There was a car full of angry white boys cruising the high street of Wootton Bassett this week, Luke and Sam and their two friends, on the lookout for camera crews from Sky, ITV and the BBC. They wanted to make it clear, for the early evening news programmes, that if the march of Muslims through the town went ahead, they would block the road with cars, bring down a whole bunch of trouble and perhaps smash some skulls. I caught up with them as they tried to get themselves onto Sky to elucidate this important point more vigorously. They’d driven over from Swindon precisely to achieve this objective and told me that thousand upon thousand more just like them, alerted by a Facebook campaign, would be supporting them. Three of the four lads said they had nothing against Muslims per se, but the fourth, an amiable young man — who nonetheless had the word ‘supremacy’ tattooed on his neck — said he thought they should all f*** off back to where they came from, the Pakis and the Indians. The Indians? What have the poor Indians done? ‘I don’t like them either,’ he grinned.
Luke, meanwhile, had served in the marines and had metal plates in his legs and thorax as a consequence; also a scar from where he was attacked with knives by ‘Muslims’ in Halifax when, he said, they tried to steal his pet dog, a mastiff. I didn’t get the name of his dog, for which apologies. The Sky people turned away from these men, shuddering, and wouldn’t put them on film; they’d got their selective quotes from the townsfolk, a nicely balanced montage of people saying the march should not go ahead and others saying oh, ok, maybe it should, in the interests of freedom of speech. That’s what you will have seen on your early evening news: balance and fairness.
Except that it isn’t really balance and fairness. My guess is that the overwhelming majority in the country are with Luke and Sam and the boys, maybe except for the skull-breaking stuff. And I wonder how hard the tv people had to search for vox pops in favour of this march? As opposed to those sort of implacably against? My own vox pops in the town, discounting the contributions from Luke and Sam et al, were 18 against the march, none in favour, but maybe I didn’t search hard enough in order to achieve balance and fairness.
There’s no date set for this little event, incidentally, just a statement of intent. A Muslim group wishes to march through Wootton Bassett to commemorate the dead Taleban combatants and in order to counteract the regular processions of dead British soldiers through this shrouded town, the cowardly imperialists of Western oppression. The Home Secretary has said he may ban the march, probably under health and safety guidelines.
F*** off back to where you’re from, then, you Muslims. Anjem Choudray, who dreamed up the march, is one of those thick-as-mince gobby little chancers who could only possibly come from Britain — Welling, Kent, in this particular case. Think Derek Hatton, except with an additional ideological commitment to clitoridectomies and beheadings. Typically too dense to pass his medical exams, he became a solicitor but for some time has lived off state benefits while urging death upon the rest of us, sometimes as a handmaiden to the exponentially stupid ‘Sheikh’ Omar Bakri Mohammed (whom we kicked out of the country), and latterly as the guiding light behind the wonderful Islam4UK group — a terrific name, like www.shariaImlovingit.com or www.kuffirsmustdielol.co.uk. You can watch him on YouTube explaining to a BBC interviewer why no infidels are innocent, they all have to die, not my fault, Stephen, just how it is, according to Allah.
Smug and stupid, comfortable in front of the camera, he’s loathed by most Muslims, of course, for the trouble he occasions them, for bringing them all to the attention of Luke and Sam and Mr Supremacy and the other 170,000 who have signed themselves up to the Facebook campaign. If Choudray had half a brain he would realise that the eternal cortege of dead British soldiers through Wootton Bassett and the angry interviews with bereaved relatives on the evening news are the most potent weapons in the battle to stop the war in Afghanistan: the infidel public has become soft-bellied and squeamish, unwilling to fight a war in which our boys might get hurt or be killed. Happy enough to start the war, but not to finish it. Paradoxically, a march by Mr Choudray’s bearded maniacs screaming death against the rest of us might well swing the opinion polls back in favour of war overnight: look, there’s the enemy and what fabulously vile people they are, bring out the cluster bombs and the depleted uranium shells. But then Choudray’s motive is not primarily to draw attention to the suffering of his Muslim brothers, but to get himself lots of infidel media attention once again. We could probably buy him off with the promise of a chat show or maybe an appearance on Come Dine With Me (‘back in his kitchen, Anjem is preparing his main course of ricin curry’).
Where Luke and Sam and the others have a reasonably compelling argument is in what they perceive as the unfairness of the treatment of the notion of freedom of speech. They point to legislation which makes it illegal for them to whip up hatred against the Muslims, yet are forced to sit back and watch hatred being whipped up against themselves. A similar point is made by the somewhat shadowy English Defence League, which has made such marches its raison d’être. Castigated as a neo-Nazi group or a bunch of fascists by mainstream politicians, they are treated far more roughly by the authorities than the gatherings of furious fundamentalists whom they oppose. This is the point the liberals cannot grasp — that you can still be a victim even if you are a part of the supposed cultural hegemony. It is the sort of mindset which has aided the rapid growth of the BNP over the last ten years, stoking feelings of deep resentment within the white working class and, I suspect, well beyond.
The traffic moves slowly through Wootton Bassett even when there isn’t a funeral cortege, a continual procession at snail’s pace through what was once a village but has long been a choked overspill suburb of Swindon. Having been rebuffed by Sky, Luke and Sam try their luck with the ITV van down the road, but there is only an elderly troll inside guarding the equipment. But they’ll be back, the four lads, if the march goes ahead. Which is just what Mr Choudray wants.
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