Rod Liddle

It’s always nice when a married couple are able to share a hobby – even if it is, in the case of Shasta and Mohammed Khan, trying to blow up Jewish people. These two imbeciles, from Oldham, have now been convicted of planning terrorist attacks which they intended to effect with hairdressing chemicals and chapatti flour. Apparently they would drive to Manchester and look at synagogues, seething with rage. “We must kill of them,” Mo told his loving wife on one of these strange trysts. Previously they had been less than radical, preferring to stay at home and watch Coronation Street and Emmerdale on their widescreen HD infidel television.

John Terry — the gift that keeps on giving. It is not enough that this stoic and rat-faced footballer should have provoked the most absurd and hilarious court case I have yet seen. Now it looks like there’ll be another one, perhaps even funnier, predicated upon a reaction to the fact that he wasn’t convicted of racially abusing another footballer, Anton Ferdinand, as everybody seemed to wish. Some chap ‘tweeted’ that Ashley Cole, who gave evidence on behalf of Terry, was a ‘choc ice’ — and of course now the police are involved. They had to be: it is deeply racist to liken black people to items of confectionery or popular snacks.

I shall be ringing the Crown Prosecution Service later today to insist that they bring a prosecution against the footballer Rio Ferdinand for having concurred with a tweeted suggestion that his colleague Ashley Cole was a ‘choc ice’. The term is deeply racist and offensive, given to mean that the person is black on the outside and white on the inside. Similar terms are, I believe, Oreo and coconut. Rio, perhaps realizing his transgression, has since insisted that he meant that Ashley was a ‘fake’; but I think we should let the courts decide that one, shouldn’t we?

It’s easy to be complacent about human rights. We commend ourselves for passing laws that are designed to ensure that, for example, gay people are not discriminated against, or subject to abuse and derision as a consequence of their sexual orientation. We pat ourselves on the back, cheered by our own civility. And yet is it not likely that gay people are still discriminated against, and abused? So, we must forever guard against complacency, against hidden or covert or subconscious homophobia. Because it is all to easy to match ourselves against the sort of behaviour that persists in less developed countries, and feel good about ourselves as a consequence, to feel smug and self righteous.

I’ve just received email notification of a debate I sadly missed at the East London Mosque entitled ‘Was Jesus a Muslim Prophet or a Christian God?’ The email came from a thoughtful chap called Abdullah Al Andalusi who informs me that the speakers tended towards the former, rather than latter proposition. Indeed, there was a ‘powerful refutation’ of Christian dogma on the subject. I am genuinely saddened to have missed this debate, as it’s the sort of thing which is always fun to chew over. As a consequence I have it in mind to arrange a similar sort of intellectual pow-wow — a debate which asks the question: ‘Was Mohammed a Jewish haberdasher or a Muslim prophet?

Imbecilic leftie authoritarians are whining again about being called nasty names by people with less power than them. Exhibit A is the fabulously stupid Islamist Mehdi Hasan, once of the New Statesman and now of the Huffington PostUK, whatever that is. Here’s the emetic opening sentence of his article in today’s Guardian (under the headline 'We Mustn’t Allow Muslims In Public Life To Be Silenced.' Yes, he means himself): 'Have you ever been called an Islamist? How about a jihadist or a terrorist?? Extremist maybe? Welcome to my world.' The abuse he gets, he whines, is 'as relentless as it is vicious'. He complains about being called a dangerous Muslim villain, and a cockroach and so on. Aaawwwwwww. Did they upset you, Mehdi? Did they? You poor little poppet.

A rather wonderful spat in the always mysterious and interesting democratic republic of homosexuals. On one side, the excellent lesbian writer Julie Bindel, on the other side, St Peter Tatchell. The point at dispute is London’s Gay Pride March: Peter likes it a lot and was there this year as usual. Julie thinks it’s become absolutely ghastly: just a huge party for men to secure sexual access to as many other men as they possibly can. It’s been taken over, she says – sounding for all the world like a retired army major living in Burford, –  by ‘rollerskating nuns and men with their backsides hanging out.

The opinion on Paul Simon’s famous Graceland album seems finally to have swung 180 degrees from where it once was. Simon recorded the music — which has just bee re-released — with black African performers (mostly) in South Africa in 1986 and was of course castigated by the authoritarian left for ‘breaking’ the cultural boycott against the apartheid state. I mean, really castigated; placed in the same rrrraaaaaccccissssst category as those cricketers who played games against South Africa’s white-only cricket team. Now, however, it seems to be accepted that it was a wise and even liberating decision from the singer, and has done much to bring African music to a wider and richer audience.

I’ve always rather taken the George Best line on David Beckham’s footballing abilities:  ‘He cannot kick with his left foot, he cannot head a ball, he cannot tackle and he doesn't score many goals. Apart from that he's all right.’ But you have to say nonetheless – Beckham’s a thoroughly likeable and decent bloke and I wish, after all the work he’s put in, he’d been awarded a place in the British Olympic © football team. The England coach Stuart Pearce seems to be under the profoundly mistaken illusion that anyone in the country gives a monkey’s about our Olympic football team. We’ve had enough of the hubris of football, for a bit; we don’t care if they lose in game one to St Kitts and Nevis.

If England had won that penalty shoot out against Italy it would have been a travesty. The press has been very kind to the national team this morning, partly because — as we kept being told — ‘expectations were low’ and partly because everyone still likes (with some justification) Roy Hodgson. But from the middle of the first half onwards, England performed as poorly as I have ever seen them, and it wasn’t simply down to the might of the opposition. Indeed, the Italian defence is ponderous and porous, as we shall see when they play a team which dares, from time to time, to attack. England’s problems were partly a consequence of team selection, and partly tactics. Rooney should not have been on the pitch; he was there as a consequence of blind hope.

I wonder how long it will be before Julian Assange’s highborn leftist supporters finally think, um, hang on, are we on the right side here? The self-obsessed albino mental is now cowering inside the Ecuadorian embassy as a last ditch attempt to get out of his extradition to Sweden. As you are aware, he faces charges of rape and sexual assault in Sweden. His objection to complying with British and international law is that he might be extradited to the USA and put in a gas chamber, if they still have them. There is not the remotest evidence to suggest this would happen. Can you imagine how the left would react if any other alleged rapist attempted to evade justice by hiding in the basement of a banana republic’s embassy?