I may be being ironic…

I just heard this broadcast on Radio 4, with the inspirational figure who paid for  it interviewed. It is a work of majestic genius, not of monumental racism. It is a tightly compressed, one minute burst of politics, densely layered and criss-crossed with meaning. It  manages to squeeze an extraordinary amount of subtext out of just a few simple statements, which are in no way false or meaningless. “They declared war against us”, “They want to build a mosque”; different ‘theys’ of course, but surely everyone realises that? The invocation to “kill the mosque” is evocative of shakespeare, not at all of lynch mobs and hate crimes. Only a paranoid idiot could interpret this as talking about all Muslims. All in all an indication of America’s status as a modern liberal democracy, entirely at home with its identity as a multicultural nation. Racism is a thing of the past after all. And anyway, Muslims aren’t a race, silly.