Anti-white Racism Growing in France

In France, cases of anti-white racism have recently started being tried in court, with anti-white racism as an aggravating circumstance, following the pattern of other cases of racism.

That happened when a young man at the Paris Station Gare du Nord was attacked with a knife without apparent reason by three men shouting "dirty French" and "gawerer" ("dirty white" in Arabic). Witnesses heard the insults.

In Toulouse, Houria Bouteldja, the spokeswoman for a movement representing immigrants from France's former colonies, went on trial for insulting white French and was charged with "racial injury":

Bouteldja, of the movement Indigenes of the Republic, called native white French "souchiens" in a TV interview. The word derives from "souche," or stock, as native white French are commonly called, but could sound like a hyphenated word meaning "lower than a dog."

A study from the French government's statistical agency INED has brought to light that 18% of French "indigenes" (who are neither immigrants nor the children of immigrants) have been the target of racist insults, remarks or attitudes.

Politician Jean-François Copé, who wants to succeed ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy at the head of France’s main right-wing party, has written a book, excerpts from which were published in Le Figaro newspaper.

In the book he says that more and more inhabitants of Meaux, the town of which he is mayor, complain of being victims of anti-white racism. He writes:

An ‘anti-white racism’ is developing in neighbourhoods of our towns where individuals – some of whom have French nationality – express contempt for French people, calling them ‘Gaulois’, on the basis that they are not of the same religion, the same skin colour or the same origins as them.

Despite the predictable protests against the book by the Left, even the Socialist Party's spokesperson Najat Vallaud-Belkacem had mentioned “anti-white racism” in her book Raison de plus!.

“Copé can’t make his mind up whether to be the spitting image of Sarkozy or the parrot of Marine Le Pen,” tweeted the newly appointed leader of the Socialist Party, Harlem Désir, who started his political career at the head of the anti-racism campaign SOS-racisme.

It is worth mentioning that Harlem Désir, the first black to lead a major European political party, has a criminal conviction, having "served 18 months in prison for fraud related to an immigrants rights group he was with".

The “anti-white racism” is manifested according to Copé “by the fact that there are areas where it is not good to be a woman, be white… some of our countrymen to flee the area where they live because they understand that they are not at home, it is unbearable,” he said.

More quote from Copé's book:

I hear more and more people complain of Meaux and this racism is as unacceptable as any other form of racism and we must denounce it as we condemn all other discrimination. I know I broke a taboo by using the term “anti-white” but I do deliberately, because it is the truth that some of our citizens live this way and silence exacerbates the trauma.

These phenomena are impossible to see from Paris, in the media and political spheres where the vast majority of officers are French of white skin born of French parents. In these microcosms, the lack of diversity limits the presence of people of color or of foreign origin. But let’s face it: the situation is reversed in many parts of our suburbs.

Of course, if you decide by diktat that only whites can be racist, as ex-London-mayor Ken Livingstone's former senior advisor on race policy Lee Jasper did, then the problem is solved, right? Or, more likely, enouncing this statement is in itself another sign of anti-white racism.

If you consider that Lee Jasper is currently also co-chairman of Black Activists Rising Against the Cuts, chair of the London Race & Criminal Justice Consortium, political adviser to the 1990 Trust and board member of Lambeth Police Consultative Group, no less, you start getting an idea of why anti-white racism is on the rise in the UK as well, and indeed throughout the West.

Moderate Muslims and Nicolai Sennels

The excellent psychological and sociological essay linked to below is by the Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels, who has worked with many Muslims and non-Muslims of similar age and socio-economic background in a Danish prison, making his - quite unique in this field - a scientific study of the experimental group, young Muslims, for the presence of a control group in which the only different variable is the one under study.

This and other writings by the same author gave me a lot of inspiration and food for thought.

Nobody so far seems to have devoted much attention to this subject: not so much what Islam is, or the Koran says, or Mohammed did, or the history of the Muslim world past and present, as what individual Muslims' psychological makeup is (in this case Muslims living in Europe).

It is very interesting for many many reasons, one of which is this: it breaks apart the distinction between Islam as a doctrine - something abstract - and the concrete reality of Muslim persons.

This in turn dissolves, or at least greatly dilutes, another distinction, which may be real but is also puzzling: that between the intransigence, intolerance, violence and criminality found in both the teachings of Islam and at least some - though we do not really know how many and what proportion of the Muslim population in every country they are - Muslims on one hand, and the so-called "moderate" Muslims on the other.

To be honest, I find this concept, "moderate Muslims", very unclear and imprecise, more prone to raise questions than capable of answering them.

What do we mean by that?

These are the possibilities:

a) Muslims who are not involved in violence. Obviously there will be many of them, particularly in the West where they are still a minority. But does it change anything? No population in history has ever gone to war with another en masse (it would be impossible biologically, because it would lead to the self-destruction of that population): it's always a minority, an avant-guard, that engages in actual combat. Britain during WWII did not take the approach that it was not at war with Germany because there were many "moderate Germans" who were not taking direct part in the military conflict. And German, as well as Italian, nationals were interned in camps, whether they were peaceful and even opposed to the war or not. We may keep saying that we are not at war with Islam, but it matters not one iota because Islam is at war with us.
A further problem with this definition is that it is too vague and general: is it enough for a person not to act violently and criminally to be considered "moderate"? No, this is not the common definition of the word, because the term is applied in reference to opinions and attitudes, not just behaviour.

b) Muslims who are opposed to the use of violence in the name of Islam by their correligionaries. Here the number of individuals covered by this definition will start decreasing from definition a, but how much we don't know. There aren't enough opinion polls among, say, British Muslims to give a full picture, although those that exist are not very promising, showing high percentages of them approving of Islamic violence.
This seems perfectly consistent with what we see every day. For example, although Muslims are amply represented in demonstrations of various types (against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, against Salman Rushdie, Mohammed cartoons, Bush, Blair, and other examples), we have never seen a Muslim demonstration against Islamic violence, against Al Qaeda, Bin Laden and so on.
Furthermore, there are too many nuances and needs for refinement to the definition. Individual Muslims may approve of some episodes of Islamist violence but not others. It is so complicated as to be useless as a definition.
And again, the fundamental problem raised in "a" applies here too: is this the same definition of the term "moderate" that we use for non-Muslims? No, a "radical" or "extremist" could be opposed to violence and still be considered such if he holds views at the extreme poles of the political or cultural spectrums.
So, why should we make an exception for Muslims? In respect for their "cultural identities", because we recognize that what for us is extreme and radical, anything but moderate, for them is the norm? But this is exactly the problem from which we started, the reason why coexistence is difficult if not almost impossible.
Saying that some - or even many - Muslims are "moderate" because the radical views they hold are the norm for their culture and religion is simply answering the question with the same question, it means getting stuck in a vicious circle.
The problem is exactly that: that we need to use the word "moderate" with a different meaning when applied to individual Muslims because they are not moderate at all by the general definition of the word.

This essay by Nicolai Sennels seems to confirm my suspicions. This concept is an artefact of the appeasers, the Chamberlains in our midst (no shortage of them, especially in the Left). The differences between Muslim mindset - cultural and sociological, and therefore psychological - and Western one are real and profound.

What Sennels says in relation to solutions and to the wishful thinking of Westerners about hopes of "integration" is also particularly important and illuminating. What Westerners do - or at least have done so far - reminds me of what they call "battered wife syndrome". Wives regularly beaten by their husbands or partners apparently continue in the relationship without leaving their men thinking that these will change.

As psychologists and wise people know, human beings do not change just because somebody else desires them to change.

People only change due to an internal motivation which, as Sennels very eloquently and descriptively shows, overwhelmingly is lacking in Muslims living in Europe.

And, if someone wants his circumstances or the people in his life to change, what he must do is take the initiative, change himself first, and the rest will change as a consequence. In the case of a battered woman, for instance, becoming aware of her problem and leaving her abusive partner could likely lead to a better relationship.

Western countries and societies are acting in relation to Muslims in their midst in perfect analogy with the battered wife with her husband.

They anxiously and hopefully wait for Muslims to "change", in this case to integrate (and become good, much less troublesome British, or Danish etc citizens).

What they should instead do is start from themselves, look at the mistakes they have made - since all evidence, as this Danish psychologist says and we already know, points in the opposite direction of integration, with each immigrant generation being more radicalized, violent and criminal than the previous - and begin making changes to "their" own views, attitudes and policies regarding the Muslim community, and only after that they will very likely see changes among the Muslims.

People like Ken Livingstone saying that London (and the UK) are good examples of integration must be deluded to the point of madness.

If several riots and bombs, and the facts that London is now a centre of international Muslim terrorism and a haven for criminal Islamists wanted all over the world, are not enough to show the idiocy of such a statement, just think of the police and security forces having to be in continuous alert over possible Islamic terrorist threats which, squandering precious resources, has now become the permanent condition and possibly the only reason why we have not had more bombings and attacks.

It is true that Sennels has studied young, imprisoned Muslim criminals, but through them he has had a unique insight into the European Muslim community in general.

Nicolai Sennels: Report from the therapy room: Why are Muslims more violent and criminal?

Rolling Stones Mock Pro-Palestinians and Honour Israel's 65th Birthday

I've always loved the Rolling Stones. Now I know why.

The Rolling Stones openly taunt pro-Palestinians.

Despite a barrage of attacks and even threats from European and American anti-Israeli groups, Mick and co. maintained their planned concert in Jerusalem for Israel's Independence Day on 15 April 2013.

Mick Jagger said that they received many criticisms and provocations, but that only made them resolve to have two concerts rather than one.

A pro-Palestinian activist retorted that this was a huge mistake by the Stones, and threatened that they would lose much money and fans, many of whom support the boycott of Israel.

When Jagger was asked if indeed this move could damage the Rolling Stones' image or career, he answered that he is not a businessman.

It is an important gesture because they are prepared to lose fans over this, and they are a role model to many. If many more people in the West had their courage or at least defiance for group-think, things would get better.

There have been accusations that the above picture has been photoshopped with the addition of the Israel flag, but the news remains true.

A Soviet Spring Spells Christian Persecution

There has been an increase in the persecution of Christians in the former Soviet Union, especially the central Asian republics where it looks like the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship, in a pattern maybe similar to that of the “Arab Spring”, has “liberated” the radical elements within the Muslim communities.

The above video is an interview with Sergey Rakhuba, President of Russian Ministries, an expert on mission issues related to Russia and the former Soviet Union.

It's been a long road since the revolution that swept away atheistic communism in Eastern Europe 20 years ago. The wave of religious freedom that swept the region now seems to be receding.

Citizens of the former Soviet Union are facing growing restrictions on their religious freedom. On Wednesday a panel of experts in Washington reported that governments are closing more churches, fining and arresting their religious leaders, and destroying church literature.

"Twenty years ago when the Soviet Union fell apart, collapsed, when the Berlin Wall fell, everybody was sort of excited about all the future possibilities. Twenty years later we are again talking about freedom. What happened?" Victor Ham, vice president for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association Crusades, said.

The situation might not be a return to the Soviet era, but the signs spell trouble.

"Churches are being torched, crosses are being burned. There's a lot of anti-Semitism, a lot of negative things appearing in the press about different organizations. So there's some reason for concern," Lauren Homer, with Homer International Law Group, said.

The atmosphere is thick with intolerance in these countries. Individual pastors are reluctant to speak out against abuses and restrictions.

"He's not so interested in going to the government and speaking to the ministers and so on because really it is a question of security most of all," Matti Sirvio, with Greater Grace Protestant Church, said. "Will it be used against them? Will their persecution become even worse."

In Uzbekistan, Sirvio encouraged church members to connect to the outside world as their best defense.

"I think people should all learn how to use the Internet, they should all learn the English language," he said. "And these two things will connect them in the future with the rest of the world and especially with the Body of Christ around the world."

Russian Ministries hopes that by shining a spotlight on these issues, international politicians and human rights proponents will do more to defend religious minorities in the former Soviet Union.

UK: Jihad Seekers Allowance Is the New Form of Jizya

Jihad Seekers' Allowance (a pun on Jobs Seekers' Allowance that unemployed British people receive as state welfare benefits) is considered by many Muslims as a form of jizya, the tax that only non-Muslims have to pay as dhimmis, the condition of submission they are forced to live in under Islamic rule.

In the remarkably candid video above Anjem Choudary, a Muslim cleric and preacher, tells other Islamists that they should follow his example and live on welfare paid for by British taxpayers who, as infidels, are slaves and are supposed to give money to their Muslim masters. This is nothing other than Islamic law:

Anjem Choudary, who in the past has planned to disrupt the minute's silence on Remembrance Sunday, also openly mocked hard-working Britons, calling them 'slaves'.

The Sun newspaper secretly filmed him saying Islam will overrun Europe, David Cameron and Barack Obama should be killed and calling the Queen 'ugly'.

But today he said he had been 'joking' and his words had been misconstrued.

He also maintained that Osama Bin Laden was his 'hero'.

The father-of-four takes home more than £25,000 a year in benefits and lives in a £320,000 house in Leytonstone, East London.

He told a crowd of around 30 fanatics: 'People will say, 'Ah, but you are not working'. But the normal situation is for you to take money from the kuffar (non-Muslim).

'So we take Jihadseeker's Allowance. You need to get support.'

In another video a grinning Choudary is recorded telling his disciples that it is justifiable to take money from non-believers.

He said: 'The normal situation is to take money from the kuffar. You work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar (God is great).

'Hopefully there's no one from the DSS listening to this.'

He also called Mr Cameron, Mr Obama and the leaders of Pakistan and Egypt the 'shaitan', or devil, and said he wanted them to be killed.

Choudary spoke glowingly of the 9/11 attacks and urged his followers to have 'hate' in their hearts for core British concepts like democracy, freedom and freedom of religion.

The 45-year-old former lawyer added: 'We are going to take England — the Muslims are coming. Brussels is 30 per cent, 40 per cent Muslim and Amsterdam. Bradford is 17 per cent Muslim.

'These people are like a tsunami going across Europe. And over here we're just relaxing, taking over Bradford brother. The reality is changing.'

O'Neill Got It Wrong: Gay Activists Want More than Liberation, not Less

Brendan O'Neill totally missed the point.

He compares the gay radicals of the past who did not want marriage because they saw it as a form of oppression to the LGBT movement of today who demand same-sex wedlock, and concludes that the latter have become bourgeois and integrated, renouncing the radical ideology of the beginning, when Stonewall was young and fighting for liberation from matrimony, not enslavement by it.

The point he misses is that the homosexual activists have become more radical, not less.

What they demand from society now is a total redefinition of marriage, something that goes to the core of this institution and pierces it through the heart. They want to shape society in their own image, not just more or less politely ask society to leave them alone.

What was a negative request, "Do not interfere with our personal lives", has become a much stronger, positive demand, "Change the meaning of marriage to fit our bill".

This can be seen especially clearly when you consider the LGBT movement's request for same-sex marriage in church, when it is obvious that the people who intend to take advantage of this "right" do not believe in the precepts of the Churches whom they would require to celebrate their wedding.

It is transparent that church gay marriage is a travesty of Christian marriage, as I have written elsewhere:

We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the [British] TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception [bar abolishing the minimum age of consent]?

Geert Wilders: The Reality of Islam in Europe

California: the Islamic Supremacists Next Door

This is the plight of an American family living in a California apartment complex. The father has written to me asking for his difficult situation to be made known, adding that they had a rousing support from Australia and the UK and less from USA, hence the wish for more exposure of their case.

The family's Muslim neighbours have made their life very difficult, with invasions of privacy, bullying of their children by the Muslim kids and several rows.

Eventually the family has contacted the apartment complex's Management, which has responded by accusing them of being “racist” and committing “hate crimes”. The father wrote that the Management even went as far as "pursuing a case of defamation and malicious prosecution of our family in spite of significant evidence to deny the validity of their claim".

This is an excerpt from the letter the father had sent to Jihad Watch, which posted it under the headline "The Islamic supremacists next door". The excerpt gives you a flavour of the situation this family found themselves in:

We took the opportunity to communicate the bullying behavior of her oldest daughter Soumaya (8 years old) toward our daughter Emma (5 years old), exposing Emma to the horrors of Hell as described in the Koran. We witnessed the children talking in the playground and Emma coming in running and crying, explaining that Soumaya (quoting passages from the Koran) had told her that she was "going to burn in boiling oil in Hell, having layers of her skin peeling off while being burnt alive for not being Muslim, and Santa Claus is not real and your parents lie." At this point we confronted Aisha with the bullying situation and she smiled in reply to the story saying, "That's because Soumaya has started studying the Koran."

Muslims Are not so Moderate, the French Think

The more a group of people knows Islam and comes into contact with it, the more they tend to dislike it.

The French, who enjoy the questionable cultural enrichment and dubious benefit of having among them the highest percentage of Muslims of any Western European country, have revealed in a recent survey that they profoundly reject Islam.

Le Monde has published the results of an IPSOS opinion poll with the headline "The Muslim religion is the subject of a profound rejection by the French".

A distrust of Islam has been clearly expressed by the French population, says Le Monde.

74% of those surveyed by Ipsos think that Islam is an intolerant religion inconsistent with the values ​​of French society

Even more damning, 80% believe that Islam tries to impose its way of thinking on others.

And 54% hold the view that individual Muslims are fundamentalist, predominantly (10%), or at least partly (44%), in their attitudes.

This last claim, says Andrew Bostom in The American Thinker, is consistent with a remark made by Gamal al-Banna, brother of the jihadist and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hasan al-Banna, who in a 2011 interview said that "most Muslims today are Salafis":

Gamal al-Banna attributed this mass Muslim phenomenon to the 10th century onset "closure of the gates of ijtihad " (ijtihad being the process whereby the most select, learned Muslim legists were allowed narrow interpretive "flexibility" regarding Sharia mandates), leaving the preponderance of Muslims, ever since, to blindly follow mainstream, traditionalist, i.e., "Salafi," interpretations of Islam.

Massacres, Gun Control Studies and Social Change

I have closely followed the gun control debate in the US from the outside and, as a European, I am trying to make sense of it because I know that at stake is not just the gun legislation but also the American Constitution, with what it represents as the most historically important declaration of human rights and liberties to be safeguarded against the power of the state; the thorny issues of broken families and of how to treat the mentally ill; and even the always controversal question of race and gang violence.

I have never seen a gun in my life except on TV and in movies. I grew up in a very gun-averse environment in Northern Italy. Almost everyone, including people on the political centre-right like my family, believed that ordinary citizens should not have guns and that America needed to have tighter gun control laws.

This is more or less what I thought too until I began realizing how anti-freedom and despotic our Western governments actually are, something I had not realized before. That, for a start, made me take a better look at the meaning of the Second Amendment.

Here is a classic emotion versus reason conflict. Many of us have an instinctive repulsion against weapons, so we think the less the better, but on closer inspection things may be different.

When something traumatic like the Newtown massacre happens, the normal human reaction is to find means of control so that we feel reassured that it won't happen again. In some ways this need for control is not dissimilar to the rituals and compulsions performed by an OCD sufferer, which don't have to be based on reality and reason as long as they have the power to assuage the anxiety.

I think that something like this on a collective scale is happening in America now.

The idea that less control on guns leads to more guns and more guns lead to more murders, multiple or not, is not so much simple as simplistic. Simple is what addresses the problem, simplistic is what avoids it.

The reason why I am saying this is that, despite the immediate intuitive nature (along with wishful thinking) of the thesis that more gun control reduces violent crime, there is absolutely no evidence to support it.

And not for lack of trying to find it.

One of the 23 “executive actions” initiated by President Obama is a Presidential Memorandum directing the Department of Health through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies to "conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it".

Something similar had already been done by one of Obama's predecessors at the White House, Jimmy Carter. Wanting to build the case for new comprehensive federal gun-control legislation, in 1978 the Carter administration commissioned a large-scale scientific study which, they presumed, would conclude that gun-control laws reduce crime.

Carter gave a substantial research grant to University of Massachusetts professor of sociology James D. Wright and his colleagues Peter Rossi and Kathleen Daly, all highly regarded sociologists. Professor Wright was on record as strongly in favour of much stricter gun controls. This was the most comprehensive study of gun control that had ever been undertaken, which resulted in a massive three-volume work, Under the Gun.

David Kopel, Research Director of the Independence Institute and co-author of the law school textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment, explains:

Wright and his colleagues were asked to survey the state of research regarding the efficacy of gun control, presumably to show that gun control worked and that America needed more of it. But when the researchers produced their report for the National Institute of Justice in 1982, they delivered a document quite different from the one they had expected to write. Carefully reviewing all existing research, the three scholars found no persuasive scholarly evidence that America's 20,000 gun-control laws had reduced criminal violence. For example, the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which banned most interstate gun sales, had no discernible impact on the criminal acquisition of guns from other states. Washington, D.C.'s ban on the ownership of handguns that had not already been registered in the District was not linked to any reduction in gun crime. Even Detroit's law providing mandatory sentences for felonies committed with a gun was found to have no effect on gun-crime patterns, in part because judges would often reduce the sentence for the underlying offense in order to balance out the mandatory two-year extra sentence for use of a gun.

Professor Wright summarized the research's conclusions thus: “Gun control laws do not reduce crime.” Kopel said: “As the scholars frankly admitted, they had started out their research as gun-control advocates, and had been forced to change their minds by a careful review of the evidence.”

Another milestone of research on the subject was a 2003 study evaluating the effect of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, a federal 10-year ban law enacted in 1994 and expiring in 2004 on so-called "assault" weapons - the same ones for which a ban is called for now by gun-control advocates -, carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It found "insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence".

The National Research Council's 2004 Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review reviewed over 200 journal articles, 99 books and 43 government publications assessing the impact of 80 gun-control measures. It was unable to find empirical evidence that restrictive firearm laws and regulations decreased violent crime, suicide, or accidents. It observed that academic studies of the assault weapon ban "did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence" and remarked: "due to the fact that the relative rarity with which the banned guns were used in crime before the ban ... the maximum potential effect of the ban on gun violence outcomes would be very small....".

A further study assessing the 1994-2004 ban's impact on gun markets and gun violence, conducted by scholars of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, and funded by the US Department of Justice, found:

Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs ["assault weapons"] were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban. LCMs [large capacity magazines] are involved in a more substantial share of gun crimes, but it is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than ten shots (the current [at the time of the ban] magazine capacity limit) without reloading.

Not coincidentally, lacking any evidence of its presumed and desired effectiveness, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was not renewed after its expiry in September 2004.

In the late ’80s, in Orlando, Florida, 33 women were raped in only 9 months. The Orlando Sun-Sentinel newspaper and the police offered a very well publicized firearms safety course.

Everybody knew that in Orlando there were 6,000 women who had handguns and knew how to use them. The result was that in the following nine-month period, there were only three rapes. In addition, crime in general declined. The fact is, Orlando, Fla., was the only U.S. city with a population of over 100,000 that had a reduction in crime that year.

In fact, it is not only Orlando that experienced a dramatic decrease in crime. After the 1987 Florida right-to-carry legislation, homicide, firearm homicide and handgun homicide rates all decreased. Eight of Florida’s 10 largest cities experienced drastic decreases in homicide rates from 1987 through 1995... Miami Beach down an incredible 93 percent.

Opponents of Florida’s right-to-carry legislation claimed their state would become known as the “Gunshine State.” But the last quarter century’s actual experience (as of mid-2011, Florida has issued a total of 2,031,106 concealed-carry permits under the 1987 law) proves Florida’s trailblazing program to fight crime has been a tremendous success. As U.S. Sen. Orin Hatch, R- Utah, put it: “The effect of that legislation on state crime rates has been astonishing. The predictions of the gun-control advocates were wrong, flat wrong.”

Research by Dr John Lott, author of the book More Guns, Less Crime (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) , published in three editions by the University of Chicago Press, was the first research on the effects not just of the federal ban but also of state legislation. Generally, his research found no impact of gun bans on violent crime rates, but the third edition of the book in 2010 offered evidence that Assault Weapon Bans even increased murder rates a little.

Leftist, uninformed media outlets sometimes may say that John Lott's research has been "debunked", but that is simply not true. In fact the National Research Council's 2004 Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review, mentioned above, in Chapter 6 "Right-to-Carry Laws", reviewed both Lott's research and its critics Ayres & Donohue who were trying to refute its thesis, and concluded that neither offered definite proof, leaving the matter undecided.

But the criminologist on the panel, James Q. Wilson, wrote a dissent from this conclusion, saying that all the panel's estimates on murder rates supported Lott's conclusion on the effect of Right-to-Carry Laws on murder. He wrote:

In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect on other crimes is ambiguous.

Several attempts have been made to discredit Dr Lott's research, but they all failed and backfired on the would-be discreditors' reputation.

We must also remember that the burden of proof is on those who want to change the law, not on those who wish to maintain it, especially in view of gun laws' potential to infringe Second Amendment rights.

In an interview, Lott says: "States with the largest increases in gun ownership also have the largest drops in violent crimes. Thirty-one states now have such laws—called “shall-issue” laws. These laws allow adults the right to carry concealed handguns if they do not have a criminal record or a history of significant mental illness."

Since the time of the interview, more and more states have adopted those laws. The above video shows that the states passing laws permitting concealed weapons have steadily increased over the years (at this moment they are all the states with the exception of Illinois, which will be required to draft a concealed carry law by May 2013), and at the same time crime declined in those states after the passing of the laws.

John Lott explains that of course guns can create violence, but they can also deter it before it starts and stop it after it started:

Criminals are deterred by higher penalties. Just as higher arrest and conviction rates deter crime, so does the risk that someone committing a crime will confront someone able to defend him or herself. There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate—as more people obtain permits there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.

Concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime for two reasons. First, they reduce the number of attempted crimes because criminals are uncertain which potential victims can defend themselves. Second, victims who have guns are in a much better position to defend themselves.

Virtually nothing is without drawbacks. The question is always of balance, of net effect. And here we need to look at the evidence.

Lott has extensively researched the subject not just in the USA but all over the world and in the above video he says: "I can't find a place in the world where you've had a ban on guns and you haven't seen an increase in murders afterwards".

He concludes:

Much of Eastern Europe; most of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa; all but one South American nation; and all of Central America and Mexico suffer even higher murder rates than we do. For example, despite very strict gun control, Russia's and Brazil's homicide rates over the last decade averaged about four to five times higher than ours.

Indeed, if you are going to look across all nations and not just a select few, what you find is that the nations with the strictest gun control tend to have higher murder rates.

A Foreign Policy magazine's survey of gun laws and gun crime in 9 countries in different parts of the world, "Armed, but Not Necessarily Dangerous", although clearly biased in favour of gun restrictions, did not find any correlation between firearm control and ownership on one hand and violent crime on the other.

Many of the countries surveyed, like Yemen, Iraq, Cyprus or Serbia, have a past or present history of conflict and instability, so the parallel with the US is difficult to draw, but the case of Switzerland is particularly interesting because the law there is more permissive for motives that are close to the United States' reasons and history.

Switzerland has a unique system of national defence, developed over the centuries. "Instead of a standing, full-time army, the country requires every man to undergo some form of military training for a few days or weeks a year throughout most of their lives."

Switzerland also requires all men aged 20-42 to own automatic rifles (i.e. military rifles, the kind that is illegal for civilians in the US to possess without a stringent permit, not the semi-automatic weapons that in the States represent virtually all guns produced for civilians), but has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.

Guns are deeply rooted within Swiss culture - but the gun crime rate is so low that statistics are not even kept.

In 2001, with a population of 6 million, at least 2 million firearms, including about 600,000 automatic rifles and 500,000 pistols, were estimated to be kept in Swiss homes.

The estimated total number of guns held by civilians in Switzerland today is 3,400,000. The rate of private gun ownership is 45.7 firearms per 100 people. "In a comparison of the number of privately owned guns in 178 countries, Switzerland ranked at No. 22."

Once discharged, men serve in the Swiss equivalent of the US National Guard, but still have to train occasionally and are given bolt rifles. Women do not have to own firearms, but are encouraged to.

Few restrictions

In addition to the government-provided arms, there are few restrictions on buying weapons...

But despite the wide ownership and availability of guns, violent crime is extremely rare. There are only minimal controls at public buildings and politicians rarely have police protection.

Switzerland is indeed a unique country, and its history has very much been moulded by its geography. Its Alpine nature has meant isolation, creating a deep sense of need for self-reliance and self-defence in its population, which has made it prouder, less dependent on the state, and more attached to its liberties. Rather, the state relies on the citizens for defence, fact which increases their freedom.

In the 19th and early 20th-centuries, for example, Switzerland was a haven for anarchists fleeing from neighbouring Italy. Switzerland has a strong tradition of direct democracy, in the form of its many referendums, and of decentralization: it is unusual for such a small country to be a federation of states, known as "cantons".

For all these reasons, the rationale behind Switzerland's exceptional gun laws have something in common with the motivations at the root of the American Constitution's Second Amendment.

So, more guns do not appear to breed more criminality and there is no empirical evidence to support this thesis. If, on the other hand, you look at successful results in the war on crime, such as New York City's dramatic reduction in crime achieved by Mayor Guliani, you see that it was not through new gun control laws but due to enforcement of existing laws and zealous prosecution of criminals.

But, as observers have remarked, addressing guns is infinitely easier than addressing people and the problems created by them, especially when there is a fear of being called "racist".

The calls for a ban have focused on rifles and not handguns. Not only rifles of any type cause a very low number of murders per year (323 in 2011) compared to hammers and clubs (496); hands, fists and feet (728); and knives (1,694). But also, according to the same official statistics by the FBI, by far the weapons most used to commit homicides are handguns (6,220).

The tragic mass shootings that hit the headlines are fortunately exceptional; what is common is inner city gang crime, committed with illegal firearms, mostly handguns, easily available. As the Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008 report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice makes it clear, although gun violence in the country is generally on a steady decline, "The profile of the typical murderer with a gun is a black male in a city under the age of 25".

In our urban areas — and gun violence happens much more in urban areas than anywhere else — young black men, often in broken families, are joining gangs and committing acts of violence against each other. There have been 24 people murdered with guns in Chicago since the Newtown tragedy... Just look at the most violent neighborhood in Chicago with 202 murders since 2007.

Daniel Greenfield tells a tale of two countries, America and Obamerica:

67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average.

Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. Those are the places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.

Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory...

Chicago, the capital of Obamerica, is a city run by gangs and politicians. It has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of police officers. Chicago politicians solicit the support of gang members in their campaigns, accepting laundered contributions from them, hiring their members and tipping them off about upcoming police raids. And their biggest favor to the gang bosses is doing nothing about the epidemic of gang violence...

America does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem and a broken family problem...

But Obama, like every Chicago politician before him, don’t want to end the violence. The death toll is profitable, not just for rappers writing bad poetry about dealing drugs and shooting rivals, but for the politicians atop that heap who score money and gain power by using the problems of Obamerica as some sort of call to conscience for the rest of the country.

Picking a fight with law-abiding rural America, Republican voters who, to quote Romney in the opposite sense, would never vote for them, does not cost the Democrats anything.

But similarly, as some have done, blaming the mentally ill and the current psychiatric system that does not detain them involuntarily is analogous to asking for gun control: both positions try to control what cannot be controlled with such simple measures.

Violent crime commited by psychotics is also, like mass killings, a very rare event. The proportion of psychotic people who commit violent crimes is extremely low. And rare events are difficult to handle statistically.

It is not so simple to predict psychotic behaviour. It is many, many times likelier to make a mistake than not, and we should not deprive people of their rights, be they gun rights protected by the Second Amendment or the right to freedom that applies to the mentally ill as much as to anyone else, without a justifiable cause.

In some ways, this request is a knee-jerk reaction without foundation like the one of the anti-gunners.

You cannot derive general principles or laws affecting large populations - like gun control - or groups - like the involuntary commitment of the mentally ill - from the occurrence of events that are rare, however tragic they may be.

To address the complex, multi-faceted problem of all crime, including violence and murder, requires the same kind of change that would also deal with many other societal problems, including substance abuse which also has an effect on the current rate of mental illness. An obvious and central necessary measure is to re-establish the importance of the family.

If Hollywood stars, who are so keen to decrease violence by gun restriction laws, decided to refuse roles in films that are filled with mindless violence, they would certainly do something good. I don't know whether the reduction of violence that serves no purpose and seems to be an end in itself (in perfect analogy with massacres like the one committed in Newtown) in movies, video games and on TV would go some way to prevent those massacres - there is no evidence for that either -, but at the very least it would help reverse the prevailing dumbing down, raise the artistic value of films and inject more content into them by forcing movie-makers to think of something that is not violence, sex or vulgar language.

Obama Makes Life Easier for Illegal than Legal Immigrants

Associated Press Fact Check Destroys Obama SOTU.

Barack Hussein Obama lied on the number of jobs created, starting its count not from when he took office but from the highest point of unemployment.

He said that Obamacare is helping to reduce the growth of health care costs, but "but many experts say that's due to the sluggish economy, not to the health care law, whose main provisions are not yet fully in effect".

On immigration, Obama stressed the establishment of a conditional pathway to earned citizenship for illegal immigrants. But this path is easier than he made it sound and, under his provisions, illegal immigrants will have privileges and advantages over legal immigrants:

Like those living abroad who have applied to come to the U.S. legally, illegal immigrants who qualify for Obama's proposed path to citizenship will surely face long waits to be processed. But during that time, they are already in the U.S. and will get to stay, work and travel in the country under their new status as provisional immigrants, while those outside the U.S. simply have to wait.

On education, Obama exaggerated the efficacy of the Head Start program for poor children.

But a study last year by the Department of Health and Human Services that found big vocabulary and social development gains for at-risk students in pre-kindergarten programs also found those effects largely faded by the time pupils reached third grade. The report didn't explain why the kids saw a drop-off in performance or predict how they would fare as they aged.

And the President said that his administration has doubled the distance USA cars will go on a gallon of gas, whereas in fact that is expected to happen in 12 years.

Pakistan Protest against St Valentines

Pakistan demonstration against St Valentine's Day, or when people prefer hatred to love.

The student movement of Pakistan's main religious party has organized a protest against the festivity which, according to them, propagates "indecency in the world."

Obviously Christians who have the terrible misfortune of living in Pakistan cannot celebrate St Valentine's either.

There have been threats: "We will not allow the holding of any celebration of Valentine's Day," said the leader of the student movement, Shahzad Ahmed. "Either the authorities prohibit them. Or we will stop them way."

Pope Canonizes Otranto Christian Martyrs Murdered by Muslim Turks

Pope Benedetto XVI announced that he will leave his ministry at 8pm on February 28.

He made this announcement during a consistory for the canonization of the martyrs of Otranto beheaded one by one by the Ottoman Turks.

Antonio Primaldo and his companions, 800 Christians, were murdered for hatred of their faith by Muslims during the Turkish siege of the town of Otranto, in South-East Italy, on August 13, 1480.

As the Qur'an commands, these infidels were offered the choice to convert to Islam or be killed. When they refused to convert, the martyrs of Otranto were massacred.

The Qur'an is obeyed and applied in the same way now as it was in 1480. The only difference between now and then is in the power and military force Muslim armies had then but now now. Let's make sure that it remains this way in the West.

In other parts of the world, Christians are still massacred by Muslims for their faith. Nothing has changed in Islamic doctrine, only the relationship of strength can be a defence for whomever Muslims consider their enemies.

An observation about the different use of the word "martyr": in Christianity, unlike in Islam, martyrs do not kill.

FBI Expert: Obama's Nominee for CIA Chief John Brennan Converted to Islam

Who would have thought this possible?

Muslim born and bred, Muslim-Brotherhood-friendly, enabler of Al Qaeda in Northern Africa Barack Hussein Obama chooses a Muslim as Central Intelligence Agency's chief.

John Guandolo, one of the FBI’s former top experts on Islam, has announced that President Obama’s choice to head the CIA, John Brennan, who in the above video indulges in a few-minutes long praise of Islam, converted to Islam years ago in Saudi Arabia.

Michele Bachmann is vindicated.

Guandolo has long warned that the federal government is being infiltrated by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. But he now warns that by appointing Brennan to CIA director, Obama has not only picked a man “naïve” to these infiltrations, but also chose someone who is himself a Muslim.

“Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on the behalf of the United States in Saudi Arabia,” Guandolo told interviewer and radio host Tom Trento.

“That fact alone is not what is most disturbing,” Guandolo continued. “His conversion to Islam was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him. The fact that foreign intelligence service operatives recruited Mr. Brennan when he was in a very sensitive and senior U.S. government position in a foreign country means that he either a traitor … [or] he has the inability to discern and understand how to walk in those kinds of environments, which makes him completely unfit to the be the director of Central Intelligence.”

Brennan did indeed serve as CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s and today holds the official title of Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. On Jan. 7, Obama nominated Brennan as the next director of the CIA, though he has yet to be confirmed.

“Are you kidding me?” Trento balked at Guandolo’s allegations. “The head of the CIA is a Muslim? For real? … Are you sure?”

“Yes I am,” Guandolo asserted. “The facts of the matter are confirmed by U.S. government officials who were also in Saudi Arabia at the time that John Brennan was serving there and have direct knowledge. These are men who work in very trusted positions, they were direct witnesses to his growing relationship with the individuals who worked for the Saudi government and others and they witnessed his conversion to Islam.”

A former Marine and combat veteran, Guandolo worked for eight years in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division as a “subject matter expert” in the Muslim Brotherhood and the global spread of Islamism. Guandolo boasts he created the Bureau’s first counterterrorism training/education program and twice received United States Attorney’s Awards for investigative intelligence.

Guandolo is also one of the authors of the Center for Security Policy’s Team B II report, “Shariah: The Threat to America.”...

“My contention is that [Brennan] is wholly unfit for government service in any national security capacity, and that would specifically make him unfit to be the director of Central Intelligence,” Guandolo told Trento.

Guandolo then broke down a three-part argument against Brennan’s confirmation.

“The first is he has interwoven his life professionally and personally with individuals that we know are terrorists,” Guandolo asserted. “He has overseen and approved and encouraged others to bring known leaders of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood into the government in positions to advise the U.S. government on counterterrorism strategy as well as the overall ‘war on terror.’”

Second, Guandolo asserted, Brennan has “proven through his own comments publicly that he is clueless and grossly ignorant of Al-Qaida’s strategy.

“Third and finally, which some would say is most disturbing, is Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam,” Guandolo said, but stressed, “I think the [larger] news is that that conversion is the culmination of the work of people in Saudi Arabia who worked for the Saudi Government – and that makes John Brennan just naïve, foolish, dangerously ignorant and totally unfit for this position.

“That in and of itself, again, shouldn’t be shocking to people,” Guandolo continued. “Mr. Brennan, they have the clip where he specifically says during a public address … he said during that speech that he has learned and gets his understanding and his ‘worldview’ in large part from Islam. It shouldn’t be a large leap to imagine he’s converted to Islam.”

Alex Jones Confronts Piers Morgan Backstage on Gun Control - Video

Video of radio host Alex Jones confronting Piers Morgan a few days ago in a protest against gun control last night, before Morgan broadcast his show from Texas, in a repetition of the explosive debate between the two on television last month.

The CNN host's decision to record his show live from a gun store in Katy, Texas, was seen as a provocation and an assault on the second amendment by Jones, who asked Morgan if he would have him back on the show for another debate, to which Morgan replied: “Well I don’t want to promote you that much, Alex.”

At that point CNN directors ordered Jones and his cameraman to leave the shooting range area while they were taping. “I understand, this is like Obama shooting the shotgun, now you’re going to make everybody think you’re pro-gun – you’re scared to have me back on”, said Jones.

The radio host then led a pro-second amendment protest outside the building, leading Morgan to tweet: “Rather large protest growing outside this Houston gun store now. Feels slightly tyrannical, ironically”.

Albanian Bogus Asylum Seeker in the UK Was Given a Cop Job

Albanian bogus asylum seeker in the UK Elidon Habilaj told a pack of lies to get a British passport and a job with the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

Fact stranger than fiction.

He has now jumped bail and fled the country, while English Defence League's Tommy Robinson is languishing in jail without bail:

But he was unmasked after being spotted checking his TRUE details on a computer at work.

Prosecutor Christian Moll said: “IWF is a database used by SOCA to track the actions and movements of people who are of interest to the Agency.”

Habilaj’s immediate boss spotted what was on the computer screen, he said.

Mr Moll told London’s Snaresbrook Crown Court: “He could clearly see the defendant was mentioned on the IWF, and this was confirmed when Mr Habilaj double-clicked on the screen and a photo of himself came up.”

Checks were made and 35-year-old Habilaj’s sham story exposed. He had claimed to be Farid Ademi, a refugee from war-torn Kosovo, when he arrived in Britain on “the back of a lorry” in September 1998.

He claimed his brother had been tortured to death and his father was killed in the fighting.

Habilaj was granted asylum and later got British citizenship and a passport — which he used to get a job at SOCA, as an intelligence officer at its headquarters in Vauxhall, South London.

After being rumbled last January, Habilaj was charged with entering the UK by deception, which he denied. But he jumped bail and FLED the country the next month — and is being tried in his absence.

The Obama Depression Is like the Great Depression

Mortimer Zuckerman on How We Can End Our Modern-Day Depression in US News: "We must increase investment in education and infrastructure, and enact tax reform":

If you went out this morning and saw hundreds of people lining up at soup kitchens, you'd think you were in a time machine, transported back to the Great Depression of the '30s, or the victim of a hallucination incubated by powerful images of those times. In fact, it is the absence of such images that is the illusion. We believe we live in more normal times—and we do not. Millions of people today are experiencing exactly the same struggle as the millions did in the Great Depression. They can't find work. They depend on government and philanthropy. They live on hope denied.

The big difference: Today millions are assisted by checks from Social Security and by food stamps. Food-stamp enrollment has been rising at the rate of 400,000 per month. More than 47 million Americans now depend on that program, an almost incredible record, for it is 15 percent of the population compared with the 7.9 percent who received food stamps from 1970 to 2000. Meanwhile, nearly 11 million Americans are now collecting federal disability checks from Social Security, and half have signed on since President Obama came to office. In 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers. Today it is one for every 16. Such an increase simply cannot have been caused by direct disability experienced during employment. This is in effect another unemployment program, one without end. Many of the people on disability would normally be considered unemployed.

The reality is, we are experiencing a modern-day Depression. It is harder to find work than it has been in any previous economic recovery period. Typically, it takes 25 months to close the employment gap from the employment peak near the start of a downturn. But this time around, five years after employment peaked in January 2008, non-farm employment is still roughly 4 million below where it started. Never before has the job level not been at a record high during the fourth year into a business cycle.

In fact, 4.5 million fewer Americans are working today than when the recession started, and fewer are working today than in the year 2000, despite the fact that our population has grown by 31 million and our labor force by 11.4 million. Though the White House forecast four years ago that, with its stimulus policies, the jobless rate would be down to 5.2 percent by now, the real unemployment rate is 14.4 percent.

The Pew Research Center reports that for the first time in the post-World War II era, middle-class families finished the decade significantly poorer in terms of household net worth—which is down almost 40 percent since 2007—and with lower incomes than a decade earlier. This has hit the middle class harder than any other group. According to Pew, one third of Americans now identify themselves as lower class or lower middle class, a deterioration since 2008 when one quarter identified themselves that way.

The outlook is no better. Job seekers are only one third as likely to find a job now as they were in 2006. A record number of households have at least one member looking for a job. Some 40 percent of the people who are unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, which means we've got 4.8 million who are described as "long-term" unemployed. Employers are shortening the work week or asking employees to take unpaid leave in unprecedented numbers. Those taking unpaid leave are not included in the unemployment count.

Indeed, the recession has shown employers that they can make do with fewer workers. Now over 20 percent of companies say that employment in their firms will not return to pre-recession levels.

Older Americans, whose net worth has taken a huge hit (75 percent of it due to a decline in their home equity), can't afford to quit. Since the recession began, employment in that age group of 55 and older is up by over 3 million, in contrast to total employment, which is down by 5 million. The baby boomers are quite simply postponing their exit from the workforce. This has created a huge bottleneck for the nation's youth, who now face double-digit unemployment.

Now Is the Time for the GOP to Destroy Obama

The American are media coming out, revealing their bias.

CBS News' Political Director John Dickerson had this advice for Obama's second inaugural address on the leftist online magazine Slate in January:

The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat...

Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition’s most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.

Obama, he said, must declare war on the Republican Party.

Breitbart commented on that:

What is worthy of note, though, is that a CBS News' political director is now comfortable openly calling for the destruction of the Republican Party. He obviously fears no admonitions from his colleagues or his employer...

You lump all of this with CNN chief Jeff Zucker applauding Piers Morgan's shameless feasting off the dead children of Sandy Hook for ratings and attention, and what you have is a media that's finally … coming out.

And yet, even as they do, even as they openly celebrate their left-wing biases out of one side of their mouth, out the other, they will claim they remain objective and unbiased.

And now the blog Flopping Aces has turned the threat upside down:

We are in a depression. The Obama depression...

But it IS a list of accomplishments he [Obama] is after. He pushed through a stimulus, a health care abomination and wants to push through amnesty and suffocate us with “climate change” legislation without any of them needing to be successful. The economy should be Job One, but it still sucks and shows no inclination to improve.

Enough. The GOP should destroy Obama and they can absolutely do it. The tools are in their hands right now.

Obama wants a deal- he wants to raise taxes and put the sequester cuts off until….well, sometime....

John Boehner should just say no. McConnell should say no.

There are a couple of possible outcomes. The economy suffers a little initially and then improves because of debt reduction. The second is that the economy does not improve. Then again, it is not improving now. Obama is treading water and he knows it. That’s why he is asking gently for a deal instead of demanding one.

This is the time to destroy him. Deny him the opportunity to put off responsibility. Deny him the chance to kick the can down the road again.

Michael Coren and Diana West on Lars Hedigaard's Attempted Assassination

Michael Coren here in superb form, commenting on yesterday's attempted assassination of Lars Hedigaard, a well-known Danish historian, defender of free speech and Islam critic by a likely "religious Muslim".

The mainstream media tend to be silent about this kind of news, but this is the new world we live in. Freedom of speech is a thing of the past in the West as well now, our political leaders do nothing to protect it from Muslims wanting to impose sharia law.

These are the new enemies, not the ones we believed in the past to be enemies. I've woken up to the new realities, and I hope that you will too.

The brilliant author of Why Catholics Are Right and TV presenter Michael Coren says on Canada's Sun News (above video) about the mainstream's media scant coverage of this assassination attempt: "Imagine if some critic of abortion had gone to the door of an abortionist and tried to shoot them dead? That would be on the front page of every newspaper. That seems to be a bit of a double standard".

Gavin Boby of Mosquebusters with Brian Lilley of Sun News

The British Gavin Boby, who specializes in planning law and is successfully stopping mosque construction in the UK by demonstrating to local councils that the building of a mosque or an Islamic center is actually in violation of British law, with Brian Lilley of Sun News.

Muslim Illegal Immigrant Arrested for Raping Dog in Italy

Another case of a Muslim raping animals.

In Spain a few months ago a Muslim had killed a horse by anally raping him, and now in Italy an illegal immigrant, an unemployed Moroccan has been arrested for repeatedly raping a dog on a farm in Sicily.

The 32-year-old-man was caught in the act by CCTV cameras.

He had previously spread panic in the countryside near the town of Ragusa by committing two arsons, the second of which on Boxing Day, causing damage for tens of thousands of euros to two local farms, by the use of a lighter.

But that's not enough. He was responsible for the theft of electrical appliances, farm equipment, clothes and food.

In Muslim countries the practice of having sex with and raping animals is much more common than we think.

In Pakistan, a donkey was honour killed after being raped, a treatment ususally reserved to Muslim women. From Wikipedia:

Karo-kari is part of cultural tradition in Pakistan and is a compound word literally meaning “black male” (Karo) and “black female (Kari), in metaphoric terms for adulterer and adulteress. Once labeled as a Kari, male family members get the self-authorized justification to kill her and the co-accused Karo to restore family honor, although in the majority of cases the victim is female, while the murderers are male.

Sorry, Gays, Equality Is a Different Thing

The TV news channel Russia Today's CrossTalk programme for once had a debate (in the above video) I am glad to report on.

"Unimarriage?", on the subject of gay marriage, was a discussion among the UK's prominent gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, UK Independence Party's Member of the European Parliament Godfrey Bloom and Thomas Peters of the USA's National Organization for Marriage who works in Washington DC.

It was introduced thus:

Should same-sex marriages be accepted? What's driving the change in the institution of marriage? Are equal marriage rights democratic? Why aren't civil unions enough for gay couples? And if marriage is about love and the emotional needs of adults, then what about their children?

The programme was also exceptional in that the supposedly "moderator" Peter Lavelle did not intervene with opinions of his own.

One of the recurring claims of the conversation was Peter Tatchell's insistence that the right to marry is one of the human rights recognized by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to deny it to homosexuals violates a principle of equality for all individuals.

But is it true that opposing gay marriage means discriminating and denying equal rights to homosexuals?

Tatchell confuses equal rights with equal treatment. Equality for individuals who are different results in different treatment.

Peter Singer, a moral and political philosopher much respected by the Left and certainly one of the thinkers of our time who will be included in future history of philosophy books, begins his classic work Animal Liberation with a comparison between the objections usually raised against the case for moral equality of animals to humans and the derisive attacks that greeted the publication of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the late 18th-century.

One of the most frequent of those criticisms was to highlight the factual differences between men and women (analogous to the possible use of the differences between human and nonhuman animals to counter Singer's argument).

Singer responds to both in the same way: equal consideration of interests (the utilitarian Singer does not use the terminology of "rights") does not require equal treatment. The treatment for different sentient beings, the moral objects, will be different if their interests are given equal consideration (if they have equal rights).

The Australian philosopher says that equality does not entail that dogs have the right to vote because humans do and men have the right to abortion on demand if women do.

The incongruity of the idea that equality requires non-differential treatment in all cases can be seen if we think of, for instance, children not being allowed to drive a car or vote, even if they wanted to: developing the logic of Tatchell's argument to its full consequences would require giving children all the rights that adults have, including, for instance, driving and voting.

In the specific case of marriage, children, close blood relatives, threesomes are not allowed to marry, even if they so wished: are all those persons discriminated against? Most reasonable people would not think so.

This is probably why the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Thatchell invokes in his support does not include sexual orientation among the characteristics that should not limit the right to marry. It says:

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.

Virtually nothing of what Peter Tatchell said throughout the debate had a leg to stand on.

His assertion that polls show that a majority favours same-sex marriage was dismantled with ease by Thomas Peters of the National Organization for Marriage. He explained that in 30 out of the 34 times when people were given the possibility to vote on this they voted against gay marriage. Polls on this subject are not reliable because people tend to say they are favourable to it even when they are not, since they think it makes them look good.

In these Orwellian times when accusation of "homophobia" are thrown so liberally (pun half-intended) it seems a highly plausible explanation.

In addition, "polls claiming a majority support redefining marriage offer those they poll a false binary choice between redefining marriage and no legal recognition whatsoever".

In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron has been accused by the polling company ComRes to misrepresent its polling data in order to claim popular support for redefining marriage:

Andrew Hawkins, Chairman of the polling company, wrote to David Cameron to “put the record straight” about the number of people who are in favour of the Government’s plans to redefine marriage.

The Prime Minister had responded to a letter from MP Cheryl Gillan, in which she criticised the proposals. He said that more Tory-leaning voters were in favour of same-sex marriage than were put off by it.

Support

But Andrew Hawkins said his polling showed that redefining marriage was unlikely to win back support from disillusioned voters.

He also said it was “simply not the case” that all the published polls show more voters are in favour of same-sex marriage, something the Prime Minister asserted as fact in his letter.

Mr Hawkins said the level of agreement that marriage should stay as it is, varies between 55% and over 70%.

Ignore

He said that taking the polling as a whole, it is hard for David Cameron to ignore the fact there is less support for gay marriage than he makes out.

He said “the policy is likely to make it harder to retrieve many former Conservative supporters” and the issue is having a “detrimental effect on local Associations.”

Andrew Hawkins referred to a recent ComRes poll which showed that six out of ten Conservative Party chairmen believed the policy would lose the party more votes than it would gain.

Election

Earlier this week, Chancellor George Osborne said that gay marriage would win the party the next election, a claim quickly refuted by the Coalition for Marriage.

C4M Director Colin Hart said: “Yet again the Government’s spin doctors are trying to claim that redefining marriage is a vote winner. Quite the opposite is true.”

More than 610,000 people have signed the Coalition for Marriage petition to keep marriage as it is.

Tatchell's presentation of his battle for gay rights as a lonely one could have been realistic a few decades ago, but these days everybody knows that it cannot be delivered with a straight face. Peters pointed out that the three main associations for same-sex marriage in Washington receive many times the money his small organization gets, not to mention Obama's support and the Decmocratic Party's inclusion of legalization of gay marriage in its manifesto. Peters also said he receives death threats.

UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom argued that the gay claims, with which he used to agree, have now gone too far, and threaten other people's liberty, as in the case of Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife B&B owners who were successfully sued by a gay couple for offering them two rooms rather than one.

Peters summed up some of the reasons to keep marriage between a man and a woman:

There's an awful lot of civil society -- churches, communities, government -- that is all built to support marriage because marriage isn't easy. It's not easy to get men and women to commit to raising the children they make with their bodies. But that's what civil society has been doing and a healthy society does that. It is difficult and gay marriage makes it difficult for all of civil society to enshrine that value that children deserve a mom and a dad, and that men and women should stick around and love and raise the children they make with their bodies, and the distraction of gay marriage has made it impossible for things like the Catholic Church, for things like political/civil government to give that message and so when you say "gay marriage won't hurt anyone" it already has because now when I try to say "a child deserves both mom and a dad" you jump in and say "that's against equality!" and so you can actually see already that the more gay marriage becomes accepted and enshrined in law the more difficult it will become for the rest of us to communicate this life-saving propagating message for the next generation.

We must also not forget how the redefinition of marriage could pave the way to allowing for Islamic polygamy to become acceptable:

Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

Post-Election Obama Administration's Iran and Israel Policies

Moshe Phillips, member of the executive committee of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel / AFSI, writing for Voice of the Copts says that Democratic Senator John Kerry as the next Secretary of State is a much bigger problem for Israel than Republican former Senator Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense, despite the American Jewish establishment's vehement protesting the latter but not the former.

The role of the Secretary of State, much more than the Secretary of Defense, is "a position to effect policy as it impacts Israel, set an overall tone for US in the Middle East and be a key player in future negotations".

Kerry thinks that the settlements are the main problem, adopted the Arab view that Jerusalem is one of “the big three issues" and believes that Israel and the Palestinian Arabs equally share blame for the continuation of a decades old conflict.

Kerry’s words show that he will be hostile to the very existence of Israeli towns in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Democrats consider these “settlements” to be part of the “Occupied West Bank”and he will label them as such.

John Kerry’s leadership at State will be the beginning of a new effort by the Obama Administration to pressure Israel to surrender territory to the Palestinian Authority, deny Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem, negotiate with Hamas and accept a hostile Palestinian State along its vulnerable borders.

Israel and its American supporters are in for a very tough time with Kerry and they seem to have no idea.

Hagel is not spared either. In another article in Voice of the Copts by Heritage Foundation senior fellow and former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Brookes, Hagel is criticized for his soft stance on Iran ("Hagel has pushed for direct talks, while pushing against economic sanctions and force"), his comments in favour of cutting the Defense budget, and his underestimation of North Korea. Brookes concludes:

The concern, of course, is that Hagel — like Kerry — will push US foreign and defense policy violently Left, more in line with Obama’s real sentiments.

I end with a quotation from a third article from the same high-quality publication, about Obama's policy of appeasement towards Iran, poorly camouflaged as Iranian Nuclear Containment. The article is by Mark Langfan, who has created an original educational 3d Topographic Map System of Israel to facilitate clear understanding of the dangers facing Israel and its water supply, which has been studied by US lawmakers:

And just like a nuclear-armed Hitler and/ or Togo would have found a "rational" use of a nuclear bomb in World War II, had he owned one, the Iranians will figure out a "rational" use of a nuclear bomb which will destroy the United States in the coming World War III.

Whether it is an Iranian EMP attack on Saudi Arabia, thereby gaining Iran sole control of 60 percent of the world's oil supply, or an Iranian untraceable nuclear suicide terror attack against Manhattan, it doesn't matter. The Iranian Islamic Regime is a talented, resourceful, and driven cabal of very rational people who are determined to rule the world, and impose their Shia Islam on every human on the planet.

The only person who is not "rational" in this drama is US President Obama, and neither is his merry band of sycophantic echo-chamber yes-men, who irrationally believe Israeli settlements are a greater threat to world peace than Iranian nuclear weapons.

Yes, elections have consequences, sometimes, irreparably catastrophic consequences. And, the horrific irreparable consequence of a 51 percent to 49 percent 2012 US Election is that the United States elected a President who has been, who is, and who will continue to be an Appeaser-in-Chief of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Had the world allowed Hitler or Togo's Japan to gain a nuclear bomb before World War II, there wouldn't be a free-world today. Unfortunately, Obama's containment policy will enable Iran to gain a nuclear weapons' arsenal which will bring the entire world into a dark ages from which the free-world will never return.

What Happens in the USA? Houston Resident: "I felt in a War Zone"

Residents of Miami, Florida, and Houston, Texas, were terrified by the sight of military helicopters in their skies and the sound of military gun fire. A Houston resident said: "I felt I was in a war zone". It turns out it was just a multi-agency training a drill.

Similar urban military exercises took place in Los Angeles and, since April 2012, in St. Louis, MO; Minneapolis, MN.; Long Branch, NJ; Laredo, TX; Boston, MA; and Chicago, IL, and Atlas Shrugs says in Harrisburg, Pennslyvania.

Atlas Shrugs also says:

What kind of military exercise requires black hawk helicopters and machine gun fire in a city? What is Obama expecting to happen?

Why such drills in civilian areas? These usually take place out of public view. Why weren't local police and fire/rescue alerted prior? There is certainly an intimidation factor at work here.

And The Examiner (h/t Augusto Pozuelos):

Of course, a little over a week ago, renowned author and humanitarian Dr. Jim Garrow made the shocking claim that President Obama will only keep military leaders who "will fire on U.S. citizens."

Read this columnist's report on the shocking claim...

It should be noted that the Obama administration has yet to deny the allegation.

On January 20, the Washington Free Beacon reported the head of Central Command, Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis is being dismissed by Obama and will leave his post in March.

Since 2010, Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal (USA), Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. David Petraeus (USA) and Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright (USMC) have all been forced into retirement.

In light of the Obama administration's push for gun-grabbing legislation (being sponsored by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA)), a flurry of "multi-agency training drills" and the dismissal of several well-respected military leaders...one need not be a conspiracy theorist to be genuinely concerned about the imminent threat to our freedoms.

As the ancient Chinese curse portends...these are truly "interesting times."