Sometimes When We're Paranoid... We're Right

By Charley Brady

So, Salinger goes off into the sunset at the age of 91, having lived his life exactly the way that he wanted to live it: as the complete anti-celebrity.

But more of the grumpy, selfish, manipulative old fellow later.

Can I just for the moment ask: "Am I down the bloody rabbit hole once again?"

Forget political correctness. Forget whimpering around the place as if we don't have a right to question what goes on in the country that we live in.

It has now been confirmed that the Saudi government will open a strict Islamic school in Dublin.

Am I losing whatever is left of my mind?

Even non-Saudi Muslims that I have spoken to are bloody terrified at this prospect, and worried that it will lead to an even greater divide between moderate Muslims and the Irish people. And they are right to be worried, because the reaction on the street - not by the glad- handing, back-slapping politicians who are too afraid of being referred to as racist - from Paddy Q. Sucker who is really cheesed off at this going ahead is... grim.

They are fed up with having to make concessions to people who make no concessions to them if they travel in their countries. That is, the ones who have heard of it because it's been kept pretty quiet so far.

I only heard about this fresh insanity last Monday, just after I had posted my column. I just thought, Oh Jeez, I know what I'll be writing about next week.

But someone beat me to it: On Tuesday Peter Thompson wrote at length in The Irish Daily Mail on the same subject and since he has lived in the Arab state I am going to draw heavily on what he says.

"So, what then, about the news that the Saudis plan to open an Islamic school in Dublin, at a time when we should be looking at integration rather than separatism in our society?"

I couldn't agree more. I am all for integration but for a school that is funded by an enormous amount of money from the Saudis to be cutting itself off from the mainstream of the country that it has CHOSEN to be "part" of is either lazy thinking or just plain subversive.

Don't forget, you are here because you want to be part of this society or else just clear off and teach your rubbish elsewhere.

Let's talk about the same textbooks that will be used here in Ireland:

"In Britain, the King Fahd Academy in West London was the subject of a most revealing discussion on BBC 2's "Newsnight" in 2008, when its director, Dr. Sunraya Alyusuf, admitted openly that its curriculum for 11 and 12-year-olds - supplied by the Saudi Ministry of Education - contained books which included sentence-completion exercises including for example: 'Every religion other than (blank) is worthless' and 'Whomsoever dies outside of Islam enters (blank); the missing words in the question, being, respectively, 'Islam' and 'Hellfire'.

"These textbooks also contained a tendentious interpretation of Koranic verse in which Christians and Jews are described as 'pigs and monkeys'".

Now, here I'm going to have to hold my hand up and admit that I can be as stupid and naïve as the people that I rail against because I came across this exact thinking during a nauseating meeting in Galway with one of these characters who quite openly said to me that he saw a time when Islam would rule Irish society.

I wrote about this at length for another magazine some eight years ago and have neither the stomach nor the space to go into it again.

He used the exact same terms: that Christians were pigs and that Jews are monkeys.

Being the true professional I listened to this calmly. And if you believe that then you probably also believe that Hell isn't black at midnight. I said a few things that can't be printed in a family newspaper and that was the end of the interview.

But it is to my shame that I just dismissed this guy as yet another nutter with delusions of grandeur, thinking to myself: "Yeah, in your dreams, pal, because that will never happen in Ireland."

I guess that you live and learn because these extremists are more powerful here than they ever were.

Back to Thompson:

"Let's get one thing straight when discussing the issues raised by the Saudi decision [I like that: the Saudi decision - to open a school in OUR country] there is no need to fear Islam.

"What there IS a need to fear is the influence on our Islamic children of a profoundly intolerant and exclusive type of Islam, a fundamentalist interpretation of Wahhabism, which helped to give us 9/11. [Forgive me if I'm wrong, but weren't the guys who flew the planes into the towers all followers of Wahhabism?]"

I admire Peter Thompson for his article and for his love for a country that he worked in but no, just no. I cannot accept being told what to do in the country that I live in and, although you wouldn't guess it from some of these columns, love deeply.

He goes on to say: "This is a philosophy which justified the Qateef rape scandal of 2006, in which an unmarried young man and woman who had been found in a car together were sentenced to 200 lashes, while the men who raped both went free; which refuses to allow women to drive or go anywhere without a male relative; and whose chief official interpreter of the Koran until his death in 1999, the Saudi Chief Justice, Sheikh Bin Baz, believed the earth was flat.

"Today, people who have significant influence in misdirecting this deeply troubled society (the kingdom's Shura Council) now want to open a school here. This is despite the fact that it is illegal to openly practise any religion in Saudi Arabia except Islam."

I have a few bones to pick with Peter Thompson's article, but to tell you the truth, not that many.

Let's cut to the chase here:

Why are people who are welcomed into this country and presumably wish to be here allowed to immediately undermine the society that we have?

Why are they here at all if all they want to live under is back in their own countries?

I'll say it, hopefully for the last time, since I'm as sick of writing it as I'm sure you're sick of hearing it: I'm an atheist and always will be. I see absolutely no hope here or hereafter.

Yet I respect the people that I live amongst and we disagree with each other. That's life. That's the way it should be. I still get on just fine with them.

More importantly, for all its faults, I live in a country where I won't be dragged out and lashed because I don't have the same opinions as everybody else.

Quite the contrary: when I had a stint in hospital (no, you at the back, not a psychiatric one) I had a lot of people who said that they prayed for me.

Odd, that, isn't it? I think that praying is a waste of time and yet I appreciated their thoughts. In the heel of the hunt, we're all rather strange and as regards this life - was it Jim Morrison who said "Nobody gets out alive"?

Exactly.

I live in a relatively free society and intend to keep it that way.

Back to the late J.D Salinger:

His "The Catcher in the Rye" must have been read, not just by my generation but by several generations as the first real attempt to show teenage angst. And let's be honest, I didn't even know what angst meant until the early Woody Allen films.

As much as I liked Marlon Brando doing the same thing in the "The Wild One", it just didn't do it for me. But perhaps that's because I was born later.

Yet when a schoolmate said to me: "You have to read this book", I was knocked out by it.

Salinger was the first one that showed me that you could write in a vernacular that people understood and related to.

I never wanted to read it again once I left my teens as I'm not sure you can ever go back to that kind of thing.

I mean, I liked Ernest Hemingway around the same time but now find that macho bullshit unreadable. That's just my opinion, by the way.

I've always swung between the two styles of writing from my teenage years when I first read Salinger. I can enjoy Shakespeare as much as I can enjoy Charles Bukowski and his seedy, drunken and yet strangely beautiful writing or the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. If it's a good story then I'm your man.

But Salinger and his obsessive need for privacy was fascinating in the way that a sleazeball like Howard Hughes and his latter days is fascinating.

I don't think that I would have liked him too much, that's for sure. Certainly the way that he treated the women in his life was quite contemptable.

His passing doesn't tear the heart out of me as did J. G. Ballard's, last year. Ballard seems to have been with me my entire life; and when I read "Miracles of Life" I knew then that it was his last gasp and that this was the last book that I would read of his.

Man, that had a few tears springing to these old cynical eyes.

I don't feel that for Salinger. To me he was just a grumpy old git that was happy out to be living as a recluse because of the many copies of "Rye" that he sold.

But that was his choice. I guess that you have to respect it.

He hated phonies so he sure as hell wouldn't have been too keen on our beloved ex-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern happily taking his tax break for the work of fiction that was his "autobiography".

Fourteen other non-fiction writers also applied for that break but of course they were turned down since they weren't smirking rats.

Get this: the Revenue Commissioners gave the man with the strange bank accounts special status despite the fact that the Arts Council [ha! That bunch!] clearly have it in their little book of rules that political books are not included. Also biographies and autobiographies don't qualify.

But this is Ireland! This is Wonderland! Words say what I mean them to say! Yes! We have no bananas! We have no bananas today!

In Cork a young opera company has actually had its funding withdrawn. Oh, come on lads, no point in complaining, you know the rules: if it's a toss up between you and a dodgy chancer then you don't have a hope.

David Hickey of the Cork Operatic Society said: "I thought this scheme was designed to help struggling creative artists, not rich politicians. In 2009 we were completely cut, we got no funding.

"If Bertie was taxed and we got the money we could put it to good use, we could have a bigger orchestra. I don't know how he can stand over it...[well, you poor innocents, that is because he is a greedy grasping chancer with not a shred of dignity].

"We are planning on having a production of Sweeney Todd in July, and we will manage it but it will have to be downsized and people will have to play for free, so it's baffling to see that he is getting this exemption".

This is just a thought, guys: since you are doing Sweeney Todd, why don't you ask Ahern to play the lead. After all, he's an expert in cutting everybody's throat while saving his own skin AND making a few greasy shekels from it.

Ah, the wonderful grinning face of Bertie Ahern: a face that you would just never tire of kicking. Never.

Hope to see you all again next week - Bertie, the Thought Police, Allah and the White Rabbit permitting.

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net