How many people who are delivering their daughters to
Oxford University are a threat to national security? I can think of no such
dad’s pulling up to the college in their estate cars packed with clothes and
computers blowing themselves up at the gates to our dreaming spires waking them
from their slumbers with cries of Jesus is merciful. Good Catholics have not
been a threat to national security since Guy Fawkes.
Rafal Ziemkiewicz a popular conservative writer from
Poland was recently prevented from entering the UK in a situation that
resembled Kafka’s Trial. He was not sure what he was accused of. He met merely
polite obscurantism from the border officials. He had committed no crime either
in Britain or in Poland, but was left unable to accompany his daughter to
Oxford just because someone, who knows whom, had denounced him.
There was minimal coverage of this event in the
British press. I searched for what he was supposed to have done but it was as
if I saw through a glass darkly so thick was the smoke and so distorting were
the mirrors.
I discovered that Rafal had planned to talk to some
Poles in London a couple of years ago, but that some left-wing Poles had
complained about him and involved Rupa Huq MP. The police got involved and the
meeting didn’t happen. Rafal thought no more about it until he was prevented
from going with his wife and daughter to Oxford.
He is accused of being far-right, but in fact his
views are simply those of a mainstream conservative in Poland. Rafal is a
best-selling author. Probably the most famous journalist in Poland. His books
top the best-seller list. If he is far-right then we can assume that most Poles
are far-right and that the Polish Government is far-right too. Perhaps we
should ban all Poles from coming to Britain.
Rafal as accused of Holocaust denial on the basis of
one sentence mentioning the myth of the Holocaust. But this was in a book that
extensively dealt with the reality of the Holocaust and which denied none of
the accepted events which occurred.
If I write about the myth of Dunkirk and the way that
it has been used in British history to create a story about little boats
rescuing our army, this does not mean that I deny the historical events, it
simply means that I am questioning a popular interpretation of these events. By
questioning popular interpretations of historical events, we are more likely to
arrive at truth. So Rafal far from denying anything is seeking to view the
events of the Holocaust with the eyes of a historian. For this he should be
commended rather than condemned.
The banning of Rafal from Britain is undoubtedly due
to the actions of Rupa Huq. She may shrug her shoulders and say “nothing to do
with me Gov” but how else did he get on some secret blacklist. It wasn’t
because the British border force monitors Polish newspapers and bestselling
books on politics and history.
But let’s look at the beam in Rupa Huq’s eye compared
to the mote in Rafal’s. Huq wants Shamima Begum to be allowed to return to
Britain from Syria in order to face whatever charges she might face. Quite
possibly none. Begum married an Isis
terrorist and was allegedly involved with Isis in Syria. Who is more of a
threat to Britain a middle-aged Polish writer or an Isis supporter? Has Rupa
Huq ever suggested that a Muslim should be excluded from coming to Britain? Did
she side with the teacher who had to go into hiding because he showed a picture
of Muhammad to his class? This poor
teacher is not threatened by anyone from Poland.
We have in Britain many fundamentalist Muslims some of
whom may believe that homosexuality is sinful or that people who cease to be
Muslims should be killed as apostates, but Huq condemns none of these people
and does not wish to exclude any of them. On the contrary she opposes any attempt
to limit immigration into Britain and puts no one on a blacklist unless he is a
Polish Catholic.
Rafal is a traditional Catholic. He follows the
teaching of the church. What he believes about homosexuality and transgender is
shared by the majority of Polish Catholics and also by the Pope. Should we have
excluded the Pope from coming to Glasgow because he believes that God created
us man and woman and that homosexual practices are sinful? This does not of
course mean that Rafal would treat transgender or homosexual people any
different from any other person. The church also teaches that we must love
sinners, care for them and treat them with dignity. This after all is the
message of the story of the woman who was a sinner. Neither do I condemn you.
Go and sin no more.
Anyone who sees the video that Rafal produced about
this case will see that this is a good kind man who is unusually intelligent.
He is a top-class writer and so he thinks for himself and tries to be original.
In order to reach truth, we need sometimes to be polemical. We need to use
reductio ad absurdum arguments such as that if it is right to call death camps
Polish it is equally right to call them Jewish because the Jews were inside of
them. But anyone who knows logic realises that this is a way of saying that
they were neither Jewish camps nor Polish, but rather Nazi.
Rafal is a writer similar to the British journalist
Douglas Murray. He says things that are a little controversial, because if we
are always scared to speak our minds then we end up with thin gruel and grey
mush that is merely boring and which says nothing. But this makes neither Rafal
nor Murray bad people and it certainly makes them no threat to anyone.
We have a large Polish community in Britain. I am
aware of zero terrorist attacks that were committed by Poles. So too in Poland
there is an almost zero threat from terrorists. The likelihood of anyone from
Poland coming to Britain to be subversive is miniscule not least because no one
would understand this subversiveness as it would be committed in a language
which to most British people amounts to a string of random consonants joined
together with some shushing sounds.
Rupa Huq is happy for anyone to arrive in Britain from
a rubber dinghy without any checks whatsoever. She is happy for supporters of
terrorism be it Isis Hamas or even the IRA to arrive here unhindered, but a
Polish intellectual writer who has never committed a crime, who is a member of
no far-right organisation and who has never expressed any hostility to Britain
or its people is excluded from our country on the basis of rumour and
unsubstantiated accusation. She is happy see him excluded.
Most people who are excluded from Britain are
genuinely dangerous, either because they are criminals or because they support
ideologies that may genuinely influence people who are here. Rafal is no threat
to anyone. He is merely excluded because he makes up the numbers. It is the
equivalent of searching little old white ladies at the airport because we must
demonstrate we don’t think Muslims are any more likely to be terrorists than
anyone else. It is this dishonesty that Rafal fights with his writing. It is
because of this dishonesty that he could not take his daughter to Oxford.
