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Mayoral contest stirs the sewer

13 May 2016

Bottom of the barrel: Katie Hopkins’s column in the Mail Online

Bottom of the barrel: Katie Hopkins’s column in the Mail Online

THE campaign to prevent the election of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London was one of those moments when the sewer of political debate becomes so turbulent that the stinking contents surface into daylight.

Last week, I was writing about anti-Semitism, but it would require a remarkable naïvety to suppose that similar prejudice is not directed against Muslims. The official Goldsmith campaign was unpleasant enough. There were leaflets deliberately designed to appeal to ancient subcontinental loyalties: Hindus were told that Labour was insufficiently respectful of Narendra Modi; Sikhs that it was planning to tax and confiscate family jewellery.

For whites of a vaguely religious tendency, there was a constant drumbeat of mentions of “extremism” (a word spelled M-u-s-l-i-m), culminating in the choice of picture to illustrate Goldsmith’s last, loudest newspaper appeal to voters: the bus destroyed by the 7/7 suicide bombers.

This did not sound like dog-whistle politics which is meant to be inaudible to most voters. This sounded more like the despairing blast of a ship’s siren as it drifts in heavy fog on to the waiting rocks.

None the less, the appeal lay to all kinds of sentiments which would never have found a place in any newspaper. An inspection shaft into this netherworld is provided by Katie Hopkins’s column in the Mail Online, where she called the candidate “Sadiqistan”.

The Mail’s online operation is not a linear descendent of the paper that once supported Adolf Hitler, but there appears to be a recessive gene surfacing here: “If the state of Europe and the recent spate of attacks in Paris and Brussels aren’t a good enough reason to vote against the Muslim Mafia, then I fail to understand the people of London. . .

“I did a recent poll of my Twitter followers, unsurprisingly, they voted that this election will be decided by religion.”

Anglican Mainstream continued the downward trend by republishing a piece from Christian Concern’s “Director of Islamic Affairs”, Tim Dieppe, who warned that Khan’s election would lead to mass rape as well as terrorism: “It is hard to see Khan supporting the police being more proactive in upholding the law in areas with high Muslim populations. . .

“Knowing they lack political support, the police are likely to continue in their politically correct ways, with disastrous results. Fear of causing offence will rule. We have already seen some of the effects of such politically correct policing in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and other cities where Islamic rape gangs have been allowed to run riot, with the police terrified of being called racist.

“With Khan in charge we can only expect an increase of Islamic segregation in London leading to increased radicalisation. Even if there was a major terrorist attack I doubt if he would take appropriate action. . . With Khan in charge, London will increasingly become Londonistan.”

 

AND so our descent has reached the level of Twitter, and the hashtag #LondonHasFallen, where the kind of people who take Dieppe and Hopkins seriously could really let themselves go. Many are Americans: “Please don’t call the US to save your asses again, we did it twice and this time, nope, now stay anti-Jew you pigs”; or “If you do not accept your women being raped your [sic] a racist”, and “Perhaps these faggots should realise that 1m British girls were raped and kebabs have taken London.”

Some were more in touch with English reality. I liked the Trump supporter who claimed that “Now that Muslims have taken over London property prices will now burst & go belly up. It will look like Syria soon.” This could almost be the Daily Express for real.

Of course there was some fight-back. Pictures of the Queen in a headscarf were tweeted ironically to prove that sharia had already forced her to cover her head; another of her knighting someone was circulated to show that we had introduced Islamic punishments.

Anglican Mainstream no more represents the English mainstream about Islam than it does about anything else. None the less, this kind of language tends to poison us all.

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