Cummins may be part of the green ink brigade, but he was right about Islam

Mark Wallace

Your furniture is still crap.

Charlieray15

"That hot summer of 2004"

So not in Britain then....

Kevyn Bodman

Mr.Liddle,
I fervently agree with what you have written.

osama

filth, pure filth

seb

In what respects does the sort of political correctness that got Mr. Cummins sacked differ from fascism? Answers on the back of a small postage stamp, written with a carpenter's pencil, please.

Jez, Leeds

"Lunatics write to me every day, long handwritten scrawls of bitter psychosis"

Talk about isolating your fan base.

Even if i stop the emails it won't change the fact that the London Olympics will be a success.

Dwight Vandryver

Mr. Liddle denigrated the Countryside Alliance and lost his job at the Beeb? Quite right, too. The countryside needs every ounce of support, now that we know there will be 7000 new wind turbines marching across it.

Jez, Leeds

Where's some bloody' green ink when you need it!

"The countryside needs every ounce of support, now that we know there will be 7000 new wind turbines marching across it."-Dwight Vandryver.

Saw it on the news tonight.

Went to Skeggy last month with the wife and kids, thanks to News International's £36 quid Holiday offer via the Sun. Arrived, unpacked, went for an explore with my oldest lad. Headed for the beach, staggering up this grassy sand dune, inhaled deeply just as i got to the brow, anticipating the awe inspiring panoramic view of the North Sea....

'Bloody hell! We've been invaded by some War of the World Tripods just off the horizon or something!'

In front of us panning across the sea were about 40 gigantic wind turbines- simply described as looking like huge cigarettes with the stubs at the bottom and these colossal propellers (that weren't doing anything) sat on the top.

The BBC was bang up for them tonight... they really hate this place i think.

Devastating.

GNO

I understand that there are moves afoot at the UN by Arab countries and Muslim immigrants in the US and Canada to ban any criticism of Islam. Forever keen to oblige, no doubt EU and therefore Briatin, will follow suit in no time.

So make the most of it Mr Liddle, for it may not be long before your thoughts on the benevolence or otherwise of Islam will be just that – thoughts. And those stupid people will have their way once again.

Lucan C. Heraclitus

Of course this is one more book in the bible of the new authoritarianism, which is liberal in name only.

We need to remind ourselves from time to time that the authors of these volumes are, in the main, former members of the student left - Students for a Democratic Society, the SWP, the IMG.

Liberal grown-ups used to smile patronizingly at their efforts not realizing the youngsters were sawing through the branch on which they sat.

My only surprise about the predicament of the poor Cummins fellow is that he got taken on by the British Council in the first place. The Council can detect non-comformity like a dog can picking up a scent and they are so committed to building good relations with the Middle East they would only recruit those who are desperately keen on the beauties of Islam.

Lucan C. Heraclitus

Your reference to the 'green-ink brigade' had me ready to apply the bleach to my 'I luv Ron' heart-shaped tattoo. But then got on with reading the piece and spared myself the pain.

The same thing happened last week when you got stuck into the fwends (!) of animals but the I found comfort with my Sooty hand-puppet.

stephen Bull

Is it not strange that the word cleave has two meanings which are opposite, ie to divide and to unite? Apparently one comes from the German klieben and the other from kleben.

WelshPatriot

Thank you, Mr Liddle, for your courage in covering this subject.
It is lamentable that free speech no longer exists in Britain

kay

Absolutely right Rod.However our right to free speech and expression of ideas is much more heavily censored in Britain- politicians are sleepwalking to the cliffs.Nobody wants to admit they gave all these dodgy people entry to the country and also awarded honorary(joke) knighthoods to characters like Mugabe and Ceascescu!

David Short

Did this thing get into print?

No proper managing director would ever allow it.

David Short

Are you Stephen Bull from the eponymous restaurant?

Anna

What is sickening about this story is that The Guardigroan itself is guilty of gross hypocrisy.

I used to live with someone dim enough to read it (and pay for it) and occasionally I would open up the “Weekend” magazine on a Saturday and read the odd passage out loud from its then columnist Julie Burchill, one of the few people in it whoever had anything interesting or meaningful to say.

It was always fun to watch a Guardianista squirm as I read out from their darling little rag something they couldn’t bear to hear.

I vividly recall a column she wrote (before 9/11) - I don’t think The Guardiamoan let anyone write like this after 9/11 – in which she talked graphically about genital mutilation and all of the sorts of other nasties that don’t seem to get a peep out of posters such as David Short (although he could at least clarify why Rod Liddle has done wrong exactly), and at the end of which she proudly proclaimed herself to be proud to be an Islamophobe.

Maybe if you’re famous enough, the Gurnydrone won’t go after you? Is that Mr Cummins' error?

While I thoroughly concurred with Ms Burchill’s sentiment, I was taken aback by what I consider to be her substandard grammar – I believe Mr Liddle has been picked up on it too – for using the word “Islamophobe”. This is an oxymoron, surely?

I don’t call objection to this:

"O Prophet! Make war against the unbelievers [all non-Muslims] and the hypocrites and be merciless against them. Their home is hell, an evil refuge indeed." (Koran, 9:73)

or this:

"Remember Allah inspired the angels: I am with you. Give firmness to the believers. I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: you smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off of them." (Koran, 8:12)

a “phobia”, even if our Orwellian government does. I call it downright common sense.

PS. I got a sore back reading the new Standpoint magazine on the weekend in Smiths (I can’t pay £4.50 for a mag) but it is on fact all on line for all us paupers. Julie Burchill has a good column in there on a not dissimilar subject

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/open-season-july

and I also read Melanie Phillips and Nick Cohen’s articles in there before I had to stop but I will catch up with more online.

David Short

JB is always fun to read. She knows how to annoy. That's her big forte. Ånd she is comprehensible.

Unlike some.

Yusuf Smith

What you have written is utter nonsense. Cummins was given four columns in a "quality" Sunday newspaper, and used them to issue hateful rants against Islam and Muslims which included obvious slurs (like calling Muslims "Janjaweed") and spurious historical references (such as saying that Christians were the orignal inhabitants of most of the Muslim lands, when in fact the Muslims there now are descended from those same Christians). I wonder what he had done to merit four high-profile columns when he could have got himself a blog, as anyone with an axe to grind can, or perhaps the Salisbury Review or Right Now! would have published them for him.

And for all this, he wasn't prosecuted, so your tale of woe really does not mean much. No doubt the British Council could not keep a press officer on who had become the story himself, and become a highly embarrassing one at that, for an organisation that wants to operate in the Muslim world. I would have been happier with Dominic Lawson (the paper's editor) losing his job, actually, unless they really wanted the Sunday Telegraph to become a place for cowardly bigots to spit venom from behind a cloak of anonymity.

Bulldogbreed

Yusuf Smith's comment "and spurious historical references (such as saying that Christians were the orignal inhabitants of most of the Muslim lands, when in fact the Muslims there now are descended from those same Christians)." was most interesting. However, it is worth expanding on it to explain why Muslims in former Christian lands are descended from those vanished Christians. It is estimated that 270 million non-muslims died over 1400 years of the spread of Islam. That's an awful lot of people of which more than 60 million were Christians. Islam spread by the sword, by forcible conversion and by the imposition of institutional discrimination known as dhimmitude. Dhimmitude is basically a state of humiliation, subjugation and denial of equal rights in which non-Muslims are permitted to live under Muslim rule(see Sura 9:29). Given such a choice many were forced to convert to Islam. It is quite understandable then that many Muslims would be descendants of Christians.

Tahir

De Lacy O’Leary in the book “Islam at the crossroad” (Page 8) gives the best reply to the misconception that Islam was spread by the sword: “History makes it clear however, that the legend of fanatical Muslims sweeping through the world and forcing Islam at the point of the sword upon conquered races is one of the most fantastically absurd myth that historians have ever repeated.”

Thomas Carlyle, in his book “Heroes and Hero worship”, refers to this misconception about the spread of Islam: “The sword indeed, but where will you get your sword? Every new opinion, at its starting is precisely in a minority of one, in one man’s head alone. There it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men. That he takes a sword and tries to propagate with that, will do little for him".