ROD LIDDLE
for... well... um... I’m not absolutely sure
you are helping, if I’m honest. Your kind-
ness and good intentions may be unques-
tionable. But helping? Really? Ron and Pen
might well complain later that the number
of foster children they reared who may have
later gone on to try to bomb the rest of us
was only 1 or 2 per cent of the total but it
would still be too large a proportion for me.
I am a bit Trumpish in the number of people
from Iraq, Syria and Somalia I wish to be let
into the country. I have a number in mind,
a smallish number, and it is one we are toldwas actually invented by Islamic scholars.
When nasty people aver that Islam has given
us nothing, they are at least partly right.
Several points occur as a consequence.
First, the speed with which the Parsons
Green bombing dropped down the news
agenda. At roughly the same time as our little
bomb, a jihadi went berserk with a hammer
in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, and attacked
two women. Before this a French policeman
was stabbed trying to arrest three female
Muslims, just returned from Syria, who were
driving with some haste towards Notre-
Dame, their car full of gas cylinders. Hear
much about that? We have become a little
like the warren of sleek, cultured, sheltered,
liberal rabbits in Watership Down whose
number reduces each day because they arePoor old Ron and Pen,
ju st t r yi ng to help
snared by the man who protects and feeds
them. They, too, dislike talking about their
plight and the deaths are not mentioned: we
must accept our fate, they say. I don’t know
what the Islamic view of rabbits is.
Second, Mr Jones is approaching his
nineties and his missus is in her seventies.
Have they not been taken advantage of by
the authorities?
‘Have we got anyone for Ron and Penny
this week? I see a new batch have arrived.’
‘Yeah, give them young Mohammed for
a few months and see how they get on.’
What sort of checks are made before
these supposed refugees are farmed out to
the kindly and the gullible? But then, I sup-
pose, what checks are made before they are
let into the country in the first place.
And then there is this. The narrative we
are expected to buy into is that terrorism is
nothing to do with Islam and, further, that it
is a state of mind imposed upon young and
‘vulnerable’ Muslim men and women by an
outside agency — a foreign agency and an
agency which, again, has nothing to do with
Islam. This is the process of ‘radicalisation’
we keep hearing about and I have never
bought into it, having a certain respect for
the concept of free will. And, I would con-
tend, a rather less generous view of Islam’s
worldwide beneficence and pacific nature
than the one we are all enjoined to take.
And yet here we have a young man
taken into the kindly, if somewhat wrinkled,
bosom of an English couple who, it may
emerge, still ended up trying to terrorise
people in the name of his weary God. If the
Joneses had been a Muslim family, then the
press and the police would be demanding to
know what they knew of this process of rad-
icalisation, and what they had done to coun-
ter it. But there is nothing to be done. The
religion itself sets its people apart from the
rest and, in all too many cases, this apartness
leads to a hatred. Radicalisation is nothing
to do with it.SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RODLIDDLE
The argument continues online.H
ere’s the problem. An Asian bloke
gets on to the Tube holding a bulg-
ing Lidl bag with wires sticking out
of it. I don’t know if it had the words ‘large
bomb’ written in Magic Marker on the side
of the bag. Anyway, a little later, it blows
up, and lots of people are injured. Later
again, surprise is expressed that he had
been able to get through with his primitive
bag of tricks. We are continually exhorted
to be vigilant on public transport, so why
wasn’t he apprehended? Did nobody think
it looked a bit suspicious? I have the feeling
we know the answer to that. Just think of
the howl-round, the furore, if the man had
been pulled over and it hadn’t been a bomb.
Like the Muslim chap who was evicted from
a flight last year because he had mentioned
9/11 and felt compelled to take legal action.
And so that’s where we are, right now.
Pinned to our seats by over-sensitivity, as
the train enters the darkness of the tunnel,
next stop paradise.
Both of the men so far arrested for last
week’s outrage were the foster children of
two elderly, respectable, caring, decent and
honest mugs, Ronald and Penny Jones, from
Sunbury-on-Thames. According to a neigh-
bour, they were gutted to read that their
charge may have carried a bomb on to a
Tube train full of commuters. Better gutted
than decapitated, I suppose, or incinerated.
Apparently Ron and Pen had experienced
a certain amount of trouble with the young
man suspected of planting the bomb. We
don’t know what sort of trouble. Wandering
around chanting stuff in Arabic? Perhaps
they thought it was just a difficult phase
he was going through, like acne or heavy
metal. ‘They just need to be loved,’ one of
the Joneses told the press, adding, ‘It’s so
rewarding... They are grateful to be safe.’
Well, indeed, and how spectacularly that
gratitude is expressed.
The couple have housed at least 250
‘children’ from war-torn countries, i.e. Iraq,
Syria, Somalia, the usual suspects. ‘We just
like to be able to help people,’ they said,
plaintively when they received their MBEs
W h at sort of ch eck s are m a d e before
these supposed refugees are farmed out
to the kindly and the gullible?‘He’s been downgraded to a Category One.’