Boris is on something, it seems…
Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has urged non-Muslims to fast for a day during Ramadan and then to break their fast at a mosque to improve their understanding of Islam.
I had thought better of him than this. I’m sorry, but not eating for a day (and getting a migraine due to low blood sugar) then nipping round to the local mosque will not give me any more understanding of Islam than I already have, frankly.
Speaking at the East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre, he said that Muslims in the capital were challenging traditional stereotypes to show that they wanted to be part of mainstream society.
Fine. That is up to them, not me, just as it is up to me to learn French and adapt to French ways, not my neighbours.
“That is why I urge people, particularly during Ramadan, to find out more about Islam, increase your understanding and learning, even fast for a day with your Muslim neighbour and break your fast at a local mosque.”
Thanks Boris, but no thanks. I don’t want to find out more about Islam and don’t need to. I am perfectly happy with people believing what they want to believe and to leave me alone to not believe. I leave them alone and they leave me alone. That’s how it works. I don’t need to understand more about Islam to achieve that.
He added: “There are valuable lessons people of all backgrounds can learn from Islam, such as the importance of community spirit, family ties, compassion and helping those less fortunate, all of which lie at the heart of the teachings of Ramadan.”
I already understand and practice these things and I don’t need belief in a deity to achieve them. It’s called basic humanity – and before preaching to us, perhaps the lecture should be reserved for the Islamic extremists in Sudan who think that beating women is part of that Islamic compassion (as opposed, that is, to satisfying their kinky fetishes).
My problem is that I get so God-damnably tired of an unreserved diet of all this brittle and splintery, untasty, white meat.
And, to top it all, I already know ahead of time what “mine own” are going to haul off and say, do and “think.”
The tedium is just plain pukesome…sorry.
So, personally, I am not only glad to have these foreigners around, but positively enjoy learning the Spanish,
Arabic and all the other gibble-gabble. It is, to me, like foreign travel without the inconvenience and expense. Still less does having these foreigners come to me involve ME being shoved around at airports by halfwits, and stuffed into the smelly and badly-maintained airliners that so frequently nowadays just plain stop dead in mid-air and fall out of the sky. Or else are being hijacked by various soreheads and rammed into things. (When we once get rid of the more immature of my fellow Moslems, “It Will Just Be Some OTHER Sonsofbitches, Sure As Hell!” as my 91-year-old farm neighbour, er, neighbor Judson Andersen says.) Actually going anywhere to me at sixty more than a hundred miles away is just plain a pain in the ass. Lucky you, Longrider, you can go through that smelly tunnel or, better (way!), take a nice ferry!
I think that you, too, must know how to “do difference” /and/ how to behave abroad. Some of these Mexicans and stuff around here of course do not, but I’ve been pretty lucky in mine just as I guess “your” French have been in having you around.
Of course many simply physically cannot tolerate obvious “others.” This is innate and it is biological, and on an instinctual level our happy chatter about “multiculturalism” is an opera contra naturam. Or, rather, it is an effort on another level of human nature. You can’t force it. And so of course any foreigners should sign in and out on arrival, and any who play up need to be shipped out, O-U-T.
But that is all about things some of us anyway already know about, isn’t it, good manners all around, and that there is nonetheless from time-to-time a police problem? The problem isn’t “foreigners” I don’t think, it’s…The Statistical Assholes!
Mostly I use the ferry – it is a civilised way of crossing the channel. I have found my French neighbours very accommodating and helpful when I struggle with the language. The point being, that they recognise that I am using French even if it is not very good. I start formal lessons next week. My neighbours always welcome a gift of fruit from our trees (apples, pears, plums greengages) and reciprocate with their excess tomatoes, eggs etc.
Boy, oh boy, do we GOT tomatoes! Up the yazoo…and this hasn’t even been a warm Summer, here, not really. We raised a load of these “heritage” seeds this year, “Mortgage Lifters,” green stripeys and Cherokee Purples. All way tasty…all dead ready to rot in an instant, too, as they are not hybrids. I’d send you some, but by the time the box got there, you’d be, well, browned off at the stench, I reckon…. So would your French postman at the seepage down trouser legs, and THERE would be all your “good will,” by God!
If you’d be interested in some seeds when I get some dried, just holler…!
“I had thought better of him than this.”
Something about holding high office in Britain seems to do this to people. If Daniel Hannan became London Mayor, he’d go the same way.
Or perhaps not 🙂
.-= My last blog ..Libertarianism and moral degeneration =-.