Rod Liddle Says Blow Up Canary Wharf

Despite his increasingly shrill and intolerant stance - not to mention his drift in the direction of the far-right - the Murdoch Sunday Times continues to give a platform to Spectator stalwart Rod “a smile, a song, and a four-pack of Stella” Liddle, with the result that the paper has just been reported yet again to press non-regulator IPSO. Liddle’s subject for the offending piece was media creation Anjem Choudary.

It'sh alright Offisher, I'm only on my shecond bottle

Choudary, who would be nothing but for the assembled and desperate complicity of our free and fearless press, has just been released from jail. Liddle, to no surprise at all, had something to say about that. “That loveable little squirrel Anjem Choudary has been released from prison and will now cost us even more money as he will be monitored day and night”. As opposed to the billions wasted by Governments courting the Murdochs.

But do go on. “I assume he’ll also be back on the teat of the cockroach infidel kaffir state, of which he professes not to be a big fan (except when the benefits are handed out)”. Is there a point to this? “Anjem and I fervently agree on one issue, though. He has urged British Islamists to leave the country and blow themselves up”.

He has? Whatever. But then Liddle lets us know that the list of subjects about which he knows Sweet Jack also includes geography, and especially that of Greater London. “Me too. Actually, I don’t really mind if they don’t leave the country, so long as they blow themselves up - somewhere a decent distance from where the rest of us live. Tower Hamlets, for example”. He may have thought that was dead clever. But it wasn’t.

Quite apart from the premeditated Muslim-bashing smear - Tower Hamlets has “one of the highest Muslim populations in the country” and also “has the highest proportion of Muslims in England outnumbering Christians” - Liddle has advocated acts of violent terrorism in an area which includes London’s second financial centre.

Idiot bigot forgets all of this no shock horror

The borough includes Canary Wharf: “Many of the tallest buildings in London occupy the centre of the Isle of Dogs in the south of the borough”. Perhaps he forgot the 1998 Docklands bombing, when the Provisional IRA detonated a truck bomb in South Quay. The blast devastated a wide area and caused an estimated £150 million worth of damage. The area was not fully evacuated in time and two people were killed.

Now, a supposedly respectable journalist at a supposedly respectable newspaper has advocated for more of that - providing the perpetrators are Scary Muslims™ and they kill themselves in the act. Perhaps the column was a result of the ale, or whatever Liddle had been supping that lunchtime, talking. But one thing is clear.

Had that comment been made by anyone with any connection to Islam, or by any commentator to the left of Genghis Khan, or indeed by anyone who has in the past passed adverse comment on the propensity of the Fourth Estate to play fast and loose with the facts, the Murdoch press would have been down on them like a tonne of bricks.

Suggesting that the lives of tens of thousands of financiers, support workers, visitors, tourists, and others be put in danger in a Sunday Times column? That is what Rod Liddle just got away with. Because IPSO will do no more than wipe his arse for him.

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