Category: Blog

Adorning the façade of King’s College London is a ‘wall of fame’ displaying the portraits of the most deserving alumni.

One has to believe that by any reasonable standards an alumnus who rises to the highest ecclesiastical post in the land, that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, is deserving enough.

Yet a five-year campaign by homosexual activists, collectively known as ‘gay-stapo’, has just succeeded in removing Lord Carey’s picture from the wall. That portrait was expunged because it failed to “capture the diversity of our university community”, meaning Lord Carey staunchly opposed homomarriage.

Now anyone who refuses to be stamped in the dirt by the steamroller of our PC modernity is a criminal by common – and increasingly more often legal – definition. Yet one can still scrape together enough audacity to suggest that accusing a Christian prelate of opposing homomarriage is tantamount to accusing him of being, well, a Christian prelate.

The scriptural position on both homosexuality and marriage is so unequivocal that any priest who fails to oppose homomarriage ought to be summarily unfrocked and ideally excommunicated. Lord Carey thus remained within the confines of his remit.

That, however, doesn’t make him guilty of one of the greatest crimes against PC sensibilities, ‘homophobia’. Not to be pedantic, I won’t emphasise the simple lexical fact that ‘phobia’ means an uncontrollable fear, not hatred, which the term ‘homophobia’ is supposed to imply nowadays.

But however one defines it, I’m sure Lord Carey isn’t a sufferer. I’m certain he doesn’t turn pale with fear at the sight of, say, the Tory MP Alan Duncan.

Nor, as a Christian, can he possibly hate Mr Duncan, at least not for his open homosexuality. However, he can – indeed, as a Christian, must – hate Mr Duncan’s homosexuality. The distinction has been valid ever since St Augustine wrote “Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum”, which is roughly translated as “Hate the sin but love the sinner”.

For any Christian, rejection of homosexuality (and consequently homomarriage) is a matter of doctrine, not personal choice. Yet the doctrine also prescribes the ultimate virtue of Christianity: loving not only one’s neighbour but also one’s enemy, not only a saint but also a sinner.

Regrettably, such distinctions are lost on the homosexual stormtroopers of King’s, led by Ben Hunt and inspired by the patron saint (well, sinner) of homosexual activism Peter Tatchell. Hunt made the removal of Lord Carey’s portrait part of his manifesto when he stood for the post of LGBT officer, whatever that means.

He’s now president of King’s student union, using the power of his office to promote his parochial interests and merit a pat on the back from Tatchell himself, who commented: “No university should celebrate a public figure who fought so hard against gay equality.”

What amuses me is that Tatchell’s stormtroopers claim they’re in favour of tolerance. This side of Khmer Rouge and ISIS, I can’t think offhand of a less tolerant group than homosexual activists. It’s like Julius Streicher accusing his opponents of racial prejudice.

Some four years ago I found myself on the receiving end of their vaunted tolerance when I published this article in The Daily Mail on-line magazine: http://www.alexanderboot.com/so-attack-on-free-speech-is-a-sign-of-tolerance/

The gist was criticism of Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, who had allowed a campaign for homomarriage to appear on buses, while banning a rebuttal by Christian groups. Fair’s fair, I suggested. What’s sauce for the homosexual goose should also be sauce for the Christian gander.

In passing, I referred to homosexuality as an ‘aberration’, which it is, if only in strictly numerical terms. In retrospect, I could have couched the argument in more anodyne terms, but mine was indeed an argument, not a harangue.

Within hours all hell broke loose. On the evening of the same day my picture and all the relevant contact details appeared in Tatchell’s propaganda sheet called PinkNews. The paper demanded that all practitioners of what I criminally called an aberration express their feelings, all in keeping with the tolerance they swore by.

Come morning, I had received thousands of balanced and well-reasoned counterarguments, along the lines of “Eat sh*it and die, you c**t”. Also coming in thick and fast were death threats, expressed in the same refined idiom.

One chap displayed a diagnostic ability of enviable attainment, saying he’d joyously kill me, but there was no need because, judging by my photograph, I wasn’t long for this world anyway. Since the picture was taken at the time I had what was believed to be terminal cancer, I silently applauded my correspondent’s perspicacity.

Coming in the wake of personal communications were some twenty PCC complaints, threatening The Mail with lawsuits the size of Belgium’s GDP. In the good, if recent, tradition of British journalism, I was thrown to the wolves immediately – no one can be so intolerant of tolerance and get away with it.

Now the same gang has succeeded in kicking out not insignificant me but Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury. Much as I’d like to, I can’t blame them – that would be like blaming a dog for chasing a cat around the block.

But I can blame a society that allows openly subversive nonentities to win their pathetic little victories. Such a society has its survival imperilled – and I’m not sure it deserves to survive.

A Russian commentator has posted this laconic comment on the murder of Ambassador Karlov by yet another exponent of the religion of peace.

That was the briefest but far from only parallel drawn by various observers between the assassination of Ambassador Karlov and that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914. Since the earlier event set off the First World War, the implication is sinister: there may be war.

But between whom and whom? Will Russia incinerate Istanbul the same way it flattened Aleppo, children’s playgrounds and all?

Such a response wouldn’t be without precedent. One of Putin’s spiritual forebears, Genghis Khan, would wipe out the entire population of a city where his envoys had been harmed. He himself never killed other countries’ ambassadors.

Even such voracious murderers as Stalin and Hitler didn’t count any ambassadors among their victims. After Hitler’s ambassador Count Schulenburg declared war on the Soviet Union, Stalin sent him back to Germany, where the privilege of killing Schulenburg was exercised by Hitler himself in 1944.

It’s also true that, regardless of who pulled the trigger, the host country is at least partly to blame for the murder of a diplomat. Hence, should Putin choose to treat the crime as a casus belli, he’d have some justification. But why should he choose to?

Putin’s official bogeyman isn’t Turkey but the West, especially the US. Whether that designation will survive President Trump’s inauguration remains to be seen, but that’s how things are at the moment.

True, as a NATO member, Erdoğan’s Turkey may be regarded as tangentially a Western country. Moreover, a year ago it committed a hostile act by downing a Russian SU-24.

However, since then Russia’s policy towards Turkey has been that of rapprochement, clearly aimed at splitting NATO and weakening its southern flank. That policy is consistent with the Russian strategy of sowing discord among Western countries, thereby creating troubled waters in which the KGB junta could profitably fish.

The first noises coming out of Russia suggest that the policy hasn’t changed, and Putin is trying to shoehorn the murder into the overall strategic pattern.

Within hours of the assassination Russia’s senator Klintsevich opined that “…it is highly likely that representatives of foreign NATO secret services are behind it. What has happened is a true provocation, a challenge.”

“They did not shoot at Karlov. They shot at Russia,” echoed Senator Kosachev. He didn’t specify who ‘they’ were, but contextually it could only be the dastardly NATO members.

Russian foreign minister Lavrov clarified for those slow on the uptake. Whoever was behind the murder, he explained, intended to “undermine” the normalisation of relations between Moscow and Ankara. According to Lavrov, that was the conclusion reached by Putin and Erdoğan in their telephone conversation.

Putin was quick to confirm: “The crime that was committed is without doubt a provocation aimed at disrupting the normalisation of Russian-Turkish relations and disrupting the peace process in Syria that is being actively advanced by Russia, Turkey and Iran.”

Evidently said normalisation isn’t being disrupted by Turkey’s support for the Sunni cannibals wishing to eviscerate Assad, whereas Putin doesn’t care how many children he must bomb to keep Assad in power. Obviously a higher purpose trumps temporary divergences.

Should we apply the ancient Cui Bono? principle, NATO would be exculpated this side of Putin’s frenzied propaganda. Yet both Erdoğan and Putin have something to gain.

Erdoğan is already blaming his major opponent, the exiled cleric Gulen. The cleric is screaming his innocence, but Erdoğan can use this pretext to round up those dissidents who miraculously are still at large after the failed July coup.

Putin’s possible benefits are far greater, even apart from laying the blame on NATO. For Moscow, Ankara and Tehran are indeed negotiating to broker some deal over Syria. And Moscow’s position has been weakened by the brutality of its indiscriminate carpet bombing of Aleppo.

Putin is being seen by many as a war criminal, a reputation he has been studiously fostering throughout his reign. Now he can shift that perception by positioning himself as a victim, one who has paid for his place at the table with Karlov’s blood.

Does this mean that either Erdoğan or Putin might have underwritten the assassination? I wouldn’t put this past either gentleman, knowing their moral fibre and track record.

The circumstances of the murder add weight to such speculations. Neither the Russians nor the Turks provided any security worthy of the name. Yet a government bombing Aleppo children must expect that some grown-ups would want to kill its diplomats.

However, the murderer managed not only to pump eight rounds into Karlov’s back but also to deliver a speech compromising the widely held belief that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. Only then did the police engage him, with nary a trained security officer within sight.

Yes, a conspiracy is possible. But the most obvious explanation of the assassination is the one visible on the surface.

After Aleppo, Russia acquired 1.5 billion Sunni enemies braying for the Russians’ blood. About 65 million of them live in Turkey and it couldn’t have been unduly hard to find one ready and able to do the deed.

One way or the other, political assassination always heightens international tensions, with unpredictable consequences. Today’s situation is particularly fraught, with Russia’s bellicose hysteria at its most febrile.

The other day Russian MP Vyachelslav Nikonov, named after his Grandpa Molotov, pronounced off the Duma pulpit that “the free world has acquired a new leader, which is Russia.” Why? Because “Russia is the world’s only country that can annihilate America ten times over.”

The atmosphere is electrically charged, but one hopes that the parallel between Karlov and the Archduke will remain a fantasy. Anything else is too horrific to fathom.

In 1729 yet another famine in Ireland caused much outrage in England. Foremost in the public mind was the plight of Irish children whom their parents were unable to feed.

Jonathan Swift brought to bear on the tragedy his genius for satire. Swift published, anonymously, a pamphlet called A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.

Rather than worrying about feeding their offspring, wrote Swift, parents should eat them. This ‘modest proposal’ would achieve the dual benefit of having fewer mouths to feed and at least two mouths fed very well indeed.

According to Swift, babies were quite a delicacy: “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

I don’t know if Col. Putin has read the pamphlet but, if he has, he seems to have taken Swift’s irony at face value. Under his stewardship Russian orphans aren’t often used for food but, all things considered, they might as well be.

Most children kept in Russian orphanages aren’t actually orphans. Many are today’s answer to the Irish babies of 300 years ago: children abandoned by their parents out of sheer destitution.

They seldom (though not never) fall victim to cannibalism. Rather than being eaten by grownups, they’re devoured by the Saturn of Putin’s Russia.

At least half, and by some estimates up to 95 per cent, of orphanage inmates become alcoholics, drug addicts or suicides. About 60 per cent of both boys and girls are raped. Few live to maturity, and those who do go into the outside world unfit to survive by any other than criminal means.

Some children are lucky enough to be adopted, though for many this means leaving the frying pan for the fire. Some foster parents are perverts, but most are kind, well-meaning persons. Alas, many overestimate their ability to feed children, with predictably disastrous consequences.

The really lucky tots are adopted by American couples – for them the chances of survival to adulthood are 39 times higher than for those adopted by Russians. And it’s this lifeline that Putin and his gang have severed with their characteristic cruelty.

The 2013 Magnitsky Law and subsequent 2014 sanctions banned from entry into the US several dozen Russian officials implicated in the crimes that had produced the sanctions.

Putin and his gang were outraged, especially since other Western countries followed suit. After all, the Russian national sport, money laundering, can’t be practised without access to the laundry, otherwise known as the West. So what’s going to happen to all those palaces in Florida, villas in Costa del Sol, Eaton Square mansions and 300-foot yachts moored at the Côte d’Azur?

Putin’s response was instant, only beaten for speed by the alacrity with which it was rubber-stamped by the Russian ‘parliament’. Thenceforth those awful Yanks wouldn’t be allowed to adopt Russian children. Col. Putin would rather watch them being raped and starved to death in the hellholes of Russian orphanages than let Americans indulge their paternal instincts.

This little bit of quid pro quo was accompanied by a propaganda campaign the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the halcyon days of the Soviet Union, if then. Back in the ‘60s an average Russian could be forgiven for forming the impression that lynching was America’s chosen leisure activity on a slow weekend. But Putin went his KGB ancestors one better.

He personally vouchsafed to his subjects the secret that in America it’s not against the law for foster parents to kill their adopted children, especially Russian ones. And according to his shrill mouthpieces in the Duma and on TV, at least 10 per cent of the little Russians were only adopted to be disassembled and sold for parts.

Others were turned into slaves, like those blacks who used to be lynched en masse back in the ‘60s. Most of them would be used as cannon fodder in the upcoming attack on Russia, which, as we all know, was and still is being planned by American warmongers.

Yesterday I used the expression plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose in relation to Saltykov-Shchedrin’s observations about Russia back in the nineteenth century. The phrase works in this case too.

Any Russian reading stories of the post-revolutionary mayhem is aware of hundreds of thousands of feral stray children roaming the streets of all major cities. They robbed, stole, begged, slept rough (often under asphalt kilns on cold winter nights) – and died. Those who survived were shipped to colonies for juvenile delinquents that made Victorian workhouses look like resorts.

In my day, brainwashed Russians accepted those stories at face value, never asking themselves the most natural question: Where did all those stray children come from? The forbidden answer would have been that the little ones were orphaned by the CheKa murder squads, famines and the Civil War provoked by Lenin’s gang.

Today’s Russians may be able to ask and answer such questions with relative impunity, preferably in private. But most take the easy option and banish the thought from their minds. As to Putin’s ‘useful idiots’ in the West, they just don’t want to know.

 

In 1849 the French journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr came up with a spiffy epigram: the more things change, the more they remain the same (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose).

 It appears that Karr’s Russian contemporary, the great satirist Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin, dedicated his work to proving the Frenchman right, at least where Russia was concerned. Modernise his language ever so slightly, and everything he wrote about Russia and the Russians reads like contemporary reportage today. (You’ll notice that a few of his epigrams now apply more widely, having left the confines of Russia.)

 Shchedrin lacerated with a light touch, which made his satire even more devastating. I don’t know if he was aware of his prophetic powers, but, if he was, I’m sure he hoped some of his observations would no longer apply centuries later.

So much more disappointed he’d be if he came back to see that every poignant word I’ve taken the liberty to translate still rings true:

If I fall asleep for a hundred years and they ask me what’s going on in Russia these days, I’ll reply: “Drinking and thieving”.

When they start talking about patriotism in Russia, you must realise: they’ve stolen something somewhere.

I felt like something: either a constitution or sturgeon with horseradish or to scam somebody.

In other countries railways are for transportation, but with us they are also for thievery.

When has there ever been a bureaucrat who wasn’t sure that Russia is a pie he can freely approach, slice and munch?

When all you get for our rouble abroad is fifty kopeks, that’s fine. The trouble starts when all you get is a punch in the snout.

Russian powers-that-be must keep the people in a state of constant bewilderment.

The strictness of Russian laws is mitigated by optional compliance therewith.

It’s not like that here, mate. Here we’d not only eat all the apples off a tree but also snap every branch. The other day Safron walked by a mug of kerosene – and even that he drank up.

God’s world apparently has corners where all times are transitional.

Alas, not even a quarter-hour had passed, but I already sensed that now was high time to drink vodka.

Literature and propaganda are the same thing.

Here in Russia everyone steals. And while at it, they laugh and keep repeating “When on earth will it all end?”

When spreading wise thoughts, one can’t avoid being called a bastard.

Nowadays, Mum, they live without a husband as if with a husband. Nowadays they mock religious prescriptions. They find a bush, get hitched under it – and Bob’s your uncle. They call it civil marriage.

All it takes to thieve successfully is speed and greed. Greed is especially important because a small theft may be grounds for prosecution.

A bribe destroys barriers and shortens distances, it makes an official’s heart open to the little troubles of everyday life.

Civic maturity is a transition from off-colour gossip to a more accurate perception of the authorities’ glances.

Education must be spread with moderation, avoiding bloodshed if at all possible.

When meeting an important official, it is permitted to express the pleasure felt thereupon by polite and respectful body movements.

For a true liberal, there is no worthier task than awaiting trustfully further clarification from the higher-ups.

A citizen is always guilty of something.

It’s but one step from irony to subversion.

Sleep and vodka – these are man’s real friends.

…he even allowed that even people’s worst misapprehensions shouldn’t always lead to execution as an ineluctable consequence.

“Credit,” he was explaining to Kolia Persianov, “is when you have no money… you follow? You have no money, but then – bang! – you’ve got it.” “But, mon cher, what if they demand repayment?” Kolia lisped. “Fool! You can’t even understand such simple things! You’ve got to repay – more credit. Repay again – still more credit! All states live that way nowadays!”

They sat thinking how to turn their loss-making business into a profitable one without changing anything.

Many tend to confuse two concepts: ‘Motherland’ and ‘Your Excellence’.

 

Make no mistake about it: the blood of Aleppo, along with that of thousands of Anglo-American servicemen and hundreds of thousands of others is on Blair’s hands.

He lied to the people, Parliament and even his cabinet colleagues to draw the country into a criminal war initiated by a hare-brained US president.

“I am with you, whatever,” Blair wrote to George W. Bush, a blanket commitment he had no constitutional right to make without prior parliamentary endorsement. A government official who cynically violates the constitution must be legally culpable. But what interests me is the criminal stupidity of it all.

At a fundamental moral level, flattening cities full of civilians is always criminal. But it’s not always stupid.

This barbaric action may be vindicated by strategic need. Hence it’s possible to argue, as Americans often do, that dropping atom bombs on Japanese cities obviated the need for taking those islands one by one, thereby saving thousands of American lives.

For the record, sensible arguments to the contrary are also possible, but at least Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated in pursuit of an intelligible strategic objective. One may argue about the morality of it, but not its effectiveness. The danger Japan presented to the US disappeared.

On the other hand, rather than eliminating or even reducing danger, the criminal attack on Iraq in 2003 increased it no end – as predicted, false modesty aside, by every sensible commentator.

The operation was tactically successful, initially at any rate, but strategically inane. For the successful tactics were employed in pursuit of a false objective.

9/11 was a memento mori for Americans. That came as a shock. A nation congenitally committed to the idea of its own greatness can’t stand intimations of mortality.

Moreover, the Americans were deprived of their all-pervasive delusion that the whole world wishes to be just like them. Flying those planes into the twin towers was more than just an aggression committed. It was a myth debunked.

A response was called for. Shrieks of “We must do something!!!” resonated throughout the 50 states, and one of the voices belonged to the intellectually challenged US president George W. Bush.

Rather than formulating an intelligent and achievable strategic objective, Bush and his men were unable to rise above the din of vox populi. They were thinking not as statesmen but as American exceptionalists with injured pride.

Rather than seeing the crime in the context of 1,400 years of Muslim aggression against the West, they looked through the wrong end of the binoculars and decided that the problem was caused by a deficit of democracy in the Middle East.

It didn’t occur to them that a region where most people relieved themselves through every orifice where they stood was perhaps not quite ready for baseball, apple pie and a bicameral legislature. Hence Dubya girded his loins and rode out to eliminate those undemocratic folks who wouldn’t let the Muslims join the PTAs and the Little Leagues.

He didn’t realise that all those beastly Saddams, Mubaraks and Gaddafis were safety valves in the bubbling cauldron of barely contained violence. Eliminate the safety valves, and the whole world will be burnt in the ensuing eruption.

Blair responded to Bush’s “Yo, Blair” with canine devotion, lying and cheating all the way to a full-blown British involvement. A blood-soaked chaos followed.

The danger wasn’t eliminated; it was enhanced by many degrees of magnitude. Not just America but the whole world became imperilled as a direct result.

What would have been the proper response? First, real statesmen must be prepared to deal with life as it is, not as they wish it to be. As it is, there exists a 1.6-billion-strong Islamic world ideologically committed to conquering the world. This ambition has only ever been kept in check when the West was sufficiently strong and resolute.

When the West was vacillating and weak, the Muslims would conquer half of Europe. When their ears were pinned back by the likes of Charles Martel and Jan Sobieski, their passion would ebb for some time, until another chastisement was needed. It was Muslim passions, red-hot at the moment, that singed America in 2001.

The first strategic objective in dealing with aggression should be downgrading the enemy’s capability to escalate or indeed continue hostile action. That means depriving the enemy of its source of strength, whatever it is. Hence attacks on airfields, armament factories, command centres etc. are logical tactics in conventional modern wars.

But Islam’s strength doesn’t come from airfields and armament factories. Today’s Islam is like Antaeus – its strength comes from the earth, specifically the part of it housing oilfields. Take them away, and Islamic power will dissipate.

That should have led Bush, Blair et al. to formulating a strategic response centred on the takeover of Middle Eastern oilfields, including those of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Effectively that would have amounted to the recolonisation of the Middle East and keeping it in that state until Muslim passions died out.

No talk of regime changes, democracy, apple pie and the PTA. Just the Raj all over again, a realpolitik dish served with the sauce of liberal interventionism.

There might have been other sensible options to be considered. There were only two utterly stupid, and therefore criminal, things to do: nothing and what Bush-Blair actually did.

Now US and UK government spokesmen shed crocodile tears at the sight of all those mangled bodies in Aleppo. Who could have done such an awful thing?

The answer is that the bombs were dropped by Assad and Putin, the immediate culprits and unapologetic barbarians.

But the ultimate fault lies with the supposedly civilised Bush and Blair, prevented from thinking strategically by their corrupt morals, weak minds and wholehearted commitment to PC populism with its defunct, if vote-getting, democratic slogans.

They started it, and the scary thing is that there’s no end in sight.

 

 

Dickens’s Mr Bumble would feel vindicated if he read about Yaya Touré’s conviction for drinking and driving.

I realise that no rational argument is possible when modernity’s sanctimonious dander is up. Over the limit? Off with his head.

But do let’s pretend we still live in a sane world where one could doubt everything except God. That world would distinguish between malum prohibitum and malum in se. The latter is wrong intrinsically; the former, only because it’s prohibited.

I’d suggest that drinking and driving is a clear-cut case of malum prohibitum. This, though statistical data doubtless show that alcohol is occasionally a contributing factor in fatal accidents.

But since when do we arrest people on statistical probability? For example, a black man is statistically more likely to commit a crime than a white one. Does this mean all black men should be arrested preventively?

There’s some reductio ad absurdum here, but not that much. Yes, a driver whose blood content of alcohol is higher than some arbitrarily established limit (for example, in France it’s half ours – does it take more to get us drunk?) is breaking a law. But the law isn’t just, and such laws never command much respect.

What kills people is bad driving, not drinking and driving. If someone drives dangerously, say tailgating at high speeds or swerving between lanes on motorways (the French routinely do both even when sober), then by all means throw the book at him.

But stopping a driver for no reason and then punishing him because his reflexes have supposedly been made slower by one glass of wine too many doesn’t strike me as just.

For example, I’m blessed with very quick reflexes, which have been further honed by a lifetime of playing tennis, much of it at the net. So even after drinking half a bottle of wine and thereby losing 20 per cent of my reaction time, I’d probably still be faster to react than my stone-sober octogenarian neighbour. Yet she’s deemed legal whereas I wouldn’t be.

If accidents caused by drunk drivers were a widespread problem (and Britain’s rate of road deaths is by far the lowest in Europe), then a better solution would be to treat a fatal accident caused by a drunk driver as murder, punishable by a mandatory life sentence. That, I dare say, would be a stronger deterrent than a year’s ban and a fine.

So much for the crime. Now let’s discuss punishment, specifically one meted out to Touré. For in any sane world that would constitute a gross miscarriage of justice.

This supposedly teetotal Muslim drank from a jug of diet Coke supposedly without realising it was laced with brandy, which put him at twice the drink-driving limit. Now, as far as I’m concerned, anyone drinking such revolting concoctions should be imprisoned for this gross lapse of taste alone, even if he doesn’t drive afterwards.

The addition of brandy would make diet Coke even more disgusting, and personally I’d doubt the veracity of a man who claims he couldn’t tell the difference. Such lack of discernment also calls for a summary conviction.

Such facetious comments aside, let’s accept for the sake of argument that, malum prohibitum or no, Touré deserved to be banned and fined.

The length of the ban he received, 18 months, is more or less normal for someone found to be twice over the limit. But the fine of £54,000 strikes me as ever so slightly excessive, not to mention draconian. This is roughly 50 times more than the usual penalty for this transgression because the fine was means-tested.

Since Mr Touré gets £200,000 a week in salary alone, and probably as much again in endorsements and image rights, he is a wealthy man – so much is true.

The logic behind means-testing is that for a rich man like Mr Touré a normal fine wouldn’t constitute much of a punishment. He probably tips parking attendants that much.

By the same logic, even £54,000 isn’t very punitive either, considering that Mr Touré makes as much in just over a day. But we’ll let it pass and concentrate instead on the diabolical injustice of means-tested punishments in general.

For one thing it contravenes the sacred principle of British jurisprudence: the same law for all. But even putting that aside for a moment, this practice isn’t only unjust but also illogical.

Why single out fines? What about prison sentences? It could be argued that imprisonment isn’t that much of a punishments for a chap who has been in and out of the pokey since his early teens and who still has friends from his last stint left inside. At the same time, even a few months in prison is a severe punishment for a middle-aged accountant who got a little too creative.

So why not apply means testing to that? Sentence the accountant to two months instead of a year, and the serial burglar to 10 instead of one. Good idea? No?

Well, I don’t see any substantive difference between that and fleecing Mr Touré for the same infraction most people would be fined £1,000. Mr Bumble, ring your office.

Not being able to read Gogol and Tolstoy in the original is unfortunate but hardly lethal. One’s physical survival isn’t threatened by reading those chaps in translation only, or for that matter not at all.

However, not being able to follow Russian newspapers and TV shows may have such a fatal effect. Granted, the official line of Putin’s government comes across on RT and other Anglophone propaganda channels.

Their Western viewers are the target of disinformation, whose techniques were honed within the good offices of the KGB’s First Directorate. Not every intended target is reached, but most receive at least glancing hits.

KGB disinformation artists paint a rosy picture of a Russia espousing every conservative value.

It’s conservative values that are stressed because, unlike the USSR, Putin’s KGB Russia cultivates her ‘useful idiots’ on the right of the political spectrum. Hence Russia comes across as the last bastion of Christianity committed to peace, love and heterosexual marriage.

It’s a tragic mistake, screams RT, to confuse today’s Russia with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is dead and it’ll never do a Lazarus.

Yet Putin’s propaganda vindicates Euclid by having two parallel lines that never converge. One is designed for the West, the other for home consumption.

One comes across in English, the other in Russian and never the twain shall meet. Only occasionally do translations of Russian-language utterances reach Western ears, usually when the speaker is either Putin or one of his top ministers.

Thus even monolingual Anglophones are aware that Putin regards the break-up of the Soviet Union 25 years ago as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”. Implicitly that suggests that he sees his mission as reversing the catastrophe by reconquering the former constituent republics (and everything else he can get while at it).

But that implication may well be drowned by RT’s explicit assurances of Russia’s peaceful intentions, her decisive break with the Soviet past and her urgent desire to be friends with the West, if only the West would let her.

That deluge drowns not only the odd bits of information to the contrary seeping out of Russia at times, but also the brains of Putin’s Western fans. That inundation is indeed mortally dangerous.

For strategic deception always pursues strategic objectives. In this case, Russia is trying to demoralise NATO and the West by corrupting public opinion, which still exercises tremendous power over our government by focus group.

This strategy is succeeding, in part by enabling Putin’s useful idiots to acquire key political appointments in the West. Putin’s name was shouted by the Italian opponents of Renzi, Turkey has just appointed dozens of Putin’s admirers to important diplomatic posts in the West and NATO, the run-off in the next French presidential election is likely to be contested by two of Putin’s fans, Bulgaria and several other Eastern European countries are being run by Putin’s acolytes, the leaders of our own UKIP drool at the very mention of Putin’s name.

And let’s not forget the US President-elect who doesn’t bother to conceal his friendship with, and admiration for, Putin. As to Rex Tillerson, about to be appointed US Secretary of State, he was personally decorated by Putin for services rendered.

Both Trump and Tillerson have extensive business dealings with Russia – and a vested interest in discontinuing Western economic sanctions against her. Given a slightly different intellectual climate, this might be regarded as conflict of interest in some quarters – yet nobody seems to mind.

None of this would be possible if the public were able to follow the parallel, domestic, line of Russian Russophone propaganda. Then everyone would know that today’s rulers of Russia are committed to recreating the Soviet Union in all its tyrannical glory, if with different institutional symbols and jargon.

Thus, for example, Dmitry Kisilev, officially known as Putin’s mouthpiece and unofficially as his Goebbels, speaking on his TV show, the most influential one in Russia:

“Much of the Soviet Union survives. It seems that the main things aren’t material. The main thing, invaluable for the whole mankind, is the experience of the grandiose social experiment we staged on ourselves. Its goal was creating paradise on earth, a good life for everyone. And much of it succeeded. We literally moved mountains, creating the material foundations of communism. Our economy still rests on those foundations. And very warm Soviet features so dear to us are still surviving in our character.”

The “grandiose social experiment” enslaved Russia and half the world, destroyed millions of lives, reduced work to servitude, the press to nauseating propaganda and government to the worst tyranny ever known in history.

Those who know and deplore this should take Kisilev’s harangues at face value, including his threat to “turn America to radioactive dust” – especially since variations on the same theme are beamed at the Russians round the clock by all sorts of sources, including Putin himself.

Listen to the tyrants, ladies and gentlemen. Unlike our politicians, they usually mean and do what they say. The entire history of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany could have been forecast – and possibly changed – by taking seriously the works of Lenin and Hitler.

But in order to take a despot’s words seriously, one has to understand the language in which they’re uttered. That gets us back to the title of this article.

If this version of Matthew 5:2 sounds odd, you don’t belong in our top universities.

For the sentence represents the twin peaks of modern lexicology, one scaled by Oxbridge, the other, with all due modesty yet justified pride, by me.

If you feel the pain of others as acutely as your own, you must behold the peaks with appropriate awe. For you must toss and turn through the night, weeping over verbal discrimination against gender-fluid and transgender people.

Even the earliest sentences written in English contained, with nary a thought for their offensive potential, the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ – not to mention their equally lacerating derivatives ‘his’, ‘her’ and ‘hers’.

Those pronouns were like knives going through the heart of every gender-fluid person millennia before this indispensable adjective was even coined or the surgical transgender option became available.

Yet those sieve-like hearts aren’t beyond healing. The cardiac holes are beginning to close thanks to a therapeutic diktat issued to Oxford students. Henceforth they shall replace ‘he’ and ‘she’ with the mellifluous neologism ‘ze’.

This explains the first ‘ze’ in the title, which corrects the crass oversight committed by Lancelot Andrewes et al. who dared refer to Jesus as ‘he’ in their grossly outdated version of the Bible.

While I wish I had come up with the ‘ze’ breakthrough, I must give credit where it’s so richly due. But I can claim some for myself too.

For the same sample phrase mentions ‘his mouth’, which undoes some of the good work by being unacceptably gender-specific. Yes, a ready-made solution can be found in the ubiquitous word ‘their’, now doing the sensitivity job in addition to its own.

However, while the phrase “And ze opened their mouth…” is unobjectionable in terms of either sensitivity or aesthetics, it creates an unnecessary theological ambiguity. This involves the dual nature of Christ, the fact that ze is an hypostasis of the Trinity and other things too involved to ponder here.

Hence my ingenuous solution: replacing ‘his’ with ‘the’. But so many English words work at several tiers of meaning, and my second ‘ze’ is no exception.

Spelling ‘the’ that way makes it easy for our German and French EU friends to scale the otherwise daunting phonetic barrier of English interdental sounds. This second ‘ze’ thus strikes a double blow for sensitivity to both gender-fluid and nation-fluid persons, whose plight happens to excite me with equal passion.

In general, as a lifelong student of English I welcome any new additions to this great language, especially those inspired by newfound empathy and sensitivity.

The innovations mentioned are paralleled in a guidebook Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity? sponsored by Educate and Celebrate, an organisation funded by your taxes – and what better use can you find for some loose change?

The book is “much-needed” as an educational guide, according to Elly Barnes, the founder of Educate and Celebrate. “Not everyone identifies as male or female – that is fact,” ze said.

Indeed it is. Some people identify as male, some as female, some as neither, some as both, some as dogs and some as trees. Branding such people as abnormal would imply that there’s such a thing as the norm, which we know isn’t true.

After all, even the forward-looking St Paul acknowledged that “there is neither male nor female”, although theological pedants will no doubt argue that the Apostle meant something other than gender-fluidity.

The next thing will be to correct the English language to bring together every possible variant of self-identification (provided we keep those who identify as dogs apart from those who see themselves as trees), but at least a step has been made in the right direction.

Or rather many steps, for the book also comes up with other suggestions to facilitate “medical transitioning for children aged seven and above”.

My personal favourites, apart from the beautiful coinage ‘transitioning’ itself, include such essential words as “cisgender” (children who stubbornly identify with their original sex), “genderqueer” and “panromantic” (children ready to jump anything with a pulse and a few things without).

How can anyone not feel overjoyed about the new blood injected into our tired old tongue? One person who can’t contain himself is Peter Tatchell, that heroic campaigner for every perve… sorry, I almost let slip a word that ought to be excised from dictionaries. Equal rights, is what I mean.

“Giving people the ‘ze’ option is a thoughtful, considerate move,” ze said. “It’s about respecting people’s right to define themselves as neither male nor female.”

Cambridge wouldn’t be outdone by its old rival, as proved by Sophie Buck, the welfare officer at its students’ union. Ze said: “Events start with a speaker introducing themselves using a gender-neutral pronoun.” ‘Themselves’ implies that the speaker suffers from the multiple personality disorder, which too must be respected.

By now you must be feeling terribly lost among the surfeit of things you must respect, to say nothing of a whole new lexicon with which such respect must be communicated. But don’t worry, I’ll keep you straight – and I don’t mean that the way it sounds.

I refuse to sit on the fence whenever this question is posed. My reply is a resounding yes and no.

Yes, if the sentiment is anti-Israel qua Israel. No, or rather not necessarily, if it’s aimed against this or that policy of Israel’s government.

Israel came into existence in the wake of a genocidal catastrophe. The awful aspect of it wasn’t just the crime itself but the wide spread of its perpetrators and accomplices.

In his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen destroyed the myth that most Germans didn’t know what was going on. But Goldhagen limited his inquiry to Germany only.

Another book ought to be written about the enthusiasm with which so many Eastern Europeans, all those Balts, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Romanians and so on, jumped on the Holocaust bandwagon. Their ardour in murdering Jews in zoologically cruel ways predated and exceeded the efforts of the Germans themselves, although, to be fair, it didn’t take them long to catch up.

The behaviour of Western Europeans was marginally better, but not wholly blameless.

Vichy France, for example, started deporting Jews before the Germans actually demanded it. And, while the Dutch are justifiably proud that a Dutch family hid Anne Frank, they should also be justifiably ashamed that a Dutch informer betrayed her and a Dutch policeman led her to the slaughter.

Yet another book should describe the sluggishness with which the Allies, including Britain, accepted Jewish refugees – this even after realising that slow hospitality meant quick death. Today’s Europe is much more eager to welcome migrants from Syria, although, compared to European Jews in the ‘30s and ‘40s, they’re much less imperilled and much more alien to our culture.

That lethal acquiescence, sometimes active participation, in genocide ran up a huge moral debt owed to Jews by what used to be called Christendom. Its – far from uniform and often lukewarm – support for the founding of Israel in 1948 was self-acknowledged as partial repayment.

Israel was established as an independent Jewish state in a region where its survival as Jewish, independent or indeed a state would always be touch and go.

The Israelis have created arguably the world’s best army, but the numbers game is stacked against them. It’s reasonably clear that without Western military aid the nation will sooner or later succumb to the kind of aggression it has successfully repelled five times in its short history.

That wouldn’t be any old military defeat. It would be Holocaust Mark II: we’re being served another demonstration, as if any more were necessary, of how Muslims deal with their enemies. Without cutting too fine a point, without Western aid, millions of Jews will again die horrible deaths.

That puts Western, especially US, support for Israel in a proper perspective. Opposition to Israel qua Israel and a concomitant campaign to withdraw Western aid, such as the one championed in the US by Pat Buchanan, is tantamount to a) repudiating the aforementioned moral debt and b) condoning genocide.

(Interestingly, however, the centre of anti-Semitism has generally shifted leftwards. For example, anti-Semitic scandals bedevil Labour, not the Tories. Considering the rabid anti-Semitism of Marx and other spiritual fathers of the Left, this isn’t surprising.)

This trumps the legitimate but tertiary strategic, idealistic or even religious considerations. That Jewish scripture is such a significant part of Christianity that our civilisation, and especially its morality, is referred to as Judaeo-Christian is an important point, but one largely invalidated by creeping secularism.

That Israel is the West’s most reliable, and sole democratic, ally in the Middle East is true but not indisputably valid. The West has no moral duty to support every democratic regime. Not all such regimes are benign, nor are all non-democratic regimes evil. Some of the former may well be anti-, and some of the latter pro-, Western.

As to strategic alliances, they’re by their nature fluid and not always dependent on political commonality. Britain and the US, for example, were allied with Stalin’s Russia and at war with democratic Finland.

Western support for Israel thus rests mainly on moral and thus unimpeachable foundations, while hostility to Israel qua Israel is definitely anti-Semitic with a strong genocidal tinge.

Moreover, there’s a longstanding tradition of using anti-Zionism as camouflage for anti-Semitism. Even in modern British papers, to say nothing of the Soviet papers of my childhood, one finds cartoons of Israeli villains indistinguishable from the Jews so lovingly depicted in Der Stürmer.

All things considered, equating hatred of Israel with hatred of Jews is bona fide. That, however, doesn’t mean that criticising this or that policy of Israel’s government automatically brands one as an anti-Semite.

Israel may be too socialist for some or not socialist enough for others. Some may believe it oversteps the boundaries of necessary self-defence, others may think it’s too reticent. And so forth, ad infinitum.

All this is part of a course charted towards the destination of free discussion. Deviating from the course means disavowing the destination.

However, the intellectual ship is cast adrift whenever someone like Pat Buchanan or Jeremy Corbyn opposes, if not in so many words, the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state for which multiculturalism spells slow death – and withdrawal of Western aid, instant extinction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our papers are filled with Muslim apologetics, essentially saying that there’s nothing about Islam that can possibly prevent its exponents from effortlessly adapting to any Western society.

This claim is an article of secular faith and therefore impervious to rational argument, appeals to history or Islamic scripture and indeed the avalanche of empirical evidence before our very eyes.

That last should by itself clinch the argument for anyone who genuinely desires to find the truth rather than merely ventilate an ideological bias. Rather than inclusivity and pluralism claimed for Islam by the Oxford imam Dr Hargey et al., Islam manifestly promotes resentful particularism.

After all, the conditions of virtual apartheid in which so many British Muslims live are self-imposed, rather than thrust down their throats by an oppressive government. Anyone who wishes to become British in every other than just the legal sense can do so without hindrance, and I would be the first one to cheer.

Life within those self-imposed ghettos isn’t necessarily all bad. In fact, there are many things in Islam that we might envy.

Respect for one’s elders and the tradition they embody, the importance of family, widespread worship, contempt for drunkenness, drugs and pornography – these are all admirable, taken one by one. However, when mixed with less admirable features, they add up to a civilisation that’s incompatible with ours.

It was the Russian philosopher Valdimir Soloviov (d. 1900) who remarked that too many Christians aren’t true to their great religion, while too many Muslims are true to their bad one. Such devoutness isn’t always voluntary.

Unlike Christianity, which was spread by suicidal missionaries, Islam was spread by homicidal warriors. Coerced conversion was the order of the day, and Muslims have never been encouraged to question their faith – and always discouraged to leave it. The punishment for apostasy is death, and good Muslims still don’t regard this as a quaint anachronism.

There are some 300 verses in the Koran, conservatively counted, that prescribe violence, plus 41 calling for jihad. Unlike the violent passages in the Old Testament, these are all open-ended, not tied into a particular situation or historical context.

This alone – before we’ve even begun to discuss Muslim matrimonial practices, treatment of women, dress code and some such – should suffice to show that Islam, for all its sterling qualities, cannot be automatically presumed to foster traditional British moderation in its adherents.

This isn’t to say that all Muslims are avid killers of infidels and apostates. Far from it. Some of them are Muslims in the same sense in which Leon Trotsky was a Jew or Richard Dawkins is a Christian.

They were born to a faith whose practices they don’t really follow and whose dictates they don’t necessarily obey. Such Muslims may indeed be really moderate – what they aren’t is really Muslims.

The argument that violent Muslim zealots constitute only a minority doesn’t quite wash either, even though I’m sure it’s technically true. Every outburst of mass aggression has always been instigated and led by a small cadre of impassioned elite turning the inert masses into lemmings.

This holds true for the American Founders who professed to be acting on behalf of the people, whereas most of the people were either indifferent or downright hostile to their cause.

It was the case with the handful of French and Russian revolutionaries who then proceeded to annihilate millions of those in whose name they were allegedly acting.

It’s also true of ‘Islamism’, which is the PC for Islam.

There’s nothing new about these comments, heretical as they may sound to modern ears half-deafened by progressivist din amplified by the newly hatched (and often legally enforced) PC orthodoxy.

A few decades ago even schoolchildren would have shared the common perception of Islam, as enunciated, among many others, by Winston Churchill: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith.”

Today’s commentators can’t express themselves so forthrightly in the mainstream press. They’re expected to profess acceptance of Dr Hargey’s assurances that Islam is inclusive and pluralistic. Only the inveterate cynics among us dare say “Yeah, yeah, known for it”, and then only in private or at best on line.

I don’t think our papers should open their pages to Muslims and their apologists when they utter demonstrable falsehoods. Freedom of the press doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, protect freedom of alien propaganda full of deliberately misleading lies.

Such openness makes us strategically vulnerable. Public opinion still matters in Britain and, while few readers of our newspapers are likely to develop particularly warm feelings about Islam, many may well accept the mythical difference between Islam and Islamism as real.

If sufficiently widespread, this public sentiment may have an adverse effect on policy, if only by giving our congenitally vacillating government an excuse to replace muscular response with, at best, police action.

Meanwhile, Mrs May gave a dressing-down to Boris Johnson for daring to say that the Saudis are involved in all sorts of beastliness by proxy. The ensuing debate revolves around the trade deals Mr Johnson’s frankness may jeopardise, rather than on whether or not his statement is true.

Post-truth society indeed.