Since my early summer trip to Madrid, this particular nomadic flaneur has not been anything like as nomadic as he would like to be. This is about to be remedied with trips to Zuhai, Dongguan, Saana and Hangzhou planned in the next three months, plus perhaps a jaunt over to Phnom Penh in the new year. Norfolk, where I currently find myself, has proven to be a not unattractive place to spend the English summer though. Huge forests, varied coastlines and an English quaintness which, at times at least, can be quite charming.
The largest city in this area is Norwich, with a staggeringly tiny population of 213,000, a figure that would barely qualify it as a town in China. I have to admit though, that parts of the city are really rather lovely and hark back to previous times of economic influence and a long history as a prosperous, if somewhat diminutive, metropolis. I personally spent several pleasant and interesting days there in the summer and even sampled, as is so often my wont, a variety of the coffee serving hostelries on offer.
On one visit in late July I happened across an interesting phenomenon, quite jolly at one level, quite sinister at another. As I wandered through the market in the centre of the city I became aware of a disproportionate number of outlandishly attired folk of indeterminate gender, wandering around that particular part of town. Hair coloured lime green or purple seemed to be the order of the day, make-up de rigeur (at least if you were male, perhaps not so much on the females) and all manner of sartorial choices the only theme of which seemed to be to engender an ambiguity in relation to gender.
I wandered further up to hill to the street just in front of the town hall. There various speakers were regaling the jolly throng of demonstrators with words of encouragement and support, outrage at the act itself and bemoaning the disrespect of society for the human rights of gay individuals. Most of these words chimed with my own fairly liberal views on such things. As a general rule I believe in the notion of live and let live, as long as said process doesn't unduly impose on another against their will.
At this point though, I did notice a rather strange phenomenon. Many of the protesters either wore badges or carried placards stating 'Refugees Welcome Here', many of these provided in the yellow and red of the Socialist Workers Party. Generally speaking, the country I currently find myself in (the UK) has a long and distinguished record in its attitude to refugees, something that speaks well for its general tolerance and ability to accommodate all manner of attitudes. The refugees in this particular case though were specifically the wave of Islamic migrants that, due to a very misguided policy, had been flooding into Europe over the course of the previous 18 months.
Perhaps it is me, but demonstrating to allow a group of people into the country who hate you, who despise everything you stand for and who want you dead seemed to your correspondent to be just a tad, how can I put it, illogical? It was bad enough that the banners mostly originated from the Socialist Workers Party which, when I last checked, was an avowedly atheist party, but the fact that they were being carried by people whose lifestyle is the very antithesis of everything that Islam stands for seemed to be stretching credulity just a bit too far.
I reflected back on the events of that awful night in Orlando. The shooter, one Omar Mateen, was a 29 year old Muslim who, in case their was the slightest doubt, rung 911 three times to inform them that he was carrying out the atrocity in the name of Islam and ISIL. As he carried out his terrible crime he was heard to shout out 'Alluha Akbar' numerous times. His father, as it turned out, had also been something of an apologist for the Taliban and had previously been under surveillance by the American security services, as had Omar Mateen himself.
There seems a strange form of denial occurring in what used to be called the 'liberal media', an almost magical form or reframing events in such a way as to avoid the all too obvious cause and instead pontificate endlessly on about anything else other than the blatantly obvious. The Washington Post indeed, in an article devoted to the Orlando shooting, somehow managed to construct a multi-column piece and not mention the words 'Islam' or 'Muslim' once. One must admire their creativity, if not necessarily their intellectual honesty.
As I watched this oddly deluded demonstration taking place, particularly as I listened to the various speakers on the steps of the town hall, the urge to point out these glaring inconsistencies rose up within me but....given I was but one voice in a crowd that seemed convinced of a contrary view, and given that almost any utterance in such a situation can so easily be defined as a 'hate crime' (the police seem very keen on that particular type of felony in these days of post-referendum Britain), I held my counsel and simply looked on with a somewhat bemused expression on my face.
There are, as some wag once put it, none so blind as those who will not see...
