Bride of Dracula

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

SHAMIMA BEGUM, the British schoolgirl who, in 2015, aged 15, sneaked into Syria to become a jihadi wife/child bride and do her bit for the I-Sissies, was “a bit shocked” to be stripped of her British citizenship, simply because she joined a group that beheads people they disagree with, throws homosexuals off of tall buildings to lead them to righteousness and, when they’re not doing God’s work with AK-47s, rapes children for a little R&R.

Shamima made things a little harder for herself (and easier for the British Home Office to disenfranchise her) by declaring that the 2017 Manchester pop concert bombing was “kind of retaliation” for attacks on the I-Sissies. Because she has a Dutch husband and a possibly Bangladeshi mother, Shamima is currently shopping around for a country that will take her.

She should come to Trinidad.

The world knows Trinidad lets anyone in to do as they please anytime, anywhere, as proven by the hordes of Nigerian security guards, Middle Eastern gyro vendors, Chinese cook-shop proprietors and, more recently, Venezuelan everythings. The number of Trinidadians who are shocked by, say, little girls being trafficked for prostitution is negligible, compared with the number of Trinis who benefit from having near-slave labour/white people to slap up for historical revenge. For every middle-class, compassionate Trinidadian horrified by the plight of the Venezuelan refugees, there are ten sufferers happy to torment and/or make style on them.

Additionally, in Trinidad, Shamima would be treated like a returning heroine, simply because of her religousness.

Lots of places in the world claim to be God’s own country – but Trinidad really is. Here, the national anthem itself expressly states that every creed and race find[s] an equal place and the national ethos requires that every God must have his own holiday. Every belief of every religion must be, not just respected, but deferred to – except Rastafari and Jah, of course, who constitute the Venezuelans of Trinidadian religions.

Trinidad, which has contributed more jihadis per capita to the I-Sissies than anywhere else in our hemisphere – and, as a percentage of the local Muslim population, anywhere in the world, after England – has refused to take the clear, sensible position that any citizen who leaves Trinidad to go to Syria to murder for Allah should be refused re-entry and told to call upon Allah, for whom he killed, to provide him with a living.

This, clearly, works in Shamima’s favour.

For Trinidadians, there can never be anything wrong with any religious belief at all (except Rastafari, supra, the exception that proves the rule). If, say, human rights conflict with what Trinidadians regard as “God’s word,” it’s the hard-won human rights that get chucked out, not the groundless belief.

When, eg, Justice Devindra Rampersad, in the Jason Jones case in April 2018, declared anti-gay legislation unconstitutional in TT, it was no deterrent to the faith of the Muslimeen “soldiers,” who disregarded the rule of law and simple good manners and took themselves in numbers to the steps of the very Hall of Justice, to wag their fingers threateningly in the faces of homosexuals gathered there to celebrate (and you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise what those ultra-macho men really wanted to wag in gay men’s faces).

Here, in God’s own country, where any singular kind of faith is preferred to universal secular rationality, even the infidel can be accommodated: on the Hall of Justice steps, the Muslimeen gay-bashers found their very strangest of bedfellows in the Pentecostals, a group who considers it an abomination to God to accept the humanity of His homosexual creations, but a homage to Him to relieve their flocks, straight or gay, of ten per cent of their income.

For the Trinidadian, it is preferable to have a dozen different prayers to almost as many gods than to have none at all; so, in Trinidad, you cannot open a cinema or a library without the bare minimum of a pundit, a priest and a preacher. And you’re better off covering yourself by bowing down to the Orishas and the Hindu pantheon, too besides.

You cannot, in Trinidad, slam the doors of entry to even self-declared multiple murderers – once those murders are done in the name of a god Trinis don’t sneer at, like the Shouter Baptists’ god, a couple o’ generations ago, or the Rastafarian one today.

Shamima, then, should find her way here, where she will be greeted on a red carpet at Piarco Airport. By an imam, a pundit, a priest, a preacher, two syncretic-religion bishops and, probably, the last adherent on Earth of the Rev Moon.

If Jim Jones had known then what Shamima knows now, he’d have come here, too.

BC Pires is persona non grata in churches, mosques and temples. Read a longer version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com