In the UK, Fantasy Can’t Quite Replace Reality

In Britain, once the seat of a global empire and a proud civilization, is undergoing a world-historical societal transformation before our very eyes, and yet few have taken notice. In fact, even as this formerly great nation and erstwhile leader of the Western world suffers through its death agonies and last days as a free society, some are even celebrating its imminent demise. And still others are going even farther: amid the death throes of British civilization, they’re still up to their old game of posturing and playing the victim, as if they, not Britain, were in mortal peril. They even claim to have been victimized at the hands of dying Britain itself, as the nation of Shakespeare, Henry V and Churchill still had the will or the strength to get the better of anyone.

The Spectator on Saturday reviewed a new play called “Expendable,” which is playing until Dec. 21 at London’s renowned West End theatre The Royal Court. The play, according to The Spectator, is “an urgent bulletin from the front line of the grooming gang scandal in the north of England.” The Royal Court website is no less effusive, saying: “Playwright Emteaz Hussain‘s Expendable spotlights the often-overlooked voices of Pakistani women, delving into the shortcomings of law enforcement, politicians, and the media.”

Spotlighting the criminally overlooked voices of Pakistani women sounds like a capital idea. They could tell us about how the Qur’an directs men to beat women from whom they “fear disobedience” (4:34). They could tell us about how it devalues a woman’s testimony (2:282) and inheritance rights (4:11), and allows for the marriage, and even the divorce, of prepubescent girls (65:4). They could tell us about honor killings, the jailing of rape victims, and more.

All that, however, is not what “Expendable” is about. “The setting,” The Spectator tells is, “is a kitchen in Yorkshire where Zara is trying to keep her family together after her son, Raheel, was outed as a rape suspect by a national newspaper.” It’s not just the shame of the charge, it’s the attendant harassment: “White thugs dump parcels of excrement on their porch and Zara cowers under the kitchen table, too scared to answer the door. The racists have mounted a mass demonstration, supported by the cops, which causes local bus services to be cancelled.”

If this doesn’t sound like the Britain of today, that’s only because it isn’t. There are no “white thugs” menacing poor, huddled groups of fearful Muslims under the approving eye of the police. The reality is exactly the opposite: Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently earned the nickname “Two-Tier Keir” for cracking down harshly on the mildest of protests against mass migration and the Islamization of Britain. Starmer oversaw the imprisonment of people who posted rude statements on social media or chanted slogans that the government found offensive. Meanwhile, police notoriously turned a blind eye to Muslims who were genuinely violent.

The play starts from the fictional premise that Muslims in the UK are victims, and degenerates from there: “Every Muslim in town is terrified of a white vigilante gang who recently targeted a blameless Yemeni pensioner and kicked him to death. It gets worse. Zara and her daughter, Sofia, join a peaceful counter-demonstration, but the heavy-handed cops arrest ten innocent Muslims and charge them with violent disorder. Meanwhile, the white thugs are free to scrawl ‘Rape capital of the UK’ across the side of the local mosque.”

That’s shattered, staggering, dhimmi Britain today: a Muslim playwright constructs a victimhood fantasy that is a one hundred-percent inversion of reality, and leftist playgoers eagerly lap it up. Note that the play even portrays the supremely cowardly and compromised British police, who have demonstrated their pro-Muslim bias on numerous occasions, as singling out Muslims and ignoring “white” violence. Nobody tell “Two-Tier Keir” about this; he will direct the cops to become even more cravenly anti-British and pro-Islamic than they already are.

And as for the nefarious “whites” scrawling “rape capital of the UK” on the mosque, here again, this is an inversion of reality. We have seen numerous churches daubed with Islamic graffiti. Mosques, however, are not being targeted. And as for the charge, “August 26 [2024] marked ten years since the publication of the Jay Report, an independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the British town of Rotherham. The 2014 report found that at least 1,400 underage girls were abused predominantly by Muslim men of Pakistani heritage between 1997 and 2013 in this South Yorkshire town.

Thus as Britain enters its final period as a free society, its intelligentsia are indulging in titillating fiction about how wicked they are to persecute the poor Muslims. To dramatize this farce properly would take a Shakespeare, but he and his ilk are long, long gone.