Question Time: George Galloway versus Jonathan Freedland?

Tonight’s Question Time will be broadcast from Finchley, and judging from the panel it seems that it has been set up to engineer a confrontation between George Galloway and “Liberal Zionist” and Guardian journalist, Jonathan Freedland. Presumably, Tower Hamlets would have been Galloway’s preferred London location, taking into account his ethno-confessional predilections, but instead he finds himself in rather different territory where the local residents are not likely to be so . . . how can I put this? Receptive to his message?  

So, prepare yourself to sit back and watch a lot of ranting and raving about conflicts in faraway lands which really shouldn’t be any of our concern. Unfortunately, however, it turns out that they are our concern, insofar as we now have so many millions of residents from the said faraway lands that they have brought their bigotries with them and their hatreds are being played out on our soil.  

I anticipate that Nicky Morgan and Tristram Hunt will make for very dull viewing, dutifully and mechanically trotting out their respected party lines, but quite what to expect of UKIP’s Suzanne Evans, I’m not sure, but as she has taken on Tim Aker’s policy brief for the party, I will be keen to hear what she says and reveals, if anything, about UKIP’s forthcoming manifesto. Once the programme moves away from the inevitable ding-dong between Galloway and Friedman over Palestine/Israel, I am hoping that Evans will shake things up a little. Will any members of the audience or panellists pick up on Galloway’s recent Bradford speech, in which he attacked Charlie Hebdo and effectively called for a global blasphemy law to protect Islam? I hope so. If you haven’t heard his speech, or are curious to view a summary, click here.  

George Galloway curries favour with Muslim Electorate through invoking the prophet Motive

It is perhaps somewhat paradoxical that the parliamentary constituency of Bradford West is very much of the East in terms of both its outlook and demographic complexion. Its MP – George Galloway, of the peculiarly named ‘Respect’ Party – knows his electorate well, and is no shrinking violet when it comes to setting out his political stall, the wares of which habitually pertain to something going on far, far away from these shores, almost always in a land with a majority Muslim population. This is, of course, no coincidence, for the lands to which he refers possess a greater emotional resonance for the bulk of his electorate than other parts of the Bradford Metropolitan District, such as Ilkley. You won’t often hear a resident of Manningham singing ‘On Ilkla Moor Baht ‘at’, for the preferred ‘song’ that wafts through the air in the vicinity of the minaret-like mighty chimney of Manningham Mills is the somewhat less lyrical, and rather more solemnly intoned, “Allahu-akbar”! Such a welcoming sound! Then again, perhaps, not.

Galloway is a canny operator, and unlike many of his opponents, is a competent orator who fine-tunes what he says for his audience to provide an appearance of ‘authenticity’. His stance is emotive, and his speeches invested with a degree of physicality, both contrasting with the listless and dull styles of the likes of Miliband, Cameron and Clegg (Miliband’s speeches possess all of the gravitas displayed by a twelve-year old presenting to the class on what he did over the summer holidays). So much for the style, but what about the substance? Alas, little positive can be said regarding the content of Galloway’s speeches upon which his talents are wasted. The latest of these he delivered on the steps of Bradford City Hall on the evening of Sunday 18 January, to a crowd several hundred strong, which had gathered to condemn the principles of freedom speech and expression, or more specifically, Charlie Hebdo.

Gathered in the dark chill of a winter’s night, his fiery oratory revisited familiar territory to fan the glowing embers of his audience’s resentment: ‘double standards’ in which ‘free speech’ was only ‘free’ if you were not a Muslim. He used the case of the recent murders perpetrated by Islamists in Paris as an opportunity to talk of a supposed anti-Muslim ‘backlash’ in this country and elsewhere in Europe, repeatedly invoking the cliché of the Muslim as ‘powerless victim’, forever set upon by an innately ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobic’ (sic.) society. His audience found his rhetoric emotionally sustaining; its tenor may have been predictable, but this is what his listeners yearned for. Of the images published by Charlie Hebdo he intoned:

“These are not cartoons. These are not depictions of the prophet. These are pornographic, obscene insults to the prophet, and by extension 1.7 billion human beings on this Earth.”

If Galloway deems the image below to be ‘pornographic’, all that can be said is that he must possess some pretty ‘specialist’ tastes when it comes to arousal. Admittedly, he did make a fair point when posing the question as to why the Saudis should have had a prominent representative at the front of the Paris ‘Je suis Charlie’ march, for quite obviously there is no free speech in Saudi Arabia, and certainly no leeway for anyone to produce depictions, let alone cartoons of, Muhammed.

Offering a cursory condemnation of the murder of 17 people in Paris, Galloway quickly moved on to the main theme of his speech:

“Charlie Hebdo’s entire purpose, and for years, has been to further marginalise, further alienate, and further endanger exactly those parts of the community who are already alienated, already endangered. It is a racist, Islamophobic, hypocritical rag. Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo! We say that the honour of religious people, their prophets, their beliefs, is not fair game for such people because there are already limits to freedom of speech.”

The crowd, predominantly Muslim, warmed to his words. George Galloway, the MP for a post-English Muslim enclave in the heart of urban Yorkshire, was forwarding himself as the defender of the Islamic faith; the champion of a new de facto blasphemy law in defence of dark age obscurantism. In his peroration, he stated: 

“So, for the sake of social peace, for the sake of unity in our society we have to demand from our Government the protection of the prophet from obscene and pornographic provocation, and in Parliament I intend to fight for that. Asalaam alaykum!”

To this, he might have added “and remember to vote for me at the forthcoming General Election, as I even went so far as to convert to Islam to win this constituency.” Perhaps it is being a little unfair to impute his conversion to tactical political cynicism, but then again, why would anyone with an ounce of intelligence who was not compelled to adopt this religion choose to embrace such a ragbag of incoherent religious twaddle? Furthermore, what sort of prophet and what sort of deity require the protection of the law? If this ‘Allah’ of theirs gets so offended by a few rather crudely drawn cartoons, he’s neither very balanced, nor omnipotent. Why should this be? Clearly because Allah only exists inside the heads of believers, for he is a work of fiction, and bad fiction at that. There really isn’t anything ‘akbar’ about him at all, and to have people demand respect for this nonsense is the greatest obscenity of all, particularly when considering that his beloved ‘prophet’ appears to have possessed anger issues on a level with those of Genghis Khan. This demand for ‘respect’ from Respect’s only MP, is offensive. 

Europe’s Cuckoos all a-twitter: ‘Je suis Kouachi’

Last night, the Belgian website sudinfo.be ran an article claiming that the top-trending twitter hashtags for Friday 9 January were #JeSuisCoulibaly and #JeSuisKouachi, which, as it notes, presents a rather ‘less positive message’ than the original #JeSuisCharlie that they were modelled upon. That these hashtags proved to be more popular raises the concern that support for their aims, if perhaps not necessarily their methods, amongst large swathes of the Muslim population in Europe is widespread.  

It should be abundantly clear by now, that doctrinaire Islam neither permits nor recognises the principles of freedom of expression and freedom of speech, and that the more people that there are in our countries who hold these views, the less secure our freedoms become. It should now also be equally clear, that this is not some esoteric intellectual debate less relevant to our everyday lives than the economic crisis through which we are living, for it is not only cartoonists, writers and thinkers who are threatened by Islamism, but everyone who does not submit to Islam. All Islamists, irrespective of whether they employ violence or strictly ideological and political methods, desire our submission. It is time that we made clear that we will not submit, and that there should be no place for such people in France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, or anywhere else in Europe. A minority of Europeans are bravely protesting and speaking out against the increasing Islamisation of their countries, in the face of unfounded accusations of racism, and the contempt of the leaderships of those political parties who have long advocated and encouraged large-scale immigration from overseas, irrespective of the values of the incoming population.  

Our message against Islamisation must be heard, taken seriously and acted upon. The Islamic cuckoo is growing restive in its European nest, and these tweets should awaken us to the fact that it must no longer be fed and nurtured with ever more emollient words and concessions, but instead ejected.

 

 

Ils ne sont pas Charlie?

The picture below has been reproduced by a number of media organisations including, notably, The Guardian. Look at the couple in the centre of the picture who are obviously not holding aloft 'Je suis Charlie' posters. Why might this be?

Sadly, as regular readers of this lately dormant blog know, this act of Islamist mass murder against the staff of Charlie Hebdo was perhaps not that unexpected, given the previous attacks upon their office, and the many death threats received. What the political fallout from this atrocity will be is hard to gauge, but one can be certain that there will be much hand-wringing about some putative 'backlash' against 'Muslim communities' in France and Europe more broadly. The advocates of mass immigration and multiculturalism will use, and have already been using, this as an opportunity to attempt to emphasise a non-existent commonality of values between Islam and the European societies that have in recent decades come to act as its accommodating, incubating host. There is no such commonality of values.

Islam, in its dogmatic literalist form, is not compatible with freedom of speech and expression, and contrary to the assertions of its many adherents and apologists, does not stand for 'peace', but for 'submission'. This is the correct translation. Those who submit are, in a very real sense, in a state of mental slavery to an entity name 'Allah', that exists only inside believers' heads. In essence, practising Muslims believe that their 'faith' is the 'truth', and if most may not be willing to use violence to bring about its dominance in our societies, they would welcome the consequences of its violent imposition.

History, alas, contains enough examples of violent, ideologically-motivated vanguard groups willing to sacrifice all for their ideals to realise their vision of the 'perfect' society, for us to posit the following question: could a violent Islamist vanguard, revelling in its use of terror, impose its vision upon its host societies? The Bolsheviks were a tiny minority in Tsarist Russia, but they successfully imposed their ideology and terror upon a population of hundreds of millions, repressing people for the best part of a century. Nazism too, although enjoying a significant degree of electoral support, cemented its grip through violence and terror, and was only defeated through a titanic military struggle.

Michel Houellebecq this week published his novel Soumission, featuring a scenario in which an alliance between French political parties results in the election of an Islamist President in 2022 following their united attempts to defeat Marine Le Pen and her Front National in the presidential elections of 2017. The timescale, as the author himself accepts, is somewhat accelerated, but such a depressing denouement is not beyond the realms of possibility at some future date. However, politics contains choices, and it will be interesting to see what choice the French people make in 2017.

What impact will recent events in Paris have upon Pegida? Deutsche Welle reports that the 'Alternative for Germany' (AfD) has recently been holding talks with Pegida, and reached agreement over Germany's need for 'new immigration laws'. Nigel Farage was correct to speak of  the existence of a 'fifth column' in this country in his interview with Channel 4 News earlier this week. This 'fifth column', alas, is well established not only here, but in many other European countries.
 

Charlie Hebdo and the Hysteria of Islamists

Once again, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has fallen foul of the Islamists by publishing cartoons of Mohammed, leading to the usual threats and security alerts that attend any slight to the fragile sensibilities of ‘the devout’. This is not the first time that it has been targeted, for back in November last year its decision to publish a special issue entitled Charia Hebdo which contained many cartoons of its ‘guest editor’ Mohammed, led to its offices being firebombed. Both incidents highlight a phenomenon first generated by the Danish Jyllands-Posten furore and its publication of a number of Mohammed cartoons in 2005.

Charlie Hebdo published a fresh set of cartoons this week as a response to the violently febrile reaction to the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ film that has been witnessed across much of the Muslim world and amongst some Muslims resident in European states. These reactions serve to illustrate the ugly domineering impulse that lies at the heart of Islamic doctrine, and it is of course crucial that we tackle this challenge in an appropriately robust fashion: we must not cave in to Islamist threats, and their demands to restrict freedom of speech and expression in our nations; blasphemy is no offence.

In Germany, the Pro-Deutschland movement has expressed its desire to publicly screen the ‘Innocence of Muslims’, causing some disquiet amongst the German authorities and sections of the media that have wheeled out the usual demonising ‘racist’ and ‘far-right’ labels to apply to the group. In Russia, Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov called for Google to block Russian web access to the film’s Youtube site, threatening to curtail its freedom to operate in the country from November if it failed to do so. Rostelekom, one of Russia’s biggest internet providers, blocked access to Youtube in a number of Russian regions last night, and Yaroslav Nilov, Chairman of the Duma Committee on Social and Religious Organisations, has called upon the Ministry of Culture to ban screenings of the film in Russia on the basis that this would constitute “incitement to religious hatred.” He noted that Russia had a Muslim population of 20 million. The reaction of these influential Russian politicians seems to have been born out of a combination of a desire to appeal to the growing number of Muslim voters in the country, and of fear.

It is time that mainstream broadcasters and politicians in Britain and other European nations stopped pretending that these violent outbursts, threats and intolerance are not connected to Islamic doctrine, which is incompatible with a modern, civilised political and social worldview. In our countries, Muslims should not only be seen to respect our right to freedom of speech and expression and to acknowledge the supremacy of secular law, but they should also give active support to these principles. If not, then they should give serious consideration as to where they ought to live: is it to be here, or somewhere more conducive to their mental and cultural universe, such as their ancestral familial homeland(s)? The recent violent reactions to the ‘Innocence of Muslims’, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and Tom Holland’s ‘Islam: The Untold Story’, have followed swiftly upon the anniversary of 9/11, which makes it apparent that all of these attacks upon freedom of expression are part of a wider Islamist political agenda.

Given this reality, how can anyone still give credence to what is printed in the pages of The Guardian upon such matters? That paper, and the BBC, to name but two influential players in the mass media, ought to offer us an explanation as to why they have systematically distorted reporting about Islamic issues so as to provide Islamic doctrine with a veneer of respectability, helping to embed it within our country and to facilitate its spread. We never wanted it, and we certainly do not need it. Now is as good a time as any to make this fact crystal clear.

Charlie Hebdo's latest cover

 

Comment te dire adieu?

Thus sang chanteuse Françoise Hardy in her 1968 hit of the same title. A similar question, if not the sentiments underpinning the song, must be passing through the minds of many Frenchwomen and men this week following the fire-bombing of the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo: how to bid farewell to France’s Islamic problem? French society – by which I mean that comprised of its autochthonous population – needs a divorce from its unbidden Maghrebian spouse. The forced marriage of Marianne to Mohammed must be brought to an end. This is no rift between lovers as explored in Hardy’s wistful melancholic lyrics, but something more akin to an attempted rape by the Mohammedan interloper.

In 2005 the printing of cartoons of Mohammed by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten led to death threats being issued against the cartoonists and the paper’s editors, as well as demands from some Muslims that freedom of speech and expression be curtailed so as not to offend their delicate sensibilities. Sensibilities so delicate in fact that the actions of enraged Islamic mobs are said to have claimed the lives of some 50 people worldwide. On this occasion, nobody has as yet admitted responsibility for the petrol bombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices, but it is of course highly likely that the individual or group of people involved were ‘aggrieved’ Muslims. Moreover, on the same day as the firebombing the Charlie Hebdo website was taken out by Islamist hackers based in Turkey, and the paper’s Belgian website host Bluevision took the site offline after its staff received a number of death threats from Muslim malcontents.

 

This Muslim reaction is wearisomely familiar, and yet what is more troubling is that our politicians continue to stick their heads in the sand and their fingers in their ears: “Islam is a religion of peace” and “such actions have nothing to do with Islam,” they say. Likewise, this is the message of the mainstream media. Ah, if only it were so mes amis, but I am afraid that it is patently not the case. Instead, mainstream politicians across Europe continue to open our borders to Muslims in growing numbers. Do the people who advocate this suicidal policy really believe what they say, or do they pursue this line because they and sections of the media have effectively been bought off with Saudi petrodollars? It may of course be a case of simple cowardice in the face of Muslim willingness to employ violence in the cause of Islamisation, or indeed a combination of all of these factors and still more not listed.

Reporting of this assault upon French liberty slotted neatly into the habitual cultural masochistic editorial lines defined by the BBC and the Guardian. In the BBC’s case, its initial report was equivocal, which is to say, cowardly and a de facto sop to the Islamists. In the case of the Guardian, it was not those who destroyed Charlie Hebdo’s office or who issued death threats against staff at its web-hosting company who were judged to be in the wrong, but the satirical magazine itself. Unsurprisingly, the Guardian also used this incident as another opportunity to attack the French claiming that ‘Muslims feel discriminated against and unwelcome’ in their French host society. The French, like the English, Germans, Swiss and many other European peoples, did not wish their countries to be settled by Islamic colonists, and yet we find ourselves burdened with an intensifying clamour for submission to Islam from this rapidly growing population of ingrates. Thus, despite the words of Paris Mosque head Dalil Boubakeur that ‘French Muslims have nothing to do with political Islam’, political Islam, as well as demographic Islamisation, is on the rise across Europe.

It is time to bid our Muslim ‘lovers’ adieu, for they have only entered into this relationship for the sake of obtaining our money and our belongings (land).  I am afraid that no amount of ‘interfaith dialogue’ (which would seem to be the political equivalent of Relate, but one that always seems to side with the abusing party rather than acting as a neutral arbiter) can resolve our differences, for we need to live separate lives. Let our separation be peaceful, and let us put this unhappy experience of forced cohabitation behind us. Adieu!

So as not to end on too gloomy a note, take time to enjoy the songs below, with Brigitte Bardot’s Moi je joue offering a breezy light-hearted contrast to Françoise Hardy’s Comment te dire adieu? Bardot herself is of course a tireless campaigner against the cruelty of halal slaughter and Islamisation who has scandalously found herself successfully prosecuted five times for “inciting racial hatred”. Her stance has, in more than one respect, been admirable. Where would such women be in an Islamised France? Wrapped in cloth and rendered mute. What a drab, ugly and joyless existence Islam gives rise to!