Posted on 01/12/2004 4:32:29 PM PST by Pokey78
Let me see if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you're Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11 – none of which is factually in dispute – the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain.
But, if you're Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a part of the world where folks need little incitement to murder, as part of a non-factual emotive rant about how "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead" because "they are Nazis" and "I feel nothing but hatred for them", the BBC will keep you on the air, kibitzing (as the Zionists would say) with the crème de la crème of London's cultural arbiters each week. Message: this behaviour is completely acceptable.
So, while the BBC is "investigating" Kilroy, its only statement on Mr Paulin was an oblique but curiously worded allusion to the non-controversy on the Corporation website: "His polemical, knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive." "The Jewish question"? "Notoriously sensitive"? Is this really how they talk at the BBC?
Mr Paulin's style is only metaphorically knockabout. But, a few days after his remarks were published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, some doughty Palestinian "activists" rose to his challenge and knocked about some settlers more literally, murdering among others five-year-old Danielle Shefi. In a touch of symbolism the critic in Mr Paulin might have found a wee bit obvious, they left her Mickey Mouse sheets soaked in blood.
Evidently Kilroy's "polemical, knockabout style" is far more problematic. For what it's worth, I accept the BBC's right to axe his show. I haven't seen it in a decade and I thought they should have axed it then. I myself got fired by the BBC a while back and, although I had a couple of rough years sleeping in a rotting boxcar at the back of the freight yards, I crawled my way back to semi-insolvency. There's no doubt in my mind that, when the CRE, the BBC, the Metropolitan Police and the Muslim Council of Britain are through making an example of him, he'll still be able to find gainful employment, if not in TV then certainly in casual construction work or seasonal fruit-picking.
But it's not really about Kilroy or Paulin or Jews, or the Saudis beheading men for (alleged) homosexuality, or the inability of the "moderate" Jordanian parliament to ban honour killing, or the fact that (as Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post memorably put it) if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit he'd be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. It's not about any of that: it's about the future of your "multicultural" society.
One reason why the Arab world is in the state it's in is because one cannot raise certain subjects without it impacting severely on one's wellbeing. And if you can't discuss issues, they don't exist. According to Ibrahim Nawar of Arab Press Freedom Watch, in the last two years seven Saudi editors have been fired for criticising government policies. To fire a British talk-show host for criticising Saudi policies is surely over-reaching even for the notoriously super-sensitive Muslim lobby.
But apparently not. "What Robert could do," suggested the CRE's Trevor Phillips helpfully, "is issue a proper apology, not for the fact that people were offended, but for saying this stuff in the first place. Secondly he could learn something about Muslims and Arabs – they gave us maths and medicine – and thirdly he could use some of his vast earnings to support a Muslim charity. Then I would say he has been properly contrite."
Extravagant public contrition. Re-education camp. "Voluntary" surrender of assets. It's not unknown for officials at government agencies to lean on troublemaking citizens in this way, but not usually in functioning democracies.
When Catholic groups complain about things like Terrence McNally's Broadway play Corpus Christi (in which a gay Jesus enjoys anal sex with Judas), the arts crowd says a healthy society has to have "artists" with the "courage" to "explore" "transgressive" "ideas", etc. But, when Cincinnati Muslims complained about the local theatre's new play about a Palestinian suicide bomber, the production was immediately cancelled: the courageous transgressive arts guys folded like a Bedouin tent. The play was almost laughably pro-Palestinian, but that wasn't the point: the Muslim community leaders didn't care whether the play was pro- or anti-Islam: for them, Islam was beyond discussion. End of subject. And so it was.
Fifteen years ago, when the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was declared and both his defenders and detractors managed to miss what the business was really about, the Times's Clifford Longley nailed it very well. Surveying the threats from British Muslim groups, he wrote that certain Muslim beliefs "are not compatible with a plural society: Islam does not know how to exist as a minority culture. For it is not just a set of private individual principles and beliefs. Islam is a social creed above all, a radically different way of organising society as a whole."
Since then, societal organisation-wise, things seem to be going Islam's way swimmingly - literally in the case of the French municipal pool which bowed to Muslim requests to institute single-sex bathing, but also in more important ways. Thus, I see the French interior minister flew to Egypt to seek the blessing for his new religious legislation of the big-time imam at the al-Azhar theological institute. Rather odd, don't you think? After all, Egypt isn't in the French interior. But, if Egypt doesn't fall within the interior minister's jurisdiction, France apparently falls within the imam's.
And so, when free speech, artistic expression, feminism and other totems of western pluralism clash directly with the Islamic lobby, Islam more often than not wins – and all the noisy types who run around crying "Censorship!" if a Texas radio station refuses to play the Bush-bashing Dixie Chicks suddenly fall silent. I don't know about you, but this "multicultural Britain" business is beginning to feel like an interim phase.
That should not be goody bag...it should be body bag.
Well done, Mr. Longley. Well done...
Because the bloody insane Arab murder cult, the Wahhabis, have billions of U.S. dollars to finance such terrorism thanks to our Saudi 'allies'.
It's the Arabs - they've got to be de-fanged.
The shining example of Muslim virtue was Muhammad, who lied, stole, cheated, and killed when it served his purpose. His followers desire to be just like him.
What they are is MUSLIMS. Not Arabs.
You get to rape and murder and plunder, and as a reward you get 72 virgins to rape forever in heaven.
Right now, they cannot reconcile their commitment to freedom of religion with a commitment not to be conquered by Muslims and subjugated to Islam.
What they must recognize is that Islam is a political movement as much as a religion. It does not recognize any seperation between religion and government, and its overt goal is the establishment of a worldwide Islamic theocracy, with the koran as the only constitution, dhimmitude for all non-Muslims, and the shariah as international law.
The only way the people of the West can prevent Muslims from achieving this is to confront Islam as an antidemocratic, aggressive, imperialist political movement and not as a religion.
Islam must be confronted in the same way that Naziism and Communism were confronted.
Hopefully, sooner rather than later.
What they must recognize is that Islam is a political movement as much as a religion. It does not recognize any separation between religion and government, and its overt goal is the establishment of a worldwide Islamic theocracy, with the Koran as the only constitution, dhimmitude for all non-Muslims, and the Sharia as international law.
I have gone back to school... and last quarter I sat in two humanities classes. Both had to do with Islam. The first prof wouldn't even call the Muslim conquest on the 700 AD's conquest... it was expansion. He wouldn't let any of the class even discuss the darker side of Islam... one religion is as good as any other.
The other prof said that when we look at 9/11, we have to remember that Islam is having the same growing pains that Christianity and Judaism had during their history. We need to be tolerant and understanding of Islam and especially 9/11, since, after all, Christianity had the Crusades.
So in other words... allow them to wholesale slaughter us because 800 years ago a Pope got it into his head to advance his political ambitions by instituting the Crusades.
The only way the people of the West can prevent Muslims from achieving this is to confront Islam as an antidemocratic, aggressive, imperialist political movement and not as a religion.
I agree... and this must be the first thing that has to happen if we want to truly win the war on terror.
In Afghanistan, the government is divorced from the religion.
In Iraq, the government is divorced from the religion.
Now... this divorce isn't going to happen over night. The religion hates the fact that church and state will be separated and will fight long and hard to prevent that from happening... but for the region to change, this has to happen... and we have to stand our ground (even at cost of lives) and make it happen.
But what has happened after 9/11 is a good strong and clear start of the Bush stratergy...
I do totally agree with you that PC is truly killing us... PC has to be the first casualty, here on the home front, on the War on Terror. If we don't kill it... we are destined to lose.
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