In Great Britain, the historic cradle of liberty and sanctum of freedom of expression, it appears that you can no longer refer to Arab depravity in the slaughter of an Israeli family — including a three month-old baby — as they slept without someone going to the police to get you arrested for racism.
This is what happened to me. I wrote on my blog about the ‘the moral depravity of the Arabs’ who had murdered Udi and Ruth Fogel and their three children, 11-year-old Yoav, four-year-old Elad and three-month-old Hadas in their home in the Samarian neighbourhood of Itamar, near Nablus, by cutting their throats while most of them were asleep.
I also pointed the finger for this atrocity at the ‘savagery’ of the Palestinian Authority, whose educational materials along with the mosques and TV stations under its control incite frenzied hatred of Jews; which teaches its children that the highest aspiration is to murder Israelis; and which glorifies those who perpetrate such unspeakable acts by naming squares and public places after them.
Next thing I knew was that the Guardian ran a story saying I was being investigated by the UK Press Complaints Commission, which had received two complaints about my remarks – and I had also been reported to the Bedfordshire police for racism.
This came as something of a surprise. If I was indeed being investigated, no-one had seen fit to tell me about it. Indeed, at time of writing I still have not heard whether either of these bodies is investigating these complaints at all.
Stranger still was the involvement of the Bedfordshire police. I do not live in Bedfordshire, an area north of London. I have never had anything to do with the place. What could my remarks about the Itamar massacre possibly have to do with Bedfordshire?
A clue lay in the involvement in the Guardian story of a prominent British Muslim activist named Inayat Bunglawala. It was he who had reported me to the Bedfordshire police – and he lives in Bedfordshire.
It would appear that having taken exception to my blog, Bunglawala went to his local police force to complain about my views and expected them to take action against me as a result.
His complaint was that I had made a ‘generalised racist outburst against Arabs as a whole’. But this was ridiculous. I was obviously referring specifically to the perpetrators of the Itamar massacre and to the Palestinian Authority which incites such deeds Bunglawala claimed that if anyone had referred to the ‘moral depravity of the Jews’ and described them as being ‘savages’ they would face prosecution for racist hate speech.
Does one really have to spell this out? Jews don’t go round murdering innocents in cold blood and cutting the throats of three-month old babies. And this was not a one-off. The Arab and Muslim world glorifies the killing of Jews.
Sweets are routinely handed round in rejoicing at the murder of Israeli civilians. And from Arab and Muslim society pours an unstoppable torrent of deranged, Nazi-style vilification of Jews which fuels the genocidal hysteria behind such attacks.
All of this, plus the fact that Arabs have been murdering Jews in the land of Israel for more than nine decades in order to drive them out, means that to refer to ‘Arab moral depravity’ is more than justified.
But my real crime was surely to refer to an Arab atrocity at all and describe it in correct moral terms. For in our politically correct society, any such criticism amounts to ‘anti-Arab racism’ – and is infinitely more reprehensible than slitting the throats of three sleeping children and their parents.
History does not yet record whether the Bedfordshire police will take the slightest notice of Bunglawala. But to understand how the police could have been dragged into this at all, it is necessary to appreciate the grip on British institutions of politically correct ‘victim culture’.
This embodies the Marxist doctrine that groups without power are invariably the victims of groups with power. The ‘powerless’ victims can never be held responsible for what they do; the fault must always lie with their ‘powerful’ oppressors.
Because subjectivity rules, feelings trump everything else. So hurting the feelings of a ‘powerless victim’ group becomes a crime. The giving of offence becomes a criminal offence.
Accordingly, British police forces have established ‘hate crime’ units to police the giving of offence against a wide range of ‘victim’ groups covering ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or disability.
Into this Orwellian universe has stepped radical Islam. Muslim activists have exploited the hysteria over ‘Islamophobia’ and racism to represent any criticism of Islam as a hate-crime and thus suppress necessary debate about Islamic extremism.
But the grotesque irony of Bunglawala’s complaints about me is that he himself has displayed profoundly anti-Jewish and anti-western views.
He believes Britain should become an Islamic society — though not, he hastens to reassure us, through violence. He has described Osama bin Laden as a ‘freedom fighter’ and reveres Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who has issued fatwas calling for jihad against Israel and the Jews and authorised suicide bombing attacks.
He described three Jewish TV executives as all belonging to ‘the tribe of Judah’, whose close friendship gave the lie to a ‘free media’. And he also claimed that the ‘Zionist movement’ was ‘at the core of international banking and commerce’.
The third leg of this very crooked stool, however, is the Guardian newspaper (where in another life I happened to be employed for around two decades).
The Guardian is virulently hostile to Israel. Like other British media, it reported the Itamar massacre by effectively blaming the Fogel family of ‘hard-line settlers’ for their own slaughter. Its opinion pages regularly read like the house journal of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
When Bunglawala contacted it, the paper simply ran as fact his claims that I was being ‘investigated’- thus creating an instant smear.
One might think that self-styled progressives would shun someone with such bigoted and reactionary views. But today the left marches shoulder to shoulder with radical Islam. Heck, what’s a little thing like the Muslim attitude to gays and women (kill ’em, stone ’em) when the great common aim is the collapse of western civilisation?
Thus the ultra-progressive Guardian has made itself the patsy of a reactionary with deeply questionable attitudes. Far from upholding freedom of speech against such people who pose a mortal threat to western liberty, the Guardian is putting itself in the forefront of the movement to shut down dissent.
But then, the radical Islamist onslaught is a perfect fit with the Manichean perspective of the left, which categorises all who are not of the left as beyond the pale altogether and uses tactics of smears, demonisation and character assassination that were once associated with Stalinist totalitarianism.
And today the Guardian, BBC and other media use those very same tactics against Israel itself. They sanitise the crimes of the Arab and Muslim world while skewing the facts to demonise, dehumanise and delegitimise Israel.
Britain is leading the way in tearing up western cultural norms and with them its ancient liberties. It has become the global hub of ‘lawfare’, the use of the libel laws by Muslim extremists and their sympathisers to shut down debate.
It is where to tell the truth about genocidal Arab aggression against Israel is today to be dismissed as an extremist or damned as a bigot. And it is where the police are called upon to treat as a crime an expression of moral outrage at a depraved campaign of genocidal incitement and mass murder.
It is not I who am in the dock, but Britain itself.
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