In the last few days there has been some talk of Old Testament values.
The Old Testament quotation and statement of Israelitish Law is “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for live, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, Burning for burning, would for wound, stripe for strip” and is taken from the Book of Exodus, Chapter 21, verses 23, 24 and 25. (Jesus reverses this for christians in the Gospel of St Matthew, Chapter 5 verses 38 to 42).
On Wednesday we had both an atrocity and, much less well reported, the echo of an older atrocity.
I don’t personally know any of those involved in Wednesday’s atrocity but I wish every ill to the perpetrators and every condolence to the bereaved amongst the family and friends of Drummer Lee Rigby.
I was somewhat more personally connected to what happened in Hyde Park on the 20th July 1982 because, as an 18 year old, I was in the Brigade of Guard’s Brigade Squad for potential officers and trained with the admirable Lt Anthony Daly who was killed that day together with 3 other soldiers of the Household Cavalry. His family were also friends of my family too. Had he lived he might have been retiring as a general now.
"Men and horses lay dead and dying in the park
Detective Inspector John Stevens was one of the first police officers to see the carnage of the IRA Hyde Park bombing in 1982
WE came on a scene of appalling devastation in the South Carriageway, on the bottom edge of the park.
A bomb loaded with 4in and 6in nails had been detonated by remote control in a blue Morris Marina, just as the Queen's Lifeguard, a detachment of the Household Calvary, was passing on its way from Knightsbridge Barracks to Horse Guards Parade. Men and horses lay dead or dying, and more than twenty people, as well as several horses, had been severely injured.
The regimental farriers, who had sprinted from their barracks when they heard the explosion, were splashed with blood from head to foot on their bare torsos and long leather aprons. Debris was scattered everywhere, and human remains were being taken away. The atmosphere was desperately tense, for there was every chance that a second bomb might go off.
The regiment's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker-Bowles, had raced to the scene on foot, and as he arrived had met a groom leading a severely wounded horse, which had blood gushing from a huge hole in its neck.
Immediately he told the man to take off his shirt and stuff it into the wound but that was impossible, for one of the groom's hands had been pierced by a four-inch nail, which was sticking out on both sides. Another man sacrificed his shirt and staunched the blood. But for that, the horse would never have reached its stable. It survived and became a hero Sefton and lived to the age of thirty." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...icle566235.ece
On Wednesday the Irish Republican, John Downey, who killed them was arrested. He had not dared to show his face and had detonated the bomb that killed them by remote control from a cowardly safe distance and kept his hands clean of their blood. Sinn Fein’s, Gerry Kelly, MLA has just claimed that arresting him now was “vindictive”.
Many of the similarities and differences between these two events are obvious but the most striking thing to me is that both demonstrate that the idea of multi-culturalism is clearly demonstrated in both cases to be deeply flawed and dangerous nonsense. As we say in the English Democrats’ Manifesto:-
“It is a fact that during the past forty years people of many different cultures have come to live in England. Our country is in that sense a multi-cultural society. However, multi-Culturalism is an ideology which suggests that a mix of many cultures in one society is desirable and that it is the duty of government to actively encourage cultural diversity within the state. Further, it suggests that all cultures should be treated as equal. A logical extension of this is that all languages, histories and law codes should be treated equally. This is clearly impossible in a unified country. All ethnic groups should be free to promote their own culture and identity but the public culture of England should be that of the indigenous English. This position is consistent with the rights of indigenous nations everywhere.”
Here also are the comments of a genuinely moderate Iman about yet another recent and utterly appalling example of the same flaws in the current British Establishment’s concept of multi-culturalism:-
The Oxford sex ring and the preachers who teach young Muslim men that white girls are cheap
By Dr Taj Hargey
Daily Mail 15 May 2013
The terrible story of the Oxford child sex ring has brought shame not only on the city of dreaming spires, but also on the local Muslim community.
It is a sense of repulsion and outrage that I feel particularly strongly, working as a Muslim leader and Imam in this neighbourhood and trying to promote genuine cultural integration.
There is no doubt that the evil deeds of these men have badly set back the cause of cross-community harmony.
In its harrowing details, this grim saga of exploitation, misogyny, perversion and cruelty fills me not only with desperate sorrow for those girls and their families, but also with dread and despair.
If I were the judge in this case, I would hand out the harshest possible jail sentences to these monstrous predators, both to see that justice is done for their victims and to send out a message to other exploiters.
And when I say harsh, I mean it: none of this fashionable nonsense about prisoners being released only a quarter of the way through their sentences. There is no pattern of good conduct these men could follow behind bars that could possibly make up for all the terrible suffering they have inflicted on others.
Depravity
But apart from its sheer depravity, what also depresses me about this case is the widespread refusal to face up to its hard realities.
The fact is that the vicious activities of the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race, because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases.
Indeed, one of the victims who bravely gave evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted white girls to abuse’.
But as so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to this reality.
Commentators and politicians tip-toe around it, hiding behind weasel words.
We are told that child sex abuse happens ‘in all communities’, that white men are really far more likely to be abusers, as has been shown by the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile case.
One particularly misguided commentary argued that the predators’ religion was an irrelevance, for what really mattered was that most of them worked in the night-time economy as taxi drivers, just as in the Rochdale child sex scandal many of the abusers worked in kebab houses, so they had far more opportunities to target vulnerable girls.
But all this is deluded nonsense. While it is, of course, true that abuse happens in all communities, no amount of obfuscation can hide the pattern that has been exposed in a series of recent chilling scandals, from Rochdale to Oxford, and Telford to Derby.
In all these incidents, the abusers were Muslim men, and their targets were under-age white girls.
Moreover, reputable studies show that around 26per cent of those involved in grooming and exploitation rings are Muslims, which is around five times higher than the proportion of Muslims in the adult male population.
To pretend that this is not an issue for the Islamic community is to fall into a state of ideological denial.
But then part of the reason this scandal happened at all is precisely because of such politically correct thinking. All the agencies of the state, including the police, the social services and the care system, seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes.
Terrified of accusations of racism, desperate not to undermine the official creed of cultural diversity, they took no action against obvious abuse.
Amazingly, the predators seem to have been allowed by local authority managers to come and go from care homes, picking their targets to ply them with drink and drugs before abusing them. You can be sure that if the situation had been reversed, with gangs of tough, young white men preying on vulnerable Muslim girls, the state’s agencies would have acted with greater alacrity.
Another sign of the cowardly approach to these horrors is the constant reference to the criminals as ‘Asians’ rather than as ‘Muslims’.
In this context, Asian is a completely meaningless term. The men were not from China, or India or Sri Lanka or even Bangladesh. They were all from either Pakistan or Eritrea, which is, in fact, in East Africa rather than Asia.
What united them in their outlook was their twisted, corrupt mindset, which bred their misogyny and racism.
If they had been real, genuine followers of Islam, they would not have dreamt of indulging in such vile crimes, for true Islam preaches respect for women and warns against all forms of sexual licence, including adultery and exploitation.
Contempt
By all accounts, this was not the version that these men heard in their mosques. On the contrary, they would have been drip-fed for years a far less uplifting doctrine, one that denigrates all women, but treats whites with particular contempt.
In the misguided orthodoxy that now prevails in many mosques, including several of those in Oxford, men are unfortunately taught that women are second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority.
That is why we see this growing, reprehensible fashion for segregation at Islamic events on university campuses, with female Muslim students pushed to the back of lecture halls.
There was a telling incident in the trial when it was revealed that one of the thugs heated up some metal to brand a girl, as if she were a cow. ‘Now, if you have sex with someone else, he’ll know that you belong to me,’ said this criminal, highlighting an attitude where women are seen as nothing more than personal property.
The view of some Islamic preachers towards white women can be appalling. They encourage their followers to believe that these women are habitually promiscuous, decadent and sleazy - sins which are made all the worse by the fact that they are kaffurs or non-believers.
Their dress code, from mini-skirts to sleeveless tops, is deemed to reflect their impure and immoral outlook. According to this mentality, these white women deserve to be punished for their behaviour by being exploited and degraded.
Brutish
On one level, most imams in the UK are simply using their puritanical sermons to promote the wearing of the hijab and even the burka among their female adherents. But the dire result can be the brutish misogyny we see in the Oxford sex ring.
For those of us who support effective and meaningful integration, it is dispiriting to see how little these criminals, several of them second-generation Britons, have been integrated into our society.
If they were possessed by the slightest sense of belonging or shared citizenship, they would have had some respect for the welfare of these girls.
Instead, they saw only people from an alien world with which they felt no connection. For them, there was no sense of kinship or solidarity for people in their neighbourhood who were not Muslims.
It is telling, though, that they never dared to target Muslim girls from the Oxford area. They knew that they would be sought out by the girls’ families and ostracised by their community. But preying on vulnerable white girls had no such consequences — once again revealing how intimately race and religion are bound up with this case.
We will build a secure society only when we are all taught to have respect for one another, regardless of creed or colour.
Horror over this latest scandal should serve as a catalyst for a new approach, but change can take place only if we abandon the dangerous blinkers of political correctness and antiquated multiculturalism.
