Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald profiles one of the contemporary scene’s leading dhimmis, London mayor Ken Livingstone, and his friend Shiekh Qaradawi:
Ken Livingstone, who presumes, has always despised America (although that does not keep him from hiring an American expert to make those underground trains run on time). And of course he is also a great beater-upper — ca va sans dire — of Israel. Like “Gorgeous George” Galloway, the Glaswegian hireling of Saddam Hussein (whose money many believe helped Galloway buy his modest vacation retreat in Spain), Ken Livingstone has earned his own moniker: Red Ken.
Red Ken, or Redken as some prefer to call him, when not being mayor of London, is also a well-known shampoo. One can only wish that London voters will wash that particular shampoo right out of their hair. And then vigorously apply some anti-Jihad conditioner.
I just bought shampoo (the brand is “Marc Anthony” -“” it was not so much the reduced price as the hint of Shakespeare’s paraleptic Roman that clinched the sale), and the bottle promises that its contents will, like a passing beauty who leaves one hot and bothered, “soulève, gonfle, et épaissit” (lift, volumize, thicken). And this brings relevantly to mind, in regard to that not-so-odd couple, the Mayor and the Muslim, those unforgettable lingerie ads that line the walls circumjacent to the escalators — those that go up, and those that come down — of the London Underground.
Now as Ken Livingstone proudly showed his honored guest round and about old Londinium, did he by any chance show off that Underground, and therefore those lingerie ads, or was it limousines all the way for the Salon Bolshevik and the Quran-quoting Qaradawi? If Red Ken, in the same spirit as the Commissars who in the 1930s liked to bring Western tourists to view the gleaming Moscow Metro (“But where are the trains!” those tourists would ungratefully point out), did offer Q. such a tour, one would like to know how Monsieur Q. reacted to those advertisements, which can leave even an unaccustomed American blushing and flustered. Perhaps if his furious reaction were to have been translated, Red Ken might have looked a bit more closely into the previous protests of women’s groups, might have found out more about Qaradawi’s strictures on women’s dress, and women’s behavior, and the need for women to submit to their Qur’an-designated superiors, that is to say — men.
And even if R. K. and Q.-q. Q. did not visit the Underground together, possibly they had a chance to take in the National Gallery. It would have been fascinating to hear Q. explain to K. through a seamlessly-bowdlerizing translator why all the statues needed to be broken or defaced if they were even to be permitted to continue to exist at all, and why, under Islam, all the paintings other than landscapes, all the depictions of famous personages, and of course anything that had a Madonna, with or without a bambino in her lap, would have to go, along with all paintings showing a saint, or a Biblical figure, or a king, or a general, or a nobleman, or any historical personage, or any non-historical figure not being held up to ridicule, because such depictions are haram, haram, haram, and don’t you forget it. Perhaps Q. could then have given K. a copy of his own guide to righteous Quran”ic living, What is Halal and What Haram, even pointing out the passages that explain this unassuagable hostility toward sculpture and portrait paintings in great detail. Of course, Ken, you dimly recall what happened to the Bamiyan Buddhas, and to the frescoes formerly on the walls of the Byzantine churches of Constantinople, and to those tens of thousands of Hindu temples, and to churches all over North Africa, and Mesopotamia, and Syria — or do you? Perhaps Ken Livingstone, a compleat homo politicus (which makes any Jack a dull boy) is not fond of art himself; he may see it as a luxury item, after all. And much of Western art, as the Kens of this world see things, corresponds to the taste of rich patrons only trying to immortalize or flatter themselves, in their commissioning of paintings and sculpture and furniture and garden follies, all paid for with the loot, as seen through the narrow lens of a narrow Ken Livingstone, accumulated through the exploitation of the working class, or the exploited colonials beyond the seas. Just look at that arch-connoisseur Kenneth Clark’s family fortune, no doubt the result of Lancashire girls spinning thread from dawn to dusk, or the liquor-store fortune of Bernard Berenson, or of course those impossible and intolerable Medicis, all those sinister Lorenzos and Cosimos. What decent human being (I quite agree, Ken) — what decent human being can even stand to look at the paintings and sculptures that were produced for those Medici, those rich Florentine swine?
Yes, Ken, on second thought, probably you and Q. would have had much to nod in agreement about, as you walked through the National Gallery, or the Tate, or any of those other decadent centers of intolerable Western art. And Ken, wasn’t it your favorite Russian writer who said that a good shoemaker was worth more than Pushkin, than everything that Pushkin had ever produced? Isn’t that a world-view, isn’t that an aesthetic creed, Ken, expressed so memorably and succinctly, that makes you a brother under the skin of Q-q. Q.?
And since Islam is now the vehicle of choice for those wishing to express their fury at their own perceived marginalization (psychic or economic), their own often self-induced alienation and hatred of Capitalism, of The System, of The West, of Amerika with a “K”(shudders of dismay may be inserted here), Mr. Q. came to the right place, and was made much of by the right host. Indeed, we are told that you liked Mr. Q. so much that you have invited him to return, any time he feels like it.
Ken, Redken, Mr. Livingstone, Lord Mayor of London, turn again, like Dick Whittington, if you possibly can. There may still be time. Think of those sculptures and those paintings. Do you really want Qaradawi and his ilk to have their way? Think of the freedoms built upon, and enjoyed, by those who now live in Old Londinium. Think of Bracton. Think of Coke. Think of Locke. Think of of John Stuart Mill. Think of Harry Lauder, and Al Bowlly and Jack Buchanan and Elsie Randolph. Think of Vera Lynn. Think of Sigmund Freud, and Lucien Freud, and Emma Freud, and any damn Freud who comes to mind. Think of Peter Sellers. Think of Frank Muir. Think of the Goon Show. Think of My Word, and all the gentle people who listen to My Word. Think of Alastair Sim and Alec Guinness. Think of The Bells of St. Trinian’s. Think of Wee Geordie. Think of 23 Laburnum Grove. Think of Dennis Potter — think of Pennies From Heaven, and The Singing Detective, and Lipstick on Your Collar. Think of Keats on Hampstead Heath. Think, Ken, even of those buying bespoke at a tailor’s on Jermyn Street, or the Burlington Arcade. Think about what London means, or should mean, to you, and think about the London that would exist if the likes of Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, and his followers, now well-ensconced, were to have their way — in London, in England, in Europe, all over the world. Forget about what you think about Bush, or what you think you should think of him. Think about what Q.-q. Q., if he had half a chance, would do to everyone and everything in free-spirited, silly, often deplorable, sometimes lovable London, over which you preside.
Forget about contriving always to act so as to annoy the Americans, the London Board of Rabbis, the leader-writers on The Telegraph. Try to have some gratitude to the Great Dead who created the civilization of which you and those who live in London are inheritors. Not one of those Great Dead (of England, of Europe, of the Western world)would have lasted a minute under Islam, under the likes of Al-Qaradawi and his grim little world of the shari”a, his Total Regulation, his manichaen assignment of everything to one or the other column: Haram over there, Halal over here. You owe those Great Dead of the Western world something. You owe Q-q. Q. nothing.
Please, Ken, please Mr. Livingstone, please Mr. Lord Mayor, turn again, even if that means you will have to turn against every cliché and received idea in the seemingly-immutable bolshevist banality of your mental universe. Get With the Program. And that program, if you need a hint, is not “Friends” but, rather, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
Yet after a terrorist attack by Muslims, for Muslim causes, prompted by the teachings of Islam that are to be found in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, Ken Livingstone yet again decided to welcome Sheikh Qaradawi to London. He, Redken, was not in the slightest apologetic about this. The trip was cancelled, at the last minute, but not because of Ken Livingstone.
He proceeded to tell us that there is a moral equivalence between Hamas, a group of terrorists who shoot their weapons and scream with hysterical joy whenever news of some great “victory” — say, the shooting a pregnant women in her car, and the murder, one by one by one by one, of her four little girls — comes across the wires. Such behavior is just par for the Hamas course, and the Likud, a political party that has the temerity to suggest that Israel has a considerable legal (the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine), historical (the buying of land, steadily, from both the Turkish authorities and absentee landlords, and the inheriting of the nearly 90% of the land that was owned by the Ottoman state, then by the Palestine Mandatory authority, and then by its rightful and intended successor, the State of Israel), and moral (about this, if Ken Livingstone knows nothing of the history of the Jews, nor of the Muslim conquerors, nor of what happened to those Jews who remained, as dhimmis,under Muslim Arab rule, or who left to live in Europe, then he knows nothing) right to exist.
So he did not turn again, like Dick Whittington. Not worth a whisker on Dick Whittington’s cat is Redken, now the mayor of the largest city in still-as-yet-incompletely-islamized Europe. But he is a portent of things to come. And how he is regarded by people in London, in England, in Europe, will tell us much about the willingness of the Infidels not to “stay the course” of appeasement and dhimmitude, but to change the course, to recover their senses, to become quick studies when it comes to Islam, and to rescue themselves, their children, and the cultural and civilizational legacy that their ancestors left them with — and so far too many have proven to be complete ingrates.
Some gratitude please. Some common sense. Some sense of self-preservation. A modicum will do.