Conservatives are intuitively opposed to big central government. After all, the bigger and more centralised the government, the more it’ll confer the kind of absolute power that, according to Lord Acton, corrupts absolutely.
That’s as true, if not to the same extent, of our so-called democracies as of openly totalitarian regimes. Hence conservatives favour transferring as much power as possible to small local government.
Such is the theory, and by and large it holds true. But then someone like Aysegul Gurbuz turns up, and a huge hole is punched right through the middle of the seemingly irrefutable theory.
Miss Gurbuz is a Labour councillor in Luton, which makes her a member of local government and supposedly an embodiment of a conservative ideal. However, she’s also a Muslim and merely 20 years old, with neither characteristic likely to appeal either to conservatives or to generally intelligent people.
Luton’s population being about 25 per cent Muslim, there can be no valid demographic objection to its council members espousing Islam. There are however, valid cultural and historical objections to any British city being 25 per cent Muslim.
After all, it’s far from certain that a devout Muslim can be trusted to uphold the founding principles of the realm, such as pluralism. Of course many Muslims are Muslim in name only, but, as you’ll see, Miss Gurbuz is a pious Muslim devoted to every tenet of her creed, including the less appealing ones.
Her age is another problem. It should be clear to anyone that a 20-year-old is too young to qualify for a government post. I’d also go so far as to suggest that 20-year-olds shouldn’t even vote, for the simple physiological reason that the human brain isn’t even wired properly until age 25 or so.
As a man who loves to see his prejudices confirmed, I’m grateful to Miss Gurbuz for validating both of my reservations about her suitability to be a councillor, even a Labour one, even in Luton.
As a pious Muslim, she’s a virulent, visceral anti-Semite who’s pining for another Holocaust. As a 20-year-old, she’s too stupid to conceal this.
On the contrary, she proudly tweets hatred urbi et orbi. “The Jews,” says one tweet, “are so powerful in the US, it’s disgusting.”
Miss Gurbuz is active in every pro-Palestinian cause under the sun, and her analysis of the situation in that volatile region reflects her slight partiality and a keen sense of history: “If it wasn’t for my man Hitler these Jews would’ve wiped Palestine years ago. Sorry but it’s a fact. Not hating on Jews btw.”
‘Not hating Jews’ would have made the last sentence more grammatical, if no more credible. It should also have been ‘wiped out’, not ‘wiped’, for surely the dastardly Jews want to destroy ‘Palestine’, not keep it clean (from what I’ve heard of the state of hygiene there, the former task would be easier to achieve).
Some punctuation would have helped too, if only to dispel the impression that Miss Gurbuz isn’t a native speaker of English or, if she is, a functionally illiterate one.
Anyway, since Muslims owe such a debt to ‘my man Hitler’, it stands to reason that in another tweet Miss Gurbuz describes her idol as “the greatest man in history”.
Labour is so sick of one anti-Semitic scandal after another, starting with the cordial friendship the party leader shares with Hamaz chieftains, that it reacted with unusual alacrity, suspending the precocious youngster from the party.
One can sympathise with Labour. First Oxford University Labour Club’s co-chairman had to resign because “a large proportion” of its members had “some kind of problem with Jews”.
Then the party twice had to suspend another functionary, Vicky Byrne, for tweeting anti-Semitic rants. Then Khadim Hussain, former Lord Mayor of Bradford, was suspended for lamenting the undue emphasis our education places on “Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler.” (For this lot ‘Zionist’ is synonymous with ‘Jew’.
And now this, a Muslim Nazi. Really, before long one could begin to doubt the socialists’ dedication to racial equality. Then one recalls that Hitler was a socialist too, and doubts become a certainty.