Boris Johnson wrote a novel called Seventy-Two Virgins: A Comedy of Errors, in 2004. And it’s racist
Boris Johnson wrote a novel called Seventy-Two Virgins: A Comedy of Errors, in 2004. And it’s racist, classist, sexist (and badly written) - and still being sold on Amazon.(the above quote in the picture is from another of his newspaper articles that’s surfaced today)His novel is described as “long forgotten”, I’m sure he’s wishing it would remain so. It was brought up in July apparently (I missed it?!) Even I’m amazed at just how racist it actually is:The subject: The book takes place over a few hours, during which a group of Islamic terrorists plan to kidnap the US president who is set to give a speech in London, while the Johnson-like Tory MP hero (clearly based on himself) stumbles across the plot and tries to foil it.There are references to “Islamic headcases” and “Islamic nutcases”. Arabs are casually noted to have “hook noses” and “slanty eyes”; a mixed-race Briton is called “coffee-coloured”; and there are mentions of “pikeys” and people who are “half-caste”Quotes from the book (be warned…):“He found himself staring irresistibly at Cameron just 10 feet or so away in her low-cut top. He felt the surge of fundamentalist rage that inspires the Islamofascistic male… He stared with that perverted Wahhabi mixture of lust, terror and disgust at this portrait of a sexually emancipated Western woman. He glared at her thighs and her unambiguously exuberant bosom and yearned to punish it, punish her entire society, punish America for her criminal role in pioneering feminism.” (The Jerusalem Post by the way seems to find this passage - the whole book - hysterically funny…, as do many right-wing UK newspapers/magazines)“One of the policemen scribbled ‘coon’ in his notebook. You never knew how these things would go. But Dean shrank before him, and the ambiguities in his status seemed to fade away.”“All of it might have been tolerable, however, had it not been for the streets. He hated the streets, walking among these skinny and malnourished people as though you were from an alien planet.”“They felt his mocking beams assess their choice of television programme, and the sad secret reasons for adopting this coffee-coloured son.”“Already he relied on immigrant labour, many of them Muslim women, and it made his blood freeze to think of a return to the closed shop.”“…a Midlands businessman called Sammy, of Viper Wipers, was cruising the Bilston Road in search, as he put it, of a ‘bit of black’.”“With his slanty eyes and triangular tongue, Haroun was like a priggish wolf. If that porky tow-van operator hadn’t beaten it so quickly, Haroun would have done for him with all the dispatch of a halal butcher slicing the throat of a sacrificial kid.”“‘….nor will I even impose the death penalty like this man does’ — jerk jerk — ‘to poor mentally defective Negroes in Texas.” “A few seats away a distinguished lady peeress began to cry. A small puddle of pee formed beneath her chair. Black terror settled on the crowd.”“She was beautiful, thought Cameron, with full red lips and skin that was startlingly pale for a Palestinian Arab.”“Ah yes, thought Roger Barlow, a classic scene of our modern vibrant multicultural society, a group of asylum seekers in dispute with a Nigerian traffic warden.”“Poor bleeders, he thought. What were they? Albanians, Kosovars, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Martians? Now their day was wrecked. They would have to find the thick end of £200 just to spring their motor. How many windscreens would they have to wash to earn that back?”It’s endless. There are said to be 20 occasions on which women feature in the novel: “Each time, the narrator or a character looks them up and down, phwoaring over, to take a representative selection, “tits out”, “lustrous eyes”, “long legs”, “a mega-titted six-footer”, “loads of pretty white teeth”, “good teeth and blonde hair”, and an “unambiguously exuberant bosom”. One woman’s comment is attributed to “premenstrual irrationality”. In this context, appearances from a “girly swot” and a woman who looks “like a lingerie model, only cleverer and, if anything, with bigger breasts” count relatively as feminism.” Sex between two characters is described as the man “do[ing] that wonderful thing to her again”.I’ve looked at various articles written when it was released; journalists at the Spectator, the Telegraph, The Times, were heaping praise on this thing. Even on BBC Newsnight there was a group of journalists and politicians (including Michael Gove) heaping praise on it. Only one didn’t like it and pointed out that it is disturbingly racist (not Gove of course). -- source link
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