'Look North' looks East

Prompted, it seems, by the recent comments made by faux Baroness Sayeeda Warsi (if she’s a baroness I may as well call myself the Baron of Elmet or the Akond of Swat) “that Islamophobia has now crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability," the BBC’s Look North regional news programme has over the past week run a couple of evening reports seeking to ‘redress’ what the BBC controllers evidently think is a very real phenomenon in Yorkshire. First we had a glowing report about how one of Bradford’s new mosques had been voted as possessing the most beautiful minarets in Europe, and then earlier this week we were treated to the sight of two young fellows in the teatime slot talking about why Islam is luring a number of gullible (my word, not theirs) men into joining its ranks in the UK. For some reason, the fact that some 5,000 indigenous males were said to have converted elicited nothing more from the interviewers than the question “why?” The Muslim doctoral student researching this topic together with an English convert explained that it was because people were looking for certainties and values.

Well, empty vessels crave to be filled I suppose. Still, a surfeit of cream cakes or ale would be less harmful than this most dreadful doctrine to which this young man has given himself over. I feel sorry for his family and hope that some day he grows out of this fad and recognises it for the mistake that it was.

Unlike Warsi, rather than creating a public atmosphere of so-called ‘Islamophobia’, I would contend that our mainstream media (the BBC to an egregious extent) and politicians have fostered a situation in which sentiments critical of Islam may only be expressed without fear between friends within their own homes, irrespective of whether they be middle class or otherwise. The BBC and the trade union movement, together with many local councils, have been mounting an effort to ‘normalise’ the image of Islam and to stigmatise its critics. The deployment of the words ‘Islamophobia’, ‘Islamophobe’, ‘bigot’ and ‘racist’ and others of that ilk against critics of Islamic doctrine are quite deliberate.

These terms are designed specifically to cow dissident voices and to assign pariah status to people who dare to deviate from the official line that Islam is now an integral part of the British way of life and is a religion like any other. Thus, people who quite rightly note that conventional mainstream Islamic doctrine possesses rather unsavoury views on the rights (more accurately, complete absence thereof) of atheists, pagans, homosexuals and women (of course, Islamists claim that women have ‘rights’ within Islam, but the ‘rights’ that they talk of are the sort of rights that we assign to lab rats and not to fellow human beings, for their ‘rights’ are of a qualitatively different nature) find themselves the object of officially-directed opprobrium. To speak freely and to speak the truth in the UK today can land the speaker in serious hot water and can destroy your career. Mainstream media and political opinion dictates that a strong dislike of the promotion of the inhumane doctrine of Islam is reflexively identified as and conflated with ‘hatred’ of people who by an accident of birth happen to have been born into Muslim families. This of course, is completely false, but the truth of this statement is not relevant to the agenda of the enablers of Islam.

Now, given that Christa Ackroyd can at times irradiate a most unpleasant orange glow, gained presumably by spending an excessive amount of time in the local tanning salon, perhaps the viewer could be forgiven for occasionally thinking that her donning a burka/burqa (pick your spelling, it’s the same old ghost outfit) might be a good idea, but much as I might find her a little irritating at times, this truly would be an alarming prospect. Christa, much as your permatan makes my eyes ache, please stand up for your right to show your face in public and stop pandering to folk who’d like to see you speak from behind a wall of cloth if they’d deign to let you speak at all.

Could this be the BBC's new official logo?