BLASPHEMOUS RUMOURS

I guess it’s the last thing the authorities needed right now – with the threat of one more national lockdown in the air, they could’ve done without a senseless murder in another country rousing thousands and bringing them onto the streets to protest and risk pushing up infection rates. Of course, you won’t have been able to avoid it on social media, what with the tech providers imposing a suitably fitting image upon their users, one that is an obligatory profile picture for a day of mass solidarity with the deceased; and, naturally, sportsmen and women are mirroring the mood by observing a moments’ silence with a symbolic bowed head – ‘taking the head’, I think it’s called; and Sainsbury’s will undoubtedly express solidarity too. Oh, wait a minute – for a moment, I forgot none of this is actually happening. No, somehow the barbaric beheading of a History & Geography teacher outside his school in Paris on Friday hasn’t generated an international response. Fancy that.

This is a story the New York Times (which is now so Woke it makes the Guardian resemble ConservativeHome) reported with the headline: ‘French Police Shoot and Kill Man after a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street.’ In case, you weren’t aware, the man who wasn’t shot and killed by the French Police was 47-year-old Samuel Paty; he’d had the gall to show his students the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad during a lesson on freedom of speech, something he’d made clear beforehand. He’d offered the Muslim members of the class the opportunity to abstain if they so wished, though his lesson still provoked an angry response from some parents who took to the internet to ramp up the pressure inevitably heaped upon a teacher working in a country that has been Europe’s most secular nation for the best part of 200 years. Misinformation was spread to the point where Paty was accused by one parent – whose daughter apparently wasn’t even present in the classroom – of displaying a ‘naked image’ of the Prophet.

Monsieur Paty’s murderer was revealed as an 18-year-old refugee who had been a resident of France for barely six months and seemingly had no connection to the school at all; he must have been scouring social media on the look-out for local infidels and happened to stumble upon his target. He turned up at the school in a Paris suburb as it was emptying for the day, asked exiting pupils to point out the guilty man and, from all accounts, launched an unprovoked attack on the teacher that climaxed with decapitation. The French themselves got over beheading people after the Terror, but it seems the spirit of Madame Guillotine is alive and kicking in some of the more enlightened overseas souls France has been generous enough to offer a home to. It’s certainly a novel way of embracing the culture of one’s chosen country, even if it is a couple of centuries out of date; but at least he was trying to fit in.

The murderer, Moscow-born Abdullakh Anzorov, went on to fire at police with an air rifle and also wielded a knife, prompting them to shoot and kill when they cornered him – hence the rightly outraged New York Times headline. This particularly appalling murder has taken place at a moment of heightened tension in France’s relationship with Islam, just as 14 people are currently being tried in connection with the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre; it’s only a fortnight ago that two employees of a TV production company were stabbed in the same location by a bright spark who thought the satirical magazine was still based at its former offices. France’s anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said Samuel Paty had been ‘assassinated for teaching’; it’s hard to disagree with his additional statement that the murder was an assault on the principle of freedom of expression. The western world is experiencing a lot of that at the moment, though the brutal methods of doing so that were employed in Paris remain a mercifully rare manifestation of it.

The man who committed the crime clearly viewed western culture and values with hatred and contempt, which is a very chic hallmark of the far left right now, visible in its daily pronouncements and denunciations; and as the far left has been the instigator behind this year’s heavily-publicised campaigns against these values, campaigns that have received the backing of tech corporations, institutions, mainstream media and academia, perhaps it’s no great surprise that there has been no organised protest over the Samuel Paty murder beyond France. The far left may be at pains to condemn the killing, but the ideological motivation isn’t a million miles away from the relentless chipping away at the cultural inheritance of the west we’re bombarded with day-after-day, one where everyone and everything is racist and evil, where the original sin of whiteness demands its sufferers are re-educated, and the Woke ‘Mein-Kampf’ that is ‘White Fragility’ is recommended reading material whilst JK Rowling books are burned. It’s not too hard to join the dots between the extremes.

The far left are also amongst the prime lockdown cheerleaders; as some wag said the other day, lockdown suits them because it translates as middle-class people being paid to stay at home while working-class people deliver everything to their door. Therefore, who cares if this year the UK has seen the closure of 11,120 shops on a high street that was already in decline even before Covid-19 intervened? It would appear some are doing alright, Jack. The authoritarian streak and casual ambivalence over the ongoing erosion of civil liberties that has unfortunately become symptomatic of the left probably wouldn’t object to the new ‘digital health passports’ currently being tried and tested either. Permission to enter another country could henceforth depend upon whether one has submitted to a vaccine that will miraculously overcome the obstacles that generally require a good five years or more to overcome during the development of such a substance. Maybe there also won’t be any concerns that those told to self-isolate through NHS track & trace could have their details shared with police, who will have access to that private information. Ah, well – all for our own good, eh?

When we live in a world in which Twitter is guilty of blatantly suppressing quite important revelations regarding the son of the man who is hoping to be voted into the White House next month, it’s increasingly difficult to take anything at face value anymore. Mind you, his opponent has spent the last four years so brazenly twisting the truth to fit his own surreal agenda that the pattern is already well-established as the way forward on both sides. It’s been refreshing to see some of our regional mayors over here at least challenge the Covid narrative, but what can the likes of Andy Burnham really do other than publicly state his opposition? Yes, it does seem a tad unfair that when London seemed threatened by the coronavirus back in the spring the whole country was willing to shut up shop, yet when a similar situation arises in the north, only the north has to close down. At the same time, trying to avoid a repeat of last April is understandable, especially when the damage that did is becoming more apparent.

Okay, so none of this on the surface seems to have much of a connection with horrific events in Paris last Friday; but as was mentioned in a comment I made on the previous post, looking back five years to the first few ‘Telegram’ missives reminded me of how nothing has really changed since 2015 when it comes to Radical Islam on western soil. The first-ever ‘proper’ post covered the murder of 14 people by two ISIS sympathisers in San Bernardino, California as well as the non-fatal stabbing of three commuters at Leytonstone Tube Station by an individual who declared ‘This is for Syria’. I wonder, five years hence, if anyone (including yours truly) is still here, whether or not I’ll be looking back to 2020 and musing on the fact that we thought the first lockdown was bad – as we live through our eleventh? Plus ça change, as they say across the Channel.

© The Editor