Mohammed Saeed al-Ustaz, aged 7. Shot dead by a sniper on his way to buy milk. (His is the body in the picture below.)

Every so often, when an appalling atrocity of the Israeli occupation force against a Palestinian child is exposed in western mainstream or social media, there will be a Zionist loudly condemning the report as a “modern-day blood libel”. In today’s Observer, there’s a piece by Howard Jacobson, a long-established columnist with the standard Zionist views of mainstream British Jewry, likening the coverage of the Gaza genocide to the mediaeval myth in which Jews were accused of killing Christian children to use their blood to make matzo, or unleavened bread, for Passover. This myth originated in England, after a young boy was found murdered in the Jewish quarter in Lincoln; the boy was buried in a tomb in the city’s cathedral and the myth spread far and wide, being used as a pretext for pogroms against Jews in eastern Europe as recently as the end of World War II. Jacobson claims there is an ‘echo’ of the blood libel in media coverage of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, and now also Lebanon:

Hence the hurt, the anger and the fear that Jewish people have been experiencing in the year since Hamas’s barbaric massacre of Israelis on 7 October and the no less barbaric denials, not to mention celebrations of it, as night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. Night after night, the unbearable footage of their parents’ agony. The savagery of war. The savagery of the Israeli onslaught. But for many, writing or marching against Israeli action, the savagery of the Jews as told for hundreds of years in literature and art and church sermons.

Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves. Even when there are other explanations for the devastation, no one really believes them. Reporters whose reports are proved wrong see no reason to apologise. No amendment of their calumnies. What is there to apologise for? It could have been true.

I first learned about the blood libel, as well as about a number of other antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories (notably the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), in a Jewish history module while at university in Aberystwyth in the mid-1990s. Of course, I knew about Jews before that; there had been a few at my school, and I had heard ‘Jew’ used as an insult and stereotypes about Jews being stingy, or involvement in money-lending (this stereotype was mentioned in Jane Eyre, a set text for A-level at the time, and may still be). I had learned about the Holocaust, but nothing about the persecution of Jews in Russia, which lasted a lot longer than Nazi Germany itself did. I was vaguely aware that there were still Nazis who hated Jews (alongside other ethnic minorities that were still perceived as ‘immigrant’ back then) but nothing about the historical involvement of the church in fostering Jew-hatred. I went to three Catholic schools and did not hear anything negative said about Jews until I was in boarding school, which was not church-run or affiliated.

As we saw with Jewish complaints about so-called antisemitism in the Labour party in the 2010s, many Jews think that non-Jews’ attitudes to them and to Israel are motivated by age-old antisemitic beliefs that bubble up through our unconscious, when in fact most British people do not know about a lot of these things unless they decide to study them in depth, as I did, while Jews learn about them from their families or schools. When we hear reports from doctors about treating children in Gaza who had been shot by snipers in the streets, or left to die in a car surrounded by their dead family, waiting for an ambulance that will never come because its crew have been murdered, or hear about the sheer numbers of children suffering the loss of limbs or eyes and undergoing amputations without anaesthetic, we don’t think about Jews back in mediaeval Lincoln murdering children to use their blood as a food ingredient because most of us have never heard of that myth. What we see is a nation using the methods of modern warfare to annihilate a native population that will not stop resisting the seizure of their country, given a free hand and an unlimited supply of munitions by the brainwashed leaders of western countries.

Image source: Martyrs of Gaza, via X (Twitter).

Possibly Related Posts:

• They weren’t protests
• Don’t mention the genocide
• Seething with anger
• “Never such depravity”
• Genocide shouldn’t be divisive

This summer I’ve made two attempts to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Both failed. On the first occasion, in early July, I was just getting the hang of riding the bike around the yard and changing the gears up and down when the instructor set a new task, the day was warming up and I was getting hot in the protective clothing you have to wear and started stalling and flubbing everything I was trying to do, and I ended up leaving the session early. The second time was last Monday; I thought trying a scooter would make things a little easier as I had already learned how to use gears the previous time, but in the event could not even bring myself to ride the thing at all. I don’t know if I will try a third time; there are some training companies that offer one- or two-hour lessons, while others offer nothing other than the standard CBT (Compulsory Basic Training), in some cases with an offer of a second try at a reduced rate.

I previously looked into learning to ride a motorcycle twice, once in the mid-90s when I was in my early 20s and still at university, the second in the late 2000s when I was in my early 30s. The first time, bike shop attendants told me that I shouldn’t really consider travelling from London to Aberystwyth and back on a 125cc motorcycle (perhaps this was advice I should have ignored; after all, it’s around 200 miles, a distance that regular commuting will run up in a couple of weeks); buying one would have meant taking out a student loan, which I had hitherto managed to avoid doing with parental help, but the old car I had acquired from my uncle had become undriveable as part of the body had rusted so bad that the rear shocks had gone straight through. In the end, I decided against it. The second time was after a job agency boss had told me I should “get a little scooter” when public transport was often failing to get me to work on time. I looked around some of the same places I’d looked at ten or so years earlier, but in the event, a family tragedy led me to knock the idea on the head once again. This time, the reasons were more practical: being able to commute without getting stuck in London’s interminable traffic jams, and perhaps a more pleasant way to get to some of the country parks and stately homes where I like to take pictures, as well as (for small bikes at least) being able to do twice or three times as many miles on a gallon of petrol as I do in my car. Initially I was considering a three-wheeler, as there are tricycles with two wheels at the front rather than the back which are a little wider than a motorcycle and can be ridden on a car licence, but the road tax and insurance costs meant this would be a costly option, far more in the long term than actually learning to ride a motorcycle.

However, despite having done a bit of research, look at training videos on YouTube showing how you operate the gears on a bike and so on, nerves still got the better of me, twice. On the first occasion I came in pretty confident that I’d complete it and the following day I’d be going out, getting a bike and riding it home, and that biking would be a new hobby I’d be able to enjoy in the coming months (less so in the winter, but I had no plans to get rid of the car), and suddenly my plans had all evaporated and there was a void; even at times when I was comfortable with the idea of never riding again, I kept thinking to myself “what am I going to do with my life now?”. The practical advantages of riding still exist, though any bike with an engine bigger than 500cc will be no more economical than my car or in fact less, which is puzzling given that my car has a one-litre engine and still has a whole cabin to pull around whereas a motorbike’s comforts consist of a cushion and nothing else: no adjustable seats, no air conditioning, no stereo or any of the other things you see in a car that add weight. If I was downsizing from a three-litre four-by-four then almost any bike would be an improvement, but my car is already one of the most economical petrol cars going. The other reason I am still tempted to try again is that, as with learning to ride a bicycle (or doing so without stabilisers), which I did when I was a child and I now cycle all the time, there is a fear barrier that has to be overcome and that once overcome, riding gets easier.

The way the training system and the training ‘scene’ works does not make it easy for new riders, in my opinion. Unlike with learning to drive a car, there is a one-day compulsory basic training (CBT) course which is a set-piece series of lectures and exercises (a talk on safety and protective equipment, a couple of hours’ tuition on basic riding and manoeuvres, a Highway Code lecture followed by a two-hour road ride) in which one instructor can be split between four trainees (though only two for the road ride). This is typically carried out in a confined space, such as a school playground, car park or some other small yard, so at no point can you just ride. By contrast, when we learn to drive a car, we have a series of one-to-one lessons that last as long as it takes to get up to test standard. There are not many training companies that offer one-to-one CBT or introductory lessons; some in fact warn learners off companies that offer the latter, when a couple of hours to get the hang of riding without worrying about taking the instructor’s time from three other trainees might be what someone needs. The cost of any non-CBT training session ranges from £30 to over £60 per hour; CBT itself in London often costs considerably more than even in nearby towns such as Crawley. I have seen one-to-one CBT advertised as costing £500; by contrast, the two-day HIAB operation course I attended earlier this year cost £725 (i.e. £362.50 a day) for one-to-one tuition, and a HIAB-equipped truck costs a lot more than a 125cc motorcycle.

Gear — protective equipment — is another stumbling block. Helmets are compulsory; gloves, boots and suitable clothing are recommended, and nobody will train you without them. However, getting hold of gear if you’re new to the scene is a chore. The gear shop near me, when I went in to buy a helmet, directed me to get a full-face helmet when I had expressed a preference for an open one, because I feared a full-face helmet would not work well with glasses, and I ended up with one that wasn’t very comfortable. Getting boots was also an ordeal; their boot selection is all laid out on the shelves (rather than in boxes in a store room as in a normal shoe shop), boots are often in sizes nothing like normal shoe sizes (I ended up with a size 13 when I am normally a 10) and there was a security tag through one of the lace holes, preventing me from doing it up properly. After the first CBT disaster, I took the helmet back to the shop unused; the cashier initially refused to give me a cash refund (if you buy online, they have to, but not for store purchases) until I told him that his voucher would be no use to me. After the second, I hung on to the boots as I suspect he’d not have made the same allowance a second time. On both occasions, it occurred to me to cancel the CBT sessions, but it was too late for a refund. I don’t dispute the need for gear when riding on the road (although I see plenty of riders without it, especially the delivery riders) but it can be sweltering on a hot day when you’re stationary and trying to listen to an instructor. That’s not a good way to learn a new skill. Perhaps doing the basic (off-road) training on grass would be better than on concrete, as they could then ease up on the gear (particularly the jacket).

Motorcycling isn’t exactly in my blood. My dad rode when I was a young child, but (as is common with young men who get married and have kids, it seems) sold his bike long enough ago that I can’t remember what make and model it was. He then cycled ten miles to work and back each day until we moved to New Malden, where it was no longer practical and took the train. I know two people who have quit, in one case because he slipped on oil and although he was not badly hurt, the bike (a Harley Sportster) was a wreck. People have lucky escapes and decide that they’ve pushed their luck enough and it’s time to quit while they’re ahead. I’ve been told that riding at 150mph is a feeling like no other, but my ambitions aren’t that extreme; I just want to be able to leave the car behind when I go to work or otherwise out alone, and pay a bit less for petrol.

Image source: Rainmaker47, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0 licence.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Let’s do away with these NIMBY zones
• Violent people get violent
• The Auriol Grey case and pavement cycling
• Brighton Hill: £20million well spent (at least partly)
• Let’s de-toll the M6 Toll

A ‘teacher’ entertains his pupils in a BBC drama about 1960s special ‘education’.

Restrained and scared - the £100k schools failing vulnerable children (from BBC News)

There has long been a section of the “special” education system in the UK that really made no attempt to educate; in the 60s and 70s there was a type of school called an “ESN school” (it stood for educationally sub-normal) where no real attempt was made to teach; rather, untrained ‘teachers’ made half-hearted attempts to merely entertain them. A few years ago there was a BBC drama and a documentary focussing on Black children consigned to these schools on spurious grounds, often because differences in language (such as calling a water outlet a pipe rather than a tap) led to them failing literacy tests (see earlier entry). Private schools do not have to hire qualified teachers, unlike state schools; in the past, state grammar schools hired teachers with subject degrees while other schools hired teachers with a Certificate in Education (Cert. Ed.), later upgraded to a Bachelor’s degree (B.Ed). Today, there was a report on BBC News about three girls who were sent to private schools, which charged six-figure sums annually, which hired untrained and unqualified staff, and used abusive practices which left the girls traumatised.

In one of the schools, which charged local authorities £250,000 per pupil annually, a girl named Leah (now 18) was held down by members of staff for so long that blood vessels burst in her face; she began self-harming in a bid to get out of the school. The other was taken over by a large chain of special schools, resulting in an overnight change in ethos and a dramatic turnover of staff; the upshot was that the use of restraint increased dramatically, with some experiencing it daily, and parents observed that “most of the children were in absolute crisis”. Leah’s mother made a complaint to the local authority, which rejected it, though she subsequently won a disability discrimination lawsuit against the school which led to her placement being terminated. In the other case, the local authority organised a “quality assurance visit” which failed to identify any concerns. The two young girls at that school, currently aged 11 and 13, are out of education.

I was in a special school myself, 30 years ago; that school also hired staff who only had degrees and had no real understanding of anyone’s particular needs, preferring to rely on force to subdue “problematic” or “challenging” behaviour (as long as it was directed at staff; when it was directed at other boys, especially smaller boys, the usual practice was to blame the victim). Some might say that if parents are paying for education out of pocket, it’s up to them whether they let staff not qualified to teach do the teaching, but when these are children with major educational needs, including autism and ADHD, the need for them to at least have a standard education degree or postgraduate certificate is all the more pressing. Surely, the practice of farming out children with such needs to private schools with unqualified teachers should have ended long ago — some time between 1997 and 2010, one might have thought. Any school that trades as a special school should be hiring special staff, trained to understand and address the needs of the children and young people they are serving (who might well be academically quite able), not random people who know only how to restrain and coerce. It also goes without saying that when half of a school’s parents complain and an investigation finds nothing wrong, it cannot have been much of an investigation; local authorities must do due diligence and must also be able to inspect without warning, as bad schools can easily cover up their faults if they see an inspection or investigation coming.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Know-nothing managers, uncaring carers
• Earl Spencer and early boarding
• The London school fighting its own pupils
• Zionist censors come for another student leader
• Uniforms and punishments for poverty

Thugs attack a car in Hull during the riots, 3rd August

Last week I was listening to Eddie Nestor’s show on BBC London on my way back from a delivery run out to south Essex, and I heard him tell us he was going to be discussing the sociological explanations for “the protests” or some such thing. I was planning to write the show an email, but he didn’t get to that segment of the show before I arrived back at base and then I had other things to do. But I have to say something. It’s to be expected that racist agitators and propagandists will call the riots earlier this month protests, but a BBC presenter should be calling them what they were: riots.

Although there were a few peaceful demonstrations, the incidents in which mobs attempted to storm mosques, or set fire to hotels with people in them, or attacked police or counter-demonstrators, or destroyed shops, were not peaceful protests that got out of hand. Eyewitnesses reported that they attacked people as soon as they arrived, both police and anti-fascist counter-demonstrators. Others reported that the rioters disappeared when it was time to catch the last trains out. Protests are typically aimed at the government, either here or in another country; these were largely aimed at ordinary people who were in some incidents caught on film, dragged out of their cars or stopped as they drove and asked their race. Protests do not involve this sort of behaviour. This is simply lawless thuggery.

I’ve been on a few protests over the years: anti-cuts, anti-Brexit and most recently against the Gaza genocide. We marched and we chanted slogans and then we listened to some speeches and cheered along. There have been some arrests at the Palestine protests, usually not for violence but for speech offences such as posters deemed racist or celebratory of terrorism. Was anyone stopped in their car by a gang of men and asked if they were Jewish? Not once (we would know about it if anyone had been). During my childhood when the Poll Tax was introduced, there were riots, but this was because an unjust tax forced people to choose between impoverishment and losing the right to vote. These were not race riots which targeted ordinary people who were unarmed and going about their business.

Clearly there are agendas behind this use of ‘protest’ to refer to the organised racist violence: some, who share the bigotries of the attackers are playing down the violence while emphasising  the “public anger” behind it, while others intend to tar actual peaceful demonstrators with the same brush because they cause minor irritation or are opposed to their politics (hence the insistence of some people on calling them “pro-Hamas demonstrations”, an obvious coded demand for them to be banned). So, by calling orgies of violence ‘protests’, we lump both into the same category. But it also smacks of fear and cowardice when BBC radio presenters use this dishonest euphemism: it sounds as if the management are clearly scared of offending someone powerful by using harsh language, when words like ‘riot’ and ‘violence’ describes those incidents perfectly, and ‘protest’ does not even come close.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Don’t mention the genocide
• Seething with anger
• “Never such depravity”
• Genocide shouldn’t be divisive
• Ask a loaded question …

Seal of the Faculty of Advocates, the Scottish lawyers’ body

Any time the matter of sex involving teenagers is adiscussed on social media, there is someone who insists that the act must be rape because someone younger than the age of consent cannot consent. Terms like “statutory rape”, not actually a thing in British law, get thrown around a lot; people presume that the actual law is a mixture of old English law, bits of American law, cherry-picked bits of current English law, and whatever they think the law should be. The law on this was reformed in the first term of the Blair government and the result was the 2003 Sexual Offences Act (the law passed in 2003 rather than 2001, as originally intended, as the House of Lords rejected it, so it was delayed for two years under the Parliament Act). That law classed having sex with anyone under the age of 13 as rape, but not those between 13 and 16; this is a separate (and lesser) offence. The law was reformed in Scotland by its parliament in 2009, and it classified the two offences as “rape of a young child” and “having intercourse with an older child” respectively. I mention Scotland here because I came across a Twitter conversation involving a Scottish senior lawyer (called to the Bar in 1998) which made the same schoolboy error.

In this case the controversy was a Daily Mail article about a man convicted in 2022 in Newport, south Wales, in his 30s of raping a “girl under 14” when he was 14 himself, in 2005; the case arose because the man broke the terms of his suspended sentence by going abroad on holiday without notifying the authorities, and was not imprisoned because of the ongoing overcrowding crisis made worse by the aftermath of the recent riots. I could not find any press reports about the original conviction and the actual age of the girl is not specified; if she was 12, the offence was rape because of her age and if she was 13, it was only rape if it was rape (that is, achieved by force, coercion or deception), and it is unlikely that a man would be charged with rape on a legal technicality for having sex with a willing partner a year and a half younger than him nearly 20 years after the event, so we can presume that force or at least coercion was involved. When someone replied asking whether the offence was merely sex or rape, the lawyer responded “the one is automatically the other, in law, as a 14yo girl cannot consent”, which is plainly wrong, as both the English and Scottish Sexual Offences Acts make clear.

As someone who is old enough to remember the debates that led up to it, it was never intended for teenagers to be charged with any criminal offence at all for having consensual sex with other teenagers; while calls for reducing the age of consent to below 16 (14, say) were rejected, politicians assured us that such situations would not lead to prosecutions unless there was evidence of exploitation or coercion. The previous law dated from the 19th century and the age of consent applied to girls only; it was presumed unthinkable in Victorian times that a boy under that age would be of sexual interest to any girl or woman, and the age of puberty was higher then because of a colder climate (tail end of the Little Ice Age and very much pre global warming) and poorer diet. The upshot was that, by the 1990s, a boy could be charged with an offence for having sex with an older girl who was still under 16, but the girl had committed no crime; the law as it stands now makes it an offence for both, though in the absence of coercion, the guidance is that neither will be charged. (This arrangement has its dangers; it still opens up the possibility for charges to be laid because the girl’s parents are powerful enough or because of prejudice against the boy and/or his family, for example.) Were this offence to be classified as rape, it would present the absurd proposition of two people simultaneously raping each other.

We now, however, have people screaming rape on social media any time they hear of two teenagers having sex, even when both are under 16, in apparent total ignorance of both the letter and spirit of current sexual offence legislation. Some of this stems from activist culture, which holds that boys are automatically more culpable than girls because they are bigger, and because as males they enjoy power that females do not (a ridiculous assumption to make of teenagers, where the boy may be poor, come from an abusive home, be in care, or be at the bottom of the pile at school). They will respond “so what?” when you mention that the boy in whatever case is being discussed was himself underage; plainly, the intention is to drag us back to the pre-2003 era when the boy was always culpable. To them, boys are males while girls are children; boys are predators right from puberty while girls are perennial victims. However, this is the second time I’ve had to correct an actual lawyer on a fairly recent, well-known piece of legislation that saw vigorous public debate at the time. An expert can be wrong, however forthright he is in stating his erroneous views.

And let’s be clear: teenagers are judged to have capacity in certain areas. The age of criminal responsibility is 10, and the doctrine of Gillick Competency means that their views are taken into account when making decisions about medical treatment. This notion that sex involving two teenagers cannot possibly be consensual and must necessarily be predatory on the boy’s part is not logical. As someone who lived through the time when it came to be understood that teenagers had rights, and that their opinions on their own lives were worth listening to, it is upsetting to see members of the generations that were the first beneficiaries of this twenty years ago — my generation, people in their forties and fifties now — demanding that today’s teenagers have fewer rights and should be treated as children other than when there is something to blame them for.

Possibly Related Posts:

• What part of ’32 weeks’ don’t people understand?
• Not just a child
• The danger of a return to the death penalty
• Inquest travesty
• Justice matters, and it costs

A man clutches his groin after being hit by a brick thrown by fellow rioters during the Southport mosque attack. Source

Last week, following the murder of three young girls in Southport, Merseyside, who attacked a number of other girls and their teachers at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, gangs of racist hooligans have been on the rampage in a number of towns and small cities across the UK, particularly the north. In Southport itself they attacked a mosque (injuring 39 police officers), in Liverpool they set a library and community centre on fire, causing serious damage; in Sunderland and Rotherham they besieged hotels housing asylum seekers and started fires. In other places they attacked shops (some but not all perceived as ‘ethnic’), looting some and burning others, smashed house and car windows, and attacked random Black and Asian people both walking and in their cars. During all this, we have had politicians, columnists (notably Nigel Farage, Matthew Goodwin and Isabel Oakeshott) and an elected police chief in the UK tell us that these thugs are a “protest against mass immigration” by “the people” who are “sick of being gaslit” and that while of course they don’t condone violence, especially against police officers (naturally), these people are not “far right thugs” at all but ordinary people protesting, and the solution is to crack down on “mass immigration” as they want, rather than on violent hooliganism and the organised gang behind it.

The way the violence erupted last Tuesday should disabuse anyone of the idea that this wasn’t racist violence. After the Southport attack last Monday, rumours began to spread (allegedly sown by Russia, although people seem to blame them for any misinformation that goes around these days) that the attacker was a Syrian asylum seeker or refugee, a group widely blamed for all sorts of things from “stealing people’s houses” to sexual harassment; when the media did not report the attacker’s name, which is normal as he was under 18 (though only just) and had yet to be charged, accusations started to be made that the authorities were sitting on the information to protect asylum seekers or to hide the ‘link’ between asylum seeking or mass immigration and this tragedy. Finally last Thursday the courts did issue his name; he is in fact the British-born son of refugees from Rwanda, born in Cardiff though raised in Southport. By that time, there had already been a mob attack in Southport itself; once any link with Islam or Muslims was disproved, the mobs continued to descend on one town and city after another, with their media crypto-allies continuing to spout the “mass immigration” excuse. The notorious serial hooligan Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), who founded the English Defence League whose slogans have been heard in the streets this past week, has been stirring the pot via Twitter from his sunbed in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, advertising locations of forthcoming ‘protests’ and claiming that Muslims were “roaming the streets in armed gangs” attacking random “whites”.

Various right-wing talking heads have been telling us since the violence started that we should not call the attackers “far-right thugs”, as the Prime Minister did, or dismiss them as racists when they are really voicing public disquiet about “mass immigration”. All this is nonsense. A thug is a person who uses violence, or willingly gives the impression he is able and willing to do so. This is quite an apt description of those who staged these riots. As for the “saying what people really think”, we have seen no large demonstrations against this, or against us accommodating asylum seekers (as we are bound to by international law), only violent, organised mob attacks. By comparison, an actual mass movement such as the campaign against the genocide in Gaza and ongoing western political and military support for it has organised demonstration after demonstration around the UK since last October, particularly in London, which have resulted in very little disorder and nothing on the scale of the past week. The most recent one resulted in two arrests, both for speech offences. The repeated partial defences of the rioters have come from the losing side in the recent election, namely the Tory party and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK vehicle, which does suggest that, having lost a democratic election (progressive parties between them scored well over 50%, even if Labour’s vote share was only around 35%), that part of the political spectrum is resorting to violence to get their way.

Someone mentioned that the Zionists on social media had been quiet since the start of the riots, but on a closer examination it turned out that they were a bit quieter but not silent. Stephen Pollard penned an article for the Jewish Chronicle complaining that people who attended the riots but did not riot were condemned, but “those who attend the hate marches alongside antisemites are described as ‘decent’”. The “hate marches” he refers to are the marches against the Gaza genocide, of course, none of which have threatened or advocated any violence against Jews just because they are Jews, or have attacked synagogues, Jewish shops, individual Jews, Jewish graves or anything else Jewish; they call for a ceasefire in Gaza, or for western powers to stop arming Israel with weapons to use on civilians. Meanwhile, the fellow travellers with the racist rioters are still complaining about “their country” being taken over, or demanding that we shut the door to refugees; a different situation altogether. Melanie Phillips, on her Substack, mouths the usual disapproval of the violence itself, but complains of “public services overwhelmed by uncontrolled immigration” when anyone involved in those services will tell you that they have been weakened by 14 years of the Tories starving them of funds. The same Tory government that refused to accept that the Far Right were a significant threat, despite intelligence warnings, choosing to focus on Muslims and environmentalists instead, also downgraded our ability to respond to a lethal contagious virus.

The media also have been timid about naming the problem. The “new Right” TV stations such as GB News and Talk TV have been full of thinly-veiled egging on of the rioters (disapproval of the violence itself but continual harping on “mass immigration”, for example) and the BBC has persistently referred to the attacks as “protests”, including in headlines; some of their reporters were seen calling them things like pro-British or anti-immigration protests, as if the people attacked were not British (which in a lot of cases they in fact were); they make no distinction between British Black and Asian people and legal or illegal immigrants (not that either deserve to be lynched or burned to death, but it shows that it is racist violence, not protests against large-scale immigration). A letter in yesterday’s Guardian noted that when the thugs came to Bristol, they would attack people immediately; there had been “no slow build-up of tension” and “no attempt to make a political point”.

As for why these riots occurred when they did, the immediate reason is that an organised gang of racist hooligans used the Southport tragedy as a pretext, but without several years of politicians and the media using ‘immigrants’ as a scapegoat for problems that were of politicians’ making, the attacks could have been brought under control much more quickly and there would have been no debate as to what kind of problem we were dealing with. Brexiteer politicians capitalised on discontent about the large wave of immigration from eastern Europe that took place in the mid-2000s; in the few years after Brexit, politicians continually complained that they had not been able to bring the numbers down despite shutting the door on new worker migrants from Europe. The prime minister spoke from behind lecterns bearing the slogan “stop the boats”, referring to the refugees (and no doubt others) coming across the Channel in small boats, and the same slogan was heard being repeated during last week’s riots. The media, including the BBC, have amplified the voices of anti-immigrant politicians, including Nigel Farage who, despite persistent pleading that Brexit was all about sovereignty, invariably diverted any discussion onto immigration. There has been more subtle agitation on social media: people reminding us of “how things used to be”, with videos on YouTube and promoted posts on Facebook consisting of pictures or footage from decades past contrasted with today (such as a thriving shopping centre in the 70s contrasted with the same mall in a run-down state today) with a comments section full of people blaming the changes on immigrants (again, meaning simply non-white people) rather than, say, online shopping or the local council going bankrupt in large part because central government starved it of funds — something that did not happen before the Tories came to power in 2010.

Racist thugs are not the only kind of racists. The people stirring this up are wealthy or at least middle-class people in the media, politics and in some cases academia. They are the ones telling us that the goons who attacked police officers, shopkeepers and ordinary people and tried to destroy mosques and shops represent “ordinary people” or at least ordinary people’s fears, that it’s only the “metropolitan liberal elite” who do not share their suspicion towards Muslims, their xenophobia or their fear of “mass immigration”. None of these people want real solutions to people’s material problems; they just want to focus people’s anger on scapegoats so they can carry on enriching themselves. Most Muslims in this country are working-class people. We don’t hate or despise working-class people of any race. We regard racists as a threat to us, because of their behaviour as demonstrated this past week. It’s a choice to be racist, and a choice to be a thug.

Possibly Related Posts:

• It’s Islamophobia, thank you
• Ask a loaded question …
• Thanks Wes, but take a stand on Gaza!
• Mosque at the Trocadero is good for it and the community
• The need for a representative academia

In the UK there is a charity called “Men Behaving Dadly” which supports fathers and other male carers to improve their relationships with their children through play and other activities (the name is also used by various courses, often run by churches). The phrase sprang to mind after I heard of yet another scandal involving the sexual behaviour of non-scholarly Muslim preachers who build their following on social media. In this case it involved a preacher approaching a divorced woman with children for temporary marriage (though not technically ‘temporary’ as no finish date was specified, which is prohibited) so as to fulfil his sexual desires until he could find himself a “proper wife”, a virgin that is. He also alleged that he had been having difficulties finding a wife through legitimate channels, i.e. by approaching someone’s family so that they could assess his suitability for their daughter or relative, and assumed that a single mother would not require the temporary husband to meet her financial needs because she was ‘loaded’, i.e. had lots of money (!). The ‘marriage’ would be secret and there would be no need for his family to know about any of it. The divorced woman in question described the approach on Instagram here.

The video quickly spread onto other platforms, including Twitter which is where I heard discussion of it, and almost as soon as it started to spread, men began defending the man responsible, telling us (and telling women especially) that we shouldn’t condemn him for “trying to satisfy his desires lawfully” as “that’s what marriage is for”, and the man responsible tweeted the hadith that “when an evildoer comes to you with news, verify it”. Others countered by saying that they should not be defending it through technicalities of fiqh when it was clearly despicable, underhand behaviour which they would not like if their sister was in the situation the lady he approached was in and someone made the same suggestion to her.

There are three principal reasons why this isn’t good behaviour for any Muslim, let alone one who represents Islam by becoming known as a preacher or caller.

First, as already mentioned here in connection with a previous scandal, the behaviour of any such person should not be just the right side of lawful, if this behaviour even was that. The behaviour of a Muslim leader should be excellent, not just about OK. We shouldn’t have to grudgingly accept that he did nothing wrong; his behaviour should just not let the matter arise. (I am not talking about accusations here, but about debate about his known behaviour.) There is no place for someone respected and trusted by the Muslim community to be making secret approaches to women and asking them to marry temporarily, least of all doing so in a derogatory manner. Secret marriages are hugely frowned upon in Islam; the hadith call for a public ceremony. The fact of someone being married is a matter of public record, not a secret between the couple and the ‘witnesses’.

Anyone who has studied the books of some of the schools of Islamic law (Reliance of the Traveller, for example) will have come across lists of types of meat we are allowed to eat which in practice we would not even think to eat, including the fox, badger and porcupine, and which if you served your guests and they discovered it, they would probably throw up. This is the like of what this preacher was doing; serving someone fox and then telling them they aren’t good enough to eat chicken or lamb, that the good meat was for someone purer than they are. The behaviour of those who teach the deen should be halaal and tayyib (wholesome and pure), not like junk food of questionable provenance. (And what makes you so pure that you can carry on secret marriages until you find the “right one” and still be good enough for that virgin? By that time, you won’t be one.)

Second, if this man really was a respectable figure in the Muslim community, he would not be having such difficulty finding a marriage partner through legitimate channels as to resort to underhand means like this. If someone was well-known as a teacher of Islam and was known in his local community for his fine character and he made it known that he wanted to get married, even if he was not financially well-off, he might even be getting approaches himself and in any case would have little difficulty finding a partner and securing her family’s blessing. This aspect of his story does not ring true.

Third, single mothers are not walking receptacles for sexual desire or providers of ‘companionship’ to order. They’re mothers, with serious responsibilities — looking after kids is a whole life, a full-time job to balance with a ‘real’ full-time job that pays a wage (and you will not be very rich working a job that you have to juggle with caring for children — where does he get the impression that divorcees are loaded?), and besides the regular cooking, laundry, taking them to school, helping them with homework and so on, she has to comfort them when they’re upset or ill, deal with problems stemming from school, give them guidance, deal with conflict between them, help them with issues stemming from her divorce and so on. By marrying a woman with children you are taking on a fatherly role; you will be a stepdad even if you just think of their mother as a sexual partner. You will also be their mahram and may be the person they come to for support if their real father isn’t available. If you aren’t willing to take on those responsibilities, you shouldn’t marry a woman with children. You will make yourself a “deadbeat dad” before you even have children of your own and her children may add you to the list of men who betrayed them.

We shouldn’t really be taking our religion from men with no scholarly credentials but who set themselves up on YouTube. Having a public platform does not mean you have any authority and these men have none, besides their attachment to anti-Islamic ideologies such as those influenced by Andrew Tate, Jordan Petersen et al. But if you have a public platform and you represent Islam, to Muslims or others, you have a duty to represent it, and us, with impeccable personal behaviour. Approaching a divorced woman or a widow with children on the sly through direct messages on Instagram, inviting her to a secret, temporary marriage and telling her she isn’t good enough to be treated honourably merely because she has one marriage in her past are all despicable behaviours which are completely unbecoming of teachers of Islam. These men shouldn’t be out preaching; they should be learning, and if not actually studying religious knowledge, then getting their degree and then a proper job. There are other ways to contribute to the betterment of the Muslim community, and to wider society if you live in the West, than making yourself a public figure when you don’t have the knowledge to behave decently.

Image source: Meruyert Gonullu, via Pexels (original image here).

Possibly Related Posts:

• Tories show their repressive side with ban on HT
• On the Daniel Jou “virginity test” controversy
• It’s not just about cooking
• Muslims, parents and nursing homes
• Rushdie, Khomeini and Muslims here and there

A former polling station in south-west London.

We have a general election tomorrow (4th July); it may be today by the time you read this. We have had 14 years of Tory mismanagement, five of them enabled by the Liberal Democrats, during which we relinquished our membership of the European Union, experienced an unnecessary austerity in which the fabric of our society was destroyed and poor and disabled people made scapegoats, saw the rise of grinding poverty that resulted in food banks rising from almost unknown to a fixture in every city and town, and witnessed our government party as the rest of the nation spent Christmas alone or isolated with their families following the second wave of Covid in late 2020. We are seeing schools persecute children over trivial uniform infractions and for forgetting pens and pencils while the buildings themselves are falling down. Large parts of our towns and cities stink of sewage. You can travel miles and not escape it in some areas.

Tomorrow, we really must vote for whoever is best placed to get these people out. Some of us have the privilege of sufficient numbers to elect an independent or third-party candidate but for many it means voting Labour or Lib Dem. If for no other reason than the Tories’ threat to reintroduce “national service”, we must get them out: if you have a teenager in your family, a boy or a girl, know that the Tories will pick a fight with the Russians if re-elected — recent stories and opinion pieces in Tory newspapers point in that direction — and they will demand that our young people fight the battle for them. More immediately, our schools will continue to inflict Michael Gove’s Gradgrindesque curriculum on our children, and our health system will move further towards using underqualified ‘associates’ as if they were doctors. Our social care, dentistry and mental health systems are in crisis and this will continue if we have another four or five years of Rishi Sunak and his contemptuous cronies.

Of course, many Muslims are angry that Labour has not stood up for the people of Gaza during the genocide, and that some of its MPs are under the sway of pro-Israel lobbying. The Tories, however, are actively hostile to Muslims. Despite boasting of the most diverse front bench ever, it has not included any practising Muslims. With Gove in government (he is not standing for re-election, but he will remain a major influence if his acolytes are in parliament), good schools have been demonised and destroyed for accommodating their Muslim pupils too much (have we forgotten the “Trojan Horse” hoax?) while another is celebrated for preventing Muslim pupils from praying. The Tories also banned Hizb-ut-Tahrir for holding demonstrations calling on Muslim countries to defend the people of Gaza.

People familiar with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign will know that they advocate targeted boycotts, not emotional scattergun boycotts: the boycotts are targeted at a small group of companies actively involved in the occupation rather than any company which does any business in Israel. We should aim our voting efforts the same way: by voting for strong independent and third-party candidates who have a chance of winning in order to unseat the most egregious pro-Israel MPs, but not (at the opposite extreme) by refusing to vote for dissenting Labour MPs who have stood against the genocide, such as John McDonnell and Diane Abbott. The Muslim Vote campaign has given in to loudmouths and withdrawn their support for these two and other pro-Palestine Labour MPs. This is a huge mistake that benefits neither the Muslims of this country nor the people of Gaza. I have seen many Muslims say they will vote Green; anyone tempted to do this should look at their candidate’s policy on halal slaughter, which some Green politicians have gone on record as supporting a ban on. Nobody with this policy should get any Muslim’s vote.

So, if Faiza Shaheen or Jeremy Corbyn is standing in your constituency then by all means vote for them. But don’t waste your vote on a candidate that can’t win if there’s a chance that it could leave you with a Tory MP and don’t waste it on a media junkie or self-promoter either, especially one who is close to the equally vicious Asad regime. We must save our country from another five years or ruinous Tory rule.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Racism, not fascism
• Encouraging obesity?
• Anti-Semitism and the ‘woke’ Muslim
• BADD 2016: Break the silence
• Of course the ‘FGM doctor’ was innocent

I’m a truck driver, and something my MP is going to be hearing from me about after the election, whoever they are, is the proliferation of so-called environmental weight limits or, as they’re often called among the driving community, “NIMBY limits” (it stands for Not In My Back Yard). These are weight limits, usually set at 7.5 tonnes which excludes all but the smallest vehicles that are recognised as trucks, intended to keep trucks out of residential areas, villages, small towns or other urban areas. Quite often they follow the construction of a bypass or other new road, and are intended to compel truck drivers to use the new road rather than jamming up the old roads through the town or village. This may seem quite reasonable, but many of them force truck drivers to use other residential roads, or slow and congested main roads, or to make circuitous detours when the direct route is only a few miles. With some of these ‘environmental’ limits, we have to ask: what do they mean by “the environment”?

To take a recent example: Buckinghamshire council recently imposed a truck ban on a whole tract of countryside south of Leighton Buzzard. After a new link road was opened up north of Dunstable, the local council there (Central Bedfordshire, which also administers the countryside between Luton and Bedford), imposed the same weight limit on roads through Dunstable, including the old A5 which was rerouted to meet the M1 north of Luton and Dunstable; a weight limit was also imposed on a stretch of the old A-road from Leighton Buzzard to Hemel Hempstead, quite appropriately as there is a bridge on that road which is narrow and has sharp bends at each end. The upshot is that anyone needing to make a journey from Leighton Buzzard to Berkhamsted, a journey of only 13 miles by the direct route, is expected to travel either via Aylesbury (resulting in a 24-mile journey) or Hemel Hempstead, resulting in a journey of nearly 28 miles running through a narrow and congested section of the M1 which runs straight through the suburbs of Luton and Dunstable. This detour is a quite unreasonable demand in an age when fuel prices are still high after the peak of 2022; it also results in greater carbon emissions.

Buckinghamshire council had conducted a consultation prior to introducing the “Ivinghoe Freight Zone”; however, it seems only to have been aimed at people living in the villages covered by it and some of those in the villages expected to take the displaced truck traffic, notably Wing, situated on the A418 road between Leighton Buzzard and Aylesbury. This was dismissed on the grounds that the road is already a strategic road. In essence, tough: their health and quality of life are to be sacrificed so that the people of Ivinghoe (where property prices are no doubt higher) can have a quieter life. I was quite unaware of any such consultation until I ran into it when trying to make this journey a few months ago. The consultation report does mention a response from the Road Haulage Association which neither supported nor opposed the scheme but did mention that it would require additional mileage, including to local businesses, which would have additional environmental impacts as well as financial ones, and displace HGV traffic into neighbouring villages rather than onto (non-existent) suitable roads. The council did not actually address these objections, however.

The report makes the usual cases for imposing the limits: that trucks cause noise, that there are properties which front the road and people complain of their houses shaking, and so on. In some cases, there are complaints of serious congestion and of trucks struggling to pass each other, but having travelled down some of the roads concerned, this is not a description of all the roads in that area and a brief look at Google’s Street View of the A418 through Wing shows that the issue of houses fronting the road is true there as well. There were also complaints of HGVs travelling at high speed through some of the villages; I think this is a dubious claim, as HGVs accelerate more slowly than cars and tend to travel more slowly (on average), especially if heavily laden or going uphill or if the road is narrow and they have to take extra care when passing other vehicles, especially other trucks. If anything, HGVs would slow traffic down and obstruct speeding cars, which would be a benefit for road safety. I don’t doubt that some of the trucks alleged to be driving at high speeds were actually there for legitimate purposes even under the new rules, accessing local businesses or providing local services.

While I do not object to EWLs per se, there should be more stringent guidelines for where and why they can be introduced: broadly, they should be used for stopping trucks using unsuitable roads where suitable alternatives exist that do not involve lengthy detours, and this should be set at five miles. Expecting truck drivers to use a perfectly good bypass instead of a narrow village road is quite reasonable; expecting them to take a ten-mile detour to avoid causing a bit of extra noise in one or two villages which do have suitable roads but whose residents would rather they didn’t go through their neighbourhood is not. If the aim is to get trucks out of residential areas, the alternative should not be through another residential area, and the fact that the latter already deals with heavy traffic congestion is not a reason to burden it with more. The mere fact of a bypass existing is not reason in itself to slap a weight limit on the old road, as people will generally use the bypass if it is available; rather, it should be imposed only if the old road is unsuitable or if there is significant vexatious use of it. There should also be a means to challenge such zones after they are imposed, or to appeal to an ombudsman outside the local council, as with planning decisions.

There is no human right to not have trucks passing by one’s house. Millions of houses the length and breadth of the country lie on roads which have large vehicles passing along them. Nobody has a better right to a quiet life than anyone else just because they live in a village rather than a town, or because their community lies along a B-road rather than an A-road, and nobody has a right to a quiet life at significant expense or inconvenience for others. There is more to the environment than noise levels in well-heeled small towns and villages; requiring vehicles grossing 18 tonnes or more to make circuitous detours through other villages and big towns to avoid one or two villages does not make environmental sense. For all these reasons we must have an end to these selfish schemes and an effective means to challenge them.

Image source: Jaggery, via Geograph. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 2.0 licence. It is not suggested that the road depicted is part of a vexatious scheme such as described in the article.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Violent people get violent
• The Auriol Grey case and pavement cycling
• Brighton Hill: £20million well spent (at least partly)
• Let’s de-toll the M6 Toll
• An unfortunately necessary upgrade

The attacker’s car (screenshot from Ashley Neal video)

In the last few years a whole genre of videos has sprung up on YouTube of compilations of clips from people’s dashcams, or from the channel author’s own. Some of these channels (particularly the American-based ones) specialise in spectacular crashes or egregiously bad driving; the ones here in the UK seem to be full of merely irritating driving — people pulling out in front of the author at a junction where they should have given way, for example. One American channel titled “Idiots in Cars” mostly features crashes, but one episode featured, amid the wreckages from the American ‘stroads’, a tame British clip featuring a driver who had pulled out onto a road when he shouldn’t, and after a brief stand-off, pulled back in. One branch of it consists of people riding around on pushbikes trying to catch people using mobile phones at the wheel, sending the footage to the police then gloating that they got the driver fined or banned from driving. There are also driving instructors who have their own channels, in which they give advice on dealing with situations you might encounter while driving, but also sometimes offer commentary on clips sent in by viewers. Last week, the Liverpool driving instructor Ashley Neal posted a video in which a driver who had been driving impatiently, swerving left to overtake and then weaving between that car and another which got in his way, was stopped at a set of lights next to one of the two cars, whose driver got out and smashed his window. What was appalling was the nature of some of the comments.

The comments included things like “cammer f***ed around and found out”, “you reap what you sow”, “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” and “if you go about annoying people all day, guess what happens”. A few of the comments noted that there was “no excuse for the smashed window”, or called both parties idiots, but there was a general sense that the cammer had asked for it, got what he deserved or at least deserved no sympathy. The fact that this was a bit of quite unprovoked and uncalled-for violence by someone who must have been carrying something in his car to use for this purpose (a baton or a brick, maybe), which is illegal, did not seem to occur to anyone.

It actually is not natural or normal to respond to ‘disrespect’ or minor provocations or annoyances with violence. People who do this are people who have not been conditioned to control their temper and have got away with using violence in the past, often from childhood. Any normal driver would have just ignored the aggressive driver when they met him at the set of lights, or at most tooted their horn and called him an idiot; only someone accustomed to using violence would get out of their car and attack them. I remember this quite clearly when I was at school, where violence was an everyday occurrence: it was the boys used to being at the top of the pile who would attack others in response to insults, annoyances or ‘disrespect’ from someone else, especially someone beneath them in the bullyarchy. People who were not would at most scream and shout. I recall one incident where a boy came into a class, read out something that had been written on a desk in another classroom about one of the bigger boys in my class and his ex-girlfriend; another boy, amused by the sexualised language and swear words, sat at his desk giggling at what he had heard. The boy the graffito was about got up and attacked him in front of the teacher. We later heard that this boy had been ‘moody’ as a result of some medication he was on, and as far as I recall, he suffered no consequences or at least we heard nothing if he did.

I don’t know the history of the thug in the red Ford in Ashley Neal’s video, but I do know that what I saw not only did not justify any violence; only a thug would respond to someone pulling in front of them on a dual carriageway with a brick through their window. We are really too quick to ‘understand’ a bully and too quick to furnish them with excuses or blame their victims. I have even read of police officers telling a teenager, after being assaulted following a road accident, that “you can’t give ‘verbal’ and expect nothing in return” and then refusing to prosecute the man responsible. It is only violent people who behave like this and ordinary people have no duty to keep their mouths shut or tiptoe around them and their sense of entitlement.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Auriol Grey case and pavement cycling
• Brighton Hill: £20million well spent (at least partly)
• Brianna Ghey and stable-door logic
• Let’s de-toll the M6 Toll
• There’s a limit to age-based mitigation