we're more than "sickened"; we're gripped by existential rage

I don’t advocate any violence. I don’t want anyone to go out and burn a mosque…It’s not the answer, because there will be innocent Muslims and you are then as bad as these scumbags who are doing it [terrorism].

The words are those of Tommy Robinson, English Defence League founder.

In an obscene desolation of responsibility, following the brutal execution of Drummer Lee Rigby by Jihadists the EDL has come in for unprecedented condemnation by the mainstream media, and given the cauldrons of bile usually reserved for us that’s saying something.

Worse still, an 83-year-old woman who shouted "go back to your own country" outside a mosque has been arrested by Kent Police. I don’t imagine her words would have been easy for worshippers to hear, but two-tier Britain, where people who protest against British policy in Afghanistan are allowed close enough to returning troops to spit on them, is seriously eroding the tolerance of the British people.

David Cameron spoke for the nation when he said the Woolwich execution "sickened us all". But he didn’t join the last dot. We are more than sick: we are gripped by existential rage at the utter failure, at the highest political levels, to tackle the Islamism which blights Muslim communities with the rest of us not far behind.

Some commentators say the death of one white man in London pales before the numbers of black men dying there. They may have a valid point, but they miss the equally valid point that Lee Rigby represented the Forces defending us, and by extension us, in this war by any other name.

Captain Dreyfus didn’t even have to die for his case to turn France upside down and inside out. This is a defining moment. I hope that cooler heads in the Police Force will see that the upcoming EDL demo in Newcastle will dissipate far more pressure than it causes, and that without the safety-valve we provide Lee Rigby’s death might well have ignited England as surely as mark Duggan’s did London.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words (minus quote)

Tommy Robinson video reacting to Woolwich execution: "I don't advocate any violence..." section starts at 28:30. Watch below, or click to watch on YouTube

Woman, 85, arrested after abuse hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham mosque in wake of Woolwich terror murder - Kent online

David Cameron: Woolwich attach "sickened us all" - Telegraph

Dispatches: The Hunt for Britain's Sex Gangs

The latest Dispatches documentary, The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Gangs, was always going to be hard-hitting. The fact it was broadcast when the nation was reeling from the brutal murder of soldier Lee Rigby by Islamists in Woolwich made it doubly so.

What enraged me was the cynical methods paedophiles’ defence lawyers use to terrify victims into incoherence: one police officer spoke of these vulnerable, abused girls being "retraumatised, revictimised and violated" in court. I’m sure she was speaking advisedly – one girl spoke of cross-examination as like being raped again.

Another police officer spoke of the danger of being perceived to be racist, when all he wanted to do was to put predatory paedophiles in jail. Putting aside the fact that there’s no such thing as race, it was obvious that the rapists were of shared ethnicity. Not every abuser is a Muslim and not every Muslim is an abuser; nevertheless, as senior police officials recover from fits of cultural sensitivity like that which scuppered the trial of Charlene Downes’ (right) groomers and killers, arrests for trafficking (which can result in more convictions than rape as it takes distorted issues surrounding consent out of the question) are soaring. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner has estimated that up to 10,000 children in Britain may be affected by sexual exploitation by gangs and groups.

And where those gangs and groups are street-based, chances are that they will be composed predominantly, if not exclusively, of Muslims. I don’t want to vilify people on account of their ethnicity or religion, I merely want children to be free to have a childhood. And, as English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson has said, Muslims are free to take to the street to point the finger at their co-religionists who rape children and kill soldiers. And say, “not in my name”.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Dispatches: The Hunt for Britain's Sex Gangs webpage

Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups (CSEGG) - The Children's Commissioner for England

Watch The Hunt for Britain's Sex Gangs on 4oD

Watch Tommy Robinson speak on the Woolwich terrorist attacks, the EDL's response and other issues below, or click here to view on YouTube.

Click for English Defence League website

Wagner Week on BBC Radio 3

Wagner having been born on May 22 1813, BBC Radio 3 is devoting a week to the man whose works are totemic amongst left-wing intelligentsia everywhere.

I don’t object to his music, I find some of it sublime. And film-scores from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings would be all the poorer without his influence, even though he himself inherited the Leitmotif from Berlioz. I’m sure his chordal progressions – for example in Ride of the Valkyries – informed rock’s metamorphosis into psychedelia and thence to proto-metal; one might even say no Wagner, no Iron Maiden.

What grates is the interminable histrionic caterwauling and bellowing his music often accompanies. Even Richard Dawkins, who you’d think would be a fan of the concept of the old gods fading before German Idealism’s new man, can only bring himself to say in The God Delusion that "Wagner’s music is better than it sounds".

Of more interest to me personally is The Essay this week, featuring philosophers analysing Wagner’s relationship to the thinkers who informed his world and whose worlds he informed. It’s a shame it’s only 15 minutes per night: if he’d had longer, perhaps Roger Scruton could have went into how Kant sent the modern world down the path to post-modernism by standing on the shoulders of British philosophe David Hume, who set the ball rolling by abolishing any availability of real things to our senses.

I’ll be interested how Radio 3 treats the H-word – Wagner’s place on the runaway train that led to Hitler, the Nazis and the Shoah. Perhaps Burkhard Kosminski, whose Nazi-themed production of Tannhäuser was closed down by Deutsche Oper am Rhein for its “extreme impact”, will turn out in the end to have placed Wagner in the most appropriate context: where the runaway train crashed.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

The Essay: Wagner and German Idealism part 1 of 5 of Wagner and the Philosophers, BBC Radio 3

Composer of the Week: Wagner and his World part 1 of 5, BBC Radio 3

Wagner Week Live Blog - BBC Radio 3

#WagnerWeek on Twitter

Nazi-themed Wagner opera cancelled in Germany after audience treated for shock - Telegraph

Clik to read the story of the above painting, Adolf Hitler as a Grail Knight like those in Parzival, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

let the England fans sing "No surrender to the IRA"

I used to work in a hotel for disabled guests in Lourdes, and one week a pilgrimage from Glasgow came in, so I invited two Irish women I worked with to come and meet some people I knew. When we went into their hotel’s bar we found a Scottish priest of my acquaintance marching on a tabletop, leading a riotous group in IRA rebel songs. Disgusted, my friends turned on their heels and I followed.

It was 1991, the year the IRA bombed 10 Downing Street and Victoria Station, and also murdered a man in Dundalk in the Republic leading to anti-IRA marches there. I hope my anecdote shows that not all Irish people are IRA supporters.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion surrounding Britain and Ireland’s joined and sometimes unhappy history. For example, when Irish historian Tom Reilly looked into Drogheda during Oliver Cromwell’s invasion – regarding which Irish history textbooks say his forces "slaughtered the entire population" - he traced contemporary records kept by Irish people in which there’s not one mention of an ununiformed Irish civilian being killed.

So I’m surprised that England manager Roy Hodgson has stepped into the fray by asking England fans not to sing No surrender to the IRA at the friendly with the Republic of Ireland on May 29. For one thing singing it isn’t a criminal offence, and for another the popular Irish football song A Soldier’s Song is the equivalent sentiment – and it’s the Republic’s national anthem. Nation Once Again is the same, and in this 2012 clip of two heavily disguised Ireland supporters you can hear one shout "Up the RA!" at the end.

Will Irish fans be asked not to sing provocative songs? If not then Roy Hodgson should concentrate on football, and FIFA needs to learn that such situations let more pressure out than they create.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

1991 in the Northern Ireland conflict - Conflict Archive on the Internet from Ulster University

Cromwell: The Irish Question - Tom Reilly, History Today

Hodgson tells fans to cut out anti-IRA songs at Ireland Friendly - Telegraph

A Soldier's Song - words and music at fanchants.com

Watch and listen to Nation Once Again or click here to view on YouTube

the fascist campaign against UKIP has begun

There are two ways to view Nigel Farage’s ill-treatment by the thugs of the Radical Independence Campaign.

The proximate cause is that UKIP is a real threat to the Scottish National Party’s predominance in the Scottish Parliament. This predominance owes its existence to the mass of Scottish working-class voters abandoned by the Labour Party who, for better or worse, cannot bring themselves to vote Conservative. UKIP’s participation in Scottish elections mean that the SNP is no longer the only populist non-Labour, non-Conservative party on the block.

However, for a fuller explanation of what was really behind the RIC riot we need to look back to March, to the conference of the so-called Unite Against Fascism. One of the themes of the conference was that "Ukip Must Not Be Allowed To Influence Politics And Immigration" (my italics).

This is the language of fascism. Modern fascism might have rounded corners and polished voices, but its message is still the same: "believe what you want – within the limits we set for you". All three main parties – the lib-lab-con trick who kick the ball to each other to create an illusion of democracy – buy into this view to some extent: witness the junta of party chiefs and unelected Hacked Off members meeting to draft legislation which they hoped would muzzle our free press. Goebbels (right) couldn’t have done a better job.

I’m pretty sure that if there’s an investigation into how and why knuckle-dragging RIC stormtroopers were mobilised the SNP will be implicated at high levels, as well as other parties who feel threatened UK-wide by UKIP. For these reasons, I’m also pretty sure there will be no such investigation. But be in no doubt: the forces of fascism that have uninterruptedly consolidated their power over the British Establishment since 1997 are on the move.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

'Scottish nationalists are fascist scum': Nigel Farage hounded by mob says they were driven by hatred of the English - Daily Mail

GERALD WARNER: Yes, Scottish nationalism DOES have an ugly face - Daily Mail

UAF Conference: Ukip Must Not Be Allowed To Influence Politics And Immigration - Huffington Post

Hacked Off's blackmail letter to Miliband - Guido Fawkes

Oxford paedophile grooming ring: what about the British institutions protecting them?

The prosecutions of Chris Huhne and Vicki Pryce cost the taxpayer in total over £147,500.

Over 700 parliamentary hours were spent debating hunting legislation.

The ongoing investigations into the Andrew Mitchell "Plebgate" affair will take up 3,000 police hours investigating 800 potential witnesses.

My point? Look at the latest child paedophile ring trial, in Oxford. Police and prosecution seem only to have taken the case on because of public fury over the predominance of Muslims in street grooming gangs. There’s certainly more anger over this than over who put the pedal to the metal, how foxes die and who said what at the Downing Street gates. But we don’t yet know how much the prosecutions cost, how much parliamentary time has been spent on Muslim paedophile gangs, and how many police hours were spent interviewing how many witnesses.

The Telegraph – whose article started on the front page then continued on page 4, being trumped by The Great Gatsby ballet, H&M bras and a Facebook party – quotes Mohammed Shafiq of the Ranmadhan foundation as saying that "The majority of Asians from all backgrounds abhor these crimes". Misusing "Asian" as a synonym for "Muslim" is commonplace, but if you go to the press release, Shafiq never actually used the word "Asian". So why did the Telegraph insert it?

The same depressing pattern emerges that Kris Hollington identifies in Unthinkable: girls contacted police and social services who, presumably for reasons of cultural sensitivity, sent them back to be raped. Like primary-school teachers in Islington who did nothing while their charges were forced into marriages, the Mail - in my opinion our only trustworthy national paper - reports that four out of five Oxford social workers knew about the girls’ suffering.

Our child protection system collapses, selectively, depending on the ethnicity of perpetrators. We need to keep up pressure on parliament, police, prosecutors and the press to stop defending abusers.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

'You have fallen from a great height': Judge jails Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce for eight months over speeding point scandal - London Evening Standard

The banned rode on - guardian.co.uk

"Plebgate" grilling: Police chiefs to spend 3,000 hours quizzing 800 cops over row - mirror.co.uk

Grooming of teenagers is evil and unacceptable to all - The Ramadhan Foundation

Asian grooming gang convicted of appalling acts of depravity on children - telegraph.co.uk

Police chief constable and council chief executive refuse to stand down despite catalogue of errors in Oxford sex ring scandal - Daily Mail

Unthinkable - 300 words

a growing storm? Unthinkable.

A growing storm surrounds Kris Hollington’s Unthinkable, an exposé of how denial, prejudice and the law of unintended consequences gone mad over decades perfected conditions for the grooming and rape of girls by predominantly Pakistani abusers.

Following a review by my associate, "Frugal Dougal" pointed out on Amazon that towards the end of the book Hollington undergoes "an intellectual and moral breakdown" in pointing the finger at patriots for doing the very thing he says he wants – getting angry.

I don’t condemn Mr Hollingworth (right). My associate describes an "existential abyss" resulting from hearing one case of a mother pimping a daughter. Hollingworth has listened to contless tales of grooming, rape (including gang rape) and torture directly from victims, so it’s no surprise if Unthinkable is not only his chronicle of that but also a raw, bleeding part of the author.

Hollington is at pains to point out that the perpetrators are not paedophiles and, of course, he is technically correct. According to the ICD10-10’s sub-Readers Digest shopping lists of symptoms, paedophilia is a preference for sexual activity with prebubescent children.

However, it’s notable that the general public does not enquire whether Jimmy Savile’s victims had developed primary and secondary sexual characteristics at the time of his abuse before labelling him a paedophile, and this is not to be ignored. Neither is the possibility that Hollingworth has been sufficiently traumatised to be suffering a sort of proxy Stockholm syndrome whereby he feels compelled to mitigate the guilt of his interviewees’ abusers.

Of much interest to me was Hollington’s interview of a "hideous man", one of the recruiters, who describes a premeditated, sophisticated syllabus of psychological programming that puts MK Ultra in the shade. This is what our security services need to concentrate on: who ordered brainwashing tolerated on grounds of cultural sensitivity?

Charles Bond
300 words

Resources

Unthinkable - 300 words, May 2013

Where do we go from here? - Review of Unthinkable on amazon.co.uk, May 2013

ICD-10 (The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders) - World Health Organisation