[HedgeYourBets]

Is the USAF the air force or general armed forces? The reason I ask is that I worked for the US armed forces overseas in Munich.

Anyway, that aside - the situation in the UK has been a sort of slow, creeping animal. You hear these mad clerics on TV or read about them in the paper but they seem so bizarre that you don't think anyone is listening to them. That's because you're assuming everyone in the world has the full set of Western logic, values and mindsets.

Then you see the odd protest - like the Danish cartoon march - and read placards carried by young men with their desert scarf covered faces and which use words like 'Behead x '(fill in the blank) and 'Europe - Bin Laden is coming' and 'Freedom go to Hell' and you realise that actually, quite a few people have listened to what appear to be mad men. Come Gaza and the crowds are even bigger, their chants more evil and even the police are running from them.

Then you have incidents where it's patently obvious that the government are influenced in favour of these lunatics - such as the threat by Lord Ahmed to rouse 10,000 muslims if Wilders was allowed in the country. I've only just discovered that this was the number said to have been engaged by Muhammed to return to Mecca and conquer it.

Gaza, has, in a way, been a tipping point. The media bias in favour of an Islamic terror organisation and the way in which even political programs shut people up makes you realise that there is much, much more to this phenomenon. And it is a phenomenon because we didn't appear to have it a decade ago. Research a little and you realise just how much has been kept from the public.

Because political correctness has been so rife, people have felt like racists for uttering what are truths - and this is the case for many intolerable things that we are tolerating, like youth crime. We have never had real violence in the UK and our normal police force is still unarmed. Years ago, a fist-fight would make the news, now we've got knife and gun crime. It's arisen because we're being told to tolerate the intolerable; everyone who is behaving in a less-than-civilised fashion is apparently a victim of something. Like any of us get through life without any grief! This transposition of victimhood on what is plain bad behaviour has created a UK I don't recognise.


That said, I think there is a twitch in the worm now. It may not have turned completely, but it's not lying on the path waiting to be trodden on. Gaza has woken up quite a few people who were previously asleep. Of course, many media outlets present pure venom against Israel as the views of the everyday person, but from what I hear around me, that isn't so.

The things to be on your guard for are the small things that you moan about from time to time, but which otherwise aren't having a huge effect right now - like political correctness, crazy health and safety laws, multi-culturalism which has only created a sort of country of tribes rather than an integrated, cohesive community - that type of thing. It's where you begin to realise that the saying 'the trouble with common sense is that it ain't so common!" is very true. You want to point out the foolishness of higher or local government, but realise that you stand a chance of being scorned or villified for doing so.

Like I said, this is a slow, creeping animal that comes in so many guises.