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Why do we tolerate
intolerance?
Rod Liddle
Red Cross officials have been meeting in Switzerland to decide upon a
new logo — and presumably, by implication, name — for their fine organisation. The logo in question is the red cross.
And the problem with the cross is that it enrages Muslims. In the theatre
of war, when most combatants see the red cross, they put their weapons down.
Muslim combatants, though, have a tendency to pick theirs up and start
shooting with even greater avidity. In recent years we have seen the
emergence of the Red Crescent, which accords with Muslim sensibilities. We
have also seen the Israeli equivalent, which is advertised by a red Star of
David. Muslims shoot at that one, too, with unquenchable fervour. It is wholly understandable, given this
profusion of competing icons, that the Red Cross, or whatever they will
henceforth call themselves, should seek a symbol which is not immediately
redolent of either an oppressive infidel religion or the Zionist
cockroaches of Israel. They want a secular, neutral symbol and have hit
upon the idea of a red ‘crystal’, or diamond. That shouldn’t offend anyone,
should it? It’s what Jesus would have wanted.
I have heard no reports of Christian or Jewish combatants firing on Red
Crescent vehicles. Our loathing of whatever enemy we are up against, it
seems to me, is less visceral and far less rooted
in notions of certainty. We are rather less inclined, these days, to wish
hell upon an entire people. The totalitarian flavour
of Islam — the unshakeable belief in its own rectitude and a terrible
paranoia directed towards serried ranks of enemies, real and imagined —
makes the thought of firing on an ambulance carrying wounded infidel
soldiers at least permissible and quite possibly, according to Islam’s more
rigorous disciples, a beholden duty. And this is where I believe our Prime
Minister has got it the wrong way around: it is the core ideology of Islam
that is the problem, not a handful of incendiary preachers. But maybe he’s
beginning to realise that right now.
According to the Daily Telegraph, a Muslim barrister who ‘advises’ the
Prime Minister has said that Mr Blair is the victim
of a sinister conspiracy between the Freemasons and the Jews, who control
him and took us to war in Iraq. Ahmad Thomson, from the Muslim Association
of Lawyers, has previously denied that six million Jews died in the
Holocaust: that’s a ‘big lie’, he avers. There are quite a few people who
think along similar lines to Mr Thomson,
particularly in the United States. Mr Timothy
McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was one such. These people call the US
government ZOG — the Zionist Occupation Government — and they tend to have
rather too many canisters of weedkiller in their
basements. You might have heard similar sentiments from David Icke, too, although David believes that it is giant
lizards rather than Jews pulling the strings. My point is that these people
are usually lumped together under the generic heading of ‘nutters’. And sometimes ‘psychos,’ ‘weirdoes’,
‘loonies’, etc. But in Britain you can believe such paranoid, irrational
gibberish and not merely be tolerated and excused the eponym ‘barking
madman’ but actually be invited to divulge your stupidity to the Prime
Minister personally. Because you are a Muslim and such poisonous paranoia
is sort of expected from you, instead of being sectioned and maybe having a
spot of ECT, you get to have your fantasies indulged.
Meanwhile, according to the same newspaper, Mr
Blair’s other Muslim advisers have reportedly told him to scrap the
Holocaust Memorial Day because it is offensive to Muslims. But the
Holocaust Memorial Day is offensive only if you really don’t like Jewish
people. The advisers have couched their language in the usual New Labour doublespeak: Holocaust Memorial Day is not
‘inclusive’, they insist, because Muslims were not killed in the Holocaust
— but they have been killed in other places and at other times. Well,
indeed. And so too have Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and so on. And that’s
rather the point. The memorial day was established for the rest of us, we
gentiles, to remember and remember well a specific appalling crime
committed against one race of people, primarily so that we may guard
against such a thing happening again. It is a lesson entirely lost, though,
upon our Muslim leaders, no matter how moderate they insist upon telling us
they are. Sir Iqbal Sacranie,
the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, refused to attend
the events organised for Holocaust Memorial Day,
if you remember. It seems to be beyond his ken to grasp the damage his
public boycott caused: he simply doesn’t get it. But as we have seen, his
views are bang in line with those of almost all ‘moderate’ Muslim
spokespeople. And again, rather than worry a little about Sacranie’s mental health when he boycotts the memorial
day or speaks of Osama bin Laden as a respected ‘scholar’, we knight the
bugger.
These are strange and disquieting double standards. I can think of no
male politician who has been more steadfast in his determination to uproot
the ‘hate crime’ of homophobia than the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
And you can bet that if he espied evidence of such a crime in one or other
of his colleagues, he would be trenchant and unforgiving in his
denunciations. But he will share a platform with and offer kind words to a
stone-age Muslim cleric who is comfortable with the notion of homosexuality
being classed as a capital offence. Is it even conceivable that he would be
so tolerant and forgiving were Mr al-Qaradawi an evangelical Christian or a humanist? Female
Labour politicians who, on other occasions, would
consider themselves the doughty heirs of Emmeline
Pankhurst nonetheless queue up to support the
wearing of the burka, even going so far as to kid
themselves that such support is in accordance with radical feminism.
Needless to say, if Nick Soames suggested such a
thing under his breath during a House of Commons debate, there would be
petitions to have him removed and he would be vilified in our national
newspapers.
When Islam appears on the agenda, the goalposts are moved: the normal
rational thought processes are not applied. Suddenly those Left-liberal shibboleths
are not very important: they can be forgotten. Append the description
‘Muslim’ to anyone and all bets are off; he or she can get away with pretty
much anything, be it the execution of homosexuals or the idea that Jews and
Freemasons are running the government. This springs from the misconception,
widespread on the Left, that being anti-Islam is in some way ‘racist’. It
is not. It has nothing to do with race — as I daresay Mr
Ahmad Thomson, that lawyer I mentioned earlier, would confirm. One is not
born believing that the world is a Zionist conspiracy any more than one is
born believing that we are all the subjects of giant alien lizards.
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