Readers might remember that after 9/11, the military band at Buckingham Palace broke with tradition and played the Stars and Stripes. Yesterday, as king Abdullah of Saudi Arabia arrived to meet Her Majesty the Queen, they played a somewhat different tune to greet the visiting monarch’s arrival: Darth Vader’s theme music. The video has to be seen to be believed.
It’s worth watching all seven minutes of the video as it also contains an interesting article on the findings by UK think tank Policy Exchange, which is very close to David Cameron, that Islamic bookshops are full of books pushing an extrem Wahhabist line, funded by the Saudi government. Policy Exchange’s Dean Godson debates someone who is reduced to arguing that it is not illegal to sell these things and that it’d be very dangerous to ban them. Unfortunately neither Dean nor the interviewer, Jon Snow, asked whether he’d be arguing that line in Saudi Arabia.
More on the report at ConservativeHome here.