By Ben Pensant

Like most leftists I was thoroughly disappointed that a federal appeals court refused to re-instate Donald Trump’s travel ban, as it meant I and the useful idiots who would re-tweet Lily Allen’s shopping list if there was a ‘like’ in it had one less thing to moralise about. Not that Lily does her own shopping, mind – she’s a creative for god’s sake. But if you are interested in the contents of her pantry you’re better off asking one of the 45-year-old Syrian children she invited to sleep in her shed. Though when I say ‘invited’ I actually mean they’ve been secretly hiding there since turning up on the Fuck You firebrand’s doorstep and being politely told by her legal team to sling their bastard hooks. Desperate times.

But educationally challenged starlets aside, the oppression of Muslims is the left’s lifeblood. Hence our excitement at the executive order, greeted with delight by all manner of intelligent commentators and Patton Oswalt. Indeed, Oswalt’s inability to deal with Trump’s presidency has earned him a legion of new fans who know him as the little bloke who hates democracy, rather than the fat lesbian out of King Of Queens. But the tears shed by Oswalt and co. could be in vain if the thing they’ve been shedding tears about doesn’t happen. Much like Brexit: it may be a xenophobic disaster that proves what happens when you let bin-men have as much of a say as Interpretive Dance graduates but by god, we’d be lost without it.

No, the travel ban needs to happen NOW, especially as we’ve only just started fabricating horror stories about Somalian migrants flushed down the toilets of 747s above the Atlantic. With the ban in place it gives us another cast-iron excuse to blame the West when oppressed Muslims decide to express their anger at imperialism by joining a group who kidnap and rape children. In a nutshell, to preserve their place at the top of the victimhood league table we must pretend this executive order is, like, the worst thing ever and anyone who disagrees is Mussolini.

So we can’t just say the travel ban is illiberal, unconstitutional and punishes innocent Muslims; we have to say it will make those innocent Muslims become jihadists.

We can’t just say it’s potentially ineffective as countries not on the list have produced more terrorists than those on it; we have to say Muslims are no threat at all, despite the fact we just said the ban could turn them into terrorists overnight.

We can’t just say that no terrorist attack on US soil has been committed by a refugee; we have to say that the travel ban is symptomatic of Trump’s sadistic plan to oppress people fleeing warzones and destroy the Muslim world, a plan somewhat half-arsed as the list includes only seven out of a possible fifty-seven Islamic countries.

And we can’t just say that temporarily banning people from places like Iran penalizes anti-regime allies and activists; we have to pretend that those regimes are progressive utopias, illustrated by the recent rally in Tehran at which tens of thousands toasted the 1979 revolution by burning flags and chanting ‘Death To America!’.

Because the fact that a 90-day ban is infinitely less damaging to Muslim countries than the 26,000 bombs Obama dropped on them in 2016 is irrelevant. As is the fact that the countries on the list were suggested by Obama’s administration, who instigated a similar restriction on Iraqis in 2011. Presumably we were all pre-occupied cheering the Arab Spring and reading Owen Jones articles lauding Venezuela to protest that.

No, these inconvenient facts are best ignored and forgotten, remarkably easy options as most of us were unaware of them in the first place. Like much of the Democrats’ foreign policy, if they happened on Trump’s watch your average protester would shit their privilege out. Hence we must maintain the narrative that the ban isn’t only dangerously indiscriminate; it’s more dangerously indiscriminate than the bombs Obama dropped on Libya.

Thank god several side effects were already in motion before the ban hit the skids, the first of which was the petition to cancel Trump’s state visit to the UK. As we saw over the last few years, there’s nothing middle-class Brits like more than campaigning to silence people who think differently to them. And before you could say ‘Kale Pesto on Rye’, the armchair activists had set the world to rights by opening their iPads and writing their names in a box.

Jeremy Corbyn was one of the first to demand Trump’s visit be cancelled, taking issue with Theresa May’s reluctance to condemn him: ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have taken the side of the oppressor’ he railed, and Corbyn’s certainly no neutral when it comes to oppressors, as demonstrated by his 2014 appearance at an event celebrating 35 years of Iranian oppression.

He then applauded John Bercow, a man so opposed to illiberal leaders visiting parliament he welcomed President Xi Jinping of China, a country whose human rights record makes Trump’s administration look like the Red Cross: ‘We must stand up for our country’s values. Trump’s state visit should not go ahead’. Which British values Jezza was standing up for when he invited hate-preacher Raed Salah for tea in the commons aren’t clear, unless you’re one of those Brits whose values include suicide bombing and believing Jews make bread from the blood of children.

Corbyn’s values are so strong he also seems to have forgotten his objection to the previous, equally ineffective petition to stop Trump visiting the UK. Back then he even offered Trump a tour of Finsbury Park Mosque to show him the peaceful face of Islam. Which is a bit like taking Morrissey to a battery farm to show him the peaceful face of animal slaughter. But Jezza knows the score and if he wants to convince Trump Muslims are a peaceful bunch by taking him somewhere that’s housed more terrorists than the Maze prison then good for him.

Corbynite Billy Bragg was in favour of the ban too, claiming on Question Time that welcoming Trump was ‘normalizing his behaviour’. Bragg failed to explain if that meant Jezza was normalising anti-Semitism when he invited Hamas and Hezbollah to parliament but frankly, why should he? Because in the world of Corbyn and the Sexual Tea songsmith, a temporary travel restriction imposed by a loud-mouthed head of state is infinitely worse than murdering Jewish people.

The reaction on social media was equally celebratory, one bright spark even suggesting that a petition which anyone, anywhere can sign multiple times is ‘arguably more democratic’ than the EU referendum and represents ‘the will of the people’. That’s right, a petition containing 2 million signatures – many of which came from the same email address in South America – is more representative than 17 million voters.

And the reason it’s more legitimate is because the right people signed it, as opposed to all those wrong people who voted Leave. Y’know, those morons who don’t deserve a say because they think differently to us, despite making up the majority of those who got off their arses to vote. To see the right way to react look no further than the Downing Street protest arranged by Owen Jones, a man so disgusted by authoritarian fascists he’s conveniently forgotten his support for authoritarian fascist Hugo Chavez.

And what a triumph it was, with Trump apparently so rattled he demanded the FBI open a file on ‘this Owen Downing wise-ass’. As lefty comic/Keith Moon lookalike Mark Steel mused upon the enormous crowd of cardigan-clad protesters in Brighton: ‘I’m starting to think we might get rid of this fucker’. Presumably ‘this fucker’ is Trump and not some cardigan-clad fucker at the march but hey, it’s great to know Mark has lost none of his hope, optimism and delusions of grandeur. And it’s nice to see him disprove the theory that he’s the only socialist who’s ever said anything intentionally funny.

Similarly, on Friday Owen congratulated himself as news broke that British officials have dropped plans for Trump to address parliament: ‘We are winning and we have them on the run’ he boasted, and with good reason. Because as anyone who’s studied American history knows, one thing guaranteed to terrify the leader of the free world is the prospect of not giving a speech. So until #StopTrump phase two kicks in let’s take pride in convincing ourselves the President is so petrified he’s spent all weekend shitting his ginger wig off.

But we mustn’t become complacent. Because wrong people are everywhere, like ants in jackboots, which is why the domino effect from Trump’s travel ban is necessary to smoke them out. And ‘smoke’ is the operative word judging by the brave souls who recently shut down a talk from professional gobshite Milo Yiannopoulos by setting fire to stuff.

Because at UC Berkeley we saw an attack on free speech – encompassing violence, arson and theft – that quite literally wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Trump. As was pointed out by numerous middle-class left-wingers who’ve never seen real violence in their lives, Trump’s authoritarianism has literally forced peaceful liberals to punch strangers and loot liquor stores. And the great thing is that when these protest get too out of hand – a fascist cop mis-gendering a non-binary brick thrower; a rioter culturally appropriating Irish nationalism by knee-capping someone – we have brave liberals like George Takei from Lost In Space to re-assure us:

‘If they’ve got black ski masks on and carry crowbars they aren’t peaceful protesters. They’re outside agitators trying to discredit us’ he tweeted, none of which had stopped him defending these outside agitators in the first place. But whether the Berkeley rioters were agent provocateurs planted by Trump or clueless leftists who believe you deal with opposing views by burning stuff, the fact is it wouldn’t have happened if the likes of Milo had kept their mouths shut and voted for Hillary. And as George should know having spent his career defending the galaxy from evil, the four-eyed hipster who punched Rebel reporter Sheila Gunn was clearly Dark Vader in disguise.

But aside from brave attempts to fight fascism with fascism, by far the best consequence of Trump’s travel ban was the Quebec mosque shooting in which six people were killed and 19 injured. Because from Lee Rigby to Jo Cox, there’s nothing regressives love more than blaming acts of murder on anyone but the murderer, and from the second the ban was announced we’ve been praying for an Islamist terror attack to blame on Trump. As it happens fate threw a delicious curveball by giving us a white supremacist suspect and twenty-five Muslim victims. Bingo! Because while alt-right trolls eagerly anticipated the announcement that the killer was a Muslim, we smugly sat back knowing we had all the bases covered; Muslim killer? Blame Trump for radicalising him. White nationalist killer? Blame Trump for incitement. Job done.

Of course it means we now have to wait for the first Islamic terror attack on Trump’s watch but make no mistake, it will be glorious. Because much like the Neo Nazi responsible for killing six Muslims whose names aren’t important, whoever carries out the first Trump-era jihadist act will be completely blameless. As all manner of seasoned politicos, intelligent debaters and Silicon Valley actors have pointed out, all it takes is one funny look at an airport to turn a peaceful Muslim into someone who shoots people in nightclubs. In the chilling words of Kumail Nanjiani:

‘How to make terrorists. 1. Ban everyone from a certain group from entering the country. 2. Wait’. A theory backed up by those stories we regularly hear about Israelis committing terrorist attacks in the sixteen Muslim countries they’re banned from. At least you would hear them, if the media wasn’t controlled by the Zios. Until then we must ignore the flimsy MSM narrative that there is something specific to Islam that compels a minority of Muslims to kill people, as if there were some kind of Islamic bible that explicitly condones killing anyone who hasn’t submitted to Allah.

Because despite all the right-wing whining, there is no equivalence whatsoever between Trump’s ban and the ban on Israelis entering sixteen Muslim countries, and not just because one will only last 90 days while the other will be in existence as long as Muhammad has a hole in his arse. No, it’s different because Israelis aren’t as oppressed as Muslims. Which explains why they’re less likely to react to travel restrictions by decapitating people.

With lack of oppression comes privilege and it’s this privilege that stops Israelis from blowing up mosques in Bangladesh. It’s nothing to do with the fact that they come from virtually the only country in the Middle-East that doesn’t teach its citizens non-Muslims are evil and anyone who disagrees deserves to die.

Inevitably, some whining Rabbi will pipe up that to claim Jews have never been oppressed ignores a little incident involving six million people that occurred last century. But as Ken Livingstone has repeatedly argued – using a unique blend of insight, analysis and fuck-witted misreading of history – Jews can hardly complain about genocide when Hitler supported Zionism. And as Corbyn acquaintances such as brother Piers and the Rev. Stephen Sizer would no doubt agree, it’s fine to talk about the holocaust as long as you remember it didn’t actually happen.

But it’s good to know we have funny-men like Kumail onside, demonstrating their opposition to smearing Muslims as terrorists by suggesting all it takes is a travel ban to turn Muslims into terrorists. And turn them it must; we’ve got four years of this bozo and the only thing guaranteed to make that fly over will be regular acts of Islamic terrorism we can blame on the West.

In the meantime, let’s just enjoy the free virtue-points as Trump’s fascist takeover continues. And if he doesn’t turn out to be the second coming of Voldemort and Len Fairclough? Well, we can always just pretend he is. As notorious Islamophobe and self-hating homosexual Douglas Murray put it: ‘There’s not enough fascism to go around’. And for once, he was right. But with the orange buffoon ensconced in the White House and protest movements silencing opinions they don’t like on a daily basis it’s never been easier to create your own.

Ban that, Drumpf.