A couple of items from the passing parade:
The Lancashire Constabulary have "added two new liveried cars to our fleet to highlight the Trans and bi-sexual community". These are decked out with their exciting new badge (right), showing the rainbow flag under the crown of Royal authority and bearing the slogan "Police with Pride".
Some years ago I wrote about an Oxford student who spent a night in the slammer and was fined £80 for asking a mounted policeman (if you'll forgive the expression): "Do you know your horse is gay?" With hindsight, it seems entirely reasonable to assume, if their cruisers are gay, so are their mounts. I'm old enough to remember being advised never to use the public toilets at Piccadilly Circus because the place was crawling with undercover constables, in unconvincing white polo necks with policemen's boots poking out from their skinny jeans, liable to arrest you for catching their eye at the urinal. In those days, they'd cuff you if they thought you were looking for gay sex. Now they cruise around trying to jolly you into giving it a go. One assumes from the specificity of their Bi-Mobiles and Trans-Cruisers that they already have liveried gay and lesbian vehicles, with the rest of the LGBTQWERTY fleet to follow. If they need to pull you in for questioning, they'll send the Questioning Cruiser.
The cool thing is these new liveried vehicles look totally awesome as you're speeding past the eleven-year-old girls being taken as sex slaves of Lancashire's many "Asian" grooming gangs en route to the LGBT Outreach Ball. (If you're read the current issue of our newsletter The Clubbable Steyn, you'll know grooming is to Northern England as oil is to Saudi Arabia - underground but everywhere.)
Meanwhile, in other police news from a little ways south:
A man who was arrested after he asked for a booklet called "44 ways to support Jihad" to be printed has lost his High Court damages action against the police.
Gas engineer Muhammad Z Khan, who lived with his parents Ashraf and Bibi in Wellingborough at the time in January 2014, sued the chief constables of West Midlands and Northamptonshire Police.
Mr Khan had gone to the local print shop to have fifty copies of Forty-Four Ways to Support Jihad printed and bound. The staff later called the police, notwithstanding that it was a big order and very lucrative. Whether they were leather-bound and exquisitely tooled, I cannot say. The books, I mean, not the coppers. Anyway, the constabulary raided the Khan household, and he subsequently sued them for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, etc. The judge, Sir David Eady, conceded that the raid must have been "stressful and disturbing" for Muhammad, Ashraf, Bibi and their Muslim neighbors, especially if Northamptonshire Police sent round the Gaymobile. Possibly they have alternative vehicles for Islamic outreach and dispatched the Burqamobile. (Come to think of it, the old Black Marias could be returned to service.)
It's modestly encouraging to know that Sir David did not think it unreasonable that a man who orders up a print run of Forty-Four Ways to Support Jihad should expect a visit from the police. On the other hand, Mr Khan was never prosecuted - because he told the officers he was interested in the subject "as a student and researcher", as no doubt many gas engineers are. The author of the book was the late Anwar al-Awlaki, "spiritual advisor" to three of the 9/11 hijackers. You'll recall that when Major Hasan, the Fort Hood mass murderer, was discovered by two US intelligence agencies to be emailing with Mr al-Awlaki, they both concluded there was no need to worry because this lively correspondence was also consistent with his "research interests". Even in death Mr al-Awlaki is an ongoing inspiration to all manner of "researchers", from US Army psychiatrists to Northamptonshire gas engineers.
So Mr Khan ordered fifty copies of Forty-Four Ways to Support Jihad just in case, in the course of all this study and research, he misplaced the first 49 copies down the back of the sofa. And that's all perfectly legal, and if you were to Tweet anything that suggested otherwise the Lancashire Constabulary would send round the Trannish Inquisition to question you for "hate crimes".
There are currently two views of cultural evolution in the west. On the one hand, we live in a magnificent age of sexual self-expression: a man can marry a man; a man can be a woman; a woman can be a pregnant man; a transwoman can be a Navy Seal; a policeman can ride around in a transgendered cruiser ..."because it's 2017," as Brooke Baldwin and Justin Trudeau would say. These are impressive victories, overturning not just age-old societal assumptions but basic human biology - and hollowing out with effortless ease institutions hitherto seen as bastions of convention, like the Lancashire Police and the diversity-crazed US military.
On the other hand, Islam thinks it too has been racking up the big wins: first toppling local secularist rulers like the Shah of Iran, then chasing the godless Commies out of Afghanistan, next reducing to dust the glittering towers of the remaining superpower in New York and Washington ...and, far more quietly, embedding itself throughout Christendom - or post-Christendom - and subtly insinuating itself into the heart of almost every western nation except Japan. Some of the changes it has wrought are small but telling: for example, the forced retirement of the established English word "Koran" by hyper-sensitive editors, and its substitution by "Quran" or "Qu'ran" or "Q'u"r*a^n". No big deal, right? In fact, it replaces a non-Islamic rendering for the Koran with an Islamic one, and in that sense supports the view of Islamic imperialists that Islam's codes and strictures apply also to non-Muslims. As I said, small but telling. But like other seemingly modest, incremental victories - prayer rooms, Halal-compliant school and hospital menus, single-sex swimming sessions, the elimination of children's piggy banks - they advance Islam's grip on the public space, and thereby shrink that of the modern, liberal, pluralist state. And in the broader sense they help support the idea that nominal citizens of developed nations can have fascinating "research interests" that are all part of the great vibrant quilt of multicultural diversity unless you actually take your "research interest" to a District Line station and leave it in a bucket on a crowded Tube train.
If you've already forgotten what that last is in reference to, well, a 21-year-old Syrian "refugee" and an 18-year-old Iraqi "refugee" were arrested over the weekend for their role in the London Underground "bucket bombing". Mayor Khan assures us that it's all "part and parcel" of life in a big city, and so you just have to take the rough with the smooth maître d' at the Michelin-starred restaurants. I believe it was François de Charette, shortly before his execution, who was the first to shrug off the number of deaths for which he was responsible by pleading "On ne saurait faire d'omelette sans casser des œufs" - you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. But for western leaders the phrase has become not literal but weirdly semi-literal: You can't get a gourmet omelette in London or Paris or Brussels or Barcelona without first admitting large numbers of people who want to blow the legs off you all over the subway system.
Hence the need to double-down on diversity. Sure, the fact that the perps are Syrian and Iraqi "refugees" might lead a careless person to assume that this is something to do with refugee and immigration policies. But don't fall for it! As The Independent's Sean O'Grady blithely assures us:
Once again a simple truth needs stating: we will not stop terror in London by kicking blameless families of Syrians out of the country... These attacks on Muslims only radicalise would-be terrorists into thinking they are defending their own communities. And so the spiral continues.
So making a fuss about all this terrorism will only lead to more blameless pre-radicalized non-terrorists becoming terrorists in order to defend their fellow non-terrorists from you. And all these blameless non-terrorists are great for the economy, boosting the critical copy-shop sector of the economy by ordering up large print runs of their many interesting research subjects. As my old colleague Ed West writes in The Spectator:
We're always told these things won't divide us, when in fact they clearly do; not just between Muslims and the majority, but between white liberals and white conservatives. For many of the former, the events of the past few months have hugely strengthened their faith in diversity and multiculturalism, a paradox, but an understandable one. They view Islamic terrorism as attacks on culturally and racially diverse liberal societies; conservatives view them as the inevitable consequence of them.
Who's right? Well, both are. Conservatives are correct that we wouldn't have this problem had not western governments consciously imported it. And liberals are right that the multiculti rainbow utopia will eventually fall victim to it. That is, if Mr West is correct and liberals do sincerely believe Islamic terrorism is an "attack on culturally and racially diverse liberal societies". There's little evidence they think that clear-sightedly at all about it: They're more likely to bring up Mossadeq or imperialism or intervention in Iraq or non-intervention in Syria, and they're most likely, in fact, to tune it out entirely, to decline to acknowledge it as a phenomenon at all, rather than merely an obsession of the right-wing.
The sexual-identity left and the Islamic imperialists have certain things in common: both dislike having to listen to opposing views, and so are ever more openly hostile to freedom of speech. Yet deep down both parties know these two surging forces of cultural evolution cannot co-exist - that the Lancashire Constabulary Transgender Unit marching behind the Forty-Four Ways to Slaughter the Infidel Study Group in the Lancashire Pride Parade is merely a passing phase: It's as if the World and Opposite World were wedged into the same physical space like overlaid telephone area codes. One will shrink, the other will expand.
Which would you bet on? As I say here, diversity is an interim stage, and, as we already see in certain parts of London and Brussels and Malmö and Toulouse and Frankfurt and on and on, what comes after diversity is the grim uniformity of Islam. And, as I say here, in the end the brave, transgressive left will give up even their bedrock freedom - sexual identity - as they have abandoned all those older, quainter freedoms like free speech. In the face of growing Islamic hostility, men will cease to marry men, and men will cease to be women, and policemen will quietly mothball the bi-cruiser.
To go back to that piece from The Independent, Sean O'Grady's headline is revealing:
Focusing on whether the Parsons Green bomber was a refugee is shamelessly Islamophobic, not to mention pointless
Pay no attention to the adverbially overheated flourish of "shamelessly Islamophobic" - that's just a bit of pro-forma scarlet-lettering. The key word here is "pointless". O'Grady is fighting vainly the old ennui: to the liberal intelligentsia, the "war on terror" is a crashing bore ...because nothing can be done.
Don't buy it. It's not "pointless". These are the oldest, freest, most prosperous societies on earth - and for very particular reasons. If we demand a change to public policy now, the damage will take decades to be reversed, but it can be done, just about. To continue down the "pointless" path is to make it a self-fulfilling prophesy. Like the Lancashire Constabulary, our societies are transitioning, but to nowhere your kids will want to live. The point of the "pointless" crowd is to cow the citizenry - from talking honestly about "grooming" or "refugees" or anything else. The point is to prevent the public conversation advancing beyond the usual multiculti boilerplate into anywhere real. That's more urgent than ever.
A closing thought from Mark Steyn Club member Tim Neilson:
Re the affluent crowd's virtue signalling about Syrian refugees, there was a great line here in Australia which I regret very much not being able to attribute:
'Margaret Thatcher famously said that the problem with socialism was that you eventually run out of other people's money. Similarly, the problem with open borders lunacy is that eventually you run out of other people's neighbourhoods.'
Unfortunately, by the time that happens it will be too late to reverse course.
~Mark's trip to Northern England to meet "grooming" victims is recounted in the current issue of The Clubbable Steyn, which comes free with membership in The Mark Steyn Club: You can sign up for a full year, or, lest you suspect a dubious scam by a fly-by-night shyster, merely a quarter. And don't forget our new gift membership for a friend or loved one. Among the other benefits of membership is our series of audio adventures, Tales for Our Time. Our current serialization is, in fact, a protean tale of London terrorism.
Tomorrow, Wednesday, Mark will be keeping his midweek date with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, live coast to coast on America's Number One cable station at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. We hope you'll tune in.
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