My late father hummed Tom Jones’ “Delilah”, one of his all-time favourites, all the time. So My, my, my, Delilah/Why, why, why, Delilah were among the first few English words I knew as a child, long before I learned the language. Imagine my surprise to read that organisers of Welsh international rugby matches in Cardiff have cancelled the song from the list of their choirs because it’s about violence against women. You know the lines: She stood there laughing/I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more . In case you didn’t know, Welsh sports fans love to sing along during matches. The BBC approvingly quoted domestic abuse campaigner Rachel Williams: “I loved the song [“Delilah”], but stopped singing it when I realised it was about glorifying the murder of a woman. We shouldn’t normalise lyrics like this and should continue to call them out.” This is the cultural moment at which the West has found itself. Just to be thorough, though, authorities should delete all the recordings of the triumphant rendition of the song by Jones at the late Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, to which tens of thousands sang along outside her palace. Prince Harry was filmed among the VIP audience mouthing the words. Guess he will now have to issue an apology and declare, with the help of his wife, the Duchess of Sussex and Queen of Woke, that he opposes absolutely and resolutely violence against women. Why Hong Kong remains as the green, green grass of home Come to think of it, the name Delilah should be banned, as it is sexist because it’s associated with “treacherous and voluptuous” women since the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah, who took bribes from the Philistines to destroy her lover. Just like Lolita, have you ever come across a person with that name? Me neither. I am almost certain that Barry Mason, the legendary British songwriter who co-wrote “Delilah”, was well aware of the “murderous jealous lover” theme running through Western culture. His “misogynist” lyrics came straight from the ending of Bizet’s Carmen : C’est moi qui l’ai tuée. [It’s me who killed her.”] Ah! Carmen! Ma Carmen adorée! That needs to be on the “cancel” list of Western opera houses as well. But that’s not all. Western universities have been systematically cancelling “dead white men” (DWM) responsible for the Western “canon”. I just read an essay by a philosophy professor who claims “racism was baked into the very structure of dialectical philosophy” from Plato to Hegel. Oh dear, and I have misspent half my life reading them, and I am not even a gweilo! My intellectual Stockholm syndrome, no doubt! Russell Brand, Plato, The Matrix and the illusion of enlightenment Speaking of violence against women, we must delete Othello and Titus Andronicus from the Shakespearean oeuvre once and for all. The latter play especially is more gratuitous than most Hollywood slasher films. Here you have Aaron, the lover of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, telling her sons to gang-rape Lavinia, Titus’ chaste and beautiful daughter: The palace full of tongues, of eyes, and ears:/ The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull;/ There speak, and strike, brave boys, and take your turns;/ There serve your lusts, shadow’d from heaven’s eye,/ And revel in Lavinia’s treasury. Afterwards, her cousin finds Lavinia ravaged, with her tongue and both hands cut off: Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands/ Have lopp’d and hew’d and made thy body bare/ Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments,/ Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in,/And might not gain so great a happiness/ As have thy love? Why dost not speak to me?/ Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,/Like to a bubbling fountain stirr’d with wind,/ Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,/ Coming and going with thy honey breath./ But, sure, some Tereus hath deflowered thee,/ And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue. In an honour killing, Titus later stabs his daughter to death. Off with Shakespeare, I say! There, my humble contribution to cancelling misogynist Western culture.