the UK within 5 years”. Guesses, estimates, hmmm. Who says? You? Some journalist for a story? Some spook or soldier who wants to keep his job or create a little anti-terrorism empire? G4S to get more contracts sitting mimimum wage lads in uniforms round things? I’ll wager that an act like this is so abhorent, as was the killing of the Greenwich drummer, that it drives anyone who might be being ‘radicalised’, away from terrorism. That was what happened with the IRA who became thoroughly alietated from the vast majority of even the nationalists. Having been brought up at a time when there was a real terrorist threat to the UK from the IRA I can only laugh at the hysteria that is being whipped by now in response to the acts of what are isolated individuals.
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January 9, 2015 at 10:39 am -
“I’ll wager that an act like this is so abhorent, as was the killing of the Greenwich drummer, that it drives anyone who might be being ‘radicalised’, away from terrorism”.
That’s a big wager on a long shot.
But please feel free to continue your shoulder-shrugging Ostrich act.
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January 9, 2015 at 10:42 am -
There’s a strongly-held view by some in the blogosphere that Rigby was not even killed but part of some kind of “false-flag” operation – aligned to 9/11 (I think). Bird brains abound.
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January 9, 2015 at 1:46 pm -
I hadn’t heard specifically of a Rigby-denial thread but the existence of same doesn’t surprise me in the social ecology we enjoy nowadays.
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January 9, 2015 at 2:20 pm -
No surprise at all. There is, or was (I haven’t looked lately) a website devoted to proving that every single disaster/atrocity is a ‘false-flag’ operation. After the Glasgow helicopter crash in 2013, for example, the website members went into overdrive, ‘proving’ that 1) nobody died; 2) a helicopter didn’t crash; 3) all the wreckage, debris and general damage was planted; 4) the whole thing was pre-planned operation to clear the pub site for development. (They’d clearly never heard of Glasgow’s reputation for having buildings occupying valuable plots to suddenly ‘go on fire’.)
There are some barmpots in the world and the internet is their playground.
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January 10, 2015 at 8:41 pm -
And yet the politically correct screechers on Facebook are still yelling UKIP are racist, UKIP are racist, any time Frage, Nuttall & Co. try to initiate a sensible discussion about the importance of controlling our borders so we know who we are letting into our country and more importantly what their criminal or political history is.
We have plenty of home grown nutters without importing other peoples’.
I get the impression the left would rather allow a thousand Islamic fundamentalist role models’ with ISIS campaign medals from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq into the country that let a thick and rather despicable footballer (who isn’t really a role model for anybody) play for a lower league team after serving time for rape because of what looks from the court records rather than the media coverage, a very dubious conviction.
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