Rod Liddle writes: I am always open to spiritual guidance from any quarter, all the more so if that guidance is of practical import. So I was especially grateful to hear reports of a fatwa from the prominent Saudi Arabian cleric, Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah. This fatwa apparently made it clear that it was perfectly permissible for me, if suffering from ‘severe hunger’, to eat my wife. Either eat all of her — or merely, as it helpfully elucidated, some of her ‘body parts’. It did not say which body parts. In lieu of further enlightenment, I assumed that all of them were up for grabs.
Anyway, many has been the time that I have rooted through the fridge for something to stave off a ravenous hunger and found nothing but those tiny yoghurts that women eat to assuage constipation. I have stamped around and cursed, not understanding that the answer to my problem was sitting a few yards away in the living room, watching a re-run of Wolf Hall. Some, perhaps including the renowned Quranic scholar David Cameron, will no doubt say that such a fatwa (which Abdul insisted was a fabrication) would exemplify a ‘perverted’ view of Islam. Perhaps. But might it actually be rather moderate in stipulating that this recourse is available only to men suffering ‘severe hunger’? There may be other Muslim clerics who would argue that we should eat our wives even if we feel only a little peckish, or have got the ‘munchies’. The disputed fatwa, by the way, was said to reinforce the thesis that wives should be obedient to their husbands and that eating them was merely another way that ‘2 become 1’, as the Spice Girls once had it.
It may well be that when you first heard of the barbarous Islamist atrocities in Paris you thought: ‘My God. My God. How could they do that? At least now maybe the scales will fall from some eyes and we will tackle the problem head on.’ And then, like me, having thought this, you will have watched a BBC news programme and very quickly realised — nope, not a chance, business as usual. The same delusional rubbish, the same gerrymandering of public opinion, the same absurdities. My anti-epiphany began with Kirsty Wark on Newsnight interviewing two women, one of whom said that the problem was France’s racist society and the other, a French-Algerian, who opined that it first looked like the attacks could have been caused by rival drug gangs. I stared at the screen, mouth agape, unable for a while to believe what I was hearing. A whole programme about the Paris attacks in which three words — Muslim, Islam, jihadi — were not used at any point. The desperation to exculpate the ideology was present long before the bodies had been carried away. Then, when it was revealed that some attackers had entered the country as refugees, the Today programme had a fair, balanced and unpartisan debate between three people who agreed that we should take more refugees, because getting tough is ‘what they (the nasty terrorists) want us to do’. Even before the attacks the majority of British people wanted fewer migrants to be allowed in and a bit more rigour at the checkpoints — but that view was not remotely reflected. With the exception of a rather fine piece by John Sweeney on Panorama, the BBC’s coverage throughout was appalling in its cringeing, politically correct, liberal bias.
Meanwhile, the Home Secretary was telling us that the terrorists represent a ‘perverted’ form of Islam. Hmm. The same perverted form of the religion as practised by Abdul’s home country, Saudi Arabia? Or in Iran, or Libya, or Palestine, or Somalia, or . . . the list of countries which kill apostates, persecute Christians, Jews, homosexuals and women is longish, you have to say. We must grasp that the proportion of Muslims worldwide who hold this ‘perverted’ view is far, far, higher than Mrs May or the BBC would like you to think. Some 27 per cent of British Muslims, for example, expressed sympathy with the Charlie Hebdo murderers. This week it was reported that one in five British Muslims sympathises with Islamic State fighters. That is a number which is, as John Major might put it, not inconsiderable.
And the weird canards and the non-sequiturs. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard politicians express worry about British Muslims going to Syria and coming home ‘radicalised’. No. They were radicalised before they went. That is why they went there. In any case, we always let them back in when they arrive home after a spot of decapitating, instead of confiscating their passports and telling them to clear off.
