Jack Straw vs Pakistan

Watching the disintegration of New Labour as they flounder around unguided in opposition would be funny if it wasn't leaving the Con-Dems so depressingly unchallenged in their prescription of neoliberal shock treatment for the nation. While Ed Milliband fails to assert leadership, John Prescott – once a member of the party who I thought had some kind of left-wing integrity – has not only joined the House of Lords (and therefore gone back on his earlier statements about not doing so) but is now hawking car insurance to the plebs. Well, I hope you get a nice new swimming pool out of the big juicy cheque they give you, John. And who knows? Maybe the chlorine will eventually wash off that lingering feeling of dirtiness that comes with the advert-whore territory.

Meanwhile, Jack Straw is indulging in casual racism, claiming that Pakistani men have a predilection towards grooming and raping white women. Well, I supposed that now Pakistan is succumbing to extremism in the face of dire economic instability (with the assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer) we had better start vilifying them all with nasty national stereotypes hadn't we, Jack? Because the West will have to bomb this extremism out of them, and if we don't dehumanise them then we might have to think about the morality of those American predator drones which have been pretty much indiscriminately killing civilians there in the name of a War on Terror which New Labour supported. But who cares, if they're all rapists-in-waiting anyway, huh?

Straw claims the this fondness for rape derives from sexual repression:

"These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they're fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits... So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls...who they think are easy meat"

Yet most cases of sexual assault are committed by white men; so from whence comes their predation, Jack?

I think it's pertinent that Straw mentions Pakistani culture in particular, rather than Islam in general, as being responsible for this rape inclination . We will likely see a lot more of this in regard to Pakistan as it becomes more and more hostile to the West. We will hear a lot about their Islamic contempt for secular values, or sexual freedom; what we won't hear about is their contempt for the capitalist system which has made an economic elite of the unpopular secular government and condemned everyone else to impoverished insecurity. Nor will we hear about the immense 'collateral damage ' resulting from the American bombing of supposed terrorist hotspots, and of how this iddy biddy bit of mass murder just might radicalise those family members who survive the attacks, and further jaundice their perceptions of the 'secular values' which are linked so indelibly in their minds to the predator drones hovering, silent and sinister, above their homes, and the capitalism which has rendered them surplus people in their own land.