How depressing it would be if the typical Muslim in Britain today were embodied by Abdullah Patel?
Abdullah is the imam at a mosque in Gloucester; doesn’t speak English that well; has a burning sense of grievance about a thing he calls “Islamophobia”; is a fan of Jeremy Corbyn because he scares “Zionist’s” [sic]; thinks Gaza is “the modern day Auschwitz”; warns women who have been sexually assaulted that “it takes two to tango”; supports CAGE (the organisation which had a research director who once described the ISIS killer Jihadi John as “a beautiful young man”); is deputy headteacher of a heavily criticised school with an Islamic ethos and curriculum…
Call me old-fashioned but I don’t much like the cut of Abdullah’s jib. Chippy, whiny, cry-bullying, over-eager to play the Muslim card at every opportunity, sympathetic — at the very least — to terrorist sympathisers, casually misogynistic, antisemitic (though no doubt he’d gloss it with euphemism anti-Zionist), and probably thick as mince, Abdullah is emblematic of so much that is wrong with cultural cohesion in Britain today.
Is this dodgy geezer really representative of British Muslims?
Some of you will no doubt say I’m being naive but I don’t think he is at all. I think of my Muslim GP, the Muslim woman who is treating my Lyme disease, the Muslim “Special Friend” who wrote me some fan mail for my podcast, the Muslim readers who occasionally accost me in the streets to tell me they’re big fans of my columns, the Muslims who work for my brother’s tech start-up, the Muslim guy who fixed my car the other day….
What all the above have in common, apart from being Muslim obviously, is that they’re ordinary British people who just want to get along in British society — make a living, improve their lot, give their kids a better standard of living than they had themselves: just like the rest of us.
These, I believe, are much, much more representative of Muslim Britain than noisy ingrates like Abdullah.
But you’d never guess this from the way Muslims are represented by the BBC.
The BBC is now trying to tell us that it was a complete accident that when they were looking for a token Muslim to appear on their now infamous Conservative Leaders Debate they ended up with an antisemitic Corbynista cry-bully obsessed with “Islamophobia”.
Yeah, right.
The last time I debated with a Muslim on the BBC, the one that they’d chosen was a self-described Islamist who said he despised British history and felt no pride in being British — largely, it seemed, because his knowledge of Britain’s history was confined to the Bengal famine for which he blamed Winston Churchill.
The time before that was for a youth debate programme staged by the BBC on the subject of Islamophobia. There were lots of bearded men in the Manchester audience, including one with a sweatshirt saying “Sharia4UK”. One of my fellow panellists — a Muslim girl whose Afghan parents had been given refugee status in the United Kingdom — insisted, when I brought up the subject of Muslim rape gangs, that there was no evidence these rape gangs existed. All the Muslim panellists agreed that the two main reasons for Islamophobia in Britain were racism and foreign policy.
And you wonder why people like me increasingly say “No” when invited on to these BBC discussion programmes. What’s the point? Why make yourself a target?
To understand what’s wrong with the BBC, you only need remind yourself of Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:
- Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
- Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
- The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
The second one is a given in the BBC’s case, but it’s the last one which is most germane in this instance.
Mad though it may seem for an organisation called the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC viscerally loathes Britain. It despises Britain’s traditions, its values, its indigenous population, its history, its culture, its instinctive conservatism — all of which it wants to remake anew with the kind of Year Zero approach which proved so successful in late ’70s Cambodia.
And that — to cut to the chase — is why the BBC chose Abdullah as its token Muslim. And why the BBC will always prefer to choose people like Abdullah as its token Muslim. Because, just like the BBC, people like Abdullah hate Britain.
I see that the remaining Conservative leadership candidates are so disgusted with the biased way the BBC handled the Leaders Debate that they are considering boycotting similar future BBC events.
A fat lot of good this will do.
If Boris Johnson is serious about restoring British greatness when he becomes prime minister, one of the first problems he will have to address is that of an overprotected, arrogant state broadcaster hell-bent on undermining Britain and British values at every turn.
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