Yet more to celebrate

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 21 December 2004 11:09.

“Sadly, community leaders have been unable to guarantee to us that there will be no repeat of the illegal and violent activities we witnessed on Saturday. It is now clear that we cannot guarantee the safety of our audiences. Very reluctantly, therefore, we have decided to end the current run of the play purely on safety grounds.”

Stuart Rogers, executive director, Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

“We congratulate the theatre for making its decision after we exercised our democratic rights to protest. There are no winners and no losers. The end result is that commonsense has prevailed.”

Kim Kirpaljit Kaur Brom, spokesman for the Sikh protesters.

And the question left behind amid the bricks and broken glass: Will a longer exposure of Sikhs to British law and the British way of doing things make the slightest difference to the way they do things?

Update

Naturally, the issue is being spoken of purely as one of free expression, thus proving that we do not possess the freedom of expression requisite to do full justice to it.

Neal Foster, actor-manager of the Birmingham Stage Company, said, “The story cannot end here. I will be willing to produce the play in Birmingham. I think freedom of expression is more important than health and safety.”

So Neal is willing to suffer for his art - not only, indeed, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but an unpredictable and violent mob of religious sub-continental Indians. Naturally, Neal has “full respect for the Sikh community.” He did a production with them last year. But will they care?

Not, it seems, unless he shows “common sense”. Or, as Mohan Singh of the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in south Birmingham puts it, “It’s a sad fact, but it’s a very good thing that they have seen common sense on the issue ... the fact of the matter is that it has taken things to become violent before it happened.”

The Telegraph article concludes with the comforting thought that such liberal-left voices as the actors’ union Equity and the Index on Censorship have condemned the outcome at the Birmingham Rep as a blow to freedom of speech and expression.

The blow fell very much earlier than that.

Tags: Immigration

Comments:

Posted by Geoff M. Beck on Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:24 | #

Part of me deplores the activity of the Sikh “community”. My first reaction is ‘why are these people allowed into the West’, the second reaction is how barbaric.

But the Western man must - too - show his anger and he must to rebel against those powers and principalities that are denigrating him, his culture, and history.

We too need to get mean and angry. Politeness, manners, and deference are relics the Victorians gave us. The Victorians are dead! Pirates run our institutions now, they don’t deserve our respect.

Posted by Braveheart on Tue, 21 Dec 2004 20:14 | #

Yesterday, on Monday, I read in the newspaper in Flanders that the play will be staged again on Thursday, but that the Sikhs will probably gather in protest from all over Britain. An escalation thus. Between five and ten thousand could be expected said Mohan Singh.

Posted by Phil on Tue, 21 Dec 2004 20:29 | #

Well, well, well. So far we have been told that intolerance is a Muslim problem. Some of our anti-Muslim neo-con “conservative” types would keep the doors open (Stephen Steinlight anyone?) if you could just keep those dangerous Muslims out.

This episode tells us that such attitudes are not the monopoly of Muslims but are endemic to what we lovingly refer to as the “Third World”.

Funny that the man who foresaw all this forty years ago was condemned as a horrible Bigot and marginalised by the entire establishment. Will someone remember him for his statesmanship twenty years from now when such events become a regular feature of British public life? Dont count on it. The people who write history these days are the ones who understand it the least.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 21 Dec 2004 21:52 | #

The irony of it all, guys, is that this is a clash between two liberal-left causes, these being: the sacred rights of minorities versus the freedom to give two fingers to every religious bigot.

As far as history is concerned, the freedom-loving left was taken through the courts by Mary Whitehouse and her “bigots” in 1976, with the Gay News blasphemy trial. The left lost the battle but won the war, having shown that, irrespective of what the courts deemed just, King Canute cannot hold back (ie censor) the tide of freely expressed artistic excrement.

To what extent blasphemy (or defamation) enters into the Sikh playwright’s transgressions now I don’t know. But if it does, the protesters probably have a case in law since the Act under which Gay News was prosecuted is still on the Statute Books.

Instead, they have responded in a perhaps more traditionally sub-continental if scarcely English, never mind Anglican, way. So much more effective than Mary W’s methodology, too.

Posted by Geoff Beck on Tue, 21 Dec 2004 23:22 | #

Ahh got it, had to dig a little bit for “Mary Whitehouse”, but found out. We’ve got lots of her type in the USA, but they are ignored and marginalized, in the same way. Love this quote: “the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt that the BBC projects into millions of homes through the television screens.”

Oh here is the link if others don’t know of her.
(don’t know anything about “melonfarmers”).

Here is another quote… great one too…

“The enemies of the West,” she said in 1965, “saw that Britain was the kingpin of Western civilisation; she had proved herself unbeatable on the field of battle because of her faith and her character. If Britain was to be destroyed, those things must be undercut.”

I agree with her. The rise to globalism on part of the USA is a historical tragedy, both for the US and her allies.

Posted by Phil on Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:41 | #

Broken windows won’t do it folks. The Left deserves its throats cut - before the TV cameras with everyone watching. Nothing less than that would do it. Muslim fanatics lusting for blood and without warning catching some Left-Wing homosexual and slitting his throat, then recording the thing and putting it on the internet for millions of his brthren to log in and see.

Thats the way forward. The Left wins the battle against civilized and civil, restrained law abiding men and women of the western Conservative persuasion because our sense of justice and deference to the law far outweighs any sense of outrage at even the greatest transgressions the left commits.

Thankfully, those swarthy darlings the Left likes to import harbour no such compunctions - and the nastier elements prefer slitting throats.

Enoch Powell warned us of all this forty years ago and our establishment shut him out. Fair enough. But that establishment now has it coming to it. Handsomely.

I might sound harsh when I say this, but I dare say those Sikhs have been a bit too restrained so far. I have a feeling that the Muslims would have been less so (and perhaps the Sikhs still have their best stuff in store).

Neitzsche said, “ideas have consequences”. They most certainly do. BUT, for a change I WANT those people who bring untold harm upon their own Nations to bear the real brunt of the worst consequences that their own political shenanigans bring about. Justice lies in the Left bearing the brunt of its own destructiveness. Let the murderers lust for their blood. Justice demands that.

Posted by Matra on Wed, 22 Dec 2004 02:43 | #

Phil, if you want to look at it that way then the attack on leftist New York City and wasn’t so bad after all. It certainly woke up some liberals.

Bill Kauffman, an American writer, who favours “localism” and writes for the left wing Counterpunch.org site and the paleoconservative Chronicles, wrote after 9/11: “even the window of the Village Voice displays Old Glory. Whether or not the colors would fly had the hijackers crashed their planes in Philadelphia or Boise is another question—one to which I think we all know the answer”.

http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17287/article_detail.asp

Yet people from Boise along with Southerners whose identity is under constant attack from people in New York and Washington (including the Pentagon) acted as if they’d all been attacked. Americans whose towns are being overrun by illegal and legal immigrants due to the unwillingness of the federal government to defend the border are willing to sign up to fight harmless Iraqis on behalf of that same federal government. The natural patriotism of Middle Americans, or Middle Englanders, leads to such conservative-minded people being willing to fight for their country no matter what, even when it protects those Leftists who most despise them. Indeed feminist and gay activists in the West still seem willing to give Muslims the kind of slack they wouldn’t for a moment give to many of their own Christian countrymen. I certainly would be fascinated to see how such people would react to a major Muslim terrorist attack at something like a homosexual rights demonstration.