Britain will not lift a finger to defend any freedom

London is willing to surrender to violence even before it is offered

England has refused the request of Asia Bibi for asylum. Dalrymple writes:

If ever there were a person who needed and deserved asylum, it was she. Having spent eight years in prison under sentence of death for supposed blasphemy, her sentence was overturned by that country’s highest court; but howling mobs of nasty bearded fools have demanded that she be hanged nonetheless because she is a Christian who refuses to convert. The threats of the bearded fools are obviously to be taken seriously: they do not recognise any legal authority but their own.

Mob rule

Dalrymple notes that the reason given for London’s pusillanimous refusal is that

granting asylum to her might have offended the sensibilities of the Muslims in Britain and caused unrest among them.

This

is an implicit insult to those Muslims.

Theresa May: policy dictated to by howling mobs of nasty bearded fools

If unrest were to occur,

it should have been faced down.

The heartless whore that is the British State

There is, Dalrymple points out, an important principle at stake,

which is why the British government has failed the test with such spectacular cowardice. Its conduct in this matter has been far worse than was Chamberlain’s at Munich. Chamberlain was a decent man who was trying to avert a war, whose horrors he understood, for which his country was unprepared; the current British government has proved decisively once again that it will not lift a finger to defend any freedom and is willing to surrender to violence even before it is offered.

The decision, says Dalrymple,

fills me with disgust and a feeling of impotent rage.

Another episode of tic douloureux

John Fothergill gave a useful description
of trigeminal neuralgia in 1773

Dalrymple likens the periodic anguish, convulsions and agitation caused by Islamist terrorist attacks to Fothergill’s disease or prosopalgia. He writes:

Every incident is now like an episode of tic douloureux: a condition very difficult to treat.

One not insignificant feature of the problem, he points out, is that their religion, for certain Muslims, is

the continuation of delinquency by other means.

Nicolas André coined the term tic douloureux in his Observations pratiques sur les maladies de l’urètre et sur plusieurs faits convulsifs (1756)

Muslim micro-totalitarianism

Paris attacks organiser: Abdelhamid Abaaoud

Why the vicious are drawn to Islam

An interviewer asks why barbarous and cruel people look to Mohammedanism. Dalrymple explains that one of the factors is that conversion to Islam allows the depraved man

to think that he has not surrendered to the predominant society around him, against which he believes himself to have been in opposition for most of his life.

Dalrymple explains also that, apart from a love of violence and killing, a big part of the appeal of Islam for young men in Western countries is

the dominance that it gives them over women.

Micro-totalitarianism

The behaviour of the large numbers of Muslims in British prisons, Dalrymple points out,

is not that of religious persons. They are not interested in halal meat, they are not interested in praying five times a day, they are not interested in keeping Ramadan (except as a reason not to go to court), but they are very interested in preventing their sisters from going out with a boy of their own choosing.

If you go into the centres of towns with large Muslim populations,

you will see young Muslim men partaking in what I would say are generally pretty disgusting activities of popular culture, but you won’t see any women.

Islamists intimidate women into wearing the veil, for in Western societies

there is a micro-totalitarian climate. To ask people what they mean by it is very difficult; it is a bit like asking people in North Korea whether they like the government.

Cowards these attackers were not

François Hollande, the French president, called the November 2015 Paris attacks cowardly. Dalrymple comments:

If there was one thing the attackers were not (alas, if only they had been), it was cowardly.

The attackers were, writes Dalrymple,

evil, their ideas were deeply stupid, and they were brutal: but a man who knows that he is going to die in committing an act, no matter how atrocious, is not a coward.

With

the accuracy of a drone, the president honed in on the one vice that the attackers did not manifest.

This establishes, Dalrymple writes,

that bravery is not by itself a virtue, that in order for it to be a virtue it has to be exercised in pursuit of a worthwhile goal.

Barack Obama, the US president, referred to the values we all share. Dalrymple says:

Either he was using the word ‘we’ in some coded fashion, in spite of having just referred to the whole of humanity, or he failed to notice that the attacks were the direct consequence of the obvious fact that we—that is to say the whole of humanity—do not share the same values. If we shared the same values, politics would be reduced to arguments about administration.

Bono, the Irish pop star, said that the attacks were an attack on music. Dalrymple:

Bono might as well have said that this was an attack on restaurants, or on Cambodian cuisine.

The Guardian, the London newspaper, said the vast majority of Muslims abhorred the attacks. Dalrymple:

I do not exclude the possibility that this is so, but we do not know, and can probably never know, that it is so: for if Elizabeth I had ‘no desire to make windows into men’s souls’, we have no ability to do so, certainly on this question. But the Guardian wanted it to be so, and therefore, to its own satisfaction, it was so. This is a kind of magical thinking that persists in a supremely scientific age, and is dangerous because completely ineffective.

 

Muslim men bent on evil

Those who become terrorist murderers cannot, of course, be satisfied with what Western society offers them, for they are, Dalrymple points out,

in the grip of a utopian ideology.

So were many successful people in the West once attracted to communism,

another ideology that would have destroyed their own freedom.

Fertile ground for Muslim ‘martyrs’

The outlook in France and the rest of the West is grim, says Dalrymple. He identifies the factors which, he writes,

ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further ‘martyrs’ for years to come.

These are:

• a highly secularised Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so
• the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society
• the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy
• the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value
• the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient, and yet in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual’s identity
• an oscillation between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between humiliation about that which is Western and that which is non-Western in the self
• the grotesque inflation of the importance of personal existential problems that is typical of modern individualism

Avian jihad

Anjem Choudary: ‘the normal situation is for you to take money from the kuffar. So we take jihadseeker’s allowance’

As chilling as any horror story

Dalrymple points out that Muslim clerical fanatics in England

receive social security payments even as they call for the destruction of the society that pays them.

In this, he notes, they resemble the honeyguide or jihadi-bird, which

lays its egg in a nest of bee-eaters [kafir-birds], which are in a tunnel underground.

The kuffar do not see what is going on, and feed them

Killer honeyguide jihadi-chick: its bites lead to haemorrhaging; bee-eater [kafir] chick victims can take up to seven hours to die

Dalrymple quotes from a book by the naturalist Nick Davies:

The honeyguide [jihadi-chick] grabs a host chick using its bill tip, then repeatedly bites and shakes its victim for up to four minutes at a time. The bites rarely cause open wounds, but lead to haemorrhaging under the skin and heavy bruising. From the time of the first attack, they take from nine minutes to seven hours to die.

Because of the darkness, Dalrymple explains, the bee-eaters or kafir-birds

do not see what is going on, and feed the honeyguide chick even as it is killing the bee-eater chicks.

Angry jihadi-bird: (a) Hatching, showing fully-developed bill hooks; (b) with three little bee-eater kuffar hatchlings it has killed; (c) biting the hand that feeds it; (d) biting unhatched swallow-tailed bee-eater [kafir] egg; (e) aged about eight days