It was the current American VP Joe Biden who set the precedent.
During his 1988 presidential campaign Biden repeated word for word Neil Kinnock’s speech on being the first in his family to go to university. Sorry, it wasn’t quite word for word: Joe did replace ‘the first Kinnock’ with ‘the first Biden’.
Personally, if I wanted to steal somebody’s speech I’d choose a more illustrious model. I hope you won’t find me disrespectful, but I don’t think Neil was easily confusable with Demosthenes or even Churchill.
But one chooses rhetorical heroes after one’s own heart, on the basis of subcutaneous kinship lying deeper than facile oratorical skills, or lack thereof.
This may explain why Dave chose to plagiarise George W. Bush when commenting on the murderers of the British hostage in Iraq:
“They boast of their brutality; they claim to do this in the name of Islam. That is nonsense. Islam is a religion of peace. They are not Muslims, they are monsters.”
This repeats almost verbatim what Dubya declared after 9/11. He then proceeded, with Blair’s help, to unleash a stupid and criminal war that put paid to about a million exponents of the peaceful religion and inflamed millions more.
The statement was cosmically stupid and ignorant when first aired, and a repeat performance doesn’t make it any less so.
Of course they aren’t Muslims, Dave. They are Buddhists. We all know that. It’s the world’s 350 million Buddhists that have been involved in just about every armed conflict over the last 20 years, and hundreds of them over the last 1,400. It’s those saffron-robed chaps who can’t resist blowing up buildings and public transport. They are the monsters.
No? Then perhaps we’re ready to admit that not all religions are equal, that some indeed inspire peace and some – emphatically like Islam – don’t.
Calling Islam a religion of peace betrays improbable ignorance, especially on the part of someone as expensively educated as Dave.
From its very inception, Islam was rather weak on theology but strong on violence.
The former is a patchwork quilt of scraps ripped out of Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism or whatever else Mohammed could pick up with the ease of an autodidact.
The latter, however, was his hallmark from the very beginning, or at least since his move from Mecca to Medina. This explains why the later verses of the Koran are considerably more bloodthirsty than the earlier ones – but never mind the words, feel the deeds.
The founder of Islam wasn’t a crucified martyr who taught to turn the other cheek. He was a brigand and a military reader, adept at raiding caravans and sacking towns.
His creed proved to be the catalyst to violent conquest whose pace was unprecedented in history. Unlike Christianity, which was first spread by peaceful and usually self-sacrificial sermon, Islam was propagated by exactly the methods currently on display in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Here’s an excerpt from the earliest Muslim biography of Mohammed, showing that in addition to inspiring murder the Prophet wasn’t averse to committing it with his own hand:
“Then [the Jewish Qurayza tribe] surrendered, and the apostle [Mohammed] confined them in Medina… Then he sent for them and struck off their heads… as they were brought out to him in batches… There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900… This went on until the apostle made an end of them.”
The Muslims began as they meant to go on. The subsequent 1,400 years provide a detailed catalogue of violence, both of the geopolitical and common-or-garden variety.
Since the IS knife-wielders are undeniably followers of Mohammed, how are we then to understand the phrase ‘They are not Muslims, they are monsters’?
That Muslims are never monsters? No, that can’t be it. Not even Dave can possibly think so.
I get it. The beheaders, according to Dave, are indeed both Muslims and monsters, but they aren’t monsters because they are Muslims. They are monsters because they are Islamists, or, better still, Islamofascists.
Most Muslims, Dave would argue, don’t cut off people’s heads just for the fun of it.
That’s true. But if there ever has been a totally, self-evidently nonsensical truism, this is it.
There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Only 15 to 25 per cent of them are, according to Western intelligence services, radicalised.
Fair enough, 15 to 25 per cent is a minority. But if we graduate from proportions to absolute numbers, the picture becomes both clearer and scarier: there are up to 300 million Muslims out there who wouldn’t flinch at cutting your head off.
That’s quite a lot, but even the proportion is impressive: the Soviet Communist Party’s membership never even approached 10 per cent of the population, never mind 25. Yet the party managed to create a state that several times brought the world to the brink of extinction – and may do so again in the near future.
Our judgement of bolshevism isn’t clouded by the actuarial calculations of the radicalised proportion, and nor do we evaluate Nazism on the basis of the exact number of fanatics among the Germans.
We look at the two creeds’ deeds and pass a moral, rather than arithmetical, judgement: both are evil. Then why do we withhold the same evaluation from Islam?
We don’t. Even Dave doesn’t. He no doubt knows all the facts I’ve mentioned, and many of those I’ve omitted. In his Bullingdon days he wouldn’t have hesitated to pass an uncompromising verdict on Islam.
But in those days he spoke English, which he no longer does. He now speaks political, and the denotation doesn’t matter. Only the connotation does.
Allow me to translate from the political back into English. What Dave is actually saying is this:
“Hey, chaps, I know all about the Muzzies as well as you do. But you don’t need the Muslim vote to win the next election, and I do – even the tiniest proportion of it could make a difference.
“And it’s not just their vote. The Brits in some parts of the country are sick and tired of seeing their towns being turned into Kasbahs. Their resentment may spill out into civil disorder at any moment, and seeing a Brit beheaded by Muslims may just provide the spark.
“If that were to happen, where would the Tories – and, more important, I – be in the national election? Exactly where we were in the European one, in third place.
“If I said a word against Islam, this just might trigger off a public revolt in Bradford or Leicester. And even if it didn’t, imagine the capital Ed would earn out of it?
“I’d be accused of racism, elitism, little-Englandism, fascism, sectarianism, antediluvian prejudice and everything else you can imagine, including, against all evidence, homophobia.”
“Can’t have that, now can we?”
This is how our ruling class thinks nowadays. This is how it acts. This is what it is. Scary, isn’t it?