The Question Mark

The question mark is a punctuation mark that is used at the end of a sentence when asking a question. As statements go, that sounds like a no-brainer.

But what is a question? A question is a direct and open request for information, e.g. What time is it? Upon hearing the example sentence, we immediately know it is a question because its first word is an interrogative pronoun. Reading on, we find the inverted verb form word order that indicates a question in English. In this example, the straightforward ‘it is’ has been switched round to ‘is it?’.

Inversion of subject and verb is a feature of Romance languages and English. (Keep in mind that English is not a Romance language like French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian. English is a West Germanic language, originating from settlers in the 5th century CE. Nevertheless, English does invert its verbs when forming a question.)

Native speakers of other languages, such as Arabic, typically have difficulty with the interrogative inversion. An Arabic speaker whose second language is English might ask, "Why he is doing that?" whereas a native English speaker would ask, "Why is he doing that?" The Arabic speaker would leave it to context and intonation to make clear he was asking a question.

Given the recognisable word order of a question written in English, the question mark at the end of the sentence seems redundant. Unfortunately, though, an emerging form of passive-aggression has hijacked the noble question mark.

Every so often, I receive emails containing statements - not questions - that end with question marks. Often, the offending sentence starts with ‘I thought’, such as ‘I thought we were going to do it my way?’

The sentence is clearly not a question. It is an assertion. The sender asserts that they thought (note the past tense, i.e. they do not think that any more) it was going to be done their way. So, why does the sender use a question mark? I think it is because they have awarded themselves the right to expect an answer, even though they have not asked a question. There is something not quite up-front about that. It’s as though the sender is saying, ‘I’m not going to do you the courtesy of deferring to you by asking an actual question, but I expect an answer nevertheless.’ Perhaps there is more to it. Clearly, the sender is responding to something. It seems they are indicating their surprise at a notification they have received, about a decision to do something in a way they don’t want. If they were to ask a straightforward question, such as ‘Why aren’t we doing this my way?’, they would thus be showing their hand, openly questioning a decision that they do not like. I could then respond by asking them on what grounds are they questioning my decision? By hiding behind the passive-aggressive statement with a question mark, they can perhaps convince themselves they are just sharing a thought, rather than demanding that the decision be reversed. It’s an instruction,without the honesty of a direct imperative. It’s a veiled command to‘Explain yourself.’ Bluntly, you can shove it.

Morality?

Letterbox format, we used to call it. Face, hair, body robed in obsidian; scarf and veil revealing no more than the eyes and the bridge of the nose. Four starved, brooding vultures biding their time in the school’s conference room. They were waiting for me.

I’ve been privileged to work, as a teacher and a headteacher, in several Middle Eastern nations and this was one of them. The troupe of black-clad dementors had come to us from the Ministry of Education. My boss, Linda (name changed), told me the reason for their visit, before I went in. “They’re looking for willies,” she said.

The ladies had come to inspect our humanities books. With some help, I bore the heavy pile into the room and set them down upon the long table. Magnetised by the promise of rich pickings, the visitors leaned forward in hungry anticipation, each reaching greedily to grasp a volume in her hennaed talons, then leafing voraciously through its pages.

“Ha!” exclaimed the quickest, triumphantly stabbing downward with her foreclaw. The image was from the Louvre, or the British Museum, or somewhere. An Adonic male statue in grey marble stood proudly, arms aloft, not a stone stitch of carved clothing to obscure God’s fine handiwork. The head scrutineer had found her willy. I am sure it was not her first.

“You will remove this. It is inappropriate,” intoned the dementor-in-chief.

Then they left. With scissors, we cut the page from every copy of the children’s encyclopaedia it had been part of.

So, what had we collectively achieved, we teachers, and the august body of officials who guide us? We had disfigured a beautiful book. We had denied young readers a remote doorway to a room filled with classical sculpture. And we had indulged a coven of inward-looking, poison-minded naysayers in their assigned pastime, one they doubtless consider a holy quest.

‘Inappropriate’ was the word the lead inquisitor used. In what sense was the picture of the statue inappropriate? Did it contain an error? The ancient sculptor’s representation of the human form is anatomically correct, and it had been accurately depicted in the encyclopaedia through the photographer’s fine work. As I’m sure you have already concluded, the ministry lady objected to the image being seen by children. This is despite the demonstrable fact that fifty percent of children were born with a penis and therefore have, we can safely assume, already seen one. Of the other fifty percent, over four fifths have at least one sibling, and half of those siblings can be expected to be biologically male, so a good number of children who don’t have a penis will most likely have seen a penis at some time during their childhood, be it at bath time or whenever.

And what of the minority for whom the statue would be their first glimpse of the unclad male form? Ought we therefore to protect them from this particular aspect of reality? I mean, it’s not necessarily all that big an aspect, is it? Are we not overblowing its importance, amid all the wonders of the world?

Islam is a conservative, unblemished religion, we are continually assured. Women cover their torsos, arms, legs, hair and faces. Men wear long pants, or thobes, eschewing short-sleeved shirts. No unworthy thought would ever cross the mind of a good Muslim, good Muslims and their apologists tell us. We can surely conclude that no good Muslim would seek to spend her time gawping at willies.

Yet, those morally exemplar, holier-than-us women were singularly lured to our school and others by the beacon of the male penis, carved in stonework, inexorably drawing them on, but an evil menace to the innocence of everyone who sees it. Are the dementors themselves at risk of harm from exposure to such an image? Of course not, because they are imbued with the power to eliminate vices and promote virtues, or at least that’s what it says in their preferred holy text.

Perhaps something else motivates the posse, and those who issue their orders. Could the inspectors’ outward, vehemently broadcast conservatism be no more than a movie set facade, masking powerful inner urges that have kept humanity and its ancestors in continuous reproductive existence throughout our history? I assert that the dementors and their handlers find the unclothed human form no less attractive than do you or I, and that they have been conditioned from early childhood, via religious indoctrination, to consider their natural human impulses unwholesome, even wicked. Able neither to talk about their shameful obsession nor to purge themselves of it, they seek to externalise their self-loathing and demonstrate to God, the world and themselves that they are doing all any mortal can to rid the world of that which they find at once so base and so compelling. Here are two examples, both depicting prurience thinly disguised as puritanism.

Doctor Samuel Johnson, it is said, upon completion of the first dictionary of English, received a visit from a delegation of elderly ladies who wished to congratulate him on having excluded all obscene words from his grand work of reference. In response, the author noted he was intrigued to learn that the unimpeachably principled gentlewomen had been looking those words up.

In Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear berates a policeman whom he has caught in the act of whipping a prostitute. Undoubtedly missing a good number of his marbles, the troubled monarch nevertheless marshals sufficient presence of mind to point out the hypocrisy of the beadle, beating the hapless woman for doing exactly what others - including the policeman himself - want her to do.

Pious, self-flagellating religion is born of a trinity - namely consciousness, death and sex. Living organisms that reproduce sexually have a huge advantage over those that don’t, insofar as they can shuffle the genetic cards and change the password every generation. Parasites and pathogens thus have a much harder time scoring points against their targets. Evolvability may be accelerated or slowed by sex, in response to selection conditions. The vast number of plants and animals that reproduce sexually testifies to sex’s efficacy. The world is full of organisms that have what it takes to be in the world.

In order to get established, sex has to be popular. Sexually reproducing organisms that don’t practise sex will die out. Therefore, sex has to include both motivation and reward. Put simply, sexually reproducing organisms must seek sex whenever and wherever they can get it, and they must find it to be worth their while when they engage in it.

Animal brains can process information sufficiently fast to be ‘in the moment’, which gives sex an ideal opportunity to make that moment one of pleasure. Once a brain adds the ability to contemplate and to analyse, it will develop its own views on sex, a subject that occupies many of its waking hours. None of us likes being told what to do. When we have identified sex as a controlling influence, we may come to resent it, while at the same time enjoying it. Dwell on that long enough, with shrieking vocal reinforcement from Lear’s policeman atop his minaret, and before long you’re a full letterbox-format dementor, travelling around, doing God’s good work. I offer my sincerest wish that you find happiness.

Missed Opportunities - the Manchester Arena tragedy

The preliminary report of the Manchester Arena Inquiry draws attention to failings of the on-site security team on the evening of the event. The problem runs deeper than that. The failings began long ago. We need to understand exactly what those failings were, and are.

In the make-believe land of Nayeif, openly armed men and women walk the streets unchallenged, their weapons flagrantly brandished in plain sight. The nation is proud of its freedom and of its citizens’ genteel restraint. Violent deaths are rare, as one would expect in any civilised society. People go about their daily business, accepting and tolerant of others, politely exchanging pleasantries and passing the time of day.

Every so often, however, something less pleasant transpires. Occasionally, there is a brutal shooting. Everyone shakes their head in puzzlement. What can have gone wrong? No-one in their peaceful, civilized culture would dream of committing such an atrocity. The balance of the gunman’s mind must have been disturbed. Perhaps he was radicalized. Yes, that’s it. Radicalized. Something happened, just to that one man, whirling him around to stand in diametric opposition to the harmonious Nayeifian way of life. There must be wicked people among the citizens of Nayeif, their hidden agenda to radicalize our innocent youth. Everyone must be on his guard. Each man must hunt the radicalized ones down. They must start an anti-radicalization movement, to avoid similar tragedies in the future.

One thing is absolutely beyond question. The barbaric murder cannot possibly have arisen from the fact that everyone carries a loaded gun as part of their daily routine. Everyone in Nayeif knows that to be true, because carrying loaded guns is part of their culture. It is a tradition dating back to the time of their forefathers. To change it would be to renounce their heritage; to betray their birthright and to comprise their rightful seat in heaven when they duly pass away and face judgment from their maker.

The make-believe land of Nayeif is full of loaded weapons, borne by those who rarely fire them. But the weapons are there. And they are loaded. They are very easy to fire, should someone decide to do so.


In the real world of twenty-first century Earth, men and women are free to believe in accordance with their learned cultures. They walk the streets unchallenged, their beliefs brandished proudly - often, loudly - in plain sight and earshot. Their holy text calls for the death of all those who do not share their beliefs, but few are motivated by that mandate to commit suicide and murder. Each nation is proud of its freedom and of its citizens’ genteel restraint from acting upon a literal reading of their preferred holy texts. Violent deaths are rare, as one would expect in any civilized society, but they do happen. People go about their daily business, accepting and tolerant of others, politely exchanging pleasantries and passing the time of day.

From time to time, however, something less pleasant transpires. Occasionally, there is a brutal suicide bombing. Everyone shakes their head in puzzlement. What can have gone wrong? No-one in their peaceful, civilized culture would dream of committing such an atrocity. The balance of the suicide bomber’s mind must have been disturbed. Perhaps he was radicalized. Yes, that’s it. Radicalized. Something happened, just to that one man, whirling him around to stand in diametric opposition to the nation’s harmonious way of life, with its fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect for, and tolerance of, those with different faiths and beliefs. There must be wicked people among the citizens of the nation, their hidden agenda to radicalize the country’s innocent youth. Everyone must be on his guard. Each man must hunt the radicalized ones down. They must start an anti-radicalization movement, to avoid similar tragedies in the future.

One thing is absolutely beyond question. The barbaric suicide-murder cannot possibly have arisen from the fact that everyone believes the literal truth of their holy text, including its injunction to slay as many unbelievers as you can. Everyone in the nation knows that to be true, because following their beliefs in their daily lives is part of their culture. It is a tradition dating back to the time of their forefathers. To change it would be to renounce their heritage; to betray their birthright and to comprise their rightful seat in heaven when they duly pass away and face judgment from their maker.

The real world of twenty-first century Earth is full of minds capable of following their holy texts’ injunction to commit murder in the name of a deity. The vast majority do not go on to murder. A few do, however. It is very easy for them to justify doing so.


Action could have prevented the 2017 Manchester suicide bombing years before Christopher Wild’s alert was ignored by poorly trained, inexperienced security staff at the Manchester Arena. We could have acted collectively, long before Salman Abedi was born. We could have put in place a healthy programme of rational education for young people, making clear the difference between actual fact and fictional holy text. But we have not done so, because we are too busy bending over backward to shower respect upon those who assert that the fantastic is true. Often, the reason for the professed ‘respect’ is pure pragmatism - we kowtow to religious bullying because we do not want our windows broken. It is ironic that such cowardly accommodationism makes it easier for misguided would-be martyrs like Abedi to carry out their self-interested crimes. The Arena security guards were worried about accusations of discrimination if they challenged Abedi. Why, we might now ask, did they not prioritise public safety over their own fears of reprisal? Perhaps it was because they did not appreciate either the immediacy or the scale of the threat.


Salman Abedi was a Muslim. That means he followed the religion of Islam, whose holy text is the Qur’an. In that book, those who die while slaying non-Muslims are promised rich rewards in heaven, to where they will be fast-tracked without having to spend years buried in the ground. The religion of Islam is comparatively young, its claimed prophet having died in AD632. However, there has been plenty of time for the civilized, rational world to react to its rise, and spread protective common sense through education. All we need to do is instil, in young people, the teaching that reality is best understood through science and clear, rational thinking, not through ancient texts and superstition. Salman Abedi could easily have been taught that he would not go to heaven for blowing up a foyer full of schoolgirls. He was born in Manchester in 1994 and was educated in UK state schools and Salford University. Throughout his formative years, there was ample time to call him out on any incipient aspiration to martyrdom. To have done so would have saved twenty-two lives, including that of eight-year-old Saffie-Rose Roussos, who bled to death from injuries caused by Abedi’s bomb, fully aware of her situation and asking medical staff if she was going to die.


Salman Abedi was 22 when he died. He threw away three quarters of his life. His death is as tragic as that of his victims. He is a victim himself, of a cruel, false ideology that dupes its adherents into acts that are extremely harmful and without benefit. Never mind the argument that most Muslims do not blow people up. Most alcoholic drivers do not kill people in road accidents, but a few do and that is why drinking and driving is, quite rightly, illegal. Islam is an expensive luxury the world cannot afford. It needs to be stopped, through a world-wide programme of rational education that should have started long ago.


We have to start now.

This is truly offensive

Peter Tait, a candidate in the upcoming Scottish Elections, has suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by gay marriage. When called out on his assertion, he cited God.

Yesterday, Good Friday, 2 April, 2021, Professor Alice Roberts tweeted, accurately and appositely, that dead people do not come back to life. There followed a stream of predictably sanctimonious replies, with the common theme that she should leave well alone and let innocent believers be happy in their harmless persuasion. Moreover, she should refrain from posting tweets that might offend people. Many of the ‘please don’t offend’ tweets were in this wise: “I personally don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, but I understand that some people really need to believe that, so you should not try to stop them doing so.” Can these people not see the patronising condescension that drips from their every word? “I am far too clever to believe in God but I pity lesser brethren for whom belief is an indispensable crutch. Prevented by their limited intellectual capacity from defending themselves, they need me, a paid-up member of the ‘I’m an Atheist-But’ club, to ride in like the cavalry on their behalf.”

As I’ve said numerous times in my own blog, there is no automatic right to believe what you want. That is because beliefs affect actions, and actions affect people. Peter Tait’s statement that the COVID-19 pandemic is God’s judgment on gay marriage is truly offensive on just about every level. Like some of the self-righteous respondents to Professor Roberts, Peter Tait hides behind God to justify his claim. I know several people, all of them honest, reliable and trustworthy, who are in gay relationships including marriages. Peter Tait has blamed those innocents for, at the time of writing, almost three million deaths. His vile words are deeply offensive to them, and to me.

Theists, please don’t respond that I’ve missed the point and I don’t understand the beautiful subtleties of your religion. There are no such subtleties. There is merely a set of contentions with nothing - absolutely nothing - to support them, other than a single book accompanied by blind faith in its inerrant truth.

Unsupported assertions deserve to be questioned. When those assertions affect people’s lives, the questioning should be especially robust. You will not be allowed to play the offence card. If you make a claim, either back it up with evidence, or stop making it.

And before you start asking me where religiously inspired great art, or music, or architecture came from, think on this. The world is, thankfully, well supplied with all of the above, pertaining to and arising from religions that are long dead, with no living adherents. As examples, I cite the breathtaking temples of Abu Simbel; the Parthenon which housed the lost statue of the goddess Athena, numerous prehistoric circles including Stonehenge and Avebury, the Temple of Mithras in London, and numerous Roman relics, such as the Temple of Diana in Turkey. There are others. None of them is evidence of the existence of the deity or deities in whose honour they were erected. As I’m sure you would agree, those beings existed only in the minds of their loyal followers, who were nevertheless driven by their piety to invest vast wealth and labour in those enduring monuments. Your cathedrals and churches are the same, with the trivial difference that you, a believer in Yahweh, are still alive. Please don’t forget that the ancient Egyptian and Roman gods and goddesses held sway for far longer than Yahweh, before their fandom faded away and they became a mere historical curiosity. There are other religions, causing us more daily grief than yours does, that have been around for even less time, and still bask in the bright, youthful flare of their adolescence. I am sure they will all go the same way as did Olympian Zeus, the sun god Ra, and the Norse pantheon of Thor and Odin.

You protest that Professor Roberts ought to remain silent. Yet, your cathedrals and churches, with their attendant rituals and pageantry, are a stark daily reminder of your own baseless claims. 

The best way to protect your declared right to your private belief is to keep it private. If you wish to make it public, be prepared to have it questioned, and to defend it, with real, verifiable evidence. 

Offence and Deep Hurt

Whoever was depicted by the cartoon shown briefly to students at Batley Grammar School last week, as part of a PowerPoint presentation that had been in use for ages, it was certainly not the Prophet Muhammad.

At the time of writing, no-one has seen his face for 1389 years. He died in 632CE. There were no cameras in those days and it is painfully well known that Muslims do not make or keep images of their beloved prophet. At the time of his death, no-one but a Muslim would have been terribly interested. It is safe to conclude that no authentic image of him survives.

Amid the furore, non-Muslim apologists are quick to bid for the politically correct limelight. The Independent grants irritatingly provocative exposure to the well-intentioned but sadly misguided Carolyn Edwards, from Leeds. Ms Edwards’ missive is fairly well written; a class of eleven-year-olds would find reassuringly few errors if they were to peer-assess her outpouring. She slips on a classic, common banana skin - that of assuming, from her liberally postmodern Olympian vantage point, that she can see everyone’s point of view, while the rest of us can see only our own.

“Are we indifferent to an action that knowingly offends the nearly 2 billion Muslims with which we share the planet?” she rhetorically asks. I really hope the bruises aren’t too bad as, feet flying amid fruit peel in the air, she crashes down in an inelegant heap. ‘We’, it is evident, are different and separate from the 2 billion Muslims. We share a planet with them. They are a different species. They get offended by stuff, and we have the power to offend or not to offend. This is patronising condescension at its nauseating worst. Blind to her own arrogance, she gazes down her nose at the simple, bewildered underlings over whom we hold potentially offensive sway.

A vanishingly small sample of the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims - a few of them actually parents of children at the school - has rocked up at the gates of Batley Grammar, COVID-19 protocols be damned, mask around the chin, to exercise their Islamic right to be offended, insulted and very, very angry. And the accommodationist left falls over itself to appease them.

Consider this. How much more respectable would be the face of Islam in the UK if the below, or something like it, was the text of their statement to the press.

“It has been reported that a cartoon, said to portray the noble Prophet Muhammad, has been shown to students in a religious studies class, as part of a PowerPoint that is used year on year. Whoever is depicted in the cartoon, it is certainly not our Prophet, for no-one knows what his face looked like. He has been dead for almost fourteen centuries. There is no recorded likeness of him anywhere. If, as some correspondents suggest, the cartoon’s display was a calculated attempt to provoke us, it has failed to do so. Islam is a peaceful religion with two billion followers. We do not fear petty mockery, which does nothing to perturb our submissive commitment to Allah and the five pillars of Islam. Those who seek to belittle us simply show their own intolerance and bigotry, which do not impact us in any way. We require no resignation, no apology and no huffing and puffing from within our own rank and file. We do not descend into street mob politics. Peace be upon our noble Prophet and upon us all.”

I will dream on. I would be exuberantly, ecstatically delighted if anything like the speech above were to issue from the lips of any influential Muslim.

Nationality, Race and Religion

Nationality, race and religion are different things. They do not depend on one another; in civilised countries, none determines either of the others.

Nationality

A person's nationality is decided upon several factors. Where they were born is often, but not always, the primary consideration. Then there are the passports held by their parents. For example, a British person, living overseas, can confer British nationality upon their offspring, although any children of such offspring must be born in the United Kingdom in order to inherit full UK nationality. If they are born overseas, they cannot claim UK nationality. Thus, nationality is not unalterably part of the DNA, nor may it be passed on verbally at will, unlike religion.

Race

The enlightened majority concur that race is an illusion. For centuries, race has been assigned by colour of skin or geometry of eyes. However, we are each unique. Identical twins have undeniable differences - so the notion of race is no more than a lame attempt to generalise, lumping groups of us together on account of some arbitrarily chosen, shared characteristic. When asked to comment in a seminar at university, I answered a physiology lecturer's question, on the result of an antibody test, with sincerity, and in error, as any learner must expect to do from time to time. "Said with great northern vigour," sneered the lecturer, "but, sadly, wrong." Entrusted as an exemplar to those under his tutelage, the youthful don unfortunately proved himself delinquent as steward of his charges. His conduct fits my definition of a racist. He belittled an identifiable trait based on my geographical origin and heritage, implying that my 'northern vigour' had replaced factual accuracy-checking when I responded to his tutorial inquiry.

I do not claim my accent as a mark of race. I simply seek to draw attention to people's propensity to point up unconsciously acquired characteristics as being indicative of something that helps them prove a point.

Religion

Religion is a set of beliefs, handed down verbally from generation to generation, usually by parents to children. You are not born into your religion. It is inculcated in you by those in charge of your upbringing. Religion is not an unalterable part of your make-up, in the way that your DNA is, or the accent you learned from your parents and those around you in childhood. For you are at liberty, upon reaching the age of majority, to throw over the religion your parents saddled you with, and replace it with another, or with the healthy freethinking vacuum of atheism.

Recently, two men were removed from an Alaska Airlines flight, after a fellow passenger raised the alarm, having seen one of them sending texts in Arabic. The whistle-blowing observer was not able to read Arabic, so did not know what was being said. The two men claim they were discriminated against as Muslims.

I argue that the men were not identifiable as Muslims from their Arabic texts, nor from their appearance. No-one can infer a person's religious affiliation, if any, by looking at him. I suggest that the observer, mindful of the horrific events of 11 September, 2001, noticed the men drawing attention to themselves, and decided he had little choice but to act. He may well have thought it better to risk a false positive than risk a tragic end to their flight for himself and his fellow travellers. And I concur.

Elephant in the room - with a trunk full of Semtex

Michelle Ramsden’s brain fell victim to a dangerous disease in 2007. It was not bovine spongiform encephalopathy. It was not meningitis. Michelle was infected by Islam, when she was 24 years old - an impressionable young adult, groomed unwittingly by a Muslim family whose intentions were, I have no doubt, wholesome and benign.

Michelle changed her name to Safiyya Amira Shaikh. Taking an Arabic name is part of conversion to Islam. The radicalisation timer began ticking. By late 2019, Safiyya was sharing details of a credible plot to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral, including her intention to kill as many kuffar (non-Muslims) as possible. Unknown to her, the ‘brother’ with whom she shared her plans was an undercover police officer, assigned to her case after she had come up on MI5’s radar.

Sentencing Safiyya in July 2020, Mr Justice Sweeney deemed her a self-evident danger to the public, adding that there was no telling when she would be safe to be released.

His Honour misses the point, by a wide margin. I sincerely hope he privately agrees with what I am about to suggest, prevented, as he is, by politically correct protocol from saying as much. Though that is not a happy state of affairs, as I shall point out.

The danger to the public is Islam itself. It spreads from brain to brain, faster then ever, thanks to twenty-first century skills and technology. If you doubt that, and you think I’m being unfair to the innocent adherents of a noble faith, think on this. Why is that that fundamentalist extremists, plotting and carrying out murderous attacks, are almost exclusively Muslim? Their targets - the kuffar - are identifiable by being outside the belief system of Islam. It is no use arguing that most Muslims do not plan or commit homicidal atrocities. Most drivers who are over the legal blood alcohol limit do not cause fatal accidents. However, all of the drunk drivers who do kill and maim, destroying or ruining countless lives, are drawn from the larger reservoir of all drunk drivers. Reduce the size of that pool - to zero if you can - and you lessen the chance of people getting killed.

If I argue that removing my right to drink beer and drive my car is a threat to my civil liberty, I’ll be quickly shouted down, and rightly so. My civil liberty is too expensive a luxury, when the price is counted in lives lost, in alcohol-related road accidents.

I assert that Islam is a similarly - and vastly more - expensive luxury than that. People do not die if they fail to pray five times a day. No-one would dream of blowing their life’s savings on a pilgrimage to Mecca to throw stones at a rock, was the idea not inculcated at an early age, through the verbally handed-down beliefs of parents. No-one would choose to starve themselves throughout daylight hours for a month, were such a ridiculous act not mandated by the authority of Islam. And no-one would seek to become a martyr in the name of Islam, if they had never heard of the whole sorry tale, and had no reason to suppose that blowing yourself to pieces leads to anything but oblivion, with no tempting reward of six dozen virgin brides, rivers of milk and honey, nor any other free gift.

If you still doubt that Islam is the cause of the problem, ask yourself how many atrocities committed by non-Muslim suicide bombers we see in daily press reports. Yes, I know the tactic of suicide bombing was first popularised by the Tamils in Sri Lanka, who are obviously not Muslims. But since the days of their rebellion, and now that the strategy has been plagiarised by the devotees of Islam, how many secular suicide attacks have there been? Every time a young hothead blows him or herself to kingdom come, we are able correctly to guess their religion, before we have even read the details.

We bend over backward to respect beliefs and faiths that are not our own. We protect the right of believers to state, without ridicule, that Mohamed ascended to heaven on the back of a winged horse, and Jesus was born of a virgin without the intervention of a sperm-providing man, when we know that both those things are scientifically not possible. Why do we do that? Because believers claim that it hurts them when their assertions are called into question.

Well, I’m afraid that’s just bad luck. Negative feedback may well hurt, but we still need to hear it. When my boss analyses my performance at work, pointing out where I haven’t done well and need to improve, I don’t enjoy it while he’s saying it. I could even claim it hurts. But that doesn’t mean he should not say it. Truth matters.

So stop whining, Muslims and your apologists. Your religion is outdated, of no use to society, and an urgent threat to the safety of civilisation. What might happen, should one of these ardent young trainee martyrs gain access to a weapon of mass destruction?

Islam could be gone in a generation, were educators allowed to do their job properly, encourage healthy scepticism, and call it out for the tissue of shallow lies that it is.

The time to act is now, while those infected by the Islam pandemic are still a minority. Don’t be afraid to speak out. Bawl your head off, before they cut it off. Seriously, they cannot behead us all. Shout it from the rooftops. Islam is false, along with Christianity, Judaism and all the other mumbo-jumbo spouted from the mouths and texts of those who promulgate popular religion. Call out the elephant in the room, and consign it to its rightful place, while we still can.