Blog

What, you don’t quite follow the logic of it? This only goes to show you aren’t a Cabinet minister, not even a former one.

You’ve got to understand that one can’t ascend to government without being touched by the hand of Sophia, divine wisdom.

Once such a tactile contact has been made, the chosen one becomes privy to the rarefied reaches of intellect, where trivial Aristotelian logic is superseded, nay transcended, by higher reason.

The freshly sacked Attorney General Dominic Grieve is a case in point.

My friend Dominic was kicked out on a matter of principle. The principle is as simple as truth itself: Dave wants to be re-elected.

The path leading to this Shangri-La is thorny, and he won’t reach the destination unless the thorns are removed. Of these, Ukip is the most bothersome.

Even if Ukip’s popular support is halved by the time of the next general election, Ed will move into 10 Downing Street and Dave will go on a speaking tour. For Dave to stay at his present address he needs to convince voters that Britain’s sovereignty will be safe in his hands.

Rumour has it that to this end Dave plans to suspend the Human Rights Act and refuse to obey the diktats of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) unless Parliament approves them.

This doesn’t mean Dave wants to leave the EU, perish the thought. What he wants is to win in 2015, and once that’s done he’ll find a way of coming back into the pan-European legal fold.

But first things first. As a sop to those voters who feel nostalgic about the time when Britain was a sovereign nation, Dave has purged the Cabinet of the more strident federasts, of whom my friend Dominic is one.

Yet Sophia confers her grace in perpetuity, and Dominic, now free of the shackles of ministerial discipline, has given us the benefit of his neo-Gnostic sagacity from the back benches.

Walking out of the ECRH, he explained for the benefit of slow learners, would spell a disaster for Britain. Why is that, Dominic? I hear you ask. In fact, I’m asking the same question myself.

We’re even slower than Dominic thought. Allow him to explain in words even we can understand: “One only has to look at what is going on at the moment in northern Iraq to see that human rights do matter.”

My first reaction is to go down on my knees, put my palms flat on the ground and cry “We are not worthy, oh Wise One!”

My second reaction, once I’ve resumed the upright position, is to reach out for that decommissioned tool of basic logic. Inferior though it clearly is, it’s the only one I’ve got handy.

So let me see if I get this right. Now that US foreign policy has triumphed in Iraq and wholesale slaughter has begun, it ought to become blindingly obvious that we should knock out the cornerstone of British polity, sovereignty within Parliament.

No, surely Dominic can’t possibly mean that.

Oh yes he does: it would be fatal, he says, “to prevent the [ECHR’s] judgements being implemented unless the Parliament approves it.” Parliament in a position to approve laws? What a quaint, outdated idea.

I get it. Parliament’s authority established over 1,500 years should be repealed because otherwise Leeds will turn into another Mosul.

Christians will be converted into Islam at gunpoint or preferably murdered, women will be stoned and children starved. York will secede from the UK and become an Islamic Caliphate, with George Galloway as the Caliph.

Come to think of it, such a situation isn’t wholly unimaginable. What is unclear is how making Britain’s Parliament irrelevant will prevent this evolutionary development. In fact, it’s easier to see how that will accelerate the evolution.

In other words, a slave to Aristotelian logic may feel that Dominic hasn’t made an ironclad case in favour of the ECHR being the sole theoretically possible guarantor of the rights of Englishmen.

Such a slave might further insist that the European Court of Human Rights is no more synonymous with human rights than the European Union is with Europe.

He may aver – mistakenly, according to my new friend – that, just as Europe had existed for a while before the EU, the notion of individual rights hadn’t been totally alien to Europeans before they were blessed with the advent of the ECHR.

Moreover, some members of this august moral authority (Russia springs to mind) don’t seem to be overly constrained by its legal notions.

The ECHR is very good on issuing variously inane laws, but its means of enforcement are somewhat lacking. If a law can’t be enforced, it’s not a law but, at best, an ideological statement. As such, it will be heeded only by those who share the same ideology.

Dominic obviously does and so, truth be told, does Dave. But don’t let me digress: my today’s point has less to do with our leaders’ ideological preferences than with their intellectual abilities.

No good case can be made for a bad cause. But, if appointed devil’s advocates, you and I could easily come up with more plausible arguments in favour of the ECHR than those based on Islamic massacres in Iraq.

Such arguments would still be fundamentally false, but at least they wouldn’t sound as if they were put forth by a 10-year-old attending a remedial reading class.

Dominic couldn’t satisfy even that minimum requirement. This is a man who for four years was the chief legal advisor to the Crown, and he was only relieved of his post for short-term political reasons.

This brings me back to my recurrent theme: modern democracy. The most reliable litmus test of a method of government is what kind of people it elevates to power.

If Dominic, Dave et al are the best we can do, it’s time to think long and hard. Or else head for the hills.

 

P.S. My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is coming out this autumn. You can pre-order at roperpenberthy.co.uk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Judit Polgár, the only woman in history capable of competing with men at the highest level, has retired at age 38.

Judit became a grandmaster at 15 years and four months, beating Bobby Fischer’s record by a month.

Since her teens she has been in and out of the world’s top ten, having won games against, among others, world champions both past (Kasparov) and present (Carlsen).

One would think that she’d leave the game with pride, thanking, if not God, then at least the game that has made her a star, though admittedly not one as stellar as Kim Kardashian, whose chief assets are located somewhat lower than Judit’s brain.

Instead Judit fired a parting shot that missed by a mile. She castigated the game as ‘sexist’, with male players doing their best to keep women down.

It’s to men’s beastliness that Judit ascribes the demonstrable fact that, out of thousands of women who have played the game professionally, she’s the only one who has ever been as good as most male grandmasters.

Feminism is a popular game these days but, unlike chess, everybody who plays it is a loser. Its underlying assumption is that, apart from certain fixtures that have made Kim Kardashian such a star, women are no different from men.

Consequently, if they don’t achieve the same results in every field of endeavour, it can only be society’s fault or, in this instance, men’s.

God forbid one should even suggest obliquely that the obvious physiological differences between the sexes extend to their brains. When ideology speaks, common sense keeps silent.

Say that men’s brains are different, and a feminist will only hear that they are better – something that only an idiot would think, amd a tactless idiot would say.

Never mind scientific facts, such, for example, as that aggressiveness (an essential part of a chess player’s equipment) is a function of testosterone, of which women, this side of Martina Navratilova, have considerably less than men.

Never mind that, just as women’s brain wiring makes them better at languages, men’s wiring makes them better at maths, a discipline that bears perhaps the closest resemblance to chess.

Never mind even abundant empirical evidence, such as the sex identity of 56 winners of the Fields Medal, the highest prize in mathematics. Yesterday, the 2014 awards were announced, and for the first time since 1936, when the prize was first endowed, a woman was among the winners.

Yet 40 percent of maths graduates are women, a proportion that diminishes precipitously at PhD level and beyond. Why?

It’s a sign of intellectual laziness and ideology-driven dishonesty to insist that the sole reason is some fiendish male conspiracy.

Women are, on average, not as good at maths as men are, which makes the achievement of the only female Fields Medal winner so much more spectacular.

Neither are they as good at chess, which is why Judit is the only woman ever to climb so high up the game’s Olympus.

If women were as good as men, all those thousands of girls who, in the communist countries, have gone through the same state-sponsored training programmes as the boys, would have produced a more proportionately representative number of top players – or at least more than just one.

Judit is in an ideal position to know what role chess played in her native Hungary, my native Russia and every other communist country.

When Mikhail Botvinnik became the first world-class Soviet player back in the 1930s, the Soviets discovered the propaganda potential of chess.

Millions were poured into unique training facilities to produce living proof of the USSR’s superiority over its ‘capitalist enemies’. Chess players became privileged citizens, enjoying the kind of wealth that was beyond not only most Soviets but, more important, Western players.

For example, when Botvinnik won the 1936 Nottingham tournament, Stalin gave him a car, a prize fully equivalent to a 300-foot yacht today.

Women were just as valuable to the propaganda offensive, and girls were trained side by side with boys. Having gone through the Soviet chess system, I can testify to this – as Judit can no doubt testify to the same situation in Hungary.

Incidentally, to disclaim any parity with her, at the same age she became a grandmaster I quit chess, having discovered joys of a more tactile and liquid nature.

Unlike her I didn’t have the talent and dedication to go all the way, having stopped at a level similar to that of a decent county player in England. Yet shortly before I quit the game, I won a blitz match against Elizaveta Bykova, then women’s world champion, though no longer at her peak.

It’s not just one man’s experience. At that time any male grandmaster would have beaten the top 20 women in a simultaneous exhibition. Today the situation isn’t appreciably different: although there are quite a few decent female players, only Judit was in the first rank.

Part of the reason women don’t go as far is that they’re saner than men. The life of a budding chess mercenary in the West, where players survive on prize money, is similar to that of a travelling tennis pro, but the potential rewards aren’t.

Thus most professional players are dysfunctional individuals who misspent their youth hustling strangers for fivers in cafés, parks and clubs. Most of them look as if they sleep rough, even if they don’t.

Many go mad, which, for example, musicians hardly ever do, belying Daniel Johnson’s assertion in today’s Times that chess has ‘a mysterious affinity’ with music.

True enough, in as much as both fields have a mathematical aspect, they have something in common. But the similarity is superficial because the nature of the inspiration is entirely different.

That’s why it’s silly to say, as Johnson does, that Judit’s brilliant 1987 victory against a Soviet grandmaster “offers raptures not unlike – to take another Hungarian example – one of Liszt’s Transcendental Études.”

A musical piece, even one as mindless as a Liszt study, is inspired by one of the highest manifestations of the human soul. A brilliant chess attack is animated by the urge “to make’em squirm”, as Fischer put it. Chess is closer to poker than to art.

That chess can give aesthetic pleasure doesn’t make it an art – unless we define the concept so broadly as to make it meaningless. Not everything that “offers rapture” is art, for otherwise we’d regard, say, Kim Kardashian’s jutting attractions as artistic masterpieces.

Women are less keen to make people squirm, which is a point in their favour. Nor, and this is another feather in their cap, are they as willing as men to spend their life on an utterly trivial pursuit, and dedicate every waking moment to it.

That’s why, say, Viktor Korchnoi is still playing grandmasters’ tournaments at 83, while Judit has wisely retired at 38. One wishes she were as wise in her pronouncements. 

First the humanitarian aid, as widely reported:

Last night a convoy of 280 KamAz lorries left the town of Narofominsk near Moscow, heading for the distressed eastern provinces of the Ukraine.

They carry 2,000 tonnes of cargo comprised of humanitarian aid for the Ukraine: cereals, sugar, baby food, medicines, sleeping bags and power generators.

The lorries are all military vehicles; all KamAz lorries commissioned by the Russian army are armoured; ergo the 280 humanitarian lorries are armoured too.

The armoured humanitarian lorries were loaded by soldiers of the Taman Guards division. Before that the soldiers had taken two days to repaint the lorries white to make them look more humanitarian and less armoured.

The night before, Col. Putin told my Maoist friend José Manuel Barroso that the convoy was being dispatched by agreement with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Yet the ICRC representative in the Ukraine Ashot Astabatsian swore on his mother’s grave that such an agreement was news to him. Had it been in place, he would have known about it.

Now comes the arithmetic, for the conflicting reports made me whip out my trusted calculator:

The payload of a military KamAz lorry is 11.4 tonnes. Multiplying this specification by the number of lorries, 280, we get 3,192 tonnes.

Subtracting from that product 2,000 tonnes, the declared weight of the humanitarian aid, we obtain 1,192 tonnes. That’s 1,192,000 kilos of payload unaccounted for.

Now the average weight of an AK-74 assault rifle is, depending on the modification, 3 kilos. Dividing 1,192,000 by 3 and multiplying the resulting quotient by the AK’s firing rate of 650 rounds/min, we get enough firepower to wipe out the entire population of the Ukraine in a few long bursts.

Far be it from me to accuse Col. Putin of trying to pull a fast one. After all, he was trained at, and remains loyal to, the KGB, an organisation known for its veracity and commitment to truth.

Moreover, even assuming in a jaundiced mood that the humanitarian convoy does carry 1,192 tonnes of AK-74 assault rifles, this doesn’t necessarily compromise Col. Putin’s stated objective.

The rifles could after all be used for purposes other than wiping out the entire population of the Ukraine.

Hunting, for example, may be instrumental in solving any food crisis, and a hunting version of the AK rifle does exist.

Firing a short burst in the air will keep wolves at bay. These always come out of the woodwork in numbers whenever the country is devastated by war – as the Ukraine is, thanks to the evil plot by the Judaeo-Banderite-EU-CIA fascists, otherwise known as Ukrainians.

Also, if left unloaded, an AK rifle could be used as a tool for hammering, say, tent pegs into the ground or driving nails into walls.

Being a credulous sort, I’d be happy to accept any such explanation, especially if coming from Col. Putin, who’s like George Washington in that he never tells a lie (if one believes his Western admirers, such as Peter Hitchens, and I see no reason not to).

What I find vexing is that no explanation has been offered at all. Nor has it been requested by anyone outside this, admittedly venomous, space.

If a third of the lorries are empty, I’d like to know why. If they aren’t empty, I’d like to know what they are carrying. Is that too much to ask?

There may be many perfectly innocuous explanations for all of this, and Col. Putin could have put forth any of them. Off the top:

• The armoured lorries were repainted white because that’s the colour of the dove of peace, and they are indeed on a humanitarian mission.
• They aren’t loaded to the gunwales to make them more drivable on Russian and Ukrainian roads.
• The stated weight of 2,000 tonnes was inaccurate, and what’s a 1,000,000 kilos here or there among friends?
• Mind your own business, you Anglo-Saxon hireling, if you don’t want to drink Polonium-200 with your tea.

My faith in Col. Putin’s boundless virtue is such that I even don’t mind suggesting such plausible explanations to him.

All he has to do is repeat them in public – and then hire me as his mouthpiece. Since the good colonel never lies, somebody has to do his lying for him.

Why not me? I may not be a natural liar, but at least I know how to make numbers add up.

 

 

 

   

 

 

Yesterday I saved €38, which is more than I can say for my sanity.

The sum in question is the cost of a day’s parking at Vinci, the Paris chain of underground garages.

What none of my French friends knows but I’ve found out is that Vinci forfeits the charge on one’s birthday, which for me was yesterday.

Call me a penny pincher, but this is one of the reasons we always spend 10 August in Paris, less than two hours away from our summer hiding place.

Another reason, actually a more important one, is that Paris empties out in August, with Parisians fleeing for more bucolic locales. Toute la France est en vacances, in the ridiculous jargon the natives use to frustrate linguistically challenged outlanders like me.

A recent US commercial, for the Cadillac if memory serves, mocked that civilised custom. It showed a well-heeled middle-aged American walking through his prole-heaven house towards the driveway where his prole-heaven car sat.

As he walked, he was pontificating that he had been able to buy all those wonderful things because, unlike some people, he doesn’t take all of August off. The words ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ weren’t spoken, but they were clearly implied.

Personally, I’d rather take the whole year off than live in an antiseptically tasteless house like his – or, as a matter of fact, drive his car, which has to roll almost to a stop before one can turn without the risk of spinning off the road.

Moreover, most Parisians I know own bigger and infinitely better appointed houses (along with large Paris flats) than the ad’s protagonist’s – this in spite of their being less dysfunctionally single-minded about turning a buck.

That they, along with millions of others, rush out at this time makes August the best month to visit Paris. Strike half a mile away from the herds of Nikon-snapping tourists and you’ll have the place all to yourself.

Yet if force majeure drives one closer to the very centre, with its museums, shops and galleries, then August is the worst time to visit Paris.

The Nikon-snappers overrun the place, creating an awful contrast between their vulgar selves and the elegant surroundings. They rush, they shout, they jostle, they munch revolting street food, drink disgusting treacly muck – and they keep on snapping their ‘here’s Shirley and me at the Eiffel Tower’ pictures.

Suddenly one feels that, on balance, one would be better off if Parisians were to reclaim Paris from the stampeding herds. The city would be better off too, more harmonious, more organic, more of a piece.

Yesterday was wet, with gusts of wind driving burger wrappers along the pavements and us into the Louvre, where one can be aesthetically elevated and, more important on a day like that, dry.

Picture-snapping grex venalium were all there, at least a million of them, though that number might have been an optical illusion. However, since perception is the ultimate reality, if Plato is to be believed, I insist on my off-the-top head count.

Suddenly we found ourselves in a maelstrom of humanity, or whatever passes for it at times. They were running through the Louvre’s 60,600 square metres at an Olympic speed, bumping into one another and, more annoying, us.

Few were looking at the paintings, most were photographing them with their mobile phones. To personalise the images, they’d place their polyester-clad wives and overfed children next to Géricault’s lively scenes and Ingres’s lifeless portraits.

It took us 10 minutes to elbow our way (in my case literally; in my wife’s case figuratively) anywhere near the two Vermeers besieged by Japanese visitors. Those in the front row of the art lovers were shooting snaps point-blank, those behind them were holding their mobiles above their heads.

I doubt this is the best way of capturing the master’s subtlety, but that’s not what the descendants of the samurai were after. Their sole aim seemed to be keeping those who can appreciate such matters as far from the canvases as possible.

Until recently photography was banned in the Louvre because flashes damage the paintings. However, democracy, with all its technological advances, trumped elitism yet again.

The advent of miniature mobile phones with built-in cameras has made a museum the size of the Louvre almost impossible to police. The CRS riot busters at full strength could possibly do it, but they’re otherwise engaged containing crowds of Muslims screaming ‘gas Jews’ and trying to do to Paris what Nero allegedly did to Rome.

Venus de Milo was densely surrounded by photography buffs, but one can step 10 yards away and still see the sculpture well, provided one isn’t trampled by the tourists procuring evidence that they actually did go to Paris.

The Mona Lisa demands a closer proximity, something that can’t be secured without the benefit of fully automatic weapons, and I didn’t have one on me. Hence we didn’t even try to see the painting, with my wife, a much kinder person than me, commenting “It’s hard to love the human race in a place like this.”

After a while we decided that, on balance, rain would be a lesser irritant and left. The rain had stopped though, as if God had approved our choice. A short cab ride later we left the hideous Pyramid far behind, sat down on a bench at Luxembourg and watched tennis players sliding all over the still damp courts.

How does one restrict attendance of great museums only to those aware of the difference between chiaroscuro and Kim Kardashian?

(For those who don’t know who Kim is, she’s some sort of celebrity whose attainments exclusively consist of extra-human endowment in what Americans call T&A, and they don’t mean the Territorial Army. Kim could have made a perfect model for Rubens, whose idea of beauty was a combination of porcine physique  and bovine expression.)

The Ebola pandemic may solve this problem by restricting air travel, but one has to be evil to wish for that. Barring such cataclysms, I’m afraid this is a game long since lost.

At least the next time we go to Paris most of the tourists will have gone back to their prole heavens, and the Parisians will be back. Popular misapprehensions notwithstanding, they aren’t at all rude if one speaks their language – even as badly as I do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

One would think that our papers don’t need lessons in demagoguery. They, right, left or centre, have become experts on it. No outside help necessary, thank you very much.

Ideas, however, may run out, at which time it’s natural to turn to those who have them in abundance. Or at least, in our intellectually barren times, those who have one basic idea but repeat it so often, and in so many different contexts, that it seems to be multiplying before our very eyes.

This brings me to the neocons, mostly Americans, but also some Brits they’ve paper-trained and taught to bark on cue.

It was mostly that shrill group that talked Bush and Blair into committing the criminally stupid aggression against Iraq in 2003.

The entirely predictable effect of that mission was to bring not democracy to the region, but destruction to our friends and those who, while falling short of friendship, at least didn’t hate us too hysterically.

That geopolitical folly acted as a recruitment drive for al-Qaeda and likeminded satanic groups whose numbers swelled to bursting and whose fervour heated up.

The whole region, previously enjoying relative stability, imploded. The so-called democratic governments beloved of the neocons proved to be exactly what everyone knew they’d be: impotent.

Chaos erupted, soaking the region in blood. The fanatics couldn’t murder the West (although there’s still time), so they aimed their guns and knives at objects of hatred within reach.

Jews, Christians, other Muslims, Zoroastrians all found themselves in peril. And it didn’t start with Isis, currently exciting everyone’s righteous wrath.

Since 2003 three out of four Christians in Iraq have fled their homes if they were lucky. The unlucky ones were killed, many for refusing to submit to being converted to the religion of peace at gunpoint.

The neocon Iagos whispering in Bush’s and Blair’s ears didn’t kill those Christians with their own hands, just like Iago didn’t strangle Desdemona. But the blood of those Christians is on their hands too, for without their wicked harebrained ideology none of this would have happened.

Let’s spell it out. Neocon warmongers aren’t just misguided simpletons. They are criminals.

Unfortunately they can’t be punished within law, for few people, and no international organisations, see what they did for what it is: war crime.

After all, it was done in the name of Democracy. Not racial superiority, not dictatorship of the proletariat – Democracy, that great vindicator of modernity’s urge to destroy Western civilisation.

Hence we can’t expect to see the neocons behind bars. But one might think we ought to expect them at least to repent. Or, barring that, honestly admit their fatal error.

Such expectations would be forlorn. The neocons don’t regret what they did to Iraq. They regret they didn’t do enough of it.

If only we hadn’t left when we did, their bleating goes, if only we had stayed longer, Iraq and the rest of the Middle East would in due course become a sort of Florida East. Peace, prosperity and, above all, Democracy would reign. Happiness all around.

If only the surge had been allowed to last longer… Surges, gentlemen, don’t last long by definition. OED’s, as a matter of fact: “Surge, n.: A sudden large increase, typically a temporary one”.

But forget semantics. How much longer are we talking here? As long as it would have taken, is the answer. One generation, two, three, for ever. No sacrifice is too great for Democracy.

This is the line taken by American neocons, who really don’t know any better. And, alas, by their British hangers-on, who should.

“Rescue the Christians. And then keep going,” says the nostalgically Trotskyist headline of Tim Montgomerie’s article. How far? Well, to the ends of the earth if that’s what Democracy demands.

He starts out well enough, by tugging on our heart’s strings. Tim met an Anglican priest who courageously keeps tending to his Iraqi flock in the face of dire danger. The priest relayed harrowing stories of Christians being tortured, murdered and displaced.

For a second there I thought the article would be Christian. But Tim quickly disabused me of this notion.

He began to repeat, word for word, the American neocons’ ‘if only’ mantra about the success of the surge, which, if only it could defy the dictionary definition by continuing in perpetuity, would have ended up in resounding success.

This is how he puts it: “America stayed in Germany and South Korea for decades to help to ensure they became the stable nations that they are today. Iraq needed a similar level of commitment. It didn’t get it.”

A rotten idea can’t be supported with good arguments, and this one is as spurious as they get, coming right out of the neocon hymnal. Americans “stayed in Germany and South Korea” because no one was shooting at them there.

It wasn’t that much of a hardship to garrison a few hundred thousand soldiers in those places where they had merely police duties to perform, and most of the time not even those.

Comparing that situation to the Middle East where people strap explosives to their bodies as a popular pastime, and where they never stop fighting and killing Western invaders, not to mention one another, is… well, I don’t want to overuse pejorative adjectives.

An intellectually honest comparison ought to have been drawn not with Germany and Korea but with Viet Nam, which proved that, when it comes to wars, Americans are sprinters, not stayers.

The nation, locked in its maniacal pursuit of happiness, can take only so many flag-wrapped coffins flown back from faraway lands.

Go beyond a certain cut-off point, and pimply youths start marching and chanting “Hell no, we won’t go”, “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” and, my personal favourite, “Ho, ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh, NFL are gonna win”.

Tim is too young to remember that, but he should have asked his older and wiser friends who would have told him. 

As it is, he goes on with his ignorant musings: “Last time the West betrayed Iraq by leaving too early. This time we need to do a proper job and help to destroy Isis.”

But Isis is no longer called Isis. It’s now the State of Islam, or hasn’t Tim heard? Destroy Isis, and the State of Islam will appear. Destroy that, and those people will think of something else. And then those pimply youths will whip out the posters and start marching in front of the White House.

Don’t those bastards ever learn? Haven’t they done enough harm?

It is the West’s moral duty to save the Christians and the Jews put in mortal danger by the West’s own criminal idiocy. If it takes military operations to achieve that end, then so be it.

But it should be that end and no other. And it must be accompanied by a generous offer of asylum and help with resettlement. Something France has offered Iraqi Christians – and something Obama reserves for those who aid and abet their murderers.

Compared to the cataclysmic events unfolding in the Ukraine and throughout the Middle East, the two items that caught my eye in today’s papers may seem insignificant.

But, as the modern banality goes, less is more. Sometimes it’s tiny stories that tell a big one.

One such story involves a Buckinghamshire woman who was banned from breastfeeding her baby in public, by poolside to be exact.

The lifeguard who issued the ban did the right thing for a wrong reason: according to him, he was enforcing the rule banning consumption of food and drink at the pool.

Instead he should have said that such exhibitionistic displays are tasteless and vulgar – not that we have many lifeguards capable of saying, or indeed thinking, any such thing.

In her own words, the woman “was in too much shock to get angry – I just got really upset and started welling up.”

My sympathy goes to the lifeguard on the receiving end of the breastfeeder’s welly, partly because years ago I too found myself in a similar situation.

A colleague’s girlfriend brought her baby (I don’t think it was also his) into the office and started to breastfeed it in the conference room, where he and I were talking shop.

I made an innocent comment, to the effect that I myself was thirsty too – only to be accused of sexism, lewdness, discrimination, perversion, rudeness and antediluvian prejudices.

All probably true in general, but the reason for my callous remark was none of those. That was my way of hinting that, much as I admire the sight of a woman’s breast, the view should be enjoyed in private.

Presumably such unrestrained behaviour is supposed to communicate to the world that the woman is free of inhibitions (particularly those of the bourgeois kind), at one with nature, proud of her body, comfortable in her femininity, basking in the glory of motherhood, and all those wonderful things.

To me, this urge to let it all hang out (in that instance literally) betokens exhibitionism, which is indeed a perversion, and bad taste, which is worse.

As further proof that my aesthetic judgement of the Bucks woman is correct, she sports a nostril ring. This, along with tattoos, is yet another semiotic communication, that of being prole-cool.

A woman, dear, should wear rings in her ears or on her fingers – not in her nostrils, eyebrows, navel or, as seems to be fashionable in certain circles, clitoris. Choosing one or more of those unconventional cites brands you as vulgar and stupid, not cool.

Breasts in, nostril ring out would be my avuncular recommendation – especially since, judging by the woman’s flabby face, her breasts can’t be much to look at.

Shamelessness seen as a sign of progress represents a reversal to neo-pagan primitivism, which makes the young lady ideally qualified for a clerical career in the Church of England. Given the prevailing climate, she’d be fast-tracked to priesthood in no time, and then a bishopric could be just round the corner.

But I shouldn’t be offering career, or indeed grooming, advice to today’s lot. Judging by the woman’s reaction to the ban, she and her ilk would neither welcome nor understand it.

The other news item involves a Carmelite nun who was run out of her convent for having sex with a handyman… sorry, I misread the story.

It’s actually about Commander Sarah West, the first woman to take charge of a frontline ship in the Royal Navy. Commander West has just been relieved of her post, though mercifully not hanged off the yardarm, for having sex with an officer under her command.

In both US and British armed forces, officers are allowed to bonk up but not down. Having sex with a superior officer is fine, but not with one sporting one less stripe than the offender.

Thus the Lieutenant-Commander who enjoyed Sarah West’s favours was free of all blame, but she wasn’t.

My heart goes out to Sarah. Considering that every man on board the frigate she commanded was by definition her statutory inferior, her amorous options weren’t so much limited as non-existent.

Now, on the available evidence, Commander West is neither a Carmelite nun nor an active practitioner of brahmacharya, the Hindu art of sexual abstinence. She’s a young, fit, physically active woman with an aggressive temperament, all of which characteristics normally presuppose a healthy sexual appetite.

In her line of work she had to spend weeks, sometimes months, at a time sequestered in the company of sex-starved young men whose opportunities for fulfilment were almost as limited as hers.

Under such circumstances, expecting Commander West to adhere strictly to the naval regulations would be presuming too much on human nature. I’m not condoning sexual licence, but then neither do I welcome such denial of basic humanity.

Does having sex with fellow servicemen undermine the unit’s battle worthiness? Perhaps. Probably. In a combat situation, it would be hard for a man or a woman to treat a lover as any other comrade.

Others would cotton on, and certain resentments might arise. This would create additional tensions, which a fighting unit could do without. And the tensions would be even stronger if one of the lovers were in command.

It has been understood since time immemorial that sexual fault lines may fracture the cohesion of a unit, its morale and hence its battle-worthiness. However, there’s only one way of preventing such problems, and that’s not having women – or practising homosexuals – on active duty.

I realise that expressing such a view marks me out as a troglodyte, but in fact the Royal Navy only began to admit women to active duty in 1990, Italy and Spain still exclude women from military service, and only five Nato countries don’t exclude women from combat.

The two stories may be different, but they’re closely linked. They both testify to a collapse of common sense, traditional morality and time-honoured sense of propriety.

A young woman who whips her breast out in public, a man who relieves himself in a crowded street (such as London’s King’s Road, in my experience) or a Royal Navy that submits to militant feminism aren’t the problems in themselves.

They’re all symptoms of the disease that in shorthand could be described as modernity, with its urge to reverse, mock and often punish yesterday’s certitudes. The barbarians are no longer at the gate, they’re inside, and they’ve taken over.

Hilaire Belloc put it just right: “We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”

Hear, hear.

 

P.S. My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is coming out this autumn. You can pre-order from the publisher on roperpenberthy.co.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

George W. Bush had a way with words that made Mrs Malaprop come across as a precise stylist.

In one of his more memorable pronouncements, Dubya declared: “Our enemies… never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

Dubya was trying to reassure Americans that his efforts to protect the country matched the efforts of those trying to harm it. Alas, his verbal proficiency wasn’t quite up to the task of enunciating even simple thoughts.

On the other hand, if Col. Putin said the same thing, it would ring true.

There’s no denying that Western sanctions, pathetically inadequate though they are, have done some damage to Russia and the Russians.

Among the Russians who’ve suffered are the few thugs graced with the misnomer ‘businessmen’ in the West. One of them, Gennadi Timchenko, widely believed to be Putin’s personal money launderer, complained the other day of his deprivations.

He can no longer blow his billions in the West, instead having to find a suitable outlet within Russian borders. Timchenko also made the magnanimous, if irrelevant, gesture of claiming he’d happily give every last billion he owns to the government.

That’s like saying you’d happily repay a mortgage loan. The money you borrowed isn’t yours, you merely have the use of it.

Similarly, the ‘oligarchs’ don’t own their capital. At best they have the leasehold on it. The freehold belongs to the source of their wealth: the state and its cutting edge, the KGB/FSB. Which is to say Putin personally.

My heart doesn’t bleed for them. I do feel for ordinary Russians, those who launder their own clothes rather than Putin’s billions. They’re the ones bearing the greatest burden.

That’s the way it always is. Whenever a country loses access to foreign goods, services and commodities, it’s the silent majority of consumers who truly suffer. For example, and it’s one among many, unplugging most Russian banks from the global financial network is rapidly driving the country’s inflation towards double digits.

Incomes are heading in the opposite direction, the rouble is losing value, and the Russians (most of whom already live below what we’d regard as poverty levels) are bearing the brunt.

That’s why protectionism doesn’t work: reducing imports may preserve some jobs in the short run, by transferring more of the production to home industries. But in the long run the rewards of every job will attenuate, consumers will consume less and therefore pump less lifeblood into the veins of local industries.

All told, there’s no doubt that what Russia has always seen as her enemy, the West, is hurting much of the population. That’s why the KGB colonel has decided to hurt it even more.

By announcing a sweeping ban on Western food imports, Putin effectively took Bush’s words and made them flesh. For, while his countersanctions will have only  a trivial effect on the West, the damage they’ll do the Russians will be anything but trivial.

Before the 1917 advent of social justice Russia had been the world’s second largest food exporter. And her 1913 exports of cereals exceeded those of the USA, Canada and Argentina combined.

However, social justice demanded that the peasants’ land be confiscated and the most productive peasants shot or sent to concentration camps, followed by all those who resisted social justice.

When whole areas, such as the Ukraine, proved recalcitrant, the previous generation of Putin’s employers would arrive in the autumn, rob the peasants of all their food and grain stocks, then seal the area tight to make sure no one could escape.

The starving peasants would eat their remaining livestock, then horses, then dogs and cats, then their children, then each other. By early spring everyone would be dead. Putin’s alma mater would come back with bulldozers and dump lorries, supplied by Ford and other American manufacturers.

The bulldozers, their blades straining, would push the frozen bodies, millions of them, into ravines, and the dump lorries would fill the nameless graves with earth and lime. Social justice would triumph yet again, to the hosannas of the West’s useful idiots.

The peasants, dead or alive, took their revenge. No one was sowing, tilling or reaping. The supply of food to the cities was cut off, and they too were starving.

Overnight, Russia became the world’s biggest importer of food, reversing the situation existing under the royal tyrants. The official explanation was bad weather, which Russia had to endure non-stop from 1917 to 1991, when talk of social justice became unfashionable and the weather miraculously improved.

The peasants were then offered all sorts of incentives to go back to the land. The offers weren’t taken up with alacrity. The peasants still remembered being given land back in 1917, only then to have it taken away, together with their lives.

Thus, even after the dictatorship of the Party was replaced with that of the KGB (sorry, I mean after Russia became a true democracy), domestic food production remained sluggish.

Hence last year Russia imported $42 billion’s worth of food, while food prices increased by almost 15 per cent on average, with potatoes, that omnipresent staple, becoming 63 per cent dearer, vegetables 23.6 per cent and dairy products 19.4 per cent. Critically, Russia imports almost a third of her meat from the West.

Putin claims that his sanctions won’t affect the living standards of the population, evoking the Soviet-time joke, whose punch line was “Have you tried rat poison?”

His mendacious promise is that the slack left by imports will be taken up by domestic production – that old saw of every protectionist. Even assuming that Russian peasants will rediscover their erstwhile industry and enterprise (an unsafe assumption if I’ve ever heard one), replacing Western imports will take decades – not one year, as Putin lied with his customary fluency.

His sanctions will hurt the Russians without hurting the West very much. For example, Europe’s largest food exporter is France, but even there agriculture accounts for a mere three per cent of GDP, while food makes up only 9.7 percent of French exports, with Russia being a very minor market.

In short, Putin has cut off his nose to spite his face. Or, as the Russian version of the same proverb goes, he gouged his own eye out to make sure his wife’s mother would have a one-eyed son-in-law.

The Russians will soon be hit by a food crisis, but there’s a silver lining to that cloud. Scotch whisky isn’t covered by Putin’s sanctions.

 

 

 

In common with all sensible men, I’m uneasy about conspiracy theories – this without denying that perfectly non-theoretical conspiracies have been known to exist (bolshevism springs to mind).

In that spirit, and in contradiction to plentiful evidence, I don’t believe Messrs Bush and Blair hatched a plot to drive Christianity out of the Middle East.

Yet I struggle to imagine what they would have done differently had that indeed been their aim.

Neither do I believe the persistent rumours that Obama is a secret Muslim, even though his name is Barak Hussein.

Again however, I fail to see how differently he’d act if he were indeed an adherent of the ‘religion of peace’, as Dubaya tagged Islam somewhat counter-intuitively in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

While our useful idiots describe Israel’s desperate struggle to survive as disproportionate, which it isn’t, few describe the 2003 Anglo-American attack on Iraq as criminal, which it was.

The attack fit in nicely with the overall campaign to destabilise and oust the quasi-secular dictatorships that alone could keep the lunatic fringe of Islam at bay.

After Saddam and Gaddafi were murdered, Mubarak was arrested, and Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq were embroiled in civil war, thousands of murderous fanatics came out of the woodwork, gun in hand, hatred in heart.

Whom do they hate specifically? The list is long.

Israel, that goes without saying. Jews in general, that too doesn’t need reiterating. Other Muslims, those holding dissenting views on the post-Mohammedan succession. The West, for its persistent if waning resolve to resist conversion from atheism to Islam. Anyone who disagrees with the fanatics now or may do so in the future.

And of course Christianity, this awful heresy to Islam that just happens to predate it by 600 years.

No wonder the Koran, the only source of spiritual and intellectual sustenance a good Muslim ever needs, puts Christians into the same bracket as Jews: “Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends…” (5:51) and, for preference, kill them: “Slay them [unbelievers] wherever ye find them…” (2:91)

The Prophet’s diktats must be obeyed. Hence, with all those secular traitors to Islam out of the way, open season on Christians began.

The think tank Civitas reports that “Christians are targeted more than any other body of believers.” It estimates that 200 million Christians are “socially disadvantaged, harassed or actively oppressed for their beliefs.”

Yet those who have the misfortune of living directly in the path of the Islamic juggernaut aren’t just ‘socially disadvantaged’. They are being robbed, raped, murdered and displaced.

Nowhere is their plight worse than in Iraq. This stands to reason: the country was the first beneficiary of American-style democracy so beloved of the neoconservatives, our typological analogue to jihadists.

This is particularly heart-rending because Christianity in Iraq goes back a long way – as long as historically possible. It was brought there by St Thomas, one of the apostles.

Iraq, or Mesopotamia as it was then, quickly became one of the world’s major centres of Christianity. For example, more bishops came to the pivotal Council of Nicaea (325 AD) from Mesopotamia than from Western Europe.

Throughout history Christians enjoyed a relatively easy ride there, as did Jews – to a point where after the Second World War a third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish.

Just eight years after the advent of laser-guided democracy there were seven Jews left in Baghdad – and now it’s the Christians’ turn.

The Islamic State, which owes its existence to the 2003 aggression, has given Iraqi Christians a straightforward choice: convert to Islam or die.

Neither alternative appealing, thousands flee, just like Egyptian Christians fled after the advent of the rather wintry Arab Spring – indeed just like the holy family fled in the wake of Herodian slaughter.

Mary and Joseph took their baby to Egypt – where can the displaced and dispossessed Iraqi Christians run? Not to the United States, that traditional refuge to ‘the huddled masses’.

Just as so many Western countries refused to admit Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1930s, so is Obama’s America ignoring the plight of Christian refugees from Iraq. The danger of the same outcome is imminent.

Last Saturday Iraqi Christians living in the United States rallied at the White House, chanting “Obama, Obama, where are you? Iraqi Christians call for you!”

There was no reply. President Obama was otherwise engaged, facilitating the entry of Muslim terrorists into the country.

Even as he’s slamming the door in the face of Christian refugees, he’s flinging it wide to welcome ‘minor’ Islamic terrorists, those not perpetrating terrorist acts themselves but merely aiding and abetting them.

In doing so, Obama has unilaterally overturned Bush’s law barring entry to providers of aid to Hamas and other terrorist groups. In the process he has removed at least 4,000 people from the terror watch list, welcomed them to the USA and offered them ‘limited material support’.

This goes on against the background of Obama’s State Department having rejected almost all of the 20,000 asylum applications from Coptic Christians trying to escape Egypt from the progressive Muslim Brotherhood.

That’s an odd way to behave for a country that liberally peppers its official documents with references to God and decorates its banknotes with the assurance that ‘in God we trust’.

France, on the other hand, is regarded as the most atheistic country in Western Europe, and indeed she’s proud of her post-revolutionary laïcité. Yet it’s the French and not the Americans who are willing to save Iraqi Christians.

France’s foreign and interior ministers said in a joint statement in Paris on 28 July that “we are ready, if they wish, to facilitate their asylum on our soil.”

The openly atheist French government is thus doing more for Christianity than the fulsomely pious United States, which stands to reason.

France, after all, was a Christian nation for most of her history, and her entire ethos is permeated with vestiges of past grandeur. The United States, on the other hand, started life as a revolutionary, secular republic, with Christianity never accepted as anything other than a personal idiosyncrasy.

Add Barack Hussein’s presidency to this heritage, and Mohammed is your uncle, Fatima is your aunt.

Meanwhile, Glasgow’s Lord Provost Sadie Docherty has declared that, as a gesture of solidarity with Hamas, the Glasgow City Council will fly the Palestinian flag from city chambers tomorrow.

The devolution still hasn’t happened, and yet Scotland’s biggest city already seems to be pursuing an independent foreign policy. I wonder what Dave has to say about this.

Now that the Gaza ceasefire seems to be holding up, post-mortems are the order of the day (no pun intended).

The Israelis credibly claim they’ve achieved their military objectives: destroying the tunnels out of which terrorists crawl like deadly rats, wiping out rocket launchers, killing high-ranking murderers and in general teaching Hamas a lesson that may take some time to unlearn.

Hamas, on the other hand, claims a moral victory, meaning a PR one (morality is these days measured in mass appeal).

True enough, the world’s media performed a neat trick of closing the vicious circle. First they saturated their pages and TV transmissions with pictures of dead or crippled Palestinians. Then they asked the survivors how they felt about it, all that slaughter of the innocents.

Basking in the limelight, the survivors would deliver the requisite amount of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The media expressed all the sympathy they could muster on such short notice, leaving their audience in no doubt who was the villain of the show.

The media were the ones who not so much fought as staged the PR war. They were the ones in control of its outcome.

All that unfolded with technically accomplished pretence at even-handedness. Yes, went the histrionic lament, firing thousands of rockets at Israeli towns wasn’t nice. Also ill-advised were all those shrieks about annihilating Israel and everyone in it.

But such minor indiscretions paled in comparison with Israel’s ‘disproportionate response’, which became a universal catchphrase.

The Israelis shouldn’t have responded to violence with greater violence, killing 30 Palestinians for every dead Israeli. They should have grinned and borne the rockets raining on their heads, wrote Peter Hitchens.

That way they would have had a decent shot at winning the PR war, otherwise won by Hamas. Admittedly the victory would have been Pyrrhic, for many Israelis would have been buried under the rubble of their houses.

But we all know that geopolitical success is also measured in PR sound bytes. All those Israeli women and children would have died in good cause, while their Palestinian counterparts died in bad cause: a nation fighting back against terror.

I’m unsure which side has emerged the winner. Only one result of the conflict calls for an unreserved cheer: Baroness Warsi, the first and only Muslim cabinet member, has resigned from the government post she should never have occupied in the first place.

Ostensibly the cause for this action was her disagreement with Dave’s policy on the conflict, which she regarded as insufficiently pro-Palestinian. Specifically, she accused Dave of having stopped just short of branding Israel a criminal state, which by inference has no right to exist.

Actually, it’s Baroness Warsi who has no right to exist – not as Sayeeda Warsi, but as a Baroness.

She ascended to nobility largely because of her political ineptitude. In 2005 Sayeeda Warsi, as she then was, stood for an eminently winnable Tory seat of Dewsbury. However, she managed to lose the election, thus denying the Conservative parliamentary party the benefit of her unique qualifications.

Said qualifications nowadays consist of a few boxes an aspiring candidate has to tick. Empirical observation compels one to admit mournfully that the list contains no boxes for ability to govern, integrity, intelligence, oratorical skills or experience.

It does contain the boxes that Sayeeda ticked better than anyone else. Woman – tick. Muslim – tick, or rather two ticks. Working class – tick. Heavy regional accent, as opposed to the Etonian cadences of so many on Dave’s front bench – tick. Under 40 – tick.

As a lifelong champion of diversity, I welcome such selection criteria applied to those on whose our lives depend. However, as a lifelong champion of sanity, I have to hope that a member of our government should also have a few other qualities.

Moreover, given the choice, those other qualities should take precedence over the aforementioned talents that Sayeeda possesses in such unequalled abundance.

Dave obviously doesn’t share this unfashionable view. He wanted Sayeeda’s talents in his government, what with its gaping vacancy for a young, working-class Muslim woman with a multi-culti accent.

Ideally Sayeeda should also have been a lesbian and a cripple, but you can’t have everything in this life. Let’s face it: what she did have was already more than Dave could get from anyone else.

There was an annoying obstacle in the way to Sayeeda’s elevation though: Britain being a parliamentary democracy, only a member of Parliament can ascend to the cabinet, and Sayeeda had lost the only election in which she had stood.

Mercifully, the constitution doesn’t specify which House of Parliament the prospective minister should serve in. Many a prime minister has taken advantage of this loophole, so Dave knew exactly what to do.

Thus Sayeeda became a life peer. Thus she became a member of the House of Lords. Thus she became Co-Chairman of the Tory Party. Thus she helped Dave in his tireless efforts to run the party into the ground, reducing its membership to a third of its recent size.

That accomplished, Baroness Warsi was prudently moved on to a post specially created for her, that of  Senior Minister of State, one in which Dave hoped her potential for doing harm would be curtailed.

Now she’s gone, amid rumours she’s about to defect to Labour. If true, this will be the greatest service she’ll ever have done the Conservative Party. The Tories’ loss will be their gain.

Everyone knows that Sayeeda’s grievance over Gaza was only a pretext. Her real reason for throwing a wobbly was that she didn’t get the Foreign Office in the recent reshuffle.

Nevertheless Boris Johnson, the Tories’ heir apparent, has supported Sayeeda, choosing to accept that the pretext for her departure was actually the reason.

He too feels that the Israeli military response was ‘disproportionate’: “I think it is ugly and it is tragic and I don’t think it will do Israel any good in the long run.”

Of course not. The only thing that’ll benefit Israel in the long run is abject surrender. Rather than losing a few citizens, she should assuage Boris’s and Sayeeda’s keen sense of proportion by losing a few million.

What Boris’s erstwhile journalistic colleagues aren’t reporting is that many denizens of Gaza are more honest than they are. They know that, rather than being ‘disproportionate’, Israel has displayed improbable restraint.

Consider the fact that during the on-going Afghan operation, the ratio of militant to civilian casualties is as low as 1:4 – something rarely seen in modern war, with its impersonal air raids.

Yet the Israelis, who uniquely warn civilians of impending strikes, have managed to achieve a miraculous ratio of 1:1, never seen anywhere before.

The blame for most of the remarkably few civilian casualties suffered by the Palestinians is squarely in Hamas’s court, and the Gazans know it.

They resent being used as a human shield, they hate seeing Hamas rocket launchers and command centres sited at, in or under their residences, schools and hospitals.

One such hospital is Al-Shifa, which has suffered several Israeli strikes. Secreted in its basement are Hamas command centres and caches of weapons, which is why the hospital and its surroundings have been hit hard.

When Hamas’s Press Secretary Abu-Zuhri arrived to offer his condolences, the locals, who knew what was what, beat him within an inch of his life. At the same time Hamas issued a ban on foreign journalists reporting the human-shield tactics.

Some journalists manage to get around Hamas, but the locals aren’t so lucky. On 29 July Izz ad-Din al-Qassam thugs massacred a demonstration of Beit Hanoun residents protesting against the use of their bodies in lieu of AA defences.

Ten dead, dozens wounded. Thirty more executed as ‘collaborators’ for the same crime. Hamas’s response to peaceful demonstrations may indeed be judged as disproportionate, among other things.

Yet neither Sayeeda nor Boris nor Miliband nor Clegg nor their likeminded spivs direct their flaming consciences at the true perpetrators of war crimes in the area: Hamas, Hezbollah, Isis and other terrorist organisations.

The spivs’ sense of proportion is in working order, which is more than one can say for their moral perspective. These are the people who govern us, ladies and gentlemen.

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

The Times refuses to rest on its laurels.

Having set seemingly impossible standards of ignorance and dishonesty, the paper still strives to exceed them, as demonstrated by two articles run a couple of days ago.

One of them supports Rowan Williams’s assertion that Muslims make an invaluable contribution to British life, and he didn’t just mean those corner shops open at all hours.

A few years ago the Archdruid found a gap between performing shamanistic dances around Stonehenge and discharging his archiepiscopal duties to welcome the unavoidability of Sharia law in Britain.

This time he implicitly extolled the value of having 1,400 mosques in Britain, most preaching hatred for our civilisation. Ours, he explained, is an ‘argumentative democracy’.

Presumably this means we like to argue, and Muslims give us something to argue about. Or, in the Archdruid’s convoluted words, “It’s really important that we respect and try to understand diversity of conscience and belief and conviction in our environment. These are not just about what makes us British, they’re about what makes us human.”

I’ve commented before that the former Archbishop of Canterbury is a man of rather modest intellectual gifts. But here he outdid himself.

Williams must have been taught at the seminary that Britain is constitutionally and historically a Christian commonwealth. That’s a great part of “what makes us British”, while a priest has to believe it’s also much of “what makes us human”.

This doesn’t mean we should persecute those whose beliefs are different – we aren’t Muslims after all. Nor does it mean that we should be incurious about other cultures or creeds.

But elevating ‘diversity of conscience’ to the acme of virtue is guaranteed to debauch the historical core of our society, turning it into an aggregate of atomised, anomic individuals spinning out of control into a vast spiritual vacuum.

The other article is the editorial in the same issue, enlarging on the same subject.

The store is set early: “It is no business of the state to take a position on the content of religious faith… The limited role of government is to defend religious liberty and the freedom of worship and association.”

Obviously The Times either doesn’t know or chooses to ignore the easily verifiable fact that we have an established religion, and it’s neither Islam nor Druidism.

That’s why one of the titles borne by our head of state is ‘Defender of the faith’. The definite article should have tipped The Times that our government’s constitutional duty goes beyond just defending ‘religious liberty’.

Having demanded that we all refrain from troubling our little heads about theology, the paper then plunges into the troubled waters of Islamic apologetics. It quotes approvingly a Sunni imam who argues that the inferior status of women has no basis in the Koran.

Being neither a Muslim nor an Islamic scholar, I’m ready to acknowledge my misapprehensions on that score. I must have been led astray by some Koran verses, such as:

“Women are your fields: go, then, into your fields whence you please.” 2:223

“Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them.” 4:34

“A male shall inherit twice as much as a female.” 4:11

“[Forbidden to you are] married women, except those whom you own as slaves.” 4:24

“You may marry two or three or four women whom you choose.” 4:3

Interpreted from the height of Islamic scholarship, these and other such verses obviously establish equality of the sexes in every sense. I hope you’ll forgive my prior misjudgement. So silly of me.

“There are ugly currents in European society,” continues the editorial, “that depict Islam as a homogeneous force and Muslims as a threat.”

I’m not sure currents can depict anything, but then I’m not guided by The Times style manual. That aside, the anthropomorphised currents that “depict Islam as a homogeneous force” aren’t just ugly but ignorant – of the hysterical hatred between the Sunni and Shi’ite branches of Islam.

Having started immediately after Mohammed’s death, this heterogeneity is claiming thousands of lives even as we speak.

As to the currents depicting “Muslims as a threat”, I must admit I myself have been known to drift with those. My only excuse is some knowledge of history, a burden evidently not shared by The Times.

The briefest of looks at some of the world’s flashpoints over the last 20 years will show that most of those involved Muslims (and, incidentally, had nothing to do with Israel, which some ‘currents’ ‘depict’ as the sole reason for Islamic radicalism).

Specifically one could mention the conflicts between Bosnian Muslims and Christians, Côte d’Ivoire Muslims and Christians, Cyprus Muslims and Christians, East Timor Muslims and Christians, Indonesian Muslims and Christians in Ambon island, Kashmir Muslims and Hindus, Kosovo Muslims and Christians, Macedonian Muslims and Christians, Nigeria Muslims and both Christians and Animists, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in Iraq and throughout the Islamic world, Muslims and Christians in the Philippines, Chechen Muslims and Russians, Azeri Muslims and Armenian Christians, Sri Lanka Tamils and Buddhists, Thailand’s Muslims and Buddhists in the Pattani province, Muslim Bengalis and Buddhists in Bangladesh, Muslims and Protestant, Chaldean Catholic and Assyrian Orthodox Christians in Kurdistan.

The impression is hard to avoid that Islam sooner or later finds itself at war with any neighbours it happens to have, a tendency that, until The Times editorial, I mistakenly regarded as threatening.

Then the ‘ugly currents’ are hit on the head (if they can depict, they must have heads) with the full weight of authority. The Times co-opts to its cause that great expert on religion Thomas Jefferson, who said “that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion…”

Suffering from a gap in his education, The Times writer doesn’t understand the reason for Jefferson’s remark, its true meaning and the context in which it was made. I’ll be happy to fill this gap.

Jefferson was a deist whose hatred of Christianity was only matched by his cordial loathing of England. His views on religion were greatly informed by Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, ostensibly preaching equanimity towards all creeds, except naturally Trinitarian Christianity.

Both Locke and the American Founders, including Jefferson, welcomed any kind of religious sectarianism because they correctly saw it as a way of removing an annoying religious check on the excesses of modernity.  

The organic states of Christendom saw their duty in protecting not only the citizens’ property but also their spiritual health, which in those days was tantamount to guarding Christianity from heresy. Locke and the Founders viscerally hated the traditional order, and they correctly identified Protestant sectarianism as an effective weapon to use against it – divide and conquer.

In other words, tolerance, in the Lockean and Jeffersonian sense, means its exact semantic opposite: intolerance to Christianity and, by inference, to the previous centuries of Western civilisation.

This is a sentiment The Times clearly shares, embellishing it with a nice tint of ignorance: “There must be no religious test for… public office.”

But there is such a test, lamentable though some of us may think it is. The 1701 Act of Settlement prohibits a Catholic from becoming head of England’s established religion – and hence from holding the office of monarch.

But facts shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with a good story. And promoting the destructive power of ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ is the best story of all.