How on earth did I miss it last year? Did I miss it at all, or are approaching old age and anger messing with my memories like Willow interfering with Tara in her sleep?
Perhaps I blogged furiously about it at the time, but supermarket budget vodka and absolutely everything that President Obama, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and the BBC have done since have wiped that spurt of fury from my recollections.
Perhaps it was because it was my birthday and I was therefore eating a curry with Mrs. Northwester and watching The Matrix or The Thirteenth Warrior or some other towering cultural item that (half) explains but (mostly) disappoints as a metaphor for our times.
Anyway, it might amuse readers to think on’t and chuckle about the BBC’s pallid cultural relativism and its moral compass stuck due Left. Are you ready for this? Are you sitting comfortably?
Then I’ll begin.
“Some Imams 'biased against women’”
Many women felt they did not get a fair hearing under Sharia law
A Muslim think tank has found some UK Imams discriminate against women when enforcing Islamic Sharia law.
Whatever next, O my lucky readers? What other discomforting situations might the Gramscian BBC disingenuously camouflage, soften, and excuse in their mission to see us all onto the slave block or into the graveyard?
Suggestions, please, as some of you have been in good inventive form this week. I’ll start us off, as it’s Friday and all.
“Some Russians ‘were a bit peckish’ under Soviet Communism.”
Many citizens of the new USSR had less to eat than the minimum recommended daily calorific amount more than once in the early years after the Bolshevik Revolution. Historical research has uncovered contemporary accounts describing the absence of some foodstuffs from Soviet-era village shops and department stores on more than one occasion.
Ross discusses Labour's latest genocidal focus-groupthink half-arsed non-science plan to ruin the country, and the Awful Fate it's brought upon mankind.
As usual, the brief piece cuts the mustard a treat.
When I was a little kid my parents bought me an Action Man (TM) soldier.
Well, it was for Christmas and I probably only mentioned my wish to own the doll en passant five or six thousand times during that December. In the middle 1960’s teachers were intelligent enough to listen to what children said and to respond appropriately.
Unfortunately, teachers back then were also rather badly paid and so rather than buy one early and expensively from the well-stocked suburban local toy shop they waited until the holidays and rushed to the local big town’s department store – by which time only the German infantryman was left, which they duly bought for me as one of their under-the-tree parental presents rather than one of the Father Christmas in the stocking by the fire gifts.
A German soldier, huh? Figures, you might say knowing my politics....
Actually, I had rather wanted the American GI or the British Tommy or better yet the French, um, 1940-issue POW, or collaborator, or fast-swimming future Gaullist, as Dad was a French teacher and at that time I regarded everything French as excitingly exotic and the epitome of heroism, as indeed was Dad in my eyes. At six I thought that France was cooler than Thunderbirds.
Anyway, small mercies. The Schmeisser machine pistol that came with the boots and the helmet and the pack was smarter looking than the British Sten gun and way cooler than the American Thompson that my friends’ soldiers were equipped with, in my tiny opinion, and so I got on with playing with the model and pretended that it was a Resistant or a British spy, and killed many, many invisible real Germans. So that was okay.
The running joke amongst us war-mongering boys (slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails and all that) was that Action Man had no married quarters at all. Not even married eighths or married sixteenths. Toys don’t, of course: just a coy curve in the plastic that could have been the outline of the with-it Y-fronts. Still, it was funny.
I’ve shared the joke since then with men and women who were girls and boys of my generations. Action Man (along with his all-American big brother GI Joe) was The Private with No Parts: The Captain Without Pips: the humble British soldier who never carried a Field Marshall’s baton in his kit bag.
He’s a pop culture icon that folk of my generation recognise, and Action Man with his rifle-gripping hands, prominent cheek scar (and boot-brush hair in the expensive models) represented the essence of European and colonial martial pride and strength. Former enemies, of course, depending on which version your parents bought for you, but definitely proud inhabitants of something that I didn’t know back then was western civilisation.
Now it’s 2009 and the world’s most famous female doll is out there rooting for Islam, the suppression of women, and a children’s charity...
Boycott Burqa Barbie
What will they think of next? A be-headed doll?
That’s right. I am talking about the new Burqa Barbie doll which is now on display in Florence, Italy, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Barbie doll. As my colleague over at weaselzippers wonders: Will clean-cut Ken now come (pun intended, ‘tis mine) with four burqa’ed Barbie doll wives?
…. After all, the Burqa Barbie is being auctioned off for the Save the Children charity.
Save the Children? Surely, you must be jesting. I would like to save the children from this as well as from every other Barbie doll…
Barbies are always anatomically impossible: their feet are pre-shaped for high heels, their breasts are high, firm, and perky—like Playboy dolls or surgically enhanced Hollywood stars. Bikini Barbie.
These dolls were so retro—or so I always thought. Well, shut my mouth, those were the good old days of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Now, Barbie is swathed, shrouded, in a burqa; now, she is even more hopelessly retro.
A woman, a girl, in a chador, chadari, burqa, cannot see that well. You cannot hear what she is saying. She cannot hear you. A woman in a burqa can’t run, or even walk that well. She stumbles. Inside, she has to balance a baby, a shopping bag, maybe a pair of glasses perched on her nose, slipping. If it’s hot, she is sweltering. If it’s sunny, she is still deprived of sunlight and Vitamin D. The burqa violates a woman’s human rights. It poses a danger to a woman’s health, both mental and medical.
The bikini and the burqa: What ever happened to women’s freedom?
I’ll tell you. While the bikini (especially as a symbol of pornography, prostitution, and promiscuity) was nevah (I say this with my best Barbra Streisand Brooklyn accent) a symbol of freedom, the western secular state never forced any woman to wear one; nor did her family. And, if a woman refused to wear a bikini, no one flogged, stoned, or honor murdered her. These things are happening to girls and women today all over the Islamic/Islamist world. They are happening in the West as well when young Muslim girls refuse to wear a modest headscarf.
Lenin boasted that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope to with which they would hang them. This is just a generation before that, but still and all one of those cases when the free market allows cultural poison into our lives.
Okay, this is for a charity, so it must be alright, and it doesn’t seem to be a production model, so no sweat. Mattel aren’t going to be encouraging little girls to think it’s okay to have dolls that spend their lives in burkas. Is it? I mean, there’re probably lots of companies making dolls for little girls who want to be neither seen nor heard, right?
Hey, we’ve even got a British Barbie (TM) fan that thinks’ it’s all just lovely, and thus wins The Golden Scourge, the prestigious TJ.AT? trophy that goes to the lucky winner of our Dhimmi of the Month Competition, for this glorious little bit of cultural cringe.
The company director of Laird Assessors from The Wirral, Cheshire, said: 'Bring it on Burkha Barbie, I think this is a great idea.
'I think this is really important for girls, wherever they are from they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them.
'I know Barbie was something seen as bad before as an image for girls, but in actual fact the message with Barbie for women is you can be whatever you want to be.
'I have a Barbie in a wheelchair that was only out for six weeks.'
Not to be confused with Majestically Stupid, Doll-Brained Bint Barbie.
Hey, kids, let’s have a competition, shall we? Just compose four shortish English sentences; including the phrases “I think,” “I think”, ”I know” and “ I have” respectively, and see just how much brass-bound, copper-bottomed, or gold-plated self-delusion and fact-free wishful thinking you can mange in 86 words or fewer.
Still, back to Action Man: the Anglo-American free man archetype with no tackle and little political leadership to tackle girl-killing psychos and their pals worldwide.
Is he such an unrealistic example of the Free world’s anti-terrorist thinking when you compare him with reality?
When a top US General whose troops have been murdered by a well-known and yet tolerated and indulged Islamist inside the military says this: "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy," said Gen. Casey, the Army's chief of staff, "but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.", and our own, our very own, (and why don’t we send it to Afghanistan naked) Ministry of Sitting on Defence spends scarce cash on burkas for British women soldiers – who don’t wear them at work - and also when some of our police spend a day dressed in the bloody things to snuggle up to the communidee (TM), I’m not 100% sure that poor old Action Man’s so unrealistic a figure these days.
I mean, what’s he got to lose?
Come on now, gentles. What’s the most politically incorrect doll model and brand name we can think of?
I’ll start with Gitmo Ken action figure: complete with facecloth, water jug, and Innocent Wedding Guest Malik (illustrated here prone). Batteries not included.
Well, my UK Independence Party membership pack has finally arrived, complete with its top-secret cipher key to send clandestine anti-EU information to their ultra-high-tech underground headquarters in Newton Abbot - a name heavy with the grisly redolence of clandestine fanaticism and byzantine global webs of conspiracy well-funded by sinister military-industrial conglomerates and men in cardigans named Colin.
The covering letter explained that the delay in sending me the stuff was because under the Party’s constitution new members must not be recruited during leadership elections for obvious reasons and the person who posts out the membership packs was himself standing for the post of Grand Dragon and Supreme Arch-Pencil Monitor.
I’m sure I’ll be able to contribute something to the Party’s publicity activities for next year’s General Election and have ticked several volunteer boxes on the prepaid return card:
# Stuffing envelopes.
# Canvassing both of your best friends at the bowling green clubhouse.
# Leafleting council housing estates at 5 AM the day after Benefits Thursdays.
# Phoning the barmy granny who promised to vote for us just as long as Enoch said it would be okay. (And he did too. Enoch’s the best-spoken parrot I’ve ever trained.)
I’m not so sure about some of the other suggested activities, and there’s a box of matches and a very detailed plan of some large building with the word Reichstag crossed out and LouiseWeissBuilding written above it in green ink.
To complicate matters, it appears that the towering glory of the European Parliament has not one but two venues so there’s also a Michelin Guide map to the Espace Léopold and the first four chapters torn from a distance-learning manual called Piloting the European Airbus for Fun and Prophet.
I’m definitely not going in for those two options - not with my back. But let’s face it, if they asked for a Vodka-Soused You Tube Heroic Last Stands Movie Montages Browser And Suicide Late-Night Amazon Cheesy War-Film DVD Shopper then by next summer my name would be as famous as…well, that chap who was entirely innocent of attacking the World Trade Centre despite what his martyrdom video, his father, his organisation and hundreds of thousands of cheering but offended moderate men, black-masked women and beardless youths dancing in the streets throughout the Middle East and Asia 11/12 September 2001 seemed to indicate, but which you never see on the BBC these days for some reason.
The lapel badge they’ve sent is the smallest party political badge I’ve ever seen in my life. I imagine that The Nazi Paedophile Kitten-Drowning Accordionist Front sports larger slogan buttons than UKIP. Still it’s quality schmutter, if tiny.
I also have a UKIP nom de guerre, which is Vangor the Vengeance-Wreaker which goes with my other aliases rather well. Of course when I’m at work or using my credit card I’m known by my true name, and when I’m describing the seedy, corrupt and criminal life of North Britain I go by North Northwester. When, on the other hand, I’m chronicling the lives and times of a galaxy-wide space civilisation I go by North N. Wester, and in the evenings and weekends and I let my hair down and relax with a few friends it’s Mistress Agonista, Queen of Pain.
Very soon I’ll have to email the local Party boss and offer my services under the name that’s written on my birth certificate.
And that’s the time I was really dreading: the point when I finally had to commit to actually doing something to persuade the residents of Castle City to come to their front doors and listen to the possibility of voting for someone other than The Statist Super-Taxing Federast Slushy Party - now available in four almost identical flavours: Mint, Raspberry, Banana and Blueberry.
All that time spent away from hearth and home and actual conservative thought and people with a discernible belief-system wisdom…to come home weary one hot Thursday evening to fall asleep exhausted and then awake to a Cameronian ‘Conservative’ victory and the knowledge that it had all been wasted and that nothing in the results would indicate to dim-bulb marginal Tory MPs that Callmedave’s Ted Heath deracinating corporatism 2.0 had been the final sellout and that they’d better damned well shape up and practice something actually resembling conservatism or else face electoral obliteration next time.
That would be the last nail in the coffin for national self-government, justice, genuine freedom and the possibility of honest administration in Britain for another generation.
David Cameron has made it clear he is not taking an election victory for granted and slapped down a senior colleague for suggesting a Labour win would be better for Britain than the uncertainty of a hung parliament…. A new poll showed that Labour had cut the lead over the Conservatives to just six points, raising the prospect of no party being able to secure a majority at next year's general election.
Mr Cameron publicly disowned comments from Ken Clarke, his front bench colleague, for suggesting recently that a Labour win would be preferable to a hung parliament. The former chancellor and current shadow business secretary argued that at a time of grave economic difficulties the uncertainty it would create could be disastrous.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven. Works fine with ‘middle aged’, too.
The woman involved is unhappy and as her friend you want to give her the best possible advice.
She started seeing the man some years ago and, though not spectacular as romances go, it seemed solid enough at first and she became ever more hopeful about it. The man was charming and respectful towards the woman’s interests and needs, and though he didn’t share them all with her, he allowed her a great deal of freedom to so her own thing; such as spending time with with her family and friends and he never insisted, as some boyfriends do, that she organise her entire life wholly subordinate to his. He was kind to her children from a previous relationship and he always allowed her time and space in their shared home for those kids to play and grow and entertain their own friends.
It looked good, and they cohabited for several years happily enough while waiting to see whether something deeper would be a good idea. And it was fine, it really was. They lived their lives together quite harmoniously and with self-restraint when the inevitable disagreements about laundry and what to eat tonight and so on occurred. They never wholly merged their finances – she always kept most of her earnings and paid for clothes and toiletries and transportation and suchlike to fit her busy lifestyle while he lived within his means as well as any man can do such a thing. Only a few bills were paid in common: rent; a monthly food budget; shared utilities costs and a modest property insurance policy against fire and theft, though it was the woman’s best friend (and niece) Sam who got them a very good deal on burglar and fire alarms and he even let them share her emergency link to the police station in case of a break-in.
Eventually, they took the plunge and decided to get married. Well, she’d known him her whole life as they grew up in the same neighbourhood and though he had been an unruly youth and had, indeed, been involved along with his family in a series of lengthy property quarrels against the woman and her family, he was obviously a reformed character: well-educated and peaceable, sociable and gentle.
It all started to go wrong soon after the wedding. Right after the honeymoon the new husband suggested they set up a shared fund from their earnings to cover the regular daily and monthly household expenses, and as they were now husband and wife she readily agreed to this, hearing no alarm bells at this stage – or ignoring them in her happiness and her optimism and her relief on having no longer to share the full burden of parenthood and household management alone. He never quite accounted for where all that money went to, and often she saw very little in return for her monthly payments into their new joint account, she was still very much in love and she had a tender heart and was prepared to overlook much to keep the peace and stay as happy as she felt a new bride ought to be.
But it kept on getting worse. He never finished the tasks around their home that he promised to do. He’d take large sums out of the joint account and soon paint trays and rollers and wallpaper would appear (and wallpaper not always to the woman’s taste), but he never did a proper job and rarely completed anything. He had never undertaken his share of the household tasks from the start even when they were just living together, but back then he was trying to make a living in a new venture that was only just getting off the ground after a series of spectacular business failures, and she was a generous soul and had forgiven him much in return for his continued love and companionship. But as soon as they were married he found ever more complex and implausible reasons why he shouldn’t do the washing up or pay for the week’s food, and he insisted that she sort out the trash in a finicky way that hurt the poor woman’s back and exposed her to nasty weather and wasted time and energy she could have been spending with her children.
He started socializing and doing shady business deals with dodgy friends and relatives from the seamiest underside of town.
On one occasion she discovered to her horror that he had passed most of their holiday savings in bits and pieces to a notorious thug who lived at the far end of town: a self-destructive wastrel and wife beater with a history of brutal assaults and housebreaking and who was a menace to his friends and neighbours alike, but her husband explained that the man had hit hard times through the spite and envy of his own neighbours and that she should shut up and think of the hooligan’s poor wife and children and not be mean about quite trivial sums of money. One associate he acquired and spent time and money on was an out-and-out gangster who had recently served his parole after convictions for murder, grand theft, blackmail, demanding money with menaces, kidnap and unlawful imprisonment. He had recently come into money and was rebuilding his reputation as a person of influence about town by flashing his cash and muscling in on other peoples’ business - including resurrecting an ancient and now pointless feud with Sam.
She just couldn’t get through to him. She pleaded with him to mend his ways and act responsibly, and several times they went to counselling together and each time he would promise to reform and to take their relationship back to the way it had been in the early days, but each time it seemed that he had lied and each time his behaviour grew worse. He had long since managed to banish her children from their home – they were old enough to stand on their own feet and had children and friends of their own now, but she resented her husband’s unreasonable and harsh criticism of them and his insistence that she cut all financial ties with them. It soon came about that Christmas and birthday visits were pretty much all she was allowed to make to their houses or them to hers. Her husband began to talk about Sam being a bad influence on his wife and the whole neighbourhood and he did all that he could to estrange the two women from each other. he talked about replacing Sam’s shared anti-theft system with one of his own. He even bought part of it but never actually installed it and it sat in its box in the spare room: useless, paid for on credit, as an ever-present reminder to her that her husband might cut her off from whatever security she still had.
One day he came up with a new and extensive list of demands. He ranted for hours about their life and how if she really loved him he’d let her take ever-tighter control of their home and finances. He demanded that she put still more of her earnings into their account and insisted that he should from now on decide when and how it was spent and he pompously declared that from now on he would tell her about it open and above board – but that he and he alone would have the right to decide on the money’s fate, though he would consult her if he had time. He also came up with a list of her treasured hobbies and friendships that he wanted her to curtail or abandon altogether.
That was the last straw.
She argued furiously with him and refused to agree to anything else without getting the advice and support of her own family and the more reasonable members of his. Faced down, he agreed to this, and for a while it seemed good again – even some of his most loyal friends and supporters actually sided with her, and in the end he backed down.
The woman was much relieved and even believed for a short while that shared happiness would be theirs again…until she heard that he was rearranging her life on the sly exactly as he’d previously demanded: stopping direct debits to her favourite charities and her gym club subscription and cancelling a family holiday she’d arranged with Sam and her own children. She found out that he’d even visited the mutual friends who’d originally taken her side and he’d browbeaten and bribed them into agreeing that his demands over her life were reasonable and that she should put up with his controlling agenda now that their own misgivings had been overcome. He did concede that he’d buy her own front door key to come and go as she pleased - but he alone would keep that key and letting her use it would be at his sole discretion.
Now, if you care about this woman and want what’s good for her, you can only have two realistic choices.
You can either encourage her to stand her ground in her own home and draw some line in the sand and say "So far and no further," and hope that she can wear him down over the years, bring him around to her point of view and hope he lets her live her life with a little bit more as she wants to despite his long record of almost unbroken duplicity and backsliding and which therefore might not work... or you can advise her to cut her losses, realize that he’s never going to treat her right, get the hell out of Dodge and get a life.
Over at Civitas they have a post that perfectly combines an eye-catchingly prurient title with the slow, logical, brutal peeling of what appears to be an evidence-free assertion of cultural relativism presented as scientific gospel by a Third Sector scientisticalist.
Do Lesbians Make Better Parents than Mums and Dads?
Professor Stephen Scott is Professor of Child Health and Behaviour at the Institute of Psychiatry at the MaudsleyHospital. He is also director of research at the NationalAcademy for Parenting Practitioners. This is a quango that the DfES gave Professor Scott and two colleagues £30 million to set up in 2007. In a widely reported speech last week, Professor Scott claimed: ‘Lesbians make better parents than a man and woman.’
Mrs. Northwester brought this to my attention while incandescent about the sentence.
I’ll try (relative) brevity in my commentary for once.
Spared jail, the forced marriage case father who told wife: 'I'll cut out your tongue'
By James Tozer
A muslim who threatened to kill his wife and cut out her tongue after she blocked an arranged marriage for their daughter has been banned from seeing his family.
Good.
In the first prosecution of its kind, Aurang Zeb has been convicted of breaching a Forced Marriage Protection Order taken out to stop him taking Rozina Akhtar out of Britain to marry.
Also good. Nice precedent. Practical.
But despite his chilling threats he escaped imprisonment and was given community service.
If it’s not shoveling it into wheel barrows on a pig farm while wearing a pink tutu and a yarmulke I’m going to be very, very disappointed.
Last night campaigners condemned the sentence, saying it sent out the wrong message.
'There's clear evidence that this man threatened to kill his wife, so how can he be given community service?' said Shazia Qayum of Karma Nirvana, a group which helps victims of forced marriage.
'He should have been locked up. The law just isn't strong enough at the moment, and it's time the Government made forced marriage a criminal offence.'
Or just one sensible prosecutor could use the existing laws on rape and false imprisonment. Whatever happened to one law for all, I wonder?
Zeb, a former builder, set up a marriage between Rozina and his brother's son while visiting their native Pakistan when she was just 19.
After returning home to Blackburn, his daughter decided she did not want to go through with it.
His wife, Parveen Akhtar, stepped in, explaining she had been pushed into an unhappy marriage to Zeb 24 years ago and did not want their daughter to suffer the same fate.
Brave woman.
But he insisted Rozina had no choice, saying she was 'dishonouring' the family, magistrates heard.
Using laws on forced marriage introduced last November, police secured one of Britain's first FMPOs against Zeb, 43.
A new but useful thing, it seems. A conservative’s dream.
He was ordered to forfeit his passport and barred from taking Rozina, now 23, to Pakistan.
How about simply marking it ‘For outbound travel only?’
But though he moved out of the family home after February's ruling, he continued stalking them, Blackburn magistrates were told.
He would wait for Parveen in his car outside the house to accuse her of having an affair - which she denied, said Catherine Allan, prosecuting.
The father of two also harassed his son, Nasir Khan, almost running him off the road and demanding he attack Parveen and Rozina.
In one conversation, Zeb said that if Nasir killed them he would 'only get five to seven years' in jail.
Then last month, he rang his wife and told her in a 'very chilling voice' she 'wouldn't dream of what I would do to you', threatening: 'I'm going to kill you and chop off your tongue.'
Miss Allan said: 'Parveen was under no doubts that he would kill her. He became more threatening and unpredictable towards her and the children, and made her life a misery.'
Zeb was arrested and pleaded guilty to harassing his wife, daughter and son.
Okay, that’s enough. Such behaviour is immoral from anyone.
But his solicitor, Basharat Ditta, denied he had tried to make Rozina marry against her will, insisting he had 'traditional Asian' values.
And that’s a defence?I repeat; Such behaviour is immoral from anyone. Daughter tongue-removal has a long and honourable tradition and they’ve go to take it into account in Blackburn? But it didn’t work, so that’s good.
The law 1, cultural relativism 0.
One hand clapping.
Zeb was ordered to do 200 hours unpaid work, placed under a 12-month community supervision order and told to pay £85 costs.
Oddly enough, I am indeed very, very disappointed.
Magistrates also imposed a restraining order barring him from contacting his family indefinitely.
Still and all, I could be wrong.
Perhaps he’ll give up harassing them now, and maybe the sentence was enough to deter him. There’s no sign from this article that he might do such things to people other than his family, e.g. a crime passionel that has no chance of occurring under other circumstances. He may have learned his lesson.
Rozina and her mother remained too fearful to speak yesterday.
Or maybe not, it seems.
But Detective Inspector Claire Holbrook, of Lancashire Police, said: 'I hope this sends a very clear message that we will use everything in our power to protect victims who are in fear of being forced into a marriage.'
On balance, though, the principles of punishment and deterrence might have been better served by… well… punishment and deterrence.
While arranged marriages are traditional in many cultures, forced marriage carrying the threat of intimidation or violence is outlawed by Muslim leaders.
That should read: forced marriage carrying the threat of intimidation or violence is outlawed by some exceptional Muslim leaders, and quite a few official pronouncements for the media but everyone knows that it goes on a lot and many tolerate or even approve of it. Actually, it’s all part of a rich and diverse culture that’s enriching our society, and it was brought to Britain on purpose to prove that multiculturalism really works. Plus when they get you to Pakistan or somewhere, all bets are off.
The system of orders was introduced after ministers dropped plans to make forcing someone to marry a crime. More than 70 have been imposed so far.
So a good idea in the circumstances in New Labour’s Britain.
Breaching one is contempt of court and can carry a two-year jail term.
…Or not even 200 days on pig farm given the absence of prison space thanks to Labour’s anti-prison bias and, let’s say, judges’reluctancetoplayhardball. So, half-arsed as usual, or a worthy start?
Applau.
Oh, and as a bonus you can read further analysis of his story from both feminist and moral perspectives in two of our finest tellers of truth here and here.
