Bruce Bawer
An Anatomy of Surrender
Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.
Spring 2008
http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=2567
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.
What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, KhoÂmeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.
The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.
Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.
The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys. After the late Dutch sociologist-turned-politician Pim Fortuyn sounded the alarm about the danger that Europe’s Islamization posed to democracy, elite journalists labeled him a threat. A New York Times headline described him as marching the dutch to the right. Dutch newspapers Het Parool and De Volkskrant compared him with Mussolini; Trouw likened him to Hitler. The man (a multiculturalist, not a Muslim) who murdered him in May 2002 seemed to echo such verdicts when explaining his motive: Fortuyn’s views on Islam, the killer insisted, were “dangerous.”
Perhaps no Western media outlet has exhibited this habit of moral inversion more regularly than the BBC. In 2006, to take a typical example, Manchester’s top imam told psychotherapist John Casson that he supported the death penalty for homosexuality. Casson expressed shock—and the BBC, in a dispatch headlined imam accused of “gay death” slur, spun the controversy as an effort by Casson to discredit Islam. The BBC concluded its story with comments from an Islamic Human Rights Commission spokesman, who equated Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality with those of “other orthodox religions, such as Catholicism” and complained that focusing on the issue was “part of demonizing Muslims.”
In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This “stunning whitewash of radical Islam,” as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, “helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses” in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police.
Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity. Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam. Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.” Exemplifying the new dhimmitude, whatever its motivation, was Norway’s leading cartoonist, Finn Graff, who had often depicted Israelis as Nazis, but who now vowed not to draw anything that might provoke Muslim wrath. (On a positive note, this February, over a dozen Danish newspapers, joined by a number of other papers around the world, reprinted one of the original cartoons as a free-speech gesture after the arrest of three people accused of plotting to kill the artist.)
Last year brought another cartoon crisis—this time over Swedish artist Lars Vilks’s drawings of Mohammed as a dog, which ambassadors from Muslim countries used as an excuse to demand speech limits in Sweden. CNN reporter Paula Newton suggested that perhaps “Vilks should have known better” because of the Jyllands-Posten incident—as if people who make art should naturally take their marching orders from people who make death threats. Meanwhile, The Economist depicted Vilks as an eccentric who shouldn’t be taken “too seriously” and noted approvingly that Sweden’s prime minister, unlike Denmark’s, invited the ambassadors “in for a chat.”
The elite media regularly underreport fundamentalist Muslim misbehavior or obfuscate its true nature. After the knighting of Rushdie in 2007 unleashed yet another wave of international Islamist mayhem, Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any.” Or consider the riots that gripped immigrant suburbs in France in the autumn of 2005. These uprisings were largely assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim neighborhoods, and thus clearly jihadist in character. Yet weeks passed before many American press outlets mentioned them—and when they did, they de-emphasized the rioters’ Muslim identity (few cited the cries of “Allahu akbar,” for instance). Instead, they described the violence as an outburst of frustration over economic injustice.
When polls and studies of Muslims appear, the media often spin the results absurdly or drop them down the memory hole after a single news cycle. Journalists celebrated the results of a 2007 Pew poll showing that 80 percent of American Muslims aged 18 to 29 said that they opposed suicide bombing—even though the flip side, and the real story, was that a double-digit percentage of young American Muslims admitted that they supported it. u.s. muslims assimilated, opposed to extremism, the Washington Post rejoiced, echoing USA Today’s american muslims reject extremes. A 2006 Daily Telegraph survey showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain—yet British reporters often write as though only a minuscule minority embraced such views.
After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash”—thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones. (These backlashes, of course, never materialize.) While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11. The Times described Armstrong’s hagiography of Mohammed as “a good place to start” learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito want to understand islam? start here.
Mainstream outlets have also served up anodyne portraits of fundamentalist Muslim life. Witness Andrea Elliott’s affectionate three-part profile of a Brooklyn imam, which appeared in the New York Times in March 2006. Elliott and the Times sought to portray Reda Shata as a heroic bridge builder between two cultures, leaving readers with the comforting belief that the growth of Islam in America was not only harmless but positive, even beautiful. Though it emerged in passing that Shata didn’t speak English, refused to shake women’s hands, wanted to forbid music, and supported Hamas and suicide bombing, Elliott did her best to downplay such unpleasant details; instead, she focused on sympathetic personal particulars. “Islam came to him softly, in the rhythms of his grandmother’s voice”; “Mr. Shata discovered love 15 years ago. . . . ‘She entered my heart,‘ said the imam.” Elliott’s saccharine piece won a Pulitzer Prize. When Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes pointed out that Shata was obviously an Islamist, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review dismissed Pipes as “right-wing” and insisted that Shata was “very moderate.”
So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are “moderate” (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”
The entertainment industry has been nearly as appalling. During World War II, Hollywood churned out scores of films that served the war effort, but today’s movies and TV shows, with very few exceptions, either tiptoe around Islam or whitewash it. In the whitewash category were two sitcoms that debuted in 2007, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Little Mosque on the Prairie and CW’s Aliens in America. Both shows are about Muslims confronting anti-Muslim bigotry; both take it for granted that there’s no fundamentalist Islam problem in the West, but only an anti-Islam problem.
Muslim pressure groups have actively tried to keep movies and TV shows from portraying Islam as anything but a Religion of Peace. For example, the Council for American-Islamic Relations successfully lobbied Paramount Pictures to change the bad guys in The Sum of All Fears (2002) from Islamist terrorists to neo-Nazis, while Fox’s popular series 24, after Muslims complained about a story line depicting Islamic terrorists, ran cringe-worthy public-service announcements emphasizing how nonviolent Islam was. Earlier this year, Iranian-Danish actor Farshad Kholghi noted that, despite the cartoon controversy’s overwhelming impact on Denmark, “not a single movie has been made about the crisis, not a single play, not a single stand-up monologue.” Which, of course, is exactly what the cartoon jihadists wanted.
In April 2006, an episode of the animated series South Park admirably mocked the wave of self-censorship that followed the Jyllands-Posten crisis—but Comedy Central censored it, replacing an image of Mohammed with a black screen and an explanatory notice. According to series producer Anne Garefino, network executives frankly admitted that they were acting out of fear. “We were happy,” she told an interviewer, “that they didn’t try to claim that it was because of religious tolerance.”
Then there’s the art world. Postmodern artists who have always striven to shock and offend now maintain piously that Islam deserves “respect.” Museums and galleries have quietly taken down paintings that might upset Muslims and have put into storage manuscripts featuring images of Mohammed. London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery removed life-size nude dolls by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from a 2006 exhibit just before its opening; the official excuse was “space constraints,” but the curator admitted that the real reason was fear that the nudity might offend the gallery’s Muslim neighbors. Last November, after the cancellation of a show in The Hague of artworks depicting gay men in Mohammed masks, the artist, Sooreh Hera, charged the museum with giving in to Muslim threats. Tim Marlow of London’s White Cube Gallery notes that such self-censorship by artists and museums is now common, though “very few people have explicitly admitted” it. British artist Grayson Perry, whose work has mercilessly mocked Christianity, is one who has—and his reluctance isn’t about multicultural sensitivity. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,” he told the Times of London, “is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”
Leading liberal intellectuals and academics have shown a striking willingness to betray liberal values when it comes to pacifying Muslims. Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to “realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
More recently, high-profile Europe experts Ian Buruma of Bard College and Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford, while furiously denying that they advocate cultural surrender, have embraced “accommodation,” which sounds like a distinction without a difference. In his book Murder in Amsterdam, Buruma approvingly quotes Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen’s call for “accommodation with the Muslims,” including those “who consciously discriminate against their women.” Sharia enshrines a Muslim man’s right to beat and rape his wife, to force marriages on his daughters, and to kill them if they resist. One wonders what female Muslims who immigrated to Europe to escape such barbarity think of this prescription.
Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and one of Britain’s best-known public intellectuals, suggested in February the institution of a parallel system of sharia law in Britain. Since the Islamic Sharia Council already adjudicates Muslim marriages and divorces in the U.K., what Williams was proposing was, as he put it, “a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resources.” Gratifyingly, his proposal, short on specifics and long on academic doublespeak (“I don’t think,” he told the BBC, “that we should instantly spring to the conclusion that the whole of that world of jurisprudence and practice is somehow monstrously incompatible with human rights, simply because it doesn’t immediately fit with how we understand it”) was greeted with public outrage.
Another prominent accommodationist is humanities professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University, author of an August 2007 essay in the New York Times Magazine so long and languorous, and written with such perfect academic dispassion, that many readers may have finished it without realizing that it charted a path leading straight to sharia. Muslims’ “full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected,” Lilla wrote. For the West, “coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle.”
Revealing in this light is Buruma’s and Garton Ash’s treatment of author Ayaan Hirsi Ali—perhaps the greatest living champion of Western freedom in the face of creeping jihad—and of the Europe-based Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan. Because Hirsi Ali refuses to compromise on liberty, Garton Ash has called her a “simplistic . . . Enlightenment fundamentalist”—thus implicitly equating her with the Muslim fundamentalists who have threatened to kill her—while Buruma, in several New York Times pieces, has portrayed her as a petulant naif. (Both men have lately backed off somewhat.) On the other hand, the professors have rhapsodized over Ramadan’s supposed brilliance. They aren’t alone: though he’s clearly not the Westernized, urbane intellectual he seems to be—he refuses to condemn the stoning of adulteresses and clearly looks forward to a Europe under sharia—this grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and protégé of Islamist scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi regularly wins praise in bien-pensant circles as representing the best hope for long-term concord between Western Muslims and non-Muslims.
This spring, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, actually gave two cheers for sharia. He contrasted it favorably with English common law, and described “the Islamists’ aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law” as “bold and noble.”
With the press, the entertainment industry, and prominent liberal thinkers all refusing to defend basic Western liberties, it’s not surprising that our political leaders have been pusillanimous, too. After a tiny Oslo newspaper, Magazinet, reprinted the Danish cartoons in early 2006, jihadists burned Norwegian flags and set fire to Norway’s embassy in Syria. Instead of standing up to the vandals, Norwegian leaders turned on Magazinet’s editor, Vebjørn Selbekk, partially blaming him for the embassy burning and pressing him to apologize. He finally gave way at a government-sponsored press conference, groveling before an assemblage of imams whose leader publicly forgave him and placed him under his protection. On that terrible day, Selbekk later acknowledged, “Norway went a long way toward allowing freedom of speech to become the Islamists’ hostage.” As if that capitulation weren’t disgrace enough, an official Norwegian delegation then traveled to Qatar and implored Qaradawi—a defender of suicide bombers and the murder of Jewish children—to accept Selbekk’s apology. “To meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi under the present circumstances,” Norwegian-Iraqi writer Walid al-Kubaisi protested, was “tantamount to granting extreme Islamists . . . a right of joint consultation regarding how Norway should be governed.”
The UN’s position on the question of speech versus “respect” for Islam was clear—and utterly at odds with its founding value of promoting human rights. “You don’t joke about other people’s religion,” Kofi Annan lectured soon after the Magazinet incident, echoing the sermons of innumerable imams, “and you must respect what is holy for other people.” In October 2006, at a UN panel discussion called “Cartooning for Peace,” Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor proposed drawing “a very thin blue UN line . . . between freedom and responsibility.” (Americans might be forgiven for wondering whether that line would strike through the First Amendment.) And in 2007, the UN’s Human Rights Council passed a Pakistani motion prohibiting defamation of religion.
Other Western government leaders have promoted the expansion of the Dar al-Islam. In September 2006, when philosophy teacher Robert Redeker went into hiding after receiving death threats over a Le Figaro op-ed on Islam, France’s then–prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, commented that “everyone has the right to express their opinions freely—at the same time that they respect others, of course.” The lesson of the Redeker affair, he said, was “how vigilant we must be to ensure that people fully respect one another in our society.” Villepin got a run for his money last year from his Swedish counterpart, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who, after meeting with Muslim ambassadors to discuss the Vilks cartoons, won praise from one of them, Algeria’s Merzak Bedjaoui, for his “spirit of appeasement.”
When, years after September 11, President George W. Bush finally acknowledged publicly that the West was at war with Islamic fascism, Muslims’ and multiculturalists’ furious reaction made him retreat to the empty term “war on terror.” Britain’s Foreign Office has since deemed even that phrase offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with “Islamic extremism”). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as “anti-Islamic activity.”
Western legislatures and courts have reinforced the “spirit of appeasement.” In 2005, Norway’s parliament, with virtually no public discussion or media coverage, criminalized religious insults (and placed the burden of proof on the defendant). Last year, that country’s most celebrated lawyer, Tor Erling Staff, argued that the punishment for honor killing should be less than for other murders, because it’s arrogant for us to expect Muslim men to conform to our society’s norms. Also in 2007, in one of several instances in which magistrates sworn to uphold German law have followed sharia instead, a Frankfurt judge rejected a Muslim woman’s request for a quick divorce from her brutally abusive husband; after all, under the Koran he had the right to beat her.
Those who dare to defy the West’s new sharia-based strictures and speak their minds now risk prosecution in some countries. In 2006, legendary author Oriana Fallaci, dying of cancer, went on trial in Italy for slurring Islam; three years earlier, she had defended herself in a French court against a similar charge. (Fallaci was ultimately found not guilty in both cases.) More recently, Canadian provinces ordered publisher Ezra Levant and journalist Mark Steyn to face human rights tribunals, the former for reprinting the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, the latter for writing critically about Islam in Maclean’s.
Even as Western authorities have hassled Islam’s critics, they’ve honored jihadists and their supporters. In 2005, Queen Elizabeth knighted Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, a man who had called for the death of Salman Rushdie. Also that year, London mayor Ken Livingstone ludicrously praised Qaradawi as “progressive”—and, in response to gay activists who pointed out that Qaradawi had defended the death penalty for homosexuals, issued a dissertation-length dossier whitewashing the Sunni scholar and trying to blacken the activists’ reputations. Of all the West’s leaders, however, few can hold a candle to Piet Hein Donner, who in 2006, as Dutch minister of justice, said that if voters wanted to bring sharia to the Netherlands—where Muslims will soon be a majority in major cities—“it would be a disgrace to say, ‘This is not permitted!’ ”
If you don’t find the dhimmification of politicians shocking, consider the degree to which law enforcement officers have yielded to Islamist pressure. Last year, when “Undercover Mosque,” an unusually frank exposé on Britain’s Channel 4, showed “moderate” Muslim preachers calling for the beating of wives and daughters and the murder of gays and apostates, police leaped into action—reporting the station to the government communications authority, Ofcom, for stirring up racial hatred. (Ofcom, to its credit, rejected the complaint.) The police reaction, as James Forsyth noted in the Spectator, “revealed a mindset that views the exposure of a problem as more of a problem than the problem itself.” Only days after the “Undercover Mosque” broadcast—in a colossal mark of indifference to the reality that it exposed—Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair announced plans to share antiterrorist intelligence with Muslim community leaders. These plans, fortunately, were later shelved.
Canadian Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has noted that in 2006, when 17 terrorists were arrested in Toronto on the verge of giving Canada “its own 9/11,” “the police did not mention that it had anything to do with Islam or Muslims, not a word.” When, after van Gogh’s murder, a Rotterdam artist drew a street mural featuring an angel and the words thou shalt not kill, police, fearing Muslim displeasure, destroyed the mural (and a videotape of its destruction). In July 2007, a planned TV appeal by British cops to help capture a Muslim rapist was canceled to avoid “racist backlash.” And in August, the Times of London reported that “Asian” men (British code for “Muslims”) in the U.K. were having sex with perhaps hundreds of “white girls as young as twelve”—but that authorities wouldn’t take action for fear of “upsetting race relations.” Typically, neither the Times nor government officials acknowledged that the “Asian” men’s contempt for the “white” girls was a matter not of race but of religion.
Even military leaders aren’t immune. In 2005, columnist Diana West noted that America’s Iraq commander, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, was educating his staff in Islam by giving them a reading list that “whitewashes jihad, dhimmitude and sharia law with the works of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito”; two years later, West noted the unwillingness of a counterinsurgency advisor, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, to mention jihad. In January 2008, the Pentagon fired Stephen Coughlin, its resident expert on sharia and jihad; reportedly, his acknowledgment that terrorism was motivated by jihad had antagonized an influential Muslim aide. “That Coughlin’s analyses would even be considered ‘controversial,’ ” wrote Andrew Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad, “is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global terrorism.” (Perhaps owing to public outcry, officials announced in February that Coughlin would not be dismissed after all, but instead moved to another Department of Defense position.)
Enough. We need to recognize that the cultural jihadists hate our freedoms because those freedoms defy sharia, which they’re determined to impose on us. So far, they have been far less successful at rolling back freedom of speech and other liberties in the U.S. than in Europe, thanks in no small part to the First Amendment. Yet America is proving increasingly susceptible to their pressures.
The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled. As for Muslims living in the West, surveys suggest that many of them, though not actively involved in jihad, are prepared to look on passively—and some, approvingly—while their coreligionists drag the Western world into the House of Submission.
But we certainly can’t expect them to take a stand for liberty if we don’t stand up for it ourselves.
Bruce Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. He blogs at BruceBawer.com.
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
Sunday, 27 April 2008
CRIMINALITY OR JIHAD
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020797.php
Fitzgerald: Criminality or jihad?
"I think this is just criminality, fair and square. We should just call them criminals. You want to call them terrorist criminals, fine," he said. "But adding the word 'Muslim' or 'Islamic' certainly doesn't help our cause as Americans. It's counterproductive. It paints an entire community of believers, 1.2 billion in total, in a very negative way. And certainly that's not something that we want to do." -- from this article
Criminality is the work of individuals, who break the law because they feel like it. It is prompted not by ideology, but rather by what has prompted criminal activity since the beginning of time.
Terrorism by Muslims is quite different. It can be the act of a collective, of Muslims acting in concert, and supported financially and morally by other Muslims who may prefer to participate in violent Jihad indirectly -- the better, for example, to participate in other, non-violent, but just as dangerous and possibly more effective methods of Jihad to remove all obstacles to the spread, and dominance, of Islam. Where an individual Muslim may be acting, he is doing so not on his own behalf, not to enrich himself, but to further what he has learned -- and learned from the texts, not mistranslated and not misunderstood, of Islam itself: Quran, Hadith, and Sira.
Furthermore, it is important that Infidels understand that they are having war made upon them, and that the war is not limited to what non-Muslims correctly identify as "terrorism." Rather, many or most Muslims are easily persuaded that it is not terrorism at all, but rather a form of qitaal, or combat, simply updated to meet modern conditions, where the Infidels have military superiority -- so unfair! -- and bombs in restaurants and on busses and planes smashed into buildings is merely a form of "equalizing," of leveling the grimmest of playing-fields.
It is important to use the phrase "Islamic terrorism," if the only alternative is "terrorism." But it would be most helpful to speak and write of Jihad, to explain what Jihad means -- what it means and has meant to Muslims over the past 1350 years, and to quickly get over the ludicrous business of those who pretend the word's main meaning is something about an interior struggle to maintain a virtuous life, or somesuch variant.
Why is it important to use the word "Jihad"? Because emphasis, exaggerated emphasis, on "terrorism" makes people pay no attention to much more effective and dangerous instruments of Jihad -- the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa aimed at the psychically and economically marginal, and demographic conquest. The latter is especially worrisome. Consider the Netherlands, where there were 1,500 Muslims in 1960, 15,000 in 1970, 800,000 in 2004, and over a million today.
It is unfortunate that none of the political leaders in the West, and few in the press, radio, television, feel they have a responsibility to learn the contents of Islam, or to learn something of the history of Islamic conquest, and subjugation of non-Muslims, over the past 1350 years. A great deal could be learned. It requires some effort and some time, and nowadays how many, in the class of people whose responsibility it is to protect and instruct us, would take that time, and make that effort?
The answer is: very few.
And we will all pay. We have already paid in the countries of Western Europe -- in Great Britain and France, in Germany and Spain, in Belgium and Italy and the Netherlands and Denmark and Norway and Sweden. We have all paid and will be grimly paying for the fact that the political and media elites were so criminally negligent over the past 35 years as Muslim immigrants by the millions were allowed in and given every conceivable benefit, and allowed to build mosques and madrasas. They were allowed to settle in without anyone questioning what this meant, what Islam was all about, and whether or not the "problems" -- as they are demurely called -- with Muslim migrants were merely, as some continue to pretend, the same problems that all immigrants experience or present, or whether there was something about that "problem" that had to do with the nature of Islam as a Total Belief-System. That Total Belief-System is inculcated with a brainwashing, and reinforced at every level, in states, societies, communities, even families suffused with Islam. That explains why, in every Infidel land, no matter what its makeup or what its politics or what the attitude of its citizens, the same problems are posed by one particular group of immigrants and by no other group -- not by Chinese, Hindus, Vietnamese Buddhists, not by Caribbean blacks, nor by non-Muslim blacks from sub-Saharan Africa, not by Mexicans, not by Central Americans, not by Andean Indians, not by any group at all. But they are posed by Muslims, to the extent that they take their Islam seriously, wherever they come from.
And that is the fix that Western Europe, and therefore the historic West, is now in. It was a problem that, had the handful of cassandras -- see for example the writings of Jacques Ellul -- been heeded, could have been avoided. Entirely manageable once, it is manageable -- with great difficulty – today.
But it is manageable only if Muslim migration is halted, and funds from Saudi Arabia and other rich Arab states are prevented from being used to build up a fifth column within the Infidel lands through mosques, madrasas, propaganda, and armies of Western hirelings, some of them merely venal, some of them something worse, all of them traitors to the West, who deserve to be seen, and to be treated, as we would have treated those who were in the pay of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.
Fitzgerald: Criminality or jihad?
"I think this is just criminality, fair and square. We should just call them criminals. You want to call them terrorist criminals, fine," he said. "But adding the word 'Muslim' or 'Islamic' certainly doesn't help our cause as Americans. It's counterproductive. It paints an entire community of believers, 1.2 billion in total, in a very negative way. And certainly that's not something that we want to do." -- from this article
Criminality is the work of individuals, who break the law because they feel like it. It is prompted not by ideology, but rather by what has prompted criminal activity since the beginning of time.
Terrorism by Muslims is quite different. It can be the act of a collective, of Muslims acting in concert, and supported financially and morally by other Muslims who may prefer to participate in violent Jihad indirectly -- the better, for example, to participate in other, non-violent, but just as dangerous and possibly more effective methods of Jihad to remove all obstacles to the spread, and dominance, of Islam. Where an individual Muslim may be acting, he is doing so not on his own behalf, not to enrich himself, but to further what he has learned -- and learned from the texts, not mistranslated and not misunderstood, of Islam itself: Quran, Hadith, and Sira.
Furthermore, it is important that Infidels understand that they are having war made upon them, and that the war is not limited to what non-Muslims correctly identify as "terrorism." Rather, many or most Muslims are easily persuaded that it is not terrorism at all, but rather a form of qitaal, or combat, simply updated to meet modern conditions, where the Infidels have military superiority -- so unfair! -- and bombs in restaurants and on busses and planes smashed into buildings is merely a form of "equalizing," of leveling the grimmest of playing-fields.
It is important to use the phrase "Islamic terrorism," if the only alternative is "terrorism." But it would be most helpful to speak and write of Jihad, to explain what Jihad means -- what it means and has meant to Muslims over the past 1350 years, and to quickly get over the ludicrous business of those who pretend the word's main meaning is something about an interior struggle to maintain a virtuous life, or somesuch variant.
Why is it important to use the word "Jihad"? Because emphasis, exaggerated emphasis, on "terrorism" makes people pay no attention to much more effective and dangerous instruments of Jihad -- the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa aimed at the psychically and economically marginal, and demographic conquest. The latter is especially worrisome. Consider the Netherlands, where there were 1,500 Muslims in 1960, 15,000 in 1970, 800,000 in 2004, and over a million today.
It is unfortunate that none of the political leaders in the West, and few in the press, radio, television, feel they have a responsibility to learn the contents of Islam, or to learn something of the history of Islamic conquest, and subjugation of non-Muslims, over the past 1350 years. A great deal could be learned. It requires some effort and some time, and nowadays how many, in the class of people whose responsibility it is to protect and instruct us, would take that time, and make that effort?
The answer is: very few.
And we will all pay. We have already paid in the countries of Western Europe -- in Great Britain and France, in Germany and Spain, in Belgium and Italy and the Netherlands and Denmark and Norway and Sweden. We have all paid and will be grimly paying for the fact that the political and media elites were so criminally negligent over the past 35 years as Muslim immigrants by the millions were allowed in and given every conceivable benefit, and allowed to build mosques and madrasas. They were allowed to settle in without anyone questioning what this meant, what Islam was all about, and whether or not the "problems" -- as they are demurely called -- with Muslim migrants were merely, as some continue to pretend, the same problems that all immigrants experience or present, or whether there was something about that "problem" that had to do with the nature of Islam as a Total Belief-System. That Total Belief-System is inculcated with a brainwashing, and reinforced at every level, in states, societies, communities, even families suffused with Islam. That explains why, in every Infidel land, no matter what its makeup or what its politics or what the attitude of its citizens, the same problems are posed by one particular group of immigrants and by no other group -- not by Chinese, Hindus, Vietnamese Buddhists, not by Caribbean blacks, nor by non-Muslim blacks from sub-Saharan Africa, not by Mexicans, not by Central Americans, not by Andean Indians, not by any group at all. But they are posed by Muslims, to the extent that they take their Islam seriously, wherever they come from.
And that is the fix that Western Europe, and therefore the historic West, is now in. It was a problem that, had the handful of cassandras -- see for example the writings of Jacques Ellul -- been heeded, could have been avoided. Entirely manageable once, it is manageable -- with great difficulty – today.
But it is manageable only if Muslim migration is halted, and funds from Saudi Arabia and other rich Arab states are prevented from being used to build up a fifth column within the Infidel lands through mosques, madrasas, propaganda, and armies of Western hirelings, some of them merely venal, some of them something worse, all of them traitors to the West, who deserve to be seen, and to be treated, as we would have treated those who were in the pay of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.
Wednesday, 23 April 2008
For St Georges day
Britishness and our Flag. 23.4.2008.
In this year of two-thousand and eight,
The EU flag has become a symbol of hate,
Given the same status as our own “Union Jack”,
Brought in by stealth- behind people’s back.
Year upon year, we watched with shame,
While a few British MP’s that thought the same
To ratify a Treaty quickly, was the race
For a political Union we should forever embrace.
In the UK Flag they wrapped themselves up,
And like Judas as he, from that cup did sup,
They called for “Britishness” to come to the fore,
Ere that Treaty once ratified, made it no more.
For shame now taint’s our once proud flag,
So still, no flight, for chastened, a rag,
For home-bred traitors lent their hand
Sing no British Anthem for that too was banned.
Yet privately and safely behind closed doors,
We celebrate all that we once had before,
Until the day comes, as surely it will,
We can proudly declare and we will fulfil
Our destiny once more, independent and free,
For that is all we ever wanted to be,
Proud to be British, embracing all,
Our Commonwealth friends, a welcoming call.
Our flag will flutter once more in the breeze,
Not still, nor close to the pole in shameful freeze
Only those that are true to Oath and Queen
Will understand what true freedom means.
So hoist your flag high this St George’s day,
Do not let anything get in its way,
Sing out our Anthem in voices loud,
Of all that is British once more be proud.
Posted by Anne Palmer on April 23, 2008 6:50 AM
In this year of two-thousand and eight,
The EU flag has become a symbol of hate,
Given the same status as our own “Union Jack”,
Brought in by stealth- behind people’s back.
Year upon year, we watched with shame,
While a few British MP’s that thought the same
To ratify a Treaty quickly, was the race
For a political Union we should forever embrace.
In the UK Flag they wrapped themselves up,
And like Judas as he, from that cup did sup,
They called for “Britishness” to come to the fore,
Ere that Treaty once ratified, made it no more.
For shame now taint’s our once proud flag,
So still, no flight, for chastened, a rag,
For home-bred traitors lent their hand
Sing no British Anthem for that too was banned.
Yet privately and safely behind closed doors,
We celebrate all that we once had before,
Until the day comes, as surely it will,
We can proudly declare and we will fulfil
Our destiny once more, independent and free,
For that is all we ever wanted to be,
Proud to be British, embracing all,
Our Commonwealth friends, a welcoming call.
Our flag will flutter once more in the breeze,
Not still, nor close to the pole in shameful freeze
Only those that are true to Oath and Queen
Will understand what true freedom means.
So hoist your flag high this St George’s day,
Do not let anything get in its way,
Sing out our Anthem in voices loud,
Of all that is British once more be proud.
Posted by Anne Palmer on April 23, 2008 6:50 AM
Monday, 21 April 2008
HANGING IS BACK
But not for serial killers, murderers, kiddy fiddlers, child murderers or traitors.
Its for political offenses.
http://www.archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/
Monday, April 21, 2008
Lisbon Treaty introduces EU-wide death penalty
Helga Zepp-LaRouche is no-one that Cranmer has ever heard of, but she is chair(wo)man of the German political party Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo). She spoke recently on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, and drew attention by analysis by one Professor Schachtschneider, who is also not someone with whom Cranmer is acquainted.
However, it appears that the Treaty of Lisbon reintroduces the death penalty in Europe, which Helga Zepp-LaRouche thinks is ‘very important’ (just a bit), ‘in light of the fact that Italy was trying to abandon the death penalty through the United Nations, forever. And this is not in the treaty, but in a footnote, because with the European Union reform treaty, we accept also the European Union Charter, which says that there is no death penalty, and then it has a footnote, which says, "except in the case of war, riots, upheaval"—then the death penalty is possible. Schachtschneider points to the fact that this is an outrage, because they put it in a footnote of a footnote, and you have to read it, like really like a super-expert to find out!’
Cranmer has not bothered to check this footnote to a footnote, not least because, although he has never heard of Helga Zepp-LaRouche or Professor Schachtschneider, he is inclined to trust them impeccably against the scheming and manipulating liars in Brussels.
Let us not forget that the Union is acquiring the legal authority to ‘provide itself with the means necessary to attain its objectives and carry through its policies’, which means raising its ‘own resources’ to finance them, which may be regarded as conferring on it revenue-raising powers, which will eventually be subject to QMV instead of unanimity. But it may also be the authority to crush any opposition, especially that which does not accord with its ‘objectives’.
The European Union not only possesses such symbols of statehood as its own flag, anthem, motto and annual official holiday. It now has its own government, with a legislature, executive and judiciary, its own President, its own citizens and citizenship, its own human and civil rights code, its own currency, economic policy and revenue, its own international treaty-making powers, foreign policy, foreign minister, diplomatic corps and United Nations voice, its own crime and justice code and Public Prosecutor.
And the citizens of the Union now owe allegiance to that Union, and to its aims and ‘objectives’, even though no-one in the UK has any idea what these objectives may be.
But Cranmer thinks it noteworthy that the death penalty is reintroduced for political offences, even as vague and undefined as ‘unrest’, but not for serial killers, rapists, paedophiles or child murderers.
One wonders why…
posted by Cranmer at 7:23 AM
I personally am not surprised. Could this be the 4th Reich?
2010 dear readers, thats when the Lisbon Treaty will be ratified and become law.
After that, its not going to be nice for those who wont comply.
Comply, submit or die. The moslims would gladly support this.
Its for political offenses.
http://www.archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/
Monday, April 21, 2008
Lisbon Treaty introduces EU-wide death penalty
Helga Zepp-LaRouche is no-one that Cranmer has ever heard of, but she is chair(wo)man of the German political party Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo). She spoke recently on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, and drew attention by analysis by one Professor Schachtschneider, who is also not someone with whom Cranmer is acquainted.
However, it appears that the Treaty of Lisbon reintroduces the death penalty in Europe, which Helga Zepp-LaRouche thinks is ‘very important’ (just a bit), ‘in light of the fact that Italy was trying to abandon the death penalty through the United Nations, forever. And this is not in the treaty, but in a footnote, because with the European Union reform treaty, we accept also the European Union Charter, which says that there is no death penalty, and then it has a footnote, which says, "except in the case of war, riots, upheaval"—then the death penalty is possible. Schachtschneider points to the fact that this is an outrage, because they put it in a footnote of a footnote, and you have to read it, like really like a super-expert to find out!’
Cranmer has not bothered to check this footnote to a footnote, not least because, although he has never heard of Helga Zepp-LaRouche or Professor Schachtschneider, he is inclined to trust them impeccably against the scheming and manipulating liars in Brussels.
Let us not forget that the Union is acquiring the legal authority to ‘provide itself with the means necessary to attain its objectives and carry through its policies’, which means raising its ‘own resources’ to finance them, which may be regarded as conferring on it revenue-raising powers, which will eventually be subject to QMV instead of unanimity. But it may also be the authority to crush any opposition, especially that which does not accord with its ‘objectives’.
The European Union not only possesses such symbols of statehood as its own flag, anthem, motto and annual official holiday. It now has its own government, with a legislature, executive and judiciary, its own President, its own citizens and citizenship, its own human and civil rights code, its own currency, economic policy and revenue, its own international treaty-making powers, foreign policy, foreign minister, diplomatic corps and United Nations voice, its own crime and justice code and Public Prosecutor.
And the citizens of the Union now owe allegiance to that Union, and to its aims and ‘objectives’, even though no-one in the UK has any idea what these objectives may be.
But Cranmer thinks it noteworthy that the death penalty is reintroduced for political offences, even as vague and undefined as ‘unrest’, but not for serial killers, rapists, paedophiles or child murderers.
One wonders why…
posted by Cranmer at 7:23 AM
I personally am not surprised. Could this be the 4th Reich?
2010 dear readers, thats when the Lisbon Treaty will be ratified and become law.
After that, its not going to be nice for those who wont comply.
Comply, submit or die. The moslims would gladly support this.
Sunday, 20 April 2008
FORTY YEARS AGO TODAY.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3189
Forty Years On: Sleepwalking Toward the Tiber’s Edge
From the desk of A. Millar on Sun, 2008-04-20 08:35
Anyone who reads the British newspapers on a regular basis will have noticed an alarming repetition. The same few stories, with minor adjustments, seem to appear over and over again: youth violence, mass immigration, Islamic extremism, terrorists planning attacks, compensation and human rights for criminals, an apparent over-sensitivity to religious minorities and an apparent lack of sensitivity to those of the majority religion and ethnicities. Rather than telling the reader something new, news serves only to clarify what he already suspects. Persue readers’ comments and, unsurprisingly, more and more do you find expressions of genuine frustration and anger.
But these voices, which speak for so many, are not heard in parliament, nor does the public seem to make any demands on politicians. A march against war in a foreign country can amass thousands, and protests against China’s treatment of Tibet are frequent, but to defend one’s heritage or culture against erosion by political design, or to voice opposition to such a scale of immigration that one’s way of life is changed or threatened, is seen as potentially dangerous – the first step toward full-blown fascism. History repeats itself, yes; but history does not repeat itself as we might expect. Today, we are obsessively fighting the last war. Everyone’s enemy is a “racist” and a “fascist.” These terms are invoked by the far-Left, Jack Straw, David Cameron, and even the B.N.P., to describe their opponents. Yet at the same time we see an extreme ideology spilling out from politics and becoming increasing absorbed by the judiciary, police, schools, local councils, etc., all against the common sense of the public. And we also see a rapidly expanding Islamic militancy, occasionally becoming linked to public figures such as Ken Livingstone, and, consequently, accepted by the public.
Free speech – which has been so horribly eroded in Britain – was meant to guard against extremism and the persecution of both individuals and larger groups because of the establishment of some dubious ideology. Today, it would appear, that prosecutions for hate speech are based not on what is said but who is speaking. Protests in support of al-Qaeda are deemed free speech, as is downloading terrorist material and discussing the validity and possibility of carrying out terrorist attacks. Similarly, as think tanks such as the Centre for Social Cohesion and CIVITAS have said, Britain’s governmental and judicial establishments have failed to tackle honor crime, with police, councils, and teachers afraid of being branded racist if they make any attempt.
Yet such is the extreme nature of the willingness to prosecute anyone who might be suspected of racism against a non-White British person, that a Down’s Syndrome boy with the mental age of a 5 year old was recently charged by the police with “racism and assault” after he pushed a girl in a playground scuffle. The charge hung over he and his family for 7 months, before they received an apology from the courts. Again, after the English Democrats party put up posters with the slogan “save London from Labour's tartan taxes” the police received complaints that this was racist, and are currently investigating the matter. These incidences are far from unique, but merely 2 reported in the week prior to my writing this article.
The effect is stifling. The accusation or even the mere faint suspicion of racism has silenced debate and even the voicing of discontent about mass immigration, discrimination against Whites in employment by the government or government-sponsored institutions, or the rise of Islamic extremism. When, in 2001, Lady Thatcher said she, “had not heard enough condemnation from Muslim priests,” of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C., her Conservative Party publicly rebuked her. When Margaret Hodge suggested that British people had valid concerns over housing, considering the level of immigration, her fellow Labour M.P.s accused her of “using the language of the B.N.P.” When Lady Warsi (a Conservative M.P. and a moderate Muslim) suggested that people had legitimate concerns over immigration she was accused of supporting the B.N.P., and, again, when Prime Minister Gordon Brown dared to utter the words “British jobs for British workers,” members of his Labour Party were “appalled” and accused him airing a policy of the B.N.P.
With problems so glaring to the ordinary man and so thoroughly repressed by the main political parties, Enoch Powell – M.P., philosopher, poet, man of the people, and visionary – is being rehabilitated, and not just here on The Brussels Journal. Simon Heffer in The Telegraph has said recently that, “Powell was the greatest Conservative thinker in political life in living memory. He foresaw what were then unimaginable tensions caused by forcibly altering the character of a country.” Looking at the visible characters of today’s Conservative Party one could be forgiven for thinking that Powell was the only Conservative intellectual of our time. The Conservative Party seems to have no real vision for the future, and no real appreciation for the past. But, in such an oppressive atmosphere of “political correctness,” and, indeed, political fear, no intellectual development can occur within popular party politics. As such, we are unlikely to see any solutions to growing problems originating with political parties themselves. It is true, of course, that the B.N.P. is the one party that unceasingly opposes political correctness, “Islamification,” etc., but it has yet to transform itself into an intellectual party, and remains one for which the issue of race is central.
Today we are faced with a “multiculturalism” that has eroded British culture and the constant drumbeat of racial “equality” that treats people not as human beings but mere racial blocks. As Rageh Omaar has said in an op-ed piece on Powell’s so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech for The Daily Mail, “Instead of multi-culturalism, we are getting tribalisation,” – a point I made some time ago here. When this is applied to voting and politics it is especially alarming, yet Equalities Minister Harriet Harman, has recently proposed that all-Black shortlists of parliamentary candidates be drawn up, to increase the number of Black and Asian M.P.s – a proposal rejected as “colonial” by those it was designed to promote. Likewise, the Conservative Party now has its own Muslim Forum and the current mayor, Ken Livingstone, is supported by Muslims 4 Ken, while his main rival, Boris Johnson, has also been careful to let his Muslim heritage be known. Again, we have seen the B.N.P. attacked in the last few weeks by Operation Black Vote (which aims to promote, within government, the supposed needs of Blacks and Asians), but on what grounds? Racial exclusivity?
We have reached a point, then, at which racially or culturally distinct ghettos – the unfortunate results of long-term multiculturalism – are mirrored at both lower and higher levels of government and party politics. Moreover, if some young Muslims are surfing the net, and finding inspiration in al-Qaeda and websites peddling Islamic radicalism, so too do we see a similar phenomenon at government level, with, for example, Livingstone now having gained the support of suicide bombing apologist Dr Azzam Tamimi – which he has not rejected. It is remarkable to think that not only Muslims, but Muslim extremists, are now playing an important, if not decisive, role in British politics. Yet, it is not difficult to imagine that Britain fifty years from now will have a political reality not entirely unlike that of Lebanon’s today. We must hope that it does not take the same sort of upheaval – such as Powell predicted for a multicultural Britain – to get there, but such a hope seems to be fading. Two thirds of the residents of Britain now believe immigration will lead to violence.
The last words are Powell’s:
For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
Forty Years On: Sleepwalking Toward the Tiber’s Edge
From the desk of A. Millar on Sun, 2008-04-20 08:35
Anyone who reads the British newspapers on a regular basis will have noticed an alarming repetition. The same few stories, with minor adjustments, seem to appear over and over again: youth violence, mass immigration, Islamic extremism, terrorists planning attacks, compensation and human rights for criminals, an apparent over-sensitivity to religious minorities and an apparent lack of sensitivity to those of the majority religion and ethnicities. Rather than telling the reader something new, news serves only to clarify what he already suspects. Persue readers’ comments and, unsurprisingly, more and more do you find expressions of genuine frustration and anger.
But these voices, which speak for so many, are not heard in parliament, nor does the public seem to make any demands on politicians. A march against war in a foreign country can amass thousands, and protests against China’s treatment of Tibet are frequent, but to defend one’s heritage or culture against erosion by political design, or to voice opposition to such a scale of immigration that one’s way of life is changed or threatened, is seen as potentially dangerous – the first step toward full-blown fascism. History repeats itself, yes; but history does not repeat itself as we might expect. Today, we are obsessively fighting the last war. Everyone’s enemy is a “racist” and a “fascist.” These terms are invoked by the far-Left, Jack Straw, David Cameron, and even the B.N.P., to describe their opponents. Yet at the same time we see an extreme ideology spilling out from politics and becoming increasing absorbed by the judiciary, police, schools, local councils, etc., all against the common sense of the public. And we also see a rapidly expanding Islamic militancy, occasionally becoming linked to public figures such as Ken Livingstone, and, consequently, accepted by the public.
Free speech – which has been so horribly eroded in Britain – was meant to guard against extremism and the persecution of both individuals and larger groups because of the establishment of some dubious ideology. Today, it would appear, that prosecutions for hate speech are based not on what is said but who is speaking. Protests in support of al-Qaeda are deemed free speech, as is downloading terrorist material and discussing the validity and possibility of carrying out terrorist attacks. Similarly, as think tanks such as the Centre for Social Cohesion and CIVITAS have said, Britain’s governmental and judicial establishments have failed to tackle honor crime, with police, councils, and teachers afraid of being branded racist if they make any attempt.
Yet such is the extreme nature of the willingness to prosecute anyone who might be suspected of racism against a non-White British person, that a Down’s Syndrome boy with the mental age of a 5 year old was recently charged by the police with “racism and assault” after he pushed a girl in a playground scuffle. The charge hung over he and his family for 7 months, before they received an apology from the courts. Again, after the English Democrats party put up posters with the slogan “save London from Labour's tartan taxes” the police received complaints that this was racist, and are currently investigating the matter. These incidences are far from unique, but merely 2 reported in the week prior to my writing this article.
The effect is stifling. The accusation or even the mere faint suspicion of racism has silenced debate and even the voicing of discontent about mass immigration, discrimination against Whites in employment by the government or government-sponsored institutions, or the rise of Islamic extremism. When, in 2001, Lady Thatcher said she, “had not heard enough condemnation from Muslim priests,” of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C., her Conservative Party publicly rebuked her. When Margaret Hodge suggested that British people had valid concerns over housing, considering the level of immigration, her fellow Labour M.P.s accused her of “using the language of the B.N.P.” When Lady Warsi (a Conservative M.P. and a moderate Muslim) suggested that people had legitimate concerns over immigration she was accused of supporting the B.N.P., and, again, when Prime Minister Gordon Brown dared to utter the words “British jobs for British workers,” members of his Labour Party were “appalled” and accused him airing a policy of the B.N.P.
With problems so glaring to the ordinary man and so thoroughly repressed by the main political parties, Enoch Powell – M.P., philosopher, poet, man of the people, and visionary – is being rehabilitated, and not just here on The Brussels Journal. Simon Heffer in The Telegraph has said recently that, “Powell was the greatest Conservative thinker in political life in living memory. He foresaw what were then unimaginable tensions caused by forcibly altering the character of a country.” Looking at the visible characters of today’s Conservative Party one could be forgiven for thinking that Powell was the only Conservative intellectual of our time. The Conservative Party seems to have no real vision for the future, and no real appreciation for the past. But, in such an oppressive atmosphere of “political correctness,” and, indeed, political fear, no intellectual development can occur within popular party politics. As such, we are unlikely to see any solutions to growing problems originating with political parties themselves. It is true, of course, that the B.N.P. is the one party that unceasingly opposes political correctness, “Islamification,” etc., but it has yet to transform itself into an intellectual party, and remains one for which the issue of race is central.
Today we are faced with a “multiculturalism” that has eroded British culture and the constant drumbeat of racial “equality” that treats people not as human beings but mere racial blocks. As Rageh Omaar has said in an op-ed piece on Powell’s so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech for The Daily Mail, “Instead of multi-culturalism, we are getting tribalisation,” – a point I made some time ago here. When this is applied to voting and politics it is especially alarming, yet Equalities Minister Harriet Harman, has recently proposed that all-Black shortlists of parliamentary candidates be drawn up, to increase the number of Black and Asian M.P.s – a proposal rejected as “colonial” by those it was designed to promote. Likewise, the Conservative Party now has its own Muslim Forum and the current mayor, Ken Livingstone, is supported by Muslims 4 Ken, while his main rival, Boris Johnson, has also been careful to let his Muslim heritage be known. Again, we have seen the B.N.P. attacked in the last few weeks by Operation Black Vote (which aims to promote, within government, the supposed needs of Blacks and Asians), but on what grounds? Racial exclusivity?
We have reached a point, then, at which racially or culturally distinct ghettos – the unfortunate results of long-term multiculturalism – are mirrored at both lower and higher levels of government and party politics. Moreover, if some young Muslims are surfing the net, and finding inspiration in al-Qaeda and websites peddling Islamic radicalism, so too do we see a similar phenomenon at government level, with, for example, Livingstone now having gained the support of suicide bombing apologist Dr Azzam Tamimi – which he has not rejected. It is remarkable to think that not only Muslims, but Muslim extremists, are now playing an important, if not decisive, role in British politics. Yet, it is not difficult to imagine that Britain fifty years from now will have a political reality not entirely unlike that of Lebanon’s today. We must hope that it does not take the same sort of upheaval – such as Powell predicted for a multicultural Britain – to get there, but such a hope seems to be fading. Two thirds of the residents of Britain now believe immigration will lead to violence.
The last words are Powell’s:
For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK, Yawnnnn.......ZZZZZZ
Maybe we would wake up if we saw how others see the situation.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2008/04/memo-to-europe-youre-israel.html
For every European who ever sat in snide judgment about Israel, who thought things would have been hunky dory if "that shitty country", in the words of a French ambassador, had never existed, I have bad news. You are Israel.
In the early 20th century Britain took over and began attracting large numbers of Arab laborers. A few decades later those Arabs combined with some of the existing natives had a manufactured identity as Palestinians, a flag, an anthem written for them by a Greek Communist composer, guns, bombs and Western bleeding hearts on their side. They've spent the intervening period, rioting, looting, raping and killing any way they can.
Sound familiar? It should.
Israel's Muslim problem pales by comparison to France's 5 million Muslim problem. And Britain didn't simply attract Arabs to Israel, it attracted them to the home country as well. Europe is overrun with guest laborers, con artists, smugglers, students, second wives and the whole bubbling goulash of Muslim immigrants who are reproducing in great numbers. They have held their first Intifadas, blown up buses, burned cars, built Mosques where the same flavor of hatred is preached as in Gaza or the West Bank and declared their intentions to reclaim Spain and whatever other parts of Europe the Ummah feels it has a claim on.
If Israel was supposed to be the new Europe, Europe instead is turning out to be the New Israel, saddled with defunct socialist bureaucracies and a growing Muslim terrorist threat that socialist governments do their best to whistle and pretend isn't there or try to frantically appease.
Oslo may have been the setting for Israel's Going Out of Business sale, but Norway and Sweden may well be the ones to go out of business first as even the coldest lands have filled up with the cries of Allah Akhbar, the lusty calls of newborn Muslim infants and the sobs and screams of raped Swedish women. This will make little difference in Israel or any other Western country which is on the conveyor belt to the same place, the Sharia Abattoir.
Israel's situation didn't come about because the Jews have some special quality for antagonizing perfectly peaceful people, as too many Europeans would like to believe. All it really takes to turn any European country into Israel is a few hundred thousand savages squatting on carpets, demanding their rights and grabbing the knife or the detonator if they don't get them. And the only thing that can prevent it is a good strong immigration policy and a great deal of boats to ship anyone back home who isn't happy with it.
Contrary to the endless bewailings of phony refugees in decades old refugee camps, Israel didn't expel Arabs from its territory. Instead Israel sent soldiers to reassure them that they wouldn't be harmed and to invite them back in. Madness? Yes, but a quite familiar madness to anyone who watches Prime Ministers declare that Islam is a religion of peace and welcome in more refugees and immigrants, even as the Muslims make it clear that if they had their way, the Prime Minister's head would be decorating a sharp stick outside a Mosque somewhere.
Welcoming the apocalypse may be madness but it's the madness of shortsighted politicians and like their European counterparts, the Israeli politicians were motivated only partly by soft-minded humanitarianism, in the mix too was the delectable thought of a reliable Labor voting base that could never possibly cast a vote for a conservative candidate and cheap labor too. That the voting base would wind up opening fire on their grandchildren was not a thought they took seriously, because it was an inconvenient thought.
The way things are has moved from inconvenient thought to inconvenient reality, but that has not diminished the desire of politicians, both European and Israeli, to wish it away in favor of a New Middle East, a New Britain, a New Ireland, a European Union -- some magical utopian socialist reality where college degrees are all the wealth anyone needs, where governments care for everyone and any immigrant can be assimilated no matter how many wives they have and what prophet they believe in.
The more bombs go off, the more politicians cling determinedly to their fantasy and look for some pesky reactionaries to blame for the whole thing. Israel blames the settlers. Europe blames Israel. European left wing parties blame the Right. The Right blames America. America blames Republicans. Republicans blame a tiny minority of extremists, effectively negating their own argument.
And as the fingers point, the chorus bellows, pointless propositions are put forward and struck down in favor of lunatic appeasements, the West is turning into Israel. And as far as both the Muslims and the Left are concerned, like Israel, the world would have been a better place had Western civilization never existed and they are doing their best to put theory into practice.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2008/04/memo-to-europe-youre-israel.html
For every European who ever sat in snide judgment about Israel, who thought things would have been hunky dory if "that shitty country", in the words of a French ambassador, had never existed, I have bad news. You are Israel.
In the early 20th century Britain took over and began attracting large numbers of Arab laborers. A few decades later those Arabs combined with some of the existing natives had a manufactured identity as Palestinians, a flag, an anthem written for them by a Greek Communist composer, guns, bombs and Western bleeding hearts on their side. They've spent the intervening period, rioting, looting, raping and killing any way they can.
Sound familiar? It should.
Israel's Muslim problem pales by comparison to France's 5 million Muslim problem. And Britain didn't simply attract Arabs to Israel, it attracted them to the home country as well. Europe is overrun with guest laborers, con artists, smugglers, students, second wives and the whole bubbling goulash of Muslim immigrants who are reproducing in great numbers. They have held their first Intifadas, blown up buses, burned cars, built Mosques where the same flavor of hatred is preached as in Gaza or the West Bank and declared their intentions to reclaim Spain and whatever other parts of Europe the Ummah feels it has a claim on.
If Israel was supposed to be the new Europe, Europe instead is turning out to be the New Israel, saddled with defunct socialist bureaucracies and a growing Muslim terrorist threat that socialist governments do their best to whistle and pretend isn't there or try to frantically appease.
Oslo may have been the setting for Israel's Going Out of Business sale, but Norway and Sweden may well be the ones to go out of business first as even the coldest lands have filled up with the cries of Allah Akhbar, the lusty calls of newborn Muslim infants and the sobs and screams of raped Swedish women. This will make little difference in Israel or any other Western country which is on the conveyor belt to the same place, the Sharia Abattoir.
Israel's situation didn't come about because the Jews have some special quality for antagonizing perfectly peaceful people, as too many Europeans would like to believe. All it really takes to turn any European country into Israel is a few hundred thousand savages squatting on carpets, demanding their rights and grabbing the knife or the detonator if they don't get them. And the only thing that can prevent it is a good strong immigration policy and a great deal of boats to ship anyone back home who isn't happy with it.
Contrary to the endless bewailings of phony refugees in decades old refugee camps, Israel didn't expel Arabs from its territory. Instead Israel sent soldiers to reassure them that they wouldn't be harmed and to invite them back in. Madness? Yes, but a quite familiar madness to anyone who watches Prime Ministers declare that Islam is a religion of peace and welcome in more refugees and immigrants, even as the Muslims make it clear that if they had their way, the Prime Minister's head would be decorating a sharp stick outside a Mosque somewhere.
Welcoming the apocalypse may be madness but it's the madness of shortsighted politicians and like their European counterparts, the Israeli politicians were motivated only partly by soft-minded humanitarianism, in the mix too was the delectable thought of a reliable Labor voting base that could never possibly cast a vote for a conservative candidate and cheap labor too. That the voting base would wind up opening fire on their grandchildren was not a thought they took seriously, because it was an inconvenient thought.
The way things are has moved from inconvenient thought to inconvenient reality, but that has not diminished the desire of politicians, both European and Israeli, to wish it away in favor of a New Middle East, a New Britain, a New Ireland, a European Union -- some magical utopian socialist reality where college degrees are all the wealth anyone needs, where governments care for everyone and any immigrant can be assimilated no matter how many wives they have and what prophet they believe in.
The more bombs go off, the more politicians cling determinedly to their fantasy and look for some pesky reactionaries to blame for the whole thing. Israel blames the settlers. Europe blames Israel. European left wing parties blame the Right. The Right blames America. America blames Republicans. Republicans blame a tiny minority of extremists, effectively negating their own argument.
And as the fingers point, the chorus bellows, pointless propositions are put forward and struck down in favor of lunatic appeasements, the West is turning into Israel. And as far as both the Muslims and the Left are concerned, like Israel, the world would have been a better place had Western civilization never existed and they are doing their best to put theory into practice.
THE FORGOTTEN HEROS
The forgotten heros, This lot never got recognition.
Britains secret army
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Auxiliary Units or British Resistance Organisation in World War 2 - 1940-1944.
"Auxiliary Units" was the innocuous codename given to a force of civilian volunteers intended to carry out sabotage, guerrilla warfare and spying from behind the enemy lines in the event of a successful German invasion of the British Isles during World War 2.
They are also connected with the only MI (once up to 20 MI branches now only MI5 and MI6 are commonly remembered) branch not to be designated by a number refered to as MI (R). More and more info is coming to light about these unknown warriors who, often, met with dirision being fit men, capable of being called up but forced to stay at home carring out mundane tasks - even the bovvy boys (conscripted miners) had more kudos!!!
Following the fall of France in May 1940, Winston Churchill ordered Colonel Colin Gubbins (later to "set Europe ablaze" in SOE) to create a force of civilian volunteers, recruited primarily from the ablest Home Guard personnel, to operate from secret underground bases located behind the enemy lines of occupation.
Initially, Gubbins was aided in this by a few "Intelligence Officers" responsible for setting up fighting patrols of six to eight men, led by a Sergeant and co-ordinated by a local commander, usually a Lieutenant or Captain, in their designated regions.
The organisation consisted of 3 main groups Fighting Patrols, Special Duties and Signals.
Ideal recruits were countrymen, farmers, foresters and gamekeepers although eventually all occupations, factory and office workers and students were represented. The main requirements were fitness, knowledge of their own areas and an ability to be trained in the necessary skills for guerrilla warfare.
Volunteers were uniformed for cover as "Home Guard", latterly being absorbed into one of three "GHQ Special Reserve Battalions" with the distinctive numbers of 201 (Scotland and the North) 202 (The Midlands) and 203 (Southern Counties)
Final numbers were in excess of 3000, located mainly in coastal areas but covering the whole of the British Isles.
They created underground O.Bs (Operational Bases or bunkers) from which to carry out attacks and acts of sabotage against enemy targets (supply dumps, railway lines, convoys and enemy occupied airfields) in the event of over run. Their stores were also kept in such bunkers.
In 1940, Britain was at her most vulnerable, and a successful German invasion at that time was considered highly likely.
The Regular Forces, depleted in men and equipment after Dunkirk, may not have withstood an attack on the South Coast and would have withdrawn to the so-called "G.H.Q.Line" just south of London. The Auxiliary Units were intended to harry and disrupt the enemy supply and lines of communication to relieve some of the pressure on the opposing forces.
Operational stores and rations were sufficient for 14 days only - the anticipated useful life of the fighting patrols. Those auxiliers who survived this period would have reverted to their civilian occupations in the hope and anticipation of a successful British counter attack.
The Operational Bases were built, either by the Royal Engineers or by civilian contractors. They, and any curious locals were told that these were to be emergency food stores. Situated usually in dense woodland, these O'Bs were constructed of pre-formed corrugated iron segments, sunk into the ground with concrete pipe access and escape tunnels.
Ingenious methods were used to camouflage and operate the entrance trap doors. Accommodation included wooden bunks for the patrol members, heating, ventilation and ration and water stores. Explosives and ammunition were stored separately.
Most O.B's were destroyed at the end of the war, although the remains of many still exist throughout the country and have been identified by the "Defence of Britain" project.
Formed in May 1940 they were maintained until Stand Down in November 1944, despite the receding risk of invasion. Before D Day, additional Auxunits were deployed on the Isle of Wight in the event of a German counter invasion against the Overlord ports.
At the time of Stand Down, volunteers were told that "no public recognition would be possible due to the secret nature of their duties" and that, since no written records of service had been kept, they were not eligible for the Defence Medal. Subsequent events have shown this latter statement to be false and belated awards have been made to some auxiliers.
Concurrently, but entirely separate from the Fighting Patrols were the Special Duties personnel, men and women recruited secretly and intended to provide an intelligence gathering service, spying on and observing enemy formations and troop movements. They were provided with insignia recognition information and individual "Dead Letter" drops from which their intelligence reports would be collected.
A network of underground radio stations was established which, following a successful invasion would have been manned by men and women of the Royal Signals, who would transmit the intelligence gathered by the Special Duties to the Headquarters of the opposing forces.
Their operational bases were similar in construction to those of the Auxunits, with the addition of electricity generators for their radio equipment.
Highworths' Fertilizers catalogues
do their stuff unseen - until you see results!
This was printed on a booklet resembling an agricultural catalogue, issued to all Auxunit volunteers. Its innocent title covered a handbook on explosives, timing devices and suitable sabotage targets. Selected recruits would be sent to Highworth, Wilts, where, after reporting to the then Postmistress, they would be collected and taken to nearby Coleshill House, their secret H.Q. for a weekends training in fieldcraft, sabotage and unarmed combat, before returning to their patrols to pass on this training.
A museum situated in Parham, Suffolk, where a group of enthusiasts have set up a museum dedicated to the 390th. Bomber Group, U.S. Air Force that operated there during the war. The land is owned by the Kindred family, who were members of an Auxunit patrol in the area, and an adjoining museum has now been created to honour the British Resistance Organisation. This contains many artefacts relating to the Auxiliary Units and has an extensive amount of archive material. A replica Operational Bases is under construction. The museum collection is superior to that in the Special Forces section of the Imperial War Museum.
Most of the above taken from http://www.warlinks.com/pages/auxiliary.html
Britains secret army
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Auxiliary Units or British Resistance Organisation in World War 2 - 1940-1944.
"Auxiliary Units" was the innocuous codename given to a force of civilian volunteers intended to carry out sabotage, guerrilla warfare and spying from behind the enemy lines in the event of a successful German invasion of the British Isles during World War 2.
They are also connected with the only MI (once up to 20 MI branches now only MI5 and MI6 are commonly remembered) branch not to be designated by a number refered to as MI (R). More and more info is coming to light about these unknown warriors who, often, met with dirision being fit men, capable of being called up but forced to stay at home carring out mundane tasks - even the bovvy boys (conscripted miners) had more kudos!!!
Following the fall of France in May 1940, Winston Churchill ordered Colonel Colin Gubbins (later to "set Europe ablaze" in SOE) to create a force of civilian volunteers, recruited primarily from the ablest Home Guard personnel, to operate from secret underground bases located behind the enemy lines of occupation.
Initially, Gubbins was aided in this by a few "Intelligence Officers" responsible for setting up fighting patrols of six to eight men, led by a Sergeant and co-ordinated by a local commander, usually a Lieutenant or Captain, in their designated regions.
The organisation consisted of 3 main groups Fighting Patrols, Special Duties and Signals.
Ideal recruits were countrymen, farmers, foresters and gamekeepers although eventually all occupations, factory and office workers and students were represented. The main requirements were fitness, knowledge of their own areas and an ability to be trained in the necessary skills for guerrilla warfare.
Volunteers were uniformed for cover as "Home Guard", latterly being absorbed into one of three "GHQ Special Reserve Battalions" with the distinctive numbers of 201 (Scotland and the North) 202 (The Midlands) and 203 (Southern Counties)
Final numbers were in excess of 3000, located mainly in coastal areas but covering the whole of the British Isles.
They created underground O.Bs (Operational Bases or bunkers) from which to carry out attacks and acts of sabotage against enemy targets (supply dumps, railway lines, convoys and enemy occupied airfields) in the event of over run. Their stores were also kept in such bunkers.
In 1940, Britain was at her most vulnerable, and a successful German invasion at that time was considered highly likely.
The Regular Forces, depleted in men and equipment after Dunkirk, may not have withstood an attack on the South Coast and would have withdrawn to the so-called "G.H.Q.Line" just south of London. The Auxiliary Units were intended to harry and disrupt the enemy supply and lines of communication to relieve some of the pressure on the opposing forces.
Operational stores and rations were sufficient for 14 days only - the anticipated useful life of the fighting patrols. Those auxiliers who survived this period would have reverted to their civilian occupations in the hope and anticipation of a successful British counter attack.
The Operational Bases were built, either by the Royal Engineers or by civilian contractors. They, and any curious locals were told that these were to be emergency food stores. Situated usually in dense woodland, these O'Bs were constructed of pre-formed corrugated iron segments, sunk into the ground with concrete pipe access and escape tunnels.
Ingenious methods were used to camouflage and operate the entrance trap doors. Accommodation included wooden bunks for the patrol members, heating, ventilation and ration and water stores. Explosives and ammunition were stored separately.
Most O.B's were destroyed at the end of the war, although the remains of many still exist throughout the country and have been identified by the "Defence of Britain" project.
Formed in May 1940 they were maintained until Stand Down in November 1944, despite the receding risk of invasion. Before D Day, additional Auxunits were deployed on the Isle of Wight in the event of a German counter invasion against the Overlord ports.
At the time of Stand Down, volunteers were told that "no public recognition would be possible due to the secret nature of their duties" and that, since no written records of service had been kept, they were not eligible for the Defence Medal. Subsequent events have shown this latter statement to be false and belated awards have been made to some auxiliers.
Concurrently, but entirely separate from the Fighting Patrols were the Special Duties personnel, men and women recruited secretly and intended to provide an intelligence gathering service, spying on and observing enemy formations and troop movements. They were provided with insignia recognition information and individual "Dead Letter" drops from which their intelligence reports would be collected.
A network of underground radio stations was established which, following a successful invasion would have been manned by men and women of the Royal Signals, who would transmit the intelligence gathered by the Special Duties to the Headquarters of the opposing forces.
Their operational bases were similar in construction to those of the Auxunits, with the addition of electricity generators for their radio equipment.
Highworths' Fertilizers catalogues
do their stuff unseen - until you see results!
This was printed on a booklet resembling an agricultural catalogue, issued to all Auxunit volunteers. Its innocent title covered a handbook on explosives, timing devices and suitable sabotage targets. Selected recruits would be sent to Highworth, Wilts, where, after reporting to the then Postmistress, they would be collected and taken to nearby Coleshill House, their secret H.Q. for a weekends training in fieldcraft, sabotage and unarmed combat, before returning to their patrols to pass on this training.
A museum situated in Parham, Suffolk, where a group of enthusiasts have set up a museum dedicated to the 390th. Bomber Group, U.S. Air Force that operated there during the war. The land is owned by the Kindred family, who were members of an Auxunit patrol in the area, and an adjoining museum has now been created to honour the British Resistance Organisation. This contains many artefacts relating to the Auxiliary Units and has an extensive amount of archive material. A replica Operational Bases is under construction. The museum collection is superior to that in the Special Forces section of the Imperial War Museum.
Most of the above taken from http://www.warlinks.com/pages/auxiliary.html
WHERE AM I ?
I nicked this piece from Peter Hitchens,
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
It is still just possible to imagine that this is a normal country, if you don't pay too much attention.
But the story of the couple who were spied on in case they were cheating to get their child into a popular school shows just how strange and alien Britain has become.
Usually when I say I feel I am living in a foreign land, my enemies accuse me of making some veiled remark about immigration. But that's not what I mean at all.
Immigration is a problem, sure enough, but if I want to talk about it, I'll make it clear that's what I'm doing. I'm not ashamed of being against mass immigration on its current absurd scale.
I feel no need to disguise my views.
What bothers me just as much is the sense of being transported, when I wasn't looking, into a very bad dream from which there is no waking up.
When exactly did it happen? When did my town hall change from being a friendly, efficient place into a headquarters of fussy political correctness where I feel like an unwanted interloper?
When did the BBC news become a shameless propaganda show, instead of a discreet one?
When did my GP surgery start asking me for my ethnic origin? Worse, when did they start treating parents as guilty suspects if they bring a child into hospital after a fall?
When did it become impossible ever to speak to anyone who will take responsibility for anything?
When did I start getting the feeling, as one of these episodes begins, that there is absolutely no point in complaining or resisting, because if I don't accept this, sooner or later, 'security' is going to be called and I will be worse off than I was before.
It was not always like this. I know it wasn't. I can remember when it wasn't. What I cannot remember is, at any stage, asking for the changes that have happened, or being asked if I wanted them.
They just happened, and now they're here.
And, while there will be some outrage in the newspapers about the spying episode – since newspapers are one of the last places where common sense survives – nothing will change.
Other couples will be spied on in the same way, under the same law, which will not be changed.
So let us look at this case and see why it happened. First of all, the spying. Authority is immensely powerful in this country now.
It has hidden itself in a tangle of quangos and interlocking authorities, effectively nationalised and often Europeanised, too, run by people whose names we can never find out.
There's no scrutiny. The main political parties are dead things, job creation schemes for people who couldn't make it anywhere else, where independence is punished.
The law is beyond the reach of most of us, unless we want to use ambulance-chasing lawyers to make grotesque claims for damages.
Then there's the question of the school. Everyone knows that the official propaganda about education is a lie. We do not have a comprehensive school system, as we pretend, but a viciously unequal selective system which fails hundreds of thousands of children from the beginning.
Selection is done by money and influence. And people try to cheat, by singing hymns and saying prayers they don't believe, by renting flats in catchment areas or lying about their circumstances.
Replacing this with a just system based on merit is ruled to be 'politically impossible' and 'cruel' – so the unfairness has to be maintained, and policed by snooping.
This has happened for years. I know of head teachers who have done it personally.
If only they'd realised that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allowed them to use taxpayers' money to stake out people's homes and follow them about.
So there it is. Lies, unaccountable authority and the seeds of a secret police force – checking today on school catchment areas, and tomorrow on what? One thing's for sure. You'll find out too late.
Charlton knew it: The bad guys will always have guns
Charlton Heston was a good and decent man, as well as a fine actor and a brave one, who did his own stunts.
Some people can't work out how the same person courageously went on civil rights demonstrations long before it was fashionable, and equally courageously opposed the authoritarian, futile silliness of 'gun control' when that cause wasn't fashionable either.
The two things are completely linked. Both are causes of liberty and justice, and both got him into trouble with received opinion.
Gun control, much imposed by dictatorships, restricts gun ownership to the State, to criminals and (in this country) certain officially approved terrorists.
It bans law-abiding people from defending themselves, even where the State is not doing its job.
As Mafia turncoat Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano once said: "Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters.
"I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun.'
Boys in blue, but not ours
Funny, in a way, to see China taking over from the USA as the world's most-protested-against country.
Peking will be a lot less relaxed than Washington about having its flag burned all over the place, but it is a sign of being a real superpower.
So expect more men in blue tracksuits who, by the way, were not the first example of an aggressive approach to protecting China's fragile image abroad.
In 1999, British police took placards from demonstrators during a State visit by Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
They later admitted they were wrong, to avoid court action. That's why they couldn't use quite such heavy-handed tactics to protect the Olympic flame, and presumably that was why the Chinese supplied the mysterious tracksuited men.
_______________________________________________
Amazingly fast, the world we knew is slipping away from us. Britain's seat on the UN Security Council – and so its veto – is now under direct threat.
I wonder how long it will be before serious moves are made to indict Anthony Blair for war crimes – it is only leaders of weak nations who need to face this sort of thing.
_______________________________________________
TV executives tell me that no mainstream channel can now show old episodes of The Sweeney because they are considered too violent. Interesting how tastes change.
Last week the BBC's supposedly gentle, quirky comedy Love Soup showed a suicide in which a woman's body thudded into the pavement and oozed blood and, shortly afterwards, a scene in which a dog has sex with a woman.
When did the taboos against such things dissolve, exactly?
How come this seriously strange programme has one of the most enviable slots on licence-funded terrestrial TV?
Still, at least we know that the central character, played by Tamsin Greig, is an OK person because she is shown reading The Guardian on her day off from her job as boss of a cosmetics counter.
_______________________________________________
A jury of adults, after listening to great mounds of evidence that Princess Diana died in a car accident, concludes that it was 'unlawful killing'.
With this level of stupidity stalking the country, how much longer can democracy survive?
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
It is still just possible to imagine that this is a normal country, if you don't pay too much attention.
But the story of the couple who were spied on in case they were cheating to get their child into a popular school shows just how strange and alien Britain has become.
Usually when I say I feel I am living in a foreign land, my enemies accuse me of making some veiled remark about immigration. But that's not what I mean at all.
Immigration is a problem, sure enough, but if I want to talk about it, I'll make it clear that's what I'm doing. I'm not ashamed of being against mass immigration on its current absurd scale.
I feel no need to disguise my views.
What bothers me just as much is the sense of being transported, when I wasn't looking, into a very bad dream from which there is no waking up.
When exactly did it happen? When did my town hall change from being a friendly, efficient place into a headquarters of fussy political correctness where I feel like an unwanted interloper?
When did the BBC news become a shameless propaganda show, instead of a discreet one?
When did my GP surgery start asking me for my ethnic origin? Worse, when did they start treating parents as guilty suspects if they bring a child into hospital after a fall?
When did it become impossible ever to speak to anyone who will take responsibility for anything?
When did I start getting the feeling, as one of these episodes begins, that there is absolutely no point in complaining or resisting, because if I don't accept this, sooner or later, 'security' is going to be called and I will be worse off than I was before.
It was not always like this. I know it wasn't. I can remember when it wasn't. What I cannot remember is, at any stage, asking for the changes that have happened, or being asked if I wanted them.
They just happened, and now they're here.
And, while there will be some outrage in the newspapers about the spying episode – since newspapers are one of the last places where common sense survives – nothing will change.
Other couples will be spied on in the same way, under the same law, which will not be changed.
So let us look at this case and see why it happened. First of all, the spying. Authority is immensely powerful in this country now.
It has hidden itself in a tangle of quangos and interlocking authorities, effectively nationalised and often Europeanised, too, run by people whose names we can never find out.
There's no scrutiny. The main political parties are dead things, job creation schemes for people who couldn't make it anywhere else, where independence is punished.
The law is beyond the reach of most of us, unless we want to use ambulance-chasing lawyers to make grotesque claims for damages.
Then there's the question of the school. Everyone knows that the official propaganda about education is a lie. We do not have a comprehensive school system, as we pretend, but a viciously unequal selective system which fails hundreds of thousands of children from the beginning.
Selection is done by money and influence. And people try to cheat, by singing hymns and saying prayers they don't believe, by renting flats in catchment areas or lying about their circumstances.
Replacing this with a just system based on merit is ruled to be 'politically impossible' and 'cruel' – so the unfairness has to be maintained, and policed by snooping.
This has happened for years. I know of head teachers who have done it personally.
If only they'd realised that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allowed them to use taxpayers' money to stake out people's homes and follow them about.
So there it is. Lies, unaccountable authority and the seeds of a secret police force – checking today on school catchment areas, and tomorrow on what? One thing's for sure. You'll find out too late.
Charlton knew it: The bad guys will always have guns
Charlton Heston was a good and decent man, as well as a fine actor and a brave one, who did his own stunts.
Some people can't work out how the same person courageously went on civil rights demonstrations long before it was fashionable, and equally courageously opposed the authoritarian, futile silliness of 'gun control' when that cause wasn't fashionable either.
The two things are completely linked. Both are causes of liberty and justice, and both got him into trouble with received opinion.
Gun control, much imposed by dictatorships, restricts gun ownership to the State, to criminals and (in this country) certain officially approved terrorists.
It bans law-abiding people from defending themselves, even where the State is not doing its job.
As Mafia turncoat Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano once said: "Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters.
"I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun.'
Boys in blue, but not ours
Funny, in a way, to see China taking over from the USA as the world's most-protested-against country.
Peking will be a lot less relaxed than Washington about having its flag burned all over the place, but it is a sign of being a real superpower.
So expect more men in blue tracksuits who, by the way, were not the first example of an aggressive approach to protecting China's fragile image abroad.
In 1999, British police took placards from demonstrators during a State visit by Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
They later admitted they were wrong, to avoid court action. That's why they couldn't use quite such heavy-handed tactics to protect the Olympic flame, and presumably that was why the Chinese supplied the mysterious tracksuited men.
_______________________________________________
Amazingly fast, the world we knew is slipping away from us. Britain's seat on the UN Security Council – and so its veto – is now under direct threat.
I wonder how long it will be before serious moves are made to indict Anthony Blair for war crimes – it is only leaders of weak nations who need to face this sort of thing.
_______________________________________________
TV executives tell me that no mainstream channel can now show old episodes of The Sweeney because they are considered too violent. Interesting how tastes change.
Last week the BBC's supposedly gentle, quirky comedy Love Soup showed a suicide in which a woman's body thudded into the pavement and oozed blood and, shortly afterwards, a scene in which a dog has sex with a woman.
When did the taboos against such things dissolve, exactly?
How come this seriously strange programme has one of the most enviable slots on licence-funded terrestrial TV?
Still, at least we know that the central character, played by Tamsin Greig, is an OK person because she is shown reading The Guardian on her day off from her job as boss of a cosmetics counter.
_______________________________________________
A jury of adults, after listening to great mounds of evidence that Princess Diana died in a car accident, concludes that it was 'unlawful killing'.
With this level of stupidity stalking the country, how much longer can democracy survive?
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
WE ARE MUGS.
If a culture doesn't want to defend itself, no one else will. But certainly, no one has to admire it.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=292203948245247
Why U.S. View Of Britain Is Tanking
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, April 04, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Public Opinion: Most global surveys on image spotlight negative views of the U.S. But a new poll of U.S. perceptions of Britain shows a plunge. Since it's the U.K.'s turn under this microscope, we'll venture some reasons.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read More: Europe & Central Asia
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First, it's no pleasure to see U.S. perceptions fall so precipitously for our oldest and closest ally — the one with whom we went through two World Wars and the Cold War, and in each simultaneously elected great leaders who rose to the occasion.
But from a BBC World Service poll of 1,000 Americans, it's clear U.S. views of Britain have fallen sharply. The BBC said "positive views" of Britain stand now at 45%, down from 67% a year ago. Those holding negative views are at 42%, up from 18%.
What happened? The poll gives no reason for the big shift, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to gauge at least some possibilities:
First, it's clear Britain is no longer the ally it once was. In the great war on terror, its leaders are going wobbly, despite the valor of British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain's weakening commitment signals an unreliable partner, which whatever the rationale, isn't admirable.
Recall that, amid public sentiment against the war, the U.K. pulled its troops out of Basra in 2007, saying they'd finished their job, but leaving a region in chaos. U.S. troops have had to clean up the mess, raising their risk and burden.
And under direct fire, some British forces looked downright soggy. When an Iranian National Guard boat brazenly took British sailors hostage in 2007, the U.K. military leadership sought to free them at any cost, including national honor.
The released seamen disgraced themselves further by whining about iPods, praising their captors when they were let go and then accepting Iranian swag bags on the way home. The British public completed the sorry picture by making a tabloid spectacle of it.
Although some of these bad moves were eventually halted, the fact that they happened at all signaled a military gone soft.
That brings up a second repellent trend — a culture gone so soft it won't defend itself. Several events happened to show it.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, who leads the Church of England, said Britons will eventually accept some aspects of Muslim Shariah law — the same rules that cut off hands for stealing, heads for blasphemy, and force women behind the veil.
As practiced, it's the very system responsible for the stagnation and poverty of Arabic and Muslim cultures over a thousand years — which happens to be why many Muslims flee to Britain in the first place. If the Archbishop won't stand up for British values, who will?
Meanwhile, an unassimilated Muslim immigrant population attends radical madrassas and adopts radical views seen on satellite TV and seems to want Britain to assimilate — not vice versa. That's why some 80% of British Muslims in one poll said they believe suicide bombing to be an acceptable form of Jihad against the West.
The U.S. is constantly bombarded with news stories of Piglet mugs being banned to avoid offending Muslims, U.K. flags being taken down in prisons because their crosses offend Muslims, and mosque Minarets rising among the historically dreaming spires of Oxford.
All these are strikes against some of the strongest and most beloved symbols of Britain. If a culture doesn't want to defend itself, no one else will. But certainly, no one has to admire it.
Then there's the lack of seriousness about terrorism. Against the Orwellian quality of British law enforcement, such as ubiquitous street cameras, there's been remarkable inefficiency in fighting terrorism — and Britain has been hit by three terror strikes as a result.
Despite its role as ally, British officialdom is loaded with anti-Americanism, which frequently spills over to the public. Everyone from Prince Andrew to local pop stars feels it's OK to make anti-American statements. The fact that Mark Malloch Brown, who has expressed open contempt for Americans, can reach a high advisory post in the government, or that crazy leftists like Ken Livingstone or George Galloway can even be elected, dampens our affection, too.
It is, of course, just an opinion poll. And fortunately opinions can change. The one bright spot in all this is that it does show that negative sentiment runs both ways, and that America still holds Britain dearly enough to become angry at it when they fail.
Best of all, shifting public sentiment inside Britain is a good reason to believe Britain can still turn itself around. Let's hope so. ARTICLE ENDS
We here in England have gone through a social revolution without even seeing it. A mass hypnosis during which so many rules and regulations have gone through without objection. We were busy enjoying "prosperity" without responsibility. We were on a binge of drink, credit,drugs nothing was going to spoil it.
We are now realising just how much it has cost us. Not just finalcially there is also family, community, moral, intelectual, educational breakdowns. We are broke, skint and in big debt, a debt as big as a major war would have cost.
This is a different war to any we have ever experienced before. Nothing to do with large armed forces and major conflicts. It is being fought every single minute without most of knowning its happening. How do you fight a beast like that?
I wonder what it will be called in the future
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=292203948245247
Why U.S. View Of Britain Is Tanking
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, April 04, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Public Opinion: Most global surveys on image spotlight negative views of the U.S. But a new poll of U.S. perceptions of Britain shows a plunge. Since it's the U.K.'s turn under this microscope, we'll venture some reasons.
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Read More: Europe & Central Asia
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First, it's no pleasure to see U.S. perceptions fall so precipitously for our oldest and closest ally — the one with whom we went through two World Wars and the Cold War, and in each simultaneously elected great leaders who rose to the occasion.
But from a BBC World Service poll of 1,000 Americans, it's clear U.S. views of Britain have fallen sharply. The BBC said "positive views" of Britain stand now at 45%, down from 67% a year ago. Those holding negative views are at 42%, up from 18%.
What happened? The poll gives no reason for the big shift, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to gauge at least some possibilities:
First, it's clear Britain is no longer the ally it once was. In the great war on terror, its leaders are going wobbly, despite the valor of British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain's weakening commitment signals an unreliable partner, which whatever the rationale, isn't admirable.
Recall that, amid public sentiment against the war, the U.K. pulled its troops out of Basra in 2007, saying they'd finished their job, but leaving a region in chaos. U.S. troops have had to clean up the mess, raising their risk and burden.
And under direct fire, some British forces looked downright soggy. When an Iranian National Guard boat brazenly took British sailors hostage in 2007, the U.K. military leadership sought to free them at any cost, including national honor.
The released seamen disgraced themselves further by whining about iPods, praising their captors when they were let go and then accepting Iranian swag bags on the way home. The British public completed the sorry picture by making a tabloid spectacle of it.
Although some of these bad moves were eventually halted, the fact that they happened at all signaled a military gone soft.
That brings up a second repellent trend — a culture gone so soft it won't defend itself. Several events happened to show it.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, who leads the Church of England, said Britons will eventually accept some aspects of Muslim Shariah law — the same rules that cut off hands for stealing, heads for blasphemy, and force women behind the veil.
As practiced, it's the very system responsible for the stagnation and poverty of Arabic and Muslim cultures over a thousand years — which happens to be why many Muslims flee to Britain in the first place. If the Archbishop won't stand up for British values, who will?
Meanwhile, an unassimilated Muslim immigrant population attends radical madrassas and adopts radical views seen on satellite TV and seems to want Britain to assimilate — not vice versa. That's why some 80% of British Muslims in one poll said they believe suicide bombing to be an acceptable form of Jihad against the West.
The U.S. is constantly bombarded with news stories of Piglet mugs being banned to avoid offending Muslims, U.K. flags being taken down in prisons because their crosses offend Muslims, and mosque Minarets rising among the historically dreaming spires of Oxford.
All these are strikes against some of the strongest and most beloved symbols of Britain. If a culture doesn't want to defend itself, no one else will. But certainly, no one has to admire it.
Then there's the lack of seriousness about terrorism. Against the Orwellian quality of British law enforcement, such as ubiquitous street cameras, there's been remarkable inefficiency in fighting terrorism — and Britain has been hit by three terror strikes as a result.
Despite its role as ally, British officialdom is loaded with anti-Americanism, which frequently spills over to the public. Everyone from Prince Andrew to local pop stars feels it's OK to make anti-American statements. The fact that Mark Malloch Brown, who has expressed open contempt for Americans, can reach a high advisory post in the government, or that crazy leftists like Ken Livingstone or George Galloway can even be elected, dampens our affection, too.
It is, of course, just an opinion poll. And fortunately opinions can change. The one bright spot in all this is that it does show that negative sentiment runs both ways, and that America still holds Britain dearly enough to become angry at it when they fail.
Best of all, shifting public sentiment inside Britain is a good reason to believe Britain can still turn itself around. Let's hope so. ARTICLE ENDS
We here in England have gone through a social revolution without even seeing it. A mass hypnosis during which so many rules and regulations have gone through without objection. We were busy enjoying "prosperity" without responsibility. We were on a binge of drink, credit,drugs nothing was going to spoil it.
We are now realising just how much it has cost us. Not just finalcially there is also family, community, moral, intelectual, educational breakdowns. We are broke, skint and in big debt, a debt as big as a major war would have cost.
This is a different war to any we have ever experienced before. Nothing to do with large armed forces and major conflicts. It is being fought every single minute without most of knowning its happening. How do you fight a beast like that?
I wonder what it will be called in the future
THE VIRUS OF TOLERANCE
The Virus of Tolerance
Tolerance is the credo of the age, the great rallying call of modern liberalism. Tolerate and be tolerated, they say. Tolerate to all alike.
But what are the limits of tolerance? To tolerate is to accept things that are strange or unpleasant to you. You tolerate things that are different from you in nature and expectation. Without a reasonable amount of tolerance, no society would be able to function for long. But at the same time the flip side of tolerance is that to tolerate a behavior is to perpetuate it.
If your neighbor plays loud music at 1 o'clock in the morning and you tolerate it for a while, you've given permission to him to continue doing so and getting him to stop will now prove much more difficult than if you had put your foot down from the beginning.
And that is the crux of the matter, because there are behaviors that we accept, behaviors that we tolerate and behaviors that are unacceptable. The liberal credo of tolerance though has eliminated two of the categories and warped language and attitudes to equate tolerance with acceptance and to all but eliminate the idea of unacceptable behaviors entirely, as long as they are grounded in a different culture.
Tolerance for liberals means acceptance. While the larger society may not accept, when it begins to tolerate, acceptance is the next and final step of the process. When liberals say tolerate, what they really mean is not 'tolerate' in its original sense of not interfering, but to mean acceptance and accommodation.
That is why we must be careful of what we tolerate, because intolerance is the gatekeeper, the immune system that acts as a barrier. There are things for which that barrier should be lowered and things for which it should remain in place. A society that universally tolerates everything is a society without values or defense mechanisms.
When the defense mechanisms no longer exist, when the gate is permanently raised and the immune system disabled, the society is open and vulnerable to conquest, exploitation and colonization. A society eager to tolerate its intolerant enemies is like an AIDS patient with no working immune system welcoming in cold sufferers or an unarmed man offering a hug to an opponent who is trying to stab him to death. Yet that is almost exactly the situation we are in.
Liberalism does not promote a universally tolerant society. Instead it promotes something far worse. Intolerance toward the immune system itself, toward the gatekeepers and the traditional and conservative elements of the society combined with a limitless tolerance toward the foreign invasion. This is not merely apathetic tolerance, it is tolerance turned virulent. It is tolerance turned into a virus that kills the host society.
Liberal society today is the AIDS patient actively seeking infection and throwing out his medication. It's the unarmed man going to the most dangerous part of town and threatening the police with a lawsuit if they try to protect him.
Like most things tolerance is a dangerous thing. To tolerate is to give your consent, your permission to an act or a way of life. Be careful of what you tolerate and remember to be wary of whether the things and people you tolerate-- are equally willing to tolerate you.
THANK YOU SULTAN
Tolerance is the credo of the age, the great rallying call of modern liberalism. Tolerate and be tolerated, they say. Tolerate to all alike.
But what are the limits of tolerance? To tolerate is to accept things that are strange or unpleasant to you. You tolerate things that are different from you in nature and expectation. Without a reasonable amount of tolerance, no society would be able to function for long. But at the same time the flip side of tolerance is that to tolerate a behavior is to perpetuate it.
If your neighbor plays loud music at 1 o'clock in the morning and you tolerate it for a while, you've given permission to him to continue doing so and getting him to stop will now prove much more difficult than if you had put your foot down from the beginning.
And that is the crux of the matter, because there are behaviors that we accept, behaviors that we tolerate and behaviors that are unacceptable. The liberal credo of tolerance though has eliminated two of the categories and warped language and attitudes to equate tolerance with acceptance and to all but eliminate the idea of unacceptable behaviors entirely, as long as they are grounded in a different culture.
Tolerance for liberals means acceptance. While the larger society may not accept, when it begins to tolerate, acceptance is the next and final step of the process. When liberals say tolerate, what they really mean is not 'tolerate' in its original sense of not interfering, but to mean acceptance and accommodation.
That is why we must be careful of what we tolerate, because intolerance is the gatekeeper, the immune system that acts as a barrier. There are things for which that barrier should be lowered and things for which it should remain in place. A society that universally tolerates everything is a society without values or defense mechanisms.
When the defense mechanisms no longer exist, when the gate is permanently raised and the immune system disabled, the society is open and vulnerable to conquest, exploitation and colonization. A society eager to tolerate its intolerant enemies is like an AIDS patient with no working immune system welcoming in cold sufferers or an unarmed man offering a hug to an opponent who is trying to stab him to death. Yet that is almost exactly the situation we are in.
Liberalism does not promote a universally tolerant society. Instead it promotes something far worse. Intolerance toward the immune system itself, toward the gatekeepers and the traditional and conservative elements of the society combined with a limitless tolerance toward the foreign invasion. This is not merely apathetic tolerance, it is tolerance turned virulent. It is tolerance turned into a virus that kills the host society.
Liberal society today is the AIDS patient actively seeking infection and throwing out his medication. It's the unarmed man going to the most dangerous part of town and threatening the police with a lawsuit if they try to protect him.
Like most things tolerance is a dangerous thing. To tolerate is to give your consent, your permission to an act or a way of life. Be careful of what you tolerate and remember to be wary of whether the things and people you tolerate-- are equally willing to tolerate you.
THANK YOU SULTAN
Monday, 14 April 2008
Terrorism, liberty and a question of liberty
Terrorism, liberty and a question of liberty
Last updated at 22:51pm on 13th April 2008
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_article_id=559477&in_page_id=1787
It is no coincidence that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith chose this weekend to warn - in a tabloid newspaper interview - that the Islamist terror threat to the British way of life is "severe and growing".
With Parliament soon to decide on her proposal that detention without charge in terror cases should increase from a maximum of 28 days to 42, she was giving rebellious Labour MPs an unsubtle reminder of where their loyalties lie.
She had nothing new to say but the message was clear - support this Bill or you are soft on terrorism and the blood of future victims may be on your hands.
Oh no, she is playing a new guilt trip card
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith: Islamist terror threat is 'severe and growing'
But is this really true? Surely only the most slavish of her colleagues will swallow Miss Smith's hollow arguments.
For example, why 42 days? Why not 90, as the Government first wanted, or seven as it was until 2003, or 56, as was floated last year, or 14, as it was before 2006. Indeed why not 28 days, as it is now?
Since the 28-day limit was introduced, there is no evidence that any terror investigation has been hampered because charges had to be brought prematurely, and even the police - though broadly in favour - are not pushing for the extension with any zeal.
Senior Government law officers are opposed, some believing that such Draconian legislation targeting one section of the community might create more terrorists than it catches.
Everyone understands the seriousness of the terror threat and when society is under attack from within, civil liberties inevitably suffer.
However, that does not mean they should be surrendered lightly - or, worst of all, for short-term political gain.
Miss Smith knows that if the Bill falls, it will be a calamity for the Prime Minister.
that would be better than her bill
As the latest polls show Mr Brown less popular even than Neville Chamberlain following his humiliation by the Nazis, a Commons defeat might quickly lead to an issue of confidence.
that took some doing, well deserved methinks
There are already mutterings about threats to his leadership.
I would rather hear the sound of the gallow makers at work than mutterings
So, in order to balm her party's selfinflicted wounds, Miss Smith is prepared to manipulate the fears of both the public and her colleagues to drive through a piece of ill-conceived and muddled legislation.
In any circumstances this would be cynical in the extreme.
When individual liberties and the defence of the realm are involved, it is nothing short of disgraceful.
Try treason, much more accurate
Licence to flout law
If you are a normally law-abiding motorist who happens to stray into a bus lane, be ten minutes late back to your parking meter, or be caught on speed camera doing five mph over the limit, the chances are you will be pursued quickly and with the full rigour of the law.
If you are part of the underclass of two million rogue drivers, without tax, insurance, and frequently even a licence, you are likely to enjoy many years of trouble-free motoring.
Underclass, who would that be?
Figures showing there are 63 per cent more tax evaders now than in 1999, yet only half as many successful prosecutions will leave most motorists speechless with impotent rage.
Only one in 20 tax-evaders is ever prosecuted.
With the proliferation of spy cameras under this overbearing, snooping Government - not to mention some deluded chief constables who seem to think hounding decent motorists is a higher priority than tackling crime - car drivers are oppressed as never before.
dont pay any tax I say
The least they are entitled to expect is that some of the billions extorted from them every year for trivial offences should be spent on pursuing those drivers who really make our roads unsafe.
Thats your road tax going up to pay for it then. More extortion, good idea.
But then, that might seem far too much like hard work.
Last updated at 22:51pm on 13th April 2008
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_article_id=559477&in_page_id=1787
It is no coincidence that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith chose this weekend to warn - in a tabloid newspaper interview - that the Islamist terror threat to the British way of life is "severe and growing".
With Parliament soon to decide on her proposal that detention without charge in terror cases should increase from a maximum of 28 days to 42, she was giving rebellious Labour MPs an unsubtle reminder of where their loyalties lie.
She had nothing new to say but the message was clear - support this Bill or you are soft on terrorism and the blood of future victims may be on your hands.
Oh no, she is playing a new guilt trip card
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith: Islamist terror threat is 'severe and growing'
But is this really true? Surely only the most slavish of her colleagues will swallow Miss Smith's hollow arguments.
For example, why 42 days? Why not 90, as the Government first wanted, or seven as it was until 2003, or 56, as was floated last year, or 14, as it was before 2006. Indeed why not 28 days, as it is now?
Since the 28-day limit was introduced, there is no evidence that any terror investigation has been hampered because charges had to be brought prematurely, and even the police - though broadly in favour - are not pushing for the extension with any zeal.
Senior Government law officers are opposed, some believing that such Draconian legislation targeting one section of the community might create more terrorists than it catches.
Everyone understands the seriousness of the terror threat and when society is under attack from within, civil liberties inevitably suffer.
However, that does not mean they should be surrendered lightly - or, worst of all, for short-term political gain.
Miss Smith knows that if the Bill falls, it will be a calamity for the Prime Minister.
that would be better than her bill
As the latest polls show Mr Brown less popular even than Neville Chamberlain following his humiliation by the Nazis, a Commons defeat might quickly lead to an issue of confidence.
that took some doing, well deserved methinks
There are already mutterings about threats to his leadership.
I would rather hear the sound of the gallow makers at work than mutterings
So, in order to balm her party's selfinflicted wounds, Miss Smith is prepared to manipulate the fears of both the public and her colleagues to drive through a piece of ill-conceived and muddled legislation.
In any circumstances this would be cynical in the extreme.
When individual liberties and the defence of the realm are involved, it is nothing short of disgraceful.
Try treason, much more accurate
Licence to flout law
If you are a normally law-abiding motorist who happens to stray into a bus lane, be ten minutes late back to your parking meter, or be caught on speed camera doing five mph over the limit, the chances are you will be pursued quickly and with the full rigour of the law.
If you are part of the underclass of two million rogue drivers, without tax, insurance, and frequently even a licence, you are likely to enjoy many years of trouble-free motoring.
Underclass, who would that be?
Figures showing there are 63 per cent more tax evaders now than in 1999, yet only half as many successful prosecutions will leave most motorists speechless with impotent rage.
Only one in 20 tax-evaders is ever prosecuted.
With the proliferation of spy cameras under this overbearing, snooping Government - not to mention some deluded chief constables who seem to think hounding decent motorists is a higher priority than tackling crime - car drivers are oppressed as never before.
dont pay any tax I say
The least they are entitled to expect is that some of the billions extorted from them every year for trivial offences should be spent on pursuing those drivers who really make our roads unsafe.
Thats your road tax going up to pay for it then. More extortion, good idea.
But then, that might seem far too much like hard work.
TO PAY TAXES OR NOT
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=559506&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770
More than 2m untaxed and uninsured drivers are laughing at the law as prosecution rates more than halve in eight years
Last updated at 01:12am on 14th April 2008
Rogue drivers: There are 63 per cent more road tax evaders than eight years ago - yet only half the number of successful prosecutions
More than two million rogue drivers escaped prosecution last year as an underclass of untaxed and uninsured drivers grows at an alarming rate, figures reveal today.
They show that there are 63 per cent more road tax evaders than eight years ago - yet only half the number of successful prosecutions.
Today, a driver who does not pay road tax has a one in 20 chance of being prosecuted against a one in six chance in 1999.
The figures were unearthed by Tory transport spokesman Theresa Villiers from answers to a series of parliamentary questions.
Miss Villiers said: 'These figures are a shocking indictment of the Government's truly hopeless record on dealing with rogue drivers.
'The Government needs to get a grip on this issue. What these stats highlight is that, under this Government, things have been getting steadily worse.
'Rogue drivers without tax or insurance are a menace to other road users.
The direct result of Labour's incompetence in dealing with rogue drivers is that our roads are more dangerous.'
The Department for Transport figures show the estimated number of untaxed vehicles on the roads has soared from 1.33million in 1999 to 2.17million in 2006, an increase of 63 per cent.
Yet over the same period, the number of successful prosecutions for car tax offences has almost halved from 204,606 to 103,108.
Ministers estimate the lost revenue is £79million for 2007-2008 alone.
In January, a report by the Commons public accounts committee said the Government's record on road tax was 'poor' and it was 'losing ground' against the evaders.
The system risked becoming 'a complete laughing stock' and spiralling out of control.
A flood of foreign motorists driving illegally, many from eastern Europe, has been blamed by MPs for contributing to the number of cars that are untaxed or unlicensed - where the documents required to get a tax disc are not in order.
Edward Leigh MP, chairman of the public accounts committee, said: 'Motorists and motorcyclists who refuse to pay road tax are stealing from law-abiding taxpayers. Unlicensed cars are often associated with other forms of crime.'
Sheila Rainger, of the RAC Foundation, said the figures were a ' wakeup call for better enforcement'.
She added: 'Motorists driving without tax are also more likely to be driving uninsured and without an MoT.
Responsible motorists are not only picking up the tab for evaders, they are also being put at risk by them. The Government needs to boost the number of traffic police carrying out on-road crackdowns, so that the motoring underclass and the hardcore tax dodgers are the ones feeling the pressure, not the law-abiding motorist.'
Paul Watters, of the AA, said: 'We fear that today's road tax evasions figures are actually the tip of the iceberg. In January, the public accounts committee reported that losses to the Treasury in 2006 were £214million, more than double that quoted today.'
A Department for Transport spokesman said: 'The DVLA and the department, together with the police and local authorities, are determined to force tax evaders off the roads. We are targeting persistent evaders and seizing 100,000 unlicensed vehicles each year.
'From September, new legislation will allow police, DVLA and local authorities to take action against unlicensed vehicles even if they are not parked on public roads.'
Under the law, motorists will receive an £80 penalty charge notice through the post if they fail to tax their cars on time, with a theoretical maximum fine for non-payment of £1,000.
But critics say the sanction is toothless against persistent offenders, who are also likely to be uninsured, without a valid driving licence, or MoT. This 'underclass' does not show up on the DVLA computer as having a valid address. article ends.
This road fund tax is not used for the road, it breaches the trade decription act, it should not be payed.
As a matter of fact all taxes should be with held. Taxes are what is paying for the destruction of this nation.
NO TAXES UNTIL WE GET A REFERENDUM
More than 2m untaxed and uninsured drivers are laughing at the law as prosecution rates more than halve in eight years
Last updated at 01:12am on 14th April 2008
Rogue drivers: There are 63 per cent more road tax evaders than eight years ago - yet only half the number of successful prosecutions
More than two million rogue drivers escaped prosecution last year as an underclass of untaxed and uninsured drivers grows at an alarming rate, figures reveal today.
They show that there are 63 per cent more road tax evaders than eight years ago - yet only half the number of successful prosecutions.
Today, a driver who does not pay road tax has a one in 20 chance of being prosecuted against a one in six chance in 1999.
The figures were unearthed by Tory transport spokesman Theresa Villiers from answers to a series of parliamentary questions.
Miss Villiers said: 'These figures are a shocking indictment of the Government's truly hopeless record on dealing with rogue drivers.
'The Government needs to get a grip on this issue. What these stats highlight is that, under this Government, things have been getting steadily worse.
'Rogue drivers without tax or insurance are a menace to other road users.
The direct result of Labour's incompetence in dealing with rogue drivers is that our roads are more dangerous.'
The Department for Transport figures show the estimated number of untaxed vehicles on the roads has soared from 1.33million in 1999 to 2.17million in 2006, an increase of 63 per cent.
Yet over the same period, the number of successful prosecutions for car tax offences has almost halved from 204,606 to 103,108.
Ministers estimate the lost revenue is £79million for 2007-2008 alone.
In January, a report by the Commons public accounts committee said the Government's record on road tax was 'poor' and it was 'losing ground' against the evaders.
The system risked becoming 'a complete laughing stock' and spiralling out of control.
A flood of foreign motorists driving illegally, many from eastern Europe, has been blamed by MPs for contributing to the number of cars that are untaxed or unlicensed - where the documents required to get a tax disc are not in order.
Edward Leigh MP, chairman of the public accounts committee, said: 'Motorists and motorcyclists who refuse to pay road tax are stealing from law-abiding taxpayers. Unlicensed cars are often associated with other forms of crime.'
Sheila Rainger, of the RAC Foundation, said the figures were a ' wakeup call for better enforcement'.
She added: 'Motorists driving without tax are also more likely to be driving uninsured and without an MoT.
Responsible motorists are not only picking up the tab for evaders, they are also being put at risk by them. The Government needs to boost the number of traffic police carrying out on-road crackdowns, so that the motoring underclass and the hardcore tax dodgers are the ones feeling the pressure, not the law-abiding motorist.'
Paul Watters, of the AA, said: 'We fear that today's road tax evasions figures are actually the tip of the iceberg. In January, the public accounts committee reported that losses to the Treasury in 2006 were £214million, more than double that quoted today.'
A Department for Transport spokesman said: 'The DVLA and the department, together with the police and local authorities, are determined to force tax evaders off the roads. We are targeting persistent evaders and seizing 100,000 unlicensed vehicles each year.
'From September, new legislation will allow police, DVLA and local authorities to take action against unlicensed vehicles even if they are not parked on public roads.'
Under the law, motorists will receive an £80 penalty charge notice through the post if they fail to tax their cars on time, with a theoretical maximum fine for non-payment of £1,000.
But critics say the sanction is toothless against persistent offenders, who are also likely to be uninsured, without a valid driving licence, or MoT. This 'underclass' does not show up on the DVLA computer as having a valid address. article ends.
This road fund tax is not used for the road, it breaches the trade decription act, it should not be payed.
As a matter of fact all taxes should be with held. Taxes are what is paying for the destruction of this nation.
NO TAXES UNTIL WE GET A REFERENDUM
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