The question is posed by Jenny Taylor of Lapido Media.
Are our public schoolboys quietly stitching us up over a game of tennis?
Peter Oborne the Sherborne educated Telegraph columnist confided to a roomful of academics and Muslim radicals at the East London Mosque today that he’d been beaten 7-5 by his mate the Mayor of London. During the course of which trouncing, on a freezing Highbury tennis court, they’d discussed the launch later in the day of the Exeter University report Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Hate Crime: UK Case Studies 2010 whose forerunner, the London Case Study, Oborne had gallantly endorsed.
Oborne shared with us his conversation with the Mayor: glossing the famed US academic John Esposito’s sentiment, in the introduction to the report, that “the exclusive Judaeo-Christian tradition of the West was an unhelpful and false doctrine” (I quote) and should be jettisoned. Boris, sensing how convenient that would be as a way of avoiding some deeply tricky questions on his watch, evidently agreed.
“East London mosque is splendid”, Oborne reported Boris as saying. “It does an enormous amount to help increase understanding between Islam and the rest of society. He was entirely positive about it – which I took as an implicit rebuke to Andrew Gilligan.”
Poor old Gilligan. Demon de jour. We may not denounce Islamists – cuddly newcomers to the political landscape. But it’s open season on Gilligan, the journalist who worries about the terrorist sympathisers who now run the once English borough of Tower Hamlets. Him we may vilify. Melanie Phillips, the Mail columnist and author of the heroic exposé Londonistan we may also vilify because she insists on loud-pedalling the nasty side of Islam in Britain.
Muslim bullying is making cowards of our elites, whose only response to what’s happening is to deny that it matters. Am I mistaken, or was it Muslims who bombed the Underground system? Or is it a crime to mention that now?