Katie Hopkins talks sense about the threat posed by Muslim immigrants - Iain Dale throws a petulant hissy fit during their LBC clash

The LBC talk show host, publisher, and former Conservative candidate Iain Dale tweeted this yesterday evening:

Well the Katie Hopkins fan club is out in force tonight. Bunch of islamophobic bigots. I'd be very worried if I attracted support like that.

Turned out they'd had a bit of a set-to during a phone interview on his radio show. Iain was jolly annoyed by comments the gobby epileptic right-wing shit-stirrer had made regarding the threat to western culture posed by what amounts to an invasion in recent years by millions of Muslim immigrants, a disproportionately large number of whom are young, unattached men.

I have no particular objection to Dale, and I know La Hopkins can be a trifle OTT at times, so I felt no inclination to favour one or the other before listening to a recording of their spat. By the end, I was pretty much entirely in Katie Hopkins's camp. After all, given the disgusting behaviour of feral mobs of young Muslims in Cologne on New Year's Eve, does a presentiment of large-scale civil unrest seem so unreasonable? Otherwise, why would the German authorities (and our own, dear BBC, of course) be so keen to cover up the incomers' criminal behaviour? Was anything Hopkins said that upsetting or controversial?

By the same token, Dale seemed to lose the plot (and his manners) from the get-go. Just because the majority of Muslims living in the West are honest, peace-loving family folk who don't wish to impose Sharia law on us or blow us to pieces or ban Christmas or rape any white female they can get their hands on, does that mean we can't criticise the small but growing minority who wish to do some or all of the above, or the seemingly rather large minority who evidently despise us and our way of life? Just as most of us are able to fart and chew gum at the same time, many of us are quite capable of telling the difference between Muslims who don't wish us harm and those who do. Dale brands his guest a coward while displaying cosmic levels of politically correct mimsiness by insisting we mustn't point out the threat posed by "bad" Muslims in case it offends "good" Muslims. As for bringing up that tired old chestnut about playing into the hands of raciststs - oh, chuck it, Dale! It's that sort of soppingly-wet liberal cowardice which has done (for instance) blacks in this country no favours at all - there's a price to be paid for being able to feel good about yourself by turning a blind eye to the faults of our various "communities", but it's never the self-satisfied virtue-signaller who has to do the actual coughing up.

It was clear (despite his subsequent displays of bravado on Twitter) that Dale had lost his little spatette with K. Hopkins when he - a childless, middle-aged homosexual - failed to cede the unarguable point that expecting an adult to show courage in the face of terrorist threats on their own behalf is entirely different from asking a mother (or father) to expose their children to potential danger. Is that really so hard to grasp?

The fact that Dale knew he'd screwed up the interview was demonstrated by the petulant way he ended it: nothing to do with being offended by his guest's refusal to embrace suicidal inclusiveness, all to do with having been bested. And by a woman! Well! A thoroughly unprofessional performance. (One assumes Dale's LBC bosses will take note of their employee's shortcomings.)

Speaking of events in Cologne, Allison Pearson tweeted this a short while ago:

#Cologne attackers found with notes in German/Arabic. "Nice breasts." "I want to have sex with you. I will kill you."  At least that's clear

You'd think so. But evidently not clear enough for the economist Frances Coppola, who shared the following insight:

I suspect anti-immigration ppl of organising the Cologne sex crimes. fastest way of getting borders closed. 

To adopt the argot of social media - FFS. Dale and Ms Coppola earned a thoroughly deserved kicking from James Delingpole in a typically feisty Breitbart article entitled: "Cologne Rapefest: The Top Five Best Liberal Excuses…" Coppola provides his first example:  It was a false flag operation designed to discredit innocent lovely immigrants, while Iain Dale occupies the second spot: You can’t talk about these things because it encourages the ‘Far Right’. I strongly recommend the article. (Your jaw will drop and a red mist will descend when you see what Laurie Penny tweeted: these people really are morally insane.)

Finally, to Rod Liddle ("the thinking man's Ricky Gervais", according to Delingpole). Now, Liddle is obviously unaware of my existence, but - despite that - I've been on the outs with him because he recently wrote the silliest, most ill-informed article about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that I have ever read - and I've read some spectacularly dumb ones. But I've already wasted far too much of my reduced supply of energy seething about it for the past few weeks - so I have decided to forgive Liddle (he'll be so relieved). I'm also inclined to forgive him because he's in such splendid form in this week's Spectator. In an article about the unfortunate necessity of siding with Saudi Arabia, no matter how revolting a country it is (and, boy, is it ever), he has this to say about the relentless goofy wrongness of liberals when it comes to Islam:

I knew it was going to happen. Shortly after Christmas Day I caught the tail end of a discussion on BBC Radio 4 in which a bunch of the corporation’s most gilded correspondents predicted what was going to occur in the year ahead. In amongst the predictions of the Earth burning to a crisp as a consequence of global warming and the poor dying everywhere because the West is rich, white and evil, some woman posited that, on a brighter note, Iran and Saudi Arabia would come together and heal the great rift between the Sunni and Shia faiths and the Religion of Peace™ would be even more peaceable than it is at the moment, if that scenario is even faintly possible to imagine.

‘Aha,’ I thought immediately, ‘it’s war, then.’ I admit I didn’t expect it all to kick off almost immediately after the silly woman had finished her sentence, but the principle holds true — whatever a western liberal tells you about the world of Islam, you can be assured that it is utterly wrong on every count. The invasion of Iraq (all they want is a nice secular democracy), the Arab Spring (all they want is a nice secular democracy), the bombing of Gaddafi’s Libya (all they want, etc), the support for Syrian rebels (all they want, etc.), Palestinian elections — liberals demonstrably wrong, every time, on every issue, without fail. It is only a matter of time before some well-meaning white liberal halfwit tells us that the murders and beheadings and reprisals and the setting fire to stuff which will undoubtedly result from this current contretemps between Iran and Saudi Arabia is ‘nothing to do with Islam’. And that will be the final triumph of patent absurdity for the liberal elite’s favourite canard.

The rest of "Why we have to stand by foul, brutal Saudi Arabia" is well worth reading.