More about Khalid Masood. A former colleague says he wasn't interested in politics

Given that some journalists have more or less decided that the Westminster killer was a militant of Islamic State, that he was ‘radicalised’ in prison and that his motives were axiomatically political (there is evidence for none of these claims) , I just thought this report in ‘The Guardian’ today was interesting. It is, as anyone can see, a partial account by a person who isn’t wholly disinterested. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/28/westminster-terrorist-khalid-masood-wasnt-an-islamist-says-ex-boss

It’s evidence, not proof, but given the grave shortage of hard evidence of any kind, it is surely interesting to anyone interested in these matters. Yet it has attracted very little attention. I thought I would give it a bit more.

 

Perhaps it will spark other revelations.

 

 

Thoughts on being liked on Facebook, by a man accused of murder

In another very different context, my late brother once recalled William Butler Yeats's alarming poem 'The Man and the Echo' . The poet, beloved by many Irish nationalists at the time of the rebellion against British rule,  feared that his words might have led others into doing terrible things.

‘All that I have said and done,

Now that I am old and ill,

Turns into a question till

I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right.

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

Did words of mine put too great strain

On that woman’s reeling brain?

Could my spoken words have checked

That whereby a house lay wrecked?

And all seems evil until I

Sleepless would lie down and die.’

My brother was dismayed and in some turmoil because a brave and idealistic young American, inspired by his writing and speaking, had volunteered for war in Iraq and been killed fighting. Of course this appears at first to be a great compliment to the power of his tongue and pen, and indeed in a way it is. But it is also a great burden.

I do not envy him the responsibility. I have myself said (quoting a fine prayer written by the late Eric Milner-White) that those who write where many read, and speak where many listen, had best be careful what they say. I know that people pay more attention to me than I might think justified, as I am no more than a jobbing scribbler, not a guru, priest or philosopher.

I sometimes receive touching and moving letters from people who tell me that something I have written or said has helped them to an understanding of the world. I tend to think that I have merely crystallised their own thoughts. The most enjoyable books, in my experience, are the ones which tell you what you already knew, but more clearly than you knew it. It is seductive, and helps the reader to be more articulate. But very few people want to read polemics by those they profoundly disagree with in the first place. To change your mind, you have to want to do so. Most don’t.  

That is one of the reasons why, when I have time for serious reading,  I read history above all things, which is full of things I didn’t know and constantly forces me to revise my position. It’s also why I try to cram my books with facts that will surprise readers. My books are of course arguments, but they would be worthless in my view if they were not also factual.

These days, now I have given up political engagement, I am not sure I would want my words to have any effect on anyone, apart from to make them feel they understand their place in the cosmos better. I think this is good in itself. The unexamined life isn’t worth living, and we cannot (as Jeannette Winterson rightly says in her book ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?) just be animals, contented with satisfying our basic material appetites.

 

We are so much more than this, potentially, that to be no more than consumers and pleasure seekers is to do ourselves actual damage.  A proper life requires some understanding of who we are and why we might be here, which is why the almost total collapse of Christian belief and worship has left so many, especially among the poor,  with empty lives without purpose or world-view. They also lack the literary impulse provided by the Authorised Version of the Bible, which clothed simple, powerful thoughts in beauty and gave the English-speaking peoples the language of glory and poetry, now lost.  

This is a long way round to my point, which is that the main suspect in the Quebec Mosque killing on Sunday night, Alexandre Bissonnette, 27, has named me as one of his ‘likes’ on his Facebook page. This has now been shut down but I believe an archived version can still be found by the diligent.

As the Canadian justice system is very similar to the English one, I am rightly constrained in what I say about the accused. I shall wait for the trial and for sworn evidence, and for the jury’s verdict, before discussing the case itself.

But I cannot think of anything I have written or said which might have impelled anyone to do the act of which Mr Bissonnette now stands accused.

 

I might add that among his other ‘likes’ are Mme Marine le Pen, the French Front National leader, my late brother Christopher and the atheist author Richard Dawkins.

I think this is an eclectic list on which almost anyone might find himself or herself. But as some people on Twitter have taken the trouble to point out (how kind of them!) that Mr Bissonnette named me on his Facebook account, I felt I should respond.  For the moment, this is all I can say. Perhaps there will be more once the matter has been tried before a jury. 

Some Thoughts On Donald Trump's First Few Days

I grow more and more baffled by the priorities of the news world. Last week the chief of Britain’s electronic spying agency, GCHQ, quit without warning or adequate reason. Robert Hannigan, we were briefly told, left his ultra-sensitive £160,000-a- year post after just two years for ‘personal reasons’ . Mr Hannigan is 51 and has previously worked as ‘director general of defence and intelligence’ at the Foreign Office. He can hardly have expected the GCHQ job to allow him to spend a lot of time at home with his family. One has to suspect a controversy. (***NOTE: On Monday 30th January Charles Moore in his Daily Telegraph column said Mr Hannigan had retired because of a 'family illness'. I have not seen any other reference to this, and was not aware of it when I wrote the article. PH***)

But far more has been written in the British press about the departure of Alexandra Shulman as editor of Vogue than about the departure of Robert Hannigan as boss of GCHQ.

Now we are all in a tizz about President Trump’s (frankly bizarre) executive orders about immigration.

Just because a lot of squeaky liberals are against these measures, it does not mean they are sensible or right. Indeed, this must be the wise person’s motto in dealing with all controversies of the Trump presidency.

As someone who has for some time openly expressed doubts about the virtue of universal suffrage democracy, and suggested ways by which it could be moderated, I am stuck in a paradox.

The people who are now most appalled by the effects of that universal suffrage democracy are exactly the same people who used to gasp or mutter ‘fascist’ when I suggested that it might have risks.

Yet here I am, annoying my own supporters by refusing to support or take part in the EU referendum, and expressing doubts about the outcome; and also annoying some of my regular readers by failing to fall in love with Mr Trump.

It isn’t Mr Trump’s politics that put me off. There’s no point telling me that he has been sound on some topic or other where we seem to share a view. I don’t think he really has any politics, apart from a vague and ill-thought-out opposition to free trade.  That’s why I am not specially heartened by the occasional sensible things he has said (and now retracted or forgotten) about Russia and NATO. I suspected, and events have so far proved me right, that the foreign policy establishment would rapidly turn him into a reliable Natopolitan,  gargling on about the need to defend Europe from a non-existent Russian threat.  

He is learning what his minders will put up with, and what they won’t. He managed to tame himself quite effectively during Mrs May’s visit, which I think will come to be seen as a premature mistake, over time.

His cautious behaviour was presumably caused by his desire to spend a night in Buckingham Palace and have his picture taken with the Queen. He is, I think,  in the White House as a rather grand souvenir-collector (he keeps the lunch-menus, we learned at the weekend) . I have long thought that when he has got enough such souvenirs, he will leave, and so become the first President to resign the office voluntarily.

The NATO issue was resolved because it really matters to his minders and doesn’t really matter to him. He’d like to have people tortured . He’s probably seen ‘Jack Bauer’ on the TV in ‘24’ saving America by torturing people. He may even get his ‘ideas’ from such shows) . His occasional escapes over the White House wall will in future be on other subjects, as we saw on Saturday. He can do damage, but as long as he does not upset the juggernaut of continuing policy, they can put up with quite a bit of this.

NATO *is* obsolete. A child could see it. You might as well maintain an alliance against the Austro-Hungarian Empire as maintain an alliance against the Soviet Union. Both have vanished, and their successor states bear no relation to the empires they once ruled.

Worse,  an alliance against Russia, which in 1991 withdrew into the narrowest borders it could possibly tolerate, has to be aggressive, not defensive. The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, writing in ‘Time’ magazine, is plainly greatly alarmed, saying : ‘Politicians and military leaders sound increasingly belligerent and defence doctrines more dangerous. Commentators and TV personalities are joining the bellicose chorus. It all looks as if the world is preparing for war.’ Mr Gorbachev is one of the last really big people alive in world politics. If he thinks so, it’s worth worrying.

NATO’s chief virtue was that it was unarguably defensive. Now it is an aggressive body, promoting the very tension it claims to soothe, like a quack doctor keeping his patient ill to ensure that he carries on buying the expensive drugs he sells, and attending the costly appointments.

 But Mr Trump has now clearly given up his childishly clear vision, and his sensible view that it is obsolete, , and become one of the conformist grown-ups, believing and repeating the official untruth. The Emperor has a very fine suit of clothes, after all. I’ve long thought and said the Andersen story about the Emperor’s clothes ended misleadingly. In real life the little boy and his family would have been attacked by the crowd, arrested, tortured and then (when the bruises had faded),  paraded to confirm that the Emperor’s new clothes were very fine indeed, before being exiled to some pig-farm.

Now we get this stuff about banning Muslims. My response? It just isn’t serious, even though it affects quite a lot of individuals very seriously indeed.  I am hilariously accused on this blog of being in some unexplained way a sympathiser with Islam, and no doubt what I say now will thicken and deepen this particular stream of ignorant, stupid drivel.  My actual position is that ,if the ‘west’ really wishes to limit the influence of Islam over its societies, it needs to rediscover the Christian faith in a big way. And that crude, ignorant attacks on Muslims themselves naturally make any intelligent open-minded person come to their defence when he can, whatever he thinks of their faith.

And as long as the ‘west’ doesn’t rediscover Christianity, it flails dangerously about, mistaking strength and wealth for virtue.  It puts its faith in reeking tube and iron shard, in bigger weapons, and in ‘tougher’ ‘securidee’ (which bears the same relation to true security as does ‘charidee’ to true charity), in consumer goods and in its own luxurious hedonism. This will not work. As I’ve said before, when George W. Bush used to say that Muslim militants ‘hate our way of life’, I could not forebear to chime in ‘But I also hate our way of life!’.

For I do. The ‘West’ only exists as a coherent part of the world because of the Christian morals,  and the extremely high levels of trust and lawfulness based upon them, which allowed Europe and the Anglosphere to develop as they have.  Islam has virtues (they have much, for instance, to teach us about hospitality and the care of the old). But Islamic societies have simply not managed to achieve levels of trust and law comparable to those in Christian lands. This could explain why Islam (if you discount oil) has not achieved any great economic success, why education,  publishing, freedom of speech and thought do not greatly flourish under its influence - and I am sceptical of claims of Islamic paradises in the distant past.

But our advantages, like our infrastructure and our other stores of wealth, material and moral, are inherited.  We are not replenishing them. We are wearing them out. We have drawn heavily on our balances and obtained a great deal of moral and political credit on the basis of a reputation won by others which we no longer deserve.

 In military terms, our scientific advances have stalled, if not gone backwards. Modern TV techniques combined with the methods of ‘people power’ which are increasingly the main weapon in international conflict, have completely (for example) neutralised Israel’s former military superiority over her neighbours. In Iraq and Libya we merely demonstrated that superior physical force can destroy but not create. Russia’s genius in Syria was to use its superior weaponry *alongside* an existing polity which could make good use of airpower. Our stupidity in Libya was to lend our airpower to the forces of anarchy, who knew what they didn’t want but had no ability to take advantage of the victory we gave them.

I see no sign that  Mr Trump, or anyone else in Washington or London, has yet understood this. His wild pledge to eradicate Islamist terror from the earth, at his inauguration, was actively alarming.  How can any mentally coherent person make such boasts? But it is dispiritingly similar to the rhetorical ‘we will find these cowards and punish them’ view emitted by Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, and British leaders, not to mention the French -  now living under an absurd and futile state of emergency which shows every sign of becoming permanent.

Since Mr Trump so famously doesn’t read, can someone arrange for him to have a late-night viewing of Gille Pontecorvo’s brilliant, rending film (based on researched facts and thinly fictionalised) about terror, counter-terror, torture and propaganda ‘The Battle of Algiers’.  Maybe he’ll miss the point. But perhaps he might get it, see what might be wrong with the Jack Bauer view of life, and so save us all a lot of trouble.

He is plainly listening to some establishment voices, even while appearing to be off the leash. This does not mean he is prepared to be sensible for its own sake (his Russian opinions, as discussed, were more sensible than those of the establishment), just that he will listen to others when the issue isn’t especially dear to his heart.  As he revealed his chaotic, illogical and foolish ‘extreme vetting’ plan, Mr Trump mentioned the September 11 2001 attacks as its ultimate justification. But most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. All of these are Arab countries with which the USA maintains close military and political relations. But none of these countries was on Mr Trump’s list, which did by contrast contain Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.  You got a sense of someone saying ‘OK, have your stupid immigration ban, if you must, as long as you don’t annoy these people while you’re doing it’.

Then there’s the question of whether Mr Trump should be a guest of the Queen. I find it hard to see a principle at stake here. Her Majesty has had to spend time with Martin McGuinness, with the appalling old waxworks who run China, with the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu, with Robert Mugabe (and plenty of other horrors who attend Commonwealth conferences). But I think it might be wise to set the visit quite a long way off, so that we have some leverage.  Mr Trump will understand that. It is Britain’s biggest asset in any bargain with Mr Trump, he really wants it, and it should not be given away until we can be quite sure we will get something in return.

Meanwhile I think events have so far shown that Mr Trump is pretty much as bad as he looked, but will moderate and restrain his behaviour whenever the issue at stake doesn’t really bother him. Not much to rejoice about but ,hey, this wasn’t my idea.

Drug Abuse and Violent Crime - is there a Link?

No Big Surprise

 

A police inquiry leaked to the German newspaper Die Welt suggests that the lorry killer who mowed down innocents in a Berlin Christmas market was under the influence of illegal drugs at the time, and may have been a drug dealer.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/15/anis-amri-high-ecstasy-cocaine-berlin-market-attack/

 

The article (in an unusual nod to the role of drugs in such incidents)  mentions the drug-troubled past of the two Abdeslam brothers, among the culprits of the Paris outrages in November 205. But it stops there. A pity. In fact drugs of one kind or another, legal or illegal, from marijuana to amphetamines and steroids, are involved in almost every European terror outrage, and almost every US rampage killing, of the last ten years, as I have detailed here. The Tunis killer had a drug record. So did the man who tried to shoot passengers on the Thalys train, the Charlie Hebdo culprits, the authors of the outbreak of terror events in Germany a few months ago, the San Bernardino killers, the Orlando killer. the Nice Killer,  the killers of Lee Rigby, the culprits of rampage shootings in Arizona, Colorado and many other places in the USA, Anders Breivik (steroids).

 

We know this (and the details are on this blog and searchable through the index or Google) because terror crimes and rampage crimes are more thoroughly investigated by police and media than other crimes. I looked, often in foreign media, for this evidence, and found it. Anyone else could have done so. They didn't because, in the USA, rampage killings invariably lead to squawks for 'gun control' whereas their European equivalents are invariably attributed to ISIS. Once people have blamed either guns or the NR, they are satisfied that they have explained the universe, and can relax their brains. Logically, people whose minds are this simple and this narrow should by now be calling for a ban on lorries. But they are not logical.

 

My suspicion is that drugs are involved in many 'normal' crimes, but go unnoticed because of the lack of attention. But see below for the argument. 

 

 

What we already knew of Anis Amri’s past, an illegal immigrant, thief, arsonist and jailbird, suggested strongly that he was, as so many of these rampage killers are, a petty criminal low-life type who used drugs.

So I am unsurprised by the new suggestions from Die Welt, as you should be. 

What does this mean?

 

First, here's what it does not mean.

I reproduce below an explanation, which is also a warning to the idiots who will now claim I have said something I haven’t

How Many Times Do I Have to Say it?

I am not defending Islam, And I am not saying there is a single cause for rampage killings.

This interesting posting (with emphases added) from Monday 7th December 2015 shows that I have been repeatedly making this clear for months. Yet I am still being accused of these things in comments posted today.

'....The other is the San Bernardino shooting,  in which 14 people died and 21 were injured by a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. This event was initially reported simply as a gun massacre, but has since been ‘nationalised’, as Sir Simon Jenkins says, by being classified by President Obama as a terror outrage. Is this wise or useful?

 

Maybe. Maybe not

Well, maybe. I keep an open mind on all such claims, though continue to insist on testable actual evidence of terrorist connections and motive, rather than unsourced claims and the whisperings of security men and their media patsies,  before accepting that they are in any way centrally directed. There’s also the usual talk of ‘radicalisation’, a speculation that doesn’t explain how even the wildest ideas translate themselves (as they do so rarely) into violent action.

The possibility that we may be dealing with unhinged people, not in full command of themselves, has been pushed into the background by the current preoccupation with Islamic State, which has now wholly replaced the (largely mythical) Al Qaeda, as the Official Octopus of global terror. This of course means nobody is looking into how they might have become unhinged, preferring to trawl through their travel, phone and computer records in the hope of finding some link between Raqqa and San Bernardino, just as we once sought similar links between every terror outrage in the world and an imaginary cave in Afghanistan.

Islamic State does certainly exist in Syria and Iraq, but I think we must be free to doubt how closely its distant franchises are linked to the central body. Also, if Islamic State wishes to strike at the USA, why would it choose to do so at a centre for the developmentally disabled in Southern California? I’ve struggled to learn much about the row Farook and Malik appear to have had with another guest at the party at the centre, before leaving to fetch their guns and bombs. Such things, surely interesting to any crime investigator searching for motive, get lost once ‘terror’ is the explanation.

Well, now look at today’s ‘Australian’  

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/san-bernardino-massacre-a-hatred-beyond-reason/news-story/5af7a1b4463bc493a852a0f634a73ab5

This opens : ‘Spilt across their cluttered kitchen counter was the last meal enjoyed by Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook. Along with orange juice and paratha bread were bottles of Adderall and Xanax pills, prescribed to steady the nerves.’

 

Who says this is the explanation? 

Who says they were ‘prescribed to steady the nerves’? Who knows that they were prescribed at all? Who says this was their purpose? Maybe an interview with the doctor involved was cut out at the last minute, but this seems to me like jumping to conclusions. Maybe the pills were prescribed.   But the misuse of Xanax is not exactly unknown. This amazing piece of presupposition allows the story to wander off immediately into all kinds of other directions.

What is Xanax, otherwise known as ‘alprazolam’? Why, it’s a member of the happy, happy benzodiazepine family.   Look it up.  Adverse effects include suicidal ideation, our old friend. And its ‘paradoxical reactions’ (that is, those you might not expect from a drug marketed as a tranquillizer) are aggression, rage , hostility, twitches and tremor, mania, agitation, hyperactivity and restlessness.

As for Adderall,  this is an amphetamine, of all things, mainly prescribed to children alleged to be suffering from the mythical complaint, ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ or its equally phantasmal relative ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’.  No objective diagnosis has ever been established for these complaints yet they are ‘treated’ with powerful mind-altering drugs. Amphetamines are totally banned in some countries, and heavily restricted in almost all jurisdictions. 

Malik and Farook had a six-month old baby, but even American ADHD/ADD fanatics have yet (I think)  to begin prescribing their ‘medications’ to children so young. So we have to wonder what it was doing in their home. I know there is an increasing habit of 'diagnosing' adults with ADD, the child market having become saturated, but some of these drugs leak out of the legal market

Very high doses can result in psychosis, involving delusions and paranoia. A Wikipedia article says ‘Recreational doses are generally much larger than prescribed therapeutic doses, and carry a far greater risk of serious side effects’.

Interestingly, its use is contraindicated in people suffering from severe anxiety, the same people who might be prescribed Xanax.  

I mention these things here, and place them in a proper context, for reasons well-known to regular readers. There appears to be a reliable correlation between outbreaks of homicidal violence (including violence classified as political) and the use of mind-altering drugs, whether legal or illegal. If we don’t investigate it, we will never find out of it is important.

 

Don't Dare Tell Me I am Trying to Excuse Crimes

Please don’t tell me I’m trying to excuse crimes, or take the heat off Islamist fanaticism. I am not. Not merely have I not said that I am, which ought to be enough for anyone short of the Thought Police.  I am here saying that I have no such motive. Please don’t tell me I’m offering a single cause. I am not.

 

*&*&*&*&*&*

This article from the archive, on jumping to the wrong conclusions, is also useful:

 

 

He wasn't No Terrorist, Bruv - reflections on the Leytonstone Knife Outrage

Back in December 2015 there was an extraordinary and disturbing incident at Leytonstone Underground Station in London. I noted briefly in my column of 13^th December 2015: ‘THIS is all I'll say about this because it seems to me the facts are so devastating. But in all three recent cases of dangerous public violence, yet again, mind-­altering drugs are involved. Robert Dear, suspect in the killings in Colorado Springs, was a cannabis user. The flat of the culprits in the San Bernardino shooting, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, contained bottles of a benzodiazepine - whose 'paradoxical reactions' include rage, hostility, aggression and mania - plus amphetamines, which can produce delusions and paranoia. And the alleged culprit of the Leytonstone knife attack, Muhaydin Mire, was a normal young man until he started smoking cannabis, after which he became mentally ill. Please may we have an inquiry into this correlation?’

I shall now say more. The marijuana element was quite specific (as it was in the Rigby murder, as I have often pointed out, and several other incidents classified as terrorist) . The Times of London had reported on 9^th December  ‘The alleged attacker's brother, Mohamed, said that he had been treated for cannabis-related "mental health issues" in 2007, but that he started behaving oddly only after finishing as an Uber driver last summer.’ The Daily Telegraph had reported on 8^th December : ‘THE family of the terror suspect accused of the London Underground knife attack raised concerns to police three weeks ago over his mental health, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

‘Relatives of Muhaydin Mire, 29, had growing fears over his behaviour and asked the Metropolitan Police whether officers needed to intervene, it is understood. Last night Scotland Yard admitted it had been in contact with a family member before Mire allegedly knifed a passenger at Leytonstone Underground station, shouting "this is for Syria".

‘The family is understood to have told officers they wanted Mire committed under the Mental Health Act.

‘Mire's brother, Mohamed, said last night: "He was saying odd things, talking nonsense and saying that he was seeing demons." However, the Met Police attempted to defend their lack of intervention, claiming in a statement sent to The Daily Telegraph that "there was no mention of radicalisation".

‘The statement said: "The police were contacted by a family member approximately three weeks before the incident on Saturday. There was no mention of radicalisation; the conversation related entirely to health related issues and the family were therefore correctly referred to health services for help." Mire has been interviewed by mental health specialists and is undergoing assessments while awaiting a court appearance at the Old Bailey.

‘Mohamed Mire told how his brother came to Britain when he was 12 from Somalia and went to school in Camden, north London.

‘"He was a good boy and he loved football. As far as I know he loved education, he wanted to be a computer scientist," he told Channel 4 News. "It didn't  work out for him. He got in with the wrong people." He said that his brother developed mental health problems after smoking cannabis: "He was diagnosed by a doctor and treated in 2007 for paranoia and [treated] in hospital for three months." Mohamed said that his brother had been working as an Uber driver, but in August this year his mental health worsened once again.

‘He said: "He went a bit crazy, he was saying odd things. I explained to the family the situation, we tried to get him help, we tried to call the local authority. They could not help him. We tried to tell them - this guy has mental issues, can you at least section him. I talked to the police. And then I decide to move him out of the country, so I called my mum [who lives in Somalia] and she told me to take him out the country to help him out. So I decide to book tickets for him this Sunday."’

The Daily Mirror of the same day reported ‘His brother Mohamed said the Uber taxi driver had mental health problems but authorities "could not help him because he wasn't a harm to people".

‘Mohamed said: "He was saying odd things, talking nonsense and saying that he was seeing demons."

‘He claimed his brother started smoking cannabis and in 2007 was diagnosed and treated for paranoia in hospital for three months.

‘But he said Mire's mental health worsened in August. Mohamed went on: "He went a bit crazy, he was saying odd things. I explained to the family the situation, we tried to get him help, we tried to call the local authority. They could not help him. We tried to tell them, 'This guy has mental issues, can you at least section him?' I talked to the police."’

And added: ‘Last night Scotland Yard admitted it had been in contact with a family member before the stabbing. A Met Police statement said: "The police were contacted by a family member approximately three weeks before the incident on Saturday.

"There was no mention of radicalisation; the conversation related entirely to health-related issues and the family were therefore correctly referred to health services for help." ‘(my emphasis).

 

The incident was widely treated as a fundamentally terrorist episode originating in political or religious fervour. Much was made of a passer-by who had called at Mire ‘You ain’t no Muslim, Bruv!’. This person was praised by the prime Minister, presumably for demonstrating something most intelligent people knew already – that most Muslims aren’t terrorists and don’t have any plans to slit our throats. 

But in today’s papers, (9^th June 2016) which reported the conviction of Mire for attempted murder, things were a bit more confused.

 

Deliberate, eh?

While none of them (as far as I can find) mentioned Mire’s cannabis habit, the Daily Telegraph noted, very oddly: ‘…a British police chief warned that Isil was deliberately encouraging (my emphasis) people with mental illnesses to carry out terror attacks, after a man suffering from psychosis was convicted of trying to behead a Tube passenger.’

This is a strange thing to say. I myself would love to know how Isil, Isis, Daesh, so-called whatever, was doing this deliberate targeting. Is it transmitting to them on those special wavelengths which crazy people believe are always giving them instructions? Are we in the world of tinfoil hats?

Well, I’m not sure, because you also need to read this account in The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/08/leytonstone-knife-attack-man-convicted-of-attempted

Especially these parts :

‘The Guardian understands that Mire was not on any database of suspects or known extremists, and is not believed to have been exploited by any known terrorist group or individual.’(My emphasis).

 

And:

 

‘Despite police initially classing it as a terrorist incident, there was no meeting of the government’s crisis committee, Cobra, which has convened after other terrorist attacks, nor statements from the prime minister. Mire is believed to have acted alone, and there is no evidence he acted under direction or as part of any network.(My emphasis).

‘After the verdict, police said they no longer classed Mire’s actions as terrorism. Cdr Dean Haydon, head of counter-terrorism for Scotland Yard, said: “I would not class it as a terrorist incident now.” (My emphasis)

 

‘Haydon said the attack was not politically motivated but down to Mire’s mental illness. (My emphasis).The attacker had been inspired by Isis propaganda, which posed a danger to the vulnerable.

Haydon said it had been right to treat the attack as potentially terrorist at the start because of words uttered by Mire, such as “Allahu Akbar”, and his comments about Syria. That impression was buttressed by the material detectives found on his phone.

‘But subsequent inquiries did not support Mire’s actions being part of a political, religious or ideological cause, which is the definition of terrorism. (my emphasis) Nonetheless, Haydon said Mire had been inspired by Isis material he downloaded on to his phone to commit violence.

“Whilst Mire has not been accused of any terrorist offences, it would appear from comments he made at the time of the attack and the content he had downloaded on his phone that he may have been inspired by extremist ideology,” he said.

“Part of their propaganda is specifically targeted in relation to the vulnerable. We’re not just talking about mental health here, we’re talking about vulnerable individuals within the community. As a result of what I would call inspiration as a result of that propaganda, we are seeing more and more lone actors. Spontaneous volatile extremists is another term.”

‘Mire had a history of mental illness and was experiencing paranoid delusions a month before the attack. He had missed an appointment with a community mental health team four days before the incident on 5 December 2015.

‘I think this is having it both ways and neither. The police attitude mingles unequivocal statements that Mire was not part of a political, religious or ideological cause. Then it veers into saying that he may been ‘inspired by extremist ideology’.’

If he was ‘spontaneous’ how can he also have been influenced? Don’t we all know that mentally ill people attach themselves to religious and political movements – but that by doing so they do not suddenly obtain rational motives for their actions, merely a more grandiose form of expression, which they might equally well have found in anything else that came to hand?  Islamic State propaganda may well have reached Mire’s mind. But had he not been mentally ill this would not have impelled him to attack a total stranger with a breadknife in a London  Tube station. Mental illness, following heavy drug abuse, was behind that. Perhaps if this were better understood, and we were not so focused on terrorism as the main threat, the authorities might have paid more attention to Mire’s family when they begged for an intervention three weeks before the crime.

Some idiot will here attempt to suggest that I am trying to excuse or minimise the role of Islamist fanaticism in terror. That idiot always does, and nothing I can say will stop him. But this is quite false.  I have no possible interest in doing so. My interest is in noting the very remarkable correlation between violent incidents, classified as terrorist and therefore subject to unusual scrutiny, and the sue of mind-altering drugs by their culprits.  

Once again, let me explain that I am not saying that all terrorists use mind-altering drugs (though I think many do). Nor am I suggesting that all users of mind-altering drugs are terrorists. So don’t write to me as if I had said either of these things which I have not merely not said but specifically stated that I have not said.

 

I am saying that in this subset of violent crime, in which the media take an unusually detailed interest, we find that the culprits are often mentally ill and often users of mind-altering drugs. This suggests that it would be wise to investigate all culprits of violent crime to discover how strong this correlation is.

 

I add as a footnote to this the story of another terrible event, this time fatal. It concerns the wholly unprovoked and horrible killing of Justin Skrebowski in a shop in the town of Abingdon, also last December. It is, literally, the sort of thing that can now happen to anyone in this country at any time. Here is one accounthttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3627756/If-way-stabbed-Chilling-words-schizophrenic-high-legal-high-Spice-killed-antiques-expert-61-Poundland-shopped-balloons-celebrate-wife-s-birthday.html

This was not by any stretch connected with terrorism or Daesh. Instead, the supposed solution is to make knives harder to get hold of, an enterprise which I fear has little chance of success. Yet only one story mentions the culprit’s use of *synthetic* cannabis, though it is noted that he had been mentally ill for years. I was more or less sure when I first heard of this event that the culprit would turn out to be a) mentally ill and b) a drug abuser. I think I can also say that, if anyone looks into his past, his mental illness was preceded by regular use of the supposedly ‘soft’ drug, cannabis. But as he is not a terrorist, such inquiries are unlikely to be made.

 

PETER HITCHENS: Amid the bombs of Aleppo, all you can hear are the lies

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I AM the opposite of a war junkie. I loathe the sound of fireworks because they remind me of a bloody night in Lithuania in January 1991, where I lay down in dirty snow to save my skin from Soviet bullets. I was also frozen with fright in lawless, gang-ruled Mogadishu in December 1992, waiting for US marines to arrive.
In Bucharest at Christmas 1989, I crawled under the bed as tracer fire whizzed past my hotel-room window, and – because my long-delayed call home came through just then – I dictated my account of events to my wife. No heroics for me, thanks.
I was in all these dreadful places by accident. I never meant to be there. I take great care not to get caught in such things again.
But I learned a bit from it, mostly that the old cliche ‘the first casualty of war is truth’ is absolutely right, and should be displayed in letters of fire over every TV and newspaper report of conflict, for ever.
Almost nothing can be checked. You become totally reliant on the people you are with, and you identify with them.
If you can find a working phone, you will feel justified in shouting whatever you have got into the mouthpiece – as simple and unqualified as possible. And your office will feel justified in putting it on the front page (if you are lucky).
And that is when you are actually there, which is a sort of excuse for bending the rules.
In the past few days we have been bombarded with colourful reports of events in eastern Aleppo, written or transmitted by people in Beirut (180 miles away and in another country), or even London (2,105 miles away and in another world). There have, we are told, been massacres of women and children, people have been burned alive.
The sources for these reports are so-called ‘activists’. Who are they? As far as I know, there was not one single staff reporter for any Western news organisation in eastern Aleppo last week. Not one.
THIS is for the very good reason that they would have been kidnapped and probably murdered. The zone was ruled without mercy by heavily armed Osama Bin Laden sympathisers, who were bombarding the west of the city with powerful artillery (they frequently killed innocent civilians and struck hospitals, since you ask). That is why you never see pictures of armed males in eastern Aleppo, just beautifully composed photographs of handsome young unarmed men lifting wounded children from the rubble, with the light just right.
The women are all but invisible, segregated and shrouded in black, just as in the IS areas, as we saw when they let them out.
For reasons that I find it increasingly hard to understand or excuse, much of the British media refer to these Al Qaeda types coyly as ‘rebels’ (David Cameron used to call them ‘moderates’). But if they were in any other place in the world, including Birmingham or Belmarsh, they would call them extremists, jihadis, terrorists and fanatics. One of them, Abu Sakkar, famously cut out and sank his teeth into the heart of a fallen enemy, while his comrades cheered. This is a checked and verified fact, by the way.
Sakkar later confirmed it to the BBC, when Western journalists still had contact with these people, and there is film of it if you care to watch. There is also film of a Syrian ‘rebel’ group, Nour al-din al Zenki, beheading a 12-year-old boy called Abdullah Issa. They smirk a lot. It is on the behalf of these ‘moderates’ that MPs staged a wholly one-sided debate last week, and on their behalf that so many people have been emoting equally one-sidedly over alleged massacres and supposed war crimes by Syrian and Russian troops – for which I have yet to see a single piece of independent, checkable evidence.
When I used to travel a lot in the communist world, I especially hated the fact that almost every official announcement was a conscious lie, taunting the poor subjugated people with their powerlessness to challenge it.
I would spend ages twiddling dials and shifting aerials to pick up the BBC World Service on my short-wave set – ‘the truth, read by gentlemen’ – because it refreshed the soul just to hear it. These days the state-sponsored lies have spread to my own country, and to the BBC, and I tell the truth as loudly as I can, simply because I cannot hear anyone else speaking it. If these lies go unchallenged, they will be the basis of some grave wrong yet to come.

The one, sorry secret of being 'just like us'

I watched Muslims Like Us on BBC2 with grim fascination. Indeed, they were mostly like us, vaguely but pleasantly charitable, sweary, victims of all kinds of fashions in thought, clothes, language and sex.
And then they were not like us. One had an arranged marriage to a woman he’d never met, as far as I could see. All suddenly slipped into Arabic from time to time. One had attracted the attention of the authorities because of the passion of his views.
I could see his point when he upbraided his temporary housemates for not being very Islamic. They weren’t. He was. And I think most of us probably quietly hope that most British Muslims aren’t very devout.
But what really bothered me was the joke British person, in a bow tie, who was brought in to introduce them to Britishness, whatever that now is. There they were in York, looking at York Minster, one of the most moving and powerful buildings on the planet. I almost stop breathing whenever I visit it (I had the same experience amid the Islamic glories of Isfahan and Samarkand, by the way). But if Mr Bow Tie once mentioned Christianity, or suggested they go inside the great church, I missed it. And the Muslim party seemed wholly unmoved, as if they were being shown a furniture factory.
The sad fact is Muslims are only going to be like us if they sink, along with us, into the same state of ignorance and indifference about the past, and cease to take serious things seriously. Some of them may. But an important number of them (to their credit) never will.

Railways are the skeleton of civilisation. I have always loved them, and can never see why we have made such a mess of them by preferring to pour money into a rival system of nationalised roads which will never work. 

So can I just say how pleased I was last week when my home town, Oxford, got a beautiful new rail link to London? It can be done.

Last week I chided the authorities for ignoring the danger of power cuts imposed by mad Green dogma. I was wrong. They have a plan after all – you can pay extra to avoid having to sit in the cold and dark. 

Andrew Wright, a senior partner at the regulator Ofgem, says: ‘We are currently all paying broadly the same price but we could be moving away from that, and there will be some new features in the market which may see some choose to pay for a higher level of reliability. 

One household may be sitting with their lights on, charging their Tesla electric car, while someone else will be sitting in the dark.’

I am not making this up.

Things we really don’t need include an all-graduate police force, as is now being madly proposed. 

Graduates spend the first ten years in any job discovering that they don’t, in fact, know everything, while the non-graduates roll their eyes in despair. 

What police officers need is not a certificate, but the common sense that comes from years of friendly contact with the people they serve. A decent pair of walking shoes, or a bicycle, will provide that.

And they must learn to go out on their own again, instead of walking in unapproachable, unobservant pairs, chatting about overtime, while crime and disorder rage within feet of them.

 

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

 

An Interview about Laxatives, the EU, religion and laws about clothes

Some readers may find this interview 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVAnUaX9fBU

interesting.

 

Others may not. 

PETER HITCHENS: This farcical witch-hunt will drag British justice back to the Dark Ages

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Countries on the brink of madness are riven by whispered scandals about the powerful - some of them true, most of them not. Four years before the French Revolution, some tangled rubbish about a diamond necklace was used to smear Queen Marie Antoinette. Pre-1917 Russia seethed with obscene rumours about the monk Grigory Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra.This tittle-tattle helped to discredit the existing regime, and opened the way for a new order which was far, far worse. With us, there is a strange belief that a vast sex-abuse scandal, reaching high into the establishment, is being hidden by the powerful. The great thing about such claims is that they can neither be proved or disproved. And so those who doubt them can be condemned as part of the cover-up. You cannot be neutral. In a reversal of the normal rules on slander, an accuser can allege the vilest things about an alleged culprit, and yet not suffer at all.

He or she can also shelter for life behind legally-enforced anonymity. Meanwhile the accused are publicly humiliated, their homes absurdly searched – for what, exactly? This unjust lunacy reached its peak in 2014 when the then Home Secretary, a Mrs Theresa May, responded to a media frenzy by setting up an ‘Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’. It was a very silly idea. If crimes have been committed, we have a huge and expensive police and justice system which, to tell the truth, isn’t half as busy as it likes to pretend. This is because it has decided that so many things that used to be crimes aren’t crimes any more, so it ignores them. And immediately, because of the wild and fantastic nature of the claims, almost nobody could be found who wasn’t in some way disqualified to lead it. Ridiculously, that fine lawyer and judge, Baroness Butler-Sloss, was ruled out as chairman because she was ‘part of the establishment’. I bet the Baroness is relieved to be out of it now, but isn’t it ridiculous that the joke MP, Simon Danczuk, later to gain fame for his sexually explicit text message habit, was allowed to influence the matter? Now on its fourth chairman, this gigantic, foggy inquisition has just lost its chief lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, amidst a barrage of leaks and counter-leaks. Meanwhile most of those involved in the original scandal-mongering have suffered various embarrassing setbacks and aren’t quite as chipper as they were when they stomped around the land demanding a state-sponsored witch-hunt.

And Mrs May, who wants to be thought of as open-minded and willing to review the decisions of the Cameron government, now has the chance to review and reverse her own mistake. I do hope she does, and shuts the whole thing down. This gigantic kangaroo court, which is, incredibly, allowed to hear evidence against accused individuals without allowing any defence, is an embarrassing hangover from a bout of national lunacy. We are slowly recovering from it. The Metropolitan Police Chief who joined in far too keenly with the hunting pack has quit his post early.

A powerful new Channel 4 Drama, ‘National Treasure’ –in which Robbie Coltrane plays a showbiz giant brought down by abuse claims - is at least toying with the possibility that some of these accusations may actually be untrue and that some accusers may be hoping for gain more than for justice. About time too. For far too long media, police and – shamefully – the courts themselves have forgotten the rule which stands between us and tyranny – that an accused person is innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. It is no good saying that the crimes are terrible. Locking up an innocent person, or destroying his life with anonymous smears, is terrible too. And if we don’t stop doing it, we will soon cease to be a free country.

**********

If a small army of Islamist terror fanatics makes its base in a crowded city, and will not let women and children leave, it is very hard to know what to do. For instance, the Iraqi army was faced with this problem in 2014 when it sought to recapture the city of Fallujah from Jihadists. Nouri al-Maliki, then President of Iraq and so the West’s ally, used barrel bombs to fight ISIS terrorists in Fallujah. Pro-ISIS propaganda made much of the civilian deaths, but I don’t recall the USA, or the BBC, or the moralizing choir who now emote over Aleppo and shout ‘war-crimes’, saying much. Nor do we hear at all from these moralists about Saudi Arabia’s rather savage little war now going on in Yemen (using British munitions) in which more than 2,000 civilians are said to have died. There’s a similar problem over the severe criticisms of the Syrian government made by the USA’s diplomats and their mouthpiece, the BBC.

Near-identical repression of dissent in Bahrain and Egypt (currently our allies) passes with barely a mention. Their governments aren’t called ‘regimes’. Why is this? For instance, on a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s over-rated ‘Today’ programme, the presenter, Justin Webb, stated as a matter of fact that Russia ‘has no obvious interest’ in bringing the Syrian war to an end. How does he know? He then used that interesting phrase ‘some who think’. There are some (namely me) who think this is a BBC way of sliding an opinion into a place where it shouldn’t be. Anyway, according to Mr Webb ‘There are some who think they (the Russians) want it to go on and on and on in order to damage Europe with the flows of migrants’. No doubt there are, but who are they, and are they right, and why is Justin Webb smuggling this opinion (especially if it isn’t his) into a major news programme?

A BBC spokesperson says feebly that this is ‘news analysis’, but it looks to me like taking sides. From the start I have been shocked by the BBC’s partial coverage of this issue, and its willingness to be a conduit for war propaganda in Syria, as it was in Libya. This is important because we are being softened up for a war far more risky than that in Libya or Iraq. In Syria, western forces might actually find themselves in direct combat with Russian troops and planes. Can you begin to imagine how dangerous that could be for Europe and the world?

Please don’t be rushed into supporting such a thing, even by the BBC.

***

I am sorry that Jeremy Paxman has gone into the memoir business. Surely he doesn’t need the money, and, whenever anyone attacks his or her dead parents in public I always wonder what those parents would say if they were still alive. But I am glad of this confession from the man who so loftily looked down on so many interviewees: ‘It is not necessary to be an expert — why bother interviewing someone if you already know it all? ‘The presenter is there merely as the representative of the average, reasonably alert viewer. You only need to know enough not to ask spectacularly stupid questions.’ Really?

*****

Tories attack Jeremy Corbyn for wanting to renationalise the railways (in my view, his best idea). Well, they can hardly accuse him of too much state interference while simultaneously demanding government control over pudding portions in restaurants. Nice big sugary puddings in old-fashioned British Railways dining cars, that’s my policy.

PETER HITCHENS: Gold for Synchronised Sunburn and self-delusion goes to...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Imagine a country that isn’t very successful, but wants to boost its image in the world. Its economy is rocky, its cities grubby and run-down. Its education system isn’t much good.
So this country spends huge sums of scarce money and great effort to find young men and women who can win medals in international sporting competitions.
It carefully chooses sports where the competition is weak. It relentlessly drives the chosen athletes. And it works. At home and abroad, its image is transformed.
Its national media go into hysterics over each medal.
The people at home forget for a moment the dreariness of their lives.
The anthem plays and the flag flies high.
The country I am thinking of is East Germany, the self-styled ‘German Democratic Republic’. You may remember the superb figure skater Katarina Witt, who won Winter Olympic gold medals in 1984 and 1988, and a pile of other awards for her ghastly country in the years just before it collapsed in a cloud of rust.
What did her triumphs prove? Nothing much, except that state power can achieve sporting success. In which case, what is so joyous about it?
If sport is about anything, surely it is about individual achievement, not plans, budgets and political prestige.
What could be further from the burning individual talents and grit celebrated in Chariots Of Fire than some Ministry of Sport fulfilling its medal plan?
But what, deep down, is the difference between this episode and Sir John Major’s dash for Olympic gold which has now paid off in Brazil?
In fact, I think our state-sponsored medal programme may be worse in some ways than East Berlin’s because, as a free society, we had the power to question it and we didn’t.
It might also be worth recalling that Sir John’s much-praised initiative was financed mainly by the Lottery – in which a British government for the first time actively encouraged gambling, especially among the vulnerable poor, the main payers of this tax on false hope.
Indeed, Sir John’s legacy of gambling and debt, forced on students in the universities he so wildly expanded, may be his main memorial.
You may say, quite rightly, that I am jaundiced because I couldn’t care less about sport. My sympathies in Rio lie mainly with the empty, wet seats, which beautifully sum up my view of the Olympics.
But even if I were an enthusiast for Underwater Motorcycling, Bovine Ballet or Synchronised Sunburn, or whatever it is we currently lead the world in, I’d still have the same misgivings.
This is what failed and powerless countries do to make themselves feel better.
It is an illusion, and when it ends, things will be worse than they were before.

Tragic Victims of our deal with the devil

Who can fail to be moved and grieved by the sight of a small child in distress? But please do not let your emotions stop you thinking.
The picture of the shocked Aleppo survivor, Omran Daqneesh, like that of the drowned child Alan Kurdi last year, should not be allowed to enforce a conformist opinion on the world.
The death of Alan Kurdi did not mean that it was wise to fling wide the borders of Europe (as Germany’s Angela Merkel now well knows).
The rescue of Omran Daqneesh should not make us side with the bloody and merciless Syrian rebels.
Why is Aleppo a war zone in the first place? Do you know? I will tell you. Syria was a peaceful country until it was deliberately destabilised by Saudi Arabia and its fanatical, sectarian Gulf allies, consumed with hatred for the Assad government and, above all, its ally Iran.
Worse, this monstrous intervention was supported by the USA, Britain and France, all sucking up to the Saudis for oil, money and arms contracts.
In the hope of bringing down Assad, we made a devil’s bargain with some of the worst fanatics in the Middle East, people who make Anjem Choudary look like the Vicar of Dibley.
We know of Britain’s role for certain because of the very strange case of Bherlin Gildo, a Swedish man accused by British authorities of attending a terror training camp in Syria. His trial collapsed in June 2015 because his defence lawyers argued that the terror groups he was accused of supporting had been helped by British intelligence.
The Assad state, as you might expect, defended itself against its attackers, helped in the end by Iran and Russia.
And the war which followed was the ruin of Syria, whose innocent people found their peaceful cities and landscape turned into a screaming battlefield, as it still is.
If you are truly grieved by the picture of poor little Omran, just be careful who you blame.

Anjem Choudary, broadcasting’s favourite Islamist loudmouth, was and is a vain, bloviating, blowhard fraud, another boozy drug-taking low-life posing as a serious person. He found a role and fools to indulge him, many in the same media who now queue up to rejoice at his imprisonment.
But I do not feel safer from terror now that he is locked up. Worse, I feel less safe from Chairman May’s sour-faced surveillance state, which takes a dim and narrow view of free speech and liberty. Choudary has been locked up not for what he did but for what he said. Claims he influenced anyone into crime are thin. Even the sneaky wording of the Terrorism Act, in which he was charged with ‘inviting’ support for IS, is suspicious.
It sounds like ‘inciting’, and is meant to, for incitement to terror and murder is a real crime, even in free countries. But it isn’t the same as ‘inviting’, a much weaker word. You may gloat that Choudary is eating Islamic porridge. But be careful what you gloat over. A law as loose as this could easily be used against anyone the state doesn’t like. I predict that it will be, too.
By the way, I spent several hours last week circling Government offices trying to find out how many such charges there have been – the CPS sent me to the Justice Ministry, they told me to call the Home Office, who sent me back to the CPS. This pathetic pass-the-parcel evasion suggests they don’t care much. This stuff is propaganda, not genuine security.

******

A few days ago I took part in a recorded BBC debate on prisons, What Point Prison?, which will be transmitted on Radio 4 at 8pm on Wednesday

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pj2pk

 There was a startling exchange on capital punishment between me and Erwin James, a penitent convicted murderer much admired by liberals, who has now become a distinguished writer on prisons. You may be surprised at what he said.

 

The Hijab versus the Bikini

I am always risking wilful misunderstanding, and have grown to expect it and to be used to it. But it can also be frustrating. A few months ago I commented on the use of a hijab-wearing model by a British advertiser, and said this was significant, as it was. I was subjected to all kinds of thought-police interrogations whose aim was clearly designed to make me confess to some shameful phobia and (quite irrelevantly, since Islam is not an ethnic group but a religion which all may join) ‘racism’.

 

I confess that I became so scornful towards these questions that I said less than I would have done had they asked me intelligent things.

As I am old enough to remember when most Englishwomen covered their heads in public, often with not-very-elegant headscarves tied savagely beneath their chins as they bent to face the drizzle and the east wind, I find all kinds of odd emotions stirred by the sight of the scarf’s return on our formerly bare-headed streets. I certainly don’t feel an unmixed hostility, more a curiosity and a sort of respect.

I don’t know, and cannot tell, how much of the Muslim scarf-wearing is voluntary and how much is forced on women by husbands, imams and indeed the Islamic sisterhood, which – having embraced the veil in various forms for whatever reason – is no doubt anxious to see others do the same. It’s a kind of conformism. Squads of veil-wearers take to the streets in some Muslim cities, cheerily urging uncovered women to adopt the hijab or the niqab.  

 

Having grown used to it in London, I’m not even especially  bothered by the severity of the niqab, the full-face veil with a narrow slit for the eyes , so often wrongly described as a burqa. On a visit to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan I encountered the most extreme form of veiling, where the women’s heads seem totally covered with fairly thick cloth (they must be able to see out, but it is not obvious how) , and they look shockingly like walking corpses in their shrouds risen from the tomb. That I did find worrying and hard to look at.

But I also wrote the words below about a visit to Iran (to the Shrine city of Mashhad, where I was hospitably invited into several homes where some women were uncovered but others remained veiled). In the case I describe the woman involved, a schoolteacher articulately and rather fiercely defended her style of dress to me. I tried to reflect this in what I wrote:

‘ There is more than one Iran, and even the passionately Islamic version should not be dismissed with scorn or distaste, though some of it remains baffling or repellent to us. One of the most articulate and intelligent people I met was a young schoolteacher, the mother of a young child. It was clear that her relationship with her husband was that of an equal. Yet as we discussed propaganda in the classroom, I was greatly struck by her extraordinary, medieval, night-black robes, so intensely sombre that they darkened the well-lit room in which we sat and so emphatically, ferociously modest that they represented an unspoken, passionate argument against secular modernity and all its works.’

In writing that I did not alter by one jot or tittle my absolute opposition to Islamic ideas of marriage or of the legal status  of women. These can and do exist independently of any dress code. Nor do I believe that women are necessarily oppressed or repressed by modesty, provided that they choose it for themselves. On the other hand I remain totally unconvinced by those left-wing Western feminists who try to claim that the Muslim dress code is ‘liberating’. It certainly isn’t in their terms, and I believe they say this for the same reasons that Ken Livingstone and other British male leftists try to suck up to Islam. They think Islam is just a squad of voters which can be appeased into supporting the left’s project forever.  

But it is not. It is a very serious, very determined religion and if, one day , English women find themselves compelled to cover themselves in black shrouds to venture on to the street, it will be because a) we completely rejected any Western philosophy or religion which might have helped us pull back from the wilder bits of the sexual revolution, so ceding that task to Islam,  and b) we did not understand just how determined, uncompromising and tough a  religion can be , because we no longer have one of our own.

I was thinking of the Mashhad schoolteacher when I wrote my brief few sentences about the Egyptian beach volleyball player  Doaa Elghobashy . She says ( see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37009324 ) that her headwear is her own choice, and she seems to have had to battle a bit with the Olympic authorities to be allowed to wear it. Her team-mates remained bare-headed.

I am against this being a divide between the Muslim world and the West. I don’t see why Western women shouldn’t object for their own reasons  to the near-nakedness that (in some cases) they now come under pressure to adopt in certain circumstances. Is it really so empowering and liberating? Is it truly voluntary? If we can ask this about the hijab, we can surely ask it about the Beach Volleyball bikini.

I am also convinced that the ‘West’ will grow tired of the moral and sexual revolution, which has now been taking place without pause for about 50 years. Such moral counter-revolutions have happened before in  human history, or how did the Victorian age come about? And it is almost bound to happen again. Who will lead it? Last time it was people such as John Wesley, whose work came to fruition in Victoria’s reign. If we don’t find his successor, it will be imams who do so.

PETER HITCHENS: Grammar wreckers KNEW they would make our schools worse

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Here's why the quarrel about grammar schools never ends: it is not really about schools, but about what sort of country this should be.
Grammar schools stood for adult authority, for discipline, for tradition, for hard work first and reward afterwards, and for self-improvement. They also tended to assume that boys and girls were different, and so educated them apart from each other. I like these things, but many don’t.

Old-fashioned Labour saw the point of this. They realised that it helped the poor become better-off and to have better lives and more power. They created a peaceful revolution that changed Britain for the better. Labour councils used to build new grammar schools and be proud of them.

But the modern liberal Left don’t like any of these ideas. They would rather teach children how to have sex than teach them to believe in God. Especially they don’t think parents or teachers should have any authority over the young. The State should be trusted to tell them what to think. They should look to the State for any improvement in their lives.

They don’t like the idea that there are fixed things that you just have to learn – which is why the teaching of languages and sciences is shrivelling in our schools. The people who smashed up more than a thousand of the best state secondary schools in the world didn’t do it to make education better. They knew it would make it worse for bright children.

In one case, that of Sir Graham Savage, they openly admitted this. They did it to make the country more ‘democratic’, more like the USA. They have made it like the worst bits, but very unlike the best bits.

How odd it is to recall that in my childhood there was a thing called the ‘brain drain’, which meant British scientists being lured away to the USA because they weren’t educating enough of them. And in those days a set of English A-levels was said to be equal to an American university degree. It isn’t so now. The enemies of grammars really should stop lying about the subject to get their way.

They moan about those who don’t get into grammars. But what about the huge numbers who can’t get into good comprehensives, and are dumped in vast bog-standard comps which are, in reality, worse than the old secondary moderns.

Of course selection for any school has losers as well as winners. But we have selection in our supposedly comprehensive schools. It is mainly done through the secret privileges (fake religious belief, close knowledge of feeder schools etc) exercised by sharp-elbowed, well-off parents. How is this better than selection by ability?
A 2010 survey by the Sutton Trust found that comprehensive schools in England are highly socially segregated. In fact, the country’s leading comprehensives are more socially exclusive than the remaining grammar schools.

Both the 164 (then remaining) grammars and the 164 most socially selective comprehensives drew pupils from areas where about 20 per cent of children were from poor homes. But the supposed comprehensives were more socially selective, taking only 9.2 per cent of their pupils from poor homes, while the grammars took 13.5 per cent. Who’s democratic now?

In fact, most of the remaining grammars are so besieged by middle-class commuters hiring tutors that their entry figures are utterly distorted. If we still had a national grammar system they would be far fairer than the top comprehensives are.

I wish I thought Theresa May really wanted to restore grammars. This has been successfully done in the former East Germany. But I fear that this is just a token move to try to hold on the support of the many voters who want to see this change. Even so, it is a good deal better than nothing, and a sign that this dreadful national error may one day be reversed.

A modest victory for decency

Islam’s real challenge to Western society is not terrorism. With a bit of resolve and common sense we can always defeat this filthy thing, and most Muslims would (in my view) be as happy as us if we did.

No, the challenge comes from Islam’s near-total monopoly on things we used to value quite a bit and then totally gave up – female modesty being one of them. And yes, I know that plenty of other things, much more controversial, come with the package.

Pictures of Egypt’s veiled and covered Doaa Elghobashy, right, competing against bikini-clad Western opponents in the Olympic beach volleyball, are very thought-provoking.

You don’t have to go more than 100 years back to find Western women who would have had much more in common – in attitudes and dress – with Ms Elghobashy than they did with her near-naked rivals.

I often wonder if our society will sicken and tire of its seemingly endless relaxation of rules. Such things have happened before. If it does, the Muslim religion may be very well-positioned to lead the counter-revolution. I don’t want this to happen. I just think it might.

*****

Shouldn’t we have a formal ceremony, with parchment documents, trumpets and heralds, to declare that the ‘war on drugs’ is over? Then at least Sir Richard Branson would stop claiming tediously and inaccurately that we groan under a cruel regime of prohibition.

If the Government still seriously disapproves of illegal drugs, explain this: EU enthusiast and hereditary Labour politician Will Straw (son of Jack) has been awarded a CBE, a heavyweight mid-ranking honour one down from a knighthood, aged 36, despite being caught (aged 17) trying to sell cannabis to a newspaper reporter. Indeed, for many people this event is the most memorable thing about him.

He went on to boast that he had carried on smoking the drug for the next nine years.
There was a bit of a fuss about the award – but it wasn’t about the illegal drugs.
Stop pretending we are actually trying to do anything about this.

*****

Of course judges should not swear in court, especially at defendants. Justice is not emotional revenge, but a cold, rational process where we all try to keep our feelings out of it.

Judges hold the keys to the prisons. They can change a convicted person’s life utterly. To wield such power, they have to be cool and self-controlled.
In fact the person Judge Patricia Lynch swore at is pathetic, fat and lonely – a dismal life probably made worse by taking State-approved ‘antidepressant’ drugs, the failed panacea of our age. Stupid four-letter words are all that is left to such people.

Her Majesty’s judges shouldn’t stoop to such sad things. Only two kinds of people use this language in public. The powerful, who employ it to bully, and the inadequate, who have no other way of expressing themselves.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down