Jonathan Meades
Minorities shall inherit the earth
If guilt was measured in bra sizes I’d be 38 GG. I am quite exceptionally guilty. Mea(des) culpa. Guilty of what? Well, just about everything. You name it. I am, after all, white, European, male and though not technically dead at the moment of writing I am a dinosaur. Every time one of Muhammad’s brave warriors slits an innocent’s throat I am to blame.
I belong to the majority: as well as being very nearly DWEM I was educated at a dim, muscular Christian boot camp which in its better moments was merely an Anglican madrassa. It left a lot that had to be sloughed but, equally, there was a lot that couldn’t be: skin colour, sex, native continent.
OK, they could at a push be amended. But of all the fashions and mores I’ve done my utmost to avoid throughout life (gonks, communism, I Ching, fascism, faith, bow ties, tattoos, hula hoops, rap, team spirit, baseball caps, veganism, Tolkien, flares, conceptual “art”, video games) none has held as little appeal as gender reassignment.
Such an intervention would have absented me from the majority. I would then not have shared our collective attritional suicide by overdosing on self-hatred and assuming a responsibility for all the ills of the planet.
This big-hearted piety has resulted in the majority being transformed into the scapegoat that minorities used to be. Retribution? Not exactly. The meek never got a look-in. It is the minorities who have inherited the earth because the penitent majority willed it to them. And having done that, the majority invited the minorities to trample all over it.
Emmanuel Macron has learnt to speak more judiciously than he did as a presidential candidate when he described France’s colonisation of Algeria as a “crime against humanity”. As the son of doctors, he ought to have known that tens of thousands of indigenous Algerians owed a great debt if not their lives to
French medical science which was more than the Hippocratic branch of la mission
civilisatrice, a phrase which it is today forbidden to write without dismissive mocking quotes around it.
Macron’s sixth-form opinion was fiercely criticised by the soon-to-beexposed prime minister Francois Fillon. But four years on, in the wake of these indiscriminate, subhuman and foul attacks, similar sentiments are now being volubly expressed by contrasting camps. Islamism is increasingly held not to be a rogue deviant from Islam but one of the orthodox aims of the “religion of peace”, whatever “moderate” Muslims claim.
What politicians of all parties
and commentators of all shirts seek is a strengthening of laïcité. This presents a brain-numbing problem. Laïcité is essentially passive. An expression of lordly indifference. It is a void. How do you strengthen a void? How do you make sure a non-faith is observed?
How do you persuade followers of cults and religions that it is not a faith like theirs but an idea with no prophets, no idols, no supernatural miracles, no beliefs, no coercive instructions how to live — other than by not demanding privileges because of your particular tablet of delusions?
In the middle of a pandemic the Catholic Church in France has demanded (and been quite rightly refused) a derogation in order that mass could be celebrated. No doubt faith grants the credulous immunity from Covid-19. Making such a demand is akin to Dominique Strauss-Kahn wanting a dispensation so that he can enjoy a party with some friends he has just bought.
Fewer than 10 per cent of France’s citizens are Muslims, though that figure is belied by the din they make. And they have allies. Believers United, whose kit includes a shirt with a yellow stripe down the back, comprises a squad of useful idiots, chief among them Robert le Gall, Archbishop of Toulouse. Speaking about the
Charlie Hebdo cartoons this stupid arse put credulousness before reason, before laïcité: “One doesn’t mock religions . . . you can see what happens when they are mocked.”
This is cowardly, treacherous and places the blame for the killing of a cartoonist on the cartoonist. The archbishop proposes an equivalence between premeditated homicides and the “offence” of making some drawings of the Paedophile Muhammad. France has mostly resisted using the fawning, appeasing British epithet “Prophet”. We do not refer to the Saviour Jesus Christ, the Redeemer Jesus Christ, the Lamb Of God Lord Jesus Christ. But then Christ is seldom heard of. He isn’t a stirrer.
Macron has been brave in supporting the republication of Charb’s Muhammad cartoons. If that has caused riots in superstitious tyrannies and backward states around the world it serves only to demonstrate France’s republican superiority and its 200-year-old disacknowledgement of such a thing as blasphemy.
He is also domestically determined to eradicate communautarianisme and separatism which are routinely portrayed in Britain as white men’s punitive creations when in fact they owe everything to willed apartheid, loyalty to the squalid tribe, and a collective victimhood which is enshrined in Islam’s successful creation of Islamophobia as an all-encompassing programme of accusation and self-pity among whose disgraceful precepts is the pretence, or ignorant claim, that Muslims are today treated like Jews in Nazi Germany.
That’ll be because, as everyone knows, Jews were accomplished suicide bombers and cleaver-wielders.
Islamism is increasingly held not to be a deviant from Islam, but an orthodox aim of the “religion of peace”