In the islammer

Mental. We all are. Bat shit, stark, staring, certifiable lunatics who should be locked away from decent society. Mental illness they say can strike anybody down. The media have been going to great lengths to portray the recent slew of attacks by muslims claiming to be acting for allah as the isolated, unconnected actions of lone madmen. The murder of nineteen inmates of a Japanese care centre a few hours ago will be seized upon by the media as some form of validation for this. See? They will say, madness and hate... nothing to do with islam. (It would of course be amusing if it turn out the suspect has recently converted to worship ‘Arrah’.)

The perverse world we live in keeps on turning and there are nutters everywhere. Human minds are malleable, sometimes fragile things and while there is far more perceived mental illness than real it is clear that some are more susceptible than others to the lure of La Lune. We all go a bit mad from time to time, adding the extension ‘mania’ to any number of faddish delights. “I’m mad, me!” giggle daft, drunken youngsters or slightly unhinged maiden aunts. “He’s mad for it!” they say of demented adherents of hedonistic pursuits. It’s everywhere, this mild form of madness.

In the US and now over here, mad can mean angry, but it can also mean hectic. In fact, mad can be pressed into service to describe anything other than – and I hesitate to use the word amid today’s insistence that there is no such thing – normal. Eccentric, not-quite-right, off-his-head, bonkers, fruitloop, psycho, schizo... maniac. There are dozens of terms for madness, from mildly afflicted to crazed, denoting any relationship with it from affection to fear. We look after the slightly mad, lock away the disturbingly mad and run away, terrified from those who act on their madness.

Moments of madness, however, are often excused, I’m assuming because of the ‘there, but for the grace of god (go I)’ principle. Crimes of passion, ‘losing it’, ‘senior moments’ all seem to recognise that one day we may all need this defence. The very word lunatic contains a ready-made vindication that we are sometimes powerless to resist the urge to lash out. In fact, despite all the contrary protestations, we are as a species exceptionally well disposed towards those who act on their inner voices, so much so that even when those lapses of reason extend to planning and acting upon an urge to kill and maim, we pretend that such unstable rages are potentially within us all.

But maybe we’re rather better than that. Think about it. Even among the ever-increasing range of clinical diagnoses of insanity, only a tiny proportion have to be chained up for the safety of themselves and others and an even tinier proportion still have gone full crazy and actually set out on a killing spree. It strikes me we have an easy way out here. Given the desire of the establishment to portray all atrocities as the works of madmen why not just have islam declared a form of insanity?

Friday prayers...

Make the mosques into mental institutions and throw away the keys. The number who flee the cuckoo’s nest and go full jihad might just be comparable to the proportion of paranoid schizophrenics who get stabby. It has to be worth a try at least...

Nothing to do with islam... again

It had to happen sooner or later. Poor Owen Jones has finally taken himself too seriously and has become Laurie Penny. As he took umbrage because it wasn’t all about him he flounced out of Sky’s Press Preview leaving behind his dignity and quite possibly his career as baby-faced spokesman for the progressive set. No doubt he will recover some composure and write a nice, long article about the event and what led up to it, but it will be with the benefit of hindsight and reflection. His normally well-rehearsed, if wrong, rebuttals – even though he has occasionally floundered for want of a meaningful comeback – deserted him as he wallowed in his own grief for people he never knew, from a community he so desperately needs to be special.

But there’s the crux of the problem. In fighting for recognition, the shriller voices of the LGBT community have demanded supra-human rights and behaved in the bullying ways they accuse the rest of us of. Most of us – and this includes the majority of LGTBs, the disabled, the welfare dependents, the refugees, the freaks and geeks and simples – just want a quiet life. But the activists just can’t leave it be. Owen was demanding that the Orlando massacre be the exclusive possessive grief of his people and nobody else. The now familiar shouting of ‘allahu akbar’, which gives access to grievance from the wider, non-islamic world must be expunged from all accounts of the shooting.

Owen’s problem was that he wasn’t going to allow anybody else’s views air time. And this is so often the way this works. The set of feelings and hopes and desires and challenges of your own specially defined group has to be a unique model. You don’t understand because you’re not gay/disabled/female/short/bald/poor/rich/thin/fat... where does it end? “You don’t know man you weren’t there!” Because here’s the thing that everybody (nearly everybody) outside of the LGBT world and its intersecting Venn satellites can’t grasp: Why couldn’t it be both homophobic AND islamic?

This theme was pursued in an elongated Twitter exchange with writer Emma Kennedy, whose cognitive dissonance was a thing of wonder to behold. No matter how many people suggested, politely, that the Orlando attacks could have been motivated by both homophobia and the rabid teachings of an unenlightened theology this, to her, was ONLY about homophobia, one of the modern seven deadly sins. Omar Mateen would just have happily gunned down any passing dirty kuffar, gay, straight or any station in between.

None of this is bringing any of the fifty dead back to life. None of this is helping to join hands in fighting this modern scourge from the middle ages. None of this is helping radical LGBT activists and their camp followers to join in the wider narrative about making our societies better. So maybe it’s time to all get your special interest heads out of your arses and start manning the barricades, unless defending the west, which gave you your freedoms is less important than nursing your own unique feelings.