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.'

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.

Italian Priest Offers Reward for Weddings

In the small village of Volania, in Northern Italy, home to about 300 families and 1,000 people, the local priest Father Giancarlo Pirini has decided to offer a "bounty" of 500 euros, in cash, of his own money to every couple who will get married.

The Father is worried about the crisis of marriage.

"Some time ago, leafing through the marriage register of the parish - says Fr Pirini - I noticed that it was still at the first volume, which began in 1955." Scanning it, the parish priest ended in despair: in 1960 only 17 weddings were celebrated, in 2006 and 2012 none.

Europeans, if the current rates of marriage and reproduction continue, are going to die out.

TV and Hollywood Subtle Hidden Persuaders: The Killing, The Final Destination

Both the television and Hollywood subtly manipulate - in a way reminiscent of the advertising industry with its "hidden persuaders" - what people think to establish a form of cultural Marxism ("political correctness" is nothing other than that) as the dominant ideology, the current orthodoxy.

Subtle, hidden persuasion used in fictional, visual stories is much more effective than direct attempts to persuade through argument. If you see the argument openly, you can also spot its faults by using reason, logic and evidence. But if you are not allowed to see the argument, you are more vulnerable to it via the power of imagery and emotionally-charged human tales.

So viewers are influenced by professional persuaders into buying an ideology or a world view as they would an advertised product or service.

These days we can watch so many shows, films and telefilms for free and in the comfort of our homes. We are lucky, yes, but just as we have to somewhat pay for all this luxury through enduring commercial breaks, similarly we also have to pay for it by being subjected to ideological and political brainwashing, more often than not without even realizing it.

I'll give two recent examples of British TV broadcasts, one of which involves a Hollywood film.

Since I mentioned "orthodoxy", a term often used in relation to religion and whose opposite is "heresy", and remembering that heretics were sometimes burnt at stakes, I'll start with the American movie, for reasons that will become clear.

The film in question is The Final Destination, the fourth in the series, made in 2009. I didn't watch the whole film, but I saw a scene in which a drunken guy, an obvious villain of the piece, calls a black man "nigger". At that point I knew, for having seen a similar thing umpteen times in Hollywood productions, that this chap was doomed. He couldn't say that word in a US film and survive unscathed: he had to die.

Sure enough, he did die. And how is also interesting. The character, Carter, caught fire in an accident involving his truck. The vehicle started moving while he was trying to burn a cross on a front lawn, and as he chased after it, his foot got caught in the chain, dragging him along the road with the truck and starting a fire through friction. So he was burnt alive, just as the heretic that he was, for having used a wrong word according to the Hollywood orthodoxy's diktats.

The important thing to consider here is that the term "racism" has become so broad and all-encompassing in its meaning, and is misapplied to so many irrelevant, inappropriate situations, that it now creates a real confusion in its usage.

Real, serious acts or demonstrations of racism - very rare, now, except those directed against whites - are put by this prevailing liberal (in both senses of abundant and leftist) use of the word in the same category as trivialities, like calling people names in a moment of irritation, so whoever commits the second kind of "offence" is treated with almost the same severity as who is a real racist.

A good instance of that is the case of former England football team's captain John Terry.

My second example from UK TV programs is the Danish detective drama The Killing, Series 3. Here a huge corporation, the biggest in Denmark, shipping and oil giant Zeeland, is the villain. Its owner Robert Zeuthen is a man who has destroyed his family for being too absorbed in his multinational empire. His young daughter is kidnapped and her life is at risk, all because Zeuthen's personal assistant and Zeeland's top executive Niels Reinhardt, a real corporate man who worked all his life for the company and in the drama personifies it, is a paedophile who raped and killed a child whose father is exacting revenge.

In the end Zeuthen, after his daughter is rescued and safe, decides to retire from running the business in order to spend all his time with his now reunited family. The corporation is seen throughout the story as an enormous predator, swallowing the life of the owner's family and then almost eating up the flesh of his daughter, run by men who are corrupt at best and murderous paedophiles at worst.

In the final episode the company seems to be abandoned, like a sinking ship, by its owner who had already squandered lots of its resources in a vain pursuit of his daughter's kidnapper, signifying the unimportance of money and wealth.

His wife is a heroine of the drama, who is against the big multinational from start to finish.

Occupy Wall Street couldn't have got the message across better.

The moral of the story is, among other things, that the corporation ruined the family, and its dereliction restored it.

How many families, in real life, are actually helped, kept together and survive thanks to businesses like Zeeland is naturally conveniently omitted from the yarn, which could have made the hardest-core Marxist proud.

Best and Worst US States for Small Business

The US magazine Entrepreneur has published a map (see below) grading American states from A to F according to how small-business friendly they are.

The map is based on a survey of over 6,000 small-business owners all over the country.

It is interesting - although hardly surprising - to note that the best states for small businesses are the Republican-majority ones (Texas, Utah, Oklahoma) and the worst are Democrat-majority (California, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts).

The only states that have Ds and Fs are Democrat ones.

This is, for whoever still needs it, the umpteenth confirmation that socialism makes countries and people poor.

It's not surprising that rich Texas, that "maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world", and other over 30 states have submitted a petition to withdraw from the union, to protect their citizens' standards of living and not force them to pay for the squandering socialist states.

And remember, we're talking small businesses here, often sole traders or family-run, managed by people who instead of sitting on their butts waiting for the government to solve all their problems go out, start a business and create jobs for the local community, and not the "demonic, greedy" big (God forbid!) corporations (which in fact create even more jobs).

Socialism at Work: Council's Foster Family Break-up

This is another bit of totalitarianism in Britain. We should not be surprised. After all, what we call, sarcastically but also kindly, "political correctness" is in fact socialism or outright Marxism, a totalitarian ideology.

Having the "wrong" ideas and being affiliated with real opposition parties is punished in totalitarian states. Welcome to the UK.

And after all, attacks on the family have been part of Marxism since its inception, when Frederick Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that family is a patriarchal, bourgeois institution oppressing women, that replaced the matrilineal clan as main domestic institution.

After the news that Labour-run Rotherham Council, in South Yorkshire, had removed children from a foster home only because the foster couple are members of the UK Independence Party broke out, Education Secretary Michael Gove said social workers at the council had made "the wrong decision in the wrong way for the wrong reasons".

Labour leader Ed Miliband also intervened calling for an urgent investigation, saying "being a member of UKIP should not be a bar to adopting children".

As a consequence of the criticisms from all sides, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, whose original response had been to defend its decision, has now announced that it will carry out an urgent review of the case.

Foster parents 'stigmatised and slandered’ for being members of Ukip:

A couple had their three foster children taken away by a council on the grounds that their membership of the UK Independence Party meant that they supported “racist” policies.

The husband and wife, who have been fostering for nearly seven years, said they were made to feel like criminals when a social worker told them that their views on immigration made them unsuitable carers.

The couple said they feared that there was a black mark against their name and they would not be able to foster again.

Campaigners representing foster parents have described the decision as “ridiculous” and warned that it could deter other prospective foster parents from volunteering.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, described the actions of Rotherham borough council as “a bloody outrage” and “political prejudice of the very worst kind”.

Tim Loughton, the former children’s minister, said: “I will be very concerned if decisions have been made about the children’s future that were based on misguided political correctness around ethnic considerations.

"Being a supporter of a mainstream political party is not a deal-breaker when it comes to looking after children if it means they can have a loving family home.”

The couple, who do not want to be named to avoid identifying the children they have fostered, are in their late 50s and live in a neat detached house in a village in South Yorkshire.

The husband was a Royal Navy reservist for more than 30 years and works with disabled people, while his wife is a qualified nursery nurse.

Former Labour voters, they have been approved foster parents for nearly seven years and have looked after about a dozen different children, one of them in a placement lasting four years.

They took on the three children — a baby girl, a boy and an older girl, who were all from an ethnic minority and a troubled family background — in September in an emergency placement.

They believe that the youngsters thrived in their care. The couple were described as “exemplary” foster parents: the baby put on weight and the older girl even began calling them “mum and dad”.

However, just under eight weeks into the placement, they received a visit out of the blue from the children’s social worker at the Labour-run council and an official from their fostering agency.

They were told that the local safeguarding children team had received an anonymous tip-off that they were members of Ukip.

The wife recalled: “I was dumbfounded. Then my question to both of them was, 'What has Ukip got to do with having the children removed?’

“Then one of them said, 'Well, Ukip have got racist policies’. The implication was that we were racist. [The social worker] said Ukip does not like European people and wants them all out of the country to be returned to their own countries.

“I’m sat there and I’m thinking, 'What the hell is going off here?’ because I wouldn’t have joined Ukip if they thought that. I’ve got mixed race in my family. I said, 'I am absolutely offended that you could come in my house and accuse me of being a member of a racist party’.”

The wife said she told the social worker and agency official: “These kids have been loved. These kids have been treated no differently to our own children. We wouldn’t have taken these children on if we had been racist.”

The boy was taken away from them the following day and the two girls were removed at the end of that week.

The wife said the social worker told her: “We would not have placed these children with you had we known you were members of Ukip because it wouldn’t have been the right cultural match.” The wife said she was left “bereft”, adding: “We felt like we were criminals. From having a little baby in my arms, suddenly there was an empty cot. I knew she wouldn’t have been here for ever, but usually there is a build-up of several weeks. I was in tears.”

Her husband added: “If we were moving the children on to happier circumstances we would be feeling warm and happy. To have it done like that, it’s beyond the pale.”

The couple said they had been “stigmatised and slandered”.

A spokesman for Rotherham metropolitan borough council said last night: “After a group of sibling children were placed with agency foster carers, issues were raised regarding the long-term suitability of the carers for these particular children.

"With careful consideration, a decision was taken to move the children to alternative care. We continue to keep the situation under review.”

Ukip was once considered a single-issue fringe party but is now part of Britain’s political mainstream, with some recent national polls putting its support as high as nine per cent. Its manifesto includes a demand for Britain to pull out of Europe and to curb immigration.

It is also critical of multiculturalism and political correctness. It has a candidate in next week’s Rotherham by-election.

Mr Farage said: “I am outraged politically and very upset for them. I think this is the kind of thing where we need some sort of decree from a Government minister that Ukip is not a racist party.

“This is political prejudice of the very worst kind. It is just a bloody outrage.”

He pointed out that Ukip has a black candidate in the forthcoming Croydon North by-election.

David Goosey, the chairman of the trustees at Community Foster care, an independent fostering charity, said: “If this is accurate and there are no other extraneous matters that have concerned the authorities, then it is completely ridiculous and no self-respecting authority should be stopping people fostering on the grounds of their membership of Ukip.”

Rotherham metropolitan borough council’s equality policy states that it is committed to “promoting equality and good relations between people of different racial groups”.

Senior Tories have criticised “politically correct” rules requiring children to be adopted by families of the same ethnic background.

In March, David Cameron pledged to tackle “absurd” barriers to mixed-race adoption, while Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said last year that “Left-wing prescriptions” were denying children loving new homes.

This is the way the council had initially defended its position, which is now reviewing:

But Joyce Thacker, the council's Director of Children and Young People's Services, today said the three ethnic minority children had been placed with the couple as an emergency and the arrangement was never going to be long-term.

She told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We always try to place children in a sensible cultural placement. These children are not UK children and we were not aware of the foster parents having strong political views.

"There are some strong views in the Ukip party and we have to think of the future of the children."

"Also the fact of the matter is I have to look at the children's cultural and ethnic needs. The children have been in care proceedings before and the judge had previously criticised us for not looking after the children's cultural and ethnic needs, and we have had to really take that into consideration with the placement that they were in."

Asked what the specific problem was with the couple being Ukip members, Mrs Thacker told the BBC: "We have to think about the clear statements on ending multi-culturalism for example.

"These children are from EU migrant backgrounds and Ukip has very clear statements on ending multiculturalism, not having that going forward, and I have to think about how sensitive I am being to those children."

Islam, Racism and Slavery. Blacks in Morocco: "I Get Called a Slave"

Islam is a supremacist doctrine that affirms not only Muslim superiority over non-Muslims, but also Arab superiority over other ethnic groups and races. Both Islam's holy texts - the Quran and the Hadith, namely Muhammad's official biography - and scholars are testament to that.

Muhammad himself bought, sold and kept African slaves.

Historically, Muslims' slave trade of black Africans has been by far the world's greatest numerically and the most long-lasting, spanning over 1400 years (watch the above video, "The Arab Muslim Slave Trade Of Africans, The Untold Story").

Arab Muslims initiated slavery of ethnic Africans and breathed new life into slavery and the slave trade.

All over the world, only Christianity brought an end to slavery of all races. The Roman Empire abolished slavery after converting to Christianity, and Christians banned slavery in 19th century America.

But slavery still exists in Muslim countries of the Middle East and north-central Africa. Watch the video "Muslim Slavery Still Exists" below:

Islamic racism against black people is well documented in its theological foundations as it is in today's practices. Here is a recent report from Morocco.

Being black in Morocco: 'I get called a slave':

The latest cover of Maroc Hebdo magazine—seen as racist by some, defended by others—has launched a national debate on the struggles faced by sub-Saharan Africans living in Morocco.

“The Black Peril.” That's the controversial headline that the Moroccan weekly ran on its cover last week to tease to an article about the rise in the number of immigrants from sub-Saharan African, many of whom come to Morocco in the hopes of making it to Europe. Many are turned back and end up staying in Morocco, where they live in poverty. Some end up taking part in illegal activities to make a living. According to Morocco’s Interior ministry, there are about 10,000 illegal immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa living in the country. Human rights organisations estimate this number higher as closer to 15,000.

Moroccan authorities are taking an increasingly strict approach to immigration from sub-Saharan Africa. Immigrants without residency permits are quickly expelled. The European Union’s ambassador to Morocco, Eneko Landaburu, recently called the treatment of these immigrants “problematic”, a sentiment echoed by the Moroccan Human Rights Organisation. Meanwhile, the Moroccan labour minister, Abdelouahed Souhail, accused sub-Saharan African immigrants of being in part responsible for the country’s employment crisis.

The International Organisation for Migration recently launched a campaign to raise 620,000 euros to help send some 1,000 illegal migrants from sub-Saharan Africa home.


"Young Moroccans have physically assaulted me on several occasions, for no reason"

Joseph (not his real name) is from Guinea. He lives in Casablanca, where he studies computing at a local university. He is a legal resident.

I came here to study computing thanks to a grant from my country. I’ve been here for four years, and for four years I’ve been a victim of racism. It happens all the time, everywhere.

The most awful incident took place at the airport. I was with my aunt, who was heading back to Guinea and had a lot of luggage. Other passengers from sub-Saharan countries, seeing her struggle to carry it, came to help her get it onto the plane, but an airline employee stopped them, saying she had to deal with it on her own because she was black. I replied in Arabic, and he replied by hitting me in the head. I told him I was going to file a complaint, and he said, sarcastically: “That’s right, go complain to the king!” I never did file a complaint.

Often, when I’m just walking down the street, people will call me a “dirty black man” or call me a slave. Young Moroccans have physically assaulted me on several occasions, for no reason, and passers-by who saw this didn’t lift a finger to help me. All my friends are black and they have all had similar experiences. Even the girls get insulted in the street. To avoid getting hurt, I now try to ignore the insults. But if someone starts to hit me, what can I do? I have to defend myself...

In two years, I’ll be done with my studies, and I certainly don’t intend to stay in Morocco to look for work. Even if someone were to offer me a job here, I would rather go home to Guinea.

GOP Trilemma: Compromise, Stand Firm, Go to the Right

This interesting video sums up, better than many words and in-depth analyses, why Obama won. This has truly become a client state. I like the following definition of client state, applied to Scotland:

Keep spending more and more money on more and more voters, and you've built a client state. Those in receipt of the largesse will want it to continue. One day the money will no longer be there to spend (see technical note from Liam Byrne for details), but by that point you will have engineered a situation where any modulation of public spending will cause pain to such a large proportion of the electorate that the chances of the Conservatives winning a straight fight will be much reduced.

Although I am not American, I am very, very sad that Romney did not win the election.

I had got to like him, a Christian, obviously good, warm and gentle person. I liked the way he spoke during the presidential debates, firm but always polite, compared to the impersonal and arrogant Obama.

I can easily believe what popular radio talk show host and political commentator Rush Limbaugh said of him, that “Mitt Romney is one of the best people, human beings I’ve ever met.”

Limbaugh also said:

None of it makes any sense! Mitt Romney and his wife and his family are the essence of decency. He's the essence of achievement. Mitt Romney's life is a testament to what's possible in this country. Mitt Romney is the nicest guy anybody would ever run into. Mitt Romney is charitable. He wouldn't hurt a fly. He doesn't hate. He's not discriminatory in any way, shape, manner, or form.

This is about Romney as a person. But the reasons why I would have voted for him, if I had been American, are obviously political and I've blogged extensively about them before the election, from the economy to abortion, from Marxism to the presidential debates, from totalitarianism to the Benghazi attack.

Romney's policies were not perfect, but infinitely better than Obama's. Barack Hussein is also someone who has been very shady about his life as well as mendacious about his politics, which makes it unwise to trust him as President of the world's most powerful country.

Exactly because I am European, I've considered the US as something to look to for upholding the western and Christian values that are being eroded so rapidly in my continent.

I'm seriously saddened now to see that the US is going the European way too. But I am still hopeful: this is not the last election, and things may happen before the next that might change America's current political and economical course towards socialism, big government, welfare state, poverty and loss of moral compass.

Looking at the election results, there has clearly been a shift much more pronouncedly to the political left in US voting patterns, strongly determined by minority votes like blacks and Latinos, groups that probably made the difference about who of the two candidates got elected.

Some commentators, on the BBC for instance, said that the Republicans must acknowledge the democraphic change produced by the much higher percentage of Latinos in several states and, if they want to woo these voters, should make changes to their policies, prominently on immigration.

We have to remember this: "As Doug Ross has pointed out, Obama is – among many other things – the lawless president: the first one to sue states for enforcing laws Congress had passed".

The state in question is Arizona, and the law is the immigration law:

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that one key part of the Arizona immigration law, known as Senate Bill 1070, is constitutional, paving the way for it to go into effect. Three other portions were deemed unconstitutional in a 5-3 opinion.

The part ruled constitutional is among the most controversial of the law's provisions. It requires an officer to make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of a person stopped, detained or arrested if there's reasonable suspicion that person is in the country illegally.

The three parts ruled unconstitutional make it a state crime for an immigrant not to be carrying papers, allow for warrant-less arrest in some situations and forbid an illegal immigrant from working in Arizona.

The long-awaited decision was a partial victory for Gov. Jan Brewer and for President Barack Obama, who sued the state of Arizona to keep the law from taking effect. By striking down the portions they did, justices said states could not overstep the federal government's immigration-enforcement authority. But by upholding the portion it did, the court said it was proper for states to partner with the federal government in immigration enforcement.

This may help explain why Latinos tend to vote for Obama. But should the Republican Party make concessions of this sort and risk going against the Constitution? Is this just a small compromise, or is it damaging what America, since its foundation, really is and stands for?

On immigration, Obama was accused by Bush administration counsel John Yoo of executive overreach:

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the president has the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This provision was included to make sure that the president could not simply choose, as the British King had, to cancel legislation simply because he disagreed with it. President Obama cannot refuse to carry out a congressional statute simply because he thinks it advances the wrong policy. To do so violates the very core of his constitutional duties.

There are two exceptions, neither of which applies here. The first is that “the Laws” includes the Constitution. The president can and should refuse to execute congressional statutes that violate the Constitution, because the Constitution is the highest form of law. We in the Bush administration argued that the president could refuse to execute laws that infringed on the executive’s constitutional powers, particularly when it came to national security — otherwise, a Congress that had a different view of foreign policy could order the military to refuse to carry out the president’s orders as Commander-in-Chief, for example. When presidents such as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR said that they would not enforce a law, they did so when the law violated their executive powers under the Constitution or the individual rights of citizens.

The president’s right to refuse to enforce unconstitutional legislation, of course, does not apply here. No one can claim with a straight face that the immigration laws here violate the Constitution.

The second exception is prosecutorial discretion, which is the idea that because of limited resources the executive cannot pursue every violation of federal law. The Justice Department must choose priorities and prosecute cases that are the most important, have the greatest impact, deter the most, and so on. But prosecutorial discretion is not being used in good faith here: A president cannot claim discretion honestly to say that he will not enforce an entire law - especially where, as here, the executive branch is enforcing the rest of immigration law.

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive — not to mention the Framers — cannot support.

On the other side of the debate, there are those who say that Romney was not conservative enough. Romney was chosen as Republican candidate because he covered a kind of moderate middle ground in the GOP, in the hope that this would appeal to middle America's voters come Election Day.

Some commentators now say that a more consistent conservative approach would have been the way forward.

British political journalist Melanie Phillips is one of them:

Britain and the Europeans love Obama because they think he will end American exceptionalism and turn the US into a pale shadow of themselves. What they don’t realise is that, all but lobotomised by consumerist rights, state dependency, victim culture, sentimentality, post-religion, post-nationalism and post-Holocaust and Empire guilt, Britain and Europe are themselves fast going down the civilisational tubes.

Romney lost because he refused to provide an alternative to any of this for fear of being labelled a warmonger, flint-heart or social reactionary. He refused to engage with any of the issues that made this Presidential election so truly momentous. Up against the bullying of the totalitarian left, he ran for cover. He played safe, and as a result only advertised his own weakness and dishonesty. Well, voters can smell inconsistency from a mile away; they call it untrustworthiness, and they are right.

Rush Limbaugh is another:

“If there’s one option that hasn’t been tried in a long time, it’s called conservatism with a capital C,” he said. “This was not a conservative campaign.”

This is the trilemma facing the GOP: compromise, stand firm, or go the full length and be more consistent in its conservative principles.

In Naples Illegal Immigrants Beat Up Police

In Naples, Southern Italy, over 30 North-African illegal immigrants have broken into a police station, assaulting and injuring the officers, 10 of whom had to be taken to the hospital.

This was in response to the rejection of their application for refugee status, for which they are also appealing.

The immigrants belong to a large group of about 1,200 North-Africans who have arrived in Italy as part of the so-called 'Emergency North Africa' program, and are housed in reception centres and hotels in Melito, north of Naples.

During the clashes a police car has also been set on fire. The illegals themselves asked the police to arrest them so that they could remain in Italy. This has given rise to the hypothesis that the illegals committed all these crimes in order to be arrested and avoid being returned to their countries.

Five of them have been arrested.

Once you commit the crime of violating the national borders of a country by entering it illegally, successive crimes must become easier.

AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda

Jihad Watch has published my article AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda:

Pamela Geller’s subway ads have achieved the very important objective of making anti-jihad reach the headlines in the UK.

Even though the coverage was, as was to be expected, mostly unsympathetic to the ads, it’s not often that an ordinary person in Britain turns the TV on and hears the word “jihad” and even less “anti-jihad”, unless in connection with terrorist activities. Counterjihad posters in US main cities’ subways are a revolutionary novelty.

So I think that even if the media reports can distort and give the wrong impression about the campaign, the very fact that the general public learns about it has the positive effect of letting people know that there is a resistance to Islamic violence and arrogance, and a response to anti-Israel ads.

There are many in Britain who don’t believe the propaganda by the political classes and the media. The idea that the BBC, for example, is strongly politically biased is becoming increasingly popular, so we can expect that lots of people will take what it says with a pinch of salt.

The BBC covered the judge ruling in favour of the ads in the New York subway with “Pro-Israel 'Defeat Jihad' ads to hit New York subway”, clearly and predictably sympathetic with the MTA and CAIR point of view:

"Pro-Israel adverts that equate jihad with savagery are to appear in 10 of New York's subway stations next week, after officials failed to block them.
…Aaron Donovan, spokesman for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), told the BBC they had no choice but to run the ad.

"'Our hands are tied,' he said. 'The MTA is subject to a court-ordered injunction that prohibits application of the MTA's existing no-demeaning ad standard.

"'That standard restricted publication of ads that demean people on the basis of their race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification. The judge recognised our intention but found our attempt to be constitutionally deficient.'"

What “race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification” is jihad? It is linked to a particular religion, yes, which is why we should be free to criticize Islam. But the ads don’t demean people for being Muslim, but just for embracing arms and killing other people. Who could object to “demeaning” murderers and terrorists?

Paradoxically, it is those like the MTA spokesman and the others who keep telling us how the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, who in practice, when they hear “jihad”, have the knee-jerk reaction of thinking “Muslims”.

Sky News similarly headlined: “Anti-Jihad Adverts To Run In New York Subway”:

"The controversial leader of the group behind the adverts says she believes that America is at risk from some Muslims.

"The head of a group that has won its fight to run controversial adverts in New York subway stations referring to some Muslims as 'savage' has told Sky News that she will fight 'to the death' for the right to offend people.

"Ms Geller told Sky News that she was unconcerned the adverts might make the subway network a target for violence.

"She said: 'Were there similar ads on the London buses and trains on 7/7? You know
there weren't.

"'I will not abridge my freedoms so as not to offend savages.

"'I won't take responsibility for other people being violent.

"'I live in America and in America we have the first amendment.'

"Ms Geller, who is a prominent supporter of Israel, stressed that she was not referring to all Muslims as savages, only those who engaged in what she characterises as ‘Jihad’.

"She believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country, and her group has launched similar campaigns before."


She believes that. And so believes everybody who has taken the time to look at the evidence as objectively as possible. That reference to “some Muslims” is ambiguous because it seems to imply, again, that Pamela Geller targets Muslims, although, for some unknown reason, not all of them.

Reporting on this without any attempt to explain the reasons behind someone’s actions is in itself deceiving. Telling that Geller “believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country” to an audience that has never been informed about what Islam preaches, how its history unfolded, what its effects globally today are, and what Sharia law involves, is implicitly portraying her as a conspiracy theorist.

Russia Today, another news channel that broadcasts in Britain, reported on the Washington court ruling:

"Judge Collyer openly described the posters as ‘hate speech’, but said the message was protected under the First Amendment as ‘core political speech’ and did not accept the Metro’s argument that it incited violence and constitutes ‘a gamble with public safety’.
AFDI, whose poster has been condemned by over 200 public organizations, had to fight a similar legal battle in New York, again winning the right to place the ads."


The word “hate” is another of those over-used and abused words, like “racism”. The politically correct and those protected by them never hate, they are just righteously angry (against injustice, presumably). Anti-jihadists who write ads hate, but Muslims violently rioting are just angry (even rightly so, because someone provoked them with – how dared they! - a film). The English Defence League staging a peaceful demonstration in Walthamstow is hate, but the far-left extremists and Muslims who pelted them with bottles and bricks only showed their anger against these “bigots”.

Hate has obviously come to mean the thought crime of not thinking politically correctly.

In the press, both The Daily Mail and The Guardian have run several articles on the subject.

They both reported, among other things, on the Mona Eltahawy incident. The MailOnline had an interview with Pamela Hall in which she talked about her plans to sue Eltahawy for the damages she caused to her clothing and equipment during her 'defense of free speech'.

The Guardian, in Comment in Free, asked its readers, “Mona Eltahawy and the anti-Muslim subway ads: is hers the right approach?”. The comments to the post are mostly answering no, drawing a distinction between exercising the freedom of speech and vandalism, and concluding that Eltahawy’s action was damaging public property and therefore illegal. This is one of the ever increasing number of cases in which the people who comment on liberal media’s articles reveal themselves to be much less on the left than the paper itself.

A commenter noticed the “anti-Muslim” in the headline, and wrote: “Strictly speaking, these ads are anti-violent-Jihad rather than anti-Muslim. That is, unless you believe that all Muslims automatically support violent Jihad. But, as we are told here so often, only a tiny, tiny minority of Muslims -- who misunderstand their Religion of Peace -- support violent Jihad. It is these people who are described in the ads as savages.”

UK Asian Machete Gangs Battle in the Streets

The Accrington Observer (via Christian Defence League) reports these events in Accrington, a town in Northern England:

Rival gangs brandishing hammers and machetes clashed on the streets of Accrington.

Around 20 Asian men are believed to have been involved in fought middle of a main road on the outskirts of the town centre.

A 36-year-old man suffered a broken jaw after being clubbed to the back of his head with a hammer during the brawl at around 10pm on Saturday.

Shocking CVTV images of the fight show hooded figures squaring up before the gangs fled as police moved in.

Witnesses described the clash as 'something you would see in America' and some said violence had been brewing at either end of Blackburn Road all day.

Detectives have made three arrests but said they don't know why the violence had taken place.

Detective Inspector Jill Johnston said the brawl may have been pre-planned.

She said 10 extra officers were sent out on patrol in the town centre and surrounding areas following the fight.

DI Johnston, of Accrington CID, said: “For that many men in their 20s and 30s to be fighting in the street, not near a pub or nightclub, is rare.

“Whether it is two groups who have arranged a fight, I don't know.

“It is possibly a dispute between two local Asian families or groups. They are old enough to know better.”

She added: “We are trying to make some sense of it all. We have CCTV footage of the incident. It appears that one group has gone to the scene in vehicles and then entered into a fight.

“We are trying to piece it all together and are hoping to make some more arrests.”

The incident took place at around 10pm on Blackburn Road in Accrington, close to Swiss Street.

Residents said traffic was held up as the gangs fought in the road.

When the police arrived the men all made off.

One businessman, who asked not to be named, said: “It was lads from the top and bottom ends of town.

“There was about 20 lads - some were in cars and were ramming people on the road.

“It looked like a gangland and is a big concern as I live and work around here with my family.”

He added: “They started clashing and waving hammers and machetes around like crazy.

“It was just mad and was going on though the whole day with little clashes. It just came to a head and ended in a big me-lee. It was something you would see in America.”

One Blackburn Road resident, who declined to be named, said more cameras and street patrols are needed.

He said: “We don't know who they were or what it was about. It's very worrying when something like this happens near your home.”

The article refers to "Asian men" and does not indicate whether there is further information about them.

But it's useful to add that Accrington is near Burnley, where this film documenting how large numbers of Muslims have affected local people's lives was made, and Rochdale, where Muslim men groomed and sexually abused white young girls for a decade, undisturbed by police and social services too frightened to intervene.

Newcastle Muslim Players Not Wearing Club Shirt with Wonga Logo

Demba Ba, Papiss Cisse, Cheick Tiote and Hatem Ben Arfa, four Muslim players of the English Premier League team Newcastle United, could refuse to wear their club's new shirt.

Newcastle United's new sponsor is the loan company Wonga, and Islamic Sharia law forbids interest on money lent. Interest is not paid on Islamic bank accounts.

This Islamic prohibition on interest is the reason why the UK's previous Labour government secretly created a loophole allowing Muslims to take a property mortgage without paying interest, which also makes it cheaper for them than for everybody else.

We are all equal before the law but some are more equal than others. When some non-Muslims discovered the loophole and exploited it for themselves, the discovery caused outrage among the British public opinion who was until then unaware of this privilege given to Muslims.

Now the Muslim players of Newcastle United may decide not to wear the shirt with the logo of Wonga.

What is puzzling, though, is that they wore shirts with logos of previous sponsors like Virgin Money, as can be seen from the video above, which was lending money with interest.

This is very similar to Muslims rioting in half the globe for a video posted on YouTube when there are dozens or even hundreds of similar videos on the internet, many of which can be considered as much or even more offensive to extra-sensitive Muslims.

Could it be that we see here the well-known problem of Muslim inbreeding at work?

Is Assad Worse Than The Alternatives?

While Western leaders were fretting over films and cartoons depicting Muhammad without giving a thought to the killing of many Christians for their faith around the world and especially in Muslim countries, this is what was happening in Egypt.

In events being ignored not only by the Egyptian authorities, but also by the mainstream media and human rights organizations in the West, Muslim terrorists have in recent weeks attacked Christian families and forced them out of their homes and businesses in the Sinai town of Rafah. The terrorists have threatened to pursue their jihad against Christians until all of them leave the Sinai.

This, just one of the many attacks, is the new reality for Christians living in the "liberated" areas of the Middle East after the "Arab Spring".

The persecution of Christians in the Islamic world, ignored by the mainstream media, is habitual, almost chronic and is escalating towards reaching epidemic proportions.

As well documented by the scholar and thinker Raymond Ibrahim at raymondibrahim.com and other sources like persecution.org, barnabasfund.org and aina.org, this persecution takes several forms, ranging from the most violent to the "merely" humiliating: sexual abuse of Christian women; attacks against churches, crosses and other symbols of Christianity; apostasy and blasphemy laws punishing with death those who leave or "offend" Islam; forced conversions to Islam; theft and pillage in place of jizya, the tax imposed on non-Muslims; general treatment of Christians as subjugated and intimidated dhimmis, "tolerated", second-class citizens; physical aggression and murder.

These persecutions derive either from the application of Islamic Sharia law or from the Islamic supremacist ideology.

According to the organization International Christian Concern, an estimated 200 million Christians suffer some kind of persecution worldwide.

The problem has been worsened by the Middle East uprisings which began a year ago. Many thought that the "Arab Spring", led by young, Western-educated people using Facebook and Twitter on their mobile phones, would bring democracy, moderation and reform, stop human rights violations, protect the rights of women and religious minorities, lead to the cessation of terrorism and extremist views.

As authors and commentators with an in-depth knowledge of Islam had predicted in early 2011, far from getting better things have got worse in practically all the above areas. They predicted that Islamists, being the only organized opposition with sufficient money and resources, would replace the dictators who had, at least, one positive characteristic: they were secularists who protected the minorities and guaranteed a certain degree of peace among the various sects, tribes or other divisions in the populations they governed.

In Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya, a survey by Abu Dhabi's Gallup Polls found that people feel less safe now than before the revolts took place.

In all those countries Muslim fundamentalists have now more power than they had before. Now Syria is on the same route.

We can already see what lies ahead when we know that in Syria on February 26, for the first time in Syria's modern history, an armed attack has been made on a Catholic monastery: 30 armed and masked jihadis attacked it demanding money.

The Syrian Christian community has suffered a series of brutal murders and kidnappings, with hundreds of Christians killed so far since the anti-government protests started.

A report from the Barnabas Fund charity says that "children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim." In one tragic case, "a young Christian boy was killed by the rebels, who filmed the murder and then claimed that government forces had committed the act." A kidnapped man "was found hanged with numerous injuries", another "was cut into pieces and thrown in a river".

As Raymond Ibrahim describes, "Christian minorities, who, as 10% of the Syrian population, have the most to gain from a secular government and the most to suffer from a state run by Islamic Sharia law, have no choice but to prefer Assad. ...prefer the devil they know to the ancient demon their forefathers knew."

And another report from the Barnabas Fund says: "Christians have mostly stayed away from the protests in Syria, having been well treated and afforded a considerable amount of religious freedom under President Assad's regime. ...Should Assad fall, it is feared that Syria could go the way of Iraq, post-Saddam Hussein. Saddam, like Assad, restrained the influence of militant Islamists, but after his fall they were free to wreak havoc on the Christian community; hundreds of thousands of Christians were consequently forced to flee the violence. Many of them went to Syria."

This does not mean that all Syrian rebels are Islamists: some are and some are not. But, in conclusion, Islamists are the only ones capable of filling the power vacuum after the toppling of Assad as the only organized opposition and in the meantime, in the chaos created by the unrest, they are the ones who are allowed free reign in their anti-Christian feeling and its expressions in the form of kidnapping, ransoming, pillaging and killing people they consider their enemies and inferiors, the "infidel" Christians.

UK Papers Have Few Readers? Tax Internet Users

Leftists love the state, and the bigger it is the better.

The government is there to solve all our problems, they think. So why not use goverment intervention to save from failure UK liberal newspapers whose readership is constantly declining because people got fed up of finding in them the same old Marxist propaganda and anti-Western, pro-Islam, pro-immigration enthusiasm which is now less and less shared by the general population, who now has the free (in every sense) alternative of the internet?

This was the idea of a journalist of - surprise, surprise - The Guardian, the paper's executive investigations editor David Leigh.

His proposal is splendid from a communist viewpoint, and atrocious for everybody else: everyone in the UK with a broadband connection account should be imposed a £2 a month broadband levy, with which to create a fund to be distributed to newspapers in proportion to their UK online readership.

So, as is the usual knee-jerk response of the Left, rather than addressing a problem with a real, concrete solution to it (like, in this case, improving the quality of their rags by better meeting the demands of their potential readership), they want to ask the government to "solve" the problem by pouring more money into it (the "progressives" answer to everything, which achieves nothing except increasing public debt).

And how do you collect this new public money? By raising taxes, of course.

Most British newspapers sales are falling. Last month, The Economist says, the Guardian Media Group "reported an annual loss of around £76m ($121m). Its newspaper unit lost £54m".

Leigh thinks that the solution he proposes is "obvious", but even the online comments to his article clearly show that he is in a tiny minority to believe that although, as is often the case, people like him are probably deluded into thinking that they represent majority views.

And these are also the same "progressives" who keep telling us how they, unlike the nasty Tories who are out of touch with ordinary people, feel our pain in these difficult economic times and know how hard it is for families to get by. And yet they want households to fork out more money just to compensate the financial losses of those papers that people are not prepared to spend money to read.

So for what should they be worth saving?

Geller's Anti-Jihad Ad Makes Headlines

Courageous USA counter-jihadist activist Pamela Geller, Executive Director of the of American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), has brought anti-jihad to national and international media attention, with her ad in New York subway.

The poster, which is a response to anti-Israel ads previously displayed there, has been repeatedly vandalized since its first day, Monday.

Says Pamela Geller about this vandalism:

In a rational society, it would be looked down upon, but more importantly, the defacement is a metaphor for this entire conversation. Hundreds and hundreds of anti-Israel posters ran all over the country. Not one was defaced. One anti-jihad poster goes up, and it's defaced within an hour, while its creator faces defamation, smears and libel. Islamic supremacists and leftist thugs criminally defaced these ads within an hour. This is a physical manifestation of the entire conversation, or lack thereof. Anyone who speaks about jihad and sharia is attacked, defamed, destroyed -- just like these ads. This is exactly what’s happening in the media regarding jihad coverage in general. Anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-sharia hate is all over the airwaves, but anyone who dares to speak the truth about Islam and jihad in the media is immediately smeared and defamed. You can't have this conversation in the media, any more than I can present these pro-Israel ads, and receive any semblance of fair treatment.

Does Racism Mean Anything Anymore?

England soccer team's former captain John Terry leaves international football. "England captain John Terry quits international football because he thinks FA have already decided he's guilty of racism charge - even though he was cleared by a court of law" (Daily Mail).

His career is the latest victim (although it sounds odd using that term about ultra-rich and famous soccer players) of the football world and authorities' obsession with racism. Another victim is English football itself, which has lost a valuable player - and God knows they could do with people like that.

Former England manager Fabio Capello acted with much integrity when he stood by Terry and resigned over the FA's decision to strip Terry of his captaincy before his trial.

The absurdity of the accusation of racism moved by the Football Association against him was revealed during the trial, when one after the other several black or half-black colleagues of Terry's testified that he never displayed any racist behaviour, quite the contrary.

What does then "racism" mean? Even if somebody - and I don't know if Terry did, actually he was accused of just saying "black" which can hardly be considered an insult - but even if someone, in a moment of anger during an altercation, especially in a heated, adrenalin-supercharged situation like a soccer match, used a racial epithet that wouldn't mean he is a racist.

If a man's whole behaviour, ideas and attitudes are non-racist, saying "nigger" does not make him a racist.

"Racism" is a much-overused and abused word which, like many others - like "family" - has come to mean whatever anyone wishes it to mean. And I'm not saying that, it's the Macpherson's Inquiry into the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993 which enshrined that, opening the door to the abuses we witness today, with these words: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".

That literally means that a racist incident can be anything, without restriction.

Wikipedia Unreliable, CNN Says

Just a confirmation of what we already noticed.

This article on CNN on Wikipedia's unreliability refers to Wikipedia business and celebrity pages, but the easiness with which inaccuracies and misleading statements can spread on that online 'encyclopaedia' is true for all of it, especially if they are politically correct and pro-Islam.

Just look at the Wikipedia entry for Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Islamic and Arabic chief centre of learning in the world. At Al-Azhar subjects that we would not normally associate with a prestigious university are taught as part of the curriculum, such as "The Treachery of the Jews" and "Islamic Jihad and Its Various Forms", as illustrated in the above video of a programme shown on the Egyptian Al-Rahma TV. The video is entitled Egyptian Cleric Miqdam Al-Khadhari on the Benefits of Al-Azhar Curricula: The Only Textbooks to Militarize the Students and Teach Jihad and Hatred of Jews Extensively.

According to Faith Freedom, Al-Azhar University curricula encourages extremism and terrorism.

And even the ultra PC New York Times reported this, happened in 2009:

Inside Al Azhar Mosque, a 1,000-year-old center of religious learning, the preacher was railing on Friday against Jews. Outside were rows of riot police officers backed by water cannons and dozens of plainclothes officers, there to prevent worshipers from charging into the street to protest against the war in Gaza.

“Muslim brothers,” said the government-appointed preacher, Sheik Eid Abdel Hamid Youssef, “God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at and whom he cursed so he made monkeys and pigs out of them. They killed prophets and messengers and sowed corruption on Earth. They are the most evil on Earth.” [Emphasis added]

On top of everything else, this continuous reference to animal epithets is speciesist, as well as anti-Semitic.

And now, just a few days ago, we have this (from Breitbart):

Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh Dr.Ahmed El-Tayyeb has called for enacting an international law that bans the denigration and desecration of Islam and its sanctities, which he said, have been violated by some "fools" who do not know the value of social peace between peoples, and do not mind fueling discord.

Dr.El-Tayyeb also demanded the punishment of those who committed such a "heinous and shameful '' act against Islam's Prophet Mohammad, peace and blessing be upon him (PBUH), calling meantime on the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to work for issuing such a law that would criminalize the insulting of Islamic sanctities and those of all universal religions, which, he added, would cause the disturbance of world peace and threaten international security, both are responsibilities of the UN and its Secretary General.

Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar , the oldest religious university worldwide, likened what happened against Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) to claims of insulting Semitism that has resulted in verdicts against several people all over the world, including thinkers and scientists.

El-Tayyeb added in his statement that silence does not befit officials at this dangerous and critical situation, stressing that such a "foolishness" should not go unpunished.

Interestingly enough, another Wikipedia entry, on Islam and Antisemitism, says:

Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque and Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University, and "perhaps the foremost Sunni Arab authority", has been criticized for remarks made in April 2002, described Jews in his weekly sermon as "the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs." [Emphasis added]

Despite all this, the Wikipedia page on Al-Azhar University does not make any mention of anti-Semitism or jihad, and the only reference to freedom of speech is to say that Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy in October 2007 "drew allegations of stifling freedom of speech when he asked the Egyptian government to toughen its rules and punishments against journalists". But the naughty Tantawy was "a supporter of then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak", so it doesn't count.

Overall, someone who didn't know anything about Al-Azhar University, reading Wikipedia would get the impression that it's an erudite, nice place where everything is hunky-dory as befits a religion of peace.