Joey Sarajevo is a Surprising Beacon of Wisdom in Today’s Ever-Darkening World
Well… maybe not quite. After all, that’s a hell of a title to live up to. Not to mention my original column this time ‘round was going to be about those magazines you get on the top shelf and the videos you get from the back room. Y’know, the kind with fully nude people? Where things go into other things? And, er, at the end, stuff comes out?
(Jesus, that’s put me off my lunch. I shoulda know this paragraph and mayonnaise were going to be a dodgy mix…)
Anyway, yeah, I was gonna continue in a similar (big blue) vein to last time and write about porn (or Pr0n, for those of you reading this at work… oops) but to be honest, I don’t really feel like it at the moment.
Why not? Well, let’s see: people are dead over a cartoon. And if that’s not bad enough, as with September the 11 th , Afghanistan, Iraq and July 7 th the latest bout of ‘ooh, check out the Arabs, they’re never happier than when beating their shoes on their knees and setting shit on fire’ news coverage is being touted in some circles as the bell for the first round of the much anticipated Clash of Civilisations…
Yes, roll on up folks, for the fight to decide the Heavyweight Ethno-Cultural Championship of the World… In the green corner, the bearded, dress-and-sandal wearing Storm from the East, Islam, weighing in at million adherents and growing… Is –hegonnapummelhisopponentsintosubmissionwithhisfantaicaladherancetotheProphetMuhammed – laaaam! And in the corner where no-one can quite decide on the colour, that mysterious, schizophrenic self-declared pinnacle of human perfection Western Liberal Values! Or quite possibly the up-and-coming menace whose even more of a pain in the arse than the sodomy he despises but seems curiously interested in, Born-Again Christianity! No-one seems quite sure!
(That’s my first issue here, by the way, if there’s going to be a Clash of Civilisations, could we at least decide on the sides? It’s getting confusing.)
Long term readers (ha! as if!) will remember I tried to tackle this issue once before, back in my “No, I’ll tell YOU when I’ve had enough wine argh burble puke gissa another fag” days, with predictably dire consequences. The whole thing got to me to the extent that I gave up trying to write any kind of socio-political commentary (no great loss). But when you’ve got fascists on the telly claiming that they’re speaking up for ‘our secular, western values’, even the shoddiest and least-read commentators end up faced with the Malcolm McClaren T-Shirt dilemma: one of these mornings you’re going to have to wake up and decide which side you’re on.
Well, I thought long and hard (sorry, still a bit keyed-up about shelving the Pr0n column) over this particular little dilemma. And boy, to slip into thirties-film-noir-journalese for a moment, was it a doozy.
Y’see, on the one hand, it’s pretty fucking obvious that burning down the Norwegian embassy because a Danish cartoonist drew a nasty racist/sacrilegious cartoon (and stop pissing about, it WAS racist in the kind of liberal intelligentsia way certain Europeans – Pym Fortuyn, for example – are very, very good at) is well, just plain wrong, as is standing outside the BBC waving placards calling for journalists to be beheaded for winding up your God. Dressing up as a suicide bomber whilst engaging in these protests is also pretty near the knuckle, too – although, with thanks to Football365 of all places, if you can ‘dress up’ as a suicide bomber, how come the real ones are so difficult to spot?
But then again, for all the spokesman of (shredding civilians with Semtex waistcoats supporter’s club) Hizb ut Tahrir’s obvious hideous moral retardation during Monday’s Newsnight debate on the subject, I couldn’t help thinking he kinda had a point complaining about media bias. Try as I might, I just can’t shake the feeling that ‘freedom of speech’ is becoming the new ‘now I’m not a racist, but…’ (as genius British humour magazine Viz once advised – racists – make people think you’re not a racist by saying ‘now, I’m not a racist but…’ before saying something racist).
Sure, there were three ‘moderate’ Muslims discussing the issues raised by the programme’s coverage of the controversy, but that coverage didn’t mention any of the more legitimate protests made by people confronted with what was at best a crassly stupid and insensitive cartoon and at worst a prime piece of race-hate propaganda. And whilst newspapers around Europe have been falling over themselves to show solidarity with their Danish fellows by reprinting the original cartoon, none have so far been quite so adulatory about the depiction of Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler enjoying a post-coital cigarette put out by a group of Euopean Arabs who appear to have successfully proved their point that all this ‘well, us sophisticated Westerners can take a joke’ back slapping is something of a (perhaps pretty sinister) sham.
And then hook-handed Littlejohn caricature Abu Hamza gets himself locked up after urging people to go out and murder Jews, shortly after that bastion of moral rectitude Nick fucking Griffin walks free after, essentially, telling people to go out and beat up Muslims. Let’s compare their comments, shall we?
“The court heard (Hamza) describe Jews as the ‘enemy of Islam’, tell followers to ‘bleed’ the enemies of Islam and they should not rest until they created a ‘Muslim state’.”
“Mr Griffin had concentrated on allegations of paedophile drug rapes by Asian Muslims in Keighley. Reading excerpts from the speeches, Mr Jameson said Mr Griffin had urged the crowd to vote for the BNP in order to ensure ‘the British people really realise the evil of what these people have done to our country’.”
(for the full stories go here and here – gawd bless Auntie Beeb)
And before all you ‘big Zionist conspiracy’ nuts out there (on either or any side of this particular little scuffle) claim me for one of your own, my point has nothing to do with Hamza being an anti-semite. It’s that both are equally vile and BOTH are a threat to any sane person’s way of life.
So you know what I decided? Fuck picking sides. Let’s just move the fucking fence.
‘Liberal’ has become shorthand, especially in America and Britain , for weak, impractical and mealy-mouthed. Soft on crime. Lax on family values. Tolerant of intolerance. And, bless ‘em, quite a lot of left-leaning people over the years have done a bit more than they should have to reinforce this image. Well, sweary, opinionated, bad-example-to-kids drunkard and general failure as a human being I may be, I for one am gonna stand up and say it’s time we put a stop to that bollocks once and for all. And here’s why:
Being a ‘liberal’, in the best sense of the word, is HARD. It requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to countenance the occasional setback and defeat in order to achieve what you believe is a right and good end. In short it requires that people grow the fuck up.
Is it easy to rehabilitate a habituated young offender from a fractured and impoverished background? No, it requires time, effort and patience. The easy thing to do would be to chuck ‘em in jail and leave ‘em to rot.
Is it easy to open up a dialogue between individuals or communities or societies after tens or hundred of years of mutual hatred and suspicion? No, it requires immense courage and self-control. The easy thing to do would be to pick up a flag or a balaclava, join a mob and feel that glorious sense of achievement that comes from kicking one of the ‘others’ to a bloody pulp.
Does that mean we shouldn’t try? Like fuck it does. In the words of an old Irish rugby coach whose name escapes me: “Of course it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt more than anything you’ve felt in your life. But that’s when you learn that nothing worth having in this life comes easy.”
We aren’t faced with a Clash of Civilisations; what we’re faced with (arguably, what we’ve always been faced with) is a clash between Civilisation (tolerance, patience, dialogue) on the one hand and Barbarism (intolerance, tribalism, conflict) on the other. And one of these mornings you’re going to have to wake up and decide which side you’re on.
There’ll be some jokes about my cock next time, I promise.