Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 271

A Crackdown on Crackdowns

Does any normal human being use the word ‘crackdown’ ? Yet politicians, and their all-too-willing patsies in the media, love to do so. Every few days we seem to have a ‘crackdown’ on hate preachers, lager louts, deadbeat dads, welfare cheats, illegal immigrants and bad teachers. The more crackdowns we have on these things, of course, the more they remain exactly the same . I’ll explain why later.

 

For the proper definition of the word ‘crackdown’  is:  ‘well-publicised attempt to appear to do something about a matter of public concern, while in fact doing nothing at all’.  Or, as a Mr A. Blair once memorably described it  ’an eye-catching initiative with which I can be personally associated’ (see ‘Marching Thugs to Cashpoints’). Some have called this method of government ‘manipulative populism’, where the state does what it wants in private but conducts (though the media) an endless series of noisy cartoon battles with cartoon dragons, to persuade the voters that the liberal state has their best interests at heart. It doesn’t, of course.

 

Something similar, I might add, can be said about almost all government announcements concerning victims and their treatment.

 

The announcers at Paddington Station ceaselessly urge me,  ‘Do not become a victim of crime’, soon after telling me that various sorts of criminals apparently ‘operate’ in the area. Well, if they ‘operate’,  then why don’t the police ‘operate’ in such a way that these ‘operators’ are prevented or deterred from operating? (For answer, see below).

 

Vigilant as I may be, if someone comes up to me with a knife (this presumably comes under the heading of ‘operating’) and earnestly requests my wallet, the chances are I’ll become a victim of crime, and the consequences for the criminal will be a lot less important to me than the effects on my life. I don’t want to be sympathetically treated by police victim support officers, or given a cup of coffee while I wait to give evidence, or told the (invariably ludicrous) outcome of the criminal process. I have so little faith in the Criminal Justice system that I am not beguiled by the chance to complain if my case is not pursued by the authorities. I know that the authorities don’t in general believe either in crime or in punishment, and only maintain this street theatre to fool the mob into believing that there is, after all, some justice.  Real punishment is reserved only for those whose crimes are too huge and too blatant to ignore, or for those who upset the establishment in some important way.

 

 I just don’t want to be a victim in the first place, and if the state can’t prevent me from becoming a victim, then I suggest we get a new state.

 

These thoughts are stimulated by two stories circulating this morning . One, there’s said to be a ‘crackdown’ planned on bad driving on Motorways. How very funny. Who is to do the cracking? I drive as little as possible these days, but one thing is quite clear when I do, and it is that the old police patrols that used to be visible on all roads have almost entirely vanished. As in all other areas of policing, the police respond to events after they have taken place, when all they can do is festoon the place with tape, flash their pretty lights and close roads for hours on end. 

 

Partly because of this, and also partly because of increasingly unrestrained drunkenness and drug-taking, and because of a general decline in civility, driving has become more irresponsible and aggressive. If you are unprotected by a steel box on the roads, as cyclists and pedestrians are, you notice this decline in civility and consideration much more than you if you are inside such a box. Almost daily, I see acts verging on clinical insanity committed by drivers who do not think they are doing anything wrong, and to whom nothing will happen until one day they do kill someone (and even then, what happens to them will not be nearly severe enough).  By the way, I don’t exempt my fellow-cyclists from this.

 

The number of cyclists who moronically overtake other cyclists on the inside grows daily, and the alert rider must now behave as if this is bound to happen, before he makes any manoeuvre. I’m sure this is only encouraged by the total police failure to ‘crack down’ on cyclists who ride through red traffic lights, which has convinced many aggressive cyclists that they are subject to no rules at all, a mental condition made worse by the belief among many of them that their green purity makes them virtuous, and cancels out their sins.

 

And then we are told by Keir Starmer, our chiselled and telegenic Director of Public Prosecutions, that the Crown Prosecution Service is to provide a ‘Victims' Right of Review’ (VRR) for crime victims dissatisfied with CPS decisions on dealing with those who have (allegedly) trespassed against them. I sought and swiftly found the flaw in this offer, which was made much of by the BBC this morning.

 

Victims can *ask* the CPS to look again at a case where they think the wrong decision has been taken. But if the CPS think there’s not enough evidence( and under current rules a full-colour 3D record of the crime being committed might just be enough, but not necessarily, especially if the authorities aren't very interested in that sort of crime) then that’s that. Likewise if the Police have already decided to do nothing (their favourite activity when faced with what they regard as ‘minor crime’ or disorder) and so haven’t even sent a file to the CPS. It is, in short, a tiny sop of no great value, and it misses the point that crime and disorder have now reached such levels in our society that the only option is to redefine crime and disorder as non-crime and non-events, and ignore them. Hence the ludicrous claims that crime is falling. We’ve simply redefined it, so that things which were crimes aren’t considered criminal any more and can be ignored by the law and the state, however much you or I might hate them.

 

It’s not as if all crimes ever were prosecuted. Justice has always been a bit of a confidence trick.  But a lot more was done to deter them, from preventive patrols to exemplary sentences, the two features of our system which have been utterly abolished.

 

This, in my view, is part of the social and cultural revolution. Preventive patrolling only works if we all agree about what we disapprove of, and if the police officer shares our view, and intervenes on our behalf (or is expected to do so when he sees certain things going on). Punishment only works if we have a set idea of what is wrong and agree that wrongdoing should be punished, and attributed to the individual who perpetrates it.  Meanwhile, widespread and unrestrained drug-taking and drunkenness(widely excused, once again, as in some way pitiable rather than wrong),  blur the boundaries of responsibility

 

So that consensus has been destroyed.  The police themselves have been taken over by post-Christian social theorists, who excuse most wrongdoing as a social malaise. And much of the public have now been successfully indoctrinated into the same belief. Those who haven't have to be fooled by the illusion of action.

 

The trouble is that , even the liberal section of the public don’t like the consequences of the policy. Even rich liberals dislike it, when it affects them personally. But they cannot address its true cause, which is the post-Christian, responsibility-free self-centred hedonism which they support and which is now our national belief system.

 

So they have crackdowns, and are vaguely surprised when they don’t work. A while later, they have another crackdown. Or they improve facilities for the (growing number of ) victims who result from the policy.

 

And so it will go on until they have run out of crackdowns, and instead we have the crack-up. It is coming.  

Constantinople Revisited - Some Thoughts on Middle Eastern Politics

The unrest in Turkey caused me to re-read an article about that fascinating country which  I published here in August 2010 :

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/08/the-disturbing-picture-of-growing-repression-at-the-heart-of-eurabia.html

 

When I wrote it nearly three years ago the mainstream media were still chanting away about how the Erdogan government in Ankara was ‘mildly Islamist’ or perhaps the Muslim equivalent of European Christian Democracy. Well, believe that if you want. Only the other day, I was struck by the fact that ‘The Times’ published a mildly critical leader on Turkey’s plans to introduce alcohol restrictions – a measure I don’t have all that much quarrel with myself. This followed a story on the same subject in ‘The Guardian’  - a story which attracted a very interesting web response from Turks who said ‘This is nothing. You should be paying attention to the protests in Istanbul about the destruction of a park’. How right they were.

 

But it’s my impression that the unpopular newspapers in this country were less exercised about the Erdogan government’s increasingly autocratic nature, its intolerance of criticism, its pressure on Turkish media to conform, its round-ups of political opponents accused of taking part in bizarre secret plots, than they were about the alcohol ban. After all, Turkey has become our ally in the battle to overthrown the Syrian government. I would never have predicted that, when I wrote my article in 2010.  In fact I referred several times to the then close relationship between Ankara and Damascus, and also between Turkey and Iran.

 

I must say that , at the time, I saw this as a clear direction for Turkey to take as it converted itself into an Islamic Republic and cast off the secular bonds placed on it by Kemal Ataturk and maintained, until recently, by the Army. But since then, the curious and misty events of the ‘Arab Spring’ have unfolded, during which much that previously seemed clear has become unclear.

 

I remember wondering out loud here whether Iran might not be behind the ‘Arab Spring’ which began by affecting largely pro-American Arab regimes. I was , as it turned out, wholly wrong about that speculation, which was too political and took too little account of religious forces. While I was right not to welcome the ‘Arab Spring’, or see it as a benevolent change, I had mistaken its origin and nature. And, having been introduced thoroughly (in Iran some years ago) to the nature and power of the great Shia-Sunni divide, I should have known better.

 

It now seems reasonably clear to me that the origins of the Arab Spring lie in Sunni Islam, and in the stern version of it which is taught and encouraged by Saudi Arabia. These ideas have been spread very widely over the past few decades, as so many Arabs from all over the poorer, oil-free lands of the Middle East have gone to the Gulf to find work and have returned home enthused by militant beliefs. Saudi money has also established many institutions which encourage and reinforce these beliefs.   Travellers in the Arab world note that , 25 years ago, few women in cities such as Cairo, Beirut  or Damascus would have worn headscarves. But now most of them adopt Islamic dress, the hijab headscarf at the very least, with increasing numbers resorting to the niquab, which conceals the whole face except the eyes. This change is visible to the most casual visitor to this part of the world. Other, deeper changes in attitudes are less easily detected, but undoubtedly taking place, as Egypt’s elections showed. Nobody expected the Salafists to do so well.

 

The beneficiaries of the Sunni revival are everywhere the more puritan and intolerant Islamists, enemies of secularists such as Muammar Gadaffi, nationalists such as Hosni Mubarak, and of Shia Muslims whom they regard as intolerable heretics. This dislike is very strong among some (but by no means all) Sunnis. An Iranian Shia friend of mine who went to Medina and Mecca on the Haj pilgrimage was shocked by the amount of cold hostility which he encountered, specifically directed against Shia Muslims and also against non-Arab Iranians.  

 

For a while, the anti-Israeli rantings of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad overcame some of this hostility. Ahmadinejad became quite popular in parts of the Sunni Arab world, a kind of taxi drivers’ hero in a culture where irrational loathing of the Jewish state is pretty much universal, and encouraged by governments and official media who like local discontents to seek a foreign scapegoat for their problems.  And I’m sure this aided the rapprochement between Sunni Turkey and Shia Iran.

 

But the ‘Arab Spring’ seems to have ended this process, for now at least. The Gulf states have firmly taken the side of the Syrian rebels and at some point Turkey(which is said to want to be the leading nation of the Middle east, as it was in ottoman days) has slipped into line with this view, swiftly dumping President Assad off its invitation list. Quite what interests Western nations (or Israel) have in taking sides in the quarrel I do not know.  I do wonder how it would be if Turkey had become (as the USA has long desired ) a member of the EU. It is quite complex enough having Turkey as a NATO member, and would be more so if anyone could work out what NATO was for these days.  

 

But Syria is very definitely not a Sunni or Salafist country. It is avowedly secular, despite its close relations with Iran( whose government is anything but secular) and the Shia militia Hezbollah.  For complex historical reasons, having much to do with the fraught period of French rule in this area after the First World War, the Alawite minority, once despised, has become a sort of ruling elite.  What are Alawites?  Are they Muslims? Like the Druze, they keep themselves to themselves and there are disputes about where they stand in the idle eastern religious spectrum.  Some say they are Muslims of a sort, perhaps a Shia sect, though some of their ceremonies are said to be similar to those of Christianity .  They certainly don’t follow all the rules or dress codes of Muslims. One description of them suggests that orthodox Muslims regard them much as orthodox Christians regard Mormons. Others say that they have more in common with the Alevi minority in Turkey, who are more or less Shias.  Yet others say that they don’t. I’m not qualified to judge. I’m still grappling with the differences between Baptists, Independents and Presbyterians in the English Civil War, not to mention the Anabaptists. I yield to any experts in this matter.

 

They certainly see Shia Islam as their ally (hence their strong friendship with the Iranian state, and with the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon) , and orthodox Sunnis are certainly very suspicious of them.  And with reason. The Alawi Assad government has flattened (sometimes literally, with artillery)  crushed any signs of revolt by the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood, both in the past and again now. Precarious post-colonial minority governments are like boys riding horned bulls, who must grip those horns like grim death, or be thrown and gored. The same was true of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority rule of Iraq. That is why Assad fights on, and why his supporters fight on. . If he loses, he and his supporters will suffer terrible fates, and they know it. They saw how Gadaffi ended his days. Why would they volunteer for such a fate?

 

You may not care about who runs Syria. This is a a reasonable position, as far as I am concerned. You may not care who runs Turkey either, though if Turkey joins the EU, and remains a member of NATO, the character of its government will be important. It is also important to the very large, significant and influential Turkish minority now to be found in Germany.  All I would say is that, if this country is going to take sides in such a quarrel, then we should debate the matter in Parliament beforehand and Ministers should explain the reasons for entering what looks like being a rather serious conflict. And if their explanation is unsatisfactory, they should abandon the policy, and (preferably) resign. If our political and media classes could for once look up from their troughs and allow themselves to be distracted from the petty gossip which obsesses them, perhaps this might happen. As it is, hige matters proceed with hardly any scrutiny or debate.

 

Simon Raven - Better Without the Sex

As some of you may have noticed, this weblog has been a little less energetic during the past fortnight, as I’ve been away from my desk. Among my many relaxations during this period were a visit to the cinema to see a film praised by reviewers ‘Populaire’,  an experience so embarrassingly bad that I left after 30 minutes, amazed that everyone else was sticking it out.  Such is the life of a minor celebrity that my early exit was observed and recorded on Twitter. True to form on that medium (where I can do nothing right) , my watcher took the opportunity to make a snide remark – suggesting that I’d let because the film was foreign. Well, do you know what? I knew it was foreign when I bought the tickets, and, having lived five years of my life abroad by my own choice,  and visited 57 different countries, I’ve nothing against foreign-ness. What I didn’t know was just how feeble and incredible it was going to be.  For those of us who like going to the cinema, but who have seen too many good films to be able to endure bad ones, life is becoming rather full of such disappointments. Perhaps someone could open a cinema devoted to showing nothing but proven classics, in comfort (much as the old Hampstead Everyman once did) . I can’t be the only person ( can I ?) who’d pay to watch them in a proper cinema on a large screen, preferably without having to endure any advertisements for cars or Virgin TV.  

 

This is the third time I’ve given up on a film in the last two years (and I’ve nearly abandoned a couple of others too). All of them, by the way, have been French. Until this bout of early exits ( and my apologies to those who had to stand to let me out), I don’t think I’d walked out of a film since I stormed out of ‘Taxi Driver’ in a Golders Green cinema more than 30 years ago. That was an act of demonstrative spite and rage, my first cinema walk-out after many long minutes of hestitation.  I had been repeatedly told that ‘Taxi Driver’ was a great work of art, etc etc etc. But it turned out to be crude, dispiriting, squalid and violent, and without any moral or cultural purpose that I could see then or can work out now. Interestingly, my walk-out on that occasion was met with snarls and rebukes from others in the audience, annoyed in some way that I wasn’t enjoying watching somebody have his fingers shot off.  Sorry, guys. It just didn’t do anything for me. And since, then, when I have seen actual shooting and its actual consequences, I haven’t at all changed my mind. It’s disgusting.  Such offences must come in our fallen world. But who would volunteer to watch them?

 

Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. A far more agreeable experience was a re-read of much of Simon Raven’s ‘Alms for Oblivion’ series of scurrilous, but captivating novels. I have a tattered paperback set of these in disagreeably lurid covers, which would put me off like anything if I didn’t know what the books were really like.

 

Can I unreservedly recommend them to all my readers? Not a bit of it. I’ve discussed here the two other sagas of English life in serial novel form, Charles Snow’s ‘Strangers and Brothers’ (which I unfashionably enjoy)  and Anthony Powell’s (say it to rhyme with ‘Hole’.  I don’t know why, but it sums up the snobbery rather well that he is supposed to have refused to have a leak fixed by a plumber who dared to rhyme his surname with ‘Owl’,  so enduring extra days of freezing leaks rather than abandon his supposedly more noble pronunciation. ) ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ . Both have their joys and their disadvantages. Neither of them are as exhilarating or as brutally honest about human foibles as Raven. Nor are they anything like as well-written.

 

I should also mention here that neither of them contain the passages of sheer filth that Raven liked to indulge in. Now, when I say filth,  I mean filth. I know that lots of people get up to odd things in their bedrooms, and up to even odder things inside their heads, and there it is.  Sexual fantasies are  frequently rather startling, and some people may long to know the details of other people’s - but I prefer not to.  Personally, I’d cheerfully Bowdlerise these books, removing various scenes of voyeurism and embarrassing sex, even (though reluctantly) excising the various spanking fantasies of one particular person who is singled out for rather a lot of this sort of thing. It’s not that I enjoy the fantasies, just that, attributed to this particular person, they are especially funny.    And I’d more or less dispense with the eighth book in the series,  ‘Come Like Shadows’ , apart from the final scene in which the appalling yet marvellous Lord Canteloupe of the Estuary of the Severn delivers some excellent advice on how to deal with foreigners, in this case Americans. Suitable pruned of their bad sex, they might have a higher reputation, a higher reputation which in my view they deserve.

 

Simon Raven’s life and work by the way,  offer an interesting commentary on the modern use of the word ‘Gay’ as a synonym for ‘Homosexual’.

 

I think it’s more or less true to say that Captain Raven, of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry,  was homosexually inclined, though he wasn’t averse to the occasional heterosexual experience too and famously fathered a son.  (He was also a terrible gambler and hopeless with money). But the word ‘Gay’ somehow doesn’t seem to suit him, and as far as I know there has been no major campaign to include Raven in the canon of ‘Gay Literature’.  I have a feeling that if there is, it won’t get far. Somehow the two just don’t go together.

Raven’s sequence (not on any account to be confused with a dud second series called ‘The First-Born of Israel’ which  are best forgotten) contain a series of major characters who reappear at various stages on life’s journey between schooldays in 1945, though the collapse of Empire,  the Cold War, Suez, the Macmillan years and the first convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, and an elegiac and gloom-shadowed finale in the crumbling Venice of 1973, just before the great oil crisis ended the long party that had begun in the 1960s.

 

Several are based on people who were at school with Raven at Charterhouse during World War Two. One of them, who eventually became a Cabinet Minister and whose blushes I shall here spare by not identifying him, once said to me ‘Oh, Simon’s books … they’re just James Bond for p**fs!’.  (It was the word he used. I suspect it now qualifies for asterisks in polite society).  I think this summary is not entirely fair. Mind you, this particular person might not have been grateful for his portrayal which – though broadly sympathetic and in some ways admiring – is also an alarmingly disconcerting character analysis and contains one episode of superb deviousness dressed up in moral garments.

 

It is fairly well-known that another of his major characters, ‘Somerset Lloyd-James’,  was based upon the late William Rees-Mogg, later Lord Rees-Mogg, who became Editor of ‘the Times’ and was of course the defender of Mick Jagger in the unforgettable ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel’ leader of 1967.  I am told that Lord Rees-Mogg was never entirely happy with the way Raven wrote about him, and I am not surprised.  It was always rather funny, seeing Lord Rees-Mogg on the television being grand, and comparing this figure with the flexible, cunning, lubricious and cleverly ambitious ‘Lloyd-James’.

 

But while these secret characters are fun, and while the books are more enjoyable if you know who they are (though some I have never guessed or worked out) the good bit is the writing. I’m not (I think) making any enormous claims for Raven. He certainly wasn’t trying to be literary, and is all the better for it. It is most of the time the fictional equivalent of George Orwell’s famous definition of good prose as a windowpane through which the reader can see clearly what the writer is saying.  But he was extremely clever and very well educated, full of poetry and music, and especially of Homer.  He loved the classics, and he loved English literature, and he loved poetry and he quite obviously loved the Army, and England too. From time to time he writes quite wonderfully about the English countryside, about the underestimated joys of being safe and warm in bad weather, and also about cricket in such a way that it makes even me, a loather of almost all sport, want to read on.

 

He once said that his only skill was an ability to arrange words in pleasing patterns, and this is both true and nothing like generous enough. It’s no mean skill.

 

For the most part his English is very plain, brisk and clean (which must have taken a great deal of work to achieve) but his imaginative power is tremendous (that is to say, he will fill your mind with moving, golden pictures)  and , when you have set aside the various melodramatic events which he flings in (many of them inventive and enjoyable) he can portray real people, their thoughts and conversation,  quite convincingly.  He can also make you cry – the passage (in ‘Sound the Retreat’ ) on the death of Lord Muscateer,  and his father’s lonely final voyage of reminiscence of his dead son, down the wintry river, is astonishingly moving.  

 

Most of his main characters, as has been said, can be relied upon to behave badly under pressure, sloping off, cheating, betraying or otherwise letting everyone down. But by contrast bad people can turn out to show unexpected courage or generosity, which I would say is pretty true to life.

 

Much of the politics, academic behaviour, journalism, soldiering, skulduggery and publishing seem to me to be pretty true to life.  One of the few utterly virtuous characters is Maisie, an inventive and unshockable  prostitute who ends up providing her services to an astonishing number of the main figures in the saga. Another homosexual writer, Gore Vidal, also writes a great deal about prostitutes. But then again, so does the aggressively heterosexual John Steinbeck in East of Eden’, so perhaps this has no significance.

 

It is quite clear from the first book (‘Fielding Gray’), which is disagreeably but justifiably frank about public school homosexuality, that Raven specifically rejected Christianity as a mean and restrictive code. He half-believed in the Greek Gods, and in the vengeance of the Furies. Several of his characters suffer fates more fitted to a pagan than a Christian world – the central character,  once a beautiful man, becomes hideous and repulsive.  A woman who puts her aged, querulous mother in an old people’s home against her will receives a terrible warning and then suffers a ghastly death, economically but horribly described. A forgotten teenage dalliance produces monstrous progeny.  He appears in the books thinly disguised as Fielding Gray (presumably in honour of the authors of Tom Jones and  the ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’) and does not spare himself. There are scenes in this book which look like confession to me, and pretty serious confession at that.

 

Yet he plainly loved much of Christian England. In what is, in some ways the central volume of the series ‘Places Where They Sing’, the very title is a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer, and contains a very early denunciation of the pestilent use of modern Bible translations. There are references to John Bunyan, and a clear appreciation of the beauty of religious architecture and art, and of the need to preserve it from destruction. He must be the only 20th century author apart from Evelyn Waugh who would even try to refer seriously to the concept of honour, and he plainly loves the badges and trumpet calls of chivalry, already vanishing from England in his own boyhood, but just faintly echoing.

 

What I find striking about it ( apart from some absurd sex-scenes in which a female student shouts ‘Che!’ at moments of excitement) is the keen analysis of the left-wing revolt of the time, and his identification of the revolutionaries with the desire to destroy private life, to build new and ugly structures in lovely places, to wreck the joys of the elite because, if everyone cannot have them, then nobody must have them.  The imagined conversations of the left-wing plotters, and the portrayal of their true leader. Mayerston,  as a 1960s Mephistopheles,  a believable demon in 20th century Cambridge, are very clever. Perhaps I also have a soft spot for this book as I was actually at school in Cambridge while the events it describes were supposedly going on. Actually, such things would not take place there until some time after 1967, the summer in which it is set. But the invasion of a college chapel by blasphemous protestors prefigures an actual event of the same kind, In St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in New York, in December 1989.  

 

Yes, there are racial epithets, which I suspect would have to stay to retain authenticity, especially in ‘Sound the Retreat’, set in the final months of British Imperial rule in India.  The people speak and think and sneer as people of that kind did speak and sneer.  Raven is a novelist, not a moralist, though the portrayal of a Muslim officer in the Indian Army in ‘Sound the Retreat’ suggests that he would (like many old-fashioned but fundamentally chivalrous people)  have despised stupid racial prejudice in practice.  Raven’s attitude towards Jews is very strange and hard to define, though only in the feeble ‘Come Like Shadows’ does he descend into crass anti-Semitism. Even then, I suppose, you could justify its presence by saying truly that people, thinking themselves unobserved, might well have said such things.

 

Honourable, honest, poetic, intelligent, fundamentally civilised, I think Raven deserves to survive his era. Not everyone can or will like ‘Alms for Oblivion’ (the title is a reference to a passage from Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’  in which Achilles speaks to Ulysses:

 

ACHILLES

‘… they pass'd by me
As misers do by beggars, neither gave to me
Good word nor look: what, are my deeds forgot?’

ULYSSES

‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours;
For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing.’

 

Well, quite. And in the meantime, do not, under any circumstances, eat the Orange Meringue Pie at Ley Wong’s Chinese Restaurant. No good will come of it.

 

What we do to Syria may one day be done to us

 Imagine this: Newspapers and
broadcasters in China suddenly start to denounce the British government. They
call it a ‘regime’. They say that its treatment of its Muslim minority is cruel
and unjust.

 

Soon, their views are echoed by the
Chinese Foreign Minister, who in a speech at the United Nations says that
Britain’s treatment of its minorities is a disgrace, and calls for sanctions
against this country.  

 

The Chinese ambassador turns up as an
‘observer’ at an Islamist demonstration in Birmingham. Some protestors are
injured. Carefully-edited footage of the occasion is shown on global TV
stations, in which the police are made to look brutal and the provocations
against them are not shown.

 

Soon after this, armed attacks are made
on police stations and on army barracks. People begin to notice the presence in
British cities of foreign-looking men, sometimes armed.

 

In a matter of months, the country is
plunged into a civil A place known for stability, order and prosperity descends
with amazing speed into a violent, rubble-strewn chaos, complete with refugees,
plumes of oily smoke and soup-kitchens. The bewildered inhabitants shrug with
hopeless bafflement when they read foreign accounts of events, encouraging the
rebels, even though nobody really knows who they are. They just long for the
fighting to be over.

 

All the time, foreign media report in a
wholly one-sided way, credulously trumpeting British government ‘atrocities’
without verification.  

 

And then all the major countries in the
world agree to permit the direct supply of weapons to the rebels.  

 

Absurd? Wait and see. Something quite
like this actually happened on a small scale in Northern Ireland, where
American individuals helped buy guns and bombs for   the
IRA, and the US government put huge pressure on us to give in to the
terrorists.  

 

And China, on the verge of becoming a
global power, is watching carefully all the precedents we set, in Yugoslavia,
in Iraq and now in Syria.

 

I apologise to the real Chinese
ambassador for inventing this particular story. But the events I imagine here
are based on the actual behaviour of Western powers in Syria. And what nations
do to others is usually, in the end, done to them in turn.  

 

I do not like the Syrian government.
Why should I? It is not much different from most Middle-Eastern nations, in
that it stays in power by fear. The same is true of countries we support, such
as Saudi Arabia, recently honoured with a lengthy visit by Prince Charles. In
fact Saudi Arabia is so repressive that it makes Assad’s Syria look like
Switzerland. And don’t forget the places we liberated earlier, which are now
sinks of violence and chaos – Iraq, Libya,

 

So many high ideals, so much misery and
destruction. My old foe Mehdi Hasan (who understands the Muslim world better
than most British journalists) rightly pointed out on ‘Question Time’ on
Thursday that our policy of backing the Syrian rebels is clinically mad.

 

These are the very same Islamists
against whom – if they are on British soil - government ministers posture and
froth, demanding that they are deported, silenced, put under surveillance and
the rest.

 

But  when we meet the same people in Syria, we want
to give them advanced weapons.  One of
these ‘activists’,   a gentleman called
Abu Sakkar, recently publicly sank his teeth into the bleeding heart of a
freshly-slain government soldier. 

 

I confess that I used to think highly
of William Hague. I now freely admit that I was hopelessly wrong. The man has
no judgement, no common sense, and is one of the worst Foreign Secretaries we
have ever had, which is saying something.  

 

His policies –disgracefully egged on by
a BBC that has lost all sense of impartiality - are crazily creating war where
there was peace.

 

Syria for all its faults was the last
place in the region where Arab Christians were safe. Now it never will be
again. Who benefits from this? Not Britain, for certain.  

 

Now, his strange zeal for lifting the
EU arms embargo has caused Moscow to promise a delivery of advanced anti-aircraft
missiles to Syria. Israel has threatened to destroy them if deployed. Syria has
said it will respond with force.  

 

This is exactly how major wars start.
Mr Hague is not just pouring petrol into a blazing house full of screaming
people. He is hurling high explosives in as well.

 

It may even be that some people
actually want such a war, with Iran as its true target. They know that ‘weapons
of mass destruction’ will not work again as propaganda. So they claim to be
fighting for ‘democracy’ in Syria.

 

It is a grisly lie. Unless this
stupidity is brought to an end, the world may be about to take another major
step down the stairway that leads to barbarism.  

 

This business is now so urgent that I
beg you to ask your MPs what they propose to do to halt this wilful slither
into a war almost nobody wants, and which could easily ruin the civilised
world.

 

*********

The great Edwardian short story writer
H.H. Munro (‘Saki’) once imagined what Britain would be like after a German
invasion. In his fascinating novel ‘When William Came’, he portrayed (among
other things) a bureaucratic state in which police officers had far more power
than old-fashioned British coppers.

 

Well, it has come true without an
invasion. The powers of the police have become oppressive to the innocent, and
feeble towards the guilty.

 

They function like continental
gendarmes and examining magistrates. The nasty procedure known as ‘police bail’
allows an official to ruin the life of someone who hasn’t even been charged,
let alone found guilty. It isn’t actually bail at all, but a very severe and
distressing  punishment without trial.

 

It is part of a general Europeanisation
of our law, which is by a long way the worst effect of our membership of the
EU, and which has never been fully understood or debated.

**********

Sixty years to the day after the last
Coronation what will the next one (which we must all hope is a long way off) be
like?   It is a sad fact that the majestic, wholly
British, Protestant Christian ceremony of 1953 cannot possibly be repeated.

 

The enfeebled Church of England loathes
the Shakespearean beauty of its own Prayer Book and Bible, and prefers the flat
banality of modern language.  

 

As for Protestant Christianity, that
might upset somebody. No doubt a committee is secretly hard at work making the
ceremony more ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’, as well as less ‘militaristic’ (that
part will be easy as we have so few soldiers left).

 

If you want a hint of what may be
coming our way, take a look at Archbishop Justin Welby’s multicultural knees-up
at Canterbury Cathedral last March. The Archbishop writes the Coronation
Service. If I’m still around that day, I think I may try to spend it abroad.

What We do to Syria May One Day Be Done to Us

 Imagine this: Newspapers and
broadcasters in China suddenly start to denounce the British government. They
call it a ‘regime’. They say that its treatment of its Muslim minority is cruel
and unjust.

 

 

Soon, their views are echoed by the
Chinese Foreign Minister, who in a speech at the United Nations says that
Britain’s treatment of its minorities is a disgrace, and calls for sanctions
against this country.  

 

The Chinese ambassador turns up as an
‘observer’ at an Islamist demonstration in Birmingham. Some protestors are
injured. Carefully-edited footage of the occasion is shown on global TV
stations, in which the police are made to look brutal and the provocations
against them are not shown.

 

Soon after this, armed attacks are made
on police stations and on army barracks. People begin to notice the presence in
British cities of foreign-looking men, sometimes armed.

 

In a matter of months, the country is
plunged into a civil A place known for stability, order and prosperity descends
with amazing speed into a violent, rubble-strewn chaos, complete with refugees,
plumes of oily smoke and soup-kitchens. The bewildered inhabitants shrug with
hopeless bafflement when they read foreign accounts of events, encouraging the
rebels, even though nobody really knows who they are. They just long for the
fighting to be over.

 

All the time, foreign media report in a
wholly one-sided way, credulously trumpeting British government ‘atrocities’
without verification.  

 

And then all the major countries in the
world agree to permit the direct supply of weapons to the rebels.  

 

Absurd? Wait and see. Something quite
like this actually happened on a small scale in Northern Ireland, where
American individuals helped buy guns and bombs for   the
IRA, and the US government put huge pressure on us to give in to the
terrorists.  

 

And China, on the verge of becoming a
global power, is watching carefully all the precedents we set, in Yugoslavia,
in Iraq and now in Syria.

 

I apologise to the real Chinese
ambassador for inventing this particular story. But the events I imagine here
are based on the actual behaviour of Western powers in Syria. And what nations
do to others is usually, in the end, done to them in turn.  

 

 

I do not like the Syrian government.
Why should I? It is not much different from most Middle-Eastern nations, in
that it stays in power by fear. The same is true of countries we support, such
as Saudi Arabia, recently honoured with a lengthy visit by Prince Charles. In
fact Saudi Arabia is so repressive that it makes Assad’s Syria look like
Switzerland. And don’t forget the places we liberated earlier, which are now
sinks of violence and chaos – Iraq, Libya,

 

So many high ideals, so much misery and
destruction. My old foe Mehdi Hasan (who understands the Muslim world better
than most British journalists) rightly pointed out on ‘Question Time’ on
Thursday that our policy of backing the Syrian rebels is clinically mad.

 

These are the very same Islamists
against whom – if they are on British soil - government ministers posture and
froth, demanding that they are deported, silenced, put under surveillance and
the rest.

 

But  when we meet the same people in Syria, we want
to give them advanced weapons.  One of
these ‘activists’,   a gentleman called
Abu Sakkar, recently publicly sank his teeth into the bleeding heart of a
freshly-slain government soldier. 

 

I confess that I used to think highly
of William Hague. I now freely admit that I was hopelessly wrong. The man has
no judgement, no common sense, and is one of the worst Foreign Secretaries we
have ever had, which is saying something.  

 

His policies –disgracefully egged on by
a BBC that has lost all sense of impartiality - are crazily creating war where
there was peace.

 

Syria for all its faults was the last
place in the region where Arab Christians were safe. Now it never will be
again. Who benefits from this? Not Britain, for certain.  

 

Now, his strange zeal for lifting the
EU arms embargo has caused Moscow to promise a delivery of advanced anti-aircraft
missiles to Syria. Israel has threatened to destroy them if deployed. Syria has
said it will respond with force.  

 

This is exactly how major wars start.
Mr Hague is not just pouring petrol into a blazing house full of screaming
people. He is hurling high explosives in as well.

 

It may even be that some people
actually want such a war, with Iran as its true target. They know that ‘weapons
of mass destruction’ will not work again as propaganda. So they claim to be
fighting for ‘democracy’ in Syria.

 

It is a grisly lie. Unless this
stupidity is brought to an end, the world may be about to take another major
step down the stairway that leads to barbarism.  

 

This business is now so urgent that I
beg you to ask your MPs what they propose to do to halt this wilful slither
into a war almost nobody wants, and which could easily ruin the civilised
world.

 

*********

The great Edwardian short story writer
H.H. Munro (‘Saki’) once imagined what Britain would be like after a German
invasion. In his fascinating novel ‘When William Came’, he portrayed (among
other things) a bureaucratic state in which police officers had far more power
than old-fashioned British coppers.

 

Well, it has come true without an
invasion. The powers of the police have become oppressive to the innocent, and
feeble towards the guilty.

 

They function like continental
gendarmes and examining magistrates. The nasty procedure known as ‘police bail’
allows an official to ruin the life of someone who hasn’t even been charged,
let alone found guilty. It isn’t actually bail at all, but a very severe and
distressing  punishment without trial.

 

It is part of a general Europeanisation
of our law, which is by a long way the worst effect of our membership of the
EU, and which has never been fully understood or debated.

 

**********

Sixty years to the day after the last
Coronation what will the next one (which we must all hope is a long way off) be
like?   It is a sad fact that the majestic, wholly
British, Protestant Christian ceremony of 1953 cannot possibly be repeated.

 

The enfeebled Church of England loathes
the Shakespearean beauty of its own Prayer Book and Bible, and prefers the flat
banality of modern language.  

 

As for Protestant Christianity, that
might upset somebody. No doubt a committee is secretly hard at work making the
ceremony more ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’, as well as less ‘militaristic’ (that
part will be easy as we have so few soldiers left).

 

If you want a hint of what may be
coming our way, take a look at Archbishop Justin Welby’s multicultural knees-up
at Canterbury Cathedral last March. The Archbishop writes the Coronation
Service. If I’m still around that day, I think I may try to spend it abroad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don't Care in the Community

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 is 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 was 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 Brief Response to Mr Monkton

A Mr Monkton writes :' Yet again we have Peter Hitchens trying to find a scapegoat for the
action of people in inanimate substances.
We've had Anders Breivik's mass murder blamed on steroids, sudafed and
caffeine, despite the fact that Breivik had begun to plan his atrocities
long before he took those drugs.
Then we had speculation that Adam Lanza's horrendous school killings may
be the result of brain damage caused by unspecified drugs of which no
trace was found in his body.
Now a terrorist attack explained lucidly by the perpetrator as motivated
by political and religious ideology is apparently really caused by some
cannabis smoked years prior.
It's not just wisdom Hitchens is challenging here, but facts and logic
too.'

 

I am not trying to find a 'scapegoat', but to open a reasoned discussion of the principal cause, so that public policy can respond intelligently.

 

On Anders Breivik, the point remains that his actual atrocity *followed* his ingestion of mind-altering drugs. Many people have grisly fantasies of this kind (the ghastly film 'If', from the 1960s contains a fantasy scene of a school massacre that was taken lightly at the time but would cause grave controversy if made or released today). It is when they put them into effect that they matter. Breivik killed *after* he had begun taking drugs which are known to have mind-altering properties. Judging by his deportment since capture and trial, Breivik is still far from sane.  His actions were not those of a sane or reasonable person.  I remain amazed that Breivik's use of steroids (and Raoul Moat's) have attracted so little attention.

 

On Lanza, I answered at the time and now repeat (and would ask that my critic addresses and acknowledges this simple point rather than repeating this argument as if it had not been answered)  that many of those who develop mental health problems after youthful cannabis use are irreversibly damaged. They do not need to take it again to be irrational.  The absence of drugs from their bodies at the time of the crime does not therefore acquit the drug. As for the alleged use of cannabis by the suspects in the Woolwich atrocity, the same point might well apply. But we do not know (At least I do not. Does my critic? If so, how?) that their alleged cannabis use was restricted to 'years prior'.

 

Facts and logic at work. That's how it's done. Read and mark.

The Battle Against Conventional Wisdom

I’d
like to resume my small skirmish against conventional wisdom on the Woolwich
atrocity. First of all, for those who claimed in various places yesterday that
I had ‘no evidence’ that the suspects might be drug abusers, here are several
extracts from news stories in the period immediately after the murder:

 

 Daily
Telegraph, 24th May

 

He
went to the local school, where he was described by his friends as a
"regular guy" until he reached his teens, when his life changed
dramatically after he became involved with drugs.



Daily Telegraph, 24th May

 

One
friend said: "He was just a normal lad but as he got older he started to
go off the rails. He was really intelligent and his parents were desperate for
him to do well at school but then he got into smoking weed and also started
dealing." 

 

Another
classmate said that Adebolajo, known as "Narn"… "changed quite
dramatically" after becoming involved with drugs, "then he started
holding knives up to people's throats, getting their phones etcetera. He'd show
us the phones he'd stolen".

 

 

The
Sun , 24th May

 

"He
would go out partying a fair bit too and loved his gangsta rap. Back in 2004 we
were listening to loads of 50 Cent and Eminem.



"On nights out, he would dress up really smart — fancy shirt, lots of
aftershave, that kind of thing. He loved chasing girls and was a bit of a
player." Adebolajo fell in with a "bad crowd", experimented with
drugs and had links to notorious South London gangs.



He appeared to shake off their clutches — only to sink deeper into the dark
world of extremism.



He used the name "Mujahid", or holy warrior, and handed out radical
leaflets in Woolwich High Street. And he began plotting jihad — while selling
drugs back in Romford.



Every morning he would drive there while texting customers about that day's
pick-up spots. Regulars knew him as Jay but nicknamed him Freddie Mercury and
Red Rum because of his buck teeth.



One said: "No one ever saw him in Muslim dress. He never spouted any
strong opinions one way or the other on the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan."
Another said: "Very occasionally he was in his car with the second man who
was photographed at the murder scene. Now we wonder who was calling the
shots." A woman in her 20s revealed how Adebolajo asked her out on dates.
She said: "He was so friendly, so polite.



"He told me how much he liked me and how he wanted to take me out, but I
explained to him I am a lesbian, though I still enjoyed his company. He took it
very well. It was all very good humoured and I kept seeing him regularly. He's
come calling to my door for a chat." Another source said: "When he
came to Romford to sell drugs he would let it be know in coded text messages
just what was on offer.



"He would say, 'I've got some designer white shirts' which meant crack
cocaine, or 'I've got black T-shirts', which meant heroin.



"If people didn't pay their debts, he never got heavy with them. He just
wasn't like that. He was the only dealer who never threatened violence."

 

Evening
Standard 24th May

 

‘The pair are thought to have plotted the attack in
Adebowale's flat in Greenwich, which was raided by up to 20 heavily armed
officers yesterday.



Neighbours said both were regularly seen at the address where Adebowale was
living with his mother Juliet. He and Adebolajo
— who is also said to have been a drug dealer
and robber — attended Greenwich University, though it is not known how they met.’

 

On Adebowale, The Guardian reported some details on
25th May which suggest that , at the very least, he was on close terms with users of illegal drugs.   :  'Background information about Adebolajo,
28, was circulating soon after Wednesday's gruesome murder but it took a
day before Adebowale's name began circulating in public. Relatively
little has been known about his background until now.


A Greenwich neighbour of the 22-year old said that after the earlier
knife attack Adebowale disappeared for a year and converted to Islam,
and that his character appeared to have changed.


The 2008 attack which Adebowale witnessed and suffered gives an insight
to a life in chaos. It led to a trial that saw Lee James, 32, convicted
of murdering an 18-year-old, Faridon Alizada, stabbing a 16-year-old in
the neck, and stabbing Adebowale in the shoulder and hand.


According to information released by the Metropolitan police after the
December 2008 trial: "Faridon Alizada was inside the flat with two
friends (victims 2 and 3) when James entered the flat on the pretext of
buying drugs.


"Having armed himself with a knife before going to the flat, he then attacked the three teenagers, fatally stabbing Faridon.


Faridon died of his injuries at the scene.


"A postmortem later revealed two stab wounds to the chest over 6in deep,
either of which would have been fatal." According to a report in the
local newspaper, the News Shopper, James went to the flat on the Larner
Road estate from where drugs were sold.
He visited it daily and was planning to rob those inside. Faridon was
in the flat with the two 16-yearold friends when James entered at 3am,
with another man. He was carrying a 12in knife hidden under his jacket
and bought and smoked crack cocaine.


Sentencing James to life imprisonment, Judge Anthony Pitts said Faridon
had tried to save the others, even after being stabbed. "He was
literally cut to pieces by Lee James who went on to stab a third man,
fortunately not so seriously.


"The murder was in the end only of one person but that was sheer chance.
[Another victim] was wounded very, very seriously and was extremely
lucky not to have been killed or incapacitated for life.


"Faridon had the extraordinary courage it seem to me to attempt to
confront Lee James, not only to protect himself but also to protect the
other 16-year-old. It was, of course, a hopeless mismatch." The trial at
Southwark crown court heard that James, a former bare-knuckle fighter,
accused Adebowale and the other youths, who were Afghans, of being
members of al-Qaida and plotting to carry out explosions. The court
heard claims that James was suffering from a drug-induced psychosis during the attack.


Madeleine Edwards, a family friend who lived in the same block of flats
as Adebowale in Greenwich, south London, said he had been involved with a
local gang - the Woolwich boys - when he was a young teenager and had
been in "some serious gangland trouble".'

 

‘The
Sun’ 25th May:

 

‘ONE
of the carving knife jihadists was once the victim of a frenzied stabbing
HIMSELF — in a crack den, The Sun can reveal.



Maniac Michael Adebowale, 22 — the monster in the tan jacket when soldier Lee
Rigby was slaughtered — cheated death but saw a close pal killed.



He was just 16 at the time — and had fallen in with a tearaway Muslim-dominated
gang of teen drug lords called the Woolwich Boys.



The Brit, whose family hail from Nigeria, was in the one-bed flat where crack
was being sold when a crazed junkie stormed in.



The would-be robber — armed with a knife — went berserk, screaming: "You
want to ruin my country, you want to blow up my country, you want to sell drugs
in my country. This is what you get." Chum Faridon Alizada, 18 — whose
nickname was "Fighter" — was killed. Adebowale and another stabbed
16-year-old only just survived. Knifeman Lee James, 32 — a bare-knuckle fighter
arrested after the bloodbath in Erith, Kent — was caged for life at the Old
Bailey.’

 

Those
are the facts, insofar as we know them. Now for some logic. Government and media have a lot to say about
a mysterious process called ‘radicalisation’ which they seem to think the state
can prevent or hamper by various bureaucratic or surveillance measures.

 

Well,
I have no doubt that there is a lot of radical Islamic thought at large in this
country. It is very common on university campuses, where it often takes the
form of a fanatical loathing of the State of Israel. I have myself spent some
time talking to members of the organization Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamist
grouping which is frequently singled out as a candidate for banning in this country.
Their ideas were, to me, appalling. But they were courteous and restrained in
their personal behaviour, hospitable to me personally and even capable of
humour.

 

By
the way, I’m against banning them, not because they were civil to me but for
sound practical reasons combined with a strong belief in freedom of speech,
especially for those I disagree with. Precisely because such organisations
attract, at their fringes, potential recruits for terror, it seems to me to be
wise to allow them to operate openly.

 

It
is hardly necessary to say that I don’t agree with this stuff, though I had
better point this out before someone tries to misrepresent me as a sympathiser.

 

But
there is a great chasm between holding the opinions of Hizb-ut-Tahrir and
killing people in the street with a meat cleaver. Holders of ‘extremist’ views
(and I write as a former Trotskyist revolutionary student, who believed for
some years in the violent overthrow of the ‘capitalist system’ and of
‘bourgeois democracy’) talk and write and demonstrate quite a lot, and seek to
draw attention to themselves. But they tend to be all mouth and no trousers
when it comes to action.

 

Some
of them are fantasists (this, I think explains some of the court cases
involving various supposed but far-from-practical bomb plots of one kind or
another). Most are quite arrogant, a necessary condition for this sort of
thing.

 

But
if ‘radicalisation’ alone led direct to the hacking to death of soldiers on the
streets of British cities, then it seems to me that we would have seen rather
more of it by now. Noisy, ‘behead the infidel!’ Islamic radicalism has been
flourishing in this country for many years. Why should it suddenly have taken
to open violence in Woolwich last week? In policy terms, militnat Musims actuaky have less to criticise than they used to. Britain is no longer in Iraq actually withdrawing (if
much too slowly, in my opinion) from Afghanistan. Despite noisy rhetoric against Islamic militancy, It has aided Islamic militants in Libya and
is trying to do the same in Syria. Its policy in the middle east in general is sympathetic to the concerns and aims of Saudi Arabia, the principal Sunni Muslim power, recently the object of a visit by the heir to the throne. Islam's status in this country is high, and getting higher. Government and judges have combined to emphasise that Christianity is no longer our dominant national religion. Muslim festivals are marked in schools and in Whitehall.

 

It
is also claimed that I have said that the suspects in this case are
insane. I haven’t . I’ve never met them and am not qualified to judge. What I
have done is to ask if a sane person could in fact attack and kill another
human being in this fashion, in cold blood. I might also ask if a sane person
having done such a thing, would then linger at the scene, encouraging passers-by
to witness his crime. 

 

I
don’t say it’s impossible, though it seems to me to be most unlikely. What I do
say is that this event has much more of a resemblance to the growing number of
killings and attacks we see on our streets, carried out by people who turn out
to have been unhinged, than it does to anything else. The perpetrators of these
horrors are often mental patients who have been released into the community’, and
in some cases where the health service has ignored severe warning signs. In several
cases it can be shown that these perpetrators were also users of illegal drugs,
including cannabis.

 

Readers
here will know of my belief that much modern mental illness is in fact caused
by the use of illegal drugs, especially cannabis, and most particularly by the
use of cannabis by boys and girls in their teens, when their brains are
unformed and particularly vulnerable. What this illness is, I cannot say. It
does not help much to give it a name, and I do not try to do so. I do not
attempt to explain exactly how it is caused, and cannot prove causation. I know
that correlation is not causation (but I also know that it is often not
necessarily not causation either. Correlation is the foundation of
epidemiology).

 

That
it exists, and that its incidence is strongly correlated with cannabis
use,  seem to me to be undeniable facts
of modern life. I have also shown here before that the idea that cannabis is a
‘peaceful’ drug is not wholly borne out by many reports of violent crimes
committed by people under the influence of this drug.

 

I’d
add that the correlation is not just immediate but also long-term. People who
use cannabis are plainly affected when they sue it. But the correlation also
suggests that its use can lead to long-term mental illness, probably
irreversible. So that a person who used cannabis in his teens might be (or
become) mentally ill some years later, even if he has long ago ceased to use
the drug.

 

Now
a quick word about the police. One simple point, once you have absorbed it,
changes many people’s consideration of this issue. A police officer cannot
really do very much after a crime has been committed, unless he or he is good
at first-aid. The crime cannot be undone. Prosecution and conviction do not
undo it. Comforting words and the reeling out of ‘do not cross’ tape do not
undo it.

 

But
the whole purpose of the police (see my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’) was (before
Roy Jenkins and others wrecked it ) to prevent crime and disorder from
happening in the first place.

 

This
was achieved by regular and constant patrolling, on foot, by individual
officers who knew the areas they patrolled, and the people in them. Not only
did their mere presence deter small acts of wrongdoing (which as James Q.
Wilson long ago established, must be deterred to prevent greater acts of
wrongdoing) . They also provided a rallying point for the law-abiding and the
good, and leadership in moments of crisis. H

 

This
meant that the law-abiding majority were more willing and able to coalesce
against the lawbreakers.  It changed the
atmosphere of the streets. I haven’t read a full account of the Woolwich events
yet, and may not do so until the trial. But it seems to me possible that there
was an important moment, after the victim was run down by the suspects’ car, when
an unarmed constable could indeed have made a great difference.  If a young teacher, the immensely courageous
Lisa Potts, could successfully defend her nursery class against a crazed man
with a machete, using nothing more than the bravery God gave her, as she did in
1996,  then it seems to me that a trained
police officer could have been pretty effective in these circumstances.  But I’ll wait to see.

For once, a stupid insult is more important than brutal murder

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

By far the most important event of the week is the attempt to conceal the truth – that the leadership of the Tory Party hate their members and their voters.

I explain in the piece at the bottom of this page why the sad and cruel murder of a soldier in London does not deserve the attention it is still getting. I also show why the media have, as usual, failed to see what is in front of their noses.

The media flock, bleating in unison as always, have also missed the point of the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ episode.

Political journalists have known for years that senior political figures in all parties despise their own supporters, while seeking their votes and money.
 They don’t say much about it, because they are themselves part of the establishment. Ministers pretend to be their friends, and they pretend back, often over expensive restaurant tables. They advance each other’s careers.
It really is not done to blab about private conversations over lunch and dinner. So what happened when Mr or Mrs X, high in the Tory Party, complained that Conservative Party members were annoying lunatics?

To you, this would be an interesting revelation about British politics. After all, if Gerald Ratner could pretty much destroy a business by saying some of its products were ‘c***’, also at a private occasion, surely a political party whose chiefs feel this way about their supporters is also rightly doomed?

And so it is quite urgent news, in my view the biggest political story of the year so far. It ought to mean a complete revolution in national politics.

It is absolute confirmation of what I have been trying to tell you for years about the blatant fraud that is the Tory Party, which, if it were a commercial organisation, would long ago have been bankrupt or worse.

Yet it took two days to get into the papers, and even then the name of the person involved was kept secret.
I cannot help you, not having been there. But I would draw your attention to the statement issued by the Downing Street press office, a taxpayer-financed outfit committed by Civil Service rules to strict truthfulness.It says: ‘It is categorically untrue that anyone in Downing Street made the comments about the Conservative party associations and activists reported in the Times and the Telegraph.’
Read it very carefully and you will see that this is what we in my sordid trade call a ‘non-denial denial’.
The word ‘anyone’ is followed by the phrase ‘in Downing Street’.

Gentle readers, this means that it is just conceivably possible that somebody did say it, but not somebody who lives or works in Downing Street. That’s quite a lot of people, isn’t it?

In the meantime, if you have worked for, supported, donated to, or voted for the Tory Party, I can assure you that its leaders laugh and sneer at you when they think they are safe to do so.

If I were you, I should repay them in kind, and leave them in the lurch for ever. It’s the only revenge they’d understand.
 

 

Drugs, a bigger threat than Al Qaeda

Michael Adebolajo's life changed in his teens when he began taking drugs, especially cannabis

When a soldier was murdered on the streets of London, what use was it to anyone that the Prime Minister flew back from Paris?

What use was the fatuous committee, grandiosely called COBRA (SLOW-WORM would be a better name), that gathered portentously in a bunker, as if the Blitz was still on?

This is just street theatre – a bunch of powerless people pretending they can protect us from the wholly unpredictable.

What use are the expensive spooks  who track, snoop and file, who want the power to lock us up for weeks and to peer even more deeply into our lives? They failed to prevent this, though they knew all about the suspects.

As for the police, living on a reputation they won decades ago and no longer deserve, wouldn’t a constable on old-fashioned foot patrol have been more help on this occasion than the squadrons of armed militia who appeared long after the event, blazing away in the street?

The police force in this country is now bigger than our shrunken Army, but it is extraordinary how its members are never, ever there, except to protect the powerful.

Too busy patrolling Twitter, perhaps.

Now look at the suspects. Oceans of piffle have been written (as usual) about the mythical bogey of ‘Al Qaeda’. We are in yet another frenzy about the ‘hate preachers’ who are the inevitable result of 40 years of state multiculturalism.

The English Defence League (even stupider than the liberal elite) is ‘defending our way of life’ by throwing bottles at the police.

But nobody has seen any significance in the fact that Michael Adebolajo’s life changed utterly when, as a teenager, he began taking drugs, especially cannabis.

Use of this drug, particularly when young, is closely correlated with irreversible mental illness. That’s also when he embraced the barmy version of Islam that seems to have him in its grip.

There are plenty of other young drug-users roaming our streets. Most of them couldn’t even spell ‘Al Qaeda’ and won’t embrace Islam.

But many of them will become mental patients. Some of them, alas, will be ‘released into the community’ to commit awful acts of unhinged violence that barely make the local TV news.

No Prime Ministers will fly back from Paris. No Whitehall committees will meet. No noble statements of defiance will be made.

And yet, if we strengthened and enforced our drug laws, instead of watering them down to nothingness as we have done, much of this would be preventable.
 
 

 

A 'tough' PM with a VERY short memory

The Prime Minister says that we never buckle to terror. Why does he get away with this? The British State buckled pathetically to terror in 1998 when it surrendered to the IRA.

 Has he forgotten the mass release of terrorist prisoners? Has he forgotten the dismantling of the Army’s security apparatus in return for a completely unconfirmed ‘decommissioning’ of IRA weapons?

Has he somehow not noticed that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are now in office, and the Union Flag can’t be flown every day any more in Northern Ireland?

Come to that, what about our sucking up to Yasser Arafat of the PLO? Or our craven release of the hijacker Leila Khaled? I could go on.

Terrorism flourishes precisely because we keep giving in to it. These fake statements of resolve should be met with raspberries and laughter, not respectful silence.

 

 

Newly opened records reveal that Stalin and Churchill drank deep into the night during a Kremlin meeting, but Churchill managed to avoid a ‘pretty savage’ Georgian spirit that the Soviet leader pressed on him.

I think I know what this was, as Stalin’s grandson, Yevgeny, once persuaded me to drink several generous glasses of Caucasus firewater during an interview.

It didn’t taste that bad, but I was barely able to stand and Yevgeny was so worried about me that he later phoned me at home to make sure I had got back safely.

His grandpa wouldn’t have done that.

 

 
Gatsby may be Great, but the story is pretty lousy

I suspect quite a lot of women are going to see the new film of The Great Gatsby to look at the frocks and the dancing, rather than because they care about the story.

They aren’t worried that the critics are pretty sniffy about the film itself. I don’t blame them.

‘Gatsby’ isn’t a particularly good book. That’s partly why nobody has ever managed to make a decent film of it.

It survives because it is on a lot of school and college reading lists, mainly because it is short.

I often wonder how many really good books are never published or promoted, because of the cruel fickleness of fashion.

 

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

Swivelgate, the Sexual Revolution and How Great is Gatsby?

It is time for a
few words on Swivelgate, or Loongate, now that the initial frenzy (which made
judicious comment difficult) has ended.  These thoughts are stimulated by Mr Slippery’s
very funny letter to the remaining members of the Conservative Party, in which
he claims to be one of them, to love them like anything, and to deplore any
rude remarks about them which might (or might not) have been made by any of his
friends and cronies.

 

The issue of this
letter was announced on the same day that he flung himself into the arms of the
Labour Party, so as to rescue his beloved Same Sex Marriage Bill.

 

Which of these two
actions is the more revealing? It doesn’t take more than half a second to work
this out.  In fact, ever since Norman St
John Stevas and Roy Jenkins co-operated to pilot the Obscene Publication Act
through Parliament back in 1959, there has been a cross-party alliance devoted
to putting through socially and politically revolutionary measures that lack
public support. The OPA was the prototype not only for Jenkins’s Permissive
Society  (achieved through supposed
‘Private Members’ Bills’ which just happened to get lots of time and informal
government backing) in the 1960s, but also for the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971,
the only Bill ever to have been tabled in identical form by both Labour and
Tory Parties, and of course the cross-party alliance that got us into the
Common Market and keeps us there however much everyone hates it, and however
obviously it reveals itself as an Empire of which we are a powerless province.  

 

 

If you believed in
‘Conspiracy Theories’, which of course only swivel-eyed loons do, you might see
this as a conspiracy of the liberal elite in both parties against what used in
those days to be a conservative electorate, and is now a declining but still
potent remnant.  The Labour decision to
back drug liberalisation split Harold Wilson’s Cabinet down the middle – the
division being between working class Real Labour types, usually Christians,
from Scotland, Wales and the Trades Union movement, and university graduates,
cultural and moral revolutionaries working through the Labour Party for
profound change. The Real Labour men, of course, had far more in common with
the ‘Swivel-Eyed loons’ than they had with (say) Richard Crossman or Roy Jenkins.
But the tribal divisions of British politics kept them far apart, never to meet
or co-operate.

 

The liberals, by
contrast, were quite happy to reach out across what they recognized was a
fictional party divide,  and have been
doing so for more than half a century. The danger, that the social
conservatives might achieve a similar alliance, never before seemed very
pressing. Now it does. UKIP is already attracting Labor voters, from among
those disgusted with the bourgeois bohemian concerns of the Blairite Party. And
Labour is very worried about this.

 

I will stay away
from the actual incident in which a person is said to have uttered the words
‘Swivel-Eyed Loons’ in front of a group of political reporters.  I have looked into it a bit, and all I can say
is that it really doesn’t seem that unlikely to me that a senior Tory might have
said such a thing, but that it is interesting that it should now be regarded as
news (in fact the time between the alleged remark and the reporting of it was
several days).  As I pointed out (to the
usual derisive laughter) during ‘Question Time’ late last year, David Cameron
hates his party. How could he not? The only puzzle was why his Party did not
return the favour (I think it was an absurd and overblown conception of ‘loyalty’,
a duty which a political party does not really deserve especially when it is
actively betraying the country).  But now
at last they seem to be doing so.

 

The occasion for
this is the trivial side issue of same-sex marriage, about which few people under
60 care at all, one on which the built-in liberal elite majority in the Commons
can easily ignore their views. I suspect this is Mr Cameron’s calculation. As I
have said here before, he knows he cannot win the next election, so it will be
handy for him and his allies to be able to blame the ‘backwoodsmen’ ‘Turnip
Talebans’ and the rest for this inevitable defeat. If only we had embraced the
modern world properly, they will say (and their many mouthpieces in the media
will echo this), then we might have won.  
They can then accelerate their slow-motion putsch and drive the
remaining conservative elements out of the Tory Party. The most nauseating
feature of this next stage is that it may well involve the arrival in the
leader’s chair of Mr Al Johnson, now mayor of London, a man who Tory activists
quaintly believe to be more conservative than David Cameron.  He isn’t, I warn you now.

 

The only danger to
the liberal elite will come when the issue in dispute is one which actually
does bring together a majority of the country (immigration, crime and disorder
occur to me). It will be no use the parliamentary ‘progressives’ uniting on
that, if the electorate are united the other way.  But ‘When will that be?’ ask the Bells of
Stepney. And ‘I do not know’, says the Great Bell of Bow.

 

In the meantime, a
few random thoughts on my discussion with Linda Grant, the novelist and my
fellow York Graduate. We talked about the sexual revolution at the Bristol
Festival of Ideas. Judging from the mood of the occasion (and from a little
traffic on Twitter), the sexual revolution is pretty much accepted as a Good
Thing among Bristol festival goers.  

 

The interesting
thing about the collapse and evaporation of the Protestant Christian Religion
By Law Established is how quickly its principles have disappeared from the list
of things which it is permissible to think. On several occasions I noticed the
temperature of the room noticeably dropping, once when I read a passage from
the Prayer Book marriage service (pointing out that an honourable equality of
man and wife as each other’s helpmeets and companions was not in any way a new
idea) and once when I said that the ready acceptance of mass abortion showed us
all what we would actually do when a defenceless minority among us was being
killed off by brute force, that is to say, we would do nothing, as we now do about such an event in our midst, though we do not like being reminded of what it actually involves.

 

There were one or
two others:  it is interesting that the
sexual revolutionaries like to consider themselves pretty free-wheeling, but a
blunt description of the old bargain  (that
a woman would not offer a man sex until he married her) seemed to shock quite a
few of those present. So did the idea that it might be an honourable estate to
be in charge of raising the next generation.

 

Although the
discussion was built around the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s
‘Feminine Mystique’ and plainly about the position of women above all, someone
sought to bring up the subject of homosexuality, and I could sense frustration
when I said it really wasn’t very important and had no organic connection with the
main issue under discussion.  Some in the
audience – or so it seemed to me - would have liked me to do or say something
they could have filed away under ‘homophobia’, thus allowing them to dismiss me
as an unworthy human being,  and this
wasn’t it. What I completely forgot to say (and I had been reading the relevant
passage the night before, so had no excuse) was that Betty Friedan herself was
none-too-friendly towards homosexuality. Those interested should turn to pages
221-224 of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of ‘The ‘Feminine Mystique’, but
it is striking that the mother of the modern Women’s Movement should have
written of ‘the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the
American scene’ and ‘male homosexuals –and the male Don Juans, whose compulsion
to test their potency is often caused by unconscious homosexuality – are, no
less than the female sex-seekers, Peter Pans, for ever childlike, afraid of
age, grasping at youth in their continual search for reassurance in some sexual
magic’.

 

Before anyone
tries to place any ambitious construction on this, I quote the above simply to
point out that this is what Mrs Friedan said, and that these words were written in 1963, not
because I agree with the words quoted, or indeed with much else that Mrs Friedan
argues.

 

One other thing
arose out of my meeting with Linda Grant. Before the event we were chatting
about the new film of ‘The Great Gatsby’, which we hadn’t seen but had heard (and
read) was pretty terrible. I said I wondered if it was hard to film because it
wasn’t actually that marvellous a book. There was a horrified silence. Linda
has since tweeted that I am ‘wrong’ to think this. I have replied that the greatness
(or otherwise) of books is not something about which one can be right or wrong.
Truth is the Daughter of Time, and so is a book’s greatness.  ‘Gatsby’ (I suspect because it is shorter than
Fitzgerald’s other major works) gets on quite a lot of school and college reading
lists. But is it that good? I got out my old 1960s Penguin Modern Classic and
had a go, but the word ‘pretentious’ kept leaping into my mind, though not as
much as it does when I struggle with ‘Tender is the Night’. I’ve written before
here of a couple of passages (one of which I wrongly remembered as being from a
short story) that I like, but they are untypical of the book as a whole.