Islamophobia - count me in

Blimey. An Islamophobe’s dream/nightmare these past few days. Personally I don’t like going round feeling quite so angry all the time. But I think we Islamophobes are gradually being absolved of the need to apologise for ourselves. Perhaps it’s time to come out of the closet.

Sudan is an utter disaster. It was from the start – what might have worked as an imperial territory, with nasty white imperialists at least treating the various ethnic groups equally patronisingly, became not so much a nation state as a state of institutionalised civil war. And it ought now be possible to say, not out of racial prejudice but out of simple observation, that you can’t safely put Muslim Arabs in charge of anything. And yes, that does include Palestine. Bye-bye, Palestinian state. Just go and get yourselves assimilated among those so-called Arab brothers who’ve done fuck all for you in the past. If it had been possible to say to the poor woman “Look, there are dozens of countries where you can do some good for poor kids. Just don’t go to Arab Muslim ones, because no-one is safe." Well, now I hope it is.

What’s really irritating have been unsympathetic commentators who’ve said things like “Well, it’s their country and she broke the laws”. Broke the laws? There aren’t any laws, just what some mad fascist cleric decides on a whim. Had she behaved differently and insisted that the name be changed, I can imagine a row breaking out along the lines of “Kufr Western Bitch prevents our kids from honouring our Prophet” and pointing out that a mere woman has no right overruling males, even if they’re seven. “It’s their country and she broke the law” would then be equally appropriate. Shari’a Law is a meaningless concept. It’s just the whim of whoever’s holding the gun or the whip. My slogan for the next confrontation: SHARI’A IS SH’ITE. Just don’t go there. People who go and work in Arab countries for money are henceforth to be called Rent Boys.

And the possibility of the lash reminded us that a chap called Gavin Sherrard-Smith got 50 lashes in Qatar in 1993 for breaking the alcohol ban. (This was reported in the Mail on Sunday – exactly half the comments were sympathetic, and the other half were about how good it would be if we introduced the same punishments here for people the Mail on Sunday doesn’t like.) Qatar! Sells itself as “the acceptable face”. No, we don’t use its airline any more, do we, however cheap its flights to Thailand might be.

Rather like Dubai. A German banker friend of mine – so wholly apolitical that he hadn’t a clue of the significance of what he was saying - that he’d been involved in some big financial deal with the Maktoums, who rule Dubai. His job was to put a syndicate of banks together to raise the money for a project. When Maktoum came over he discovered that one of the banks was M. M. Warburg, and asked if the Warburgs were Jewish. This could not be denied, and he banged the table and demanded that the syndicate be reconstituted as all-Aryan. I understand, though not agreeing with, the Arab boycott of Israel, but if one is the right side of the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism one should be perfectly at ease with fully assimilated European Jews like the Warburgs. No, the Maktoums are straightforwardly anti-Semitic. Shit, if we don’t fly Emirates either, getting to Thailand might become a tad expensive.

Remember Hilaire Belloc, also, coincidentally, on the Sudan: “Whatever happens, we have got/ The Maxim gun, and they have not.” Now update it. L’audace, my friends, toujours l’audace. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And if we don’t get you, the Israelis must.

A few hundred yards from where I live in Lancaster, there stands a vast Victorian Gothic building well set back from the A588. It used to be a mental hospital, called the Royal Albert or something similarly comfortingly Victorian. It would not astonish me if it were discovered that the late Mervyn Peake had been round here and a light-bulb had switched on in his head with the word “Gormenghast” above it.

Not very long ago, somebody decided they could make quite a wad of cash if they dumped the patients and sold the whole thing off. The mantra of “care in the community” was doubtless intoned, and the mental patients returned to their “communities” of origin, to be fed by the ravens. This being Lancashire, a large number of the patients were found to have a birthplace in Manchester. One shudders at the thought of them being dropped off in Moss Side with twenty quid and a couple of local authority leaflets. But that, I’m told, is what happened.

The building, meanwhile, was sold to some Islamic organisation. Now it announces itself as Jamea Al Kauthar Islamic College. It’s a girls’ school of the strict Muslim kind, no doubt there to serve the sort of people who don’t really think girls should go to school at all but have to set up something to show to the police. I’d love to see their GCSE and A level results. Perhaps I should enquire.

Anyway, there’s usually a couple of superannuated Mercs or Volvos parked up there when one drives past, but one very rarely sees signs of human life. I have to say I was rather relieved when, driving into town today at about half past four, I passed a group of girls in niqabs waiting at the bus stop opposite the school. (Since you ask, no I didn’t drive close to the kerb so as to soak them with water. It hadn’t rained today.) So it isn’t entirely an Al-Qa’eda bomb factory. OK, so I’m a bit prejudiced. (I prefer to use the term post-judiced.) But how would you like, in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, to live virtually next door to a place that looks like Gormenghast and is covered with a blanket of silence except for the occasional appearance of a bird in a burqa?

So nothing sinister should be read into the fact that we’re moving house in the New Year. I just need a bigger place so as to get my stuff out of storage. Honest.