RATIONAL PHOBIAS

Am I an Islamophobe? A phobia, according to the OED, is “a fear, horror, strong dislike, or aversion; esp. an extreme or irrational fear or dread aroused by a particular object or circumstance”. Well, I certainly possess a fear, horror, strong dislike and aversion to the expressions of Islam that are routinely made in Britain and across the world and I probably experience an extreme fear and dread too. But I wouldn’t call it “irrational”. I think it is wholly deductive.

I have made it a rule in life to take people as I find them. Sometimes, I find myself disagreeing with a friend about a third party and being aware that our experiences of this third party have been our own and different. I don’t generally accept at face value someone’s assessment of someone or something else without verifying for myself and, as often as not, finding cause to dispute the offered opinion.

My aversion to Islam is pragmatic, able to be reasoned, a posteriori. It begins with Islamic homophobia. In Iran, Saudi, Somalia, Sudan and other Muslim nations, homosexuality is a capital offence. Mullahs and other influential men cite The Qur’an as justification. On the other hand, some Islamic cultures are more tolerant. The somewhat notorious practise of bache bazi – men fucking boys – is widespread in Afghanistan but will doubtless be suppressed when the Taliban return to power (or perhaps not; there are contradictions even in extremism).

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says hi to his friend; who knew?

Of course, opposition to being gay, more or less fiercely expressed, is common to all religions. The present pope believes that homosexuality is the greatest threat to the world today. He recites this belief while sitting in a dress on a throne surrounded by other old men in dresses and “protected” by a cadre of Swiss guards, also in dresses, among whom homosexuality is pretty much de rigueur. But as I say, extremism is no guarantee against contradiction.

As a consequence of homophobia routinely expressed by leaders and “teachers” of religion, I have a phobia of them all, a religiophobia. It starts with their hatred of me. But all religions embrace the irrational and I am a rationalist so I soon find myself rejecting all that religions stand for. For that reason, I prefer to use the term “supernatural superstition” rather than “religion”.

Baroness Warsi makes a characteristically subtle point

Sayeeda Warsi is the first Muslim woman to serve in a British cabinet. She is Minister Without Portfolio, a nonce term coined two hundred years ago to justify co-opting some pal of the Prime Minister who has no particular knowledge or skills. Not for the first time, MWP has been used as a device to bring a party appointee into cabinet. Lady Warsi is co-chair of the Conservative Party. I bet you don’t know the name of her fellow co-chair *.

The other day, Warsi made a speech at the University of Leicester on the subject of “casual Islamophobia”. She reckoned that this phobia has “crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability”, that “Islamophobia has now passed the dinner-table test”. I dare say that the “dinner-table test” is pretty easily surmounted. The kind of disobliging talk that has evidently cleared out a few dinosaurs from Sky Sports this week (and filled the pages of The Guardian to the extent that I thought it must be the result of a WikiLeaks revelation) is doubtless common enough at dinner tables throughout the land, once the ladies have withdrawn, the cigars are lit and the port is circulating. Islamophobia, homophobia, LibDemophobia, Milibandophobia and Beebophobia are probably just as generally aired in this unguarded, unbridled atmosphere.

Islamists enjoy free speech in London

My own lifestyle has little use for dinner-tables these days, but I often recall an Easter Sunday teatime passed around a large parlour table in north London some years ago. It was a very jolly and lively gathering, probably with a majority of women (I didn’t reckon it up), dominated by journalists and with extensive representation of Jews, non-whites and gays. What certainly united us all was that we knew ourselves to be articulate, informed and enlightened.

Quite suddenly and without warning, the general conversation took a markedly racist turn. I immediately recoiled from this, looked around the room and was astonished at the individuals who, one after another, ratcheted up this now nakedly racist chatter. Punily, I tried to raise an objection but I was quickly shouted down and slumped into appalled impotence. The rampant, excited expressions of group racism went on for some time and then segued into some other topic.

The all-knowing greybeards of Tehran; no prejudice at their dinner-tables

Does this surprise you? Perhaps not when I reveal the object of this racism. It was the Welsh. The hatred of the Welsh that has been indulged by the English for decades, even centuries, is a good deal harder to fathom than the even fiercer hatred for the English felt by the Scots, but it is palpable and there seems little prospect that it will decline soon. I find it very hard to understand. I have no Welsh connections, save that the mother of my oldest friend was Welsh and so he is half-Welsh. This fact does not impinge on our friendship or indeed make its presence felt very often. Equally, I have no unpleasantness, actual or imagined, upon which to found hatred or even disdain. But the Easter outburst was clearly a case of casual racism, indulged by people who, without exception, ought to have known better.

The Welsh are not suicide bombers. There was a period a few decades ago when Welsh nationalists set fire to the odd English holiday home in the principality. That was about the extent of Welsh anger at English exploitation.

London suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer, making his witlessly brutal self-justifying video

Radical Islamists, however, are indeed suicide bombers, easily making up the majority of such kamikazes this century. They are going in for what they term istishhad, which is to say “martyrdom”. The point of this martyrdom is simultaneously to kill others at random. It is the cruellest, most brutal act of war imaginable, largely because it is utterly impossible to combat. Once the perpetrator is determined to “sacrifice” his – or, increasingly often, her – life, he becomes much more difficult to pre-empt.

The passage of the Qur’an most often used to rationalise this philosophy is this passage from the book called, in English, Repentance: “Allah has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of Allah; they kill and are killed; that is a promise binding upon Allah in the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur’an” [from Arthur J Arberry’s translation for OUP, though I have changed his own term ‘God’ to ‘Allah’]. It is, of course, no accident that this verse is number 9:111.

In actuality, there is no Paradise and no existence after corporeal death. Islamists, like others who cleave to supernatural delusions, are determined that the utterly unverifiable notion of life after death is not only a fact but a sacred fact; Islamists further consider that those who refute eternal life or even question it are infidels who deserve to die. You might spot the odd paradox here but, as I say, extremism is no bulwark against contradiction.

Anjem Choudery, 7/7 apologist and Sharia advocate

The notion that life is readily disposable is one of the scariest aspect of Islam. Do you notice how close are the words ‘sacred’ and ‘scared’ – can it be a coincidence? Islamists happily kill their daughters if they disobey their fathers -– "honour killing" they call it, as if somehow there is some notion of morality involved in it – and they kill neighbours who have been accused – the accusation, however baseless and malicious, is sufficient – of blasphemy, adultery, sodomy and other relatively harmless and certainly not murderous activities. BBC News showed heavily edited footage on Wednesday evening of the summary justice meted out in a Taliban-controlled village in Afghanistan when a couple in their early 20s, accused of adultery, were tricked into returning to their village where they were trussed up and stoned to death. A Taliban spokesman told the BBC reporter: “There are people who say that stoning is inhuman but in doing so they insult the prophet”. Not much room for rational discussion there, I suggest.

There are Muslims in Britain – Anjem Choudery is one such – who wish to introduce Sharia Law into our system of justice. Such a nice idea, don’t you feel? We all look forward to the day when the high court rules that both the Poet Laureate and the Master of the Queen’s Musick are to be publicly beheaded for being gay and that the likes of Mrs Edwina Currie and Sir John Major are to be stoned to death for adultery.

Doku Umarov, leading advocate of terrorist attacks on Russia by Chechen Muslims

Other British Muslims, while not supporting the July 7th bomb attacks in London as Choudery does, do go in for special pleading about the imagined depth of Islamophobia. Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain draws a parallel with “how the Jew was persecuted as a misfit … by the Nazis”. You don’t have to be Jewish to find that a wholly outrageous suggestion.

Britain is not a Muslim nation. It is fundamentally haram which means un-Islamic. It is, by and large and despite the existence of the BNP, a nation that tolerates all manner of in-comers. There are nearly two and a half million Muslims here and they may go about their business pretty much as they please, worshipping in mosques, observing their own dietary requirements, wearing the dress they choose, establishing their own schools and generally being thoroughly Islamic. I do not believe that the infidel – whether Christian, Hindu, Jew or rationalist – enjoys anything like such peace, freedom and security in any nation governed by Islam.

The surviving Muslim terrorist who struck at Mumbai in 2008

So, what are the arguments that should render me an Islamophile?

* You can’t name the other Tory co-chairman? I didn’t think so. His name is Andrew Feldman and he is a pal of David Cameron’s from Brasenose. Jobs for the boys, eh?

GORDON’s GIN TRAP

The star of the past political week is almost universally expected to be confirmed as our next prime minister in a little over three months’ time. Given that this is so widely assumed to be a foregone conclusion, you could be forgiven for feeling a little surprised that the Chancellor should pull such a dubious stunt in seeking to wrong-foot the opposition by his announcement of a two-pence cut in the basic rate of income tax as the parting shot of his last Budget.

As surely as the night follows the day, politicians and commentators immediately began the search for the classes of persons who would enjoy no benefit from the tax changes of which the 2p cut was the showpiece. And, rather to his own disadvantage, it was soon found that those who would be worse off were overwhelmingly members of that stratum of society that used to be referred to as those in “genteel poverty”; which is to say, not those subsisting solely on state benefit and chips but those in low-paid service jobs who cannot afford to get onto the property-owning ladder. They’ll all be voting for David Cameron, then.

Gordon Brown is inevitably hoist with the petard of the Blair governments’ reputation. He has to “sell” the government’s economic policies, just as his colleagues have to talk up their own achievements (if such they are). And of course the danger must be pretty high that Labour’s present, very hard-earned reputation for economic competence – a reputation conspicuously lacking under previous Labour governments – will start to unravel before the next general election, as much due to global conditions as to any loss of touch by the Chancellor or his successor.

I always assumed that, after Blair’s third election victory, he would shift Brown to the foreign office, the logical post for an heir presumptive. The next prime minister would only benefit from greater exposure on the world stage, becoming a more widely familiar figure ahead of taking over the top job. After all, can you name the present secretary of state for economic affairs in Washington? Neither can I. But we all know Condi, don’t we.

If Blair wouldn’t countenance Brown as foreign secretary – or Brown wouldn’t countenance the idea himself – purely because of differing notions on how to develop the policies over Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the Middle East, then that reflects well on Brown. If he wouldn’t move because he wouldn’t relinquish control of the economy, then he’s made a big mistake. He could have had a blameless two years at the FO, becoming a formidable global player, while the slow worsening of the economy began to tarnish his successor. As it is, who except Brown’s creature (Ed Balls) would willingly go to the Treasury in a Brown government? The PM would be on your back on a daily basis.

Gordon Brown needs to shake off as fast as he can the reputation for government by gimmick, sound-bite, tabloid agenda and polling returns because it is damaging. Among those who may run for deputy leader is one who has introduced a new irregular verb into the political lexicon: to blear. This means to blah and blur on behalf of Blair and it is to be found in the observation “Hazel blears”. Members of the present cabinet do a great deal of blearing. While Sir John Major’s governments became irredeemably associated with “sleaze”, Blair’s are stuck with a reputation for blather as well as for “spin”. Brown is not noted among the public for straight talking, even if his bluntness is more evident to colleagues at Westminster. And he has no reason to thank whoever it was who persuaded him to start flashing that unexpected salesman’s beam in mid-sentence, a habit now as ingrained as Thatcher’s change of vocal pitch. It’s more likely to frighten people than to reassure them.

There is one factor about Gordon Brown that I have never seen mentioned in the press so I will (of course) raise it here. It is that he is Scottish. Not only that, he sounds Scottish. Blair was born in Edinburgh but his roots are English and nobody would think him a Scot. In the era of broadcasting, when the appearance and sound of politicians have gradually become available to everyone, there has only been one British prime minister who did not sound English. Ramsay MacDonald, from Lossiemouth, Morayshire, was the first Labour prime minister, briefly in 1924 and again in 1929. It was a period of parliamentary stalemate and these were minority Labour administrations. MacDonald found it impossible to sustain power and invited opposition leaders to form a National government, an act for which the Labour party never forgave him.

So MacDonald is an unhappy precedent for Brown. The only other Labour leader with a Scottish accent was Blair’s predecessor, John Smith. Whether the English electorate would have accepted him was never put to the test for he died suddenly while leading the parliamentary opposition.

Smith’s predecessor, Neil Kinnock, led Labour to two general election defeats. Kinnock is – and more importantly sounds – Welsh. I have always believed that Kinnock’s accent counted heavily against Labour in its English seats. Don’t let’s mince words here. The English hate the Welsh. When I come across this hatred (which is surprisingly often), I am always astonished by the way its irrationality – as baselessly absurd as all racism and prejudice – is matched only by its vehemence. The English hatred for the Welsh is exceeded only by the Scots’ hatred of the English. This at least has some historical justification. It is just as ugly and malign, though. I don’t think the Welsh entertain any feelings, one way or the other, for the Scots and all of course merely despair of the Irish.

Now, I suspect that Brown’s Scottishness will tell against Labour in English seats at the next general election. Indeed – and, as a rule, I eschew political predictions as a mug’s game – I would not be a bit surprised if Labour does not go down to a rather bigger defeat after two or three years of a Brown premiership than any pollster predicts now or will be looking for then. In the privacy of the ballot box, voters can express their prejudices without anyone being able to expose them. Why do you think people vote for the BNP in the numbers that they do? They don’t tell pollsters that they are inclining that way.

I really don’t want David Cameron to win the next election, if for no better reason than his youth. The great movie director Billy Wilder once said that he knew he must be getting old because he was older than the pope (who at the time was John Paul II). I have been wrestling with the disheartening sensation of being older than the prime minister for the past ten years. But to find oneself old enough to be the prime minister’s father would really take the biscuit.

On the other hand, I have never before known a time (or dreamed I would ever know a time) when a Labour government – "New" Labour in Blair’s glib marketing speak, but nonetheless a Labour government – was to the right of every parliamentary opposition party, including the Tories, on just about every issue. Really, they need to be turfed out of office for the good of the Labour party. For Brown to reverse that perception – widely held if not perhaps in the terms in which I have expressed it – would be a Herculean task. I have an awful feeling that, irrational though it be, Cameron’s cultured Englishness set against Brown’s son-of-the-manse persona will be enough to make it impossible for Brown to stay in office. But who knows? – perhaps Sir Ming Campbell’s very home counties version of Scottishness will be enough to hold onto the balance.