Can we stop hassling Hasselbaink?

I wasn’t so much disappointed with the section of the Q block singing ‘There’s only one Neil Warnock’ periodically against Hull. Rather, when a few of us in the P block tried to drown these morons out with our own rendition of ‘Hasselbaink’s Blue Army’, surprisingly few seemed to join in. I understand the boys are playing bad football at the moment, but this is no reason not to get behind your team. As I say frequently: we are supporters, not consumers.

However such is the modern consumer mentality, catalysed by the pervasiveness and sheer abruptness of social media, that owners, journalist and fans alike, expect instant results, QPR is no exception, with an unhealthy habit of getting through roughly a manager a season.

When Tango and Cash were still running the show, fans would become increasingly disgruntled at the rapid turnover in playing and managerial staff alike, and it was no surprise that when the owners took a step back, and allowed a manager with a proven track record to get on with his job, imposing his own ideas, that we went up as champions with relative ease.

Stability is the key here, and it is totally unreasonable to expect Jimmy to undo the bad habits created by the previous two managers in under a month. Under both Harry Redknapp and Chris Ramsey, there was never any attempt to play anything that resembles high-pressing, possession-based football, so I for one was delighted when a former Dutch international, who has played with some of the finest players to grace the game, came to Loftus Road.

For me, Jimmy is above all an educator and innovator. He took Burton Albion; one of the smallest clubs in the football league, out of League 2 and further still left them at the summit of League 1 when he left early last month. Now I care little whether he is ‘proven’ at this level like Warnock is… because what he did with Burton is clearly a massive achievement itself.

But it’s not just the statistical success he had with Albion that impresses me (a formidable 61% win ratio by the way), but the manner in which he has achieved it. I often hear from other Rangers fans that we’re simply not good enough to play the kind of football that progressives demand but I wholeheartedly reject that argument. I’ve seen Eddie Howe take Bournemouth up the leagues playing an expansive game. Similarly Brendan Rodgers and Roberto Martinez before him were hugely successful at Swansea City, affectionately known by many in Wales as ‘Swansalona’.

Professional footballers play at the level that they do because they are incredibly talented, and there is no question in my mind that players like Alejandro Faurlin, Matty Phillips et al are up to the job. QPR’s problem is that other than a brief period at the start of the 2013-14 season, we have not had a manager in the last ten years who seems intent on producing good quality football. Even when Neil Warnock took us out of the Championship, we were largely reliant on a resilient base and a magician in the 10 who could win games on his own.

Neil Warnock is a brilliant coach, and we saw once again when he assumed temporary charge a couple of months ago that his impact was instantaneous. But I would hasten to add that he has a considerably poorer record in the Premier League than he has at Championship level, and this I put down to him only really knowing one way to play football.

As I say, Jimmy is an educator, a student of the game – a man who knows what he is doing. And coming into a club who have not been accustomed to playing the right way will take time to fix. Give him a full season, at least a full 2016, so that he can recruit and build in the way that he sees fit. I know that the sensible majority of QPR fans are prepared to give him that length of time, but as usual, both on the internet and at Loftus Road, it’s the stupid minority who are making more noise.

So let's get behind our team. It never was easy being a Rangers fan.

Let's condemn religion for what it actually gets wrong

There’s plenty of comment out there about religion, particularly Islam. There always is in the aftermath of any terror attack, from islamophobes keen to make political capital of any catastrophe, to those of us on the left who become burdened with defending the 1.6 billion innocent Muslims who are the victims of an animalistic and highly uncritical human need to generalise, often crassly, in order to make sense of the world.

Really the argument should stop here. This pie chart is about as simple and factual as it gets. Not that I want to upset any bigots with evidence.

That’s my caveat for the rest of this article. Though I want to make a point about religion in general, not just Islam. All three Abrahamic religions, to a greater or lesser degree, subscribe to St Paul’s/Saul’s (whatever you want to call him) doctrine of the Golden Rule: that is to love thy neighbour as thyself, to do unto others as we would have done unto us. All the Abrahamic religions endorse charity as a virtue. Zakah/Tzadakah in Islam and Judaism. And in Christianity, one of Jesus’ most powerful lessons is that the rich should give to the poor, stating that it is ‘easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’ It’s no coincidence, then, that the majority of work done to alleviate food poverty at the UK’s 445 Trussell Trust Food Banks is done through local Church communities and other religious groups. It’s clear, then, that for the most part, religion is a force for good in society.

So let’s focus on the real issues here – the ones that should be getting a lot more attention than bigoted islamophobic terrorism nonsense. Religion, it's safe to say, has not always been the LGBT community's best friend. A 2013 report conducted by Pew suggests a positive correlation between religiosity and condemnation of homosexuality:

Ah yes, well done Josh, you used a graph… but you’re misunderstanding correlation and cause (I can hear my critics shouting at their screens now). It is not religiosity which undermines tolerance of homosexuality; rather it is a cultural phenomenon. It just so happens that those countries with conservative cultures are generally more religious.

Well I don’t really like that argument. It’s a religious cop-out. Religion and culture are not the same entities, yes. Culture is an umbrella term, encompassing sport, entertainment, community and among other things… religion. So when it says in the Bible “No man must lie with another man as he lies with a woman for that is an abomination”, it does not surprise me to see that Christian countries are more “culturally” averse to homosexuality than us enlightened westerners.

But OK, let’s pretend that my critics have a point here. Well I can offset that. In France, only 35% of Muslims sampled believe that homosexual acts are morally acceptable. Christians in Britain do significantly better, with 61% supporting equal rights for gay people, though that still means 39% don’t support equal rights, or ‘don’t know’ which is still reprehensible.

It’s not just homosexuals that religions enjoy to condemn. It has taken until 2014 for the Church of England to approve women bishops. And the Catholic Church still prohibits them. In all orthodox Jewish communities and most mosques, women are forced to worship in segregation from the men. In orthodox synagogues, women cannot be rabbis, or even lead worship. This isn’t happening in the Middle East… this is happening in the United Kingdom in 2015!

I’m a liberal to the extent that I support people’s right to worship whomever they choose, and to belong to whichever religion they so desire. But I am not a liberal to the extent that I champion religious rights above human rights. If you genuinely consider homophobia to be an integral part of your religion, then no, I do not support your right to be a bigot.

So let’s not get distracted by the odd terror attack here and there. More people get killed by wasps and bees than they do by terrorists in Europe. Let’s have a meaningful discussion about religion and where it can improve its contribution to society. Let’s focus on the real flaws. The onus should be on the liberal-minded in the religious communities to lead these conversations.