Three Tweets Are Not Racially Aggravated Harassment, Birmingham Court Rules; Taqiyya Doctrine Accepted

On 8 April at Birmingham Magistrates' Court, District Judge Ian Strongman heard a trial of racially aggravated harassment against Tim Burton, 61, a computing consultant from Birmingham and the Radio Officer of the British party Liberty GB.

The reason for the charge was three tweets he sent over a period of a month from early June to early July 2013 to Tell Mama UK, a helpline organisation for victims of anti-Muslim attacks that also serves to monitor and collect data on them, whose director is prominent Muslim Fiyaz Mughal.

Investigations by The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan discovered that, in the wake of the murder of soldier Lee Rigby, Tell Mama had inflated numbers and seriousness of “Islamophobic” crimes, many of which were just posts on social media.

Discrepancies were also found between police figures and the association’s statistics, and this led to Tell Mama’ state funding – which by then amounted to £375,000 – being discontinued.

These revelations inspired Mr Burton to write the tweet “I wish to report Fiyaz Mughal for being a mendacious, grievance-mongering little Muslim scumbag & I want my £214,000 back now.” (a reference to taxpayers’ money) and two other tweets of a similar tone, calling Mr Mughal a “taqiyya-artist”. For these three tweets Mr Burton was accused of racially aggravated harassment.

The concept of taqiyya, part of a well-established Islamic doctrine, is the divine permission and even encouragement for Muslims to deceive non-Muslims to further the cause of Islam, particularly when Muslims are a minority.

The trial lasted all day. The Crown Prosecution Service called Mr Mughal as a witness via a video link. He repeatedly expressed that the tweets made him feel intimidated and targeted for his Muslim faith. On cross-examination, it was revealed that he did not know the meaning of the word “mendacious”, one of the insulting remarks that provoked the trial.

Next, the defendant Tim Burton took the witness stand. He said that his tweets, although in retrospect intemperate, were not intended nor expected to generate distress or anguish in someone like Tell Mama’s director, whose job is to search for and read online posts of analogous kind.

He added that the tweets were a political expression of outrage at the abuse of public money and the encroachment of Islam into British society.

Dutch scholar of Islam Professor Hans Jansen gave evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. He explained that the doctrine of taqiyya is accepted by all Muslim theologians and Quran commentaries, and rejected the prosecution’s and Mr Mughal’s theory that this word refers to a behaviour only found among minority Shia Muslims persecuted by majority Sunni Muslims, or that it is just used by far-right groups to victimise Muslims.

Asked by the defence lawyer if a Muslim could reasonably be offended by being described as practicing taqiyya, the witness replied that he had no reason to, since it is part of the faith he follows.

The District Judge, who had read some of Professor Jansen’s writings before the trial, seemed to find his arguments persuasive.

He found that Mr Burton had a right to free expression and that Mr Mughal had not been caused harassment by the three tweets sent to Tell Mama which were critical of him and his organisation. Mr Burton was acquitted on all charges.

Is Islam a Race? Birmingham Trial Will Tell

On Tuesday 8 April at 10am Tim Burton’s trial at Birmingham Magistrates' Court will settle the question of whether the defendant, by calling Muslim Fiyaz Mujhal “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist” on Twitter, committed racially aggravated harassment, as he is accused of having done by the West Midlands Police.

Mujhal was exposed by The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan for exaggerating the numbers and seriousness of “anti-Muslim attacks” following the Woolwich murder of soldier Lee Rigby, and had his organisation Tell MAMA’s public funding discontinued. Many of these “attacks” were in fact simple posts on Facebook and other social media, similar to the tweets for which Burton is on trial.

Tim is the Radio Officer of Liberty GB, a British newly-formed conservative and patriotic party.

Burton’s trial is very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims belong to all races, including white. Furthermore, the Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct ones.

But, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case the CPS is trying to combine and confuse the two because it does not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge – which requires stronger evidence -, so decides to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.

As the CPS’s own website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.

The attempt to “racialise Muslims” clearly exists but not, as Tell MAMA says, on the part of Liberty GB. It exists on the part of British Islam apologists and their allies, the politically correct Establishment.

Since there are no blasphemy laws in the UK and criticism of any religion, including Islam, is theoretically tolerated, only two alternatives are left to British Muslims who want to protect Islam from the expression of the uncomfortable truths of its supremacist and violent nature. One is to invoke the introduction of a blasphemy law; the other, subtler and more effective, is to turn existing anti-racist, “hate crime” laws into a sharia-style blasphemy law.

An attempt had previously been made by the Labour government, when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 was passed, to formulate it in such a way that it could criminalise the criticism of Islam, the Quran and Muhammad. This was made impossible by the opposition of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, as well as the evangelical group Christian Voice who threatened to use this law against the Quran, which is full to the brim with incitements to religious hatred. Therefore the bill had to be amended.

But what went out legally by the door of Parliamentary procedure is now being reintroduced surreptitiously through the window of politically correct police and prosecution establishments.

This is why Liberty GB will hold a public protest outside Birmingham Magistrates' Court on 8 April at 9am and considers this trial crucially important.

Our intention is twofold. Firstly, to show to the British and Western public what taqiyya – deception for the good of Islam - is and, given the special position in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims of this divine permission to lie, to show the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it. For this reason, Islam’s scholar Professor Hans Jansen is scheduled to appear at the trial and give evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. We’ve christened this a “taqiyya trial”.

Secondly, to defend free speech and stop the effective use of anti-racist legislation as blasphemy laws.

Here are more details on Taqiyya Trials in Europe

The defendant Tim Burton will be on the courtroom steps at 9:15am and then inside the main building from 9:30am ready to be interviewed.

Are only True Beliefs Effective?

I’m interested in the relationship between truth and effectiveness of a belief (or a theory).

Are true beliefs the only ones to be useful, solve problems, achieve goals?

Is there a correspondence between what is true and what is effective?

Positivism says yes (look at the relationship of correspondence between science and technology, its application).

I also say yes: historically it seems true, humankind is ever more effective and has ever more power as scientific knowledge of reality progresses.

Whenever this is not the case, it is because one acts “as if”. That is, it happens if a false belief makes one behave in the same way as a true one.

A good example is: to suffer for the death of a loved one does not serve any purpose. But if somebody simply says that to him/herself, it may have no effect.

If, on the other hand, one thinks: “I’ll see that person again in Heaven”, s/he behaves as one who says: “Suffering serves no purpose”, even though s/he does that by following a, let’s assume, false belief, which in this case leads to the same behaviour that would be inspired by a true belief.

I've assumed, for the sake of argument, that this belief is false, but in reality it would be more accurate to say that it's not certain.

A British Tea Party?

First published on American Thinker.

By Enza Ferreri


If you had had the dubious privilege of watching the BBC’s political debate programme Question Time on March 6, you would have been afforded a glimpse of what immigration and multiculturalism have become in Britain, their consequences for its native residents and the Establishment’s response to both the crisis and the protests about it.

It followed the usual Question Time format, in which members of the public from an always-changing part of the country ask a panel of politicians and other “experts”, such as media people and assorted celebrities, questions of particular importance to them. This episode was filmed in Barking, an area of East London that has been subjected to an invasion – a member of the programme’s audience did use this appropriate term – by many ethnic immigrants over a short time. A look at the studio audience gave an idea of its multicultural composition.

Only one person was allowed to ask a question expressing her deep concerns over immigration, despite the fact that, as the moderator David Dimbleby explained, the programme had had more questions submitted on immigration than on any other topic except Ukraine, which was hot news at the time. He said this twice – once in reply to a politically-correct person who even dared reprimand the BBC for allowing the question to be aired.

The questioner, a native British woman, said that her community had been totally changed by immigration, “they” were a minority there now and Barking was the most terrible place on earth to live at the moment. Amidst a less-than-warm reaction, a man was the only other member of the audience taking her side, saying how the indigenous population was discriminated against while the immigrants had “money thrown at them”. He was jobless and homeless. He became so annoyed by the response he received from the hostile audience and the patronising, condemning panellists that he very ostentatiously put his coat on and left the studio. I’ve never seen this happening before, and I’ve watched perhaps hundreds of Question Time broadcasts.

On May 22nd, Britain will elect its share of Members of the European Parliament. One of the parties on the list will be, for the first time, Liberty GB. I am a member of Liberty GB’s Executive Council and a candidate at the May 2014 European Elections .

Liberty GB (donations towards the electoral effort are welcome) was born a year ago exactly out of this predicament and to give it a real solution, rather than the shrugging of shoulders of the main parties.

Mass immigration and Islamisation are the two greatest threats for the country, clearly related. Other priorities are to sort out the UK’s disastrous economy and to protect its traditions of democratic liberties and freedom of speech: all these problems are somewhat beautifully and – from the viewpoint of their solutions - conveniently interconnected, and we’ll see why.

Liberty GB has been compared to the USA’s Tea Party, and in fact has many similarities with it.

Looking at the Tea Party’s “15 Non-negotiable Core Beliefs” reveals that, apart from the belief about Obama’s stimulus which is specifically American, 13 out of the remaining 14 – the exception is about gun ownership, on which our views vary – are very close to our own core beliefs.

The 15 open with: “Illegal immigrants are here illegally.” It may appear a truism, but there’s an important reason why tautologies like this need to be enunciated, namely that the Left nonsensically tries to deny them and their implications, in the UK as in the USA. You couldn’t find a party in Britain which would agree with that sentiment expressed by the Tea Party more than Liberty GB.

Our manifesto contains “Deport all illegal immigrants” and “Establish a National Border Police Force to tackle illegal entry and other cross-border crime.”

Several Tea Party’s core beliefs, like ours, stress the importance of economic issues and of balancing the respective countries’ budgets.

The Tea Party is internationally renowned for its strong anti-tax stance. Liberty GB has, among its manifesto policies, the implementation of two projects researched and devised by the UK’s TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA): The Single Income Tax Report for the purpose of tax reduction and simplification, and Work for the Dole, similar to the Workfare enacted in America, to train and help people on out-of-work benefits back to work, thus reducing the size of the welfare state and the burden for taxpayers.

“Pro-domestic employment is indispensable.” is another Tea Party’s core belief. That is certainly not less true in Britain.

The UK has a peacetime-record national debt of one and a quarter trillion pounds, or 76.6% of GDP - predicted to rise to 94.30% this year -, growing at a rate of over 5,000 pounds per second.

A University College London’s study covering 16 years, the most far-reaching study ever conducted on the impact of migration on taxpayers, based on official and government figures, concluded that immigrants from outside the EEA (European Economic Area) take £100 billion, or 14%, more in benefits than they pay back in taxes.

What about European immigrants then? They pay 4% more than they take out, while indigenous British pay in 7% less than they receive from the government.

Despite the spin given by the authors of the study and some media that concentrated only on the favourable effect for Britain from European immigration, a look at the whole picture shows that immigration hurts British economy.

While for Third Worlders the negative verdict it’s easy to reach, for Europeans it requires more analysis but is the same.

European immigrants take jobs and pay taxes that the natives would, without foreign competition and with the help of Workfare schemes.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance report Work for the Dole analysis shows that employment today stands at a higher level than ever in UK history, and that 3.5 million new jobs have been created since 1997, but 68% of them were taken by immigrants. Therefore the number of out-of-work welfare claimants remained about the same, as many British people weren’t interested in the new jobs.

This is where all comes together: British identity, economy, welfare and tax systems, size of government.

We need to stop unrestricted immigration, to push welfare claimants to work, to reduce big government and high taxation: it’s all in Liberty GB’s manifesto.

There’s a good reason why human populations have come to be ruled by local bodies, and world government is favoured only by totalitarians like communists and devout Muslims. No country can be morally or politically responsible for what happens in so many others. Human beings, even the relatively more affluent and freer, are not omnipotent supermen or deities, and there’s only so much they can do.

People living in poor parts of the world should not be encouraged by rich nations’ wrong immigration open-doors policies to move there. It’s not just bad for the host countries, but for the ones the immigrants leave behind too.

As Roy Beck aptly and visually explains in the video Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs, even our well-intentioned efforts to relieve world poverty through immigration are never going to be anything more than a drop in the ocean. Not only that: they may paradoxically be counterproductive, by depriving destitute nations of their most resourceful, entrepreneurial, active and skilful inhabitants, who would do well to remain in order to help their own countries out of their quagmire.

After all, we’re not asking them to do anything that European and European-descendent people didn’t themselves do in past centuries, when they also had to fight against poverty, disease and despotism.

The neediest are not the immigrants from the Third World to our shores, who, having the money to pay for the travel, are likely to be less indigent and isolated than their non-emigrating countrymen.

The greatest areas of difference between Liberty GB and the Tea Party are firearms and Islam, perhaps due to the diverse contexts of Britain and America.

Regarding Islam, there isn’t so much a distinction in stance as in emphasis. Islam pervades British life more, and as a consequence it’s far more present in our policies, news, articles, Facebook posts, and the like.

Gun ownership doesn’t have in the UK the same resonance as in the USA. There’s hardly any public discussion, no Constitutional amendment to argue about, and public opinion is rather indifferent.
Britain changed its gun laws to highly restrict their use as a typical kneejerk reaction to a mass shooting - the Dunblane killings -, the kind of response which in the US found a staunch opposition during the hysteria in the wake of the Newtown massacre a year ago.

In 1996 a man walked into a school in Dunblane, Scotland, armed with four handguns, and began shooting, killing 16 children, their teacher, and himself. A year later, private ownership of handguns was almost completely banned. Penalties can be up to 10 years’ imprisonment. Tens of thousands of firearms were handed into the government. It’s not so surprising, if you think that, after all, Piers Morgan is British.

I am in favour of the Tea Party’s position, maybe due to the fact that I have followed the situation in the USA and researched the topic, but, since we have various views within Liberty GB’s Executive Council on this, it’s been decided that we don’t have an official stance.

An idea Liberty GB shares with the Tea Party is the belief in the fundamental importance of Christianity for the historic development and the future resilience of Western civilisation.

We favour immigration of Christians, not only for ease of assimilation, but also because they are by far the most persecuted group in the world. For the same reason we have the manifesto policy of ending foreign aid to countries without a proven record of protection of their minorities, in particular Christians.

Liberty GB also supports Christian values, marriage and traditional families.

What the two, the British party and the American movement, more fundamentally than anything else have in common is the awareness that compromise on core principles does not pay in politics. Conservatives’ abandonment of what defines them doesn’t lead to more popularity and election victories, but to the moving of the political middle ground further and further to the Left, making success more, not less, elusive.

Easy Smears of Political Opponents: An Example

A funny thing happened on the way to Facebook.

A month ago I posted on my Facebook page Save the West a photo by the US Anti-Fur Society of a white fox about to be anally electrocuted for his fur. The fox had overgrown nails for lack of walking on solid grounds, having lived his life on wire cages.

Animals farm-raised for fur are killed by gassing, neck-breaking, injection with poisons and anal electrocution so as not to damage their pelts. Wild fur-bearing animals are killed by clubbing and trapping, suffering agonising deaths.

An otherwise sensible visitor of Save the West, Davy Goossens, was shocked not so much by the atrocity portrayed by the picture - taken from a video - as from what he must have considered a greater crime: that, he claimed, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) had staged a different video of an animal skinned alive for his fur.

That PETA video was not the one I had posted, about the abysmal cruelty of which he had no comment to make.

Nevertheless, I investigated and found this.

From the beginning, I had very strong doubts that PETA, an organisation devoted to the protection of animals, would pay someone to skin animals alive in order to make a video - as was claimed -, and sure enough I found no evidence for that accusation.

I found no mention of this story in any respectable publication. The only link Goossens provided is to a blog, Top Cats Roar, which says: 'PETA ADMITS “SKINNED ALIVE IS A MYTH”', whereas in reality PETA has done no such thing. On PETA's website you still find the same video (that you can see above this article - warning: it's a suffering even to watch it, let alone to be the victim). That blog is clearly not telling the truth about PETA's position, so it is not reliable.

The only source that blog provides to support this alleged, extraordinary PETA's retraction is a link to a non-existing, probably removed, page on a website called Shanghaiist.

Top Cats Roar links to a page in Bradford Telegraph and Argus, a local paper. On this page is an article about a circus and a not-clearly-identified item claiming that "The German High Court found PeTA guilty of paying people to skin animals alive." There is no byline, no link or reference to the source of the news, not even a headline. Not a picture in sight. It does not look like an article but a comment from the public. In fact it's titled "Report this comment". I'm a professional journalist, and I don't recognise this as a proper story. It's very easy, these days, to fabricate a false piece of news online to smear an enemy - even easier than to forge a video -, and PETA has made many enemies in its battles for animal rights.

That's it. All the sources end in this pseudo-article.

Listen to the alleged key "witness" in the case:

The witness who committed this act for PeTA, a videographer, told the court that he didn't understand why they wanted it done that way, but he needed the money. This video was made in a third world country and the prosecutor found the man in the video who skinned the animal.

Let's be charitable and put aside for a moment the style of reporting, which betrays that this cannot be the product of serious journalism. Could this man be a worker for the fur industry just claiming that he's done his job on the request of PETA? Of course he could. What evidence is that? If people could be so easily found guilty on such kind of evidence, we would all be in prison.

Maybe this chap is as reliable as the Chinese farmer who claimed he had electrocuted an alien and kept it in his freezer.

Germany doesn't even have a High Court, it is called Federal Constitutional Court. It's sloppy reporting when dealing with a subject of this kind.

Other links in Top Cats Roar are to pages that have been removed too, like the supposedly original document in German of the German court order against PETA.

There is nothing about PETA on the Court's website.

You find nothing if you google "The German High Court found PeTA guilty of paying people to skin animals alive" except in obscure little sources replicating each other's content.

Nothing in PETA's very long Wikipedia entry.

In fact, PETA didn't need to fake anything because skinning animals alive for their fur is practised.

But Davy Goossens hasn't dropped this subject. Even when I post something not related to it, he occasionally repeats his same comments. Not exactly modestly and politely, he commented on Save the West:

you don't understand how fur trade works... If you want to sell it, you want to get the most money. if you want the most money, you want to sell the best fur. does it really make for too much intellect above your ability to grasp if you skin an animal alive you will ruin the fur?

In fact, he does't really know how these terrible operations work:

Many fur farms skin animals alive to keep the pelts intact from damage that could occur while killing them. To avoid bullet holes, tears or slits from a knife, fur farmers can use methods such as beating the animal, electrocuting them, using poison to paralyse them, or breaking their necks.[16] Although these methods ensure an undamaged pelt, they are sometimes not enough to confirm the death of the animal, leaving the creature to be skinned alive.

Or does he think that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is faking it too when it reports that Raccoon Dogs are Skinned Alive in China? Isn't this a more trustworthy source than the sorry, scruffy ones he referred to?

Political Seismic Shock across Europe

At least one senior Tory politician has realised what the new party Liberty GB has been saying since its inception a year ago.

From "European elite's refusal to accept change is fuelling extremism, warns leading Tory", in today's Daily Express:

Former Defence Secretary Liam Fox believes there will be "a seismic shock" across the continent as support grows for parties such as France's National Front and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands.

In a speech due to be delivered to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Williamsburg, Virginia tomorrow, Dr Fox is expected to blame EU leaders for the rise in extremism, as politicians are failing to represent the fears of the electorate properly.

He is due to say: "The heavily cosseted and pampered European political class in Brussels are only too willing to blame the citizens of the EU for the rise of political extremes on both left and right of the spectrum.

"They seem congenitally incapable of asking themselves whether it is their behaviour and their political brittleness that is the primary driver of this process."

It seems obvious that Fox sees what he calls "rise of political extremes" as something to be avoided, and I agree with him if he refers to communism and fascism.

But, from his references to the Dutch PVV and the French National Front, I suspect that he considers as extremism the totally legitimate and wholly natural resistance of European populations to being invaded, colonised and Islamised.

This confusion is useful to the Conservatives, though, as they can proclaim to be the bulwark against both real extremism and, more importantly, the much more likely electoral threat posed to them by the emerging parties that don't ignore but represent people's worries about immigration and Islam, of which Liberty GB is a still small but unwavering example.

The article ends thus:

Dr Fox's comments come after a ComRes poll published yesterday shows the Conservatives are set to finish third in May's European elections, with Ukip winning the vote.

Commissioned by the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror, the poll puts Ukip on 30 per cent of the vote, Labour on 28 per cent and the Tories on 21 per cent.

Patriotism from Life-Saving to Destructive Force

Below is one of the most lucid and insightful analyses of patriotism I've come across, dissecting the various stages through which this sentiment can go and clarifying at which of them it can or does become toxic.

"All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.", said the Swiss Paracelsus, one of the early chemists, founder of the discipline of toxicology. Even the best life-giving medicine, capable of restoring health if used in the appropriate way, may cause serious harm if misused and administered in the wrong dose.

I have some doubts only about the specific movements to which the poisonous level of patriotism is attributed, and I spot a certain harshness in the way the excerpt treats the USA, one of my favourite countries.

Also notice that, although the passage only deals with country patriotism and references to God and religion in it only concern Christianity, the final stage, the description of the "lowest rung of the ladder" can very neatly be applied to Islamic patriotism (or nationalism).

It is an extract from the upcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick by my friend, author and thinker Alexander Boot. That's how he describes it:

It's a thorough debunking of every political presupposition of modernity. The conclusion is the same as that reached by T.S. Eliot: democracy (the modern, unchecked version thereof) is incompatible with Christianity -- and therefore the Western political tradition. But Eliot had other irons in the fire, which is why he didn't approach the subject as systematically as I try to.

These are Alex's other books.

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Obviously Americans were not the first people to love their birthplace. Patriotism may have been the last refuge of a scoundrel to Dr Johnson, and indeed many a scoundrel has used it as such. But there is nothing wrong with loving one’s country, especially if it is lovable. (“For a country to be loved it ought to be lovely” was how Burke put it.) However, patriotism elevated to the perch previously occupied by religion is always pernicious. Here it would be useful to consider various levels of patriotism as expressed through everyday phrases uttered to describe them. This is best imagined as a ladder, with degrees of patriotism forming descending rungs.

“I love my country” sits at the top. This is a laudable statement. The country in which one is born and grows up does not have to be ideal any more than a woman has to be ideal to be loved. Whether it is perceived as perfect or flawed, one’s own country offers the degree of intimacy, warmth and shared historical memory that is keenly felt and cherished. Like two siblings who possess a knowledge inaccessible to a stranger, countrymen – regardless of their individual differences – are united by a bond as strong as it may be invisible to outsiders.

To expand on this observation, earlier I pointed out the intellectual weakness of the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” But the phrase is unassailable on a sub-intellectual level: a nation truly becomes one when most people in it regard most of the same truths as self-evident. In that sense the American states had been united even before the Declaration – that is, united in what most of their denizens accepted as axiomatic. Such shared knowledge and mutual understanding indeed come close to the feelings of two siblings: in that sense, brotherly love and love of one’s country are similar.

Nor is there anything wrong with regarding one’s country as unlike any other. All countries are different; if they were not, we would not have so many different countries. This is so obvious that one would think it hardly needs saying. But of course what matters here is not the text but the subtext: when people insist that their country is exceptional, they usually do not mean ‘different from…’, they mean ‘better than…’. They are entitled even to that opinion, as long as they recognise that tastes may differ.

Moving down a step, “I love my country, right or wrong” begins to be problematic. However, the problem is not insurmountable: after all, though we like for something, we love in spite of everything. A normal son cannot always stop loving his mother just because she is a compulsive shoplifter. Nor will a normal mother stop loving her son even if he boasts a string of juvenile convictions before his sixteenth birthday. So perhaps Burke’s aphorism quoted above ought to be ever so slightly modified. A country has to be lovely to be liked – loving it is a slightly different matter.

Another step down, and we overhear the statement “I love my country because it is always right.” Between this step and the previous one a line was crossed separating patriotism from jingoism. No country is always right. The belief that one can be is as false as it is widespread at the American grassroots.

When such sentiments are translated into action, we begin to leave behind the rivers supposedly flowing with milk and honey and approach a swamp fuming with putrid emanations. Implicit in this statement is tribal, what before the advent of political correctness used to be called Hottentot, morality: if I steal his cow, that is good; if he steals my cow, that is bad. It took several millennia of civilisation to overcome such tribalism, and by the looks of it the job has never been finished.

Another step down, and the morass sucks us in waist-high. Here one hears “My country is always right because it is guided by God in everything it does.” Typically this has nothing to do with any true religious faith: after all, Christ was unequivocal in stating that his kingdom was not of this world. America or any other country is ‘under God’ because everything is – but only for that reason.

At this level ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘a city on a hill’ are joined by the ‘Third Rome’ of Russia (replaced for a few decades by a more aggressive communist messianism) and the ‘Gott mit uns’ of the SS. The underlying assumption is that our actions cannot be judged by infidels, only by God, and he has given us an open-ended endorsement. Thus anything we do is justified simply because we do it.

The lowest rung reaches to the bottom of the swamp, where real creepy-crawlies take refuge. Here the sentiment is “Because our country is guided by God, it is our duty to impose our ways on others, whether they want it or not. Others may be either seduced or coerced, it does not matter which, as long as they join the fold.” Since no real faith in God underlines this feeling, the explanatory clause at the beginning of the sentence may at some point be dropped for being superfluous.

Only Americans and Russians ever descend this ladder below the top two rungs in noticeable numbers, and only Americans hardly ever stumble along the way. Also unique to America is the heavy representation of this genre of patriotism in the political mainstream. In other countries it is usually relegated to the lunatic fringe, an area inhabited, say, by France’s Front National, German neo-Nazis or our own dear BNP. Other places also have individuals prepared to dive headlong into the swamp of sanctimonious jingoism, except that in those places such willing divers do not represent the dominant, nor even influential, ethos.