The Looting of Italy

This is an article that was written and sent to me by Alessandra Nucci, an Italian journalist and friend. It describes what the European Union has done to Italy. Since it's a very long article, I've broken it down in 4 parts. Here is the first part.

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How would you feel if for years you had been picking up shipwrecked penniless migrants from Africa, dumped by criminal agents all over the Mediterranean, ferrying them to your shores and taking them in by the thousands, only to see yourself made the butt of sarcasm, reproaches and even pecuniary fines for not doing enough?

How would you feel if the EU, to which you have contributed and continue to contribute billions, were to ignore your pleas for help, and yours alone?

How would you feel if you were to help debtors out to the tune of billions of euros, then were to find yourself painted in the media as being a spendthrift recipient of bailouts?

How would you feel if in order to bail other countries out, you had to borrow money yourself, at double the interest, ruining your own credit rating while praise is heaped on the borrower countries for their newly shining performance?

These are just a few examples of what has been happening in the last several years to Italy.

At the end of June 2012, and then again at the beginning of July, the headlines in the international press carried news of the “bailout of Spain and Italy”, placing the two on the same level. Yet it was Spain that was being bailed out while Italy is the third most generous contributor to the funding.

This is just the latest blow to the reputation of the euro-zone’s third-largest economy (and the world’s eighth largest), dealt like all the others in a seemingly innocent manner by an international press which is either superficial or conniving in what amounts to the looting of Italy.

By looting I mean the process of cheapening the country, its name and its worth by means of discredit nonchalantly but relentlessly sown in every possible way and direction, from within and without, to drive the value of its assets down and make them more … affordable. This has quietly been going on since 1992, but was stepped up with a double-barrelled aggression, on a military and financial level, in 2011.


The Philosophical Divide

The world, and the stock markets, are being told today that the countries insultingly referred to with the acronym "PIIGS" are a bunch of lazy, irresponsible spendthrifts who, after piling debt upon debt, are now squandering other people's hard-earned money. Therefore they deserve whatever degree of impoverishment they may get. Well, the truth is mostly the exact opposite. The financial élite gathered around the EU buildings in Brussels have been quietly at work undermining the economies of Southern Europe, out of the need to save their own.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the “PIIGS” countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) all have a historically Catholic or Christian Orthodox background, which the common assumptions underlying the culture have maintained as a basic frame of reference, even if the number of liturgically-practicing faithful is at a minimum. On the other hand, the countries that are aggressively posing as having been economically wise and virtuous (Germany, France, Belgium) are leaders on the road to the predominance of a secular culture.

In Italy’s case, we are clearly a big disappointment to the EU secularists. Once the showcase land of successful inroads against Catholic norms (our 1978 law provides abortion free of charge to all, within the first three months of pregnancy, for whatever reasons of health, including the prospective mother’s psychological duress), Italy now identifies with a firm and widespread resistance against the pressure of gay lobbies and pro-euthanasia activism (described in my piece “The Struggle For Italy’s Soul”).

The last straw, to the pagans in Brussels, was probably the march in Rome organized by the Forum of Families in 2007, which mobilized over a million people in defence of heterosexual marriage. Oh, yes, and also the sensational defence of the Crucifix upheld by Italians of all stripes, including agnostics and even a few atheists, against a decision by the Court in Strasbourg in 2006 to prohibit its being exhibited on classroom and courtroom walls. Italy appealed the decision and won, but the occult powers that inhabit the EU-governing bodies have dug in their heels and clearly intend to make us pay for it. Their objective? Nothing less than physically taking over the country, thereby finishing the job that had been started in the mid-nineteenth century.

The irony of this all is that Italian citizens find themselves being told they must look up to those who have cleverly installed themselves in power, and be grateful to those who are actually ruining the economy under the guise of fixing it. Like the Masonic élite who took power in the nineteenth century, they are impoverishing us while declaring themselves Catholic, and then coming, like the elders to Job, to lecture and teach us our lessons.


Before Prime Minister Mario Monti

Until ex EU commissioner Mario Monti was sent in to help, Italy was doing better than all of the other EU countries, bar only Germany. We had a higher surplus than France, a higher surplus than the UK, and only a slightly lower surplus than Germany. Our banks had almost none of the toxic assets that glutted the banks of France and above all of Germany. Our unemployment was manageable. Our companies and trade marks were and still are so successful that they are constantly being bought up by foreign companies.

All this was despite the vast amounts of money that Italy shelled out to line the coffers of the European Union. According to the official data released by the EU Commission, the balance of payments from Italy surpass incoming funds by 25 billion. By Italian official accounts the real amount is 40 billion.

Yes, we did have a huge public debt, but the private debt was almost non-existent, which, together with the solid economy, guaranteed that the bonds would be paid back. In other words, our debt, like Japan’s even bigger one, was manageable.

Some figures? Italy’s GDP in 2010 was $2.1 trillion. We were the 8th exporters in the world ($448 billion foreign exports), and the 6th preferred nation for investors (source: World Bank). Unemployment was at a manageable 8.3%, which was lower than the euro-zone average of 10.2% and also lower than the US's 9.1 % - and that is despite our very high population density.

Without the interest on our national debt, we would have been way past France and Germany. The prospects for 2012 were that France would have a deficit of 2.4% of its GDP while Italy was predicted to have a 2% surplus, which was to be even greater than Germany's, forecast at 1.4%.

The debt was bringing us down, of course, but the real debt parade, which must include private debts, has the United Kingdom in n.1 position. The international media, however, take care not to point that out, as they considerately avoided making a fuss when then Prime Minister Gordon Brown turned the UK into the first European country to nationalize a bank (Northern Rock) to prevent it from failing, in 2008.

So, well, Italy had it fairly good. Russia guaranteed the flow of oil from the North, and Libya guaranteed it from south of the Mediterranean. Most importantly, a costly treaty with Libya had finally put a stop to the flow of illegal immigration that had been overwhelming the country, weighing down on the economy (and the debt) and almost literally crowding out Italians themselves, thanks to Leftist quotas discriminating against Italians.

Why am I writing all this in the past tense? Because this was the situation before Nato’s 2010 attack on Libya, pretending Gaddafi was killing his own people, and before 2011 when ex EU commissioner Mario Monti was sent in to help. Mr Monti’s CV reads like a page out of a book on conspiracy theories. He is a past official advisor to Goldman Sachs and to Moody’s, president of the Trilateral Commission for Europe and a member of the Bilderberger clique. Since his sudden appearance on the scene in mid-November 2011, not elected but appointed single-mindedly by our ex(?)-communist President Giorgio Napolitano to head the Italian government, Italy’s sole negative economic index, the public debt, rather than diminishing has soared. At the end of 2011 it was 1897.9 billion euros, four months later it was 1948.5 billion: a 50 billion increase in a matter of 120 days. And we are now officially in a recession, whose beginning is vaguely being retro-dated to precede November’s unacknowledged coup d’état.


Read the second, third and fourth parts of "The Looting of Italy":

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

What’s Next for Britain?

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


After an earthquake, we gather the pieces hurled and scattered all over the place by the magnitude of the event, we put them together and reconstruct.

The big question in British politics is who is going to win the 2015 General Elections for the British Parliament, which will produce the majority to form the new government.

The local and European elections have been much anticipated before and analysed at length afterwards because they are supposed to give an idea of the next occupant of 10 Downing Street, the British Prime Minister’s residence.

But the new four-main-party-system that UKIP has introduced by storm makes these predictions much more complicated. UKIP has been the nightmare of pollsters and number crunchers, who admit defeat in appraising the current and, more importantly, future situation.

Without UKIP, it would be relatively easy to forecast next year’s results. If, as it’s often the case, on May 22 the incumbent party in government had fared badly and the opposition well, it would be seen as a sign that it’s time for the usual reversal of roles between them.

But now the Labour Party in opposition, although electorally performing better than the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in the government coalition, has also haemorrhaged a stream of votes to UKIP. Therefore its percentage in the polls is not as much higher than the Tories as it should be for a safe victory prediction in 2015.

On the other hand, most votes for UKIP have come from the Conservatives (Prime Minister David Cameron’s party). This means that these two parties of the Right will be forced to share votes at the General Elections too, thus reducing the Tories’ chances to win. But by how much we don’t know, because a certain numbers of people who vote for UKIP at the European Elections won’t do so when it comes to electing the UK Parliament and deciding the next Prime Minister.

It may seem appropriate to choose UKIP, a party which is largely one-issue (leaving the European Union), at the Euro polls, but from the national government many voters, albeit sympathetic to Farage’s views, want something more. They require a wide range of policies that will affect their lives, on the economy, education, health, crime, welfare, housing, employment, and so on. It’s difficult to know how many will desert UKIP for the Tories next year.

The three main parties, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats - often placed in the same bracket and derisively called “LibLabCon” to indicate that what they have in common is much more significant than their differences, giving the electorate no real choice –, inevitably did not understand or take on board the message of the vote.

In order to do so they would have to change what they are to become something completely different. All their existence, aims and policies are predicated on carrying on as usual, offering the country more of the same, the only difference being in degree. Yesterday it was recognition of same-sex civil unions, today the law on same-sex marriage. Today it’s racist to quote Churchill’s anti-Islam words, tomorrow it will be racist describing a pet as “a black cat with a bit of white”.

Incidentally, many votes were lost by the Conservatives to UKIP because of the Tory Prime Minister’s David Cameron insistence on making homosexual marriage legal.

All the three main parties are egalitarian and strict followers of political correctness. They give the public what they want, not what people ask. They vilify people for asking it, explicitly or implicitly calling them names. They never stop to wonder whether people might be right; at most they express sympathy, understanding and “concern” for how people feel, not so subtly implying that those feelings are irrational and based on false perceptions, whereas reality is what the business of politics is all about so those feelings should be disregarded.

This sums up the reasons why many voted UKIP:

Despite all of this, I will vote UKIP at the Euro-elections, and there are two main reasons for this: first, that I wish to carry the message, very strongly, to the LibLabCon alliance that they do not have a right to be in government, they do not have a right to power—something that Labour and Conservatives have, I think, utterly forgotten (leading inexorably to a corruption almost as total as the Republicans and Democrats in Washington).

Some pundits informed us that UKIP’s voters are mostly men, over 50, blue collar. Implicit in this announcement is the view that such demographics should say a lot about UKIP, specifically how bad it must be if it attracts predominantly people of this despicable sort.

It’s reminiscent of the media in the US and elsewhere, which at the time of the presidential elections were highlighting how Mitt Romney was disproportionately preferred by men, with the same ominous implications of backwardness and “uncoolness”.

Similarly, a frequent attack against counterjihad websites is that their readers are mainly males.

I know that, despite being a female, I’ll be accused of sexism and misogyny for saying this. Does everybody ignore or pretend to ignore that the overwhelming majority of philosophers, scientists, inventors, artists, musicians, authors, historians, industrialists – in short all those who have pushed the human machine forward, the makers of human progress – have been men? If it had been left only to women, we don’t know how far from cave dwelling we would be today.

For whatever reason, this is simply the historical reality. Socialists, feminists and their useful idiots may think whatever they like about the causes of this 100-percent-true fact, but they shouldn’t be allowed to be so disingenuous as to pretend that women are the only force for improvement and progress in human affairs.

That London is not part of the UK any more, due to its strong immigrant and Muslim presence, and is becoming increasingly so, was confirmed once again by the last vote pattern.

London is the only region where UKIP is still struggling, whereas Labour is doing fine. Immigrants in general and Muslims in particular tend to vote for the Labour Party, which has opened wide the doors of the country to them when in government, is overgenerous in its welfare policies for everyone –natives, foreigners legally or illegally here – and is Islamophile to the point of destruction, sorry, distraction.

This is only one of several cases in which the Muslim vote has shaped European politics in recent times. In some cases it’s proved decisive: the analysis of the various groups’ votes showed that, without Muslims in France, Sarkozy would have won, so the election of socialist Francois Hollande as President was determined by the followers of Islam.

What’s in the future for UKIP and for Britain?

The UKIP will try to get its first Member of the British House of Commons elected on this 5 June, at the Newark, Nottinghamshire, by-election, caused by the suspension from Parliament and subsequent resignation as MP of Patrick Mercer.

European UKIP representatives, including Farage, have said that at the General Elections of 2015 they'll target and concentrate their efforts particularly on those constituencies where they already have councillors or have done well in the local elections. They say that this has been the successful strategy of the Lib Dems, who have been in a similar position of outsiders in the past.

In the long term, Farage aims to repeat the destruction of Canada’s Conservative Party two decades ago, when the rebel Right-wing Reform Party, that many compare to UKIP itself, caused another political earthquake.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Farage said that a Canadian-style Tory meltdown “could happen” in Britain. Canada’s century-old ruling Conservative Party was destroyed overnight in the country’s 1993 election by the populist, low-tax Reform Party, which had been called “racist, sexist and homophobic”, some of the epithets thrown at UKIP, along with the “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” that PM Cameron used for UKIP supporters.

The split in Canada’s Centre Right enabled the Liberals, Canada’s equivalent of our Labour Party, to take power.

But after ten years of infighting, the Reform revolution succeeded. The Canadian Alliance, a merger of Reform with the ruins of Canada’s old-style Tories, led to former Reform official Stephen Harper becoming Prime Minister in 2006.

Farage compared attacks on himself to those on Reform Party leader:

‘They called him a Right-wing extremist, a nutter, away with the fairies, he’ll never get anywhere and what happens? They won one by-election, a schoolmistress way out West, who resisted every bribe and temptation to rejoin the Conservative Party.

‘Now you have a Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who was first elected on a Reform ticket, as were half the Cabinet.

‘Don’t think this can’t happen here. The public want something different. We are catalysing a big change in British politics on fundamental issues that have been brushed under the carpet and ignored by a completely out-of-touch career political class for too long.’

In all this euphoria, we mustn’t forget UKIP’s limitation, first of all that the party’s not opposed to Islam. In fact, it even has British parliamentary candidates who openly advocate Sharia law, like Dean Perks:

"Sharia law, in my opinion, works as a prevention. And prevention is better than cure. If you think you're going to get your hands chopped off for pinching something, you won't pinch it."

A UKIP council candidate who tweeted that Islam is "evil" was suspended from the party. Farage distanced himself from his own immigration spokesman, Gerard Batten, who had proposed a special code of conduct in the form of a charter calling on Muslims to accept equality, reject violence and accept the need to modify the Quran, which Muslims had to sign. And in public speeches UKIP leader is careful to limit his comments on Islam to politically correct ones.

Even more tellingly, membership of UKIP is forbidden to current or even previous members of the English Defence League and other groups who are outspoken on the Islamisation of Britain and dare hinder it.

"Earthquake" in the UK

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


"An earthquake" is how the United Kingdom Indepence Party (UKIP) called what happened Thursday 22 May, when all Britain voted to elect its share of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and various parts of the country voted to elect local councils.

While the results of the Euro Elections were not announced until Sunday to wait for the results of the whole European Union, where some countries voted later, the local elections results were known immediately, and were pretty much as Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, described them: an earthquake.

In a country with a three-main-party system (Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats), the UKIP became firmly established as the fourth party. It didn't gain overall control of any local council, but that doesn't tell the whole story.

Labour won 338 more councillors than it previously had, the Conservatives were down 231 councillors, the Liberal Democrats took a bashing losing 307, as many as 40 percent, of their councillors, and UKIP went from 2 to an astonishing 163 councillors, turning from a fringe, tiny party into a serious contender for government.

But it was tonight, at the European Elections, that UKIP got a real triumph. Not only it topped the polls with more votes than all other parties for the first time in its history, but also its victory marked the first time in which a nationally-held election has not been won by either the Conservative Party or the Labour Party since 1906.

This historical event upsets all the current paradigms of British politics. For a start, it makes it much more difficult to predict future election results, first of all the 2015 general elections for the British Parliament, the "real" polls that will decide who's going to govern the UK.

A three-party system is easier to understand and forecast than a four-party one. Without UKIP, Labour might have been cast as the next British goverment, benefiting from the dissatisfaction from the supposed "cuts" and "austerity" measures that the present coalition of Tories and LibDems in goverment had to enforce to heal at least in part the ruinously irresponsible economy and welfare policies of the past Labour administration.

Something similar happened in other parts of Europe, hence the BBC's headline "Eurosceptic 'earthquake' rocks EU elections", in reference to the parallel result of Marine Le Pen's Front National which won a record victory in France.

Back in the UK, the Liberal Democrats were almost wiped out from the European Parliament, being left with just one MEP of the 11 they previously had. This is Catherine Zena Bearder, standing in the South East, the largest region in the UK, where my party, one-year-old Liberty GB, got 2494 votes.

These results show a clear shift in public opinion towards a decidedly anti-immigration, anti-European-Union stance.

The reaction of the (previously) three main parties and of the liberal media is interesting because it shows that they simply didn't get it.

They cling to justifications, rationalisations, excuses, pedantic nitpicking, like "it hasn't been an earthquake because UKIP has no control of a single council", or "it's just a temporary protest vote, they'll come back to us".

The Lib Dems project onto the UKIP's future what happened to them. They, never genuinely contemplating the possibility of being in government, were ruined by their experience in power, where they didn't keep their utopian promises to the electorate, and in an act of wishful thinking predict that the same will happen to UKIP.

My favourite is the reaction of Labour. Faithful to their Marxist heritage, they explain everything away with the economy. People on the doorstep tell us that they are not concerned about immigration per se, they say, but only about its economic consequences for jobs, wages, housing and so on.

We'll sort these things out, they continue, the usual Labour way, by wasting more of public money and increasing taxes.

They don't realise that no people "on the doorstep" will tell any Labour representative that they don't want immigration for reasons of culture and identity, not just economics, lest they'll be considered racist by the aforementioned Labour person.

And UKIP took votes from all parties, including Labour, whose traditional base of working-class voters got progressively dissatisfied with it.

People who until now voted for the mainstream, Establishment parties - and people who didn't vote at all - have decided to stop being silent and taken action by choosing a party that says many of the things they think but cannot express.

We all take great hope and encouragement from this trend.

It took UKIP 20 years from its foundation to get to this point, and it struggled for recognition for a very long time.

There was a time when a vote for UKIP was considered wasted, but it turned out to be instrumental in putting pressure on the Tories on the issue of leaving the European Union. There will be a time when voting for Liberty GB will put pressure on UKIP on the issue of addressing the threat of Britain's Islamisation, on which Farage's party has so far been persistently silent.

A Tale of Two Conferences

I recently attended two conferences. One left me full of enthusiasm, the other dispirited. The former was the Campaign for an Independent Britain's rhetorical-question-titled conference “Can Christianity and the European Union Survive One Another” on February 22. The latter was the London Evening Standard's “London Needs More Immigration” debate on March 3.

All this shows very clearly why opinion polls and other demographic or epidemiological (in medicine) studies need samples which are highily representative of the populations surveyed in order to have any meaning at all.

Neither meeting's audience was representative, both were very much self-selected, which explains my elation at the first and frustration - if not despair - at the second.

All three speeches at the Christianity and EU discussion were excellent and inspiring. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s was my favourite. His speech “Christian Europe or Federal Europe” I consider one of the best I’ve heard in a very long time. He went through a concise but complete history of the close relationship between Christianity and the West, covering all the important points in a short time, and in so doing answering some of the questions I had in my mind. An illuminating speech.

Last but not least, to see a large room full of Christians and other people quite enthusiastic and prepared to do something about Christianity was a novel, rare, wonderful experience. Admittedly, the average age was very high, which could be the only worrisome aspect.

The audience at the London immigration debate was larger, several hundred people, on average younger and multicultural.

The speakers were lacklustre, and some, like Labour MP for Tottenham David Lammy, seemed more suitable to address a kindergarten assembly than a gathering of adults interested in political issues. Suffice it to say that, for him, immigration's gift of Kylie Minogue to London was a good enough reason to support the population replacement the city has been going through.

To me, a long-time sufferer of addiction to Question Time (often a stressful experience), the discussion was very evocative of the BBC program, in that the views expressed seemed so much at odds with both reality and what people in the street would say.

Where the 70% of people in Britain who want immigration to be reduced or stopped completely - although apparently they are 65% in London, which is still two thirds anyway - had been hiding during the ES debate I don't know, but they certainly were not there.

A vote was taken at the end, which showed a majority in favour of the motion “London Needs More Immigration”. That's why George Whale of Liberty GB, who also attended the conference, suggested as this article's title "London Surrenders".

Questions that should have been asked at the immigration debate but never were

1) So far we've talked about immigration, but not much about immigrants. A particularly numerous group of them is Muslims. If the panellists take a look at a map of the world and listen to international news, they'll see that in every country in which Muslims reach a certain number - they don't need to be the majority, only a sizeable minority -, they try to impose sharia law on everybody and often use violent means to that end. What makes the panel think that Britain, once Muslims become 10, 20, or 30 percent of the population, will be the exception to the universal rule?

2) Member of the panel and Labour MP for Tottenham David Lammy said that immigration should not be stopped - far from it -, but all debate on immigration should, as it's toxic, like the debate on abortion in America. Although I disagree on his suggested repression of freedom of speech, I find his parallel appropriate. I'd also add that the reason why both debates are toxic and divisive is the same. Abortion on demand was undemocratically imposed on the American people, the majority of whom were opposed to abortion, by a in which not a law of the US Congress, but unelected judges of the Supreme Court liberalised it in the landmark Roe v. Wade case ruling. Similarly, mass and uncontrolled immigration from all over the world was imposed on the British by successive governments which never bothered to consult the opinion of the people about this huge social experiment which was going to change their lives forever in the most dramatic of ways. Doesn't the panel think that divisions within a nation are created by undemocratic and unpopular decisions of the ruling elites, which lead to forced conformism by a part of the population and opposition by the other?

3) Panellist Tessa Jowell, Labour MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, and others have claimed that resistance to change is a major reason for the hostility towards uncontrolled immigration. Does the Right Honourable Dame Tessa believe that all change should be welcome just for the sake of novelty? Should Germans have been happy when Hitler, who represented lots of changes, became chancellor?

4) If immigrants are so beneficial for London's (and one presumes Britain's) economy, how is it that, after many years of this beneficial open-doors immigration policies, the country has a national debt of one and a quarter trillion pounds, a peacetime record, equivalent to 76.6% of GDP (the highest ratio to GDP since World War II and predicted to rise to 94.30% under current trends) - although, factoring in all liabilities including state and public sector pensions, the real national debt is closer to £4.8 trillion, some £78,000 for every person in the UK -, growing at a rate of over 5,000 pounds per second? To give you an idea of how fast public debt is growing, it was only £0.53 trillion, less than half, in 2008.

Could this be because the present immigration and welfare policies, working together, are bankrupting Britain? Don't take my word for it. The most far-reaching study ever conducted on the impact of migration on taxpayers, a University College London’s study covering 16 years, concluded that immigrants from outside the EEA (European Economic Area) take £100 billion more in benefits than they pay back in taxes. Non-Europeans immigrants dig a deep hole in our finances: the amount taken in benefits and services by them is 14% higher than money put back.

European immigrants pay 4 per cent more into the tax system than they take out, while British-born people pay in 7 per cent less than they receive from the state.

But this does not mean that, as the spin goes, immigrants positively contribute to Britain. It just means that a high number of even hard-working European immigrants hurts the British economy, as they take jobs that would otherwise be filled by British people, who in turn because of that are on the dole and a burden for taxpayers. If natives did those jobs, they would contribute to the revenue the same amount of tax as the immigrants, instead of living on benefits.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) report Work for the Dole shows that it’s not true, as we often hear, that the jobs simply aren’t there, particularly with the difficult economic situation. Its analysis shows that 3.5 million new jobs have been created since 1997, and that employment today stands at a higher level than at any time in UK history. As 2.5 million jobs were created since 2000, out-of-work welfare claimant rolls stayed about the same. UK welfare claimants were not moving into work as jobs were created, while 68% of the jobs created were taken by immigrants prepared to work hard rather than rely on benefits, and while many British people on out-of-work benefits evidently weren’t interested in the new jobs.

Stopping uncontrolled immigration, combined with a plan for helping and training natives on the dole to get into work - as outlined in the TPA’s document -, is what is needed, and this is what the Liberty GB party has in its manifesto policies.

The question for the panel is: why don't you all stop talking nonsense and start joining and voting for Liberty GB?

Immigration: UK public was never consulted

It’s so odd that many British politicians, especially those of the Euro-skeptic variety, always go on saying that the UK public has not been consulted regarding Britain’s position in the European Union now that the process of European integration is political and not just economical as it was when the UK held a referendum on the subject in 1975.

It’s odd because no politician ever, at least in the mainstream political parties, has ever uttered a word about another dramatically important issue affecting British people’s lives much more profoundly than the country’s European membership.

I refer to the mass immigration, legal and illegal, of so-called economic migrants as well as political refugees and asylum seekers, genuine and bogus alike, that has inundated the country with a number of people from all over the world so large and so unmanageable that nobody knows exactly what it is.

I said it’s odd but in fact it isn’t. There’s a crucial reason why the decisions about mass immigration have been taken by the various successive governments from the post-war period to now without bothering to find out what the people actually wanted.

Because politicians know extremely well that the vast majority of the British population do not want this large-scale demographic experiment performed on their own skin, as all opinion polls clearly show.

Welfare State, Students, Immigration

In the UK there is a constant talk of the need for immigrants’ skills and an endless repetition of the fact that there are many necessary jobs and positions which would be left vacant without immigration.

Let’s see. Is it the number of unskilled and manual workers which is not high enough to fill the vacancies?

In that case, why are there millions of people on welfare in Britain?

In the United Kingdom, 5.6 million people of working age are not working and receive state hand-outs in various forms – and this number has remained stubbornly high even at times when the economy has grown (it has been over 5 million for more than a decade).

It is a well-known fact that the system is abused and the welfare money goes to many people who don’t or shouldn’t really need it, but that’s what happens.

And if the labour force which is needed and imported from abroad is composed of skilled, professional and intellectual workers, why are all the university students supported in their studies by the taxpayers through various public grants and loans not available to fill these positions?

Because, having removed the market as the force to influence people’s choice in university courses and careers, we end up with a great number of the university population specializing in ‘media studies’ and other subjects which are of no or little relevance to the country’s economy, while the much-needed skills are overlooked.

After all, if the state is paying for somebody’s studies, why should that person or his/her family bother so much about what course or faculty to choose? It is not an investment to consider carefully.

So, British taxpayers are in the enviable position of having to support an enormous number of unemployed unskilled or semi-skilled people because ‘there are no jobs’, having to pay for students’ education and, on top of all that, being told that they have to put up with huge figures of immigration because ‘there are not enough workers and skills in this country’.

Lampedusa, Italy. Part I: What Happened in 2011

During the "Arab Spring", the tiny island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily, due to its unfortunate vicinity to North Africa saw the arrival of around 50,000 migrants mostly from Tunisia and Libya in 2011.

We know that the use of words like "invasion" or "flooding" is considered racist by the liberal media, but how else is it possible to describe this situation?

Lampedusa has a total population of just over 6,000 people only when you also include the inhabitants of the nearby island of Linosa, with which it forms Italy's southernmost local council.

Invasion does not need to be military. Any violation of a sovereign country's borders is a crime and an aggression.

There was even an allegation that some women had been thrown overboard by the migrants during the sea crossing from Africa to prevent the overloaded boats from capsizing, according to an eye witness aboard the boats.

The many thousands of immigrants and refugees fleeing the chaos of the "revolution", among whom were suspected escaped prisoners, were then gradually transferred to mainland Italy and other EU countries, but there were repeated times when the number of newcomers was higher than that of locals.

On those occasions when natives were outnumbered, there were tales of local women having to be accompanied everywhere to protect them from immigrants' unwanted attentions, sacked shops, flats' doors forced open, people returning home to find Tunisians sitting at the dining table eating and, after their departures, some householders even discovering faeces inside saucepans.

The island just became what one newspaper called "a huge immigrant camp".

Maybe expecting to find a hotel reception and with scarcely a thought about the crisis they were creating in the small island, the illegal immigrants were complaining, as in the above video, describing what they found in Lampedusa as "shameful" and pontificating "the reception is zero" as if they had been giving a hotel review on TripAdvisor.

The attitude of the Tunisian refugee in the video is particularly enlightening, showing an entitlement mentality according to which Europe, the land of democracy, justice and human rights, was expected, as was its duty, to give all these things to him and his companions, and Italians should have "taken the time" to provide them with all they needed.

This video confirms what Lampedusa mayor Bernardino De Rubeis said: "We have here young Tunisians who arrogantly want everything immediately, just like criminals, ready to endanger our lives and theirs". He later added: "We're in a war, and the people will react. There are people here who want to go out into the streets armed with clubs".

The one expressed in the film is the typical mindset of many Muslim immigrants to Europe. These are the people usually portrayed as "victims" for whom everything else has to be sacrificed.

And when they don't get what they want, there is trouble. In April 2011 the illegals, unhappy about their accommodation conditions, set fire to a guest house where they were staying at the expense of a charity organization, and threw rocks at the police.

On 20 September 2011, similar story: the immigrants torched the reception centre where they were accommodated, destroying three buildings in the holding facility, and clashed with the police, while the media were blaming for the arson everyone, the Italian government, the provisional Tunisian government, the European Union, except the actual perpetrators. This was the second time that the reception centre had been burnt down by refugees, the first during an inmate riot destroying a large part of the complex on 19 February 2009.

The desperate Lampedusa natives, seeing their predicament not understood or helped by Italian or European authorities, in March 2011 even resorted to stopping for an hour the Italian Coast Guard patrol boat, loaded with still more North Africans, from docking at the harbour, and repeated this sort of "direct action" several times.

Lampedusa lives mainly on tourism, and the thousands of migrants, often behaving not exactly as gentlemen, were making the place inhospitable to visitors. In this financial crisis every job is precious. In 2011, the tourist season started in August, two months later than usual.

In addition, the island did not have the agricultural and water resources to deal with the refugee emergency.

And anyway, the crux of the matter is that people should not be forced into that situation through the moral blackmail accusation of not acting charitably.

Unfortunately these are, as Oriana Fallaci said, the enemies we welcome as friends, and their sob stories seem to have the desired effect on many people, in Italy as all over Europe.

The Arab Spring in Europe

From The Arab Spring in Europe, in the Gatestone Institute:

In a 1996 interview, Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin stated that "every Arab rule that does not rule by the law of Allah and his religion is to be rejected." That was 17 years ago, long before the so-called Arab Spring, the terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe and the "days of rage" declared by Muslim rioters worldwide; now the breathing spaces between the attacks get shorter, and turn into years of rage.

One would expect that Muslim immigrants, whose children were born in the West, would adapt, become part of the Western society and partake of its freedom -- otherwise, why did they immigrate? What we see, however, is the opposite. The beheading of a British soldier in London, and the murder of a soldier in France, are only the beginning of a wave of violence and a dictatorship of fundamentalists who will call the tune. The wave of riots and vandalism carried out by Muslim immigrants in France in 2005 was just a hint at what is to come. The immigrants are brainwashed in the mosques, the madrasas [Islamic religious schools] and informal discussion groups, all of which represent the West as worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.

Western women in particular are easy prey; it is not difficult to portray them as licentious whores. Since in Muslim culture the honor of a man is dependent on the behavior of his woman (like chattel), especially when it comes to accepting the laws of modesty, chastity and sexual conduct in general, for Muslim men the West has no honor whatsoever. The face of Europe is changing rapidly, as is clear to anyone walking along a street in Paris, London or Berlin. The veiled women are immediately obvious, their hair covered by hijabs or their faces covered with niqabs; their personalities, identities, features and femininity obliterated, their freedom of movement hindered, ground under the heel of religious dictates chained to the past, despite their living in enlightened, progressive Western countries.

Even if immigrants try to adopt the culture of their new countries, the cultural and religious indoctrination breeds only the rejection of all the values of the host country. As Sheikh Yassin put it, "Islam rejects all the cultural and social aspects of the West that contradict Islam and its religious laws [the sharia], for example, we reject women going with the faces uncovered, prostitution and all the immoral aspects of life in the [Western] world."

It was not by chance that the pepper-sprayed "woman in red" became the icon of the struggle against Islamization in Turkey. We saw women at the demonstrations in the main square of Istanbul shouting "Run, Erdogan, run, the women are coming!" The Western world, until now nodding sagely and saying it is a matter of cultural differences, is beginning to realize that it will have to pay a heavy price for its tolerant approach to the murders, "honor killings," rapes, oppression, abuse of and traffic in women and girls -- not only in the Islamic countries but among the Islamic immigrants in the West.

There are, broadly, two different movements, heading in opposite directions: The West looks forward and seeks progress, the welfare of the individual and scientific achievements. The Muslim immigrants, on the other hand, look longingly backward, their faces turned resolutely to the days of Muhammad. For both, the status of women is an indication of the struggle for the face of the West. The gap is widening and the liberal approach is collapsing along with its hypocritical double standards, political correctness and submission to multiculturalism. What we are witnessing is not multiculturalism, it is a violent attempt made by guests in various countries to devour their hosts whole, along with their houses and property, culture and legacy. For anyone who has not been paying attention, the Arab Spring has arrived in Europe, and it would be a good idea to get ready to deal with it.

UK Muslim Paedophile Rings Are an Epidemic



The Russian TV channel RT is, as usual, doing something right and something wrong, often in the same breath.

Two days ago I saw its broadcast on the anti-Islam backlash in the UK following the brutal beheading of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich, East London. In it they mentioned graffiti on mosques, attacks on Muslims and protest marches by the English Defence League (EDL), whose images were shown.

Even in me, despite my distrust for the mainstrean, socio-communist media, they created a subliminal, temporary association between the first two, which are criminal acts, and the third, which is lawful exercise of freedom of expression, moreover amply justified in this case. I recovered from that association almost immediately, by using my critical spirit, but many will have not.

That was followed by an interview with Paul Weston, the chairman of the newly-formed counterjihad party Liberty GB, to which I belong. He rightly said that the EDL should not be called far-right for protesting against such a horrific murder, and then went on to suggest that drastic measures should be taken by the government to eradicate Islamic militancy, for example closing down the mosques that spread radical and violent ideologies (which, I venture to add, are probably many more than we think).

Then I found that RT has a few days ago tackled another big issue related to how Islam "enriches" our cultural environment, namely the Muslim gangs that groom white girls for sexual exploitation.

Maybe something is moving in the right direction here. It only took 20 years after all, from the early 1990s if not before, a jiffy in geological terms! The police, social services and prosecutors, not to mention the politicians, have required two decades, first to recover from the shock of finding out that someone, or rather a lot of people, in the Muslim community were not acting as uprightly as the apologists of the "religion of peace" keep telling us that its followers do; then to master the extreme courage of braving the chance of various epithets, from "far-right" to "racist", being thrown at them; and then finally to find, as in the recently-tried Oxford gang case, a Muslim prosecutor who could do the dirty job for them without risking his career.

Add to the picture the help, or lack thereof, from the media, and 20 years indeed appears like a quick response.

All this can be compared to the 20 minutes taken by the police to get to the crime scene in Woolwich. The contact with, or even proximity to, Islam slows down our betters' reflexes.

The Oxfordshire child-sex-trafficking ring was allowed by the authorities' negligence to drug, rape and sell for sex girls aged 11-16 over seven years. Seven gang members, all Muslim, have been found guilty of a string of sex offences just over two weeks ago.

Here is an interesting quote:

The fact is that the vicious activities of the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race, because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases.

Indeed, one of the victims who bravely gave evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted white girls to abuse’.

But as so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to this reality.

Commentators and politicians tip-toe around it, hiding behind weasel words.

We are told that child sex abuse happens ‘in all communities’, that white men are really far more likely to be abusers, as has been shown by the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile case.

One particularly misguided commentary argued that the predators’ religion was an irrelevance, for what really mattered was that most of them worked in the night-time economy as taxi drivers, just as in the Rochdale child sex scandal many of the abusers worked in kebab houses, so they had far more opportunities to target vulnerable girls.

But all this is deluded nonsense. While it is, of course, true that abuse happens in all communities, no amount of obfuscation can hide the pattern that has been exposed in a series of recent chilling scandals, from Rochdale to Oxford, and Telford to Derby.

In all these incidents, the abusers were Muslim men, and their targets were under-age white girls.

Moreover, reputable studies show that around 26 per cent of those involved in grooming and exploitation rings are Muslims, which is around five times higher than the proportion of Muslims in the adult male population.

To pretend that this is not an issue for the Islamic community is to fall into a state of ideological denial.

But then part of the reason this scandal happened at all is precisely because of such politically correct thinking. All the agencies of the state, including the police, the social services and the care system, seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes.

Terrified of accusations of racism, desperate not to undermine the official creed of cultural diversity, they took no action against obvious abuse.

Amazingly, the predators seem to have been allowed by local authority managers to come and go from care homes, picking their targets to ply them with drink and drugs before abusing them. You can be sure that if the situation had been reversed, with gangs of tough, young white men preying on vulnerable Muslim girls, the state’s agencies would have acted with greater alacrity.

Another sign of the cowardly approach to these horrors is the constant reference to the criminals as ‘Asians’ rather than as ‘Muslims’.

In this context, Asian is a completely meaningless term. The men were not from China, or India or Sri Lanka or even Bangladesh. They were all from either Pakistan or Eritrea, which is, in fact, in East Africa rather than Asia.

What appalling, Islamophobic, right-wing extremist wrote that? A Muslim leader, the imam Dr Taj Hargey.

I've quoted him at length due to the exceptionality of a member of the Muslim community in Britain, and an imam at that, being honest enough to admit, and therefore willing to redress, Muslim grooming gangs. Hargey also has the audacity to accuse imams of promoting grooming rings by encouraging followers to think that white women deserve to be “punished”.

Only a week before the Oxford trial, it had been the turn of another gang of "men" (as the media tactfully or, shall we say, cowardly, call them), in this UK epidemic of sex-slave rings run by Muslims, to be convicted in Telford, a town in Shropshire, for sexually abusing schoolgirls in cases stretching over two years.

Writer and journalist Sean Thomas, in his interview with RT in the video above, correctly identifies these as clear cases of racist crimes in which the victims are targeted for being white.

A Police Chief Constable warned that child sex-slave gangs could exist in every British city.

The Mirror newspaper reports that there are now at least 54 active investigations on grooming rings in Britain. Steve Heywood, chief constable at Greater Manchester, said that child exploitation was now the force’s “number one priority”.

Out of the 43 police divisions in England and Wales, at least a whopping 31 have ongoing investigations into these crimes. The other 12 did not respond to the paper's request for information. Of the 43 that did, 3 refused to tell The Mirror how many investigations they had. So, 54 is the number of probes disclosed to the paper, but their number is likely to be higher.

Last week another trial involved 10 "men" with names like Mohammed Adnan, Mudassar Hussain, Rameez Ali and Ammar Rafiq, accused of abusing and exploiting a girl in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, over a four-year period.

In April, probably Britain’s biggest child-sex ring, with the highest number of victims by one gang, 50 (the youngest of whom was 12), was discovered by the police. The suspects, six men "of various nationalities", were arrested in Peterborough, near Cambridge.

In March, 7 men were charged in Newham, East London, on a range of offences against a 14-year-old girl, including rape and human trafficking for sexual exploitation.

And last year 5 men were charged with rape in Stockport, Greater Manchester, after an investigation showed they had 39 potential victims.

Sean Thomas in the video interview above sums up the grisly situation in its numeric terms: "Fifty-four gangs is an astonishing figure. Each gang may have dozens or hundreds of victims, so we're talking about possibly thousands and thousands of white girls who have been abused, raped and even murdered in the last 20 years, because this crime has been ignored. It's shocking".

Ordinary Greeks Turn to Golden Dawn

The media blame Golden Dawn for being racist, but they don't say that the situation in Greece is beyond tolerability.

90% of illegal immigrants to Europe go through Greece, the gateway to our continent. One million immigrants are reported to be in Greece, half of whom illegal.

Ordinary, non-racist Greeks, whose lives have become unbearable due to the very high level of immigrants' crime which makes them scared of going out at night, vote for Golden Dawn because the party is the only one that tackles the problem and helps.

A Golden Dawn voter is the florist in the video, who says she ended up living in a ghetto.

H/t to Vlad Tepes

Immigrants Commit Ten Times More Rapes than Italians

Ah, the joys of mass immigration and multiculturalism! From La Repubblica, latest news from Rome:

Rome police have intensified their controls to stop pickpocketing in the areas surrounding the Vatican and the historic centre, that in the last several days have been frequented by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims.

The carabinieri in a few hours arrested 14 pickpockets involved in stealing from the pockets and backpacks of tourists who have arrived in the capital from all over the world.

The plainclothes police are still used on buses, metro trains, near crowded squares and monuments, to ensure the safety of visitors.

The thieves, aged between 15 and 46 years, are all foreigners, mostly nomads.

All the stolen goods, cameras, smart phones, wallets containing cash and credit cards, were returned to the victims. Those arrested, charged with aggravated theft, will be tried straight away.

Only a month ago a 46-year-old Chinese man was caught thanks to a CCTV camera and arrested for stealing the faithful's offerings from a church's collection boxes near Verona on at least three separate occasions.

Official statistics released in 2009 by the Italian Interior Ministry show that 60 percent of all rapes in Italy are committed by immigrants, who therefore, being only 6-7 percent of the country's population, commit rape 10 times more than Italians.

Among immigrant groups, the nationalities committing most rapes are, in order, Romanians, Moroccans, Albanians.

In Italy immigrants commit such a disproportionate number of crimes, ranging from petty thieving to assault, rape and murder, that an Italian website entirely devoted to this issue has been created, Tutti i Crimini degli Immigrati (All the Immigrants' Crimes). Its tagline is "The others talk about integration, we are just showing it to you".

The site is a catalogue of daily horrors, from filthy Chinese restaurants that seriously jeopardize the health of their customers to a drunk Moroccan, unemployed and without fixed abode, who Thursday evening smashed the window of a crowded Milanese restaurant shouting: "I want to eat for free".

One crime that I found particularly cowardly, cruel and repulsive is that reported by the Italian news agency ANSA about the arrest yesterday of 75 South American immigrants who used large-size breeds of dogs, like St. Bernard, Great Dane, Dog de ​​Bordeaux, Neapolitan Mastiff and Labrador, as drug carriers.

The animals were subjected to surgery and their entrails were filled with pure cocaine to be exported. The drug was wrapped in layers of different substances impenetrable to X-rays. Upon arrival at the destination the dogs were killed and cut up to retrieve the cocaine.

The estimate is that 50 dogs have been used this way, and only one was saved.

The so-called pandillas, organized violent gangs of Latinos who are involved not only in common crimes but also in international drug trafficking in northern Italy, have in recent years become an increasingly worrying phenomenon in Italy.

This new police investigation has for the first time demonstrated the existence of a link between the pandillas and the emissaries of the South American cartels with whom the pandillas were in direct contact to procure large quantities of cocaine.

Why we leave our borders open to this scum is beyond comprehension.

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.

UK Fact-Checker "Full Fact" Is not Impartial

This post is also in Italian: Il Sito di Fact-Checking Inglese "Full Fact" Non È Imparziale


Like me, you may have been attracted to the reassuringly-named Full Fact website and non-profit company.

It's a fact-checking group, whose tagline is "Promoting accuracy in public debate".

After hearing about it from David Dimbleby on Question Time, I was immediately interested in this site, which I believe follows a trend set by Americans whose fact-checking after, for example, televised presidential debates becomes frenetic.

I am a firm believer in evidence-based reasoning in every sphere, using the scientific method of investigation whenever we can.

In politics as much as in health, in sociology as much as in the environmental subjects, empiricism and logic are what we need.

Therefore I welcomed the existence of this British site, and I read it. Certain things in it didn't seem too impartial to me, though, for example about Portugal's drugs decriminalization laws' outcomes.

So I checked who is behind Full Fact. I discovered that its "core funding comes from three independent charitable trusts: the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Nuffield Foundation and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation".

A look at The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust's site reveals that it has a strong focus on "racial justice" and "Islamophobia". Its pamphlet The Quest for Racial Justice has the picture of a hijab-wearing woman on its cover, so we know immediately what kind of "racial justice" we're talking about.

It doesn't take much to realize that this is a charitable, Quaker in origin, but politically not unbiased organization, believing in multiculturalism and seeing things only from the perspective of ethnic groups and immigrants, legal or not, and not the indigenous population of Britain.

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust does not define what it means by "racial justice", probably assuming that it should be obvious, and indeed it is obvious what it intends when you see that it is in full support of the Macpherson Report on the death of Stephen Lawrence, which accuses the police of being "institutionally racist" and contains a pearl like this: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person" opening the door to any abuse of the term. Or when you read in The Quest for Racial Justice statements like this:

"Stephen Lawrence died at the hands of racists in 1993... In the meantime, many others have lost their lives in a similar way"

without any mention of the many white victims of non-white racism, about whom the national media are totally silent, a situation so scandalous as to prompt even Muslim multiculturalist and leftist Yasmin Alibhai Brown to write an article whose headline says it all: "When the victim is white, does anyone care?" (The article has then been removed from the website of London newspaper Evening Standard, apparently the only link left is on an online library).

It's clear that for this organization victims cannot be white. Yet, the mentioned article reports, "Almost half of the 58 known victims of racially motivated murders between 1995 and 2004 were white".

Yorkshire Conservative Councillor Roger Taylor called JUST West Yorkshire, a group affiliated with The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, an "ultra-left organization".

Discover the Networks gives this description:

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) was founded in 1904 by its namesake, a prominent Quaker entrepreneur and philanthropist. Viewing the unequal distribution of wealth as a defect inherent in all capitalist countries, JRCT aims to change “the existing power imbalances in society” and create “a better world.” Led by a board whose members are guided by the principles and values of Quakerism, the Trust focuses especially on eradicating the “root” causes of poverty, “social injustice,” and “political inequality”—and not merely on treating “the superficial manifestations” of those problems.

The second major funder of Full Fact, the Nuffield Foundation, has a website that welcomes you with talk of class divide and disadvantaged backgrounds.

The third, finally, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, supports "vulnerable migrants" and "social change".

The jargon is revealing, the picture is clear.

Full Fact is a bit like Wikipedia, pretending to be impartial and just offering "facts", but the people giving this information have a very specific, culturally Marxist, ideology colouring their fact-checking. I suspect that Dimbleby wouldn't have advertised it otherwise.


PHOTO CREDIT
Pixabay