Boris Johnson's burqa comments have worked out exactly the way he planned

Boris Johnson's comments ridiculing women who wear the veil were a blatant ploy to rile up the extreme-right by throwing them the red meat of Muslims to hate, and the free speech issue to gnash their teeth over.

It's no coincidence whatever that Johnson has decided to whip up the extreme-right like this, having just had a secretive meeting with the alt right "kingmaker" Steve Bannon who was the one who unified the Swastika-waving "Jews will not replace us" crowd and the Donald Trump Presidential campaign.

Picking minority groups to bash rather than talking about policy issues has been a classic extreme-right tactic ever since Hitler and the Nazis, and just look how it's already worked a treat for the hard-right Brextremists:

Look how they successfully pinned the blame for the devastating consequences of their own hard-right austerity agenda onto immigrants and the EU in order to con people into voting for their 'make it up as we go along' Brexit shambles.

Public pressure has eventually convinced the Tory leadership to drop their usual "ignore it until it goes away" stance in favour of a supposedly independent inquiry into Johnson's conduct.

But this inquiry is disastrous for multiple reasons. The main one is that it feeds into the victimhood narratives that the extreme-right rely so heavily upon to spread their divisive bile. 

Boris was clearly hoping his comments would generate pushback so that he can pose as the poor innocent victim who is being silenced, so it's played right into his hands.

Another reason such a limited inquiry is a disastrous idea is that it's a lose-lose outcome for Muslims. If Boris is cleared then it sends out a signal to every single bigot in Britain that ridiculing Muslim women and demanding they be denied access to public services is now approved and acceptable behaviour. Boris gets off scot free, Muslims take the hit

If Boris is sanctioned for his comments, then he's sure to be anointed with martyrdom sainthood by the extreme right, with Muslim people bearing the brunt of the criticism for the fact he's been sanctioned. Boris gets a huge popularity boost with the extreme-right mob, Muslims take the hit

What the Tory party really needed to do is call the wide-ranging inquiry into anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks that the Muslim Council of Britain and several senior Tories have been demanding for months.

Instead they've cobbled together this rigged Boris wins - Muslims lose farce.

If you're under any doubt whatever about whether Boris Johnson's comment were a ploy to garner support from the extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic, just take a look at what's been going on in the Tommy Robinson hate chamber since Johnson made his remarks.

These are just a tiny sample illustrating the wave of extreme-right Boris adoration and anti-Muslim commentary he's managed to whip up.

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Why is the leader of the Scottish Tory youth movement spreading recycled Nazi conspiracy theories?

In the grand scheme of things James Bundy isn't an important figure. Yes he heads up the Scottish Tory youth wing, but he's hardly a household name. However in one vile Tweet he's managed to perfectly illustrate the appalling ideological decomposition of the Tory party, and the outright complicity of the media who have allowed this to happen right in front of their eyes.

In his Tweet Bundy decided to rail against a BBC article about gender stereotyping of children by invoking a truly sinister anti-Semitic conspiracy trope straight from the Nazi propaganda playbook.

By invoking "cultural Marxism" as a threat to our way of life, Bundy has recycled a the Nazi propaganda trope of "Kulturbolschewismus" (cultural Bolshevism) which posited that modern culture (art, architecture, music, literature, groundbreaking television shows, anything the Nazis disapproved of really) was the result of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Western way of life.

Once Hitler and the Nazi party assumed power they outlawed modernist styles in music, architecture, literature and art, began the systematic persecution of Jews and leftists, and imposed their own strict ethno-nationalist standards.

After the defeat of Nazism the concept of "Kulturbolschewismus" was kept alive by fringe extreme-right ideologues and their supporters, largely flying under the radar in British political discourse until the rise of UKIP, Brexit, and the sudden blue-kip takeover of the Tory party.

In a desperate post-Brexit bid to unify the Tory vote with the UKIP vote to deliver a hard-right landslide, Theresa May and the top Tories began openly courting the extreme-right demographic, and welcoming them into the Tory fold.

Unfortunately for Theresa May her blue-kip gamble failed as Jeremy Corbyn rallied the beleaguered Labour Party to an unprecedented electoral surge which almost matched the combined vote share of the Tories and the mass influx of extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kippers fleeing the wreckage of UKIP.

The loss of her majority has rendered Theresa May absolutely and desperately dependent on continually appeasing the dangerous extreme-right fringe that she welcomed with open arms, otherwise she knows they'd just flock back to UKIP, or to the next extreme-right fad.

The fact that the leader of the Scottish Tory youth wing now feels absolutely comfortable sharing propaganda tropes crudely recycled from the Nazi playbook just goes to show how rotten the Tory party has become.

The use of this kind of anti-Semitic recycled Nazi propaganda must be increasingly commonplace within Tory circles if their Scottish youth leader is openly spouting this shit in public.

Anyone would have thought that traditional "one nation" Tories and even economically hard-right pro-privatisation Thatcherites and Majorites would be absolutely disgusted at the way their party is being usurped by extreme-right lunatics openly spouting fascist propaganda. 

But no, you barely hear any complaints about it (except for the honourable exception of Sayeeda Warsi who will not drop the issue of extreme-right anti-Islamic bigotry in the Tory ranks), so presumably because they consider welcoming fascists on board as "a price worth paying" just to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of power and stop him from renationalising the railways, water companies, and national grid, implementing an actual industrial strategy, and introducing a £10 minimum wage.

Then there's the news that three very senior Tories (Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove) have been colluding with the dangerous extreme-right white-supremacist Steve Bannon, who told the French extreme-right Front National to embrace their racism "as a badge of honour".

James Bundy is the Scottish Tory youth leader and he's left free to spread anti-Semitic Nazi conspiracy tropes on Twitter, and Michael Gove is an actual government minister openly cavorting with an ideologue of the "Jews will not replace us" extreme-right. Yet Theresa May does nothing to discipline them, and virtually nobody in the mainstream press gives a damn about it.

Te mainstream media have endlessly reported the Labour anti-Semitism debate in outraged tones, yet they choose to ignore a Tory government minister cavorting with a dangerous extreme-right fanatic, and a Tory youth leader spreading Nazi conspiracy tropes. In light of this double standard there's little doubt whatever that their outrage is highly selective, and politically motivated.

Just imagine that Bundy was a Labour youth activist and he was caught spreading recycled anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda tropes on social media.

Do you really think the mainstream media would refuse to cover it despite people all over social media trying to goad them into providing a tiny bit of balance. Or do you think they'd already be all over it like a pack of snarling dogs*?

The fact is that they don't give a shit about the ongoing extreme-right takeover of the Tory party, because providing any coverage of this ideological decomposition of the Tory party runs entirely counter to the over-riding groupthink agenda of undermining any alternative to the four decade hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that most mainstream media hacks have done very nicely indeed out of thank you very much.

So if keeping orthodox neoliberals in power requires outright collusion with actual fascists like Steve Bannon these days, and the normalisation of fascist conspiracy theories and extreme-right hate speech within mainstream political discourse, as far as most comfortable mainstream media hacks are concerned, so be it.

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* = And rightly so because all anti-Semitism, bigotry, and fascist propaganda should be vehemently condemned on sight.

The terrifying right-wing contempt for justice and the rule of law

The underlying contempt for justice amongst many on the political right has been clear for some time. It's come to the fore in recent times with the British right-wing propaganda rags attacking judges as "enemies of the people" and now Donald Trump Twitter abusing a well respected judge for daring to over-rule his Muslim ban as unconstitutional, but for those of us who have been paying attention, it's been an obvious problem for a long time.

You only have to look back at Theresa May's appalling track record at the Home Office to see manifestations of this opposition to the concept of open justice.

One of the big alarm bells was the introduction of Secret Courts through "Justice and Security" legislation in 2013. This legislation fundamentally undermines the concept that justice needs to be seen to be done in order to be effective. If people can be locked up by a court they can't enter on charges they don't know relating to evidence they're not allowed to see, then how can anyone know that the justice system is being administered fairly?

Theresa May's reaction to the Edward Snowden revelations was telling. Instead of seeking justice against the people who had been unlawfully stealing the private communication data of millions of British people and businesses, she introduced rushed legislation to temporarily legalise what they had been doing unlawfully for years (Dripa) and then permanently legalised mass data retention and snooping by all manner of non-terrorism related state agencies through the Snoopers' Charter, an act that also retroactively legalised the criminal behaviour of the surveillance state and allows the state to lie in court in order to secure convictions!.

Theresa May's next huge display of contempt for the rule of law came when she attempted to bypass parliament entirely out of a desire to conduct the Brexit process as an autocrat who gets to make and repeal laws at their personal will, free from legislative or judicial oversight.

As this astounding power grab was defeated in the courts the right-wing press went into an unprecedented frenzy of condemnation. The tabloid hatchet jobs on the judges who ruled in favour of parliamentary sovereignty (against autocracy) were absolutely shocking. It's hard to imagine how anyone could be uneducated enough not to be horrified at the Daily Mail describing judges as "enemies of the people", but millions of people actually applauded these displays of contempt for the rule of law under the delusion that High Court judges are the evil metropolitan elite, and Theresa May is some kind of not-at-all dictatorial woman of the people!

Revealing their true character Theresa May and the Tories refused to condemn the appalling tabloid hatchet jobs on the judges. As far as they were concerned a wave of public contempt towards the justice system was exactly what they needed in order to disempower parliament and the courts and centralise even more political power in the hands of the Theresa May and the Tory party.

Credit: Sousa & Machedo Arts

The refusal of the Tory government to condemn the abuse of judges was deeply shocking, but the sight of an actual President of the United States actively delegitimising and threatening judges is pretty near top-level craziness.

Trump signed an astonishing 22 Executive Orders in his first couple of weeks as President. It soon became clear that he didn't even bother to read some of them. He apparently had little idea that Steve Bannon had promoted himself onto the National Security Council in one of the Orders he signed without bothering to understand. 

It's no wonder that this blizzard of hastily drafted Executive Orders is falling foul of the United States constitution. Trump's Muslim Ban was so profoundly unconstitutional it's astonishing that it was ever enacted. Not as astonishing though as Trump's petulant and abusive reaction to being denied his own way by the justice system.

You don't have to be an expert in the history of the American justice system to understand that a sitting President publicly lambasting a judge for the "crime" of upholding the constitution of the United States is utterly extraordinary stuff.

Neither do you have to be an expert in the authoritarian dictatorships of the 20th Century to see that contempt for the rule of law goes hand-in-hand with despotism. There's little excuse for not at least having heard of the political show trials in Nazi Germany, the Great Purge in Soviet Russia or the campaigns of extrajudicial killings carried out by US backed Latin American dictators.

My mention of Soviet Russia makes it clear that justice-hating despots can come from the left or the right, but modern manifestations of this contempt for justice are clearly coming from the political right:Theresa May's repeated assaults on the justice system; the Britain First leader openly calling for instant lynch mob killings on the streets;  the baying attacks on judges from extreme-right propaganda rags like the Daily Mail and the Express,  the Michigan Republican leader Dan Adamini calling for a repeat of the 1970 Kent State shooting of unarmed protesters; Donald Trump Twitter-ranting about the judge who dared to defy his Muslim Ban by upholding the US constitution.

It's pretty clear where this contempt for justice stems from. Wielders of political and economic power like to see justice system as something that exists primarily to defend their interests. They certainly don't see it as something that exists in order protect the interests of ordinary people from them.

The establishment elitists see justice as a commodity that can be bought and sold, not something that exists to serve everyone. Thus the extraordinary tantrums when the justice system intervenes to prevent them carrying out some of their appalling schemes.

The rage of the Express and the Daily Mail against the judges who ruled to protect the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, and the rage of Donald Trump against the judge who upheld the United States constitution both come from the same essential source. The hard-right craving for despotism and the establishment of a permanent dictatorship of those with the most capital.

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Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban is a gift to extremists

Make no mistake. Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban is an absolute gift to extremists.

It's a gift to the fascistic white supremacist demographic who propelled Donald Trump into the White House, and made the extreme-right propagandist Steve Bannon one of the most powerful men on the planet. They've been baying for this kind of bigoted arbitrary discrimination for years. By giving them a bit of what they want Trump and Bannon have rewarded them for their votes.

White supremacist racists adore the idea of ethnicity and nationality based discrimination, but they're not the only extremists who will be delighted at Trump's Muslim travel ban. Islamist extremists all over the world will be ecstatic at this collective discrimination against Muslims, because it represents evidence to support their narrative that the West hate Muslims. 

It's a massive boon for them because it feeds into their divisive "clash of civilisations" agenda. "Look at how the West hate and discriminate against Muslims" is the perfect recruiting tool for these appalling savages.

Trump's Muslim ban is also a gift to the extremist Islamist theocracy in Saudi Arabia, which for some reason is one of the Muslim majority countries in the middle east to be excluded from the travel ban list. Let's not forget that 15 of the 19 September 11th attackers were Saudis; that it's widely acknowledged that Saudi Arabia spreads Islamist extremism and terrorism all over the world; that the leaked Clinton emails showed that the Americans have known for quite some time that Saudi Arabia is funding ISIS; nor that even the Saudi Arabian ministry admits that there are over 2,000 Saudi Arabians fighting for ISIS to create their barbaric Islamist caliphate in the middle east.

It's extraordinary that Saudi Arabia gets a free pass on this Muslim travel ban despite their obvious links to Islamist extremism, but it's hardly surprising given the vast amount of US weapons the Saudis buy, the vast amount of US currency, stocks and bonds they hold, and the fact that the Trump business empire has investments in Saudi Arabia too.

Social liberals find it easy to see the wrongness of Trump's arbitrary collective discrimination against Muslims from some countries but not others.

• Turning away refugees fleeing persecution and abuse is appalling. 

• Arbitrary collective discrimination is bigoted and inhumane. 

• Discriminating against people based on their religious beliefs is profoundly unconstitutional.

• Barring people who just need to fly through American airports to get to their final destinations is egregious. 

• Barring people who are just visiting temporarily to spend time with dying relatives is sadistic.

• Barring people who actually served alongside American soldiers during their imperialist wars is an obvious betrayal. 

• Expecting countries in Europe and the middle east to carry the entire burden of the refugee crisis that stemmed from the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is astoundingly selfish.

• Turning away refugees from Iraq (a country suffering the appalling consequences of US imperialism) whilst welcoming Saudi Arabians (a country that funds, arms and supplies ISIS) is completely unjustifiable.

Anyone with any basic human decency can see how unjust Trump's Muslim travel ban is, but you don't even need to recognise the injustice of it in order to see the biggest problem of all, you just need to be a pragmatist:

You just have to look at who actually benefits from this kind of cruel and arbitrary collective discrimination, and the answer is extremists.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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