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