No room at the Irish inn?

This 5th of 7 Christmas colyooms I’m posting this week was written in December 2004, just after the Irish, (a nation of people who more than any other have seen - and still see! - economic migration as their birthright) voted in a referendum to deny children born in Ireland the right of automatic citizenship. 

Christmas is a cosy time of year, isn’t it? Roaring fires, full bellies and a movie before tea. Comfortable, happy and safe. Yes, feeling safe, that’s what it’s all about. 

You close your eyes and drift off into a little snooze, but your mind brings you nightmares.

You’re walking into your home, but it feels empty. Silent. Where is your wife and where are your children?

You walk into the kids’ bedroom and see a few clothes thrown around. You see that their small suitcase is missing, and then you run, crazed, into your own bedroom, where you see your wife’s bag gone too. 

You don’t know what to do. 

You call your friends and find nobody knows anything. 

All you can do is sit and wait and hope they return.

Two days later, you receive a call from the police. Your wife went to a government office to pick up some forms, was suddenly arrested, handcuffed, and driven immediately across town to pick up some clothes for the children. Then she and your children were rushed to the airport and thrown out of the country, flown off to the very place you spent your life trying to escape.

What a terrible country that must be to live in. To lose your wife and kids, without so much as a kiss goodbye. To think of the shame your wife felt being walked handcuffed through an airport. To feel the fear and confusion of your children who might wonder what terrible thing they had done to deserve this.

To wonder if you will ever see your family again. 

Kingsley Igbojionu may well have seen his wife Rachel, and their two Irish-born children again, as months after his wife was humiliated and deported, he too was sent back to Nigeria.

As you recline safely in your Christmas armchairs, ponder for a second about Ireland, and how it behaves towards refugees.

Over 80% of you voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum this year. Over 400 people have been sent out of this country since then, and more than 11,000 parents of Irish-born children could be deported. 

The kids can stay, but what parents would abandon their children to the care of a State that has enforced such a separation?

No room at the Inn. Happy Christmas to you.

Christmas is supposedly a celebration of birth, love and delivery from fear. This year, if you will excuse my chutzpah, this Atheist Jew implores you all to behave like true Christians. 

Love thy neighbour.

Celebrate the fact that others want to live here. They want to share their cultures, to love their children, and to worship their own gods.

Pray in your churches this Christmas that all the people living in this land might feel as safe as you do.

Oh, and have a most excellent and jubilant Christmas holiday!

Imposing Human Rights onto others is as paradoxical as this headscarf ban is dangerous.

This has been driving me crazy for weeks.
Day after day I’ve been hurting and reading the papers and hoping and praying, even though I don’t believe in God, but it’s not going away.

It’s so clear to me I can’t stand it, but because it’s being done by democratic Western European governments, all we Western European voters seem to think it’s okay to ban the veil.
But it isn’t.

Oh my good sweet Lord, it isn’t okay at all. Not one sticky bit.
Evil is not a word atheists use, but I’m allowing myself to stray here.
For crying out loud, this is dangerous stuff. We’re stoking up a holocaust, people.

Our leaders tell us that the ban is protecting women from subjugation by religious extremists, but that is nonsense. Of course, unfortunately, there are women out there who are forced to wear veils and scarves against their will, but much more importantly there are countless million Muslim women who choose to worship their God by living in the way they believe is appropriate.

They are not all dupes.
They do not all suffer.
Yet we believe we have the right to take away their right to worship.

Burkha shmurka, this is about the demonisation of a major world religion by the EU and the USA. Our leaders are off fighting a Crusade and we are sitting back saying nothing.
The Judaeo-Christian democracies of the West have decided that Islam is the enemy and Islam has taken up the fight.

But oy, once you start producing doublespeak about 'imposing human rights' on people, you know you’ve lost the plot.

Well I know, but do you? If so, why are you silent? These new laws will be passed in Holland, Belgium, France ... who knows where next?

Quite apart from anything, the notion itself is absurd.
My sweet old Jewish mumma used to be seen in the days of white gloves and Carnaby Street wearing her Hermes headscarf with pride. Ladies in Bradford, West Yorkshire will walk the streets of Little Horton and Buttershaw wearing scarves, head coverings of all types, from hair nets to cheap oversized hankies to yashmak, bhurka and hajib.

When I lived up there, in the middle of Bradford’s deprived Canterbury Estate, a Pakistani lass chatted to me in the drab half-empty Co-Op PriceFighter Supermarket.

“When I walk around in here nobody gives me a second look. I can see all you lot, the men and boys, all looking at all the other women who are not Muslim and I see them judging those women with their eyes, but me? What do I look like? You don’t know so I don’t care. I only care for my husband.”

For a second I wished she’d said “...and myself.” but she didn’t and then I realised I’d only been imposing onto her my own expectations that a powerful and happy woman would have a good self-image.

Maybe to that Muslim woman, self-image was less a matter of how she looked.

I’ve no idea, but I do know that I hate this policy; abhor this thinking; loathe these new laws. I despise the way it’s oozing out of page 7 of the newspapers, and nobody is talking about how we, the once great and wonderful people of Western Europe came out in the streets wearing yellow stars in solidarity with the Jews, who were forced to wear yellow stars by the Nazis.

We, the people, showed our compassion, our love and our respect of all to the right to worship, or indeed the right to worship nothing at all, and now we say nothing.

I'm not a Muslim, but this fight is for all of us. I’m a mutant Jewish Pantheist-Atheist who’s all mixed up for God’s sake, evidently, but dead clear about one thing.
I’m hurting.
I’m ashamed of Europe.
I’m ashamed of all of us who allow this vile degrading propagandist bile to pass into law.

Our elected Western governments are now talking about arresting tourists who wear the veil, so
I want to get a bunch of people together and go to Paris or Brussels or wherever these nonsensical rulings are first passed. I’m going to put on veils of all description and have them arrest this Jewish Atheist-Pantheist non-Muslim extremist for wearing a scarf.

Ban the scarf and the veil and all that will happen is that good Muslim women will be forced to stay inside their homes. That hardly helps their cause as humans with rights.

The utter immensity of the arrogance involved in imposing what our Western governments consider Human Rights on people scares me way more than being arrested by the Fashion Police. Hell, they should have knicked me years ago!

Wear a scarf and get arrested.
Please, let’s not just sit back and let this Crusade nonsense go on.