LETTER FROM LONDON MARCH 2015
Cameron's Temper, Young Girls and Jihad, CAGE, The Book of Disquiet
The Past as a Foreign country
The incredible fiasco of the British Prime Minister, David
Cameron, ducking out of the TV debates has been like the script of the old TV
series ‘Yes Minister,’ as the Prime minister sought ever more devious ways to
avoid having to debate Ed Miliband on TV. First, improbably, he discovered a
secret love for the Greens, who, he argued, couldn’t possibly be excluded from
the debates. Then, when this request was acceded to, more probably, he felt a
surge of passion for the Ulster Unionists, demanding that they too be included.
Conveniently for the Tories the Unionists have continued, having never hitherto
been part of the national debate, to wail about their exclusion, now
threatening to set my ‘learned friends’ upon the broadcasters.
Finally, having
failed to get his way, Little Lord Cameron-Fauntleroy has picked up his ball
and walked away. Though condescending to
participate in a one off 7 sided debate, providing this is held before the
campaign proper and, more importantly, the Tory election Manifesto is launched.
The Prime Minister has form, if he doesn’t get his own way
he sulks and petulantly throws his toys around. This was seen most prominently,
and from British strategic interest most seriously, after Cameron lost the
debate on intervention in Syria, when, rather that pursue common ground with
the Labour opposition, which Miliband was prepared to do, he simply flounced
away.
The signs of a brewing temper tantrum can often be seen at
Prime Ministers Questions, (PMQ’s), the reddening face, the resort to bluster
and insult, leaning heavily into the despatch box. Fortunately for Cameron the
nature of PMQ’s allows him to quickly move on whenever Ed Miliband gets
sufficiently under his skin. This of course is not possible during a prolonged
TV debate. As I say the Prime Minister is said to have a quick temper, he is
justified in fearing a TV debate.
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| Cameron Colours Up |
That we have ended up with such a vacuous Prime Minister is
a product of the British Class System. Cameron’s rise, through Eton and
Oxbridge, with his connections in the British ruling elite, being a model of
how the system works. Now surrounded by his peers from the Oxbridge he sees his
position as PM as one of entitlement. He wanted to be Prime Minister, he said,
because he thought he’d be good at it. As Polly Toynbee observes, he is not.
In truth, in a truly meritocratic society, he would be lucky
to manage a call centre in Luton.
Three schoolgirls from East London, one 16 the other two 15,
ran away to join the circus of 14th Century barbarity that is the so
called Islamic State. Lured, it seems, by the prospect of taking part in the
great experiment that is seeking to turn the clock back to a time when
beheading, mass rape, slavery and the conquest of territory was accompanied by
genocide, the destruction of books and culture and the crucifixion of heretics.
There has been a concerted effort to portray the girls as
victims, seduced by cunning fanatics. Well certainly they are young, but at 16,
the Labour party has concluded you are old enough to vote, as indeed a great
number did in the Scottish referenda campaign; and maybe I was born at a
particularly liberal time but at 15 I knew that rape, beheading and slavery
were wrong. Of course one possible explanation for the girls heading Jihad way
was precisely because of ISIS brutality. There seems to be some evidence for
this.
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| Heading for Jihad Girls PassThrough Security |
‘A study released last
month by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that women on the receiving
end of that social media onslaught were captivated by the violence they saw.
Examining the social media accounts of six European women who ultimately
travelled to Syria and Iraq, they discovered that one described the brutal
murder of the American aid worker Peter Kassig and 18 Syrian hostages as
“gut-wrenchingly awesome”.’ Another
woman, who watched a different beheading video, wrote: “I was happy to see the
beheading of that kaffir [non-believer], I just rewinded to the cutting part,”
and called for “more beheadings please!” according to the study.[1]
Of course it is impossible not to be moved by the distress
of the family, but whilst it is understandable, it is misguided of them to
search for scapegoats in the form of the school, the Metropolitan police or
border agency. Whilst all of these agencies may have handled the affair better,
the ultimate responsibility lies with the girls who betrayed their families and
inflicted terrible suffering upon those closest to them. This may be hard for
the families to digest, but it is
unfortunately the truth.
For myself I reserve my compassion for the Yazidi girls, 15
and younger, raped and enslaved by IS.
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| Asim Qureshi CAGE Spokesman Toby Melville Rueters |
The week also saw the literal unmasking of ‘Jihadi John’-
and how inappropriate that tag is, making him sound like a stand-up comic. No
sooner had he been named as Mohammed Emwazi, than the Islamists of the
‘charity’ CAGE[2]
sought to betray him as a victim. In nauseating interviews they sought to explain
Emwazi’s behaviour as being the result of being harassed by MI5. After all that
is what you do when the police and security services give you a hard time, you
go off and behead someone. The only good thing to come out of the whole affair
of unmasking of Emwazi, aside from the obvious fact that this brings his
eventual capture or killing closer, has been the simultaneous unmasking of CAGE
as the Islamist front organisation that it is.
Am currently reading/re-reading, digesting and being
digested by Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. I have ‘owned’ the book since
2002, though it is not a book that you can possibly read either quickly, or in
a single serving. Rather like Richard Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, with
which it has some similarities, it can only be read very slowly and over time.
It is an extraordinary book, impossible to categorise. As
Sophia Martelli describes it in the Guardian ‘it cannot be described as a novel; it is more an insomniac's journal,
written in the persona of an accounting clerk in Lisbon, Bernardo Soares… a man on first-name terms with tedium and
despair.’[3]
It is a book replete with great humour and wit, barely a
page goes by without a memorable quote: “I'd
woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.” “Life-a
plotless novel.” “I feel as if I'm
always on the verge of waking up.” “I'm
sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
It is not a book for everyone. A few years back, rather
flatteringly, one of my counselling students, asked a friend of mine what did I
read? My friend mentioned that I was very passionate about The Book of
Disquiet.
Some months later they bumped into one another. “That bloody
book,” the young student said at the very outset. Testing to breaking point what it means to be conscious and human it can make for unsettling
reading.
I have been contacted by someone with whom I was at school.
It’s a strange feeling talking about events that took place over 40 years ago.
As names are mentioned a giddy feeling comes over me as images come out of the
fog. The Past is of course famously another country, where things are ordered differently and I am nervous about going deeper, memory of course is not a reliable
guide. Still it feels strangely exiting to be reconnected to that other world, the past, exiting, slightly disturbing and rather sad.
I look now at the
photograph of the schoolboy in grey sweater and silver tie and I have nothing
in common with him, only we are one and the same person. Without his exertions
I would not be here today. So I look back with that greatest of all nostalgias,
the ‘nostalgia for things that never were.’*
Fernando Pessoa
[2]
CAGE claims to be ‘an independent advocacy organisation working to empower
communities impacted by the War on Terror.’ It is in fact an Islamist front
organisation.
