It looks like Marama Davidson is getting jealous of all the attention the Australian Greens have been gobbling up. Or is there just a pool running at the Greens HQ to see who can make the biggest dickhead of themselves, following the death of the Queen?
Sorry, Marama — nice try, but you can’t hold a pig fat candle to Australia’s own Prize Grunt, Mehreen Faruqi. Faruqi slam-dunked the Green Dickhead Stakes with her puerile tweet, “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples”
As I commented, that, coming from the Faruqi the loudmouth Muslim, is quite a flex.
Like her fellow Islamo-foghorn, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who also likes blithering about “colonisation”, Faruqi seems either totally ignorant of, or, more likely, selectively blind about Islam’s own history of bloody, racist conquest and slavery.
Faruqi, who emigrated from Pakistan and who is a Muslim, should perhaps remember that Islam only entered what is now Pakistan through the conquest and subjugation of the Sindh Kingdom in the eighth century C.E., led by Muhammad ibn Qasim.
A conquest marked by such brutality that the mountains straddled by the main slave-trading route is still known as the Hindu Kush: literally, “Hindu Killer”.
She might also remember the almost 800-year period of the al-Andalus when the Berber commander Tariq ibn Ziyad subjugated the indigenous Visigoth Kingdom and the Muslims ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula as an imperialist power. Or the Ottoman Empire, one of the largest expansionist empires in history.
The 600-year-long Sunni Muslim Empire conquered large swathes of North Africa, including Egypt, as well as European territories that included Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, and had reached the gates of Vienna before being repelled by a coalition of European forces in 1683. Greece only regained independence in 1829. Other European territories were lost by the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars, as recently as 1913.
Some of the Islamic Empires are unique in human history for their vast armies of slave soldiers. Muslim slave traders also had a marked fondness for white female sex slaves, and black male labourers, whom they routinely castrated. The Islamic slave trade, perhaps unsurprisingly in a religion founded by a slave-trader, persisted long after the British empire stamped out the trade wherever else it could.
Even today, the common Muslim slang for blacks, “Abed”, literally means “slave”.
So, when Faruqi spouts cheap, prefabricated insults like ‘racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples’, while she might not feel a fool, she certainly looks like one.
Faruqi might also benefit from reflecting that her native Pakistan only exists because Britain voluntarily decolonised its empire — and because the Muslim inhabitants of India simply could not co-exist peacefully with Hindus.
Anyone who knows anything about Elizabeth II should have an inkling that one of her major achievements was to have accelerated the decolonisation process, overseeing the transition to independence of over 20 countries. While colonialism has been tried by almost every notable civilisation, from Portugal to Turkey to Japan, it must be noted that the decolonialisation of the British Empire is unique for its comparative peacefulness. It is not an accident that the Commonwealth of Nations remains a thriving entity.
Spectator Australia
Even if, as is apparent, such a mental feat is beyond Faruqi’s grasp, she could at least reflect on why she chose to live in Australia, not Pakistan — and why she hasn’t taken up Pauline Hanson’s (speaking for many) invitation for her to “P… off back”.
First, if the UK had not colonised Pakistan (as part of undivided India), not brought the English language to the subcontinent, and not introduced the UK education system and curricula, where does Faruqi believe she’d be living today?
Second, what does she believe her status and life conditions would be as a woman in a Muslim society and Islamic country without the history of British colonialism? Does she have the honesty and courage to address this question?
Spectator Australia
No more than Marama Davidson has the intellectual honesty to reflect on her likely life in pre-British New Zealand.
