We have two Wankers this week, both from Nottingham. One is the leader of Nottingham City Council, Jon Collins, and the other is Chief Superintendent Marcus Beale, Divisional Commander for the City Division of Nottinghamshire Police (marvellous, isn't it? We bend over backwards to find nice things to say about the police because they get such a bad press all the time, and they just let us down time after time).
Bob T recently emailed us suggesting that Nottingham City Council should feature in our pages because they've decided that in their new £2.5 million cemetery the graves should be aligned with Mecca, as required by the Muslim religion, instead of facing East as is usual in Christian countries.
Certainly this seems a crazy decision, especially as only 5% of Nottingham's population is Muslim. The Bishop of Nottingham & Southwell said so, anyway. So did Brendan Clarke-Smith, a Nottingham councillor, who said: "I was totally bewildered when I read about this decision. I spoke to one of the local Muslim groups in my area and they were equally surprised by what had been done. It is utterly ridiculous and I know it'll create a lot of ill feeling both in Nottingham and the country generally."
While Christian groups expressed dismay at a policy that they said "marginalised" them and accommodated Muslims at the expense of other faiths, Raza Ul Haq, Imam at the Madni Masjid Mosque, confirmed that "it is part of our religion for the dead to be aligned with Mecca. It is very important," he also said "but for Christians, if they want to face somewhere else we support them." A spokesman for the Institute of Cemeteries and Crematorium Management said it was the first time he had heard of any public cemetery in Britain choosing to have all its gravestones facing north-east, in line with Muslim tradition. "It is unusual," he said, and added that it would be appropriate only "if there was a large population of Muslims."
Nigel Lymn Rose, managing director of A.W.Lymn Funeral Directors and a past president of the National Association of Funeral Directors said "I was astonished to be told 'Oh yes, we're burying everyone so they are aligned to Mecca. It will make things easier.'"
We were certainly tempted to agree with Bob T and award the title Wanker of the Week to the whole of Nottingham City Council, but when we delved a little deeper something even more bizarre came to light. A stupid decision is one thing. Bloody-minded, belligerent threats are something else.
There seems to be no question that this was a deliberate decision, made by officials with their eyes open. The responsibility appears to rest with one Steve Dowling, Nottingham City Council's Services Director for Environment and Public Protection, who is quoted as saying "For people of the Muslim faith this fits in with a religious requirement, but it will also ensure a tidy appearance for the site. People can choose to be buried facing another direction but if they do not specify that, they will be buried facing north-east."
Fair enough. It was a decision they thought they had to make, so they made it. It was a rotten decision, but that's all it was - just a bad decision which they could, if necessary, alter or abandon.
But faced with adverse publicity in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph and vociferous dissent from local Christian groups as well as religious and political leaders' more dignified protests, the leader of the city council, Jon Collins, evidently decided that attack was the best means of defence. First he flatly denied that the policy had been adopted to placate Muslims. He insisted "We haven't made any agreement with any single community group. Anyone can be buried facing in any direction they like."
Then he upped the ante and took the offensive by warning that organisations like the BNP were using recent print media coverage to fuel hate campaigns. It wasn't true, of course, but hey, who cares about little details like that? He pontificated "We made it clear before the first newspaper article appeared about this issue that it is and always has been the case that people can be buried in any way they wish. To suggest otherwise is not only plain wrong, it's divisive and potentially dangerous."
He went on "There is to be an area in the cemetery where people can be buried east to west just as there is an area for people to be buried in the Muslim tradition. All the options will be made clear prior to burial." So, Councillor Collins' facts are not quite the same as Steve Dowling's facts, but apparently he's managed to persuade George Cassidy, the Bishop, because the bish now "shares our concerns about how the issue could be used by racially-motivated individuals and organisations."
And then Chief Superintendent Marcus Beale, Divisional Commander for the City Division of Nottinghamshire Police, weighed in, saying "Thankfully we do not have a major problem with racially motivated crime in Nottingham but we take very seriously the behaviour of any individual or organisation that tries to stir up racial hatred."
Well, there you have it. According to the Nottingham police, if you don't want to be buried facing Mecca, you're a racist. And if you protest about the way the City Council is managing this new cemetery you must, in the view of Councillor Jon Collins, be a "racially-motivated individual".
There's just one little snag with this opinion, though. Islam isn't a race. It's a religion. People of many different nationalities and races follow Islam, including those from Somalia, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Saudi-Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some are African black people (are we still allowed to say that?), many have an Arab background, and some, like the Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, are almost indistinguishable from Europeans.
So it's rather hard to see just how expressing an opinion about the alignment of graves to suit one religion over another can be racist, isn't it? And for failing to understand this distinction, and for believing that the best way to extricate yourself from a bad decision is to use bully-boy threats and PC slurs against those who disagree with you, Jon Collins and his monkey Marcus Beale are our new Wankers of the Week.
Congratulations, boys. And no, we're not stirring up racial hatred. We're just calling you a pair of wankers.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
This site created and maintained by PlainSite