How would you describe a culture where women are flogged in public for ‘inappropriate dress’? A culture where one woman suffered 40 lashes from a leather whip for the crime of wearing trousers and a T-shirt? A culture where a man who lies with a man risks being whipped a hundred times before being put in a dank cell for five years? A culture where apostasy is considered such an abominable sin that even a heavily pregnant woman could be sentenced to death for supposedly committing it?
The good people of Belfast are well within their rights to ask whether men from such a culture should be living on their streets
Personally, I would call such a culture ‘alien’. In fact, I would call it backward, regressive, inhuman and morally inferior to the freer, more forgiving culture we Brits are lucky to live in. Why, then, was the unionist MP Jim Allister rebuked in the Commons yesterday for suggesting that the bloodletting maniac in Belfast heralded from an ‘alien culture’? For all of the primitive punishments listed above, all that state barbarism, took place in the nation where he was reportedly born: Sudan.
It was Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland secretary, who took Mr Allister to task. What will be done to ‘stop the importation of an alien culture’, Allister asked? Benn’s political correctness radar pinged. ‘I’m sorry the honourable gentleman used the term “alien culture”, because what exactly is he referring to?’, he said, with more than a little sniffiness. Okay then, I’ll bite. I’ll tell Mr Benn what I think Mr Allister was referring to.
