Godless And Free (12 page)

34.
O Dhimmi Canada

January 19, 2008

Well, once again free speech is under attack from a small group of Muslim fanatics, this time in Canada, where
Maclean’s
magazine is being hauled before a couple of laughably named “human rights commissions” for printing an article about the threat of militant Islam to our freedom in the West, and our bone-headed complacency in the face of it.

A group of law students saw an opportunity to be offended by this, because they’ve been waiting for just such an opportunity, of course, and they pounced on it like pigs on truffles

And they don’t want justice here, because they know that justice would tell them to go and screw themselves. What they want is legal victory, a completely different thing. And they’ve got that before the case is even heard, because even if it’s thrown out it will still incur great expense, for the defendants, for the magazine, not the plaintiffs – it will cost them precisely nothing.

And, if precedent is anything to go by, it will be decided, not on whether there was any truth in the article, but on whether anyone’s precious feelings were hurt, or might have been hurt, and how certain members of the unelected commission feel about that.

This case is important to all of us in the West, because if this is tolerated it will start to happen everywhere. Newspapers and magazines that are even mildly critical of political Islam will be under pressure to censor themselves or face another expensive law suit, brought at no cost, and with the complacent connivance of a guilt-ridden patronising liberal establishment of self-haters and hand-wringers who are so ashamed of their own culture they can’t stop apologising for it, and who, in doing so, give us every reason to be ashamed.

So what if a few fanatics are offended? It won’t do them any harm. It will give them a idea of how the rests feel when we are confronted with cases like this.

On the other hand (and let’s face it, there’s always another hand, unless you’re a Saudi Arabian shoplifter, of course) hurt feelings can be quite traumatic. I’ve heard that it can take seconds, sometimes even minutes, to get over it. So I’m not a bit surprised that Canadians are sympathetic, because they’re a very warm and welcoming people, and I know this because I lived and worked there for several years.

So I also know that they’re not fools, and they can see they’re being taken for a ride here, that their well-meant humanitarian laws are being twisted and used against them by people to whom the very idea of human rights is blasphemy.

They can see that bringing this case is nothing but an act of legal terrorism, a lowdown dirty little stunt with no moral weight whatsoever, and that those who indulge it and who connive with it are not only making fools of themselves, they’re making a fool of their country, when they’d be far better employed focussing on the genuine human rights of young girls shipped off to forced marriages, or murdered for refusing to go.

Do you want my opinion? No? Good. Here it is anyway.

I think this cynical stunt will backfire. Far from intimidating people into silence, I think this will encourage free speech and make those of us who care about it doubly determined to speak out.

Look what happened with the cartoons. The famous one with the turban bomb, that’s all over the internet now, and it will always be all over the internet. It will never go away. If they hadn’t made a fuss it would have been forgotten long ago.

Every incident like this will simply put a little more steel into people’s resolve not to accommodate political Islam.

We already know in our hearts there’s no reason why we should have to accommodate this repressive medieval ideology which most of us in the West frankly don’t want anywhere near our society, and we should be entitled to say that openly and freely without fear of persecution.

Free speech is not negotiable. If we allow it to be compromised even slightly here they’ll continue to chip away at it by whining and complaining and suing until they’ve worn it right down. You know they will, and so do they. And if we let that happen our children will never forgive us.

Some say that the western world is already well on its way to hell in a handbasket. Well, maybe not quite in a handbasket; we’ll have to wait and see if we can stretch the budget that far after Halliburton and Blackwater have taken their cut. But we are on a slippery slope. Freedom is cheap to us now, because we’re governed mainly by people of my generation who have never had to fight for the liberty they abuse in such a cavalier manner and take so much for granted.

They don’t value it for themselves, because they don’t know its true value, and they certainly don’t value it for the likes of you and me.

So, if you’re happy about that, and you’re content for your freedom to be filtered through other people’s narrow beliefs and prejudices, then you can roll over and go back to sleep now.

But if, like me, you’re not happy about it and you hear somebody demanding special privileges based on their faith, then you’re entitled to let them know exactly what you think about their demands. You’ve got as much right to be offended as they have.

The dhimmi human rights Stalinists will try to shut you up, of course, because free speech puts them out of a job. But if enough people speak out they can’t drag us all in front of their poxy commissions, their preposterous toytown star chambers. They can’t turn us all into criminals for having a free opinion in a free country.

It’s utterly ridiculous that we should have to trip over other people’s unprovable beliefs every time we turn around. We treat the religious with more consideration than we treat the disabled. How long before the women on these absurd commissions start wearing headscarves out of respect? It can only be a matter of time.

You know, I think ordinary Muslims in Canada who just want a peaceful life (as I know most of them do), I think they could argue that by taking on this bullshit case and giving it publicity it doesn’t deserve, the human rights commissions have themselves unnecessarily increased tensions and resentment towards Muslims and perhaps even made it more likely that they’ll be abused. And I think any Muslim who took that one on and who sued these unelected self-righteous nonentities right back into the cosy PC universe they live in would become an instant national hero. Ain’t that the truth, O Canada? Peace, eh?

35.
God the Psycho

February 2, 2008

I just had an e-mail from somebody who said: “I hope you find God in 2008”, which is a very positive sentiment, and thank you very much for that. However, I hope you’re wrong about it because from what I’ve heard about God and the way he likes to do things – particularly the kind of people he tends to attract – well, all these things have combined to make me hope he stays as far away from me as humanly, or inhumanly, possible.

We are talking, of course, about the god of the desert, the god of death. And we know that all three desert dogmas are variations on the same death cult, and they all worship this same god of supposed love and benevolent mercy, which is presumably why they hate each other with such a violent passion. I don’t know, you’d have to ask them that.

Collectively they’re known as the children of Abraham because Abraham is the original patriarch to whom they all trace themselves back. In fact, without Abraham’s influence there’s a chance that none of these dogmas would even exist today, which makes me wish there was some way that I could travel back in time and give him a severe talking to.

“You stupid idiot,” I’d say. “Couldn’t you foresee what would happen? Some prophet you turned out to be.”

Abraham is the person who originally decided that there would only be one god from here on in. One size fits all, that was his message. And this would have had quite a devastating effect on the god community at the time. All the gods of the rivers and the mountains and the woods and so on – the local small specialised gods that had served people so well for generations for g they would have found themselves squeezed out of the picture, or forcibly amalgamated into one giant elemental conglomerate with centralised control, a narrow moral code, and righteous vengeance in its heart.

Even to this day it’s a matter of some conjecture whether this was the right direction for the human race to take at that particular time. The debate goes on.

Appropriately, given the religions he spawned, Abraham was not particularly noted for his mental stability. He was famously prepared to kill his own son because he heard God telling him to.

Fortunately, God intervened at the last second and stayed his hand, proving what a just and merciful god he is, if you ignore the severe psychological trauma he has just inflicted on these two unfortunate people. Scarred both of them for life, no question about that.

But that’s pretty much par for the course, isn’t it, for the Old Testament. Everyone ends up scarred mentally, physically. Hardly anyone comes out in one piece.

Look at the treatment dished out to Adam and Eve, the very first people on the planet. They were punished for being true to their nature, the very nature that God endowed them with. He knew they were curious, he knew they had to be curious to survive, so he knew that they would eat the apple.

A cynical person might start to suspect that God only created us in the first place in order to punish us, because this is the first lesson we learn in Genesis – that being human is a sin. We were punished and driven from paradise for the sin of being true to our nature.

But we pulled ourselves together and we started on the Tower of Babel,* because we wanted to get up to heaven and have a look round. We were being curious, doing what comes naturally. But God didn’t like that much either, so he punished us by destroying our language.

So here we are, we’re barely a few pages into the Bible and already we’ve taken two massive body blows from our loving and merciful god.

Shortly after this he floods the entire planet because somebody must have looked at him the wrong way. He does tip off one person to build a boat, because obviously he doesn’t want everybody wiped out, otherwise there’d be nobody left to punish.

Now I can understand somebody would read the Bible for pleasure because it’s arguably a great work of literature; it’s certainly an interesting cultural artifact, but it’s not the word of God, and it’s really time that we stopped pretending that it is, or even that it might be.

God is the main character in the book, and if you read it you’ll quickly see this. He’s an interesting personality, if a little crudely drawn. He’s basically an attempt to put a human face on the creative life force, but unfortunately we’ve saddled him with all our petty prejudices and made him a bit too human for our own good. Because one thing I’ve noticed is that being human really only works for humans. It doesn’t transfer at all well to deities. Human gods tend to be wilful, violent and unpredictable in a shallow ego-driven kind of way. The only thing boundless about them is their eagerness to take offence, like so many of the sensitive souls who worship them.

But if you’re loog for offence, well then look no further than the Bible, surely one of the most offensive books that you could read, unless you believe that adulterers should be killed, or that it’s OK to sell your daughter into slavery, or that anyone who works on the Sabbath should be stoned to death on the spot.

Maybe you’re fine with all that. Or with the fact that God repeatedly advocates mass murder. Granted, he doesn’t specifically mention cluster bombs and cruise missiles, but no doubt this is where the fine art of biblical interpretation comes in.

This guy’s got a track record that would make Saddam look like Gandhi. In Deuteronomy 13, according to God, if you hear of a city where another god is worshipped you must kill everybody in that city; men, women, children, babies, even cattle. And then you must burn that city to the ground. Oh, and by the way, thou shalt not kill.

So I hope you can see why I have trouble embracing this god of the desert, this god of death that you seem to be so fond of, and I hope you can understand why I want nothing to do with him whether he exists or not. I simply don’t share his values. I find them to be quite literally inhuman.

So I really don’t care what he’s got to say about anything, and if he came clumping down from heaven right now in a big pair of hobnail boots, waving the Book of Judges in my face, I’d simply tell him what I tell every other evangelising prick I meet: “No thanks, I’m not interested in your phoney salvation. I prefer damnation. Now piss off, I’ve got some sinning to do.”

Peace, if that’s not too blasphemous. Wouldn’t want to hurt anybody’s precious feelings.

* Yes, I know I’ve placed the Tower of Babel and the Flood in the wrong order and that negates everything I’ve ever said. I take it all back. Praise the Lord.

36.
Sharia Fiasco

February 10, 2008

Well, it seems that the Archbishop of Canterbury is shocked at the reaction to his verbal suicide bomb.* He received quite a lot of abuse. One person even called him a Judas, which I thought was a little unfair. What did Judas ever do to deserve that kind of abuse? Yes, OK, he betrayed Jesus, but the Christian Church has betrayed him every day for the last two thousand years, and nobody seems to care about that.

The Archbishop is a very clever man, but he’s clever in a useless way, because he lives in a bubble. All this stuff is theoretical to him. None of it will impact on his life in any way, so he can well afford to be magnanimous about it.

Personally, I don’t think it will affect his credibility, because I don’t think he ever had any in the first place, but I think his words are important because they’re symptomatic of a wider malaise in British society.

Whenever there’s a clash between Islamic culture and the indigenous culture here in Britain (yes, I did use the word indigenous, as opposed to Islamic, i.e. alien and foreign – just thought I’d clear that one up), whenever they clash, the indigenous culture is always presumed to be in the wron in the interests of community cohesion, of course.

For example, polygamy is illegal in Britain, but Muslim polygamists not only get away with it, they now also receive extra state benefits for their extra wives.

Hate speech is banned in Britain, for everyone except extremist Muslim imams, who are free to preach hatred against Jews and homosexuals because if we required them to obey the law they might be offended.

I would say that we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, but of course we already are, which is why all this is happening.

Western society has its faults, as we all know, and as the Islamists themselves never tire of pointing out, but personally speaking they’re faults that I can live with. Islam on the other hand has faults that I can’t live with and I won’t live with under any circumstances, and a lot of people in this country feel exactly the same way.

The reason that we don’t want any aspect of sharia law in our society is because it’s a manifestation of clerical fascism, and because it favours men over women, which makes it a violation of civilised democratic values. And the reaction that the Archbishop received, which obviously did affect him (which just goes to show what a bubble he really does live in, and it also explains why so many Muslims were puzzled by his remarks), but the reaction is an illustration of the anger that people feel at not being allowed to express an honest opinion about Islam in our society, because rather than calling things honestly by their name, we’re always encouraged to hide behind cowardly euphemisms to avoid offending people who’ve got nothing to be offended about.

Just last week, for example, we were issued with special politically correct guidelines about how we should refer to Islamic terrorism lest we give the false impression that it’s got anything to do with Islam. We’re talking about terrorism carried out in the name of Islam, by Muslims, and justified using their holy scripture. But apparently it’s got nothing to do with Islam. Well, I’m sorry, but just because every Muslim doesn’t support it doesn’t mean it’s not Islamic.

People say you can’t judge Islam by its followers, but that’s like saying you can’t judge a football team by its results. Islam is its followers. Because there’s no central authority the Koran is open to interpretation by men who, being human, will always interpret to suit their own cultural prejudices. So Islam is its followers. It’s a representation of how they interpret their holy book, and therefore the only way it can be judged is by their behaviour.

Unfortunately right now for all of us (that’s Muslims and non-Muslims alike) the driving force behind the religion is Saudi Arabia, where most of the terrorist money comes from, and where many of the so-called community leaders in Britain get their funding. And this particular brand of Islam preaches intolerance, hatred, and righteous bloodlust to children.

And people like the Archbishop, who think that every situation can be resolved by respectful dialogue even while the people they’re talking to are stepping on their faces, these people are part of the problem, not the solution.

The solution is not more appeasement, dialogue and debate. The solution is to enforce the law equally and impartially for everyone, regardless of whether it’s inonvenient for some Muslims. The solution is to prosecute those who incite terror, to close down the mosques and deport the imams. Any sane society would be doing this automatically.

We need to stop treating Islam like a special needs case. If I were a Muslim I’d be insulted by it. The police should stop consulting with these so-called community leaders before raiding premises or making arrests. They should stop pussyfooting around in mosques. If a criminal is hiding there, go in and get him out.

There should be no more pandering to Muslim sensibilities in the public arena. No footbaths in public washrooms, no separate days for swimming where nobody else is allowed, no special job conditions that don’t apply to others, and nobody should be allowed to teach children or appear in court while wearing a ridiculous mask.

There should be no restrictions on non-Muslims, like when Scottish Health Service staff were forbidden to eat lunch at their desks during Ramadan in case somebody happened to be fasting nearby. And there should be no cultural sensitivity of any kind involving Christmas or pigs or dogs.

In fact, just a couple of weeks ago the classic children’s story of the Three Little Pigs was censored by a committee of English middle class bedwetters desperate to show how culturally sensitive they are at everybody else’s expense.

And it’s a classic story. We all know the story, I’m sure. The three little pigs, they’re building their houses, one of brick, one of wood, and with a naivete that would embarrass even a dhimmi Archbishop, one of straw.

And we all know what happens. The big bad wolf comes along and blows down the first two houses, but he can’t blow down the brick one, so he flies an airplane into it and blames the Jews.

Isn’t that it? No? Gosh, you know it’s so long since I read the story, I guess I’ll have to go back and read it again, that’s if I can find a copy that hasn’t been pulped in the interests of community cohesion.

Peace to everyone, especially to all those Muslims who are as embarrassed as I am by this cloistered bubble-headed fool of an Archbishop.

* He said it was inevitable that Britain would have to accommodate sharia.