Our Wanker this Week is, sadly, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party. I say “sadly” because in the past she's always seemed the voice of sweet reason and, if I'm honest, a bit of a doll. We also like the way she keeps quiet about her acting career, in which she has played Zainab Masood in Eastenders for the last ten years. But this time she's really let herself down.
Sayeeda Warsi in her day-job, and as Eastenders heart-throb Zainab Masood
You will all know, of course, why she's been selected – that speech she gave (“The Sir Sigmund Sternberg Lecture”) at the University of Leicester. But we'd just like to qualify it a little, so have patience and read on ...
She used the lecture to explain her position about the ‘ongoing battle against bigotry’. No argument there. We see bigotry on our streets, don't we, every time army units march through the streets on returning from overseas? Bigotry holds placards threatening various kinds of horrible death to our soldiers for doing their duty and risking their lives for their country. We read about bigotry in the newspapers, too, when some young woman is murdered or mutilated because she wore a miniskirt or didn't like her family's choice of husband. So an ongoing battle against bigotry? Right on, we're all with you there, love.
We even enjoy the way she describes bigotry, by quoting Catholic President Bartlet talking with a fundamentalist television presenter in the TV series “West Wing” ...
President Bartlet: “I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an abomination.”
TV Presenter: “I don’t say homosexuality is an abomination, Mr. President. The Bible does.”
President Bartlet: “Yes it does. Leviticus 18:22 … I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I have you here.
“I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My Chief of Staff Leo McGarry insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police?
“Here’s one that’s really important because we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town: touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean. Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football?
“Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? And can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?”
So far, so good. But Warsi went on to talk about dinner parties, and here she rather loses her thread. Why does she think that we shouldn't talk about Islam round the dinner table? We talk about politics, house prices, investment bankers, schools, the parlous state of the Church of England, our health, the future of the NHS (as in whether it actually has one, that is) ... but we mustn't talk about Islam?
Why not? Is it private? Does it belong, in some arcane way, only to those people that practise it, and they don't want us to mention it? If so, why not? Are they ashamed of it?
The Baroness (what a cutie!) tried to explain: ‘It’s not a big leap of imagination to predict where the talk of “moderate” Muslims leads ...' (mustn't talk about moderation now; dirty word) '... in the factory, where they’ve just hired a Muslim worker, the boss says to his employees: “Not to worry, he’s only fairly Muslim”. In the school, the kids say: “The family next door are Muslim but they’re not too bad”. And in the road, as a woman walks past wearing a burka, the passers-by think: “That woman’s either oppressed or is making a political statement”.’
Duh?
What does all that mean, exactly?
Frankly, cutie-pie, it's gibberish. It makes no sense. It has no logic. We mustn't say even slightly positive things about Muslims, because that implies that there must be a lot of negative things we might have said but didn't? That passes the “I'm a famous politician and a highly educated lawyer” test, does it? Sorry, luv, it's bollox.
Later in her speech she addressed the question of why, round the dinner tables of Middle England, this rising tide of intemperately moderate discussion has reached flood proportions, so that people whose main claim to fame is that they've never held a strong opinion in their lives are now wont to utter inflammatory phrases like “Of course, most Muslims are hard-working, law-abiding members of society” or “Our next-door neighbours are Muslims, and she's utterly charming”. Dangerous talk, you'll agree, and the reasons for it are not hard to see.
“The drip feeding of fear fuels a rising tide of prejudice,” Cutie-chops said in her speech. “So when people get on the tube and see a bearded Muslim, they think “terrorist”… when they hear “Halal” they think “that sounds like contaminated food”… and when they walk past a woman wearing a veil, they think automatically “that woman’s oppressed”. And what’s particularly worrying is that this can lead down the slippery slope to violence. So why is this happening?”
She's absolutely right, of course. This kind of simplistic conclusion-jumping and generalisation needs stamping out. Not all the bearded, slogan-shouting, placard-waving men in sandals who line the streets threatening to behead our soldiers are terrorists. Perish the thought. At the end of a hard day's shouting and threatening, they put their placards down and go home to the same domestic relaxation as the rest of us. They play with the kids, they give the wife an affectionate beating, they turn on the telly, they collect stamps or build model railways. The idea that they are all dangerous extremists is absurd. Of course it is.
And halal meat is absolutely wonderful; how can it be contaminated? The violent threshing of the terrified animal as its throat is cut is enough to cast off any possible germs, and then the flowing blood cleanses the floor in the most delightful and salubrious way. Contaminated? Don't be silly! And those young women we read about in the papers, the one who get found buried in suitcases, or have their noses cut off, or are beaten up by their brothers, they're not all “oppressed”. Most of them enjoy it really, it's their culture.
And as for the “slippery slope to violence”, well, Sayeeda Baby is absolutely right. Just because a group of people threaten us, or plant bombs on our buses, or demand the right to free housing and a generous income because they've made the difficult and dangerous flight in an aircraft all the way from Kabul, there's no reason to hate or fear them! When groups of their young men carry knives, attack white youths in the street, or treat white thirteen-year-old girls like prostitutes, that's just their playful fun. How can we possibly object? And when they say they want Islam to rule the world, and Sharia rule to be applied throughout our society, that doesn't mean we should mention them at dinner parties.
No, Baroness Floppy-knockers, it's not for these sensible and entirely reasonable views that we're awarding you the title of Wanker of the Week. It's simply for not being clear. You just didn't explain yourself properly, and that gave the gutter press (that's the Daily Mail, for anyone new to these pages) the excuse to parody you and hold you up to ridicule in a way that we on this website would never dream of doing.
So as you didn't manage it for yourself, we're going to explain for you. We know exactly what you meant, so here it is ...
What you were getting at is that it doesn't matter, in modern British society, what you say about someone. Be they a religious group, a minority group like homosexuals or paraplegics, or just people who've had a sad or nasty experience like losing a loved one or being obese, it makes little difference what you say about them, it's the fact that you have spoken about them at all that's offensive.
You see, it's their religion, not yours, so you've no right to mention it. Similarly, it's their sexual practice, or their missing limbs, so how dare you even think about it? And if you even breathe the words “cot death” or “fat”, you're being unbelievably insensitive and you deserve to be prosecuted, sued, interviewed by local authority equality officers, shouted after in the street and punched in the supermarket car-park.
Of course, it's OK for them, the fat religious nutters in wheelchairs whose gay partners just died, to talk about how awful it is and society should take a great deal of notice of them and give them lots of money. In fact, it's impossible to shut them up sometimes, about their dreadful victim-hood and how no one understands. But you try speaking about them: dare to suggest that perhaps they might eat a little less, or get out a bit to take their minds off it, or just bloody shut up about what they like to do in bed and who they like to do it with because we're not interested, and see how the shits hit the fan. Even if you're being frightfully sympathetic and positive, just mentioning their victim-ness is often enough to trigger a shower of vituperation. It's their misfortune, and you can keep your nose out.
So, by announcing to the middle-class hostesses of the nation that they should not permit any discussion at their dinner tables of Muslims or the Islamic religion, that gorgeous Sayeeda bird is really just applying to one social class what is already commonplace in another. She's saying, like they do on housing estates in Peckham, Harlesden, Preston or Govanhill, “I'm going to batter that fat slag because I heard she said something about me!”
And you can't get much more British than that.
The GOS says: Thinking of being punched in the supermarket car-park, did you read the report about the seventy-year-old man in need of a hip replacement who found that his much younger wife had been having an affair with her doctor? He confronted the doctor in the practice car-park and, in the words of the Daily Mail, “beat him up”.
Bloody brilliant. There's hope for us old codgers yet. I hope when I'm seventy I'll still be fit enough to take my grumpiness out on other people instead of just writing about it.
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