Red Alert

Why do white British redheads flock to the hateful ramblings of radical Islam?

Hope by Ron Francis (2024)

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One evening in my late teens, I stood accused of the most heinous crime known to the English-speaking peoples. The evidence of this social horror threads along my left sideburn like a scarlet letter.

A friend, not one to hold his tongue after necking a clutch of violent white ciders, zeroed in like a film noir detective:

“What’s that... streak in your hair?”

“What streak?” My cheeks burned hot.

“That... It’s... Your sideburn! That’s! It’s! You’re fucking ginger! You’ve got the gene! You’ve got the plague!”

Despite visual evidence of a triumphant, thick thatch of brown hair, that one-inch copper streak glinting in the light was enough to charge me with possessing the regressive gene which colours hair a despised shade of red.

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For weeks following, I had to answer to my peers. What did I know about my suspected, dormant possession of the regressive gene, and for how long had I known it? Did I aid and abet others with this gene? Were we planning to overthrow our blonde and brown-headed overseers? Who was our leader? Was it Ed Sheeran? Had Mr Sheeran’s orange locks influenced an underground railroad network? Was I hiding enemies of the state beneath my floorboards?

Here in Great Britain, a teenage diagnosis of ‘ginger’ is usually terminal. The prognosis for millions of redheads is a lifetime of teasing and ridicule.

The British prejudice toward the red-headed stems from ancient battles with Celts clotted along England’s borders. Google ‘Celt’ and you’ll see a red-headed savage snarling, ready to rain a battleaxe down upon your skull. Folklore believed the redhead to be deceitful, dangerous, and the devil’s child. Ginger hair, atop just 1% of the global population, sits upon ten percent of the Irish and the Scots. To the English subconscious, red hair provokes a primitive suspicion.

In school, where brutal hierarchies reign, the ginger kid scrapes along the bottom, the victim of taunts such as ‘carrot top’ and ‘rusty bollocks.’ This extends into adulthood. A fat percentage of women won’t date a ginger man. Would-be parents worry that somewhere in their blood lurks a regressive gene, its activation a blight on their child’s life.

Some even furnish this prejudice with academic flourish. On the documentary, Fuck Off, I’m Ginger!, a psychologist claimed the apparent female aversion to red-haired males stems from fears of inferior genes. The Penguin Guide to Superstitions notes a “general prejudice… that red-haired people are devious, cruel, lascivious, unlucky and generally untrustworthy.”

This is, of course, pure hokum—a semi-conscious primal scream of our monkey brains. It’s a hair colour.

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But the earth chokes with the toxic fumes of high-school jibes. Ask anyone you know. Those nasty remarks printed upon one’s head ten, twenty, thirty years ago still drop the stomach and tighten the voice box. To be branded as defective for something as innocuous as a hair colour no doubt imprints a mental welt.

Of course, every social superstition eventually mutates. And ours—like everything else in Britain—has gone online.

Accused of skulduggery, deception, of evil genesis; denied personhood, mocked, ridiculed, beaten—and even murdered—the redhead minority now stands accused of something far graver: supplying radical Islam with a steady stream of resentful converts to fundamentalist hatred.

A recent online flurry pointed out the phenomenon of the ‘ginger jihadi.’ According to media archives, near 70% of white British converts magnetised toward the delusions of hate preachers were ginger. In The Guardian, the in-house magazine of diversity co-ordinators and the chatterati, one hundred percent.

Although this is fag-packet science of the highest order—the kind that supplies talking heads their lurid purpose—it suggests that red-heads are fifteen times more likely than their peers to flock toward fundamental interpretations of Islam.

Again, this is poppycock redolent of the terminally online mind, which, reconfigured by algorithms to seek novelty and ascribe value to novelty, makes connections where there are none.

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Last night, I trawled through veritable oceans of ‘ginger jihadi’ content, plumbing the very depths of dopamine-addled content makers whose sole contribution to the human experience is their unnatural ability to talk bollocks into a video camera.

The theories made one wince, then laugh, then despair. The problem with the video age is that it doesn’t translate to print. The former rewards what the latter punishes—i.e. knowing what you’re talking about. One can say anything in a video; it need not make sense. Whereas print demands reason, reflection, thought, video demands sensation, reaction, spectacle. Hence, our comet-like trajectory toward Idiocracy.

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After wading through the thickets of piffle, I concluded. Those angry young men flock to radical Islam to validate their faulty worldview. In short, the world has conspired against me, and I will avenge myself upon the world.

What better to soothe one’s bruised ego than a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam? What belief system in this age is more self-assertive? For the alienated young man, the more offensive and brutal the redeeming belief system, the better. The same lost boys in the 1980s would have lopped off their hair and laced up their Dr Martens. In the 1990s, they’d have dropped Es and danced in muddy fields to tinny, repetitive music.

But this is an age of extremes. Algorithms punish the middle. For the disaffected, radical Islam offers the same redemption as the incel forum: both are creeds of victimhood. Both promise the victim the mantle of victor.

Much like incels, the ginger converts glowered into the camera. Their indulgent self-pity renders them uglier and more unfuckable than any hair colour.

Not so long ago, such people would have done what the well-adjusted do and made the most of what they had and got on with their lives. But this is the age of victimhood. We mistake personal shortcomings for universal ones.

The ginger jihadi, then, is less a curiosity than a symbol—another casualty of an age that rewards outrage, dignifies resentment, and mistakes shouting for substance. My red-headed friends, I can confirm, this one is not on you.

But times are a-changing. Strong rumours abound that the next James Bond might just be a redhead. And who is more desirable than Britain’s most famous ladykiller?

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