Thou shalt not worship Graven images

In the debate that’s currently raging about those naughty Danish cartoons there is a conflation of several different issues taking place...

• The long standing conflict between religious and secular thinking
• Concerns about mass migration into Europe
• The supposed rise of fundamentalist terrorism

These are separate issues which I maintain are being deliberately confused. Topics such as large scale migration or the role of religion in modern life are perfectly valid areas for discussion and concern but allowing those concerns to be hijacked to serve a Fascist Neocon agenda benefits no one

Well, except for Fascist Neocons, obviously.

Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, managed to bamboozle a jury last week by maintaining that his hatred, of Muslims was driven by passages in the Koran that supposedly say it’s OK to slaughter non believers and take their women. I don’t believe for a second that Griffin’s dislike of foreigners, Muslim or non-Muslim, is anything to do with the teachings of the Koran. But if Griffin’s issues really are scripturally based I could quote chunks from the Old Testament, Papal Bulls or even Charles Darwin that could justify hatred of pretty much anyone, if that’s what he would like.

I am one of those people who is worried about the current rate and impact of migration into the UK, and there are issues brewing, but promoting an agenda through suspicion, hate and fear is plain wrong. Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous people who do. And they are doing it more and more, with the tacit support of our governments and media.

One of the finest examples of Orwellian doublethink being pedalled around the World today is the notion that the current War on Terror, the Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, whatever is being laid on for Syria and Iran, all of it, is all simply a response to religious fundamentalism. People somehow manage to believe that, yet at the same time many of them acknowledge that it is ‘all about oil’.

Which is it?

I know where my money would be. I’m also sure that if every Muslim on the face of the Earth disappeared overnight there would only be a short pause before the Beast found a new ‘Evil Empire’ to wage war on.

China looks like a safe bet.

The current Islamo-mental coverage in our media; the cartoons and their aftermath, the confrontation with Iran, the upsurge in terror alerts is all depressingly similar to what went on three years ago as part of the build up to the invasion of Iraq. I am sure that this mania is planned and quite, quite deliberate.

For starters, the escalation of the cartoon story was clearly a manipulated event.

And this particular wheeze has been so successful because Muslims have taken the bait. In some cases, spectacularly so.

The prize for Idiot of the Week just has to go to that bloke who dressed up as a suicide bomber and pranced around in front of the Danish embassy in London. His thinking, as I understand it, was to try and convey his sense of outrage at the cartoons by doing something equally outrageous.

Well, he managed that.

Big time.

The fucking idiot.

And the television cameras did their bit by spending their time pointed at him and his handful of loony mates whilst several hundred moderate Muslim protestors stood around picking their noses, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be seen on national television.

But the media didn’t stop there in its sensitive coverage of such an emotive event. One of the cardinal rules of policing crowds is not to do anything that would escalate a tense situation. The situation outside the Danish embassy was clearly, er, quite tense so the police backed off from arresting the people carrying the more provocative placards. I have no doubt that the police took pictures, as they always do, with a view to having a ‘quiet chat’ with the offenders a little later on. And hopefully locking a few of them up.

But no, that wasn’t good enough for our media pundits. Apparently, the police were supposed to go wading in and kick some darkie butt. Yes, that would have helped the situation immensely.

Woeful, utterly woeful.

Alternatively, a True Cynic might point out that if the police had arrested the extremist demonstrators early on the rest of us wouldn't have had the opportunity to see them on television.

I can’t even start to imagine what it must feel like to be a devout, decent Muslim in the UK today, let alone a Muslim in the Middle East. And the thought of what might pass through the minds of not so devout, not so decent Muslims scares me. Does anyone really believe that those people swarming all over and fire bombing Scandinavian embassies around the world are doing this purely because of a few poxy cartoons, or even religion? What we are looking at are the fruits of decades of atrocious behaviour on the part of the West. We have been bombing the hell out of them for years.

Those guys are pissy for all sorts of reasons and a little bit of empathy on our part would go a long way.

Alternatively, we could just say bollocks to empathy and get stuck into a good fight that will last for generations

Only it wouldn’t be that good.

… and if I’ve offended anyone with this last couple of posts mark it down as being cutting edge social satire