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By Julie Burchill
March 15, 2005
Originally published as a column in The Times of London.
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| Ken Livingstone: "hissy-fit" |
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A word of consolation for British bloodsport fans. Hare-coursing will be a thing of the past this month, March, and hunting foxes with hounds soon to follow it, but it's increasingly starting to look like open season on the Jews over here. No sooner had the ruling Labour Party withdrawn its charming Michael-Howard-as-Fagin/Shylock posters then the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, blotted his copybook by comparing a Jewish reporter to "a German war criminal" and "a concentration camp guard."
At the same time as the British Establishment seems to be behaving with quite monstrous insensitivity towards Jews, their sucking-up to Islam could barely be any more blatant. The most recent incident concerns the Home Office refusing to let a young woman use a photograph of her 7-month-old son in his first passport as it may be considered offensive to Muslim countries. Why? Because the little he-hussy is topless!
Before Livingstone had his hissy-fit, he was already in the (chicken?) soup with British Jews -- as well as sentient women and homosexuals -- for his extraordinary promotion of an unpleasant Islamic cleric who approves of suicide-bombing, wife-beating and throwing gay lads from steep clifftops. But astoundingly, in Livingstone's eyes he can seem to do no wrong and is back and forth from the Mayoral Chamber like the all-time favorite concubine of King Ken.
I feel very English as a rule, but a few things about my people never fail to amaze, even alarm, me. And one of them is the rather overheated and unwholesome relationship between certain British men and Arab culture. From the most Establishment -- Prince Charles, who has asked the chairman of the Imams and Mosques Council to his "close friends only" wedding next month -- to the most anti-Establishment -- Livingstone -- a particular type of Englishman seems to have a chronic, collective, schoolboy crush on big scary Arab men that can be traced all the way back to T.E. Lawrence. This may well be a low blow -- but what else could possibly explain the ceaseless, irrational habit of favoring filthy rich Arab dictatorships over the ever-struggling, always democratic State of Israel?
I blame the subliminal power of advertising. All through the '70s and '80s and right into the '90s, one of the most popular of all British TV adverts was that of Fry's Turkish Delight, during which, in various permutations, a doe-eyed white woman welcomed a suave dish-dosh-wearing bit of rough into her tent, there to share said gooey pink substance with him. Who's to say that Prince Charles and Red Ken, along with Vanessa Redgrave, George Galloway and the other British Islam-groupies weren't swept off their feet by this flamboyant display of concupiscence? Of course, even before the Turkish Delight chick commenced to fill her boots on prime-time TV, Westerners were tripping on the idea of the noble-savage-sheikh who would free them of all their uptight Judaeo-Christian hang-ups.
All sexual fantasies say more about what the fantasist lacks than what the object of fantasy actually has - but at a time when even 7-month-old male babies are forced to cover their tiny nipples in order not to offend the all-evil-seeing eye of Islam, how singularly inaccurate this one now seems!
Views expressed by the author do not
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