Dogwash

Good news! Integration of the ethnic minorities into mainstream culture is going ahead in leaps and bounds.

As I made my way to the ATM to convert a modest fraction of my accumulated lucre into anonymous beer tokens. I was accosted by a gentleman of highly indeterminate ethnicity. Spade with a touch of wog, or vice versa, perhaps; I think that sort of malarkey goes on in the Caribbean. Alas not quite in the Tiger Woods class of material achievement, though, as he asked me for spare change in a tone of voice which challenged me not to dare an impudent denial of his entitlement. I refused politely.

Concluding my transaction with the machine, I turned to walk on, only to encounter our friend again, repeating his demand for spare change. What the fuck was he expecting, a gash £20 note? I fear my reply was rather less polite this time round.

I've always marvelled at those street beggars who sit beside ATMs hoping to shame folk into dropping them the odd tenner. I might have more sympathy for their chutzpah had I not also watched them reporting in on their mobiles to their "co-ordinator" when their shift came to an end.

This was beautiful downtown Greenwich by the way. This beggar is a relatively new one on me. Looks a bit like a younger version of long-term Greennwich fixture Joe the Parasite, and has the same arrogant manner. Perhaps it's a family business.

Uncharitable rant ends.

Those inventive chappies at Hope not Hate have put up a remarkable set of photographs, altogether too remarkable in my entirely unhumble opinion, purporting to show leading EDLers posing for the camera with a variety of firearms in a variety of largely private settings.

Evidently an element of the ongoing campaign to associate Anders Breivik with the EDL, it builds upon the deliberate misinterpretation of Tommy Robinson's comment after the Breivik atrocity that a similar atrocity in the UK was probable within the next five years to unjustifiably imply that the EDL intends to carry out or foment such an atrocity.

Well, I leave it to others with more knowledge of firearms than I to comment on the plausibility and effectiveness of the motley collection of weapons on display — the last time I handled a rifle was 50 years ago when I was in the CCF at school.

And I leave to the Photoshop experts the analysis of the authenticity of the photos; though I wish you luck given that they are so highly compressed that the typical filesize is 5 to 10K. Why might that be? Some may be real but innocent. What to make of the photograph supposedly of "James Clarke (Nottingham EDL)", for example, posing with a firearm in front of an RAF banner of some kind? A joke pose at an ex-serviceman's gathering, maybe?

But, as I say, I'll leave all that to others better equipped and just offer you one thought. Not so much a reductio ad absurdum, more a reductio ad testiculos totales.

Let's suppose that these photos are all genuine and represent what they are implied to represent. If the EDL are a genuine and serious emergent terrorist organization, do you really think the leadership would allow such pictures to be taken at all, let alone circulated in some manner? If the pictures are truly what they are made out to be, then we can only conclude that the EDL are a bunch of useless Walter Mitty muppets who, given a modicum of attention by the security services, are no real threat to anyone except themselves.

In a word, bollocks.


Oh, and incidentally, did anything ever come out of HnH's last splendid effort in this field, the famous EDL photoshoot? That's gone very quiet, hasn't it? No arrests then?

The Muslims Against Crusades website is currently displaying as its "intro page" a short flash movie featuring the silhouette of an approaching airliner with engine noise sound effects, followed by a digital clock display counting down to the precise 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center attack. (via)

Here is a selection of stills (full screen but scaled to 50% to keep total file sizes reasonable).






Quite despicable.



Afterthought (13:00)

After both the 9/11 and 7/7 atrocities, there were reports of Muslims in the UK openly celebrating. I wonder if we'll see the same at the impending anniversary. Or indeed worse. That'll do wonders for cohesion.

Those who are kind enough to read this drivel regularly may have noticed that the "Tales from the Multiculture" series majors heavily on public transport in London, and in particular on how the trains are packed to the gunwales with persons of a non-indigenous persuasion jabbering away on their mobiles in foreign. Or more frequently jabbering on one mobile while keying stuff into another. Busy little bees, whatever it is they are up to.

Not that trains have gunwales, but you know what I mean.

I have to report a correction. You see, I do most of my travelling offpeak. Even when I was working in a proper 40 hour a week job until a few years ago, I was generally able to avoid the full-on 9-5 commuter crush; being an IT wallah called upon to make frequent out-of-hours and weekend attendances does have its quid pro quos*.

Recently, however, circumstances have compelled me to undertake a number of local rail journeys at the height of the peak, squeezed in with the rest of the hoi polloi. And the difference in demographic is startling. You can almost imagine yourself back in pre-Neather London.

So then it would appear that during the peak hours the trains are full of White people. But during the offpeak the trains are full of Dark people.

Make of that what you will.

___
* quid pro quos: apparently the correct plural form of quid pro quo is quæ pro quibus. Now that would be really showing off.

Yesterday's Guardian has a charming little "and finally" piece to end its editorial column, relating the tale — yes, I did actually write "tail" there and had to go back and correct it — of "Station Jim", a dog famously resident at Slough railway station who was so appreciated that he was stuffed and displayed there after his death. (Read the link.)

Being the Guardian, they can't resist appending a sententious political tie-in to this amusing little anecdote, can they? (Or should that be "innit?")

Jim is in surprisingly good nick. His coat is glossy, and his case well-polished. Compare this with Britain's other modern mummy, Jeremy Bentham, whose severed head has been repeatedly pinched by students amid dubious japes. We would appear to have greater respect for dead dogs than for dead philosophers. It would be nice to think that, rather than revealing deficient regard for abstract thought, this reflects a proud national trait: the British capacity for boundless sentimentality about animals, including those who are animate no more. Maybe, just maybe, as they rebuild after the riots, shops could consider putting stuffed creatures in their window. Public taxidermy as the antidote to public unrest? Stranger things have happened.

The obvious response is not long coming, in the first below-the-line comment in fact,

How about stuffed rioters in their windows?

Serves you jolly well right, you sanctimonious barstewards. Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if many of the rioting demographic were more likely to break the window and attempt to eat the stuffed animal. I think you might be on a loser there.


Addendum

I've just noticed another comment further down BTL

Oh I remember Station Jim from childhood when we went to visit my Aunt Agnes in Slough. How fantastic he's still there! Is The Dolphin pub still there too? I used to thin it was called Courage The Dolphin, and that it was named after a particularly brave cetacean.

Reminds me of when I was sitting in the beer garden (ie several of those one-piece wooden table and bench doodahs in the car park) of a South London pub when a passing German tourist stopped to inquire. He was intrigued by the inscription in huge letters on the side wall of the pub.

TAKE COURAGE

it proclaimed. He had seen several of these encouraging mottoes on his travels round London. Was this an English tradition, he wondered? He was most disappointed when I explained that it was the brewery's advertising slogan.

I've often wondered, should I perhaps have left him with his happy illusion.

Or is he losing what few marbles he had and becoming totally paranoid.

A kebab outlet in Leicester was destroyed in an explosion in the small hours of Monday. As of this writing media reports (eg this at the Mail) tell us that foul play is suspected and that six people have been arrested by police. A body has been recovered from the wreckage, so this is now a murder inquiry.

None of the media reports, most of them repeated from a single source, identify the suspects in any way, beyond the fact that they are two men and four women. An unusual gender ratio for a violent crime of this nature, to be sure, but beyond that there is absolutely no indication yet of who or why.

And yet Ketlan Ossowski ('Antifascist') sees fit to repost the BBC news report at Lancaster Unity, adding the following tags,

Does he know something the rest of us don't, or does Ketlan automatically assume that all violence in this country is the work of the EDL? Perhaps he can enlighten us.

A further example of the sort of intercommunal violence between alien groups resident on European turf which I referred to in my recent posts [1][2] about the miraculous intervention of The Blessed Tariq Jahan.

Nigerians in Mallorca go on the rampage after one of their number dies, allegedly at the hands of a Romany. And why, in the name of Fuck are there enough Nigerians in Mallorca to constitute a "community" in the first place? Still, I suppose it keeps the bastards away from Woolwich.

In the past year or so I have dropped into the habit of browsing second-hand bookshops, something I've not done for years. In particular those few bookshops, of which type there are still one or two along the Charing Cross Road, which have outside trays full of miscellaneous junk. Booksellers often buy in job lots from, for example, house clearances. The dross, clean and intact but not even considered worth pricing up, is relegated to outside trays, where it is offered at a flat rate per item. (Often with bulk discounts like £1 each, 5 for £4, which seems counterintuitive for items as individual and specific as books, but there you go.)

I'm not after specific titles or valuable "collectables"; I'm more interested in the serendipity of finding things like long out-of-print Penguins and Pelicans which I missed "first time round". There are unexpected bonuses too, like a 2d London bus ticket presumably used as a bookmark in a Penguin probably last opened in the early 1950s. And a couple of non-fiction paperbacks containing relevant newspaper clippings from the 1960s or early 70s, inserted by the original owner. Fascinating stuff.

My most serendipitous find was a copy of the first Pelican I ever owned personally, my original copy of which has long since disappeared. Simeon Potter's Our Language, a popular exposition of English linguistics, brought back from a shopping trip into Manchester by my parents who knew I was interested in that sort of thing.

And in the original plain 1950s edition, too. And all for £1.

It was in this spirit that I entered a newly opened bookshop in Greenwich. There were no outside trays. In a sense which will become clear, the whole shop was one big "outside tray". There was interesting stuff on offer, to be sure, at prices of at most a couple of pints on the Wetherspoon scale.

I toyed with one and began to approach the counter, behind which stood a couple of late-middle-aged, middle-class volunteers. I could not proceed. As with the trapped characters in The Exterminating Angel, there was no physical barrier preventing me from approaching them, but nevertheless I simply could not take those steps forward to complete the purchase.

The clue lies in the term "volunteers". For it was an Oxfam shop, and there is no way I could bring myself to contribute so directly and knowingly to that organization's coffers.

And so it was that I returned the volume gently to its shelf, turned and left, and spent my money on a pint of expensive but delightful Japanese lager in the Spanish Galleon next door.

I was wandering round Waterstone's — yes, Edwin does visit and even patronize commercial emporia other than Wetherspoon's and Sainsbury's — when I saw this on promotion

and I found myself wondering whom this rather cheesecaky cover image is aimed at. Christmas-shopping mums who are not sure whether they'd like to shag Brian or mother him, perhaps. Mebbe he'll fit both roles: despite his gamin looks, our Brian (who is a Chadderton lad so I will hear nothing said against) is actually 43.

Of course there might be an alternative audience. Perhaps Comrade Putin, He-man of the Soviet Union, might appreciate a copy.

But the other thought which immediately came to mind as I walked past the display was of a series of Carol Vorderman-sponsored GCSE revision books which used to be on sale in Smith's about a decade ago. Carol and her advisers have obviously thought better of the strategy and current editions feature a chaste head and shoulders photograph: Carol is careful these days to separate her arse-of-the-year telly milf persona from her celeb schoolmarm image. But the earlier version, of which unfortunately I have been unable to find an online image, featured our Carol smiling up at the camera and showing off a serious amount of peekaboo cleavage. Tsk!

Sex sells, but only when it's all done in the best possible taste™, of course.

Islam v Europe has a post up about a confectionery called Negro on sale in Switzerland. As might be expected, this appellation has attracted the wrathful attentions of the po-faced and professionally offended in the corporate person of a body called the Commission fédérale contre le racisme. Even the robustly sensible Swiss suffer from this sort of bollocks.

You want offensive, I'll give you offensive. The reference to edible negroes immediately brought to mind this Robert Crumb cartoon.


Click for full-size offensiveness. (Source.)

Number of police officers deployed in London on the last night of the riots: 16,000

Number of police officers to be deployed in London for the Notting Hill Carnival: 16,000

Brendan O'Neill, for whose sensible commentaries I am developing an increasing respect, has a suitably worthy blog post up at the Telegraph on attempts to lay sole blame on Facebook and Twitter for facilitating the recent festival of firesetting, stone throwing and informal out-of-hours shopping.

Below the line, there is a brief outbreak of whataboutery among the hoi polloi in which someone mentions Belgium. Then we get...


Yep! That just about sums up Belgium.

From Socialist Worker Online,

We have a right to march against the EDL racists

In an unprecedented step, Scotland Yard has applied to the home secretary to ban all marches in five London boroughs for 30 days starting from 2 September.

This means that the English Defence League march in Tower Hamlets, east London, set for 3 September will be banned. But the blanket ban will also cover the counter-demonstration organised by Unite against Fascism and United East End.

The English Defence League still plan to come to Tower Hamlets to hold a static protest.

Already anti-racist activists in Tower Hamlets have put out calls for the counter-demonstration to go ahead. Socialist Worker backs all those who want to stand up to the racists. We call on everyone to come to Tower Hamlets to show that the racist EDL is not welcome.

Everyone who opposes racism and fascism should protest about the ban, which denies us our right to stand up to the EDL, and should mobilise to come to Tower Hamlets on Saturday 3 September.

(My emphasis)

*snigger*

I mean, swive me with a rusty tyre lever smeared in pork fat. It's bad enough getting spam text messages like this,

You have still not claimed the compensation you are due for the accident you had. To start the process please reply YES. To opt out text STOP

on your mobile, but when they start coming in on your mobile broadband dongle...

I'm almost tempted to respond. After all, the bastards are going to have an interesting time making the follow-up voice call, aren't they?

Hmm, perhaps not.

I rambled on the other day about the convenient beatification of Tariq Jahan, my point being that Mr Jahan's fortuitous intervention diverted attention from the actual underlying problem, namely the balkanization of British society into inward-looking ethnocentric tribal groups each with a culture not only of nepotism and ethnic favoritism but also of ready resort to intercommunal mob violence: a process which not only bodes ill for social cohesion and integration but less obviously puts those of us in the much more diffuse default culture at significant disadvantage.

And along comes an interesting for-instance. I'm rather surprised that this story got under the editorial radar at the Lancashire Telegraph. I can only assume they saw it as a White racism story rather than a Paki violence story.

The gist is that some White bloke in Darwen lost his rag in a local "Asian" shop. Now I don't know the background to this any more than you do. It might have been unprovoked "recreational racism". On the other hand it may have been a common-or-garden dispute over something unconnected with race. I don't set much store by reports like

A 24-year-old man, believed to be a resident of the house, had been cautioned for making racist and abusive comments.

If someone is annoyed enough at me to call me "stupid four-eyed get", I don't automatically assume that he is motivated by dioptrophobia; more likely he just needs a handy characteristic to hang his abuse on.

But it's the sequel to the altercation in the shop which makes this case interesting. Did the shopkeeper shrug the incident off? Did he report it to the police? No, he mobilized a small militia of friends and family and went round to attack the difficult customer at his home.

Let's run that one along the breaking news ticker again, shall we?

Customer upsets Paki shopkeeper. Shopkeeper gets 30 men to attack the customer and his mother at their home.

Because if the ethnicities had been reversed, this would have been headline news on the BBC and Sky and the CiF race posse would be typing their fingers off.

Instead we get a passing mensh in the local rag.

I wonder how much of this goes on, unreported.


And another thing that puzzles me. If you have issues with your local "Asian" small businessmen, why continue to patronize them? I'm not familiar with the delights of shopping in Blackburn and Darwen, but here in the Occupied Territories of Greater Woolwich there are plenty of White-run businesses to use, mostly chain stores. If your corner shop is hostile and racist and overcharges you for duff goods, go to Morrison's or Lidl.

That paragon of balanced reporting, The Voice, put up a short piece about the "street defenders" of Eltham during the recent festival of arson and informal shopping.

Predictable sort of stuff, best précised as "Drunken EDL thugs intent on orgy of unprovoked nigger-bashing stopped from marching on Lewisham, says opportunistic local MP".

Well, ye pays yer money and ye takes yer choice. (Or, as we used to say during the 1970s oil crisis, "Yer pays Yermani and the Sheikhs rejoice", but that's another story.)

The comments below-the-line are, to be fair, more varied and literate than is usual beneath a Voice article, but it is this one I think is worth quoting in full,

Go and read the blogs and see BBC, ITV, Sky news and Channel 4. The ratio of caucasian, europeans, asians, (excluding blacks) is greater % in the riots than blacks. But the racial fixation with capturing blacks only shows the UK will not change. See how they treated Darcus Howe during a BBC TV interview yesterday morning.

They psychically mug us, they rape our ancestors, our mothers, us mentally have tortured us for over 400 years even using the bible and religion; and endeavouring to strip us our morals and dignity.

Who are the rioters? Are they those who stole slaves, resources and their lands; placed indentured asians in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda; Trinidad, St. Lucia, Guyana and Guadeloupe, smidgens in Grenada. All this done by the so-called British!

They have built Britain on psycho and physical slavery and colonialism-it is a fact!!!

But this time we have to be prepared for war. We must control our youth and destiny.

They say a siege of the cities, what about their siege of races and people under guise of civilising them

We Black men have to responsible and ready for the call of duty to support our women, children and youth. As this now a war!!!

They have killed over 10 million+ blacks in the triangular slave trade; and hitherto Duggan and Smiley Culture etc...the list goes on

We have to reclaim our youth nurtured, inspire them and ultimately leave these shores; and kicked the caucasians, asians (from East India) out of Africa and the Caribbean. As you will see that English Defence League, BNP, the Tory party and most whites want to kick us out of Britain and they ramp this up, to drive home this at football matches with season starting.

There is unerringly feeling that a racial war is brooding. See the English defence league activities in Eltham (the same area that they murdered Stephen Lawrence); the Clapham Junction brigade; and the Sikhs in Southall last night. To them the enemy are the blacks. It is all of pretence of 'sweeping and cleaning the streets of rioters.

This incitement was done yesterday by Cameron and Boris Johnson (who has already called black people picannies, watermelon smilers and nappy heads); and the weak hanging on their coat tails Ed Milliband.

Finally, this is a spiritual revolution go and listen to Bob Marley's Redemption song, Buffalo Soldier and War!!!

Wed, 2011-08-10 16:27

It's worth quoting not because of what it says about the recent rioting, but because of the general attitude towards the White host community that it displays in an unusually explicit way. As I say, the comments as a whole are quite varied and reasonably balanced but the attitude exhibited above is by no means rare. I have encountered it, usually but not always in milder forms, throughout the 37 years I have lived in London.

At least he doesn't like wogs either. Now there's a turn-up for the books (as one tailor said to the other). In the old days it used to be Black and Brown united against the White oppressor. Now it's White and Brown united against the Black savage, or so it would appear. Good stuff this race war, innit.

One can only hope the writer realizes his threat to return to Africa. I'm sure we'll all be much happier all round.

Nor is this all-justifying sense of grievance a uniquely Black phenomenon. Try sampling Pickled Politics. A relatively civilized and heavily commented blog, mostly patronized by British Indians, predominantly Sikhs and secular Punjabis. The posters and commenters are articulate, seemingly well integrated 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants. (Yes I am going to use that form of words because it's the most vividly effective way of expressing it in the present context: UK-born people with a strong cultural and emotional link to their ancestors' country of recent origin.)

And yet the undercurrent of anti-British sentiment bubbles continually under. Strange historical grievances from the time of the Raj are trotted out. We are reminded, for example, of our apparent responsibility in perpetuity for the millions of deaths that occurred during Partition.

Dunno. Not my field. Maybe we should have postponed independence until Jinna snuffed it, in the hope that religious separatism would fade without him as a focus. Maybe it would. Maybe that strategy would have brought other problems. You can't win in a lose-lose situation, but that doesn't stop you getting the blame.

Whatever, the point is that this is not some academic Ferguson v Schama bout on telly, of passing and abstract interest. This sort of stuff is a real generalized resentment which is projected onto White British people as a whole. Often subconsciously, but it's there. And subconsciously it will be used to justify all manner of discriminatory behaviour.

OK, let's go the whole alarmist hog, shall we? How far are we from

— Why is that White man being sent to the labour camps?
— Because his ancestors were responsible for the death of my great-great uncle during Partition.
— No, becasue they were responsible for my ancestors being transported across the Atlantic as slaves.

And these are the people that the Righteous liberal elite tell us are as British as we are? They tell us that we shouldn't worry about becoming a minority in our own country, 'cos we're all the same colour under the skin, innit?

Up to a point, Lord Copper, up to a point. Personally, I'm less sanguine.


Anyway, a cheerful note to end on. One of the replies to the angry Black gentleman's rant quoted above reads,

Bob Marley's father was a white man!

Wed, 2011-08-10 17:42

Ha! I'll bet that went down well. So was Mary Seacole's, as it happens.

Although no longer a capital offence, having sex with the wife of the heir to the throne (unless, presumably, you happen to be the heir to the throne) remains an act of high treason. Just thought I'd share that with you; it's certainly put the damper on my early morning fantasies of a vigorous romp in the sack with Camilla, I can tell you.

You do have to tread so bloody carefully these days. So I'd like to seek your advice. In simpler times, the inimitable Ronnie Barker could get away with referring to our sovereign as Hor Majosty Tho Quoon,



a phrase which has stuck in my head for the last 36 years. I still have difficulty not automatically calling her "Tho Quoon" and getting blank stares in return. Such are mindworms.

Suppose then in this edgy offence-ridden era, if I were to raise the innocent query on Faceache or Twatter or wotever as to whether the Queen likes to have a rubber duck in her bath, would I be banged up for lèse majesté?

Answers ,on a postcard please, to

HH1948 Greenwood, E
Kufr Wing
HMP Tower of London
Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets

Mind you, the sight of the Yeomen breaking my door down with their partisans when they come to cart me off at six in the morning will give the local Nigerians something to think about. "Riots, arson, intercommunal voilence, early morning snatch arrests. This place ain't safe, man, I'm going back to Lagos."

Vivemus in spe!



What was all that about, then, you are asking? Just practising how to embed YouTubes in posts, mostly, innit. Or something. Off up that there London to watch the riots, I think.

I like to think I'm a water off a duck's arse man on the whole. Certainly I take an interest in the "passing show" of largely unpleasant news that washes over us every day, and I reflect on it and occasionally go so far as to broadcast my obnoxious opinions in places like this blog. But I don't emote about it and I tend to regard with a certain wary suspicion those who scream and shout how much they are "sickened" and "appalled" by events which for them can only be remote and abstract, or who moralize in absolute black-and-white terms, dividing the world up unequivocally between Good and Evil — or, as we usually say round here, Righteous and Unrighteous. Life is complicated. There are rarely simple, unequivocal answers. And above all, as the Grand Unified Theory of Thermodynamics teaches us, Shit Happens.

However, with Jai the Prolix's latest effort at Pickled Politics I come close to being actually sickened. This saccharine tale of interfaith harmony, reconciliation, mutual support and ... well, read it for yourself; by Jai's usual standards it's relatively concise.

Interfaith unity from the ashes of the riots in England

Jai speaks lovingly of interfaith collaboration and shared commemorations. Mostly, it seems, between Muslims and Sikhs. Whites don't seem to get much of a look-in. He mentions interracial collaboration in post-riot clean-up efforts, though as I recall the Ealing clean-up was an almost entirely White effort and some of the non-White shopkeepers rejected offers of help, fearing that the White men were really looters in disguise. Links to MSM pieces are given, in which White journalists apparently recant their anti-Muslim prejudices. Eh? (Have a bucket handy if you decide to follow the link to Andrew Wilson's piece in the Mail.)

Jai even manages to squeeze in digs at the EDL (natch) and Anders Breivik (yawn).

Jai, my old mucker, stick to your last — tedious Indian supremacist diatribes about the superiority of Indian culture, about how the Indians inspired the industrial revolution and selflessly won the two World Wars on behalf of the ingrate British plunderers. I like a good ripping yarn and yours are quite imaginative — if overlong.


But enough of this ad hominem pettiness. Let's look at the substance.

Mr Jahan is a hero, an emergent hero of heroes, to be sure.

Let's think about that. Not the fact that Tariq's impassioned and timely speech defused a developing violent situation, but more that the situation — the realistic threat of violent generalized reprisals by one "community" against random and largely innocent members of another "community" in reaction to an intercommunal insult — that such a situation was there to be defused in the first place.

Let's step back a bit and try and get a bit of perspective on this; time for a spot of righteous whataboutery in the form of a counterfactual, methinks.

Terry James is a White Englishman living in a White community. During the period of the riots, and unknown to him, his son Harry is out on the streets with other young White men defending their community and property against the imminent threat of attack by looters, rioters and arsonists. A carload of young Pakistani-heritage men from an adjacent district arrives, intent on mischief. The Whites attack the car and the young Pakis, meeting an unanticipated level of violent resistance, panic and attempt to drive off at speed. In the process several of the young White men, including Harry James, are run down and killed.

Anger is rising within White communities across the country and there is serious talk of large groups tooling up, travelling down and exacting random revenge on the Pakistani community concerned.

In an impassioned speech before locals and the assembled press, Terry urges calm and restraint; he wishes to see no more violence and no more unnecessary deaths. Popular anger is mollified by his unexpected eloquence and is displaced into solidarity, expressed inter alia in the form of a huge memorial service attended by tens of thousands.

OK, there's your counterfactual scenario. And your starter for ten?

Well, would the young Whites be seen as defending their community against attack? More likely they would be condemned as thugs taking the law into their own hands. Investigations would begin attempting to implicate the NF, C18, BNP, EDL, etc and whoever else is on the hate list this week.

Would the anger in distant White communities be seen as an unfortunate but, well, understandable response, thankfully quelled? Perhaps not. More likely historical reflections on the chronic volatility of the indigenous rabble and a half gross of agonizing CiF pieces about the cancer of White violence.

Barely any mention was made in the press of the violent attack on the car by the "defending" Pakis. And as little mention as possible has been made of the ethnicity of those in the car. In the case of the late Harry and his mates, you can bet — though no bookie would give odds on such a dead cert — that the stoning by a White mob of a car full of Paki lads out for a spin would soon be parlayed into a a racist attack upon the disadvantaged.

Tariq Jahan is a comfortably-off scrap dealer. In his younger years, we learn, he dabbled with Hizb-ut-Tahrir. But thankfully he escaped their baleful influence and settled down to become a pillar of the community. So that's alright then.

Terry James is a scap dealer who seems to have an awful of cash floating about — we wonder if the taxman knows about this. Terry ran with C18 and the NF in his youth. Hey, we all know once a Nazi always a Nazi — a Nazi whose car mechanic son goes round stoning innocent Pakis.

Tariq never goes to Mosque but nonetheless is a deeply religious man whose faith is an example to us all. Terry last went to Church for his wedding ceremony. So much for Christian society, eh?

And so on.


Our shared gratitude to Tariq Jahan is comparable to the gratitude we might feel towards a huge tattooed thug who thoughtfully restrains his pit bull from mauling our toddler. Should we feel gratitude for his intervention; or should we feel anger that the danger he so helpfully thwarted was present in the first place?

My — necessarily abstract and remote — sympathy to Mr Jahan in his loss, and my pragmatic gratitude for the effect of his words, but let's not build an ecumenical Tariq Jahan Shrine in Winson Green, shall we? This is not the Second Coming.

A decent enough Brown man, through his well-chosen words, deflects a community of colonizing Brown savages from taking revenge on a community of colonizing Black savages while a largely White police force attempts to maintain order and largely White taxpayers foot the bill for reconstruction.

For this we are supposed to be grateful already?

Do me a favour!

We are enduring the expected highly polarized debate about the appropriate punishment of the looters who took part in the festival of shopping with violence a fortnight ago.

At one extreme there are those who believe the scrotes' human rights to own a 50" plasma telly have been infringed and are demanding compensation for the brutality and trauma inflicted when the police lined up in their riot gear and wagged their fingers at the looters from a safe distance.

At the other end are those who want all of those who were apprehended to be hanged, drawn and quartered, boiled in oil, given a damned good talking to and finally transported, dressed only in their underwear, to spend the remainder of their worthless and miserable lives on South Georgia.

Well, let's not get involved in all that and instead look at the matter practically from a customer's point of view.

The judiciary are, we are told, handing down "exemplary" sentences. An exemplary sentence serves two purposes. The first is to deter potential future offenders. The second is to reassure the public at large.

As to deterrence, well let's start by dividing the perpetrators into three crude groups.

First-time opportunists. Normally law-abiding people who succumbed to temptation, swept up by the infectious excitement and "naughtiness" of the occasion. For most of them, mere involvement as "clients" of the criminal justice system will be traumatic enough to deter them individually from future misbehaviour. The impact of a criminal record on their legitimate careers will also be a signficant punishment. Will it deter others of the same ilk from future opportunism? I don't know, but somehow I expect the implications will not really get through to them; it will remain an abstraction to be regaled down the pub as Tarquin's jolly adventure among the lags or debated solemnly in the columns of the Guardian rather than a potential personal experience.

Petty scrotes. The chronically criminalized unemployable chav underclass we are always hand-wringing about. Are they going to be deterred by heavy sentences? I dunno, but they will be well familiar with the system and many will already have served short custodial sentences. They will have little fear of the punishment itself and even the thickest of them will have cottoned on that this is a one-off. Six months for nicking 200 fags this time. So what? When you get out in two or three months' time and celebrate with an afternoon of recreational vandalism and nicking, it'll be back to business as usual for your next offence. A stern look from the magistrate and a course in "thinking skills".

Serious criminals. They won't be deterred because, unless they were unlucky enough to accidentally trip over a policeman's baton because they were unable to see over the top of their pile of loot, they didn't get caught anyway, did they? Unlike the naïve and the stupid, they dressed anonymously and covered their faces. In all the lurid publicity of the prosecutions, we don't seem to hear much about this group, do we?

So not much exemplary justice there then. What about reassuring the general public? Well, I'm a general public and I'm not reassured. I don't see a criminal justice system responding with a firm and even hand; I see panic and desperate political theatre.

It's not simply that it's perceived as unfair; it completely undermines what little credibility our judiciary has. We have gone from seeing a criminal justice system that is weak, overlenient and hamstrung by idealistic human rights legislation to watching a criminal justice system that indulges in populist kneejerk reactions, that is politicized and above all arbitrary and unpredictable.

That is truly frightening. The arbitrary and whimsical judicial "standards" of the third world.

There is no consistency here, no sense of a fair and well-understood social contract, just a frightened and cornered animal lashing out.

The "multiplier" effect of looting during a riot has been put forward as a factor in the harsher sentencing, ie the concept that the looters acted in the knowledge that, even if no formal joint enterprise was involved, their sheer numbers diluted the effectiveness of the police, increasing their individual chances of escape. That's fair enough. But it's a fairly abstruse concept that needs to be communicated effectively to the public. But even if that can be achieved, I don't see that public being convinced that the "multiplication factor" is sufficient to justify promoting an offence that in normal times would be punished with a small fine and 20 hours' graffiti cleaning into one that gets you banged up for eighteen months.

A politically inspired orgy of tough sentencing convinces nobody.

We don't need a dramatic burst of sentencing so draconian and obviously over the top that most of it will be overturned on appeal, thus further diminishing the reputation of the judiciary. What we need is meaningful and effective sentencing, consistently applied, during "normal times". Then you can tack on a modest supplement for opportunism during a riot and we might have some faith that you know what you are doing.

I don't suppose the term is much used these days — it was always more a didactic than a hackerish coinage.

I was watching BBC News with the sound down and the subtitles on again. OK, I admit it, I was in a pub at the time, but at least it wasn't a Wetherspoon this time. And the subtitles were a real mess. A sort of alphabet soup that was reminiscent of the plucky but totally useless efforts of a 1980s OCR program faced with a font more adventurous than Courier.

And then the business news came on, along with the exchange rates summary, where "pound" was rendered as

... doud ...

Aha! Has the revoicing operator got a cold, I wondered.

Which begs a very interesting question. Revoicing text to the speech recognition software is one of those jobs where the state of the worker's voice is a key element of the job, as much as it would be for, say, an opera singer.

So how does that work then? Are there pre-arranged stand-in arrangements, or is the attitude: you're lucky to have this service at all, you ungrateful bastards; just suck it up?

Amazing what you take for granted.

The live subtitles available on rolling news programmes like BBC News and Sky News are generated using speech recognition software. An operator revoices the words heard into a piece of software which has been trained to his voice; the software generates the corresponding text. I guess it's cheaper than hiring skilled stenographers.

Software which could successfully handle the live feed directly would be really, really impressive. Imagine code which can faithfully transcribe the words of Neil Nunes reporting from a noisy outside broadcast location. Now that would be something special; and jolly useful too — you could listen to the irritating bastard with the sound turned down.

But the existing technology is pretty damned clever. Most of the time. Sometimes it has ideas of its own.

On yesterday's BBC News, during a report on Stephen House's candidature for the top job at the Met, the subtitles starting banging on about

... Antiguan operations ...

Antiguan operations? Is there much Antiguan crime in Glasgow then? Most of the Antiguan people I've met have been honest upstanding types. Do they have a dark seceret, perchance? It's only a small island; surely there can't be enough ex-pat Antiguans to cause a Scottish crimewave. Then the captions operator keyed in a correction

...anti-gang operations ...

Phew! Normality restored.

And then the weather forecast came on and the presenter promised us, at least according to the subtitles,

A Sunni start.

Aargh! The shape of things to come?

Man comes home from a punishing day at the workface and collapses into his favorite armchair. His dear wife brings him a cup of tea and his faithful hound Fido fetches his slippers and the evening paper.

He nods an acknowledgement to his wife and turns to address the dog.

"Well Fido, I've just had a bastard of a day. How's your day been?"

To which the dog replies,

"Rough!"

A rather nasty conclusion has just occurred to me.

Yesterday, Islam v Europe offered up a spoof news quote about ethnic English mobs converging on London to avenge the murder of Richard Bowes, in order to illustrate the observation that

... it highlights an interesting aspect of the gushing praise that was lavished on Tariq Jahan last week after his son was killed during the rioting. The fact that Muslims were likely to go on a violent killing spree in response to the deaths, had Tariq Jahan not successfully calmed them, just seems to be taken for granted. It is regarded as "normal" that when a person from a third-world ethnic group dies, fellow members of his ethnic group will go out rioting, bashing and killing in response. Is this state of affairs not something that deserves to be deplored rather than praised or simply accepted?

I find myself wondering the same thing about the various community self-defence actions that sprang up during the recent festivities. Kurds, Pakistani Muslims and Sikhs were lauded for their community spirit, pluck, and general downright jolly-good-fellow-ness when they took to the streets, armed to the teeth with baseball bats, meat cleavers and other handy weapons to protect their properties and holy places. The White folk of Eltham who patrolled their own streets were excoriated with the well-practised loathing the Righteous elite reserves especially for the White working class.

And yet, as I understand it, the situations were comparable. The Sikhs of Southall and the Kurds of Dalston turned out in response to an anticipated threat of attack. The Whites of Eltham, I hear from some sources, turned out against a rumoured threat of racially motivated attack by Blacks coming down from Lewisham. Both popular responses were driven by a reasonable, or at least not unreasonable, expectation of disorder and a desire to counter it in the absence of a credible police response. Yet the "ethnic" response is regarded as both laudable and natural, while the indigenous response is condemned as thuggish disorder to be suppressed, and also a very handy opportunity to take a pop at the BNP and EDL.

Could this be because, while they hate the native English, the liberal elite also harbour low expectations of the non-White population they so cherish? To put it with a certain Starkeyesque directness, surely our leaders are not thinking along the lines of, "these Darkies are savages fresh out of the jungle and they don't know any better".

Heavens to Betsy, surely not!

Well, we effectively tolerate forced marriages, honour killings, FGM, and all manner of unsavoury behaviours which are "part of their culture, innit". The elite mumble piously against these practices but take no real action against them.

Hmm. A little more application of the "our gaff, our rules" principle might not go amiss, methinks. No concessions, if you want to live here, you behave according to our rules, or you fuck off.

(The title is best uttered in a Bob Geldof accent, with added expletives to taste.)

Was that what all the fuss was about?

A bit of context first, I think. I don't currently have a landline at home and access the web using a T-Mobile USB stick. On the whole it's been very satisfactory. The mast is no more than 200m away and I get speeds close to the advertised 3.6Mbit/s. At £15 a month PAYG the cost is not high enough to motivate me to embark upon the tussle with the Monster Telco (© The Register) required to reinstate landline service. BT's engineering standards are excellent; its sales and customer service is, to use the technical term, incoherent crap. The only drawback of the mobile broadband is that the monthly data allowance is only 2GB. This is fine provided I avoid too many big downloads. As I am no longer in full-time employment with daily access to the web at the office, YouTube links are generally noted down and deferred to my next visit to the pub and its free WiFi service.

Contrary to the impression I may perhaps have given in other posts, I do not spend all my waking hours in Wetherspoons, so such deferred downloads may not take place for some time. And so it is that I have only just got round to actually watching the infamous Starkey Newsnight discussion, which I downloaded from YouTube yesterday.


And I cannot for the life of me see what all the fuss was about. Starkey was coherent, cogent, measured and entirely reasonable; he wasn't even being remotely controversial or contrarian as his reputation apparently demands. His only sins were in being honest and direct, being somewhat old-fashioned in his choice of language and in breaching the taboo that Black people and their doings must never, ever be spoken of negatively, whatever the truth of the matter.

Notwithstanding Professor Geoff Pullum's academic hissy fit about Starkey's incorrect use of the term "Jamaican patois", Starkey's meaning was perfectly clear: many disengaged young White people have been attracted to a particularly unpleasant manifestation of Black popular culture and the Wiggers' often conscious affectation of the "Jafaican" dialect is one expression of this.

Similarly the David Lammy reference which has caused so much uproar amongst the Righteous commentariat was no more than an incidental allusion to reinforce Starkey's point about language and culture. No self-respecting yoot, Black or White, hanging round his endz trying to big himself up before his rivals is going to get very far if he speaks like Brian Sewell*. In the same way, any aspirant, Black or White, to most high-status tie-wearing roles will generally be more successful if they speak a reasonable approximation to RP or an accepted regional equivalent. It's yer basic sociolinguistics lahk, innit?

Starkey was entirely reasonable. Jones and Mitchell just came across as intolerant shouty bigots.


So what was Starkey on about, after all the sectarian shouting has died down? Well, he didn't really get the chance to explain, but for what it's worth here's my take on it all.

On one of the many Radio 4 programmes I have half-listened to over the years, a vibrant group of schoolchildren were interviewed about their cultural identities. Most were positive and confident about their Jamaican, Nigerian, Punjabi, Afghan or whatever identities, which they had some understanding of and drew strength from. Then they turned to the English child, who replied that she didn't seem to have an identity, really, and seemed quite lost, almost disconsolate in her response. It was pathetic; I really felt for that kid; and I found myself loathing her so-called teachers.

This is partly, of course, a consequence of being the default. One of the reasons we find it so difficult to respond to the persistent snarky demands from the Righteous that we "define" British culture or British identity is that it is all around us, despite the erosions of the last 50 years. It is hard to pin down. The name Māori means, in the Māori people's own language, no more than "ordinary, normal". So it is with us. British or English culture is how normal people behave. British identity is what normal people are. Everything else is foreign. That, folks, is how the world works.

Nonetheless our children seem not to be given a sense of that English or British culture as a role model to aspire to. At best they are offered a vacuum: you are the grey substrate of nothingness upon which the vibrant diversity of a thousand cultures will be sown.

Black pop culture and Black culture and achievement generally have however been glamourized for decades, both in our education system and in popular culture.

Nina Simone's classic, "Young, gifted and black", started out as a eulogy to a dead friend, though even then its assertion of the subject's being lucky enough to be born Black as a explicitly fortuitous thing is at the very least tendentious. In practice, the song is heard as a general assertion of the superiority of being Black. This is accepted as natural and uncontroversial and goes entirely unchallenged.

Can you imagine for one second that a song celebrating Whiteness in the same way would be countenanced? Anyone sincerely echoing Cecil Rhodes' dictum that "to be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life" these days would be howled down, would lose their career and would be lucky if they did not lose their very liberty. And yet we accept the corresponding sentiments without demur, even actively welcome them, when they are made by persons of colour.

Our children are offered no positive model of White British culture. Instead they are offered White guilt set in the context of positive images of any and every non-White culture. Our children are taught that they are worthless.

Europeans in general and the British especially, they are taught, went out and raped and enslaved the world, while Olaudah Equiano singlehandedly overthrew slavery, Mary Seacole singlehandedly reformed military nursing and, if Jai the Prolix at Pickled Politics is to be believed (posts passim ad nauseam at PP), Indian troops won the Second World War against the scourge of the Nazis while the British cowered and drank tea in their Anderson shelters.

Is it any wonder then that White kids turn to other identities for self-esteem and sustenance?

Unfortunately the model they aspire to, the one which is barking its wares the loudest in the cultural marketplace, is the worst elements of the Black subculture of gangsta-rap. Misogyny, casual sex, casual violence or at best the celebration of violence, meretricious ostentation, greed, nihilism, anti-authoritarianism and a sense of payback entitlement rooted in self-righteous all-excusing victimhood.

And you're surprised when the little sods go out a-burnin' and a-lootin' for ... well, for what? Trainers and mobile phones.

As another admirable Sewell, Tony of that ilk, perhaps rather unlikely to be a relative of the Standard's veteran art critic, puts it (here via here), "Let’s face it, there were no reports of the vandals looting bookshops or public libraries."

______
* Brian Sewell. If you have never heard Mr Sewell's splendid and apparently entirely naturally upper-crust accent, it is best captured in John Humphrys' description of him as "...the only man I have ever met who makes the Queen sound common."

Dreda Say Mitchell appeared on last Friday's Newsnight discussion about the week's festival of arson, looting, mayhem and impromptu vibrancy, alongside Owen Jones and David Starkey. Or possibly alongside Owen Jones against Dr Starkey.

Owen Jones is some kind of minor political apparatchik wot has wrote a book about chavs, so I can see why he was on. Ms Mitchell's qualifications are less clear. She seems to be a novellist specializing in crime novels. Perhaps all the usual "Black community leaders" were busy on other programmes, so she was invited on as the token articulate Darkie. (Given that the festival was supposedly of a non-racial nature, I wonder why a Black community leader was required on every occasion. No White or Brown community leaders, then?)

Anyway now she gets a chance to at least try to give the crafty old shitstirrer a supplementary kicking on CiF. Judge her arguments for yourself, but this one's a real doozy,

Do we really need to compare gangsta rap with other forms of "outlaw" music, like country and western?

Say what?

The Today programme yestermorning had an item on the "feminization" of schools as a contributing factor to the poor academic performance of White underclass and African-Caribbean boys. The investigative journalist Harriet Sergeant was interviewed along with some chap whose status and affiliation I didn't pick up. The latter might as well have been a piece of AI software generating random sentences culled from NUJ documents; he emitted random comforting and well-meaning soundbites that bore only accidental relevance to the topic at hand.

Sergeant was rather more interesting. She spoke of her time researching and sitting in in schools and of forming long term friendly relationships with gangs of youths as part of her research. Of the latter she said (from memory and may not be verbatim),

A lot of the boys in my gang are in prison. They love prison; it's the first time they've been around adult males.

Update (14:50)

Sergeant in the Speccie

I ventured into beautiful downtown Woolwich yesterday afternoon for the first time since Monday night's festival of cashfree shopping, violence and amateur fireraising.

On my previous visit on Monday afternoon well before the evening's celebrations kicked off, I remarked on how in the Great Harry, which itself was to be burnt out only a few hours later, the customers, both native and Nigerian, were half-watching television reports of rioting and looting elsewhere in London with the sort of vague mildly voyeuristic detachment that they might apply to pictures of crowds of anonymous wogs shouting, gesticulating and generally milling about in some nameless city in the Middle East or of dumbstruck flyblown starving pickneys in the Horn of Africa. In other words, too much instant information, mediated and remote and irrelevant to one's immediate concerns.

And anyway London is not a single place. Events in Lewisham or Eltham might interest us. We've been there, it's just a bus ride away. But Clapham, Tottenham, Enfield, Hackney, Southall. They might as well be in Asia or Africa. (What? Yes OK, in some ways they actually are, but you know what I mean.)

So when I set off to view the aftermath in Woolwich with my own pretty blue eyes, I wondered what impact it would have on me. The events of the last week have been momentous. Remember, this has not been a few overexcited kids waving their arms about a bit; there has been riot, looting, arson, and murder. And yet it all seems vaguely unreal. Yet another tacky long-winded television drama, where the director will soon call "Cut!", the dead will get up and troop off to the canteen for a mug of rosie and and a bacon butty, and the monkeys will start to sweep up the special-effects débris.

Would seeing real damage in the flesh (or in the ruined smoke-blackened brickwork, anyway) bring it to life?

In the event, the impact was non-existent. OK, I was perversely disappointed that the Great Harry, below, had not been reduced to a roofless, collapsed shell. Was I secretly hoping for something more spectacular like the fate of Reeves Corner in Croydon or the old Co-op building in Tottenham? Given that they've bothered to board up the upper windows of the building and that adjacent buildings seem completely unaffected, I'd guess this block, which I first knew 30 years ago as a FADS decorating supplies store, might be structurally intact and capable of renovation. But they still won't be serving bottles of Lech there for a while.

(As is usual, click through the thumbnails below for the full-sized picture.)


In the picture below, while the T-Mobile shop next door obviously attracted the interest of the free shoppers, the building to its left, which I believe was a chavvy clothing store (Blue Inc?), got the full treatment and is in process of being demolished.


In case the picture is unclear, the tree is actually in the street; it hasn't grown overnight in the ruins of the building. Now that would be truly impressive.

The jeweller's and pawn shop on Thomas Street got particular attention, and remains closed, displaying a poignant notice.

I expect they would indeed like to give a few people a "piece of their mind".

The block shown below houses a Barclay's Bank (boarded up). The smoke-blackened part is over the entrance to a small supermarket (Wilkinson's, I think).



But what has struck me most about the aftermath in those parts of London I have visited in the past few days (the Centre, Canary Wharf, Greenwich and Woolwich), has been the absence of a response. Among the White British and assimilated non-White population with whom I mostly associate, the general attitude is a disgusted shrug followed by just getting on with it. There is little discussion of the riots or the resulting damage. Perhaps we're becoming inured to stuff like this. Among the more exotic residents I detect a more subdued atmosphere; there is a certain "carefulness" in the air.

I dunno, maybe I'm imagining things. But it reminds me a bit of 7/7. Having failed to get into work that day, I returned and spent some time wandering round downtown Woolwich. In the intensely Africanized area near the old covered market on Plumstead Road where the African market mamas ply their incomprehensible jumble of wares amid piles of uncollected rubbish, the "colourful" residents seemed totally oblivious of what had happened in London. They seemed to live in a self-contained little bubble, interacting little with the surrounding communities. The events of last week, impinging as they did on their immediate locality, must have puzzled them greatly. Subsequently on that day back in 2005 I repaired to the Earl of Chatham (which appears to have survived last week's festivities entirely unscathed). Contrary to Islamist claims that the White Infidels were cowering in terror, the indigenes were watching events unfold on BBC News 24 while supping their pints, expressing general disgust and worrying about how they were going to get to work the next day.

Perhaps it's about time we stopped being so phlegmatic and easy-going, and started kicking a few impudent arses.


Update (15:20)

Mr Greenwood wishes it to be made known that there is absolutely no truth in the rumour that he burned the Great Harry down on Monday 'cos he was well annoyed that they had increased the price of a bottle of Lech from £2.60 to £2.70. Honest.

Things are not always as straightforward as we would like them to be.

I wouldn't want to detract from Tariq Jahan's grief at the death of his son, nor from the eloquence of his powerful speech to the media, a speech which I suspect did a great deal to defuse rising tensions and mollify threats from Pakistani groups around the country to travel to Birmingham and take 'revenge' on random Blacks. But are things quite as black-and-white as they are presented? Media reports suggest that a carload of Blacks deliberately and without provocation drove at the three young Pakistani men. The Islam v Europe blog, however, quotes a Times report,

At the crime scene, witnesses spoke of their anger and frustration. A youth worker who was with the three men when they were killed said that the rioters had “a Grand Theft Auto mentality”, adding: “They think they can steal and do anything. People here were just wanting to protect their property.”

He admitted that the car which ploughed into the men had been attacked with bricks and sticks seconds before the fatal collision.

(IvE emphasis)

And this presumably US source reprints an agency wire,

A carload of rioters sped into a fleeing crowd of shop defenders, witnesses said, hurling three young men into the air and killing amateur boxer Haroon Jahan, 21, and brothers Shazzad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31.

"We all had stones in our hands. But we had no defense to stop a car. They revved their engines and drove right at us as fast as they could," Mohammed Ibrahim, 23, told The Associated Press. "These black men deliberately tried to kill us all."

So then, a carload of evil Spades playing human skittles with a group of Paki lads gathered peacefully in the street to dissuade potential rioters and looters by the force of their moral authority? Or a car load of Black lads intent on causing mayhem among the 'soft' Pakis, coming under attack and, realizing they were in over their heads, panicking and gunning the gas pedal lahk wot dey do in da movies, innit. Particularly if they were familiar with the likely attitude of their opponents,

"We'll hunt down these black men, cut off their heads and feed them to our dogs," said Amir Hawid, 20, who lives just a hundred yards (meters) from the killing scene and heard the screams of the crowd at the moment of impact.

(I thought Muslims didn't do dogs, but there you go.)

Not easy this blame bollocks, is it? Six of one and three pairs of the other.

Innit?

So I went down to see what the SP was in Greenwich this afternoon. More or less total lockdown, with 98% of shops closed and shuttered. At 2 in the afternoon. Crowds of bemused tourists milling about.

A precautionary early shutdown I could understand, but this is pathetic.

The remaindered book shop in Church Street* epitomizes the degree of capitulation,


Look, I'm empty. Please don't smash the door down!

_____
* Or quite possibly Greenwich High Road, he emended sheepishly. Baa!

Yesterday afternoon I made an extra trip into beautiful vibrant, diverse, enriched downtown Woolwich to resupply my larder from Sainsbury's. In view of the weekend's events stocking up a tad seemed a wise precaution.

As is my custom on these occasions I popped into the Great Harry for a bottle or three of Poland's finest lager before making my way home.

I guess I won't be doing that for a while.

(source)

Interesting times.

Idiot senior BNP activist with less sense than he was born with is spotted attending Saga gig in Hungary and enthusiastically siegheiling along. And the Currant Bun's headline naturally reads,

BNP chief’s Hitler salute to Breivik heroine

Why dat den? Well, apparently Anders likes Saga too.



But this week's prize goes to Andy "call me Anjem" Choudary, interviewed about the outbreak of Sharia law stickers,

[The stickers] are partly a response to the mass-shooting in Norway by gunman Anders Behring Breivik, [Choudary] claimed.

Breivik espoused strong Islamophobic opinions in a rambling 1,500 page manifesto drawn up before he murdered 76 young people.

“After the Oslo attacks, the Muslims are going to be more in focus by the extreme right. So we need to step up security,” said Choudary.

Hold up, didn't these stickers first appear well before the 22 July? So were Choudary and MAC, or whatever it's called this week, complicit in planning the Norwegian atrocity, then? Is Choudary really a double agent working for white nationalist terrorists? Or ZOG? Or the Purple Lizards?

Come to think of it, have you ever seen David Icke and Andy Choudary in the same room at the same time?

I don't think I can keep up with this. Sod it, I'm off down Sainsbury's for an extra roll of Bacofoil to line my hat with.

So I'm getting my daily fix of CiF, irredeemable masochist that I am, and reading Mehdi "The Moderate Muslim Intellectual" Hasan's piece on the rigours of Ramadan. This year, of course, Ramadan falls in high summer and Mehdi is having a bit of a hard time of it, getting up to eat and drink before the oh-so early dawn and stuffing his face in the knowledge that it will be late evening before he can eat again.

The reaction below the line is not entirely sympathetic. Some of the comment is the usual tedious sneering about sky fairies and imaginary friends from people desperate to demonstrate their righteous liberal rational credentials — I'm an atheist myself as it happens but I don't feel the desperate need to loudly declare my lack of faith in insulting and condescending language at every opportunity, like some tosser perpetually finding excuses to show off his Black mates to remind everybody how non-racist he is.

A couple of commenters, however, raise an interesting point. Mehdi's difficulties this year stem from the co-incidence of the highly peripatetic month of Ramadan with the long days of the northern summer. While the practice of religious fasting in some form or other predates Islam, both in Christianity and Judaism, it is prescribed by Allah:

In the Qur'an, God proclaims that "fasting has been written down (as obligatory) upon you, as it was upon those before you".

(Wikipedia). While Mo may not have been aware of the long days of the temperate and arctic summer when taking holy dictation, Allah the all-knowing most certainly was. Which suggests two possible conclusions,

1. Allah is a cruel prankster revelling in the suffering of His followers.

or

2. Allah never intended Islam to spread beyond the subtropical and tropical regions where days are of much the same length throughout the year and daylight fasting is merely a testing discipline.


Nice little problem you've got there, chaps, however you slice it. Pardon me while I watch from the sidelines, occasionally taking a swig from a bottle of binge and dipping into my packet of organic roast pork-flavour kettle chips hand fried in Tromsø by flaxen-haired Nordic virgins.

Ah,where would we be without the Socialist Unity blog for our occasional nourishing dose of 1960s/70s nostalgia? Thank you, Andy, thank you. Cheered me up no end.



The commenter (I wonder how long he'll last) obviously gets the anachronistic irony too.

Time for a pointless joke, I think.


Alerted that they had been, if you'll pardon the expression, grassed up, and that the police would be waiting for them when they landed, the smugglers flew low over a small island inhabited only by nesting seabirds, where they jettisoned their cargo of marijuana, hoping to return for it later.

Unfortunately for them, the crew of a passing boat had seen them and reported the incident to the authorities. The smugglers were arrested and the following day a coastguard cutter was dispatched to the island to recover the contraband.

Announcing to a subsequent press conference that the suspects had been released without charge for lack of evidence, the inspector explained how his men had discovered some torn sacking on the island but absolutely no trace of the suspected cargo of narcotics. "Did you search thoroughly?", asked a sceptical reporter. "Absolutely", insisted the inspector, his hackles rising somewhat. "What's more, I can categorically assure you that no tern was left unstoned."


Permission to groan granted.

The smear campaign conducted by the MSM against the EDL continues at such an intensity that comparison is unavoidable with the Searchlight-led MSM-wide smear campaign against the BNP in 2009 when the liberal establishment was terrified by the real prospect of the BNP winning seats in the European parliament.

The current episode in the anti-EDL campaign appears in the Guardian in the article

EDL leader demanded debate on killing David Cameron and archbishop

which reports businessman Alan Lake, the alleged paymaster of the EDL, thus,

On 23 May 2010, Alan Lake posted on his 4 Freedoms website an article outlining his belief that "in 20 or 30 years the UK will start to fragment into Islamic enclaves". He went on: "It's time we decide... who we will force in the Islamic enclaves (and who we will execute if they sneak out.) By forcing these liberal twits into those enclaves, we will be sending them to their death at worst, and at best they and their families will be subjected to all the depredations, persecution and abuse that non-Muslims worldwide currently 'enjoy' in countries like Pakistan... It will be great to see them executed or tortured to death."

The only extant source of this precise wording, from which the Guardian piece is evidently quoting, is an Indymedia article published on 30 May 2010. It has been picked up by Jai the Prolix at Pickled Politics, EDL News (an anti-EDL site), One Million United and others.

I cannot find the original of the comment (not strictly speaking an article) which is displayed in the Indymedia 'screen capture', but the closest matching extant thread on 4 Freedoms is here.

There are interesting differences. The Indymedia version of Lake's words begins

In 20 or 30 years the UK will start to fragment into Islamic enclaves and non-Islamic areas around them. Its time we decided who will be allowed in the non-Islamic areas. These are the people will force into the Islamic enclaves (and who we will execute if they sneak out).

By forcing these liberal twits into those enclaves we will be sending them to their death, at worst, and at best they and their families will be subjected to the depredations, persecution and abuse that non-Muslims worldwide currently 'enjoy' in countries like Pakistan, Iran and Egypt. It will be great to see them executed or tortured to death, as in Shiva's photos above.

The "Shiva's photos" reference is to some tasteful snaps of the charming Iranian custom of synchronized mass hangings upthread. Lake's purported post then goes on to kick off a list of candidates for banishment to Muslim ghettos, listing Rowan Williams, David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

This precise text is not present in the 4 Freedoms thread. It may have been deleted, of course. The closest match is what appears to be an update to the opening post, original date 21 May, The added section begins,

{due to the limitations of Ning, the section below is an edited version of a post that was previously further down}

In 20 to 50 years the UK will start to fragment into Islamic enclaves and non-Islamic areas around them. Note that these are self-formed enclaves (like the French or Swedish ones, not government forced ghettoes). I suggest that as an exercise we consider what type of people would be asked to leave the non-Islamic areas. This could be due to being a security risk, or due to not helping, or perhaps simply being a drain on morale.

By forcing these liberal twits into those enclaves then, at best they and their families will be subjected to all the depredations, persecution and abuse that non-Muslims worldwide currently 'enjoy' in countries like Pakistan, Iran and Egypt, and at worst, they will be executed.

The same text is also posted as a standalone comment in the same thread on 2 June.

The Guardian's piece quotes Lake as having regretted the hotheaded tone of the comment as originally posted and as having withdrawn it, posting a watered-down version after being 'spotted' by Indymedia.

OK, my first reaction was to question the authenticity of the Indymedia screenshot. It's not 'clean', in that it has an added heading and citation line incorporated into the image itself rather than supplied as caption text. There's all that confusion over the dates. And finally the style of the Indymedia version doesn't feel right: it reads more like what a Hard-Lefty would expect a 'Fascist' to write rather than the style Lake employs in his extant posts at 4 Freedoms. But let's not go down that path; there lies madness and the unfortunate fate of the Oozlum bird. The balance of evidence, particularly as implied by Lake's extant comments in the the thread and his failure to challenge the authenticity of the Indymedia screenshot when alerted to it, suggest that the Indymedia version is kosher as Lake's first bad-tempered draft, later regretted.


Two things:

Firstly, if this shocking post was first brought to Righteous attention in May 2010, why was it not condemned in the Guardian and the rest of the MSM then? Why does it become of national interest only in July 2011? Curious, that. Could there be some kind of campaign going on which makes dirt-digging profitable?

Secondly, the actual substance of the post. Indymedia, and the blogs who quote them, spin it explicitly as a proposal to force Muslims into ghettos and to persecute liberals and 'race traitors' by forcing them to live in the ghettos in the hope that the Muslims will kill them; and if the Muzzies won't kill them, we'll kill them ourselves along with any Muzzies who try to escape the ghettos. The footsteps of Godwin can be heard echoing down the corridor as hazy images of the Warsaw ghetto can be glimpsed in the distance. The Guardian is slightly more circumspect, omitting the direct ghettoization slur, but when you've got the edited quote, "It's time we decide... who we will force in the Islamic enclaves (and who we will execute if they sneak out.)", who needs to be explicit?

Well, how do I read it, unencumbered as I am by the burdens of the red mist of political hatred and of naked political opportunism? Even without the explication provided by Lake's subsequent revision, it is clear that no-one is calling for enforced ghettoization. It is a prediction, not a plan. Increasing numbers of third world-origin Muslims settling in inner city areas will encourage White flight to rural and outer suburban areas. Either voluntary White flight by those uncomfortable with the transformed environment or enforced flight as the result of threats. The result will be like the USA, where inner cities are populated by Blacks and increasingly by recently-arrived and largely illegal Hispanics, while middle-class Whites flee to suburbs and exurbs. Separation will be voluntary at the group level, and stark.

So much is simple prediction, social commentary.

Lake's other remarks, if accurately reported, are less excusable, but nonetheless can be charitably ascribed to anger rather than 'neo-Nazi' hatred. He is blaming the liberal elite for allowing the overwhelming, destructive Islamization which he predicts, and is simply suggesting that if they, the liberals, are so damned keen on Islam and Muslims, why don't they go and live among them and enjoy it to the full. The sort of sentiment bandied about on CiF daily, but inflated by very angry rhetoric. His anger at the liberals is justified; his original language is well over the top.

Have you never, my dear Indymedians and assorted Righteous Lefties, gone off on one and subsquently regretted it? Your intolerance will be your undoing in the end.

As always, your mileage may vary.

There's going to be an awful lot more of this stuff. It's gonna be a long hot summer.



Comrade, it has been reliably reported that three years ago during the Dear Leader's speech to the people on the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, you were observed to scratch your testicles on several occasions. How do you account for this counterrevolutionary behaviour?