According to Ros Coward of the Wanker, we should be grateful to the Islamic rioters in Nigeria for reminding us of our shortcomings and just how far we have strayed from acceptable civilised standards:
“What an irony that fundamentalist Muslims managed to do what feminism ultimately failed to do: make Miss World a global political issue. As contestants flee to London, and Nigeria counts its dead, it is almost impossible to retain the idea that an annual parade of female flesh is just an innocent quest for universal beauty acceptable to all reasonable people.”
Of course! (Slap to the forehead) I should have realised that ‘Miss World’ is a deeply symbolic manifestation of class and gender struggle; the very antithesis of the dialectic rationale for the liberation of..er..something or other.
“In the west, the contest became as naff as bingo. It was feminism that represented modernity.”
That’s funny, I thought things like the silicon chip and the space shuttle represented modernity.
“Last year’s winner, Miss Nigeria herself pointed out that she is “the first black African woman to win”, because, for all its multiculturalism, the winners from black countries remained resolutely pale.”
That’s right, they weren’t ‘black’ enough. They were the wrong sort of ‘black’. In fact, they were all Uncle Toms still grovelling to ‘de White Massa.’
“How was this circus of womanhood going to respond to an issue of global political concern for women: the sentencing of Amina Lawal to death by stoning for adultery? Even a bunch of brainless bimbos would have found this a problem, but our post-feminist intellectual beauty queens couldn’t avoid it.”
‘Brainless bimbos’? Excuse me, but isn’t that a rather pejorative, sexist remark? Hate speech, in fact?
“The riots in Nigeria were ultimately triggered, not by the contest itself but by a piece in a local paper claiming the prophet himself might have chosen a wife from these beauties.”
If only all newspapers could be as sensitive as the ‘Wanker’ then surely there would be world peace!
“This is the same cultural naivety exposed by the bombing of the Sari club in Bali. The consolation some clubbers exchanged after the outrage betrays this same sense that the world is a playground where the true human (western) values can be paraded. Because no harm is meant, no offence should be taken. One clubber mourned the passing of the club on a website, saying “it was the United Nations of decadence” without any sense that this is what made it a target.”
Translation: the victims of the Bali bomb got what deserved and deserved what they got. They should have shrouded themselves in self-effacement and sensitivity. Instead they recklessly taunted and tortured those poor Islamic terrorists until they could tolerate it no more. They are the real victims.
“Now the reluctance to attack representatives of western values has disappeared even among those with no involvement in extremist organisations.”
And, let’s face it, in that extremist organisation known as the ‘Wanker’, that reluctance never existed in the first place.
“In such a world we should think carefully about what values we want to parade. Democracy, equality and tolerance certainly. But a beauty contest?”
We must abandon our sinful ways and foreswear all this drinking, dancing, laughing, carousing, loving and generally celebrating our lives. It’s unseemly; it’s uncivilised; it’s dangerous, dammit. We must aspire to the true hallmarks of civilised behaviour, like wearing sensible shoes, cross-referencing files in the Department of Social Security, exchanging Outreach Initiatives and discussing gender politics over an organic vegetable curry in a ‘Fair Trade’ workers co-operative canteen. That is the zenith of Western civilisation and it behoves us well to aspire to nothing more than that.
In order to survive we must be boring, po-faced, monochromatic, insecure, shot through with crippling guilt and terminally earnest. Just like…well, just like Ros Coward I should imagine.
Would somebody please send a message to Al-Qaeda to the effect that the editorial staff at the ‘Wanker’ are planning to sponsor a Naked Lesbian Dance Collective in Mecca. With a bit of luck, they’ll be next on the hit-list.
MommaBear wonders if all the U.S. readers are aware of the meaning of that alternative nickname for the Grauniad; perhaps a wee explanation would really assist in understanding from whence cometh all the ‘gar-bahge’ spewed forth daily on those poor dead trees.
Mohammed the Prophet: feminist icon. See how well that plays in Finbury Park.
Mommabear,
I thought the Blog-annointed sobriquet was now world-famous?
Ah well, never mind. The link should dispel all doubts.
Seriously, maybe someone should write a complaint about Ros Coward’s article to the police. This stuff is hateful rubbish. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
Tom is right, if asking for rural citizens to have the same rights as other minorities is hate speech, then what else could an epithet like “brainless bimbos” be?
Amazing how certain darlings of the media are allowed such vicious, murderous behavior without criticism. No, not amazing, disgusting.
If MommaBear is asking about the term “wanker”, this US reader is quite aware of it. And in this case, it fits him very well.
As for enraging Muslims, naked lesbians prancing in Mecca would not be half as bad as evangelical Christian women helping pregnant women in Lebanon.
Kevin
http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-12179556,00.html
Oscar-winning actress turned parliamentarian Glenda Jackson led calls for the contest to be halted.
“The best thing to do after such fratricide and blood-letting is to cancel the whole competition,” Ms Jackson said.
*******
Given all the blood-letting socialism has caused how about giving that up Glenda?
Possibly the most troubling thing to have emerged from the 9-11 attacks is the realization that large portions of the Left will gravitate to whatever thug regime or movement that is willing to set itself up in opposition to liberal (in the classical, European sense) democractic capitalism (LDC).
It’s not so much that they are for anything so much as they are against whatever LDC offers: when LDC represented conservative politics, stuffy university administrations, sobriety and sexual probity, they advocated radical politics, overthrow of the university system, drug use and sexual liberation. Now that we in the LDCs have discovered the benefits and joys of rough-and-tumble politics, bong hits and, most of all, open sexual mores, their solution is to pick up the banner of OBL and the Taliban.
We need to recognize these people for that they are.
Ros Coward’s remarks are senseless and illogical, not least because she seems not to understand the issue in Nigeria, which is sectarianism, not outrage at Western values. The Muslim-Christian conflict has claimed more than 2000 lives in the sharia-ruled north in recent times. The government in Abuja seems fearful of alienating Muslims in its power base and therefore did nothing when Amina Lawal was sentenced to be stoned to death as soon as her child was born.
This prompted contestants from South Africa (where I live) and other countries, to boycott the Nigerian event, which seems a perfectly understandable and commendable action
However, the organisers of Miss World tried to ignore this perspective. In fact so deep was their denial of the obvious outcome — that the event would be used by Islamist hardliners to excuse another orgy of bloodshed — that the contestants arriving in London today seemed to think “going forward” with the contest was more important than a town burnt and a couple of hundred people being torched, stabbed and in other brutal ways put to death. I didn’t hear any regrets expressed for what happened. Most were grinning happily and no doubt in relief.
Ros Coward has exactly the same priorities: the horror was just a way to try to get beauty contests banned. Pity about the Nigerians murdered to give her some ammunition.
She ought to be made to read Osama’s manifesto in Sunday’s Observer. That should clear up any lingering doubts that anything short of conversion to Islam (and an end to all democracy) will be enough to stop the war on the rest of us.
Christ, do the guys at that paper like getting me wound up on purpose or something?
The aptly named Coward is willing to halt any activity, however harmless, if it happens to offend the sensibilities of hateful, violent bigots. If anyone is annoyed, it’s our fault.
According to Coward and his ilk, Western values of freedom, playfulness or hedonism must never be defended, ever. The people who spout this self-loathing crap simply have no values of their own. Eugh.
This is not only ridiculously off-base, but disgustingly disrespectful to the people that died in Nigeria and Bali because of religious fanatics.
Perhaps if the Miss World contestants, being rightly chagrined at being called brainless bimbos, put a burning tire around Ros Coward’s neck, that would be alright?
Nigeria is an unstable, dangerous, violent place. The “brainless bimbos” are those who chose Nigeria to host this contest (or any other event) that could be perfectly held in some civilized place.
I suspect some PC thought was involved in this decision.
As to Ros Coward who maintains that the correct values should be paraded in such countires as Nigeria – why doesn’t she organize some feminist gathering there ?
Oh, you people are all so insensitive! Can’t you see that running around killing people — just a few hundred, after all — is really a very mild sort of protest against the disgusting exploitation of women by lookism, cheap, shallow celebrity, and the false lure of a chance to make a few bucks for your education? Can’t you see that drinking and carousing in an island that is surrounded by other islands, most of which have Muslim majorities, is an intolerable insult to those sensitive souls who have had to suffer centuries of colonialism, and are now prevented by post-colonial traumatic disorders, not to mention encroaching globalization, from taking their own destiny into their hands, at least until they have rid their neighboring Hindu island of the decadent filth that infests it? Don’t you understand that the Guardian’s sensitive commentators are the only thing standing between the West and the righteous wrath of the oppressed? Where is your empathy? Where are your manners? Please join me in my movement to convice all white people to return to the bit of Western Europe where they originated — wherever that is, exactly — and leave the world’s oppressed people of color to get on with working out their destiny free of the dead hand of imperialism.
>>>Nigeria is an unstable, dangerous, violent place. The “brainless bimbos” are those who chose Nigeria to host this contest (or any other event) that could be perfectly held in some civilized place.
I suspect some PC thought was involved in this decision.
nah… it was just that miss Nigeria won last year. sorry!