Volvos, pushchairs and the Jewish threat to multi-cultural Britain

In the Monty Python sketch, “Hell’s Grannies”, an earnest TV documentary presenter investigates ruthless gangs of grannies, who rule the streets by spreading fear and terror amongst healthy young men and women, clobbering people with their handbags and walking sticks.

I was reminded of the sketch when reading a startling article entitled "The Limits of Multi-Culturalism"in The Independent newspaper (28 July 2010). It begins with this: 

I would like to teach some of my neighbours some manners

These neighbours (and the article's author, Christina Patterson) live in Stamford Hill: a fascinating multi-cultural neighbourhood, with many different types of people and not insignificant amounts of criminality on its streets. Out of all these various people who live in and around Stamford Hill and who populate its pavements, roads and street corners it is the orthodox Jews that concern Patterson.

"Hell's Grannies" came to me when I read Patterson's take on orthodox Jewish women who "roam" with "pushchairs and vast armies of children":

I would like to say to the women who roam the streets with double-decker pushchairs and vast armies of children, that it’s sometimes nice to allow someone else to get past

There is nothing wrong with writing an article that asks a group to do more to integrate with the surrounding society. This article, however, goes much further than that. It treats Muslims and Jews as nothing more than uncivilised mirror images of one another; and ranges, seamlessly, from genital mutilation to castigating Jews in Volvos with mobile phones, bad manners and “chosen" people haughtiness.

In the first two paragraphs, Patterson complains of orthodox Jews

• They are ill-mannered and non-communicative to others.
• Don’t say “please” or “thank you”; and would rather not sell fish to others (especially black others).

The third paragraph picks up the pace

• Their little boys make women feel like pariahs because they “leap up as if an infection from the ebola virus was imminent” when a woman sits next to them on the bus.
• Their “women who roam the streets with double-decker pushchairs” block the pavement.
• “They could treat their neighbours with a bit more courtesy and just a little bit more respect.”

Patterson's next paragraph moves well beyond Monty Python territory – and was extracted by The Independent to highlight the article

When I moved to Stamford Hill, I didn’t realise that goyim were about as welcome in the Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Ku Klux Klan convention

I take the King and Klan references not so much as seriously comparing orthodox Jews with terroristic racist murderers, but rather as a more extreme version of the tired old joke, ‘about as welcome as a pork pie at a Bar Mitzvah’. However, the use of the single word “goyim” troubles me far more: as it always does when journalists use it to invoke the notion that Jews believe others to be inferior beings.

The motif of “chosen people” (and therefore “goyim”) is a core historical element of antisemitism throughout the ages. An article entitled “Why There is ‘Anti-Semitism’”,(subtitle: “The Average Man’s Guide to the Jewish Peril”), in the January 1965 edition of the neo-Nazi publication Spearhead explains why:

4) The Jews regard themselves as a master-race.

…As the ‘chosen people’, they intermarry very little with non-Jews, and wherever possible form ghettos where they can live a life apart from the ‘inferior’ Gentiles, whom they call ‘Goyim’ (cattle).

Sure enough, Patterson immediately uses the word “goy” again: and does so with a follow-up sucker punch about the “chosen” people.

I didn’t realise that a purchase by a goy was a crime to be punished with monosyllabic terseness, or that bus seats were a potential source of contamination, or that road signs, and parking restrictions, were for people who hadn't been chosen by God.

Patterson says that “none of this is a source of anything much more than irritation” (although she could have fooled me) and adds that she is made “sad” by eight year old boys who have “presumably…been taught” that “a normal-looking woman” (ie her) “is dirty, or dangerous, or, heaven forbid, dripping with menstrual blood”. From this, she also goes on to say how “sad” she is about “three year olds in hijab, who want, of course, to look like mummy”.

Having acknowledged that you cannot legislate against what “parents, or rabbis” teach their children, Patterson then veers off into an impassioned polemic against “one thing I will never accept”: female circumcision within the Muslim community. This concludes with

There is, I'm sure, nothing in the Koran to indicate that hacking off a girl's labia is an all-round great idea, just as there's nothing in the Torah to say that Volvos should always be driven with a mobile phone in hand, and goyim should be treated with contempt.

This seamless comparison between the brutality of female circumcision and Volvo-driving Jews who treat "goyim...with contempt" is shocking. Stylistically, however, it neatly sets Patterson up to demand laws against anyone breaching her notion of what is a “civilised society”. This is no longer about female circumcision: we are back to Jews and Jewish practises again. Having previously insisted that she is merely “sad” about such things, she now rails against them as “crazed whims”

 ….a civilised society will have laws to indicate what is acceptable… A properly civilised society would also ensure that children are not subject to the crazed whims of their parents, and hived off into "faith schools" where they're taught that the world was created in seven days, or that they need special gadgets to switch on the lights on a Saturday, or that women who show their face are sluts.

This is not a Richard Dawkins style atheist argument against all religions, Patterson fondly recalls

lovely little C of E schools were once an excellent place for children to learn about the religion that shaped their culture, art and laws

Patterson bemoans that if you are to close down “the madrassa run by the mad mullah next door”, then you must also shut the C of E school. Her silver lining, however, is that she would replace them with “compulsory state secular education” in which all children are taught to get on with one another; and that “the culture of the country they’re living in was, for 2,000 years, largely based on one.”

If the old age pensioner branch of the British National Party published this kind of stuff, then nobody would bat an eyelid. It simply won’t do, its simply not how we do things here old boy. But The Independent?

It was, however, only in March and June of last year that two different Independent journalists wrote about the power of the “Jewish lobby” in America. Furthermore, the same newspaper twice warned against Jews serving on the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. Now, it seems that Jews are also threatening London’s multi-cultural tapestry. Whatever will these Jews subvert next? No doubt The Independent will let us know soon enough.

Note – Miriam Shaviv’s deconstruction of Patterson, on the Jewish Chronicle blog is well worth reading. It is here, and begins

I feel like I need to wipe the spittle off my face. I have just finished reading one of the ugliest, most vile pieces ever published in the British press. It is actually dripping with venom.

And if, like me, you need cheering up after all of this, then click here to watch the aforementioned Monty Python granny sketch (scroll in by about 24 seconds to reach the start).