Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 250

Don't Be Silly - A Riposte to Mr Jacubs

Mr Jacubs asserts that I show 'support for' Islam. He also says 'I have to ask why is he (me) defending every horrible crime/massacre carried out by Islamists.'

Can Mr Jacubs provide any evidence to support these statements, which seem to me to be mistaken?

My purpose in pointing out that the *significant* factor in turning Adebolajo and Adebowale from normal human beings into gory murderers was drug-induced madness was just that. Without the drugs I do not believe they would have killed. Their undoubted long-term drug abuse was the necessary condition for the action, not their fanatical and hate-filled beliefs (need I say that I deplore these? Plainly I do).

It is very difficult to kill another human being deliberately. The few who do this have either fallen victim to terrible short-lived rages which they immediately and ever afterwards regret, or have been hardened by long experience of demoralised and immoral living, or have been hardened by intense military training (which in many cases fails to turn its objects into willing killers, even in the heat of battle) .Or they have been unhinged by drugs of various kinds.

 

Even such people are in most cases horrified and ashamed by the results of their actions, either immediately or soon afterwards. These two, however, not only deliberately drove a car at a defenceless person unknown to them, but then  emerged from the car and began methodically to butcher their victim's body, standing calmly in the street next to the desecrated remains of their victim under the eyes of dozens of appalled people, and red to the elbows with his innocent blood. It appears that when the police arrived they actually sought their own deaths. I cannot accept that these were the actions of sane men.  I am not given ( as readers here will know) to making excuses for murder. But the initial crime of these killers was to begin to use a drug known to be dangerous to the mind.

 

My constant complaint that few have been taught how to think (while millions have been taught what to think) , applies very strongly here. I am attacked for what I don't say, and what I do say is wilfully misunderstood (wilfully, because people don't want to listen). Within moments of my posting this, a comment had appeared which completely ignored my reasoning here and repeated the fatuous accusation that I am in some way excusing jihadists.

 

I am not 'obsessed' with cannabis. I wish that what I say about it would be understood and acted upon, and then I could discuss some of the many other ills that afflict our society. But the intensity of the rage and fury of the drug's defenders, when I address this subject makes it necessary to redouble my efforts to get this point across. 

 

Our society is obsessed with cannabis, uses it in increasing quantities,  manufactures it in vast amounts in uncontrollable numbers of cannabis farms, excuses its use among young and old, indulges its use among the rich , famous and popular, rages against, and smears those who warn of its dangers.  Unlike its users, I have no interest in this matter beyond telling the truth. And I have the old-fashioned view that, when people try to scare, smear or mock me out of telling the truth about an important matter, I should respond by redoubling my efforts rater than running away. My reward for that is to be called 'obsessed', the unvarying leftist response to opposition - psychologising opposition as a pathology.

 

Well, I must put up with that too, but I absolutely won't accept the attempt by Mr Jacubs to use this totalitarian smear against me while claiming that he is 'saddened' by the supposed need to do so. If he is so jolly sad, then let him turn away from this disreputable tactic.

Nor have I described the drugs as the 'motivation' for the murder of Lee Rigby. The drug-unhinged person cannot be said to have a motivation. His reason is overthrown.
Were it not so, he could not do the dreadful things he does.



As for the bizarre suggestion that this is some sort of defence or excusal of Islamic militancy (a defence and an excusal I have not offered and have no wish to offer), I made the same point in the case of Anders Breivik, whose unhinged massacre was likewise 'explained' by conformist and incurious media  by an analysis of his incoherent attic-dweller's 'opinions'. Many sad people have such opinions. But they do not go out and kill dozens of people and smile afterwards.In Breivik's case it was his use of steroids (with which I am also not 'obsessed') that gave the clue to his insanity.

And I have for years been pointing to the influence of drugs, legal and illegal, in many massacres which cannot possibly be blamed on the killers' political or religious opinions, since the killers had none, or none of any significance.

Peter Hitchens's Christmas Meditation on BBC Radio 4

This can be listened to here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03m7twp

Why I like Vladimir Putin - the Video

At last - the recording of a talk I gave at Bristol University last October

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeO44STvnJw&feature=youtu.be

Matthew Perry and the Addiction Fiction

This article appeared in the Mail on Sunday on 22nd December:

Hollywood royalty is much more regal than the real thing. I’ve met Prime Ministers with smaller retinues than the one that trails round after Matthew Perry, who used to be ‘Chandler’ in ‘Friends’.

 

He and his entourage were given a hospitality room all to themselves at the BBC on Monday while I and all the other Newsnight guests were tactfully steered elsewhere.

 

I have seen the arrogance of power in many forms and in many places. But I’ve seldom seen anything to beat the sense of pure entitlement that radiated from Mr Perry.

 

How he has suffered, we are supposed to think. How good it is of him to now embrace a supposedly noble cause, that of special courts for people who buy and use illegal drugs.   

 

Who is Mr Perry speaking for in this campaign? Why is he involved in it? As far as I know he has never been prosecuted for any offence. He is described in newspaper reports as having been ‘battling addiction’, a prejudiced phrase which assumes that ‘addiction’ exists, and that he has no free will, and so must wrestle for the rest of his days with some mighty overpowering force.

 

But what does it actually mean? It means that, lapped in money and fame, and greatly loved for speaking lines written for him by others, he took prescription opioid pills and swallowed vodka by the bottle until he became so ill he had to stop. 

 

There’s a lot of this sort of thing in show business, and my own view is that it’s a very bad example to all those poor people who confuse actors with the parts they play, and are influenced by them, as millions were by ‘Friends’.

 

It is not especially deserving of sympathy, let alone admiration. We’re invited to walk a mile in the shoes of those whose lives are difficult, but most of us probably couldn’t afford the shoes these people wear.

 

I was ready to talk to Mr Perry about drugs courts, but when I said that ‘addiction’ is a fantasy. Mr Perry decided he’d rather have a fight.

 

He said ‘You are making a point that is as ludicrous as saying Peter Pan is real.’ Later, in the same vein, he called me ‘Santa’ suggesting that I believe in Father Christmas.

 

Yet it is he, not I, who insists in believing in a comforting fantasy. ‘Addiction’ is no more real than Tinkerbell, and, like her, would fade and die if people stopped believing in it.  We live in a world where millions have been taught what to think, and very few taught how to think.

 

And the word ‘addiction’ has slipped into common speech so that we hardly ever consider it. People are said to be ‘addicted to’ anything from sex to chocolate cake.  What does the tricky word mean?

 

If it means that they have no power to stop themselves, then how is it that so many ‘addicts’ manage to give up the thing they’re supposedly enslaved to?

 

And if it doesn’t mean that they have no power to stop themselves, then it looks remarkably like an excuse.

 

 

Many people are unconsciously influenced in their views by  films such as ‘French Connection 2’, in which a narcotics detective is forcibly turned into an ‘addict’ by crooks and then has to undergo a terrifying withdrawal.

 

But this portrayal isn’t accurate.  I was alerted to this long ago by Theodore Dalrymple, for many years a prison doctor, who wrote in his book ‘Junk Medicine’ that most ‘addicted’ prisoners stopped taking heroin, without great difficulty, soon after they arrived in jail.

 

It’s also well known that American soldiers in Vietnam used heroin in huge numbers, yet most gave up without difficulty when they returned home.

 

Dalyrmple observed often that the feared ‘Cold Turkey’ was nothing like as bad as claimed, and concluded that ‘To conceive of heroin addiction as such seems to me to miss the fundamental point: it is a moral or spiritual condition that will never yield to medical treatment.’

 

Actually, the moment you think about it, the idea that it is a physical illness begins to fall apart in your hands. How could you identify the symptoms? But huge industries of ‘treatment’ and ‘rehabilitation’, not to mention the makers of substitutes such as methadone, and the regiments of social workers whose employment depends on these (largely futile) programmes lobby constantly against the truth.

 

And once an idea becomes conventional wisdom, it is actually quite risky to challenge it.  My view that addiction is fiction is actually shocking to many who have simply never heard this possibility discussed. Rather than examine my case, they react like so many startled squirrels, screeching and running about in circles.

 

Plenty of people who like to think they believe in free speech strongly dislike it when they meet it. So the electronic left-wing mob that is Twitter is full of personal insults, rage, and threats of violence aimed at me and at least one shamelessly totalitarian suggestion that I should be put in a ‘re-education clinic’

 

As to the argument, two quite prominent campaigners for relaxing the drug laws, with whom I have clashed in the past, contacted me on Wednesday to say they were embarrassed by Mr Perry’s performance, especially his weird claim that ‘addiction’ is ‘an obsession of the mind and an allergy of the body’.

 

Also Mr Perry contradicted himself about his drinking. He said he was in control of the first drink’. Well, how was he ‘in control’ except by the use of his will?

 

The point never seemed to have occurred to Mr Perry, who simply repeated that the American Medical Association said that addiction is a disease. Well, doctors, both individually and in crowds, are often horribly wrong and are very vulnerable to fashion. Think of lobotomies and Thalidomide. For years they thought stomach ulcers were caused by stress when in fact they are caused by bacteria. The American Psychiatric Association used to say homosexuality was a disease.

 

Doctors also don’t want to miss a chance to keep a patient by prescribing a pill or a spell in a costly clinic. Their opinion is no substitute for thought.

 

And if these people really believed that ‘addiction’ was a disease you could catch, and which then sat on your back till you died, then surely they’d agree with me that the best protection against it would be a severe deterrent law, so that nobody ever started doing the things that are ‘addictive’. But funnily enough, they never do agree with me about that.

For Hitchens Obsessives Only

A telephone interview I recently gave, on religion, 'addiction' and my brother Christopher

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3vZujqsL9Q&feature=youtu.be&a

My (complete) letter to The New Statesman on Grammar Schools

This is the full text of a letter I wrote to the 'New Statesman' a few days ago.

 

'Tim Wigmore, in “Grammar schools fail poor pupils” (13 December), looks at the operation of a few vestigial grammar schools in the Home Counties, vastly over-subscribed because they are besieged by well-off commuters. Then he assumes that a national selective system would work in the same unfair way.  It wouldn’t. It doesn’t. It didn’t. Selection helps the children of the poor.

 

In Northern Ireland, which retains grammar schools, the proportion of young full-time first-degree entrants to Higher Education institutions, from socio-economic class 4 to 7, is 39.1%, compared with 30.9% in largely comprehensive England, 29.1% in wholly comprehensive Wales and 26.6% in totally comprehensive Scotland (source: Higher Education Statistics Agency,  2011/2012). In short,  children from the less-favoured social classes have a substantially better chance of qualifying for university entrance under a selective system.  

 

In 1966, the Franks Report into Oxford University showed that, during the selective era which began in 1944, the proportion of state and direct-grant pupils entering Oxford rose rapidly. Such schools had won 32% of places in 1938-9. By 1958-9, they won 45% (Direct Grants 15%, ordinary grammars 30%) and by 1965-5 they won 49% (Direct Grants 17%, ordinary grammars 34%) . These improvements were achieved without any special concessions, and despite the private schools’ inbuilt advantage in Classics, then essential for Oxbridge entry.

 

Peter Hitchens'

 

 

It doesn't seem very long to me, but not all of it appeared (the sections in bold were missing) . I accept that journals have the right to cut letters, and acknowledge that none of the other letters published were any longer, and thatnd the NS devotes one page to readers' correspondence. I'm just sad that this should be so, in a major journal of opinion. The trouble is that people so often accuse me of having no evidence for my positions. Evidence takes up space.

 

 

 

'

 

Time for a Repeat- Cannabis, Mental Illness and Violence

I first published this Item some months ago.  I am republishing it to rebut attacks on my contention that the most significant influence over the behaviour of Lee Rigby's killers was not militant Islam, but drug-induced mental illness. This is much more common in our country than many think, because its tragedies are so seldom reported or - if they are- the connections are not made.

By contrast two groups of people like to attribute such things to 'militat islam'  - securocrats seeking budgets for staff and 'tough' new surveillance powers; and atheists seeking the friendship of neo-conservatives, who camouflage a loathing for all religions behind an expressed dislike for Islam 

 

'I just thought I would illustrate here the existence of a very serous national problem, of innocent people killed by total strangers in our streets (or, in one terrible case, which I mention because it involved a British subject and because the culprit, who had British connections, was undoubtedly an abuser of illegal drugs including cannabis, on a foreign street).

 

It is hard to quantify because of the shifting definitions involved. Even so, it seems to me to suggest that a danger to life and safety exists in our country which is certainly serious, and could in my view be significantly reduced by government action.

 

In the light of what is below, are we seeing straight when we attribute the atrocity in Woolwich primarily to militant politics and religion?

 

What follows does not pretend to be a complete account of the problem but is the fruit of some hours in the archives. 

 

On 26th February 2005, The Independent published an article by Maxine Frith which began thus ‘In 1992, Jonathan Zito was murdered by a stranger in an unprovoked attack. Yesterday, the man who stabbed to death Denis Finnegan was jailed. In both cases, the assailants were mentally ill patients denied the care they needed. In the years between these two tragic incidents, up to 40 people a year have died in similar circumstances. In 2005, is there still such a thing as care in the community?’ At the bottom of the article, the newspaper published an appalling and desperately upsetting list of recent random killings by mentally ill persons, often using  particularly horrific methods - generally involving stabbing though in one case involving the victim being burned to death.   
  

The Times wrote on 27th July 1995 ‘One killing a month and two suicides a week are committed by mentally ill people living in the community.’

 

The variation between the two newspapers’ figures illustrates the difficulty in fixing categories, and in uncovering details of such cases, which are often not much covered by the media, except locally.

Among such cases one of the worst was that (mentioned above) of Christopher Clunis, 30, a mentally-ill man who stabbed to death Jonathan Zito, 27, after selecting him from a crowd at a London Underground station in December 1992, weeks after being released from hospital.

 

More recently, Deyan Deyanov beheaded Jennifer Mills-Westley, in Tenerife, on 13th May 2011(shortly after being released from a local psychiatric unit). He was a drug abuser (this is completely undisputed). Deyanov, an undoubted user of cannabis, cocaine and LSD, believed he was a reincarnation of Christ, filmed himself smoking cannabis. After committing his terrible deed, he carried his victim’s head on to the street

 

In February 2013, Nicola Edgington was convicted at the Old Bailey of murdering Sally Hodkin, and attempting to murder Kerry Clark in the town centre of Bexleyheath on the morning of October 10, 2011.  Edgington, 32, of Greenwich, virtually decapitated Sally Hodkin,  six years after killing her own mother.

This case gained prominence because of the failure of the authorities to heed blatant warnings - from the killer herself - of approaching danger.

In the hours before the murder, Edgington called emergency services four times asking for help, saying she was hearing voices again and that she was going to kill somebody.

Note that in these cases that the killer decapitated, or attempted to decapitate,  the victim.

In Doncaster on February 14 2012, a woman with a history of mental health problems who stabbed a teenager to death in South Yorkshire was imprisoned for ‘life’. Hannah Bonser, 26, randomly attacked Casey Kearney, 13, as she walked through Elmfield Park in Doncaster. The judge said she would serve a minimum of 22 years.

The Daily Mail reported : 'In 2002, Bonser walked into a hospital on her 17th birthday complaining of hearing voices telling her ‘to kill people’. She was admitted to hospital and given anti-psychotic drugs. Later that year she twice overdosed.

The judge said Bonser had a ‘mental and behaviour disorder due to abuse of cannabis’. She was in regular contact with psychiatric services between 2004 and 2007 and had been given drugs to control her delusions.

The September before the killing, Bonser was warned by a policeman for carrying a knife. She was at that time taking cannabis and regarded as a ‘strange loner’ by neighbours.

In November she was admitted to hospital after attempting suicide and in January her requests to be sectioned were rejected as ‘nothing was wrong with her’.

Looking at many of these cases, I am compelled to wonder how many of them involved cannabis, but were not connected to this drug because a) its use is so common and accepted that the authorities don’t regard it as notable and its users don’t regard it as a drug, , the law against it is not enforced so its presence and use are not recorded, and b) nobody has made the connection or asked the necessary questions.

I know from sources with direct personal experience of mental health nursing that cannabis is frequently smuggled into the locked wards of mental hospitals.

Where we do have the details, usually because it actually came up in the trial, it is often the case that cannabis is prominently involved.

In any case, I fear that most of us are in greater peril from these sad and wretched cases than we are from terror. And I believe that government action could significantly lessen this risk, without attacking the freedom of speech or the privacy of the subject.'  

A Christmas Meditation

If you are quick you can still hear most of Jeremy Summerly’s superb Radio 4 series ‘A Cause for Carolling’, by going here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03m34d8/episodes/player, but I warn you that (for some obscure reason) the BBC doesn’t plan to keep them available for long. It’s exceptionally good, thoughtful, full of new things, joys and surprises. You’ll be a better person after you’ve heard it than you were before, which is most of the point of art and culture.  

 

The title is a quotation from Thomas Hardy’s marvellous poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’ , and the programmes explore the very, very old beginnings of the English Christmas carol, the 19th century creation of so many of the carols we now love so much, and the birth and growing power of the ‘Service of Nine Lessons and Carols’ broadcast to the world from the Chapel of King’s College in Cambridge and now copied in thousands of towns and cities, especially in North America.

 

It is very good on the ‘Bidding Prayer’ which, in that service,  follows ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and which has, since I first heard it, always given me a lump in the throat and a prickling behind the eyes. I don’t really know why. Haunted prose like this cannot easily be analysed.  

 

It runs : ‘Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmas Eve our care and delight to prepare ourselves   to hear again the message of the angels; in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.

 

‘Let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purpose of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child; and let us make this Chapel, dedicated to Mary, His most blessed Mother, glad with our carols of praise.

 

‘But first let us pray for the needs of his whole world; for peace and goodwill over all the earth; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in the dominions of our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth, within this University and City of Cambridge, and in the two royal and religious foundations of King Henry VI here and at Eton.

 

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us at this time remember in his name the poor and the helpless, the cold, the hungry and the oppressed; the sick in body and in mind and them that mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; all who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

 

Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we for evermore are one.

 

These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the throne of heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us…’

 

The programme reveals that this prayer has been described as the greatest to be written in the English language since the Prayer Book of 1662 (which really dates to 1549 in most of its words and cadences). I am inclined to agree. The key to it is in the very last part, which refers directly to the multitude of the dead in the First World War (since the prayer was first introduced in 1919). This is moving enough anyway for ( as A.S. Byatt says in her ‘Virgin in the Garden’ series of books) the dead are very present at Christmas. But the knowledge that the grief is being expressed for an entire generation of young men makes it far more poignant.

 

The whole thing is a narrow bridge between our world and the one before 1914. It couod not be written now. Nobody would have the knowledge and experience which allowed him to do so. Every word of it contains a Biblical   knowledge reaching back deep in time through the Victorian era and then on back into the earthy, ancient past of our country and its language, culture and faith ( a past which is briefly and faintly accessible in some of the older carols we sing at this season). It is the last expression of that, before restless modernism took charge. Eric Milner-White who wrote it, had I think been an army chaplain during the war. He later became Dean of York and was probably the last of the Anglican clergy to continue to write prayers in the tradition of Thomas Cranmer, plain yet poetic and full of thought and wisdom.  

 

About 20 years ago now, in fact rather longer ago,  I attended a carol service in the newly reopened Anglican church in  Moscow, an Edwardian or Victorian red brick building stolen by the Bolsheviks and turned into a recording studio for decades of neglect and casual vandalism (Many orthodox churches, if they survived at all, suffered much worse and more deliberately desecrating fates than that, under the rule of the League of the Militant Godless).

 

 It was an enjoyable moment of restoration, but I have always remembered the parson’s sermon, in which he described the great Christmas festival as the moment when ordinary time falls into step with eternity.

 

And I do have a strong feeling that something of the kind is taking place when, as the light thickens on the afternoon of December 24th, the carols begin at King’s. For some days before that, England has been growing quieter, gentler and calmer.

 

And I always think of Carol singing as the essential prelude to this. I try to observe Advent (which begins for me with the superb Anglo-German Advent carol service, hymns, bible lessons and prayers partly in English, partly in German, shared with a Lutheran congregation which has been in Oxford since 1938) .  It’s supposed to be an austere season, and so I find the Christmas spirit elusive for much of December.  But by the 15th December I am ready for my first Christmas carols, and by the Sunday before Christmas, even more so. My great and beautiful city of Oxford has a very old tradition that the Lord Mayor leads carols in the Town Hall that day. And he or she is expected to sing one part of the exchange (depending on sex) between Prince and Page in ‘Good King Wenceslas, in front of a room full of 400 people. It’s an act of great courage, but it raises a lot of money for charity. The occasion is wonderfully civic in an old-fashioned way, from the days when town halls were places we were proud of, rather than regulation-issuing centres of bureaucracy. Oxford’s is a riot of Victorian plasterwork and unhinged pseudo-Jacobean turrets and curlicues, and the Lord Mayor is still preceded by a mace-bearer (whose giant silver-gilt mace was a present to the city from Charles II, who knew he owed loyal Oxford a great deal)

 

The county youth orchestra plays, a superb primary school choir, and a fine voluntary adult choir, lead the singing. It mists the eyes a bit to see something so completely traditional, though I’m not sure all those present sing as hard as they would have done 30 or 40 years ago, singing being something that the unchurched rarely have a chance to do.    

 

And when it was over and we spilled out into the dark street and the strong wind, I felt that Christmas was really approaching. And so it is, that odd mixture of jollity and deep thought, birth and approaching death, which seems to me to be more profound and moving every year I experience it. I’ll mention here, for those that like that sort of thing, that if you are still awake in the early hours of the Feast of St Stephen (Boxing Day if you must), you will be able to listen to my ‘Christmas Meditation’ on BBC Radio 4 FM at about 15 minutes after midnight, once the news is over.  In any case, a Very Happy and Blessed Christmas to all my readers, whether you agree with me or not.

Mission accomplished? Only if it was to throw away 446 lives

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Was our mission accomplished in Afghanistan, as David Cameron seemed to say last week? The truth, as so often, is worse than you think. The  446 servicemen and women (so far) who died in Afghanistan, and the many more (whom we seldom see) who were terribly wounded, had no real mission  to accomplish.

Everyone who understands what happened on September 11, 2001, knows that atrocity originated in the Arab world, not in Afghanistan. Look at who the hijackers were.

The first attack on the Taliban state was a wild, furious and illogical loss of temper by the US government, trying to calm mass public grief, and to look as if it was doing something.

The unlovely nature of the Taliban regime was an excuse invented afterwards. If the USA is so opposed to militant, fundamentalist Islamic governments that oppress women and persecute other religions, why doesn’t it invade Saudi Arabia?

Overthrowing governments by force is quite easy. It is the next stage that is hard. The Taliban, rather patiently, have waited for us to lose interest and will shortly be back.

Then, how could we seriously set out to destroy the opium poppy trade? That trade is rich and successful because of our own greed and guilt at home, where we deal softly with  the morons who buy and use illegal drugs. What then gives us the right to persecute and ruin Afghan poppy farmers?

It is our lax drug laws that allow demand to flourish and  so push up the price of poppies to the point where there is little sense in growing anything else, if you are an Afghan farmer.

Anyway, in the end we didn’t dare to destroy their crops.

As for the desperate Helmand episode, it was a crude blunder. Comrade Dr Lord Reid, the onetime Kremlin apologist who had mysteriously become Defence Secretary at that time, simply did not understand what was going on. That is why he made his crass remark about leaving without a shot being fired.

There was never at any stage any worked-out purpose for a British presence in Afghanistan. Anyone who knew any history knew that the Afghans resent foreigners and fight like tigers to drive them out. Ever since the Afghans defeated us in 1842, at the Gandamak massacre, all intelligent soldiers and statesmen have known better than to get mixed up in Afghan affairs.

But the intelligent people were ignored. The whole thing was driven from Downing Street, nowadays not much more than a glorified public relations company.

The Government wanted good news, so the Army obediently gave it to them. It was all rubbish. We achieved nothing. Within weeks of our departure, the wind will blow dust over  the remains of our bases and we will be forgotten.

And which of those responsible will ever dare to tell the bereaved and the maimed that their loyalty, discipline and courage were thrown away to make politicians look good?

Dope, not Islam, drove Lee Rigby's killers

Back in May, I pointed out that at least one of the Woolwich killers had wrecked his brain with cannabis from an early age.

Now we know that both of them had done so.

My point was this – that the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby were among the large number of British criminals sent mad by this terrible drug.

Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale both acted like drugged madmen on the day of the killing. For instance, Cheralee Armstrong said in a statement read in court on December 2 that Adebowale ‘looked mad, like he’d escaped from a mental hospital’.

We now know that, for a week before the murder, Adebolajo was living in a house where there was a cannabis farm. Both men were habitual users of cannabis, and had been since their teens. The correlation between the use of this drug and severe, irreversible mental illness is very strong, especially in the young.

Many violent criminals, most of them having nothing to do with politics or Islam, are long-term cannabis users.

The important element in this case is not the religion. It is the dope.

Many young men become militant Muslims but never kill. Many young men never embrace any religion, but take to skunk and become mad  and violent. What, then should we be worrying about more? Skunk? Or Militant Islam?

But cannabis has so many friends and secret users in  the political, legal, and  media establishment that  this crucial connection is repeatedly ignored.

Rather than indulge in secret police fantasies about somehow guarding against ‘extremism’, we should treat cannabis as the menace it is, and severely punish all those found in possession of it.

Rich, free, famous - and still moaning

Nigella Lawson protests that she has been vilified for ‘doing her civic duty’. What twaddle.

If you give evidence against someone, who may well go to prison and be ruined for life  if convicted, then you must expect them and their lawyers to do everything in their power  to fight you.

Our legal system really does presume that the defendant is innocent, a tremendous protection against state power which we don’t value enough. Juries really are independent. And it  is the job of the judge, above all things, to ensure that a trial is fair.

Miss Lawson is a wealthy person whose TV celebrity gives her great influence. She has instant access to the airwaves and the newspapers, and skilled professionals to help her look and sound good. The Grillos are nobodies. Despite that, Miss Lawson lost. She is still rich, popular and free. She shouldn’t complain.

A rather good dramatisation of the Great Train Robbery, A Copper’s Tale, almost gets the past right. But, infuriatingly, not quite. A Scotland Yard detective in 1963 would not have ‘protested’ something. He would have ‘protested against’ it. The telephones of those days had a shrill double ring, not the single melodious trill they are given in the film. And surely police cars at that time still had bells, not nee-naw sirens.

The Sutton Trust points out that our dogma-driven comprehensive school system has selection by estate agent, bank balance and cunning. How and why is that better than selection by ability?

Feminism was a fine cause. It achieved great things. It ended stupid discrimination against women in life, work and law. But now this honoured title has been taken over by  people who seem to think that men and women are not just equal, which they are, but identical, which they are not.

This is not feminism but a revolutionary flat-Earth theory that denies the obvious physical truth. You might expect to find it in odd corners of the dimmer universities. That would be fine.

But it is another matter when Marks & Spencer, a mighty public company, cravenly gives in to these fanatics by abandoning  separate lines of toys for boys and girls. What has happened to us that we are so frightened by the self-righteousness of the Far Left? Which unhinged demand will we give in to next?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Matthew Perry Speaks

I have just come across this unintentionally hilarious piece of film showing Mr Perry's return to the City of the Angels. The thing I really enjoy is the sycophantic questioning, which makes 1950s deference look like bold aggression.

 

http://www.tmz.com/2013/12/20/matthew-perry-peter-hitchens-fight-drug-uk/