Poppy Daze

Another day and the swooping wrecking ball of outrage swings low over the land. Yesterday was like all the bottled up bile of the weekend bubbling up biliously and spewing itself over the newspapers and social media. First off, the Poppy Nazis – people who are angry if you don’t wear a poppy and believe that not to so do is mocking those who died. Those who – it is often tediously repeated – died to defend your right to freedom of expression. The face-palming irony of it all. They didn’t, though. They went to war for far less well-defined reasons and their memory, while it is deserving of respect, in no way commands it.

If you believe, as @crimesofbrits seem to do, that their deaths were acts of post-colonial hate crime brought on by the arrogance of British expansionism then, as warped as that view may seem to you, it is their view. You don’t have to respect it, but you can’t deny them the right to hold it, however misguided you believe it to be. As soon as you start to shut down or shout over opinion – as we are all guilty of at some time in our lives – you provide justification for the leftist trope that freedom of speech does not include freedom to offend. Except it surely must.

While white Britain, especially male white Britain is fair game for all manner of organised and prolonged hatred the very opposite applies to one particular preserved sub-variant of humanity; the muslim. It has been ordained from on high that we have reached nowhere near the required number of bloody atrocities for anybody to officially raise even a murmur against islam. To which end even tin-pot dictatorships like British Gymnastics feel the need to toe the party line – the Communist Party line, I’m assuming – and censure Louis Smith for a joke.

They are right in a way though; islam is not a joke, it is an invasive, doctrinaire, human-hating affront to civilisation which, alongside other religions has wrought little but misery on mankind since its inception. But speak out against it and you are labelled ‘islamophobic’ as if that was a bad thing. Listen, you are right to be afraid of islam, there is nothing irrational about it, just as there is nothing rational about believing in the literal word of a non-existent god. islam is against all reason and it must be mocked for its obdurance and utter lack of perspective.

Brendan O’Neill, as always, puts the case particularly well. And while mechanisms of state are still cowed before the muslim council and desperate not to make a stand, they must realise that attacking those who do openly oppose this alien way of living can only take the country in one direction. Who knows, maybe the government would prefer insurrection and rampant vigilantism from those most directly affected by the invasion; it makes the establishment look tolerant. Well done British Gymnastics, you may just have precipitated a holy war.

Latest government statement on sharia councils

But if that doesn’t do it then islam is more than ready to provide ever more fuel for the fires. The issue has never gone away but this week sees some tentative moves to quantify and codify so-called sharia councils. They act outside of British society, British laws and British interests; this much is indisputable. As always, the official line seeks to mollify this vexatious phenomenon by suggesting the estimate of around 80 such bodies to be an exaggeration. At a guess I wouldn’t be surprised to discover there were this many in Birmingham alone. Watch this space...