First the swine of Dudley, now this…

A concerned Scotsman has drawn my attention to this report from CNN:

<p>”British prison officers who wore a St. George’s Cross tie-pin have been ticked off by the jails watchdog over concerns about the symbol’s racist connotations. The pins showing the English flag — which has often raised hackles due to its connection with the Crusades of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries — could be “misconstrued,” Chief Inspector of Prisons Anne Owers said in a section on race in a report on a jail in the northern English city of Wakefield.”

It’s difficult to know where to begin with a story this dumb, but perhaps the comments of Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding will do. He reportedly thinks that it’s time for England to find a new flag and a patron saint who is “not associated with our bloody past and one we can all identify with.”

I can’t believe that we are discussing this the best part of a thousand years after the Crusades were fought (kudos to CNN, incidentally, for noting that they were fought to re-capture the Holy Land), but It’s time for Mr Doyle to return to the history books, where he will find that the crescent has been associated with a spot of blood too, He’d be equally wrong to suggest that that symbol should be added to the banned list, but unless he does, I fail to see why we should pay him any attention at all.

It’s also worth noting that the constant (and wrong-headed) denigration of western culture in this way does, I am sure, play a part in the failure to integrate Europe’s minorities. Why should they want to merge into a culture with a past apparently so uniquely barbarous that it is even repudiated by its own people?