It may be time to retire from satire due to unfair competition, again. The news item is unremarkable, but the readers comments are utterly beyond parody...

What Not To Wear

On Saturday October 8th, the Sun ran the headline

HOUNDED OUT
Hero soldiers' home wrecked by Muslims.

The substance of the story was that a house earmarked for servicemen returning from Afghanistan had been vandalized. The Sun drew the conclusion that the vandals were Muslims, although their only actual evidence was a quote from an un-named source and a non-committal quote from the police. ('One line of inquiry' is that the attack was racially motivated.)

Underneath this front-page story was a four column strip. On the left was a picture of a woman wearing a burkha. (This picture was approximately three times as large as the photo of the vandalized house.) In the middle was a caption which reads THE BIG BURKHA DEBATE – PAGES 6 and 7. And on the right was a photograph of Labour MP Jack Straw.

Elsewhere in the paper, you could read about Muslim cabbie's guide dog ban.

On 10th October, the front page of the Sun featured another picture of a woman in a burkha. This time, the headline was HIDDEN DANGER. The previous day, a Sun reporter had caught a plane to Paris wearing a niqab. Customs inspectors didn't ask her to raise her veil to check that her face matched her passport picture, although regulations say that they should have doneⁱ. This is chilling, apparently. 'I hope this is an oversight, and not political correctness' says the inevitable Tory MP. If you read the 'full story' on page 9, you would also have learned about a terror suspect (unnamed) who, it is claimed (we aren't told by who) tried to escape capture by disguising himself with a burkha. And who should be at the top of column 1 but Labour MP Jack Straw?

So, images of veiled women are being placed alongside stories about Muslim yobs and vandals; stories are dredged up in which burkhas are tangentially associated with terrorism. Anyone looking at Saturday's paper would have taken in the words Hounded Out -- Hero soldiers' home wrecked by Muslims -- The Big Burhka Debate in a single glance. The vandalism story is printed in a frame; and the 'burka' caption overlaps that frame: quite clearly, we are being invited to forge a mental link between the two stories. Muslims are dangerous and frightening. Muslims are alien. Muslims are chilling. And wherever there are stories about dangerous, frightening, chilling, alien Muslims there will be a little picture of a woman in a veil. The Sun has made veils into a hieroglyphⁱⁱ which means 'Muslims are scary'. And alongside this icon of Islamophobia there is always a picture of Labour MP Jack Straw.

Interestingly enough, the HIDDEN DANGER story only takes up about 1/3 of Monday's front page. The other 2/3 are given over to a promotion for something called Page 3 Idol. ('Turn to page 3', the caption very logically advises.) Female Sun readers are being invited to send nude photographs of themselves to the paper. Male readers will then vote for the picture they like the best, and the winner will be offered a job as a model. You couldn't, as I believe someone once said, make it up. This is illustrated, naturally, by a picture of a lady with no clothes on. (Page 3 itself has a total of 14 tits on it, which must be some kind of record.) So, when we look at Monday's front page, what we actually see is a small picture of a dark skinned lady wearing a veil, underneath a large picture of a light skinned lady wearing nothing at all. The message is clear: totally covering yourself up is 'chilling' and 'dangerous', whereas stripping naked, having your picture taken and sending it to a national newspaper so that strangers can masturbate over it is perfectly normal.

Meanwhile, the Daily Express has had one of its famous phone-in-polls in which it has turned out that 97% of readers think that Muslim women should uncover themselves -- though not, presumably, to the extent that Sun readers are going to -- because it would 'safeguard racial harmony'. In order to further safeguard racial harmony, the Express reported these findings under the headline BAN THE VEIL! The accompanying text is vintage Daily Express stuff:

CONCERNED Britons gave massive backing last night to calls for Muslim women to ditch the veil.

An astonishing 97 per cent of Daily Express readers agreed that a ban would help to safeguard racial harmony.

Our exclusive poll came a day after Leader of the Commons Jack Straw spoke out against the veils.

Note how 'Britons' are contrasted with 'Muslims' in the first line, and that 'ditch the veil' (choose to stop wearing it) in line 1 slides into 'ban' (prohibit it by law) in line 2. Observe the presentation of the story: 97% of readers 'gave backing' and 'agreed' to the idea of 'a ban': even though no ban has been proposed and there is nothing to back. And once again, it is all associated with Labour MP Jack Straw. It is literally true that he 'spoke out' against veils in the sense that he remarked that he would rather talk to people whose faces he could see. He quite explicitly didn't call for any kind of ban. But the trajectory of the opening paragraph goes 'Ban the veil – ditch the veil – a ban -- Jack Straw.'

Jack Straw knew what he was doing. New Labour is the political wing of the middle classes. Every New Labour speech goes out of its way to praise the car-driving home-owning hardwor kingfamily. These are the votes which win elections. White – people who read papers in which lapsed Anglicans from England are 'us' and dark skinned Muslims are 'them'. Paranoid – people who feel that their way of life is under threat from gypsies, gays, terrorists, asylum seekers, the political correctness brigade, Europe, foreigners in general. Four million of them pay money to read the paranoid fantasies of Richard Desmond and Rupert Murdoch on a daily basis. Ten days ago the average Sun readers didn't remember Jack Straw's name, let alone his job title. But for a week, they have had his face in front of them every day, linked with stories about Hidden Danger and Banning the Veil. What he actually said no longer matters, any more than it ever mattered exactly which river it was that Aeneas had seen frothing with much blood. Straw wasn't presenting an argument, but positioning himself. He has brilliantly associated himself with the paranoid middle-class. The people whose votes he most needs now think of him as 'That fellow who spoke up for ordinary White people and against chilling Muslim yobs who sneak through customs and vandalize guide-dogs.' And this, unless he is very stupid indeed, was precisely what he knew would happen.

I live in Bristol. Burkhas are quite rare, although there are increasing numbers of Somali women whose robes cover the whole of their body except their faces. (I think that they look very attractive and exotic.) Headscarves are so common that I no longer notice them. I admit that, when I see a black hat and ringlets, I still think 'Jew' before I think 'man'; but when I see a headscarf, I no longer think 'Muslim woman' or 'religious woman' or 'Asian woman' but just 'woman'.

When I first moved to Bristol the man in my local corner shop had a West Country Accent. If you want to buy a pint of milk after half past ten, the person who sells it to you will be an Asian: it's a stereotype, but it's true. 'What's a Pakistani man doing with a West Country accent' I said to myself. 'Everyone knows that Pakistanis have South London accents.' Since then, I have noticed that some teenagers combine Brizzle dialect with British Asian, even when their vowels are RP. 'Where's Rashid to, innit?' White kids are also picking up the 'innit' habit, which seems itself to be a bit of cockney dialect pressed into service to represent a Punjabi tag word. I find this aesthetically displeasing. The whole purpose of teenage slang is to irritate people over 30. That is what 'assimilation' means. You spend decades worrying about the fact that New York has been overrun by Italians who don't speaka the lingo proper, and then wake up to discover that Pizza is a classic American dish. I shouldn't be surprised if next year, white teenagers decide it's fashionable to cover up their faces. If it irritates Jack Straw, I may start doing it myself.

i Private Eye points out that the story is not attributed to Anila Baig, the dark-skinned journalism who carried out the stunt, but is claimed as an exclusive by light skinned Julie Moult.

ii Actually, the icon is a partial photograph: the paper tends to show a narrow strip of two eyes looking out from a slit, rather than the whole head. The papers' layout therefore distances the woman more than the actual veil does.

The Sun is a disgusting little right-wing sexist New Labour rag, but it has to be said that How do you solve a problem like Korea? is a bloody good headline.

It's international talk like a pirate day, apparently

"You are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery.

But damn ye all together: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment? ....You are a devilish conscience rascal, I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me: but there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure and pin their Faith upon a Pimp of a Parson; a Squab, who neither practices nor believes what he puts upon the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to.