Notes on the Islamisation of London VIII.

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Birmingham, Christianity and Islam, Christopher Hitchens, Civilisation, Civilization, Counter-Jihad, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, England, Islamisation of London, LDN, london, Milton Keynes, Multiculturalism, Muslims, No to Turkey in the EU, The Clash of Civilizations

The other day, as I sat in a train carriage taking me from Birmingham to London, I decided to tilt my head against the window and try to get some sleep. It had been a long, difficult, boring day and the opiate lure of sleep seemed to offer a warm bath for my aching senses.

I didn’t get any though, for no sooner had I shut my eyes than a burly Somali woman crashed down on the seat across the gangway and began to graze like a cow.

Fidgeting around in a small grey trolley bag she removed box after box, flipping off the lids each time with an echoing pop. She prepared what must have been the apperitif – a cold soup, green in colour, similar in appearance to a badly made guacamole.

I remember thinking “Now she is not going to drink that out of the tub….She can’t do.”

Well, she did, and with a noise more distressing than the whoosh of an approaching bullet. An English (or any rate European) woman ( long legs, short dress) stationed in front of the Somali began to wince in time to every slurp. At one point (to my pleasure) she consulted me with a wry, sympathetic smile.

This went on through five courses. After each one, the woman wiped her mouth gracelessly on her flowing black cloak (by the end it looked like the bed-sheets of a mental patient).

When the train docked at Milton Keynes, the Somali woman picked up her bag and departed the carriage, leaving the boxes, wrappers, and copius stains for the poor train crew to deal with.

The train peeled away towards the smoke, and as I took the postponed chance to rest my head, I thought lazily about the differences in moral priotities between a Muslim woman and her equivalent in the West. No doubt for that Somali woman, bedecked in her Hijab and modest cloak, the lady in front who winced at her behaviour was a barbarian. No doubt her short skirt, social independence and unmutilated labia marked her out as someone awaiting civilisation. My thoughts of the Somali – of course – were of the same kind.

And that’s a good (if slightly ludicrous) analogy for the Muslim-Kaffir quarrel itself. As Christopher Hitchens wrote, it is not a ‘clash of civilisations’, but a clash about what constitutes civilisation that most separates East from West.

Or of course, I could be reading too much into a woman with no table manners.

D, LDN.

Dubai: Money Can’t Buy Civilisation.

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Abudhabi, American Liberty, Canada, Christianity and Islam, Christopher Caldwell, Civilisation, Civilization, Counter-Jihad, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Dubai, KFC, Middle East, Multiculturalism, No to Turkey in the EU, Qatar, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Rihanna Muslim, United Arab Emirates

What is ‘Civilisation’?

Some people, typically on the Political Left, claim (and presumably believe) that ‘Civilisation’ is fundamentally indistinct from ‘affluence’.

By implication then, ‘Civilisation’ is at base just a commodity, available for purchase to every culture and people the world over. The essence of a ‘Civilised country’ meanwhile isn’t Literature, Human Rights, Liberty, or Justice, but simply skyscrapers, fast cars, cable TV, and KFC Restaurants.

These people are wrong of course, and no better pursuasion of this can be found than the modern City-State of Dubai.

This blog is called ‘Defend the Modern World’. I should probably clarify then, exactly what I classify as ‘Modern’.

Imagine if you met an apolitical simpleton and showed him two photographs, the first of the small town of Fleming, Saskatchewan in Canada, and the second of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

If you then asked him which city of the two is more ‘ modern’, the simpleton would almost certainly pick the latter.

He’d be wrong.

Modernity for me, has little to do with technology or convenience. While I would gladly live in a Scandinavian village without electricity, I could never live happily in Abu Dhabi or Qatar. This is because the first would doubtlessly be more ‘modern’ and Civilised than the latter (with the first term here qualified by the criteria above).

Every year, Great hordes of Westerners (permanent settlers among them) travel to Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Their reasons for doing so (and this needs clarifying) have only a little to do with tax, and a lot to do with immorality.

In Dubai, after-all, you can not only exercise the mod-cons of a millionaire, but the cruelty of a medieval King.

Dubai has an entire class (by some estimates making up a majority of those resident in the country at any given time) of East and South Asian slaves. Yes, that’s right, slaves…

But maybe that’s unexeptional. Many African countries – after-all – still operate systems of slavery and then there’s the ‘caste system’ of India etc….

Where Dubai is different is in the way the slaves are treated by their masters, and by the laxity of the law in protecting them.

Regard the words of the Guardian’s Tanya Gold:

“There are 250,000 foreign workers in Dubai, drawn mostly from India and Bangladesh. They are indentured servants, in other words, slaves. The usual way to recruit them is to draw them a picture of joy — great wages, fabulous working conditions — and charge them an enormous recruitment fee. Then, when they arrive, the construction companies often steal their passports, deny them their wages and say they must work endlessly to pay for their return home, while living 10 to a room and working in the terrible heat. In Dubai, they cannot change jobs, and they cannot strike; those who do face violence or deportation. Last year, 113 Indians committed suicide in Dubai, or one every three days.”

To return to the photo comparison thought-experiment, when was the last time a migrant worker jumped off an unfinished building in Canada?

Alongside slavery, Dubai also offers lengthy prison sentences for adultery, kissing on the beach, homosexuality, transvestism, and possession of such horrific drugs of abuse as Benadryl. These prohibitions too, demonstrate a great lag in cultural time, perhaps (relative to the West) of more than a century.

Civilization, to conclude, is not a commodity. It cannot be bought. It develops inside the psyche of a population over many centuries. The desert Sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf then, skyscrapers and underwater hotels aside, have a long distance to travel.

D, LDN.