Saturday, August 26, 2006

Footballer gets criminal record for making sign of the cross

If Mr Boruc's reverent sign of the Cross was so serious a provocation to Scottish thugs as to merit a criminal record, why is not the public wearing of the "hijab" or the "kufi?"

Scotland is truly the advance guard of New Labour's totalitarian state.

I hope the Catholic Church will now help in the Resistance as it so signally failed to do at the same stage in the development of totalitarianism in Germany. It has an opportunity to redeem itself for its shameful history of craven responses to Fascist and Communist regimes around the world.

Certainly, its spokesman's comments reported here are far too mild. The Church should demand the dismissal of the police officers and the Procurator Fiscal concerned.

The British people now have little influence over the Blair regime. It is arrogant and utterly out of control. Through the Blessed Cherie, however, the Pope has far more than mere influence. Let him use it.

Footballer gets criminal record for making sign of the cross | the Daily Mail

5 comments:

Mr Eugenides said...

Tom,

In general terms I am fully in agreement with your viewpoint on Nu Labour's quasi-fascist assault on civil liberties, and the way in which Christianity is discriminated against in relation to minority religions in this country in the name of political correctness.

However I must say that in my opnion you have this incident all wrong, or at least out of context. I have blogged on it at some length myself. This incident needs to be seen in the context of the sectarian divide in Glasgow.

Boruc's actions were not a private, or even public, expression of faith, but a deliberate act of provocation to the crowd. I know; I was there. (Bang goes my claim to objectivity). Similar incidents twenty-odd years ago saw police involvement too; this is not a new development.

dearieme said...

You might view it differently if you check with Mr Eugenides, an eye-witness to events.

Tom Paine said...

Thanks for this. I have read Mr Eugenides piece, and it was interesting to have an eye-witness account. I can accept that Boruc was wrong - in a non-criminal way - to provoke the crowd. It wasn't responsible. It wasn't polite. But so what?

Coming from monocultural Poland, where there are probably more Buddhists than Protestants, he must find the violent hostilities of sectarian Glasgow inexplicable. Frankly, so do I. In the end, as I have now commented at Mr Eugenides' blog "If someone is violent in response to a word or gesture, you must punish the violence, not the word or gesture - otherwise you are condoning the violence.".

We must stop letting thugs dictate our behaviour.

dearieme said...

Fair enough, but it has always been potentially illegal to indulge in behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace, hasn't it? Celtic and Rangers fans are, en masse, excitable scum. That fact forms part of the calculation of the "likely" I presume.

Tom Paine said...

dearieme, you make my point for me - albeit unintentionally. If we must take account of the exciteability of Celtic and Rangers fans in deciding whether otherwise unexceptionable behaviours are permitted to others, we are allowing thugs to dictate to us. In a civilised society, we would hold them to our standards, not hold ourselves to theirs.

Besides, frankly, who cares how many thugs get excited and kill each other? Let's provide them with an arena in which to do it. Boruc and Gascoigne can open the games with suitable gestures to set the cretinous gladiators off.