Husserl, Not The Hustler

Peter Hitchens is quite wrong to deny the comparison between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism by reference to such a figure as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), about whom I happen to know quite a lot. 

She was canonised as a Catholic martyr, and a number of her surviving relatives refused to attend the ceremony. Hitchens really could have picked some far better examples in order to illustrate his own argument.

Anyone can become a Jew just as anyone can become a Muslim, and Ashkenazi Jews are of course descended from such long-ago converts, with perhaps a tiny bit of Israelite in them, if that. 

Nevertheless, that defines an entire culture, a distinct people. There are several other such Jewish peoples in the world, and there have been several more historically.

Much the same is true of Muslims everywhere outside the Arabian Peninsula, and most certainly in the South Asia from which most British Muslims originated quite recently. 

The existence of such a people, who were born that way and who will die that way, is the ideological basis of the existence of Pakistan.

In South Asia, or in the Balkans, or in numerous other places, Muslims, thus defined, have been and are subjected to the kind of ancestry-based persecution that Jews have been. 

They have given as good as they have got, and they still do. But then look at the Israelis, among other Jews.

There is no saving Boris Johnson after that article, and there is no point trying. He knew what he was doing, trying to cast himself as the posh Tommy Robinson, and he must bear the consequences.

The questions are now starting to be asked about how a man with his record has survived in public life anything like as long as he has, and about how a man who could afford to be a member of the Bullingdon Club was on a full grant at Oxford, having attended Eton on a Scholarship.

His brother the Minister on the edge of the Cabinet cannot save him. Nor can his sister the prominent journalist. Nor can his father the emerging National Treasure. His school and university frenemy, and fellow Bully Boy, stopped being Prime Minister far more recently than it seems.

He's finished.