Posted on 07/03/2007 9:36:19 AM PDT by Eurotwit
Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in connection with the terrorism crisis.
The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase “war on terror” is to be dropped.
The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more “consensual” tone than existed under Tony Blair.
However, the change provoked claims last night that ministers are indulging in yet more political correctness.
The sudden shift in tone emerged in comments by Mr Brown and Ms Smith in the wake of the failed attacks in London and Glasgow.
Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language.
“There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,” the spokesman said. “It is important that the country remains united.”
He confirmed that the phrase “war on terror” – strongly associated with Mr Blair and US President George Bush – has been dropped.
Officials insist that no direct links with Muslim extremists have been publicly confirmed by police investigating the latest attempted terror attacks. Mr Brown himself did not refer to Muslims or Islam once in a BBC TV interview on Sunday. Ms Smith also avoided any such reference in her statement to MPs yesterday.
She said: “Let us be clear – terrorists are criminals, whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religions. Terrorists attack the values shared by all law-abiding citizens. As a Government, as communities, as individuals, we need to ensure that the message of the terrorists is rejected.”
Tory backbencher Philip Davies said: “I don’t know what purpose is served by this. I don’t think we need pussyfoot around when talking about terrorism.”
But former Tory homeland security spokesman Patrick Mercer said: “This is quite a smart idea. We know that the vast majority of Muslims are not involved in terrorism and we have to accept there are sensitivities about these matters.”
What about passive support? Most muslims don't do anything but nod in agreement and provide passive support for Islamic hegemony. This is a crime of omission for which there is no penalty in a non-accountable society like G.B.
Might I offer the suggestion that singling out a gender like that will only lead to more hard feelings? What you need to do is use a more inclusive descriptor as well as placing the responsibility where it truly belongs.
Perhaps, “A scuffle with individuals of indeterminate gender, race, creed, or orientation whom we have inadvertently managed to offend in some way which is completely our fault.” would be less offensive to the aggrieved party.
Okay,..so if Brown doesn’t want to say that terrorist are muslims, how about if we simply say that muslims are terrorists?
Yup. As if appeasing the MUSLIM TERRORIST BASTARDS did Spain any good at all.
Islamofascist Serial Killers of innocent people.
Sounds bad but you can bet your bottom dollar “america” is more than the big cities and suburbs where most of the Islamists have taken up refuge.
Others have said that the UK needs another Churchill or Maggie Thatcher.
They probably have to have a Chamberlain first - looks like they got one.
No wonder Tony held on so long.
Scratch that, reverse it.
There are terrorists that aren’t muslim.
“The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims.”
I wish the PC pansies would just come clean and say “We’re not really afraid of offending muslims. We’re merely sh#t-scared out of our minds that they’ll use this excuse, any excuse to blow the hell out of us.”
If this isn’t the UK version of Scrappleface, Brown has condemned innocent UKers to a life like the Israelis have.
The link below discusses PCism around the world and really gets into how PCism controls the UK.
http://www.angryharry.com/boretreatofreason2.htm
In 1997, Britain began, in effect, to be ruled by political correctness for the first time. The Labour government was the first UK government not to stand up to political correctness, but to try and enact its dictates when they are not too electorally unpopular or seriously mugged by reality, and even sometimes when they are. The previous Conservative government was almost deliberately politi-cally incorrect, and during the previous Labour government political correctness had too little grip on the body politic to hold much sway.
In Britain, at the start of the twenty-first century, political correctness encompasses almost the entire range of policies from women’s pay to race relations, health care to education, crime to child discipline, and almost every institution, society, company and authority.
Political correctness has gained power over public services, from schools and hospitals to local authorities and central government. Political correctness became institutionalised at the BBC, but also started exerting control over ITV and broadsheet newspapers. Politically correct alternative comedians quickly swept to power, becoming the new establishment, while PC triumphed in the literary field. PC triumphed not just in trade unions and charities, but in professional and trade associations, from medical Royal Colleges to business associations. Finally, even multinationals and the police started suc-cumbing to PC.
The long march of PC through every nook and cranny of national life, leaving nothing untouched, was helped by the fact there is little competing ideology: although PC has been ridiculed, there has been virtually no counter-PC movement. A society enjoying unprecedented affluence and no external threats can afford to become intellectually decadent.
PC’s methodology of controlling speech and isolating opponents has been extraordinarily effective in a society that has practiced free speech for so long—and had to fight for it so little—that it has become complacent about it.
Since its establishment as the national ideology, political correctness sets the ground rules for debate, and is the benchmark against which public opinion is measured. When two strangers meet and talk politics, the need for acceptance means that more often than not they will usually stick to the politically correct text, even if they don’t agree with it.
So heavy is the punishment for transgression that few mainstream politicians or public figures would dare to be un-PC unless there is huge elect-oral advantage. Those simply seeking popular approval, such as actors or pop stars, automatically adopt and espouse politically correct beliefs, reinforcing them in the public mind in the process.
Anything that breaches political correctness is auto-matically controversial, and so any institution that wants to court public acceptance and avoid controversy must be PC. Since most institutions in Britain want to be publicly accepted, most have now become thoroughly permeated by political correctness.
The broadcast media, and the BBC in particular, stick to the politically correct text on most issues because it safely protects them from criticism. The BBC can endlessly promote mass immigration against the wishes of its licence fee payers with impunity, but as soon as one Panorama programme pointed to some downsides of mass immigration, it was attacked by the government and left-wing press as being ‘Powellite’. The film industry, both in the UK and US, almost uniformly sticks to the safe territory of promoting political correctness.
PC has silenced many awkward debates, as well as those that oppose them. As the row over Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve showed, the study of racial differences has become almost totally taboo. Groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre have proved very effective at silencing those they deem guilty of ‘hate’.
Amnesty International has been turned by political correctness from a worthy fighter for political prisoners around the world into a knee-jerk anti-Western-govern-ment campaigning organisation that has all but lost sight of its founding principles. Index on Censorship is on the brink of turning from an organisation that campaigns for freedom of speech to one that campaigns against it.
Political correctness has also created a climate that has fuelled a vast growth in charities and pressure groups that support and promote the politically correct world view on almost all issues. From Greenpeace to Amnesty Inter-national, from Refugee Action to the National Council for One Parent Families, a huge non-governmental sector has grown up, all pushing in the PC direction.
They are often taxpayer-funded, or charities subsidised by tax relief, and can campaign for funds from the public without oppo-sition. They are given endless invaluable free publicity from the BBC and most newspapers as objective, independent groups—the BBC repeats everything that Liberty says with such unquestioning respect that they treat it often as a justification for a story in itself, with no counterbalancing points of view, even though Liberty is tied closely to the Labour party and cannot be described as politically neutral. As frequently complained about in the tabloid media, the National Lottery has been reduced to a fund to promote political correctness.
Non-government groups that may have a politically incorrect aspect to their work usually silence it. The Council for the Protection of Rural England campaigns about house building in the countryside, but it would never dare tackle one of the main, and most easily tackled, causes in the growth in housing demand, mass immigration.
In contrast, there are virtually no pressure groups that promote politically incorrect views, and most of those that do, such as Christian family groups, tend to have a low profile and are treated with suspicion by the media, especially the BBC. One example is Migrationwatch UK, founded by the former ambassador Sir Andrew Green, a lone group campaigning for less immigration (a view supported by 80 per cent of the public), against literally dozens of groups promoting mass immigration. In contrast to these other groups,
Migrationwatch gets no taxpayers’ money and is almost totally blackballed by the BBC, and to some extent by the broadsheet media. Political correctness also means that high profile figures are far less likely to support Migrationwatch in public than they are any politically correct organisation, because they will automatically become open to attack.
Political correctness also succeeds, like the British empire, through divide and rule.
While those on the politically correct side of a debate can happily hang together, whatever their differences, the politically incorrect often end up appeasing political correctness by denouncing fellow travellers, in an act of ‘triangulation’ aimed at making them appear less extreme than the others. Political correctness is so powerful, and the guilt by association that it promotes so effective, that even the politically incorrect fear being seen together. This makes it far more difficult for politically incorrect individuals and groups to work together for common causes.
Changes in society have fuelled the growth of political correctness. The growing emphasis on emotion and feelings over reason and logic in recent decades, combined with the decline in the study of science, has given PC a more powerful grip on the mind of the nation. The triumph of a more superficial celebrity culture over an intellectual literary culture has reduced resistance to PC, as shallow celebrities are more likely to succumb to the fashionable pressure of being PC than an intellectual icon. The TV culture champions the personal experience over abstract reasoning, intrinsically giving backing to politically correct ways of thinking.
PC encourages policies that further increase its potency. It encourages Third World immigration to the West, importing challenges to traditional Western values, and dividing society into ethnic groups where identity and grievance politics can thrive. It encourages the growth of the public sector, increasing the domain where it has the most powerful grip.
Political correctness also binds its values into the fabric of a country by laws and international treaties that make it very difficult to challenge. Various human rights laws, charters, conventions and treaties, from the UN to Europe to the Human Rights Act, create an entire international and domestic legal framework that upholds PC values and beliefs, making it very difficult for future governments to challenge them.
When Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, said in 2005 that if elected Prime Minister he would take Britain out of the UN convention on refugees, he was told by the European Commission that he had no legal right to, and Britain would immediately be taken to the European Court of Justice.
Ultimately, political correctness is the luxury of a powerful society. As the fear of Islamic terrorism has shown, PC’s enemy is a society’s sense of vulnerability. When people feel insecure, they more strongly resist what they see as the idiocies of PC because they believe the stakes are too high.
The combination of all these factors meant that PC, one of history’s most wide-ranging ideological revolutions, enjoyed the most extraordinarily rapid advance. Ellis wrote:
Dissenters can expect to be not only criticised, as dissenters always are, but denounced as both moral outcasts and unsophisticated simpletons. Yet this is done on the basis of a viewpoint that coalesced far too quickly for it to have been properly thought through, one that seemed to advance not by its intellectual force but instead by a kind of tidal action that suddenly surged everyone.
It is time to retrace our steps, to do what should have been done initially; we must take a hard look at what this position really amounts to and whether it is sound enough to deserve the commanding position it now has.
In other words, stop using your logic and be illogical by listening to my proclamation.
Yeah, that's sure to work.
“Sounds very Monty-Python-esque.”
Back in my married days, I used to walk on eggshells when my wife’s brother came to visit, lest I say something to offend the little ^*!# ick. While I didn’t like him, I didn’t go out of my way to offend him, but found it just took too little to do so.
Solution? I told him to leave and never come back.
There’s a whole lot more to America than the big cities. If there’s going to be violence, we in the countryside can dish out much more than the few million Muslims in this country will be able to withstand.
How many days has it been? I already miss Tony Blair.
In other news, the Prime Minister also ordered that the “Irish Republican Army” be referred to by his ministers in the future as the “Nobody in Particular Republican Army”.
“A quote from an 1899 book by Winston Churchill, “The River War...”
Has that text been outlawed in the UK and/or US yet? You know, so as not to offend the animalistic, beastial, devil worshippers? Surely some panty-waisted, faggoty bureaucrat hasn’t overlooked this chance to curry favor with the child sacrificers, has he/she/it?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.