Michael Blackburn: ‘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. ‘
Michael Blackburn: ‘It may seem churlish to point out that to talk about “religion” is to avoid the problem, a suitably liberal way of doing so, at that, and who can blame Rushdie for not wanting to spend any more time in hiding? But to say “religion” implies any or all religions, which, as we know (and Rushdie half-heartedly acknowledges) is not the case. The core of the problem is one religion alone — Islam, and calling this terrorism the product of a “deadly mutation” of Islam is simply to fall in line with the politicians and media, whose constant agenda is to avoid confronting the fact.’
Wednesday, 7 January 2015
Michael Blackburn: ‘Sweden is indeed a pioneer in cultural suicide. We are witnessing a wealthy, civilised country deliberately demolishing itself in the name of an insane ideology. Sweden has lit a fire underneath itself and is blowing on the flames.’
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Thursday, 25 December 2014
Michael Blackburn: ‘Everyone knows that maidservants got up early in the morning from their straw beds in cold cramped attic rooms, lived off the greasy scraps left by the dogs, polished the lady’s corsets by candlelight, scrubbed furniture all day till their fingers wore down to stumps, and got impregnated by the lord of house (and probably his sons as well), only to be turfed out in their millions into the workhouses with no references to get them onto social mobility schemes. Or something like that.’
Saturday, 13 December 2014
Michael Blackburn: Jihadists’ ‘dissatisfaction, just like that of the extreme left, is based on a stubborn blindness to the comfortable reality of everyday existence guaranteed by a system they can’t acknowledge is overwhelmingly benevolent. It’s what the rest of us know as civilisation.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘Friedfeld has come in for a lot of mockery over his stance, and rightly so. Next time the “otherised” someone may just pop a slug in his gut before appropriating his iPhone. There’d be no chance then to parade his understanding to the world. ‘
Saturday, 22 November 2014
Michael Blackburn: ‘The good thing that’s come out of this is that both Thornberry and her boss, Ed Miliband, have now said we should fly the England flag with pride. We can therefore take it that the flag of St George has officially been released from the stereotyped hands of fascists and football hooligans and joined the ranks of the politically acceptable. The left are probably already rueing this day for the aggravation it’s going to cause them in the future. They deserve all the pain they’re going to get.’
Wednesday, 12 November 2014
Michael Blackburn: ‘Oddly enough for a man so wrapped in the worship of his own ego that reality barely gets a look in, Obama spoke a truth: people, he said, want to feel “the ground is stable under their feet.” The trouble is you can’t promise a fundamental transformation of society, which involves a shambles in every area of policy making, without making people feel uncertain about their future.’
Thursday, 6 November 2014
Michael Blackburn: There’s nothing about these tired old nags of anti-patriotism and national self-loathing dragged from the stables of predictable correctness that we haven’t seen before but Mr Jones may be somewhat surprised at the less than complimentary reactions he’s been getting.
Michael Blackburn: ‘[Naomi] Wolf’s bizarre claims that the Scottish referendum was rigged, that Obama is using the ebola outbreak to militarise Africa (you seen the size of Africa, Naomi?) and that the Isis beheading videos were not filmed by Isis (a minor point given that IS/Isis/Isil are slaughtering thousands of people), suggest a certain slippage in her grip on reality.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘The problem for Labour is twofold. Firstly, they don’t understand why this is happening. Secondly, they don’t know how to counter it. Labour’s obsession with political correctness, its obeisance to the EU, its interfering authoritarianism and its unbalanced emphasis on welfare rather than wealth creation and individual aspiration have severed its connection with what used to be its natural constituency, “the working class”. And that old “working class” itself no longer exists. For Labour it’s been replaced by a dependency class and a rump of supporters who would vote for a monkey as long as it had a red rosette pinned to its chest.’
Michel Blackburn: ‘Unfortunately, hypocrisy doesn’t figure among the great sins condemned by the liberal establishment. Banksy is thus absolved of being a money-grubbing, faux rebel because he’s an exposer of the truth. He can stick it to The Man and pocket the kudos and the cash at the same time. That’s how the scrubbing out of this piece can be hailed as no less than a “vicious act of censorship”. The little Lenins of the metropolitan establishment love this down-with-the-people, street art stuff. It combines the pretentiousness of the cultural world with a yearning for the authenticity of working class experience, of “real people”.’
Sunday, 28 September 2014
Michael Blackburn: ‘I’ve also watched programmes on the Egyptians (you can’t go wrong with the ancient ones), including one on the women pharaohs. I have no problem at all with that except that their being women seemed to be the only thing worthy of note about them. The presenter herself kept appearing in her baggy black pants suit and wildly wacky, frizzy red hair, strolling about the desert, entering dark tombs, gazing up raptly, etc, etc. All I can remember her telling us was that one pharaoh was a successful warrior and built lots of stuff. Hardly a great boost for the sisterhood or my appreciation of the ancient world.’
Thursday, 18 September 2014
Michael Blackburn: ‘Even after the murder of Lee Rigby on a London street, the backlash amounted mainly to a bodged arson attack on a mosque in Grimsby. The other two major incidents — the burning down of a Somali “community centre” (ie, mosque) in North London and the attempted arson of an Islamic boys’ school in Chislehurst — seem to have yielded no far-right involvement. That’s despite the fact that in the case of the community centre the media made a point of saying that EDL graffiti had been found daubed on the walls. Pity they never provided any photos or footage of it.’
Tuesday, 9 September 2014
Michael Blackburn: It’s not that the system is broken. It’s that the people in it are third raters who are not up to the job. The unpalatable truth is that in Scotland at least the only politician who attracts any credibility is Alex Salmond. That’s a sorry state to be in.