ONE OF THE few consoling things to see during the Charlie Hebdo and supermarket attacks in Paris was the brutal efficiency of the French special forces in finally despatching the terrorists. Video of the second incident shows them pumping bullets into the falling and fallen body of Coulibaly in a reassuring move to make sure he was a dead as dead can be.
I was accused of “gloating” when talking about this the other day, but as far as I’m concerned everybody in the civilised world should be rejoicing. Coulibaly had already killed four innocent people, the corpse of one them clearly visible on the floor behind him while the final moments of the siege were played out.
In a week of nuancing and contextualising, that’s about as much nuance as we need, in my opinion.
One of the repugnant things that followed, apart from the endless apologetics of journalists and pundits, was the alacrity with which Francois Hollande succeeded in putting the political class into the limelight by arranging a massive photo-opportunity for himself and various other scoundrels at the head of the demonstration in Paris the Sunday after the attacks.
The hypocrisy of having Mahmoud Abbas at a demonstration for unity for freedom of speech against Islamic terrorism is beyond satire, but the western media swallowed it all without a murmur. If the whole bunch of those posturing charlatans had stayed home I don’t think the world would be any the worse for it.
The old adage about fearing Greeks especially when bearing gifts needs to be updated to fearing politicians when they all agree. When you see politicians of different parties all spouting the same cliches and nodding in agreement with each other you know they’re conspiring against you.
That’s what occurred to me when I watched the BBC’s Question Time programme, which was recorded in Lincoln the other night. As usual the panel was weighted against the token non-PC figure, in this case the historian David Starkey. Ranged against him were three MPs — Anna Soubry of the Conservatives, Dougie Alexander of Labour and Baroness Brinton of the Liberal Democrats. The other non-MP was Mehdi Hasan, currently Political Editor of Huffington Post’s UK edition and soon to be a presenter on Al Jazeera in America.
THE PREDICTABLE QUESTION about provoking offence elicited equally predictable responses. Everyone, including Hasan, condemned the attacks in Paris and said free speech must not be curtailed. Hasan appended a final bit of contextualisation, of course, about the West’s involvement in the Middle East. What I did find interesting was that when asked to define where the limits of free speech should be neither Anna Soubry nor Dougie Alexander referred to the relevant legislation, despite both proudly saying they were lawyers.
They all puffed and pontificated, Baroness Brinton taking the opportunity to drop the faux-liberals’ favourite incorrect quote onto the table, “I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” (how Voltaire would have hated these people), as if she had said something terribly profound.
The panel weren’t so happy to listen to Starkey, however, when he suggested that the real problem bedevilling the Muslim world was its continuing civil war and its difficulty adapting to modernity. Voices were raised and the bigot identified, after which Starkey was given little opportunity to talk about anything for very long. Not much nuance there, then.
The representatives of all three major parties offered their cultural condolences on behalf of free speech but proposed nothing to eradicate the specific breeding ground of its deniers here in the UK. Nothing about having allowed radicalism to thrive in British cities and schools for nearly three decades, nothing about mass immigration, nothing about promoting a multicultural agenda without the consent of the populace, etc. And nothing about all three parties being complicit in the problem in the first place.
The sensitive and intelligent may think they’re doing the right thing by avoiding making harsh judgements, and talking about nuance and understanding. They’re not. Our enemies are not concerned with such things, that’s why they use automatic weapons, grenades, rocket launchers, knives and anything else at hand to kill and silence us. You can’t nuance a terrorist out of existence as he’s coming at you with a Kalashnikov. What you always end up relying on is a bunch of heavily-armed guys putting their lives of the line and shooting him down like a rabid dog.
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