And another thing…

HITLER managed to “put the Jews in their place”, according to this video of radical Islamist scholar, Yusuf Qaradawi.

According to this paper, written by Qaradawi, the beating of wives is acceptable. And here, Qaradawi writes that western tolerance of homosexuality “put man in a position even worse than animals” and suggests that capital punishment is an appropriate response to homosexuality.

But, according to Osama Saeed, who leads the Scottish Islamic Foundation, Qaradawi is an “eminent scholar”. Saeed has complained that the BBC accurately reported Qaradawi’s relelant views of violence against women and homosexuals.

Oh, and did I mention that Saeed was last week formally endorsed as a parliamentary candidate for the nationalists in Scotland?

In doing so, the nationalists have become the first “mainstream” party in the United Kingdom to endorse an Islamist candidate. 

Saeed, a former aide to Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, and whose organisation was given £400,000 of public money by Salmond shortly after it was set up, subscribes to the fundamental principle of Islamists throughout the world: the re-establishment of a worldwide caliphate.

Why has a party which has made such strides in establishing its “moderate” credentials allowed itself to become the only party in the country trying to elect an Islamist to parliament?

I suspect that if you were to speak to nationalists at every level in the party, from leafleter to Salmond himself, you would find an ignorance, or even apathy, about Islamism and the threat it poses. It’s more important, they will claim (probably only privately), to have an articulate young Muslim fighting a seat that is currently held by Scotland’s only Muslim MP, Mohammad Sarwar, and which will be fought at the next election by Sarwar’s son, Anas, as Labour’s candidate.

Perhaps Saeed’s views on separate state-funded Islamic schools and his support for clerics’ extremist views will play well in the seat which has a high population of Muslim voters, they have concluded. If so, then endorsing an Islamist is a small price to pay for the prospect of winning the seat, surely? That’s a very patronising and ignorant view, of course, so highly likely to be held by the SNP.

Salmond and the rest of his party are turning a blind eye to Saeed’s views. Either that or they fully understand the illiberal and intolerant nature of Islamism and wish deliberately to entrench it in Scottish and British society, or see such infection of the body politic as a small price to pay for winning some votes.

Or perhaps, like the Scottish media, they believe that different standards should be applied to Muslim and non-Muslim candidates, or at least tolerated? This is a dangerous and sensitive area to write about, after all, and no-one wants even to risk being accused of racism. “Islamism? Isn’t that the same as Islam? Well, it’s a cultural thing, isn’t it? All very complicated…”

No electoral prize could justify the endorsement of an Islamist as a Parliamentary candidate. There is a huge difference between Islam and Islamism. Islamism, the view that Islam is a political as well as a religious movement, has found its voice in controversial organisations such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Association of Britain (for which Saeed acted as spokesman for a number of years) and Al-Quaeda.

No socially liberal, progressive, democratic party would ever have endorsed Osama Saeed as a parliamentary candidate. Following his endorsement by the SNP, it’s fair to say that no socially liberal, progressive, democratic party yet has.

THE SCOTTISH singer, Sandi Thom, has been at the centre of some controversy this week, having accepted nearly £10,000 in expenses for performing at various non-political, totally non-partisan Homecoming events.

I’m actually a fan of Miss Thom’s; I even bought one of her songs, Saturday Night, when it was in the Hit Parade (though admittedly, I didn’t buy the whole of the LP).

Well, it seems that I share an appreciation of her work with none other than the First Minister. Have a look.

YOU know what they say about every Scotsman thinking he can do an impersonation of Sean Connery?

Well, here is the current First Minister proving once and for all that it’s not true.

This video was clearly filmed on a mobile phone, which is crazy – what possible reason would the SNP have for not allowing TV cameras in to film Alex singing a duet with Sandi Thom? Madness, I tell you… madness!

My favourite part? Well, since you ask, it’s Ms Thom referring (more than once) to “Sir” Alex Salmond, assuming, I guess, that a “Rt Hon” is the same as a knighthood. Bless.

The fun starts at about 1 minute and 30 seconds in. Watch it all the way through and just feel the pride oozing. Go on, feel it. Yes, that’s pride you’re feeling, that oozing sensation…



Hat-tip: Caron’s Musings.

REMEMBER that clip of the movie Downfall, which has been re-subtitled dozens of times to make it relevant to more recent events, including Labour’s loss of the Glasgow East by-election? Well, inevitably someone with far too much time on their hands has produced a version to reflect the result of Glenrothes. I don’t advise watching it; it’s coarse and foul-mouthed, not to mention disrespectful of a number of members of the SNP government. 

You can refuse to watch it by not clicking here.

Wendy Alexander has announced she now backs a referendum on independence. Its one of those issues where, for a Unionist like myself, there are advantages and disadvantages to having a public vote.

The intellectual journey of the SNP activist is different from that of other people. When we were young, most of us who are political activists looked at the world around us and decided what priorities a future government should have, and then, based on those priorities, decided which party best reflected those priorities. If you’re a nationalist, you start off by deciding you can’t stand the English for one reason or another (probably connected with football and, for those of a certain age, Jimmy Hill, who has a lot to answer for, let me tell you), and that you want independence. The rest of your political development – the insistence that you’re not anti-English, that you’re, in fact, very fond of our southern neighbours and that you are an internationalist – will come later. Then, once you are a regular attendee of your local SNP branch and you share your colleagues’ intense indignation at having “ER II” on Scotland’s post boxes, you make your first strategic decision: should the SNP, a party of no political principle other than nationalism, veer to the left or the right? That will depend on whether the dominant party at any particular time is of the left or the right. If it’s a centre-left party, then the SNP should go in the same direction, since there are clearly more votes there. Similarly, had the Tories still been Scotland’s dominant party over the past couple of decades, the SNP would today be adopting the veneer of a centre-right party.

You end up with a party and with activists who couldn’t care less about trivial stuff like the health service, schools, unemployment or poverty, but who get awful excited when you start banging on about the constitution.

Obviously the political advantage Wendy hopes to secure in supporting a referendum is that she can shoot the SNP’s fox. This will probably happen at some point, and Alex Salmond has admitted that a referendum decision will stick for a generation. The down side is that all those SNP members who positively salivate at the mere thought of a referendum will have their day – at least in the run-up to polling. And I can’t help worrying that an SNP with a populist platform that, because of a previous referendum decision – doesn’t include independence, will appear a lot less threatening to unionist-inclined voters.