Let’s pretend that nineteen year old Mohammed posted something along these lines on TikTok from his bedroom in Luton:

“A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Golders Green (an area in London with a large Jewish population) would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the kosher klan, for a start, and all those middle-class lawyers, bankers and media types would be vapourised in a nanosecond.”

As the cops point a gun to his head, he tells them “I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kind of way. One on Golders Green, one on Finchley, and the UK would soon begin its recovery, with only a few chunks of gently glowing cobalt 60 left to remind us of what we are missing.”

Those two paragraphs are a very lightly edited transcription of “And now let’s bomb Glastonbury” in The Spectator by a character called Rod Liddle in which he makes the case for bombing the festival and the city of Brighton. (I have heard people say that it is possible to read paywalled articles through some sort of technological magic. I really wouldn’t know about that.)

Liddle won’t be dragged out of bed at 5am because he’s a white, 65 year old who is well connected in the worlds of politics and journalism. He now specialises in doing a clownish version of right wing extremism, or more precisely, suggesting to others that right wing violent extremism is certainly an option worth considering.

He is the sort that believes the Israeli Defence Force is entirely justified in dealing with its collective trauma following Bob Vylan’s thirty seconds of chanting by dropping a 500lb bomb a couple of days later on a café it knew to be full of civilians, followed by a bit of recreational shooting of people in food queues.

Patrick Magee, a man who knows more than most, about bombing Brighton has said that he approached the IRA leadership with the idea and didn’t think it would be taken seriously. The bilious Liddle doesn’t have Magee’s willingness to get himself killed or locked up for a long time, but I absolutely believe him when he says that he is in favour of killing large numbers of people who oppose a genocide to which, as far as I know, he has never voiced the slightest objection. Why else is he floating the idea in an influential right wing magazine?

If an 83 year old woman can be arrested and face two or three years in prison for holding up a placard, a year more than she’d get for gross negligence manslaughter, then it is hard to understand why a 65 year old man is not arrested for inciting someone who shares his views to plant bombs. If it’s good enough for a young Muslim enraged by mass murder, it’s good enough for a reactionary old white man.

Rod Liddle, Sue Parfitt and Mohammed’s Tik Tok

Let’s pretend that nineteen year old Mohammed posted something along these lines on TikTok from his bedroom in Luton:

“A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Golders Green (an area in London with a large Jewish population) would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the kosher klan, for a start, and all those middle-class lawyers, bankers and media types would be vapourised in a nanosecond.”

As the cops point a gun to his head, he tells them “I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kind of way. One on Golders Green, one on Finchley, and the UK would soon begin its recovery, with only a few chunks of gently glowing cobalt 60 left to remind us of what we are missing.”

Those two paragraphs are a very lightly edited transcription of “And now let’s bomb Glastonbury” in The Spectator by a character called Rod Liddle in which he makes the case for bombing the festival and the city of Brighton.

Liddle won’t be dragged out of bed at 5am because he’s a white, 65 year old who is well connected in the worlds of politics and journalism. He now specialises in doing a clownish version of right wing extremism, or more precisely, suggesting to others that right wing violent extremism is certainly an option worth considering.

He is the sort that believes the Israeli Defence Force is entirely justified in dealing with its collective trauma following Bob Vylan’s thirty seconds of chanting by dropping a 500lb bomb a couple of days later on a café it knew to be full of civilians, followed by a bit of recreational shooting of people in food queues.

Patrick Magee, a man who knows more than most, about bombing Brighton has said that he approached the IRA leadership with the idea and didn’t think it would be taken seriously. The bilious Liddle doesn’t have Magee’s willingness to get himself killed or locked up for a long time, but I absolutely believe him when he says that he is in favour of killing large numbers of people who oppose a genocide to which, as far as I know, he has never voiced the slightest objection. Why else is he floating the idea in an influential right wing magazine?

If an 83 year old woman can be arrested and face two or three years in prison for holding up a placard, a year more than she’d get for gross negligence manslaughter, then it is hard to understand why a 65 year old man is not arrested for inciting someone who shares his views to plant bombs. If it’s good enough for a young Muslim enraged by mass murder, it’s good enough for a reactionary old white man.

Let’s pretend that nineteen year old Mohammed posted something along these lines on TikTok from his bedroom in Luton:

“A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Golders Green (an area in London with a large Jewish population) would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the kosher klan, for a start, and all those middle-class lawyers, bankers and media types would be vapourised in a nanosecond.”

As the cops point a gun to his head, he tells them “I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kind of way. One on Golders Green, one on Finchley, and the UK would soon begin its recovery, with only a few chunks of gently glowing cobalt 60 left to remind us of what we are missing.”

Those two paragraphs are a very lightly edited transcription of “And now let’s bomb Glastonbury” in The Spectator by a character called Rod Liddle in which he makes the case for bombing the festival and the city of Brighton.

Liddle won’t be dragged out of bed at 5am because he’s a white, 65 year old who is well connected in the worlds of politics and journalism. He now specialises in doing a clownish version of right wing extremism, or more precisely, suggesting to others that right wing violent extremism is certainly an option worth considering.

He is the sort that believes the Israeli Defence Force is entirely justified in dealing with its collective trauma following Bob Vylan’s thirty seconds of chanting by dropping a 500lb bomb a couple of days later on a café it knew to be full of civilians, followed by a bit of recreational shooting of people in food queues.

Patrick Magee, a man who knows more than most, about bombing Brighton has said that he approached the IRA leadership with the idea and didn’t think it would be taken seriously. The bilious Liddle doesn’t have Magee’s willingness to get himself killed or locked up for a long time, but I absolutely believe him when he says that he is in favour of killing large numbers of people who oppose a genocide to which, as far as I know, he has never voiced the slightest objection. Why else is he floating the idea in an influential right wing magazine?

If an 83 year old woman can be arrested and face two or three years in prison for holding up a placard, a year more than she’d get for gross negligence manslaughter, then it is hard to understand why a 65 year old man is not arrested for inciting someone who shares his views to plant bombs. If it’s good enough for a young Muslim enraged by mass murder, it’s good enough for a reactionary old white man.