The Sweet Smell of Head-Chopping… And the Stench of Silence from Libertarians

Enlightenment enthusiast Kenan Malik is at it again. So are Kenan’s Komrades, the fanatical Furedite freedom-fighters at the libertarian journal Spiked Online. Or rather, Kenan & Komrades aren’t at it again. The problem is not what they’ve done, but what they’ve yet again failed to do. A fascinatingly horrible story about censorship has been in the news. It cries out for condemnation by defenders of free speech, for expert analysis and interpretation by enthusiasts for the Enlightenment. So how have Kenan and his comrades responded to the story? By ignoring it.

The sweet smell of cephalotomy

It’s very easy to understand their silence. Like the murder of Asad Shah, the story explodes all their bullshit and obfuscation about why free speech is dying in the West. Even though the story itself takes place in the East. In Pakistan, to be precise. It’s a good example of how Lewis Carroll (1832–98), the author of Alice in Wonderland, and the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), the author of 120 Days of Sodom, seem to be collaborating from the afterlife on the script for Pakistani culture. Carroll supplies the absurdity and the Marquis de Sade supplies the atrocity. In this case, fortunately enough, Carroll had the upper hand and the Marquis held himself in check.

An innocent woman in terror of a mainstream Muslim mob: the Arabic script says halwa, meaning “sweet”

So how does the story go? It goes like this: on 25th February, 2024, a young Muslim woman went shopping in Lahore in a pretty new dress. The dress came from a Kuwaiti fashion-house and had Arabic calligraphy on it. Even if you don’t read Arabic, it isn’t hard to see that a single word is repeated there in various colors. The word is حلوۃ, halwa, meaning “sweet” and having no religious significance. Pakistan uses an adapted (and less attractive) form of Arabic script for its own national language of Urdu, so this dress shouldn’t have got the woman in any trouble.

But remember, Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade are writing the script for Pakistan. So here come the actual absurdity and the attempted atrocity. As the woman did her shopping, some men falsely accused her of blasphemy for wearing verses from the Qur’an on her body. The woman fled into a food-shop and huddled there in terror as a mob of hundreds gathered outside. Some of the mob chanted for her death using well-known advice for lovers of the Prophet Muhammad in Pakistan:

!⁧گستاخ رسول کی ایک ہی سزا سر تن سے جدا

Gustakh-e-Rasūl kī ek hī sazā, sar tan se judā!

“For insult to the Prophet, there is only one punishment: cut the head from the body!” (See “sar tan se juda” at Wiktionary)

Fortunately for the woman, her alleged blasphemy didn’t result in actual cephalotomy (Greek kephalos, “head,” + tomos, “cutting”). The police arrived and a brave policewoman called Syeda Shehrbano Naqvi faced down the mob. Naqvi then escorted the woman to safety with her head covered and the dress concealed. Three bearded mullahs later interviewed her at a police-station, examined the dress, and certified that she was entirely innocent of blasphemy. The woman herself issued a terrified apology: “I didn’t have any such intention [of provoking trouble], it happened by mistake. Still I apologise for all that happened, and I’ll make sure it never happens again.”

Patriarchs pronounce: the terrified female fashion-fan is cleared of blasphemy by bearded mullahs

The woman was entirely innocent, remember. But she still felt obliged to apologize to the misogynistic fanatics who threatened to chop her head off. Misogyny was definitely part of what happened. So was patriarchy. Misogynists don’t like seeing women happily shopping in pretty new dresses. Patriarchs do like dictating female behavior. It’s not just libertarians in the West who should have been writing about this story, even though it took place in the East. Western feminists should have been all over it too. This is because the West is importing the East, so misogynistic and intolerant Pakistani culture is now firmly established on Western soil. Misogynistic and intolerant Afghan culture is firmly established too, as we saw when the Afghan “asylum seeker” Abdul Ezedi threw a flesh-eating alkali over a woman and her two young daughters in London in February.

The stench of silence

That was a horrific act of misogyny by a convinced patriarch, but feminists ignored it and wrote no outraged commentaries about its significance for Western women. After all, no White man was involved, so there was no advantage to be gained for leftism in condemning the attack. Similarly, there’s no advantage for leftism or libertarianism in the story about the fashion-phobic mob in Pakistan. Given the enthusiasm of the mob for decapitation and what was written on the woman’s dress, you could say that it was a story about the sweet smell of head-chopping. By ignoring it, Kenan & Komrades have also made it into a story about the stench of silence. After all, the fashion-phobic mob revealed the lunacy of importing Pakistanis and other Muslims into the West. The mob also exploded the lies in articles like this, posted at Spiked by one of Frank Furedi’s fanatical freedom-fighters:

British schools are being turned into political battlegrounds. A militant Muslim identity politics is mounting an ever-stronger challenge to their educational authority. Over the past few weeks alone, the Michaela Community School in north-west London has appeared at the High Court, having been sued for discrimination by a Muslim pupil over its decision to ban prayer rituals. And a few miles away in east London, Barclay Primary School has been under attack from Islamists and a few parents after it told children not to wear clothing or badges displaying some form of ‘political allegiance’ in school — a move interpreted as a clampdown on pro-Palestine symbols.

In both cases, activists’ response to the school’s decisions has been marked by menace. Following Michaela’s decision to ban prayer rituals last spring, bomb threats were made to teachers, the school was vandalised and a brick was thrown through a classroom window. And in response to Barclay Primary’s change to its uniform code, arson and bomb threats were sent both to the school and individual staff. Masked men climbed the school’s fence at night to hang Palestinian flags around its perimeter.

There is a tendency to frame cases like this as part of an age-old conflict between religion and modernity. Between the demands of faith and the demands of public life in secular societies. But it’s a misleading characterisation. The aggressive imposition of Muslim cultural practices on to education has very little to do with Islam and everything to do with decades of multicultural policymaking. That is what we’re seeing right now in the cases of Michaela and Barclay. Not quiet displays of faith, but loud, all-too-visible assertions of Muslim identitarianism. (“How Muslim identity politics colonised education,” Spiked, 28th January 2024)

If you’re like me, your jaw may still be aching from the speed at which it dropped when you read this line: “The aggressive imposition of Muslim cultural practices on to education has very little to do with Islam and everything to do with decades of multicultural policymaking.” What planet is the author on? Planet Trotsky, that’s what. That article was a “Long Read” but it might as well have been called a “Long List of Lies.” It was written by someone called Tim Black, but plugs the same line as Kenan Malik’s many articles on the ever-increasing pathologies created by Muslims in kaffir countries

Black and Malik were once members of a Trotskyist cult called the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). They’re still devoted disciples of the RCP’s leader, a Jewish sociologist called Frank Furedi (born 1947) who isn’t remarkable for insight or intellect but is remarkable for his ability to create cognitive clones of himself. Just as Furedi taught them, Kenan and his comrades carry on claiming that Islam and Muslim migration have never been a genuine problem. No, it’s the mistaken policies of the non-Muslim elite towards Muslims that causes all the trouble. If it weren’t for the foul and foolish policy of “multiculturalism,” Muslims would long ago have begun erecting statues of Voltaire and forming reading-clubs to probe the collected works of John Stuart Mill. Their Islamic faith would have remained “a private affair, a matter of conscience and ritual.”

Murderers for Muhammad

That’s the theory, anyway. Alas for libertarians, it falls apart when it’s set against reality. “Multiculturalism” didn’t embolden that Muslim mob chanting for the decapitation of a terrified woman in Lahore in 2024. Nor did it embolden the Muslims who burnt a copy of H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World in London in 1938. Wells had disrespected the Prophet Muhammad, you see, so Muslims burnt his book for lack of ability to chop his head off. And “multiculturalism” definitely didn’t embolden the Muslim hero-martyr Ilm ud-Deen, who stabbed a Hindu blasphemer to death in 1929, then calmly accepted arrest, imprisonment, and execution. The Hindu had satirized the Prophet in a book called Rangila Rasul or Colorful Prophet, so Ilm Ud-Deen did the decent thing and dispatched him to Hell (“colorful” also implies “promiscuous” or “wanton” in Urdu and Hindi).

Islamic Hero #1: Ilm ud-Deen, who murdered for Muhammad in India (image from the movie Hero Ilmuddin the Martyr)

Islamic Hero #2: Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered for Muhammad in Pakistan (the poster is for a celebration of Qadri in a mainstream Muslim mosque in Maryland, USA)

Islamic Hero #3: Tanveer Ahmed, who murdered for Muhammad in Britain (Ahmed is described as ghazi, “hero,” and his victim Asad Shah as kazzab, “liar”)

Ilm Ud-Deen’s heroic defence of the Prophet’s honor explains why there are shrines devoted to his memory in modern Pakistan. A movie was released there in 2002 celebrating his love of the Prophet and noble self-sacrifice (you can watch it for free at Youtube). It’s called Ghazi Ilmuddin Shahid, which means Hero Ilmuddin the Martyr. To millions of Pakistanis that’s exactly what he is. He’s a hero for killing the Hindu blasphemer and a martyr for welcoming the execution that followed.

Given the continuing veneration of Ilm ud-Deen in Pakistan, it’s no surprise that in 2011 another devout Muslim followed his golden example and became a ghazi-shahid too. Mumtaz Qadri was a bodyguard for the Pakistani minister Salmaan Taseer. But Taseer tried to help the Christian woman Asia Bibi, who was rotting on death-row after a righteous conviction for blasphemy. Taseer “advocated reform of Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws,” so Qadri did the decent thing and machine-gunned him to death, then calmly accepted arrest, imprisonment, and execution. His golden example inspired another yet devout Muslim, this time one living in Britain. After his arrival here from Pakistan, Tanveer Ahmed was horrified to learn that an Ahmadi heretic called Asad Shah was disseminating blasphemous videos from his shop in Glasgow. So Tanveer got in his taxi and drove up from Bradford in 2016 to do the decent thing. He stabbed and stamped Asad Shah to death, then calmly accepted arrest and imprisonment for murder.

Murderous Mumtaz was a “true Muslim”

If Britain still had the death-penalty, he would have accepted execution just as calmly. He didn’t get to be a shahid, a “martyr,” but he’s still a ghazi, a “hero,” to many mainstream Muslims in Britain. For example, Glasgow Central Mosque and the Muslim Council of Scotland refused to take part in an “anti-extremism event” held in memory of Asad Shah. They too thought that Asad Shah was a heretic and deserved all he got. Indeed, only a month before Shah was dispatched to Hell-fire, an imam at Glasgow Central Mosque had expressed his “pain” at the execution of Mumtaz Qadri, the Martyr with a Machine-Gun, called him a “true Muslim,” and pronounced a blessing on him. Kenan Malik’s own newspaper, the Guardian, reported that “One of the largest mosques in Birmingham said special prayers for Qadri, describing him as ‘a martyr’, as did influential preachers in Bradford and Dewsbury’.” Qadri-fans from Pakistan have toured mosques in Britain and praised his heroic defence of the Prophet.

How have Kenan and his comrades responded to this perfectly mainstream Muslim love of violent censorship and hatred of peaceful free speech? Well, to the best of my knowledge, Kenan Malik has never written a word about the murder of Asad Shah or the deep-rooted Pakistani tradition of murder-for-Muhammad that inspired it. The same silence has long been maintained at Spiked, where no senior writer mentioned Asad Shah until 2023, when Spiked’s editor Tom Slater (who isn’t one of Kenan’s original comrades) wrote a detailed article about the murder. But detail didn’t preclude dishonesty. As I described in “Blasphemy and Bullshit,” Slater blamed “liberal cowardice” and “state multiculturalism” for “fuel[ing] Islamic intolerance” and encouraging Muslims “to see themselves as separate and distinct.” Contra Slater’s dishonesty, Tanveer Ahmed came to Britain as an adult with his “Islamic intolerance” fully formed by his upbringing in Pakistan.

“Love Muslim migration, hate free speech”

And Slater doesn’t understand — or pretends not to understand — that “multiculturalism” harmonizes perfectly with mass immigration. Opposing “multiculturalism” and supporting open borders, as Slater and his comrades have always done, is like opposing maggot infestation and supporting open wounds. When the elite of a civilized nation is on the side of the ordinary people in that nation, it does not allow mass immigration from the Third World. That’s why Frank Furedi’s homeland of Hungary is not troubled by rape-gangs, suicide-bombing, murder-for-Muhammad, and other aspects of Islamic enrichment. However, when the elite of a nation is hostile to the ordinary people of that nation, it imposes Third-World immigration on the ordinary people no matter how much they protest. At the same time, the hostile elite privileges the Third-World invaders over the White natives and allows them to pursue their own advantage at all turns.

You can see this elite betrayal in Britain, which has had an official policy of multiculturalism, just as much as in France, which has had an official policy of monoculturalism. In other words, the imposition of Third-World immigration by a hostile elite harmonizes perfectly with the incubation of Third-World pathologies. Kenan Malik and Spiked never point out that the greatest enemies of free speech, like Labour in Britain and the Democrats in America, are simultaneously the greatest supporters of Third-World immigration. Nor do they point out the rarity and fragility of free speech. Across almost all the world throughout almost all of history, tyrants and religious believers have maintained their power by silencing their critics with violence and imprisonment. Given their own political history, Malik and Spiked should need no reminding that it was the freedom-hating Josef Stalin who triumphed over the freedom-loving Leon Trotsky.

Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses

Not that Trotsky was a genuine lover of freedom. He might well have become a worse tyrant than Stalin if he’d won the battle for supremacy. Malik and Spiked aren’t genuine lovers of freedom either. If they were, they wouldn’t have ignored the horrific murder of Asad Shah for so long. When Tom Slater finally broke that shameful silence at Spiked, he complained that Shah’s “name doesn’t mean much to people in Britain today. But it really should.” I fully agree. That’s why I’ve been writing about the murder of Asad Shah ever since it happened: see here, here, here, here, here, here and here. But alas, I’m a crazed far-right extremist and I don’t have the mainstream audience enjoyed by Spiked and by Kenan Malik at the Observer, the Sunday version of the Guardian. If Kenan & Komrades had written regularly and often about Asad Shah, he would now be much better known. But if they’d done that, they would have contradicted their own bullshit about “multiculturalism” rather than migration being to blame for “Muslim identity politics” in the West.

As I’ve said, that theory falls apart when it’s set against reality. That’s why Kenan Malik, for example, has protested loudly about Uyghur Muslims being persecuted by kaffir communists in China even as he’s ignored the murder of Asad Shah in Glasgow and the fashion-phobic mob in Lahore. If Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade are writing the script for Pakistan, then it’s Douglas Adams (1952–2001), author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who’s writing the script for Kenan & Komrades:

Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you. (From Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), chapter 5)

Metaphorically speaking, Kenan & Komrades have been wearing Joo Janta Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses for decades. But the real problem isn’t that they’re blind to the truth about Islam and Third-World migration, it’s that they see the truth and then refuse to be honest about it. That’s why they’ve ignored so many inconvenient stories about Muslim love of Muhammad and hatred of free speech. As I said above, Lewis Carroll had the upper hand on the dress-script, rather than the Marquis de Sade. But the Marquis had the upper hand on this script for lovers of Muhammad:

A mob in Pakistan tortured, killed and then set on fire a Sri Lankan man who was accused of blasphemy over some posters he had allegedly taken down. Priyantha Diyawadana, a Sri Lankan national who worked as general manager of a factory of the industrial engineering company Rajco Industries in Sialkot, Punjab, was set upon by a violent crowd on Friday.

In horrific videos shared across social media, Diyawadana can be seen being thrown on to the floor, where hundreds began tearing his clothes, violently beating him. He was tortured to death and then his body was burned. Dozens in the crowd can also be seen taking selfies with his dead body. The incident began when rumours emerged that Diyawadana, who had been manager of the factory for seven years, had taken down a poster bearing words from the Qur’an. By the morning, a crowd began to gather at the factory gates and by early afternoon they had charged into the factory and seized Diyawadana. (Man tortured and killed in Pakistan over alleged blasphemy, The Guardian, 3rd December 2021)

If Kenan Malik and Spiked were genuinely concerned with defending free speech, they would write about stories like that. There’s no shortage of them from Pakistan and other Muslim countries. But alas, if Kenan & Komrades wrote about horrific stories like that, they would find it much harder to plug bullshit like this:

Discussions about ideas or social practices or public policy should be as unfettered as possible. But when disdain for ideas or policies or practices become transposed into prejudices about people, a red line is crossed. It’s crossed when castigation of Islamism leads to calls for an end to Muslim immigration. (“Blurring the line between criticism and bigotry fuels hatred of Muslims and Jews,” The Observer, 3rd March 2023)

That’s Kenan Malik in the Sunday version of the Guardian. He wants both discussion about ideas and Muslim immigration to “be as unfettered as possible.” But the murder of Asad Shah proves that “Muslim immigration” is very bad for “discussion of ideas.” That’s why Kenan has ignored the murder of Asad Shah. He’s also ignored the fact that ideas do not have to be accompanied by immigration. Here is an image of a Muslim expressing an idea in India:

A Muslim offers some wholesome head-chopping advice in Hindi script (image from OpIndia)

The Hindi script on the placard reads Gustākh-e-nabi ki ek hi sazā, sar tan se judā, sar tan se judā, which means “For insulting the Prophet, there is only one punishment: cut the head from the body, cut the head from the body!” It’s the same wholesome head-chopping advice that I discussed at the beginning of this article (or nearly the same: it uses nabi for “prophet” rather than rasūl).

That’s the magic of writing, you see: it allows ideas to fly across vast stretches of space and time without any accompanying body or brain. The Muslim is in India, I’m in Britain. I’ve seen his “idea” and I reject it. But alas: Muslims who accept the same idea have colonized Britain in ever-growing numbers. Tanveer Ahmed accepts that idea. That’s why he triumphed in his “discussion” with the heretical Asad Shah in Glasgow. Asad wanted to shake hands with his opponent; Tanveer wanted to murder his opponent. It was Tanveer who won the discussion and who strengthened his violent form of Islam at the expense of Asad’s peaceful form of Islam.

Phony friend of free speech

As Kenan Malik never told you, Asad Shah had been granted asylum in Britain precisely because he was at threat of violence in Pakistan. But Pakistan followed him to Britain thanks to Britain’s insane and evil immigration policies. When you import Third-World people, you inevitably import Third-World pathologies with them. But it isn’t just the murderous intolerance of mainstream Pakistani culture that Britain has imported. It’s also the rape-culture of Pakistan. And the horrible genetic diseases caused by the Pakistani tradition of marrying close relatives. How does Kenan Malik respond to all these pathologies? To the best of his ability, he ignores them completely. But he claims that “a red line is crossed” when those who oppose “Islamism” call for “an end to Muslim immigration.” So there you have Malik’s “red line.” Not the murder of Asad Shah, which he ignored, but any call for an end to Muslim immigration.

In other words, Malik isn’t a genuine friend of free speech and isn’t a genuine opponent of identity politics. That’s why he ignores horrific stories about Muslim intolerance and why he uses weasel-words like “Islamism.” I don’t think murderers like Mumtaz Qadri and Tanveer Ahmed are “Islamists.” I think they’re perfectly mainstream Muslims. I think the same of the Muslims at Glasgow Central Mosque who refused to attend the “anti-extremism event” for Asad Shah and who pronounced a blessing on Mumtaz Qadri, the Martyr with a Machine-Gun.

“Love Muhammad, hate free speech”

But I’m a crazed right-wing extremist, so I’m sure that Kenan Malik won’t take my word for it. That’s fine. He can take the word of his own newspaper instead. In 2011 Saeed Shah, the Guardian’s correspondent in Islamabad, reported that “mainstream religious organisations applauded the murder of Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, earlier this week and his killer was showered with rose petals as he appeared in court.” In 2014, the Guardian was back with an update: “A mosque named in honour of the killer of a politician who called for the reform of Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws is proving so popular it is raising funds to double its capacity.”

Is Kenan Malik wearing his Joo Janta Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses when stories like that make their regular appearance in his own newspaper? Do the sunglasses “turn totally black and thus prevent him from seeing anything that might alarm him”? No, that’s not what happens. The problem with Kenan & Komrades isn’t their eye-wear but their dishonesty and refusal to admit the truth. Murder for Muhammad is mainstream in Islamic countries. Thanks to Muslim immigration, murder for Muhammad is becoming mainstream in Britain too. And in France, where cartoonists have been massacred and a schoolteacher beheaded by yet more imported lovers of Muhammad and haters of free speech. Lying leftists are responsible for those murders. But so are lip-sealed libertarians.