How would you describe a culture where women are flogged in public for “inappropriate dress?†A culture where one woman suffered 40 lashes from a leather whip for the crime of wearing trousers and a T-shirt? A culture where a man who lies with a man risks being whipped a hundred times before being put in a dank cell for five years? A culture where apostasy is considered such an abominable sin that even a heavily pregnant woman could be sentenced to death for supposedly committing it?
The good people of Belfast are well within their rights to ask whether men from such a culture should be living on their streets
Personally, I would call such a culture “alien.†In fact, I would call it backward, regressive, inhuman and morally inferior to the freer, more forgiving culture we Brits are lucky to live in. Why, then, was the unionist MP Jim Allister rebuked in the UK House of Commons yesterday for suggesting that the bloodletting maniac in Belfast heralded from an “alien culture?†For all of the primitive punishments listed above, all that state barbarism, took place in the nation where he was reportedly born: Sudan.
It was Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland secretary, who took Mr. Allister to task. What will be done to “stop the importation of an alien culture,†Allister asked? Benn's political correctness radar pinged. “I'm sorry the honourable gentleman used the term ‘alien culture,' because what exactly is he referring to?†he said, with more than a little sniffiness. Okay then, I'll bite. I'll tell Mr. Benn what I think Mr. Allister was referring to.
For 30 years, up to the Sudanese Revolution of 2019, Sudan was governed by a system of Islamist savagery. Religious diktat was ruthlessly enforced. Women were treated like cattle, homosexuals like godless filth. Even now, after the repeal of some of those Sharia laws, sodomy remains a crime, punishable by life in jail. Following that 30-year experiment in medieval despotism, Sudan descended into a civil war that the UN has called a “war of atrocitiesâ€: massacres, hunger, desperation.
There you go, Mr. Benn: that's what people mean when they say “alien culture.†They mean a culture that feels foreign, unsettling, morally deficient. We await more information about the suspect in Belfast, but according to police he is 30 years old. This means he will have become a man in a nation where women were subjected to feudal violence, where ex-Muslims were threatened with being hanged by the neck, and where gays were considered so vile they were thrown in jail. The good people of Belfast are well within their rights to ask whether men from such a culture should be living on their streets.
Benn's comment sums up everything that's gone wrong in the political class. It confirms that the cult of relativism still swirls in establishment circles. To the modern left there is no greater thoughtcrime than to make a moral distinction between cultures. It is tantamount to heresy in their world to suggest that some cultures enjoy fewer virtues than others. Mercifully, they won't give you a lashing with a leather whip for such sacrilegious utterances, but they will give you a tongue lashing. That suspicion will hang in the air: “Are you racist?â€
Moral judgment is bigotry now. It is seen as suspect to celebrate the West's enlightened way of life over the benighted ignorance some nations tragically stew in. Let's turn it back on Mr Benn. How would you describe the culture of Afghanistan, where women are cloaked and gagged in public? Or of Saudi Arabia, where it is against the law to publicly proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ? Or of Eritrea, where homosexuals are frequently rounded up by the state and subjected to horrifying violence?
I'd call them alien cultures. And inferior cultures. It is better to live in a society where women can wear what they want, where you can worship any god or none, and where the state leaves gays alone. It isn't racist for everyday Brits to bristle at the arrival of thousands of young men from cultures that force women to cover up their sinful flesh and which considers it legitimate to asphyxiate non-believers in Allah.
I suspect Benn's attitude would be different if he were a 15-year-old girl in a working-class town who woke up one morning to find 800 men from alien cultures in the hotel at the end of the road. Indeed, the government expressly warns against travel to Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan, yet then it lets in young men full of swagger from those very nations. It isn't these men's “race†Brits are worried about – the vast majority of Britons are perfectly fine with our multiracial society. No, it's their culture.
For how much longer will working-class communities have to suffer the consequences of state failure and bourgeois virtue? “Refugees welcome!†cry the activist classes in their leafy suburbs, while in less well-off Britain the mass arrival of these “refugees†is leading to discomfort, tension, assault, even murder. The social experiment of moral non-judgmentalism has been a catastrophe. Time to end it.
