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The old Jew stumbled and nearly fell, cursing under his breath. Why couldn’t the council do something about the pavements? he thought. Catching his breath, he shook his head; it wasn’t just here, but the length and breadth of the country. There were so many rules and regulations about where people could meet, what they could do, what they could or could not purchase in the market bazarres. There were ration cards, identification cards, warrant cards to travel even a short distance, and they all had to be in order. One would have thought with all this people control that the government would at least be able to maintain the paving stones, keep the streets clean and make the trains run on time. Even Mussolini had been able to do that.
He remembered that old joke about the Italian Fascist leader. He remembered too all the hysteria about the Fascists, how they’d send all the Jews to the gas chambers once they got into power. After all, they had done that before, hadn’t they?
He remembered too the hue and cry that had gone up worldwide when the filthy fascists, Nazis and Jew-haters had attempted to deny the Holocaust, and the quite extraordinary lengths he and his colleagues
in the Jewish Defence Bureau had gone to in order to suppress them, not just here but worldwide. He allowed himself a faint smile of satisfaction when he remembered the agents provocateurs they had engaged
through their mischief-making middle men and communist allies. People like that Lancashireman, the foul-mouthed bully who had served them well both here and in South Africa. Then there was the mentally deranged youth who’d been in and out of every far right group going, inciting hatred and violence not only against Jews but against blacks and Moslems as well. Ironically, when he’d been found out, his mischief-making had been put down to some sort of government or secret service counterintelligence programme. The far right had known who was behind him of course, but all such claims could be and were dismissed as anti-Semitic.
The greatest irony of all had been that silly document the Protocols; it had caused terrible pogroms in Russia of course,
but in later years it had been their deadliest weapon. Anytime they’d been caught with their hands in the till they screamed not just “anti-Semitic” but Protocols Of Zion. After all, wasn’t that what any charge of conspiracy against any Jew always came down to, the Protocols Of Zion?
He sighed to himself. That was all a lot of water under a lot of bridges now. Now, he was simply an old man stumbling in the semi-darkness of an ill-lit street, and a Jew at that.
Suddenly a voice rang out, “Hey you!” it came, out of the darkness.
He looked up, and thirty yards in front of him he saw a lone soldier standing rifle in hand. He stopped in his tracks.
“You, old man”, came the voice again, motioning him to approach. The old man shambled on, pulled up in front of his challenger and said, “Yes?”
“Where are you going at this hour?”
He shrugged his shoulders; it was hardly late, but the new régime had so many bizarre ideas, all of them based on the caprices of the various Imams, that it was pointless to question them.
“Never mind,” the soldier said, seeing the old man’s confusion. Then he demanded, “Papers”.
The old man sighed, now the trouble would start, it always did. He unbuttoned his coat, reached inside his jacket and pulled out his wallet. Handing the soldier his ID card and a fistful of other mandatory documents he stood resignedly waiting for the abuse he knew would come.
“Aha, Jew”, said the soldier.
At the beginning they would say Zionist, but now they didn’t bother, not anymore, not since they had attained absolute power. Two years ago they had even revived the archaic ritual murder propaganda after a
young Moslem boy had been found battered to death on a playing field in a northern city. He had lost a great deal of blood and in the first instance there had been rumours that his killer was a vampire. Then they had shifted to rumours based around the criminal investigation; the officer who investigated the case had been Jewish, or at least his family had been intermarried with Jews three generations ago. Then, before anyone knew it, there had been lurid cartoons and grotesque stories circulated far and wide, including a series of obviously bogus letters sent to a Fundamentalist magazine claiming that this murder had been the first of many, and that the Kehilla would continue murdering pre-pubescent Moslem boys until the government had been overthrown. This had led to riots and pogroms in two major cities, although, more by good fortune than good judgment, no one had been killed.
But the real trouble had started after the murderer had been caught. The killer had been a Gentile, although in their eyes a heathen, and that would have been the end of it if the Jewish Defence Bureau had not issued a statement, but alas it had. The Director Mr Winner,
had protested against the defamation and calumny, which he might have got away with, but then he had added that
“The Jews constitute today as ever one of the most law-abiding and respectable minorities of the entire community.”
This had led to him being arrested under the new anti-defamation legislation. Winner had told the old Jew what had happened after his release. He had been dragged before the Ayatollah himself.
“You say, Zionist, that your race is one of the most law-abiding and respectable minorities of the entire community. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Winner had replied.
“By that I presume that you mean that Zionists, Jews, are more respectable and more law-abiding than Moslems?”
He had begun “No, I didn’t mean that at all, what I meant was...”
“Silence!” the Ayatollah had snapped. He’d then read out some obscure decree of the Grand Council and gone on to place his own interpretation on the Defence Bureau’s statement. By using such words the Committee, Winner in particular, had defamed the community. Anyone, any non-Moslem that is, who claimed or insinuated that another minority was more law-abiding than Moslems, was guilty of incitement to racial hatred under the Anti-Defamation Act. Yes, they even had an Act of Parliament to cover it, although few people paid any attention to any of the new legislation that was being constantly drafted. The rule of law had long since been usurped, and the Imams could do more or less as they liked.
Winner had escaped with his life, but not without a whipping. It had been ironic really because Jewish organisations worldwide had been lobbying for decades for such legislation. They had succeeded by constant whining and wailing, lobbying behind the scenes, by cunning, steal and outright tyranny, in having anti-Holocaust Denial legislation effected throughout Europe, Britain, Canada, and even the United States. And now they had been hoist with their own petard. Now, the fast breeding Moslem population having taken over, had simply redefined the word Holocaust to mean Sabra and Shatila, Hebron, and a dozen other Zionist atrocities in what had once been Israel.
The word Zionist had been common currency after their ascension to power, but soon all pretence had been dropped, and the more extremist groups had quickly adopted the phrase of the German anti-Semite Heinrich von Treitschke “Die Juden sind unser Unglüeck”.
Now “The Jews are our misfortune” could be heard in half a dozen languages in the busy street markets of the Metropolis.
The greatest irony of course had been that Jewish leaders had been largely responsible for this. Hadn’t they more than anyone else smeared right wing extremists as fascists, racists and Nazis? Hadn’t they equated any form of race consciousness amongst the Aryan goyim with a particularly bizarre form of sex-shop Nazism? Hadn’t they fought long and hard to suppress such groups? Hadn’t they framed the legislation themselves to silence them? Hadn’t they used agents provocateurs to incite the more gullible and street-wise members of such groups to violence, even anti-Semitic violence? And at the end of the day, what threat had they really posed either to Jewry or to democracy? Groups of football thugs chanting obscene slogans on Saturday afternoons on the one hand, and on the other, small groups of demented old men and women wittering on about how the Jews controlled the economy, the government and everything else. The truth was that they hadn’t hated the Jews at all, most of them,
they were mystics, not bigots. What hate there was, had existed largely on the Jewish side. Winner realised that now, so did the old Jew who was at this very moment being challenged by a soldier. But it was too late now for Winner, too late for the old Jew, too late for them all.
He had been daydreaming, he must have been, he hadn’t heard the soldier at all. Suddenly he found himself being pushed back, he stumbled and fell into the gutter. The soldier was screaming abuse at him, calling him a dirty Yid bastard and all manner of vile names.
He felt a blow on his shoulder; the man had hit him with the butt of his rifle, now he was raising it to hit him again. The old man cried out. “No sir, please, please...”
As if from a thousand miles away came the sound of tyres skidding on the potholed road, and then a deep booming voice. “You there!”
The old Jew had raised his hands feebly to cushion the blow that would surely come, but it didn’t. In the dim light as if through a fog, he could make out two heavily armoured limousines, and standing beside them a group of men which included the soldier who had challenged him.
The group turned around and walked towards him. Suddenly he recognised the tall man in the gold turban; it was the Ayatollah himself. “What’s going on here, Sergeant?”
“This Yid’s papers aren’t in order, Excellence, and he abused me.”
“That’s not true,” said the old Jew, but the Ayatollah cut him short.
“Silence! Don’t speak until you’re spoken to, Yid. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he replied.
Suddenly, the Ayatollah’s eyes narrowed, “I know you. You were on that so-called Defence Committee.”
He had been indeed, the Defence Committee had been the forerunner of the Defence Bureau, and he had sat on it, although only briefly. “What’s this man’s name, Sergeant?” he said, turning to the soldier,
“Alderman, Excellence, Philip Alderman.”
“That’s right,” he turned back to the old Jew with a broad leer on his face. “You had me gaoled that time, remember?”
“No, not me...” he protested feebly.
“Yes you did,” the Ayatollah kicked him viciously, “I remember, it was you, you and that other Yid, Stein. You were the ones who made all the noise about incitement to racial hatred.”
“Please sir,” he said, raising him hands to his face where he knelt on the pavement, expecting another blow, this time from the ruler of the country himself.
“Yes,” the Ayatollah’s face had become a mask of unconditional hatred, “And this was at the very same time your brave co-racialists were shooting Palestinian schoolchildren on the West Bank in the glorious Intifada. Schoolchildren, the sons and daughters of my fellow Moslems.”
“Please sir, it wasn’t me,” he whined, sounding like a naughty schoolboy.
“Oh yes it was. While we were handing out leaflets protesting against your filthy Yid Holocaust lie, your brave co-racialists were murdering children, and what did you do? You had me, and my fellow protesters thrown into gaol.
And ignored the murderers of children!”
As he said this, the Ayatollah raised him foot and kicked the old man in the shin. He cried out in pain and crumpled forward onto his face. The Ayatollah spat on him.
“You’re lucky, you Yid dog, lucky that this happened before I saw the light, before the prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him – revealed Allah’s plan to this, this unworthy heathen.” Now he was speaking of himself, with contrition and humility.
A voice rang out from the leading limousine, “Excellence, they have arrived.”
The Ayatollah turned to his underling and barked something in Arabic, then back to the old man, kicked him where he now lay and said to his chauffeur/bodyguard who had joined him, “Okay, Abdul, let’s go.”
The soldier saluted him.
“Carry on, soldier,” he told him.
"Yes Excellence," the man bowed, and as the Ayatollah walked back to the car, he turned back to the old man and began abusing him again.
As the Ayatollah climbed back into his limousine his face contorted in a wry smile of satisfaction, and his thoughts turned to the meeting with Al-Salaam, the man who had made him see the light. He remembered sharing a cell with the mild-mannered Moslem fanatic. At first he hadn’t been able to stand him; he’d wreaked of garlic for one thing. But the highly intelligent Al-Salaam had had a presence, almost an aura about him.
“Why do you chaps hate us, so much?” he’d said one night as they lay on their mattresses, he in the bottom bunk, his large frame spilling over the edge.
He’d grunted, not meaning to answer, but Al-Salaam had repeated the question.
“Because this is our country,” he’d replied, “you’ve no right to be here.”
“Ah, so you do hate us then.”
“I don’t hate you personally, just the type.”
“But we don’t interfere with you. We don’t go with your women. Only the blacks do that, and you know why.”
“Of course I do,” he’d replied, sarcastically, “if I were a black man I wouldn’t want to go with black women either.”
“No, not for that reason, it is them, the Zionists. You think we don’t know about them? They have lived among us longer than they have lived among you. That’s when it all started, when they lived among us.”
“When what all started?”
“The Plan, you see, it’s all in here.”
Al-Salaam shifted on his bunk and passed down a book. It was a hardback, and the title was printed on its cover in both Arabic and English; it was the Protocols Of Zion.
He’d seen it before many times, including German, French and Russian translations, but never in Arabic, although he recalled that the Jews had been forever whining about Arab anti-Semitica all through the seventies and eighties.
He would have handed it back to Al-Salaam but there was something about it. The numerous editions of the Protocols were of various lengths. Some were abridged,
some contained lengthy introductions, but this edition ran to over five hundred pages of almost microscopic text, which, even allowing for it being a dual language edition, meant that it contained a lot more than
the basic text and the usual drivel about the background to the world conspiracy. And as he began reading it, he realised why, it had been fully revised and updated since
the Gulf War. Apparently, fresh documents had been discovered in the Chancellery of Zion which provided overwhelming proof of a direct link between the first ever meeting
of the Elders of Zion in 929BC down to the destruction of Iraq via the Knights Templars, the Order of the Illuminati and the French and Bolshevik Revolutions.
He couldn’t help but laugh, though he was careful not to let Al-Salaam know what he thought of this nonsense. He’d never believed in
the conspiracy himself, not the Jewish one or the Zionist one. Indeed, he wondered why anyone did or ever had. A conspiracy was a secret, and there had never been anything secret about
these people, their unremitting hatemongering and their incessant whining and wailing. One had only to read the Jewish Chronicle to realise the full extent of their power, and their total ruthlessness.
All that was long ago now he thought as he climbed back into the car, and the memory of the late Muhammad Al-Salaam was thrust out of his mind by the stabbing pain. The chauffeur rushed to help him but he waved the man away; he wasn’t a cripple and he hated being treated like one. He just had to bend more carefully; his personal physician had told him only the previous week that for a man of nearly ninety he was in terrific shape, but he had to be realistic, and, first and foremost, he had to lighten his schedule.
As he closed the door behind him he turned to her and she smiled; he smiled back, weakly, then tapped on the window and barked a command at the chauffeur in his appalling pidgin Arabic. The man acknowledged and drove on, even though he couldn’t hear him through the bulletproof glass.
He glanced back at the old Jew again and laughed up his sleeve. The soldier was still abusing him. Again he thought back to the last time he had been in prison, and that Jewish prisoner who had spat on him for wearing a swastika chain around his neck. How ironic it was that the swastika had now been adopted as the symbol of the Greater Britain Islamic Party; it had once been all but impossible to display the hooked cross openly anywhere; the mere possession of Nazi regalia had long been made a criminal offence in democratic Germany. Now it was the Magan David that had become the ultimate badge of hatred and shame, for it was the Magan David which symbolised the true Holocausts rather than the phony Holocaust: the Holocausts of Sabra and Shatila, and Hebron. And the perpetrators of these most terrible of crimes against humanity: Menachem Begin, Aeriel Sharon, Barukh Goldstein, and Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, the man who had pronounced that a million Arabs, Moslems, or indeed of any goyim, were not worth a Jewish fingernail.
As he was driven away, the Ayatollah sank back in his seat and closed his eyes, hoping to catch a few minutes sleep on the way to the award ceremony.
His tranquillity was rudely shattered by a falsetto voice which pierced the Stygian blackness. “Will Mrs Farouk be there, Dickie?”
At once he was wide awake, and, turning towards his female companion he hissed,
“I told you never to call me that!”
“I’m sorry darling, I...”
“And don’t call me that, either, not in front of the chauffeur.”
“He can’t hear us, he’s...”
“Do you hear me, woman?”
“Yes, I...”
“Then shut up!”
His face had become an ugly mask; she turned away, bit her lip and fought back the tears like the delicate creature she was. The Ayatollah looked at her more with disgust than the pride he had once held in her. She was barely thirty, and although her long, blonde hair was hidden beneath her black veil, she was as strikingly beautiful as the day he had first met her. But she was so dumb; still that was the way the Moslems preferred their women. “Us Moslems”, he corrected himself quickly.
“I’m sorry”, he said, not meaning it, “just don’t call me that except when we’re alone together. In the apartment.”
“Yes, I understand,” she snivelled.
So did he. It was a charade, but it was one worth playing, now that the enemies of all races but one had been hoist with their own petard. All thought of
sleep or rest had fled him; he was looking forward
to the ceremony. He remembered last year, walking down the spectacular marble staircase, and on the wall alternately were photographs of the heroes of
yesteryear, a strange eclectic mixture, one that would have been inconceivable even ten years before, but that was before he had followed in the steps of Al-Salaam.
Now, all good Moslems were good racists; Hitler had after all been a great friend of Islam; loyalty to Islam meant first and foremost loyalty to one’s race,
in particular the Aryan race, which had been classified by the Grand Council as brown, white, and African (for the Black Moslems), and never the twain shall meet.
And he, as the Ayatollah, was the lord of them all. Another thing all good Moslems were was very moral people; none of that gay “rights” stuff of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. He remembered the year after
they had come to power, how they had strung up all the queers, burnt down that obnoxious gay centre in Central London, and burnt all those homosexual books and magazines.
Just like the Nazis had when they had come to power.
“Let us cleanse our society of this Zionist-sponsored filth and disease, my Moslem Brothers; praise be to Allah and his prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him.”
And death to the queers and the Yids. He found it difficult not to laugh.
Now here was the photograph of Abu Nidal, the great anti-Zionist freedom fighter who had been murdered by the Zionists in Tunis in 1997.
Next to him was that of the late, great Colin Jordan, the British Führer whose dream of freeing Britain from Jewish control had finally been realised,
although he had never lived to see it. Next to him were the photographs of Willis Carto the American Populist, and Colonel Qathafi the leader of the Libyan Revolution.
Soon his photograph would be added to theirs, but he was in no hurry for this to happen, he liked life too much. He had though to admit that in death as in life he would enjoy his official title. It was His Excellence and Leader of the British Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Abdul Majid Muhammad Al-Salaam. He had taken the name of his teacher. It had not simply an air of authority but a certain ring to it. And after all, it sounded much more grand than plain old Richard Edmonds.
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