Comment of the week

Off to France this weekend, here’s hoping it’s the last time I touch a Euro, other than to fix one to my fridge next to the Zimbabwean dollar alrerady (sic) there.

Turkeys voting for Christmas

Daniel Hannan is perfectly entitled to continue as a Member of the European “Parliament”, despite the fact that is a body whose legitimacy and sovereignty he questions. He is, after all, only following the time-honoured custom of champions of liberty like Charles Stewart Parnell, but one can’t help but wonder which audience he thinks he’s addressing here.

Doctrinally not quite up to his usual high standards….

Yellow card, Daniel.

Any enlargement of the EU is wrong because the EU is, in and of itself, wrong.

If Mr Cameron wishes to conduct bi-lateral diplomacy with a country that for decades protected our south-eastern flank against the Soviet Union (in the best Tory tradition, as you say) that is one thing, but to wrap his discourse in honeyed phrases about Turkey’s eventual entry into the EU is quite another. It is merely a continuation of the treason, committed by others and compounded by him, when he failed to deliver a referendum on Lisbon.

It won’t be the Liberal Democrats who bring down the Coalition, it will be the libertarian right that reclaims the party of Pitt and Peel.

Hate to say I told you so

There’s nothing clever about predicting violence on the 12th.

It’s one of life’s racing certainties.

A happy 12th to all my friends in the Province

Thanks to the late lamented Portadown News.

Cartoons and religion – bland and not very funny, but offensive?

So the Lars Vilks affair is back in the news again. Did anyone really ever think it would go away?

Following His Grace, Archbishop Cranmer’s contribution to the debate on religion and free speech, I thought I’d weigh in with my own two penn’orth.

The whole object of political cartooning is to confront us with unpalatable details and observations. They are by their very nature excessive. An excess of caricature is preferable to an excess of censorship or the timid pronouncements of those yielding ground to latter-day book burners, who are only using a contrived issue as yet another proxy for anti-enlightenment hysteria.

Who decides what is offensive to Christians, Jews or Muslims? Which are to be considered protected species?

The cartoon is not gratuitously offensive, bland and not very funny, yes, but offensive?

The depiction of Mohammed as a dog is a fairly neat encapsulation of what radicalised religion has come to mean for more and more people appalled by the violence committed in its name. Subsequent reactions – flag burning, fatwas, death threats – only vindicate this perception. The drawings are designed to provoke a response, of that there is no doubt, but political cartoons are provocative. It simply comes back to who decides what is ‘gratuitously insulting’. When you have a group that places itself above all others while at the same time practising an absurdly transparent hypocrisy, then they are an obvious target for parody.

Can any objective person satisfy themselves that public beheadings, massacres and bloodcurdling invocations by religious zealots with mediaeval attitudes are not, by contrast, far more offensive to the senses than a few cartoons in a newspaper? Or how about the officially sanctioned contest in Iran to produce the most offensive holocaust cartoon? There is certainly no moral advantage to be gained there.

The greater part of the debate in our guilt-ridden society has been whether Nerikes-Allehanda was ‘responsible’ in printing the cartoon. The only sense in which they might not have been was the concern that they might result in just such an up welling of fury as we are once again witnessing. Once you start bowing to, and legislating for such behaviour, you only encourage it.

This is just an excuse, a proxy by which they can express their hatred and fear of democracy and pluralism, and it’s a racing certainty they’ll find another before long.

Final word on the matter from Zombietime….

Fuck EU!

Please Ireland, I implore you, vote “NO” on 2nd October.

It may be your last chance ever to have a say in the government of your country.

Tweet #votenoireland.