This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column The extension of rape, to cover any situation where a woman says she has been raped, is a huge difficulty for a fair legal system that relies on actual evidence before deciding guilt. As he quickly found out, it is not. I am sorry that he was in the end forced to grovel. But this is a Liberal, PC government, and I am not surprised. Revolutionary feminism, which regards all men as predators and sees the married family as a sordid prison, has scared most politicians, most judges, most journalists, most civil servants – and most people – into accepting its nasty dogmas. Oddly enough, Mr Clarke would normally be an ally of this cause. But ultra-feminist zealotry is bitterly intolerant of any disagreement, however gentle or thoughtful. Nothing short of total submission will do. The problem is Mr Clarke’s unceasing search for ways of stopping our prisons from bursting. The answer is quite simple – the reintroduction of serious punitive prison regimes, plus putting the police back on preventive foot patrol. But that would never do in the liberal world of David Cameron. So instead sentences – even for rape – must get shorter and shorter until they almostentirely disappear. It won’t work. Whatever this lot does, I promise you, the prisons will be crammed, with their revolving doors whizzing round fast enough to generate electricity. Modern liberals make a few exceptions to their view that lawbreakers need to be let out of jail quickly. One is over child-molesting, which has become the one form of sexual behaviour of which we can all still disapprove. One is when people ‘take the law into their own hands’, by defending themselves, their families or their property. The courts and the police view this as competition, and fear it. So it is crushed with heavy sentences. Another is offences against political correctness. And another is rape. But in this case rape does not usually mean what most people think it means – the forcible abduction and violation of a woman by a stranger. It means a dispute about consent, often between people who are already in a sexual relationship. It means one person’s word against another’s, in highly unequal circumstances, with the accuser granted anonymity and the accused under the glare of publicity. Ms Guerin, who during her stint in Israel often seemed more like a prosecutor than a reporter, has adopted the full hijab or headscarf, completely covering her hair, plus a very, very long dress. Is she trying too hard here? And if so, why? The BBC said it was a ‘conservative area’ but couldn’t provide any details of how it measured this. It also said other female reporters had done the same thing, but couldn’t, despite repeated requests, substantiate this. I’m all in favour of showing respect to the culture where you are. But in this clip, Ms Guerin is speaking to camera and standing in front of a van, not conversing with some mullah stuck in the 14th Century. If he will wear a Union Jack tie, then I don’t see why an Army band can’t play Kevin Barry or some other rebel ditty while he lays his tributes. As far as I am concerned the Irish people, almost all of them, are our friends, brothers and sisters, bound to us by many common causes, greatly enriching the culture and history of our two islands. If I could undo the Easter Rising and the execution of its leaders, I would. The obvious liking shown on both sides during the Queen’s visit is far more representative than the violent, undying hate of Sinn Fein. The pro-drug lobby – much like Big Tobacco when the link between cigarettes and lung cancer was first made – is hostile to any facts that contradict its claims. I fear Sir Ian’s allegiance to this cause has affected him in this way. During a London debate on the subject last week, my ally Dr Hans-Christian Raabe tried to hand Sir Ian an article from the New England Journal Of Medicine that supported a point he had just made – that deaths due to legal prescription drugs (eg methadone) far exceed deaths due to illegal drugs (eg heroin) in the USA. Sir Ian flung it to the floor. Is this what we should expect from a former president of the Royal College of Physicians? If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column First, I’ll deal with the massacre of Liberal Democrat councillors. There was some justice in this. We have a Liberal Government, and it was right that Liberals should be punished for its failings – the terrible schools where learning takes second place to social engineering, the mad foreign policy where we intervene cluelessly in other people’s countries while disbanding our armed forces, the pitiful justice system which refuses to protect the good from the bad, and instead makes excuses for the bad. But alas, this was not what the voters meant to do. They believed the comical media fiction – the exact opposite of the truth – that this is a conservative Government being propped up by imprisoned liberals. And so they sacked a lot of Liberal councillors in revenge for this imagined crime. I do wish these people could find me one scrap of evidence that this is in fact a ‘Right-wing’ Government. It would cheer me up. Please don’t tell me about the alleged ‘cuts’, which when finished will still leave us as one of the highest-taxed and most state-controlled, politically corrected countries on earth. The people who should have been punished, who stand for election as Conservatives and then govern as Liberals, were let off. I do not know if this can last. It is quite possible. I suppose that Tory voters may believe that if they carry on voting Tory, their party may one day turn into a proper conservative pro-British movement. This is a bit like going down to your nearest swamp, pond or bog and kissing all the frogs you can find in the belief that eventually one of them will turn into a prince. It didn’t work the first time because it is never going to work. But hope seems to override sense in the polling booths when party loyalties are involved. It is striking that if people forget party loyalties they actually start to think. Millions for once actually used their brains in a polling booth when asked to decide on the AV referendum. The huge majority against AV was a flickering vision of what might happen if we had a party that wasn’t the Tories, and which stood for common-sense policies on crime, mass immigration, education, the family and national independence. The sad part of this is that our clear dislike of constitutional reform will not actually make much difference. I suspect we will now get something much worse than AV as a consolation prize for the Liberals. This will be a ‘Senate’ to replace the House of Lords, elected by proportional representation. And there will be no referendum on that because we might reject it. Then, as the Election approaches, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories will stage a noisy trial separation. It will be much like the largely faked bickering of the past few weeks, only more so. And it will end with the Liberal Democrats pretending to walk out of the Coalition in a huff over some carefully chosen row. And then David Cameron will be Prime Minister of a minority Government which is made up entirely of Tories, but which still follows the Liberal policies Mr Cameron likes. The excuse this time will be that it doesn’t have a majority. He hopes that thanks to the revolutionary boundary changes due to come into force soon that he will then win the next Election outright. And then he will be able to govern as a Liberal because nobody in his feeble party will dare to challenge him. If that doesn’t work, he can always try another coalition. More than eight years ago I wrote in this newspaper warning of the foolish sex quotas being imposed on Fire Brigades. I have nothing against any fit, strong women who want to work as firefighters. Good luck to them. What I warned against was a lowering of standards to raise the quota of women in the fire service. Minimum height rules were abandoned, chest expansion and lung-capacity tests abolished. A test which involved carrying a 12-stone man 100 yards was scrapped. I suspect that the main result of this will have been more small, unfit men in the Fire Service, which doesn’t strike me as a good thing. The numbers of women have remained obstinately low. But the equality zealots have not been put off. I have heard from a firefighter who (as they all do) begged me to keep her or his sex, name and location secret. He or she writes that the watered-down fitness standards of only six years ago have now been weakened further still. ‘They’ve reduced the standard to the point where, if you can walk, you can probably pass it. I know of a woman, weighing 26 stone, who smoked, drank and had done no physical exercise since she left school 16 years before, and she drove everywhere. She came down and took the “official national fire service fitness test” and passed. She only failed to get in because she was scared of heights.’ Could these reduced standards, combined with a reduction in training and a pursuit of ‘equality and diversity’, have anything to do with the alarming rise in deaths in the fire brigades, especially since 2003? Something is certainly wrong. The Fire Brigades Union and the Labour Research Department – both Left-wing bodies – say that more firefighters are dying on duty now than for 30 years. Time for an inquiry, before it gets worse, and before the public are affected as well. Surely the saving of lives comes before equality and diversity? Or does it?
Some rapes ARE worse than others... there, I've said it
16 May 2011 2:22 PM
How I can be so relaxed about Bin Laden's death? It's easy...
14 May 2011 6:43 PM
Keep on kissing the Tory frog if you like - but he's never going to turn into a prince
Sunday, 22 May 2011
I am sick of the censorship that surrounds the issue
of rape. So I shall defy it. Of course all rapes are bad. But some rapes are worse than others.
Even for saying this, I know quite well that I will get raging, lying abuse. This is what
happened to Kenneth Clarke, right, when he went on the radio and tried to speak his mind as if
this were a free country.
Those who don’t think there’s anything wrong with this definition are quite entitled to their opinion. But they’re not entitled to shout down those who disagree with them. Even so, I bet they try to.
In full hijab, is Orla trying a bit too hard?
Here's the BBC’s very severe reporter Orla Guerin broadcasting from Pakistan after an atrocity.
Even the late Benazir Bhutto, who was Premier of Pakistan and needed to keep the imams happy, usually wore her headgear further back than this.
Now Gerry Adams can lay a wreath in Guildford
Following the Queen’s successful visit to the Irish Republic, I look forward to the day when President-of-all-Ireland Gerry Adams makes a state visit to London and lays wreaths at Harrods, in Hyde Park, outside the Old Bailey, in Bishopsgate and at Canary Wharf, and then heads out of town to do the same in Brighton, Deal, Warrington, Manchester, Guildford and Birmingham – and on the graves of Ross McWhirter and Ian Gow.
Yet, behind all the smiles and generosity, Sinn Fein has been the ultimate winner in this conflict.
Lawrence retrial is a bad day for liberty
I am sorry but I cannot rejoice at the planned retrial of a suspect in the Stephen Lawrence murder case.
The rule against being tried twice for the same offence is a keystone of freedom. And to work, it has to be a rule, even when it breaks our hearts to obey it. For if it is not absolute, then one day a bad government will use this as a precedent to pursue and crush opponents. Why do we care so little about these great treasures of liberty? Perhaps we no longer deserve to have them.
**************************
The head of the Armed Forces, General Sir David Richards, has been making political speeches, calling for more indiscriminate bombing of Libya.
This is not his job. He is also plumb wrong. We should abandon this daft ill-considered war before we get in any deeper.
**************************
It always gravely saddens me to see Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, a distinguished doctor who has dedicated his life and mind to the cure of disease and the easing of pain, supporting the dangerous campaign to soften our drug laws. If successful, this will lead to greatly increased pain, misery and disease.
Notes and Queries
I'm in between journeys and cumbered about with much business of one kind or another. So I can't reply as fully as I'd like, but here are a few general thoughts on comments and responses to recent postings.
On the Bin Laden question, I am asked how I can be so relaxed about his death if he was not directly responsible for the 11th September massacres. Mainly because I have no doubt that he was directly responsible for several earlier, if lesser, attacks.
I am also asked if my speculation flies in the face of the 9/11 commission report. Does it? I would be glad if anyone could quote from that report the passages which directly link Osama Bin Laden to the attacks in the USA on that date, which do not rely on Bin Laden's own boasting of his responsibility.
I am happy to concede that he had *some* involvement. What seems to me to be suspect is the 'Al Qaeda' explanation, that this was a generalised attack on the 'West' by 'Al Qaeda' because 'they hate our way of life'.
My point is that both 'Al Qaeda' and the 'West' are concepts too vague to be much use (any expert will tell you that 'Al Qaeda' is at most a franchise or an ideology, rather than a close-knit organisation with a command structure. It simply cannot be compared to the Provisional IRA, ETA, the Red Army Faction or other previous terror groups, which most definitely did – and in some cases still do – have such structures). Also, the contention that this was in some way an attack on our way of life' is in my view both false and gravely misleading. If this is so, then we are condemned to war forever, since there will always be billions of people who can be assumed to be motivated to war and terror by the fact that the 'west' is not Islamic.
I happen to think this is untrue.
I think that most Muslims are entirely uninterested in such a war. I also think that many Muslims quite rightly and reasonably disapprove of our debauched and decadent way of life, as do I, and I do not think that a temporary superiority in wealth and weapons entitles us to feel superior to them.
The fundamental emptiness of neo-conservatism (and its ability to appeal to Marxist leftists such as Nick Cohen and my brother) comes from its complete absence of a real counter to the claims and ideas of Islam. This is because it has rejected Christianity, the only coherent answer we in fact possess to Islam. As Rudyard Kipling once wrote in 'Recessional', 'Reeking tube' and 'iron shard' will not alone protect us.
My point is that specific actions happen at specific times for specific reasons. Like it or not, terrorists are rational beings, hateful not because of their irrationality – but because of their merciless ruthlessness.
Terrorism works. Look at Northern Ireland. Look at the transformation of Yasser Arafat from despised fringe figure to garlanded statesman, showered with money and status by the 'West' which began by denouncing him. Look, as some will rightly point out, at Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
My points, about the UN Durban conference just before the outrage, about the actual words of one of the principal murderers, about the major retreats and policy changes made by the U.S. after the outrage, about the unbridled joy over the outrage concentrated in the Middle East itself, seem to me to be persuasive.
Those, such as Mr 'Crosland', who dispute this, need to explain an alternative *specific* rationale, not huff and puff with general doubts.
I am also asked what is so significant about the switch of U.S. policy, to support for a Palestinian State.
Those who ask this maintain that support for such a state, which could co-exist with Israel, is not a blow to Israel.
This is, in my view, seriously naïve. The reason why Israel itself (and many in the U.S. policy establishment before 11th September 2001) so fiercely opposed this move, the reason why the Clinton White House actually disavowed a statement in its support by the President's own wife, is that the idea that such Palestinian State could co-exist with Israel is not, er, universally shared. (Look, for example, at Gaza, from which Israel has withdrawn. Do its people go about their business seeking the best available lives? No, they do not. They continue to wage war against the state which has granted them the independence they said was their aim, at great cost to themselves).
Those who take the pessimistic view argue that such a state (this goal is a fairly recent invention as an aim of the 'Palestinian' cause, itself invented only after the successive military defeats of direct Arab attacks on Israel) is not an aim in itself. It is instead intended to be temporary, as a stage upon the way to the true objective, namely the removal of the Jewish state (one governed by Jews and – crucially – with its immigration controlled by Jews) from the Middle East.
There is plenty of evidence that this is the case, which I have gone into before and will no doubt have to go into again. But not now. Look at the index.
My case that, to imagine that it doesn't matter which side the USA takes in this controversy is to miss the point, spectacularly. This, plus the rapprochement with the UN, was a gigantic policy switch which needs to be explained by something.
Now, it is never a good idea for a President whose country has just been attacked to look weak. And this is never more important than when he is actually *being* weak. So this is a perfectly good explanation for the flailing, futile attack on Afghanistan and even (though I agree that fear of 'losing' Saudi Arabia may have played a part) the later attack upon Iraq.
Personally I have little doubt that George W.Bush would have made still more concessions to Arafat, had it not been for the brutally cynical diplomacy of Ariel Sharon, who cunningly managed to identify Israel with the wounded USA. There is also the perennial problem, that practical, real concessions to the 'Palestinian' cause are not really what is wanted in the Arab Muslim world. What is wanted is a steady move towards the de-recognition, destabilisation and de-legitimisation of Israel, ending with the Jewish state enduring a South African style political and economic isolation (this – in my view false - parallel between Israel and Apartheid South Africa is repeatedly made by influential people), followed by the concession of the 'right of return' of Arab refuges which will spell the end of it.
You may want this outcome or you may not (personally I do not, as I sometimes say but I don't wish to argue about that here again and haven't time to do so now). But the point here is that I just think it silly to pretend that 11th September wasn't about Israel, the preoccupation of the Arab and Muslim world, or that it didn't move the world many steps closer to that point.
As to who was actually directly responsible for plotting these cruel murders, I have no idea. Quite possibly Bin Laden's Afghan outfit played some part, though quite how one learns to hijack and fly a plane in Kandahar or a 'terror training camp' I don't know. As I sometimes point out, the use of air piracy (hijacking) as a political weapon was originated, developed and perfected by the 'Palestinian' movement, going back to Leila Khaled and Dawson's Field. It seems worth asking. But as soon as we believe the single bogeyman theory, we stop thinking…
And I think we should start thinking again.
For the ten millionth time, I have explained why I will not support UKIP and the index provides the answer (though the key phrases 'Robert Kilroy Silk', 'behind the fridge', 'Nigel Farage' and 'cannabis decriminalisation' may help).
People did not, as one contributor says, vote against AV because the Tories told them to. The huge majority against this silly scheme included many who would never have voted Tory. My point was and remains that, freed from the party mind-set, people voted intelligently in their own interest. But as long as elections are conducted on this Rangers versus Celtic, or Spurs versus Chelsea basis, people will stop thinking as soon as they go into the general election polling booths. Hence the need to get rid of the existing parties, especially the Tories, urged here ad infinitum.
A reader doubts the story of the 26-stone woman. It was told to me in good faith by an articulate well-informed firefighter who knew of it directly. If the reader believes it to be untrue, perhaps he can tell me what, in the recruitment regulations of those fire services which have most lowered their standards, would prevent it?
My suspicion is that a) in many services nothing would prevent it and b) that the person's sex would make it difficult for recruiters pursuing quotas to reject her. I expect something of this kind will happen before long, if it has not already done so.
And then people will say 'Political correctness gone mad' and as 'how did we get here?' We got here by not believing how bad things are, and by not being prepared to fight back against it.
I have looked hard and long for any grounds for hope in the votes that took place on
May 5. So far I have not found any. The cynical liberal David Cameron is still very much in charge of his Unconservative Party.
He may even be able to save it from the collapse it has so long and so richly deserved by actually winning the next Election outright. If so it will be by luck rather than judgment.
But Mr Cameron, alas, is almost as lucky as his mentor and model Anthony Blair, whose prosperous, grinning survival is bitter proof that fortune doesn’t necessarily favour the good.
Or it might all go wrong, if George Osborne’s economic policies plunge us into another recession and things get so bad that even Ed Miliband can win an Election – by no means impossible. So there you have it – Left-wing government stretching out ahead till the crack of doom, while the country slowly breaks up, and nothing you can do about it, as long as you carry on kissing the Tory frog and hoping he’ll turn into a prince. As I said, not much to look forward to, but quite a lot to laugh at, if you have a bitter sense of humour. Luckily for me, I do.
What’s really important, ‘equality and diversity’ or the lives of firefighters?
The dogmatic madness of the Cultural Revolution marches on, screaming abuse at its critics as it destroys good institutions
and people.
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