Luke the gay hairdresser? Yes, Mr Minhas has chosen a scientifically representative sample of early 21st century infidels: a gay hairdresser, a “glamour model” partial to flashing her breasts, an atheist taxi driver with a porn habit, etc. Evidently, Harrogate has changed somewhat from the genteel spa town it was when I took tea and crumpets there some years ago. Anyway, the gay coiffeur and the porno cabbie et al have to live without pork, alcohol, immodest ladies’ clothing and non-marital sex. Which pretty much eliminates every pillar of the Yorkshire infidel lifestyle.
Minhas, previously the producer of “Priest Idol” and “Indian Finishing School”, says he and Channel 4 wanted their new reality series to be “fun”. “We were a bit tired,” he explained wearily, “of seeing guys with beards who are a bit scary.” Indeed. Who among us has not found himself fighting vainly the old ennui at the umpteenth fire-breathing imam exhorting the lads to one more chorus of “Death to the Great Satan”? It was unclear from the publicity what happens if you find the three-week sharia tough-sledding. Do you get voted off the island? Or beheaded off the island? It had the vague feel of sharia-lite, the Islamic equivalent of Richard Gere Buddhism. A day or two later, I awoke to an e-mail about a British teacher in Sudan facing 40 lashes and blasphemy charges for having been careless enough to let her pupils name a classroom teddy bear “Mohammed”. Don’t know what precise sura references the matter of cuddly-toy nomenclature, but apparently it’s a big deal. You can’t help feeling Luke the gay hairdresser would have a livelier sharia-for-a-day session in the Khartoum spin-off.
Meanwhile, away from reality TV, reality plods on. In Pakistan, the suicide bomber who killed 170 people at Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming rally is believed by police to be a one-year old child involuntarily conscripted by his jihadist father. Miss Bhutto had glimpsed the kid and beckoned dad over for a baby-kissing photo-op, but someone got between them and her motorcade swept on, fortunately for her. In the west, not many of us would wire up our one-year olds, and, if we did, they’d soon be outnumbered. I said in my book that Europe’s demographically shriveled liberal progressives had in effect adopted the same strategy as the 19th century Shakers, who were forbidden to reproduce and so could increase their numbers only by conversion. Result: There aren’t a lot of Shakers around today. At the time I wrote it, a year and a half back, I meant it as a cheap metaphorical crack at the expense of European fertility rates. After all, it would be absurd to suggest that liberal progressives were formally enjoined to desist from going forth and multiplying.
But I’m reminded of some advice I once got from a showbiz veteran: the easiest way to make a million bucks is to take your favorite gag and play it for real. My little Shaker crack has been eagerly taken up and made literal by the environmental movement: As the Daily Mail headline put it, “Meet The Women Who Won’t Have Babies – Because They’re Not Eco-Friendly”. The best way to save the earth for the next generation is not to have a next generation. So Toni and Sarah, at the peak of their reproductive years, both decided to have themselves sterilized to “protect the planet”. As Toni explained, “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of overpopulation.” We are the pollution, and sterilization is the solution. It’s the ultimate reality TV show: a series of Survivor where everyone gets voted off the island.
Toni and Sarah assume they’re saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bears, and the spotted owl, and the three-toed tree sloth, and the green-cheeked parrot. In fact, they’re saving the planet for the cultures whose womenfolk don’t get themselves sterilized. Forty per cent of children in London primary schools now speak a language other than English at home. No matter how frantically Toni and Sarah and all their chums tie their tubes, England grows ever more crowded.
The culture that built the modern world is playing “Civilizational Survivor”. Alas, sharia isn’t a TV show. For one thing, it never gets canceled.
ANTI-ISLAMIC ACTIVITY
That’s all, folks!
MY FAVORITE headline of the year so far comes from The Daily Mail in Britain:
Her Majesty’s Government is not alone in feeling it’s not always helpful to link Islam and the, ah, various unpleasantnesses with suicide bombers and whatnot. Even in his cowboy Crusader heyday, President Bush liked to cool down the crowd with a lot of religion-of-peace stuff. But the British have decided that that kind of mealy-mouthed “respect” is no longer sufficient. So, henceforth, any terrorism perpetrated by persons of an Islamic persuasion will be designated “anti-Islamic activity”. Britain’s Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveiled the new brand name in a speech a few days ago. “There is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief,” she told her audience. “Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic.”
Well, yes, one sort of sees what she means. Killing thousands of people in Manhattan skyscrapers in the name of Islam does, among a certain narrow-minded type of person, give Islam a bad name, and thus could be said to be “anti-Islamic” – in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction on Londoners during the Blitz was an “anti-German activity”. But I don’t recall even Neville Chamberlain explaining, as if to a five-year old, that there is nothing German about the wish to terrorize and invade, and that this is entirely at odds with the core German values of sitting around eating huge sausages in beer gardens while wearing lederhosen.
Still, it should add a certain surreal quality to BBC news bulletins: “The Prime Minister today condemned the latest anti-Islamic activity as he picked through the rubble of Downing Street looking for his 2008 Wahhabi Community Outreach Award. In a related incident, the anti-Islamic activists who blew up Buckingham Palace have unfortunately caused the postponement of the Queen’s annual Ramadan banquet.”
A few days ago, a pre-trial hearing in an Atlanta courtroom made public for the first time a video made by two Georgia Tech students. Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee went to Washington and took footage of key buildings, and that “casing video” then wound up in the hands of Younis Tsouli, an al-Qaeda recruiter in London. As the film shot by the Georgia students was played in court, Ehsanul Islam Sadequee’s voice could be heard on the soundtrack: “This is where our brothers attacked the Pentagon.”
“Allahu Akbar,” responds young Ahmed. God is great.
How “anti-Islamic” an activity is that? Certainly, not all Muslims want to fly planes into the Pentagon. But those that do do it in the name of their faith. And anyone minded to engage in an “anti-Islamic activity” will find quite a lot of support from leading Islamic scholars. Take, for example, the “moderate” imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who once observed that “we will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through the sword, but through da’wa” – ie, the non-incendiary form of Islamic outreach, the call to live according to the will of Allah.