Marketing to British Islam

Here's a potted history of Muslims (for it is them we are talking about) in the UK. Shortly after the war, we needed a load of cheap labour, so we imported a lot of poor people from around the world, lots of whom were Muslims.

They all went and lived in ghettoes, but we didn't care because they were too poor and downtrodden to cause any trouble, plus they never had any spare time because they were doing eighty hour shifts in the textile industry.

Now there's a second generation of them, who are not quite so poor, not quite so downtrodden and we don't really have a textile industry any more. As a result, we have to be a little bit worried that they might end up as a terrorism risk, particularly as they do not all feel 100% grateful about the way they've been treated over the last 50 years, nor do many of them really think all that much of our current foreign policy.

That is my summary of the history of British Islam and if you think it's simplistic, crude or politically slanted then my response is that at least it didn't cost a million pounds and I didn't need to appoint a committee to draft it. It's actually not that inaccurate and it gives us all the material we need to start analysing the problem.

So what's an example of bad marketing?

Let's look at a concrete example - the John Reid "grass [inform] on your kids" inititative. In principle, a very sensible policy - young Muslim men are exactly the ones who are vulnerable to being drawn into violent extremist movements, and their parents have both much better information about this happening than we do, and a powerful interest in stopping their sons turning into suicide bombers. In actual fact, yet another god-damned own goal which had the effect of getting peoples' backs even further up.

How could this have been sold better?

Well, it seems to me that if the action that you want to achieve is "hand your children over to us", the very most obvious message that you need to add to that is "we promise that we will keep them safe". However, since our government currently has as its policy that it wants to hold people for 90 days without trial, and to extradite them without hearings to the Americans, who in turn might subject them to extraordinary rendition and waterboarding, we are not currently in a position to make that promise. We need to get into a position to make that promise, and fast.

Even as Tiger blazes his legendary trail with a "Do Not Disturb" sign dangling from his neck, the fans will settle for the shiny trophies and the pearly whites because they're a whole lot better than the alternative.

Namely, a Grand Slam world without Tiger. Imagine that. Imagine subtracting Woods from the Augusta National field, subtracting him from the game of golf entirely and trying to stay excited about a sport overrun by a bunch of guys named Charles Howell III.

...

Had his father, Earl, put a tennis racket in his crib instead of a five-iron, golf would have far bigger concerns than the yardage added to the extra-large Augusta National course.

Phil Mickelson would have won five majors instead of two, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing: Mickelson is quite an interesting guy. But all in all, a game without Tiger would be a game with a surplus of faceless pros and colorless styles.

The 'X' announced what you had been and what you had become: Ex-smoker, Ex-drinker, Ex-Christian, Ex-slave.

[Tony Blair's envoy in Baghdad] Mr Sawers, in a memo titled Iraq: What's Going Wrong, written on May 11, four days after he had arrived in Baghdad, is uncompromising about the US administration in Baghdad. He wrote: "No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis." (emphasis mine)

My affection for them [the sketches] despite their rough composition and clumsy execution is indicative of their special and private importance to me. They are the only homework to which I energetically applied myself, the only school that ever taught me anything.