Britain’s woke Left have totally lost plot – latest trigger warning is barely believable | UK | News

I don’t play football. But if I did, do you know what I’d wear? A football kit. Preferably the claret and blue of my beloved West Ham United. Sometimes in my real life, my preferred choice of clothing for the occasion just doesn’t cut it. When I’m visiting the Serbian Orthodox church that is one of the highlights of yearly trips to Leskovac in the south of the country for example, it’s usually summer and I want to wear shorts. I don’t. Because the custom in that sacred building – built to be disguised from Serbia’s then-Ottoman rulers – is that you don’t show your legs off. So no matter the heat, I whack on a pair of jeans.

I’ve also taken my shoes off in mosques while working as a local reporter in East London and donned an orange bandana that made me look daft in a gurdwara. On both occasions I was advised and encourage to do so and complied so as not to offend against their holy places and hospitality.

Now I worry that such revelations require a trigger warning to be slapped on this article. Because today in woke w***ery it’s surfaced that the National Portrait Gallery slapped sensitivity alerts on pictures of Thomas Edward Lawrence, the British Army officer from Wales who became known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Of particular concern was his choice of dress. Lawrence famously donned a keffiyeh in the pictures, which for some reason just isn’t on if you’re a white Brit.

So it’s good to know that middle-class white kids who’ve recently taken up that trend in the name of Palestine might finally take them off for fear of being seen as racist.

Of course they won’t. And nor should they be made to feel bad on grounds of so-called cultural appropriation. Certain among them should instead feel bad for their hatred of the Jewish state.

While we’re on this, just where are all the morality mobs who railed against white blokes with dreadlocks when droves of keffiyeh-clad caucasians are clogging our capital’s streets?

Unlike those Israel-obsessed protesters – whose main expenditure of energy on behalf of the Arabs consists of walking slowly and shouting slogans – Lawrence was pictured in local dress while fighting alongside the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.

Dress customs are of course one way to show solidarity, risking your life is quite another. The trigger warnings have also surfaced in spite of the fact that Emir Faisal, who later became King of Iraq, encouraged Lawrence to dress in this fashion.

Of course, such details don’t matter. Because these warnings aren’t about what actually happened or whether Lawrence was some sort of culturally appropriating racist.

They’re an insane attempt to appease ahistorical a***wipes who see everything through the lens of their own time, even when it’s from another.

This weird cultural imperialism in which they engage is among the most ironic practices of our time.

They simply cannot conceive of a reason that Lawrence would wear this clothing for any other reason than parody, so they impose their very western framing wherever they can.

Great institutions like the National Portrait Gallery should pity these benighted morons for their lack of empathy and imagination, for their dogmatic projection onto events that took place before the term “cultural appropriation” existed.

Those who run the place should wonder how these prigs pass their time without enjoying any music, art or literature that engages with another culture.

Instead, they pander to these playground potentates in the hope that protests involving cold soup and a lot of whingeing don’t darken their gallery.

The tragic thing about this affair is that anyone with a brain knows that this American-imported nonsense is on the way out.

Most people of any importance don’t take this seriously anymore. And if they do they look and sound remarkably silly.

So a bastion of British culture and history has made itself look even stupider than a shrill student complaining about an Osama bin Laden costume at a Halloween party.

This puritan priggery has had its day. And it’s time the National Portrait Gallery caught up.