RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you look you will find that numbers of Conservative MPs in England hide their school. This is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine that they’ve either gone to a posh public school and want to hide that from the common folk; or they’ve gone to a local comprehensive and want to hide that from their colleagues and sundry VIPs.

Who cares, I suppose? But I was looking up Conservative MP Michael Tomlinson. He’d asked a particularly stupid question of Theresa May and I wondered, naturally, whether he’d been educated at Eton.

I have the view that public schoolboys have been largely responsible for selling England’s (Britain’s if you really insist) cultural heritage down the river to satisfy their moral vanity. I could be wrong about that. I might have a chip on my shoulder, having been dragged up in a working-class school for budding deplorables in the North West of England.

But never mind, that’s my view, and I am sticking to it. If climate alarmists can stick to their tenuous view, why can’t I?

Apropos the Westminster act of terror, Mr Tomlinson asked this question of Mrs May in the UK Parliament:

“It is reported that what happened yesterday was an act of Islamic terror. Will the Prime Minister agree with me that what happened was not Islamic, just as the murder of Airey Neave* was not Christian, and that in fact both are perversions of religion?”

I don’t want to dwell on Tomlinson or his penchant for the non sequitur. But to state the bleeding obvious, killing for Allah is religious alright. Killing for a united Ireland has nothing to do with wanting the universal imposition of papal law.

The illogicality of Tomlinson’s question is one of the reasons I thought that he might be an old Etonian But wherever he was educated, he is quite clearly a fool. But enough of him, what about Mrs May?

In part she answered this way:

“I absolutely agree, and it is wrong to describe this as Islamic terrorism. It is Islamist terrorism; it is a perversion of a great faith.”

It has been convenient to hide behind the terms Islamism and Islamists as distinct from Islam. Islamism is all the perverted bits. Islam is the “great” faith. And that’s it. No further analysis is undertaken. It is tautological. If anything bad happens it is done by Islamists. Only the good can be ascribed to Islam.

The problem is that there is only one Koran; one set of canonical scripture. There is no separate ‘perverted’ Islamist scripture. It all comes out of the same books. Of those same books, I don’t want to quote again the stuff that anyone with half a brain is now familiar with. Killing, enslaving, and subjugating non-believers, wife beating, apostate killing, under-age marrying; it’s all there in black and white.

OK then, it is clear to me now. Islamists are faithful to the whole kit and caboodle of Islamic scripture, whereas the good Muslims pick and choose. They, the latter group, follow an expurgated version of their scripture. All we need now is for them to identify which parts they embrace and which parts they disavow.

To help out, it would be sensible for Prime Minister May to commission someone of stature, with a public school background of course, Tomlinson perhaps, to head up an Islamic Inquiry. Its purpose would be to identify, on behalf of us non-believers, the makeup of the expurgated version of Islamic scripture. It would determine those parts of the full version deleted, scrapped, expunged, erased, effaced, cancelled, obliterated, crossed out, scratched out, wiped out, rubbed out, or otherwise edited out.

Good imams in the UK could be called together to ratify the expurgated version, as a prelude to its worldwide adoption by the whole world’s good Islamic clerical leaders. The redacted parts could be collected together as an Islamic version of the Grand Grimoire. Then we would know what perverted Islam looked like. And, to boot, readily identify Islamists whenever and wherever they were found secretly poring over their benighted and perverted scripture.

Would the expurgated faith stay “great”? Or, stripped of its malign, lose its shine? Leave it to our politicians to decide, there doth theological expertise reside. What’s clear beyond all argumentation is Mohammad’s inevitable defenestration.

Perforce Mohammad would be reduced to having a bit part. You simply can’t have the star of the show countenancing people being killed for insulting him or marrying a six-year old, even if he did resist temptation until she was nine. It’s just not a good look for a non-perverted religion.

* Neave, a Conservative MP, was killed in 1979 by a car bomb planted in the carpark of the House of Commons by the Irish National Liberation Army.