Do you feel offended by this statement? If so, I beg your forgiveness, even though I was simply stating a fact. So please don’t call the police to have me arrested for ‘racially or religiously aggravated harassment, alarm or distress.’

I’m not being crazy – our world is, and I know you’ve heard me say so before. Well, you’ll hear me say it many times again.

For Paul Griffith, 75, was arrested by armed police on that very charge for uttering the phrase in the title.

Going through airport security at Stansted, Mr Griffith was asked to remove his shoes. He complied, but in the process uttered the offensive, nay criminal, sentence above.

The security chap (whose religion isn’t specified in the news reports) felt mortally and racially offended, which I hope you weren’t when I said the same thing.

The uncharacteristically lackadaisical policemen turned up armed to the teeth, but allowed the pensioner to go on his trip. When he returned, they were lying in wait.

Mr Griffith was kept in airport detention for six hours, had his fingerprints and an oral DNA swab taken and was told to report to his local police station.

When he did so the next day, he was told that he had been charged with an offence under the Crime and Disorder Act. To be fair, Mr Griffith was then magnanimously offered to accept a caution, which is to say a criminal record.

When the wrongdoer refused, claiming he had done nothing wrong, the charge was made official and Mr Griffith was given a court date for a trial.

I’m with him on this one: he did nothing wrong. Mr Griffith simply denied any adherence to Islam, and his statement was factually correct.

Then of course he was charged not with lying but with a racial offence. Since we’ve already agreed that the phrase ‘I’m not a Muslim’ is semantically inoffensive, it must have been deemed criminal contextually.

In that context the phrase ‘I’m not a Muslim’ really meant something more than just a statement of religious disassociation.

In effect Mr Griffith was saying that, since he manifestly wasn’t a Muslim, he was statistically unlikely either to hijack or to blow up his flight to Malaga.

Implicitly he was thereby suggesting that this statistical probability was somewhat higher for Muslim passengers, as opposed to, say, Buddhist ones.

Otherwise he would have said, ‘I’m not a Buddhist’ or, for that matter, ‘…Taoist’, ‘…Zoroastrian’ or ‘…Presbyterian’.

Now if that’s what he really meant, as seems likely, then his contextual statement seems as factually correct as the textual one.

To verify this, I opened an appropriate Google page and scanned the headlines of the articles cited. Here they are, in the right order with none left out:

“Muslim Terrorist Who Detonated Bomb on Pan Am Flight 830 Freed from Prison”

“Canada: Muslim arrested after flight escorted back to Toronto – said on plane, ‘I just want to bomb Canada’.”

“Three British Muslims have been convicted of planning a series of co-ordinates suicide bomb attacks on transatlantic airliners, which could have killed up to 10,000 people.”

“British Muslims ‘planned to kill thousands by bringing down SEVEN transatlantic airliners in one go with liquid bombs’.”

“Three guilty of airline bomb plot: Tanvir Hussain, Abdulla Ahmed ali and Assad Sarwar”

“F-16 jets escort Toronto-Panama plane after Mohammadan ali Shahi bomb threat”

Then of course, bygones be bygones and all that, but it’s hard to forget it was Muslims who flew airliners into those tall New York  buildings, killing 3,000.

And – you’ll never know how it pains me to say this – it was Muslims who on 7 July, 2005 conducted a series of coordinated bombings on London public transport, killing 52 and crippling God knows how many more.

Muslims. Not Buddhists, Taoists, Zoroastrians – nor even Presbyterians, Lutherans or Ultramontane Catholics.

Hence Mr Griffith made a statement correct in every possibly way, explicit or implicit. Neither did it contain any rude words, threats or a general assessment of the Muslims’ moral character. It was purely factual, if ill-advised.

Yet he barely escaped a criminal sentence, possibly even a custodial one. In fact, the case didn’t get as far as the trial. Twenty-four hours before the gavel was to fall, the CPO dropped all charges, if with clearly perceptible regret.

Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor Frank Ferguson said: “In order to successfully prosecute a charge of racially or religiously aggravated disorderly conduct, we first have to show that the language used was threatening or abusive and in these particular circumstances we could not show that to the high criminal standard required.”

Don’t worry, Frank, you’ll get your man next time or, if not him specifically, someone like him.

After all, most mental disorders, including the one our society is suffering from, are degenerative, meaning they get worse with the passage of time.

Even a paltry 10 years ago an airport security man wouldn’t have called the cops under similar circumstances, nor would the cops have arrested the transgressor.

Ten years from now, and I’m being optimistic, a man like Mr Griffiths will be sent down, to spend a few years in the company of murderers.

Meanwhile, this lunacy has done little to endear the authorities, or indeed Muslims, to the rest of us. Quite the opposite, I dare say – but please don’t report me to the police.

 

 

 

 

 

“The abolition of God necessarily leads to the abolition of man,” wrote C.S. Lewis, ever the prophet.

True enough, half a century or so later we’ve developed a knack for talking about people not as individuals but as groups.

By doing so, we’ve jumped backwards, leapfrogging two millennia of our civilisation and landing smack in the middle of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman antiquity.

Rather than rejoicing in the Christian notion of the sovereign individual, we wallow in the defacing collectivism of modernity – and love it.

Group identity has replaced individual dignity, and any personal affront is instantly taken as an assault on the group with which the target identifies, especially if the group enjoys a minority status in public perception.

Hence women, who, in defiance of maths, are supposed to be a minority, and an oppressed one at that, routinely demand – and are given – certain privileges not on merit but simply on the strength of their being women.

Having ridden their sex to a particular job, such women then erect around themselves a protective wall to ward off any insinuations about their incompetence. Like Nato’s charter stipulating that an attack on one member is an attack on all, they accuse the insinuator of misogyny, not a legitimate gripe against a certain woman but hatred of women as such.

In that spirit, since I’m about to point out the cosmic incompetence of two of our female ministers, I hasten to offer this disclaimer: neither women nor men in general are fit to govern. However, some men are, and so are some women.

It’s just that neither Nicky Morgan nor Helen Grant is, and they both happen to have ministerial portfolios, for Equality (along with Education) and Sport respectively.

Helen is grievously hurt by the observation that some professional women athletes get paid less than their male counterparts.

As if setting out to vindicate my belief that the world has gone mad, she’s particularly upset about the gross discrimination suffered by female footballers. These ball-kickers, she claims, should be paid as much as the men.

This raises many questions, not least those about Miss Grant’s professional competence.

For example, which male footballers should be used as the standard to follow? We have in England four professional leagues: the Premiership, the Championship, the First and the Second Divisions.

The average salary in the Premiership is roughly eight times higher than in the Championship. In the Championship Division it’s three times higher than in the First, which in turn towers over the Second by a factor of two.

The same goes for those teams’ managers. Those working in the top flight typically get about £3,000,000 a year, as opposed to something like £50,000 in the Second division.

Presumably Miss Grant sets her sight stratospherically high, seeing in her myopic mind’s eye female strikers earning as much as Rooney or Costa. This brings to mind a purely commercial question.

Apart from the generosity of billionaire owners, football revenues come from ticket sales, TV income, kit sales and endorsements. Comparing, say, the FA Cup Final with a similar women’s competition, which do you think will be more commercially virile?

Don’t answer that. Instead answer another question: how can someone capable of uttering such stupid, ideologically driven statements be trusted with running the country? On second thoughts, don’t bother with that one either: there is no good answer.

Front-bencher Nicky Morgan was one of 161 MPs who opposed the legalisation of homomarriage in 2013, thereby defying her party leader Dave.

However, she has since changed her mind. If the vote were held today, Miss Morgan says, she “probably would” vote in favour. She now welcomes “anybody who enters into a commitment”.

Since she didn’t qualify the statement in any way, one could infer that she’d welcome marital commitment between mother and son or brother and sister. But let’s not indulge in such reductio ad absurdum.

Instead let’s wonder what has happened in the intervening year to make Miss Morgan change her mind.

Actually, there was no change. What passes for Miss Morgan’s heart was even then firmly on the side of Dave and all those who helped him push that subversive bill through Parliament.

However, she went against her deeply held convictions because her constituents were asking her to oppose the bill “by ten to one”. This is how Miss Morgan explains the decision-making process in a style that’s rather lamentable in someone who holds the Education portfolio to augment the Equality one:

“We are all, as Members of Parliament, here to represent, to listen, to hear, to change minds but I have a lot of constituents who asked me to vote in a particular way and I listened to them and it was an issue of conscience too.”

Leaving aside the disputable claim to possessing a conscience, one has to say that, for an Education Minister or simply a halfway educated person, Miss Morgan has little idea about her parliamentary responsibilities or indeed our constitution.

On the off chance that she’s one of the few politicians who ever read books, perhaps one could recommend she acquaint herself with the writings of Edmund Burke, who knew a thing or two about constitutional matters.

An MP, wrote Burke, should be the people’s representative, not their delegate. As such, his vote should reflect not his constituents’ wishes but their interests – whatever he judges those to be.

The underlying assumption was that voters sent to Parliament those they trusted to represent their interests, even if these diverged from their wishes. In his turn, an MP felt free to vote according to his conscience, a freedom that had been vouchsafed to him by the electorate.

Hence, if Miss Morgan’s conscience called for a vote in favour of that perverse legislation, she presumably felt that the law would be in the interests of the community she represented.

Hence, by acting on the voters’ wishes rather than their interests, she effectively betrayed their trust – not to mention the constitution of this country.

Sorry about indulging in such subtleties. They have no place in a nation governed by a parliament stuffed to the gunwales with self-serving, intellectually inadequate, morally corrupt nonentities.

 

Both male and female.