Covid-19 Fake News Is Real: a Direct Personal Experience

Fake news is real, especially in the mainstream media.

The tabloids may be the worst offenders, but are not the only ones.

And, in these times of coronavirus pandemic and great confusion about something new and not well understood, we need to be particularly careful about what the big newspapers and magazines, on which many rely for their news, information and opinions, publish.

This life experience reported by writer Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review well illustrates it.

After writing an article in which he advanced a few hypotheses, making it clear that they were only his layman's (not a doctor's) conjectures, on why California a month ago had not experienced the same level of Covid-19 cases as New York, he was "hit" by media as well as private enquiries about his ongoing “coronavirus antibody testing studies.”

Despite the fact that he never claimed to be a medical expert in his article or in any enquiry following it, and that he explained he never conducted a coronavirus study, he was repeatedly pursued for medical advice, even by Chinese media who were in search of "lab" confirmation that the virus spread started in the US (some Chinese go as far as saying that the origin of the disease was in Italy).

Hanson adds that the more he was denying any expert knowledge the more the media, including American ones, ignored his correction and continued asking him the same questions regardless.

He concludes that fake news is real, and it's interesting to hear it from someone who has experienced personally how easily and quickly it spreads.

A book could be written on how efficiently, without difficulty and terrifyingly the mass media can manipulate consciences.

Coronavirus Lockdown Effectiveness, Other Doubts

One of the few certainties about this novel virus and the pandemic it is spreading is that, being new (or at least new to us, namely newly discovered), we don't know very much about it, and we are constantly learning about it all the time.

But, being human and not liking uncertainty in a similar way in which nature abhors vacuum, we try to jump to conclusions, any conclusion, in fact, just to avoid doubt, chaos and disorder (a very natural feeling). So we grab at many different explanatory theories, whether supported a lot, a little or not at all.

This is The Times of Israel reporting on the theory held by someone the newspaper describes as a top Israeli mathematician:

"I have no explanation but the numbers speak for themselves."

Top Israeli prof claims simple stats show virus plays itself out after 70 days.

Isaac Ben-Israel, who is not a medical expert, says analysis worldwide shows new cases peaking after about 40 days, slams economic closures; leading doctor dismisses his claims.

So, according to Professor Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development, "simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it."

What is intriguing is that, minus the mathematical and statistical calculations, a similar view, at least in its practical conclusions, is supported by another person in the news, who has been accused of "anti-Semitism", ie David Icke:

On Wednesday night Icke shared his unsubstantiated views in an edited interview for London Real: COVID-19, and shared baseless claims on coronavirus including that mandatory vaccination for the virus would be 'fascism' and include 'nanotechnology microchips'.

… he appeared to justify attacks on 5G masts around the UK, adding 'human life as we know it is over' if the construction continued.

The 5G theory has been discredited by experts, with Public Health England stating that 'the overall exposure is expected to remain low relative to guidelines and, as such, there should be no consequences for public health.' The new coronavirus is also spreading in places without 5G networks, including in Iran.

Strange bedfellows as they may be, Icke shares with Professor Ben-Israel the hypothesis that the lockdown doesn't help to limit the spread of Covid-19, as shown on this tweet of his with a diagram comparing countries with and without lockdown measures:

Compare this image, though, with the one pictured above this post and you'll see how focusing only on deaths per million and removing cases per million gives a very different picture: this should provide an indication of the complexity of the issue, which doesn't lend itself to over-simplifications, much as we would love to rely on them.

Icke is not the only one to believe in the uselessness of lockdowns, there are many, especially among conservative and Right-oriented people, who are sceptical of their government's policies and think the same.

Now, I am in no position to categorically declare that this idea is right or wrong. As I said at the beginning, we don't have enough information.

I do have some doubts about using pure mathematics to arrive at conclusions like those of Ben-Israel on this. Correlation doesn't mean and doesn't necessarily involve causation. In Latin, this supremely logical and succinct language, it's better: post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy.

For example, is it possible that countries with less contact with the rest of the world and therefore fewer opportunities for contagion (ah, the joys of globalisation! we have finally discovered them in their full glory) have had lower numbers of cases of Covid-19 and therefore had a comparable smaller need for lockdown than those with more international traffic and Coronavirus spread which as a consequence resorted more to lockdown, inverting the cause-effect direction?

Has this been considered as a contributing factor, anyway?

At least we have a glimmer of hope, though: it's the prediction on the progress of the disease in Israel made by Professor Ben-Israel on last 12 April on Facebook, which I have to reproduce in its online translation:

It turns out that the expansion of the expansion [meaning, I presume, the peak] has been behind us for about a week, and apparently it will fade almost completely in about two weeks.

Assuming the translation is accurate, we can wait about two weeks to see if his prediction for Israel materialises and test whether his theory might be correct.

Question Time Shows Equality's True Meaning

When people say that they want equality, what they often actually mean is that they want to be more equal than others.

This can be seen in the case of the extortionist rob-the-rich taxes that people of the Left advocate as a means to wealth equality. In this case they want to be more equal by arrogating for themselves – or for the state acting on their behalf – the power to steal from the rich without being prosecuted, which puts them above the law against theft that applies to everyone else.

In last night's Question Time in Cardiff, this was brought home rather nicely when the leader of Plaid Cymru Leanne Wood, supporting a request from a member of the audience, called for Wales to be treated with parity with Scotland in relation to England. She went on to ask for Wales to be given more money, specifically an additional £1.2 billion a year. In response, another panellist in the debate, Labour's First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones, uttered his only sensible sentence of the entire evening, when he pointed out the paradox of Wood‘s wanting at the same time more money from London and more independence from it.

She retorted that she does want independence for Wales but not before the playing field has been levelled up. At that point the moderator David Dimbleby gave everybody some sobering figures: Scotland gets per head over £10,000, Wales almost £10,000, Northern Ireland £10,800 and England £8,500.

Now, that's what the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish call equality.

But not the English.

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

This is the fourth and final part of the article by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci. Here are the first three parts:

The Looting of Italy

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy


Also read Italy Invented Banks by Enza Ferreri

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Attack Begins In Earnest

2011 is when they began in earnest to train their guns on us, with the military aggression that started with the Nato attack on Libya culminating in half-truths calculated to stampede investors away from Italy in the direction of presumably safe bonds. And what bonds can be safer than Germany’s?

After the attack on Libya pulverized the country’s infrastructure, mainly built by Italy, as well as the many giant Italian industries that lined the coast, the banksters sprang into action. In July, Germany’s heavily-leveraged Deutsche Bank - which a month later was revealed to be one of the prime recipients of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s tremendous secret bailout, to the tune of $354 billion - dumped over 7 billion euros’ worth of Italian bonds onto the market in one swoop, loudly trumpeting this fact to the press and then just as dramatically buying up unnecessary swap options that bet on Italy’s going bust.

This of course signalled to all investors to follow suit, lest they remain saddled with bonds that might never be paid back! After which the panic inevitably spread to the shareholders’ market, driving the price of wealthy banks and huge joint-stock companies down to levels of craziness where one could buy a mega-multinational concern at the cost of maybe a single one of its properties.

Der Spiegel may have let the cat out of the bag when it wrote that documents in its possession showed that the reason Angela Merkel was holding out against the Euro-bonds - which would guarantee the debt of all the euro-zone countries - was that in exchange for relenting she planned to demand privileges for foreign buyers of choice property in Southern Europe.

This may or may not be. What is certain is that they have had this on their minds for a long time. In one sole day, in July 2011, Germany’s Deutsche Bank dumped billions of euros’ worth of perfectly good Italian sovereign bonds onto the market, trumpeting the move as the markets were still open – something that is NEVER done – and then dramatically buying swaps that would make a profit if Italy went bankrupt. By stampeding investors away from Italy they managed not only to distract the press from their own banks’ toxic assets, which they were busy dumping onto other countries’ debit accounts, but also to attract the money thereby freed up to – where else? Germany of course.

This kind of situation is a problem even in normal free markets. But in the euro-zone, where the spigot of money creation has been clamped off in the name of thrift (“austerity” they call it) - and, thanks to Maastricht and other assorted treaties, cannot be turned back on except by fiat of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt - it becomes a matter of mors tua vita mea. It’s like when you tilt a glass of water letting it all flow to one side, leaving the rest high and dry. If there is a fixed amount of money and it is all made to flow to one corner of the continent, the rest is left high and dry, with no way for people to exchange the fruits of their respective labour to procure the rest of the things they need to live. Money has no value in itself. The value lies in goods and manpower. But barter became impossible a long long time ago. Even in the bronze age there were products of human invention that needed some instrument to fraction their worth with respect to whatever needed interchange. Can a piano manufacturer barter his goods in exchange for his daily bread? Or must he grow his own produce if he wants to eat? Without money, markets are not free but paralyzed. Such is the situation of the captive countries of the euro-zone.

Hence, from July 2011 on, Germany’s vested interest in the collapse of other countries, and particularly of Italy’s rival economy, has been obvious to all who cared to see. Nevertheless, no-one could possibly have imagined that two months later, and a fortnight before the financial putsch in Italy, the Deutsche Bank would go so far as to secretly request the Troika [European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund] to impose a “massive and profound decommissioning of the system of social welfare and of services to the public, to the tune of hundreds of billions of euros, for France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Ireland” (the so-called “PIIGS” countries, plus France), according to a report which we only discovered the following year.

Unsurprisingly, the insultingly-named “PIIGS” countries are all non-Protestant. As attested in several editorials, since the euro no longer evokes wealth and stability but unemployment, poverty and decline, there has been a return of anti-Catholic prejudice in Northern Europe, where many consider the “PIIGS” countries to be doing badly because of Catholic sin. The whore of Babylon all over again.


Mario Monti's Government of Technocrats

Enter Mario Monti, the unelected Prime Minister, self-proclaimed Catholic and supposed conservative economics professor who went to visit the Pope eight times in little over a year while impoverishing the country and instigating the suicide of dozens of industrialists.

Under his watch billions were siphoned out of the economy, while the vast majority of Parliament remained inert, the conservatives mostly looking on in passive and silent dejection and the leftists simply waiting for election time to reinstall them in power. All of them, left and right, were as if traumatized at the display of power in what amounted to a coup d’etat by President Napolitano, and even more frightened at witnessing each other's silence. One MP, an ex-socialist friend of mine who had joined Berlusconi's centrist party Forza Italia, wrote a piece early on which ended saying that we were in the midst of a tragedy which risked changing forever the face of the country. When I called to compliment him for his perspicacity, he cut me short replying “Yes but nobody else is speaking up.” In a matter of weeks he had eaten his words and climbed aboard Mario Monti’s brand-new political party.

I think that a sequence of events of this kind – plus the court actions which have devastated and closed down one major industry after another on charges usually involving either environmental disaster, health hazards or corruption, increasing unemployment by the thousands - are probably what is routinely done to countries when there is a leftist takeover. I hold that they could purposely be using the power to legislate money away, isolate the country from investors so as to tear the system down for good and render the people powerless to recreate it. This is the only explanation I can find to the inexplicable way the technocrats have been sending money abroad as if there were no need for it at home: 5 million to Albania to buy equipment for doctors’ offices, 3 million to Bolivia to help protect its biodiversity, 1.3 billion to help Ethiopians guard against a new drought, 400,000 for a school for tour operators in Mozambique... it goes on and on.

Is it any wonder that Monti’s supposedly un-political, technocratic administration was actually made up of 99 % left-wing ministers? Why else would our ex(?)-communist President Giorgio Napolitano - whom The NYT enthused about dubbing him “King Giorgio” - install Monti in the Premier’s office the minute the stock markets’ plunge finally managed to dislodge the entrenched incumbent, overriding all constitution-mandated Parliamentary prerogative? The international press immediately recorded this unprecedented power grab as the virtual coup d’etat it was, but this soon became an embarrassing detail that it is impolite to even mention any more.

Because Italy's politics was purposely programmed by our post-war Constitution - largely dictated by the powerful Communist Party - to be unmanageable and incomprehensible, hardly anyone in the international press bothers to delve into anything that regards Italy. Journalists have us conveniently shelved under the categories of fashion, pizza, the mafia, the Leaning Tower and the Pope. Investors care only about what the herd will do next in order to follow suit and try and turn a profit on the stock exchange. As a result, no-one ever writes about Italy except if there is a sex scandal, a mafia crime, or talk of corruption. Or, today, if the press says that Italy is being bailed out.

All of the good things, the 95 percent of hard-working, honest Italians, who are not corrupt but actually the first victims of corruption, the mafia, etc, are invariably ignored.

Ironically, despite the country's having had as Prime Minister a media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, whose supposed expertise in manipulating media coverage might have served Italy in good stead, the international spotlight has remained firmly projected onto the unfavourable clichés and the sole unfavourable numbers of Italy’s external debt. Our erstwhile Premier’s ludicrous private lechery deservedly made him the butt of worldwide ridicule, and dragged Italy down with him. However, I can’t help remembering that Bill Clinton was President of the United States when his sex-capades in the White House were made public. Has this ever made a laughing stock of the entire American populace for having elected him? Hardly.

I believe that in this globalized world, relying solely on the mainstream media for news about other countries is a mistake that can prevent a needed comprehension of what is going on. Because, the globalist players being a tight-knit clique, the blueprint they follow can eventually come round to harass other countries in their turn.

Paternal Uncertainty in a Godless Society

When I work until late at night, just about the only TV programme left to watch afterwards is often The Jeremy Kyle Show. At first I watched it for its comic value, as dysfunctional couples and families shout at each other over non-existing problems before turning to the namesake presenter of the show for guidance and, more importantly, to solve their real problems with DNA paternity and lie detector tests.

But then I realised that this broadcast is much more useful than an average comedy show. It has exposed at least two things.

The first is how in the lives of the people appearing in Kyles' studio - who are British reprentatives of what American sociologist Charles Murray and others call the "underclass" - Christianity has totally disappeared.

The underclass is a new social class, it is no longer the working class. It is not characterised by its economic status so much as by its behaviour, mores and ethos.

It has a disproportionately high illegitimacy rate, school drop-out rate, unemployment rate and crime rate. It is anti-social in its outlook, attitudes, rules and codes.

In the US the underclass is disproportionately black - which is why the American version of the JK Show has mostly black guests - but in Britain it is mainly formed by indigenous Britons.

The complete abandonment of Christian values and principles, particularly those of self-discipline in every area of life - ranging from what psychologists today call "anger management", and was once the fight against the sin of wrath, to sexual self-restraint -, seems more than a mere coincidence in the type of problems that Kyle guests face.

The second thing that this TV show evidences is how in today's society the pendulum has gone too far in favouring women over men, in many different fields but specifically here in the case of paternity issues.

Gerd Gigerenzer's book on risk and its statistical aspects, Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK), explains how human males are exceptional in the animal kingdom in being expected to contribute to the rearing of a child without certainty of fatherhood. Paternity uncertainty coupled with parental responsibility is a very heavy burden that society forces men to bear:

Why is there wife battering all around the world? And why do many more men than women kill their partners? Although there are many contributing variables, such as alcoholism, the classic explanation is paternal uncertainty. Unlike in the majority of mammalian species, in which males contribute nothing to the upbringing of their offspring, in the human species males and females cooperate in providing parental care. Fathers face a problem that mothers do not, and which according to evolutionary theory is so serious that most mammalian fathers opt out of paternal investment entirely. This problem is cuckoldry. That is, a man has to accept some degree of uncertainty about whether he actually is the father of his children. A woman, in contrast, can be certain that she is the mother of her children (barring an accidental exchange of babies in the hospital). Paternal uncertainty can be reduced by many means, one of which is for a man to control his partner physically to ensure that she is not consorting with other men. According to this argument, the cost of male parental investment brings with it male sexual jealousy, which leads men to use methods ranging from vigilance to violence to controlling sexual access to their mates.

How certain should human fathers be about their paternity? Probably not as certain as is conceivably possible since the mid-1980s, when DNA fingerprinting became available as a highly reliable method for paternity testing. Using DNA fingerprinting, researchers found that 5 to 10 percent of children in Western countries who had been studied have a different biological father from the one they thought they had. [Emphases added]

Or, as the Romans put it in their lapidary, succinct way: Mater semper certa est, pater numquam (the mother is always certain, the father never).

At least since the advent of feminism, it's always been considered sexist (in the direction of misogyny) to stigmatise female adulterous and promiscuous behaviours in a way that male corresponding behaviours are not.

In fact, in light of the serious repercussions on paternal uncertainty, what is sexist (in the direction of misandry) is not to stigmatise women more than men for sexually promiscuous habits.

It has to be noted that Gerd Gigerenzer is not a political writer. He is a psychology academic, former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and currently director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

The book from which I quoted deals with statistics, calculation and assessment of risk in human and medical sciences. It is a scientific work, with hardly any political implication.

His political views on this matter are unlikely to be similar to mine, i.e. right-wing or anti-feminist, firstly because he would by now have been sacked from his academic position, secondly because his work is highly recommended by openly Leftist, Guardian columnist and author of Bad Science (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK), Ben Goldacre, and thirdly because the application of DNA paternity tests that he mostly advocates is for catching fathers trying to avoid their responsibilities.

He writes, for instance:

Before DNA testing, court proceedings were often colored by the public humiliation of unmarried mothers...

DNA testing has helped to dispense with the humiliating [for the mother] character that court hearings had in the past. Now that DNA evidence for paternity exists, courts rarely subject mothers to cross-examinations about their sex lives...

My point is that the mere possibility of DNA fingerprinting can be sufficient to end denial, to spare the mother an inquisition into her sex life, and to oblige the father to pay child support.

I don't see anything wrong with public humiliation and stigma for unmarried mothers. It's because Western societies have abandoned this stigma that illegitimacy rates have been steadily rising in all EU countries, North America and Australia.

In 2009, 41% of children born in the US were illegitimate, from 5% a half century ago. As for the European Union:

In 2011, 39.5% of all births in the 27 EU countries were extramarital. In that year, births outside marriage represented a majority in Iceland (65.0%), Estonia (59.7%), Slovenia (56.8%), Bulgaria (56.1%), France (55.8%), Norway (55.0%), Sweden (54.3%), and Belgium (50%). The proportion of extramarital births is also approaching half in Denmark (49%), the United Kingdom (47.3%) and the Netherlands (45.3%)...

In the EU, the average percentage of extramarital births has risen steadily in recent years, from 27.4% in 2000 to 39.5% in 2011.

In the UK most children will be born out of wedlock by 2016.

While people were too concerned about sexual liberation and women's rights, children and society at large were paying the price. I cannot cover in this post all the consequences of fatherlessness - and they are all negative -, although I will in future articles.

But I'll say that the price is astronomical in terms of children's psychological wellbeing, children's poverty, crime levels, antisocial behavior, unemployment, and finally the welfare state bills for taxpayers.

Also, observe the double standard. Whereas hormonal and other biological factors are often utilised in women's favour, as excuses even for murders allegedly due to Pre-Menstrual Tension (PMT) or postpartum psychosis, similar factors are never employed to excuse men in cases of rape, for example, or, as in this case, paternity uncertainty is never recognised as an intense stressor for a man and used to justify his jealous, controlling or violent behaviour.

Men are expected to provide for and in other ways contribute to a child's upbringing, no questions asked.

Not many consider this immense factor of stress for men, in the same way as in public discourse it's very rare for someone to examine things from a man's perspective. It is politically incorrect. It's only from a woman's viewpoint that we are supposed to look at everything.

Whereas oceans of ink and light years of film have been devoted to all the various problems associated with the woman's role in reproduction, hardly anybody has paid even the scantest attention to those related to the man's role.


Photo by toledo clubber (Creative Commons CC BY-ND 2.0).

Question Time: the NHS Is still in Chaos

Have you seen Question Time on BBC1 tonight? Among the panelists was Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

They talked about the NHS (National Health Service), welfare, pensions, youth unemployment, housing crisis. If you haven’t seen it you can watch it on BBC iPlayer online.

Interesting points have been:

• the idea of forcing owners to sell or develop property on unused land seems popular (although some people would probably forcibly impose developing, which seems to me communist-style; the idea of a tax on unused land or brownfield sites to make owners sell or develop is better).
• the average age of people buying a property these days is 38 years (apparently higher than in the past), which many find too high. I disagree: probably the average age was too low before. It’s not necessary for everyone to own a house, as it’s not necessary for everyone to go to university: these are wrong ideas of equality and set the wrong targets to achieve for many people.
• nothing very interesting was said about the NHS, reflecting the fact that they haven’t got a clue about how to solve its problems. However, despite what I had read about the drop in number of nurses, an audience member said that their number is probably the same, only their job names have changed from “sister” to “manager”. Another attendee correctly observed that hospitals in the news like the Mid-Staffordshire hospitals - where, in the 3 years from 2005 to 2008, between 400 and 1,200 more patients died than would have been expected - have neglected their patients because they were more worried about meeting government targets than about sick people in their care. This is true, and confirms my idea that it is not the function and within the nature of the state to manage the health care of a country.
• nobody obviously mentioned immigration. The term was pronounced once by a woman who was discussing a different subject and didn’t actually talk about immigration at all, but using the “i” word once was enough for the audience to boo her.
• about youth unemployment, an elderly gentleman made the observation that he bought his first property at 33, and he could do so because he was prepared to move to where the jobs were. I believe that his point is valid, the welfare state has made unemployed people unwilling to move with the jobs.
• the government’s proposals of making people below 25 not eligible for benefits were covered, obviously disliked by the Lefties and the young in both panel and audience. There was also talk of removal of certain entitlements like free bus passes from pensioners.

Photo by eye dropper (Creative Commons CC BY-ND 2.0).

Christians in Syria: Separating Grim Reality from Islamist Propaganda

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri

A recently released video of an interview with a Syrian rebel — and would-be-martyr – gives extraordinary insight into the mentality of the Syrian opposition. Believing that he’s speaking to European jihadist volunteers, the rebel says that Christians must be killed to impose a Sharia state in Syria, after which they will be given the classic choice: pay the jizya, convert or die. He also says that the rebels intend to move on from Syria to attack Europe and America.

Similarly, another rebel clearly explains that Islam must be the sole source of authority of the future Syrian state.  In the meantime, Syrian militants just massacred a Christian village’s population. Many Syrian Christians have been kidnapped and killed or never seen again.

Targeting Syrian Christians for kidnapping and attacks on churches is condemned by Human Rights Watch.  An U.N. Independent Inquiry on Syria concludes: “Entire communities are at risk of being forced out of the country or of being killed inside the country”—two cautiously worded reminders of the reality of Christian suffering in Syria at the hands of Islamist militants.  During a recent Congressional hearing on Syria’s minorities, witnesses rightly testified that Christians are more fearful for their lives than other group, because they are targeted for religious cleansing.

Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence concerning the plight of Syria’s Christians, there are those who are not convinced that Syrian Christians are being deliberately targeted in a religious purification campaign.

One of them is Muslim college student, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, who lives in the UK and authored the report Christians in Syria: Separating Fact from Fiction, published by The Henry Jackson Society, a UK neoconservative think tank.

Through psychological tactics, like his title Fact and Fiction, and the questioning of absolute figures, percentages and details, Al-Tamimi tries to use the conflicting reports regarding some specific events in order to generate doubts about the veracity of Syrian Christians’ persecution.

Among other things, by claiming that the narrative of those concerned about the Christians’ fate is not the only possible one, he subtly and surreptitiously creates suspicions that those people lie or distort the evidence.

The main problem with his report isn’t so much that it disputes specific details of events. Initially the Western media was rehashing the stories created by the insurgents’ anti-Assad propaganda. Later it became clear that these reports were one-sided and adjustments were made:

For nearly two years, SOHR [Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization of Syrian rebels in exile] has reported only acts of violence by the regime against the rebels. Mainstream international media like the BBC, al-Jazeera and al-Arabya, have relied on it as their sole source of news.

In recent months, several experts and Syrians interviewed by AsiaNews accused Western and Gulf State media of selective reporting. More recently, coverage has become more impartial, but SOHR continues to defend Islamic extremists to avoid losing support among rebel forces.

The jihadists are particularly ruthless in their hide-and-seek mind games, reminiscent of Hamas in its conflict with Israel.

In these conflicts many media reporters on the ground aren’t dispassionate observers but have a stake in the matter. As in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which several freelancers supplying news materials are under Hamas’ control, Western media’s flirtation with the Syrian rebels is well-documented.

For example, from Biased War Photography in Western Media:

[T]he portrayal of the “Syrian revolution” is decidedly one-sided… the images taken to supply Western Media all portrayed the Syrian rebels in a way to render sympathy and support.

Here are some other examples.

The Vatican’s news-gathering facilities are a welcome counterbalance to mainstream Western media’s bias.  Of course, there can be a margin of error or doubt concerning the details of some events. Yet what is problematic with the Henry Jackson Report is the arbitrariness with which its author, Al-Tamimi, cherry-picks his favorite sources and rejects those he doesn’t like, without giving reasons or criteria.

This is his account about Qusayr:

Modeled on the story of the ethnic cleansing of 90 per cent of Homs’ Christian population, stories began to circulate that 9,000 out-of-a-supposed population of 10,000 Christians had left the city of Qusayr on the basis of an ultimatum issued by a rebel battalion. However, the rebels in Qusayr denied this story. The truth about what happened, most likely, lies in the account given by a couple of reports in the Wall Street Journal.

So, reports from Jihad Watch and from the Vatican news agency Fides, Vatican Insider, and Barnabas Fund, aren’t to be trusted, but the rebels, who are, for all intents and purposes, the suspects of heinous crimes and so naturally deny it, are more trustworthy?

Or the truth, he moderately suggests, is “in the middle”—that is, in places like The Wall Street Journal, that supports Obama’s decision to arm the Syrian rebels and he only regrets Obama didn’t make this decision sooner, and in The Independent, whose senior Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk had the honor of a personal recommendation from Osama Bin Laden and demonizes Christians for supporting Assad.

Al-Tamimi offers no reason for adopting those two pro-Arab-Spring newspapers’ version of the events.

“The rebels deny it,” Al-Tamimi pronounces. Here’s what the rebels also say:

Syrian opposition spokesmen have repeatedly said that Syrian rebels do not target Christians or other minorities and believe in creating a democratic society once Assad is ousted.

To which we can add: and pigs might fly. To believe that al-Qaeda-linked Islamists want a democratic society—in the Western sense of giving everyone equal rights, and not in the Muslim Brotherhood’s interpretation of it as a means to impose an Islamic state—is, at best, naïve. That part of the Syrian opposition’s statement should throw doubt on the other part, that rebels don’t target Christians.

But Al-Tamimi, who must surely know about taqiyya—lying to non-believers to advance the cause of Islam—behaves as if he didn’t.

The conclusion of Al-Tamimi’s report looks like a highly precarious assembling of statements counterbalancing, if not contradicting, each other to produce a very confused and confusing result.
He writes:

The evidence surveyed here does not, as of yet, suggest the existence of an organized campaign of militant Islamic persecution of Christians throughout Syria… Have there been incidents of anti-Christian violence in Syria? Undoubtedly, but one should always be alert to those pro-Assad propaganda outlets which are willing to exploit, for their own ends, what they see as Western concerns about the status of Christians in the country. In addition, analysts should be more nuanced… At the same time, one must avoid complacency: the ever-growing infiltration of Syria by foreign jihadists (e.g. from Jordan to the south) poses an increasing threat to the survival of the various Christian communities of Syria.

First, that the evidence doesn’t suggest “an organized campaign” is puzzling. What evidence of an “organized” campaign would Al-Tamimi accept?

The Syrian opposition has no effective centralized political or military leadership, so how could there be an organized campaign of any sort?

Muslim persecution of Christians doesn’t require central, bureaucratic coordination. Its organization derives from Islamic law and the hostility it breeds for Christians.

Al-Tamimi warns that we should be alert to pro-Assad propaganda exploiting Western concerns about Christians—without bothering to mention that the propaganda war is fought on both fronts. So why should we be more alert to one side of it than the other?

Apparently simply because one source confirms what Al-Tamimi wants to believe and validates his agenda.

In the end, however, after another series of self-limiting statements, his final conclusion is that there’s an increasing threat to the survival of the various Christian communities of Syria.

Isn’t that enough reason for concern? Why nitpick—why write this convoluted report trying to minimize the persecution of Syrian Christians in the first place—if in the end you must, perhaps begrudgingly, admit that there is “an increasing threat to the survival of the various Christian communities of Syria.”

This research doesn’t lead to a new interpretation of the events. Its conclusion is remarkably similar to that of most counterjihad analysts.

What’s its point then? It’s not immediately clear until one remembers that it was published by the neoconservative think tank The Henry Jackson Society, calling for Western intervention to assist Syrian rebels. Hence the “nuances” that Al-Tamimi mentions, which would help erase any black and white contrast and paint the rebels a uniform, unintelligible gray.

Hope Is a Theological Virtue

Theodore Dalrymple, in his excellent book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , wrote in the year 2000 that the liberal elites at the BBC and other UK media were denying the reality of the British working class's degeneration in the previous few decades.

He describes what he saw in the downmarket seaside resort of Blackpool, in Northern England, which he had visited for the purpose fo writing an article commissioned to him "to describe the conduct of the people who go there for a weekend":

This sophisticated innocence has departed. Without the institution of marriage, mother-in-law and divorce jokes are pointless and passé. Fun now means public drunkenness on a mass scale, screaming in the streets, and the frequent exposure of naked buttocks to passersby. Within moments of arriving on the street along the beach, which was ankle-deep in discarded fast-food wrappings (the smell of stale fat obliterates completely the salt smell of the sea), I saw a woman who had pulled down her slacks and tied a pair of plastic breasts to her bare buttocks, while a man crawled after her on the sidewalk, licking them. At midnight along this street—with the sound of rock music pounding insistently out of every club door, and each door presided over by a pair of steroid-inflated bouncers, among men vomiting into the gutters, and with untold numbers of empty bags of marijuana on the pavement—I saw children as young as six, unattended by adults, waiting for their parents to emerge from their nocturnal recreations.

He recounts how, after the article's publication, he was accused by the mainstream media's intellectual elites of being a snob, and letters sent to these media outlets accused him of not understanding the working class "culture".

But other, unpublished, letters sent by the public were supportive of his position:

The liberal assumption, in this as in most things, is that to understand is to approve (or at least to pardon), and therefore my disapproval indicated a lack of understanding. But strangely enough, the letters that the BBC and the newspaper that published the original article forwarded to me—those they hadn't broadcast or published—wholly endorsed my comments. They were from Blackpool residents and from working-class people elsewhere who passionately denied that working-class culture had always consisted of nothing but mindless obscenity. Several writers spoke very movingly of enduring real poverty in childhood while maintaining self-respect and a striving for mental distinction. The deliberate exclusion of these voices from public expression provided a fine example of how the British intelligentsia goes about its self-appointed task of cultural destruction.

Since the time when Dalrymple wrote about his difficulty in breaking through the media wall on the subject of descent from self-respecting working class to underclass, the press and TV networks have repeatedly published images of events similar to the ones he described occurring at weekends in many other cities and towns across the country, and indeed even abroad, in places like Spain or wherever British holidaymakers can be found.

A single man armed with a pen, determined to expose a problem and indicate a solution, has had a lasting influence in showing a path that other mass means of communication followed.

It is just one of the numerous examples of how change can be easier than we sometimes think.

When I was a teenager in the 60s and 70s, the radical ideas of the Left seemed unrealistic and their goals unattainable. Now for them it's almost mission accomplished.

Things can turn around the other way just as easily as they did this way.

Associated Press Bans the Use of "Islamophobia", "Homophobia" and Other Words

The major news agency Associated Press (AP) has recently decided to put an end to the use of "Islamophobia", "homophobia", "ethnic cleansing" and other politically charged words in its highly influential The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, generally called the AP Stylebook.

The book, annually updated, is a guide for style, usage, grammar, punctuation and reporting principles and practices used by reporters, editors and others in the US newspapers, news industry, magazines, broadcasters, public relations firms and so on.

Although not all publications use it, the AP Stylebook is regarded as a newspaper industry standard.

Therefore, the decision of making these changes, which will appear in the next printed edition that usually comes out in June, has particular importance.

The online Style Book now says that "-phobia," "an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness" should not be used "in political or social contexts," including "homophobia" and "Islamophobia." It also calls "ethnic cleansing" a "euphemism," and says the AP "does not use 'ethnic cleansing' on its own. It must be enclosed in quotes, attributed and explained."

"Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a psychiatric or medical term for a severe mental disorder. Those terms have been used quite a bit in the past, and we don't feel that's quite accurate," AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn told POLITICO.

"When you break down 'ethnic cleansing,' it's a cover for terrible violent activities. It's a term we certainly don't want to propgate," Minthorn continued. "Homophobia especially -- it's just off the mark. It's ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don't have. It seems inaccurate. Instead, we would use something more neutral: anti-gay, or some such, if we had reason to believe that was the case."

"We want to be precise and accurate and neutral in our phrasing," he said.

This is an obvious improvement, since"homophobia" and "Islamophobia" are terms coined with the sole purpose of denigrating an opponent in a debate, as ad hominem attacks, and are devoid of any real meaning: they say more about the people who use them than about those they refer to.

Regarding "Islamophobia", David Horowitz and Robert Spencer have written a pamphlet on the word's origins that can be ordered or read for free online, entitled "Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future":

The U.S. is slowly but certainly accommodating the view that free speech, when it comes to religious (i.e. Muslim) matters, is suspect. We have come to this point, in large part, because of the growing success of the idea that any criticism of Islam is actually a pathology, rather than a legitimate exercise of free speech. It is, in other words, “Islamophobia.”

In their pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, David Horowitz and Robert Spencer document how the origin of the word “Islamophobia” is a coinage of the Muslim Brotherhood. They show how the Brotherhood launched a campaign, by ginning up “Islamophobia” as a hate crime, to stigmatize mention of such issues as radical Islam’s violence against women and murder of homosexuals, and the constant incitement of many imams to terrorism. The authors make the case that “Islamophobia” is a dagger aimed at the heart of free speech and also at the heart of our national security.

Regarding the political use of the suffix -phobia generally, it is interesting to note, as Peter LaBarbera does, how unequally and uni-directionally it is employed; *-phobes never belong to the dominant orthodoxy, but always to the class of those who dissent from it:

We at Americans For Truth, like our peers in the pro-family, conservative movement who stand in principled and faith-based opposition to the LGBT political and cultural agenda, do not “fear” homosexuals. We simply disagree profoundly with the normalization of homosexual behavior and the elevation of homosexuality and “gay” identity to “civil rights” status.

Of course, there are people who do fear homosexuals, but there are also people who fear conservative Christians. So isn’t it odd that “homophobia” (and “Islamophobia”) became mainstreamed in America’s media-driven lexicon, while “Christian-phobia” did not? (And now transgender activists, piggybacking off the semantic success of their homosexual allies, are pushing the equally dubious “transphobia” to advance their agenda.)

You could easily fill ten large books with examples of abuses of the tendentious term “homophobia” and its derivative, “homophobe,” in the same-sex debate. Advocates of homosexuality and foes of biblical sexual morality would never allow themselves to be categorized and caricatured as “phobes” — our friend John Biver posits the Secular Left as “morality-phobia” HERE — yet they pretend that somehow “homophobia” objectively describes opposition to homosexuality. That’s because to far too many homosexual advocates, the end justifies the means, and the “gay” cause advances when its critics are cynically and falsely cast as hateful and fearful creeps.

We will have more on this story. For now, it is gratifying to see AP make a move toward neutrality, objectivity and fairness in its coverage of homosexuality.

It's extremely telling that Associated Press decided to drop both "Islamophobia" and "homophobia" simultaneously, because their origin and usage as denigratory terms, free-speech attacks and thought-policing instruments are remarkably similar.

It is really good news that someone in a position of influence in the media has started taking notice. And it is not the first time:

First the Associated Press announced that it would continue using “Illegal Alien” instead of “Undocumented American”, “Accidental Border Crosser” or “Beautiful Dreamer” on the grounds that it was well… technically accurate.

...The Associated Press is not taking a conservative position here, but we have reached such a point of cultural decay that fact-based positions that derive their grounds from reason and proof are already innately conservative. Or as George Orwell put it, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

The left’s counterattack on behalf of homophobia is already irrational, even from the standpoint of their own interests, because it communicates mental problems when the goal is to communicate bigotry.

Slate argues that homophobia is just like arachnophobia. The argument is wrong on a number of levels. The most simple level where it’s wrong is that the subject under discussion is not even fear. It’s dislike. The Guardian and several other media outlets have churned out pieces arguing that dislike of homosexuality is primarily motivated by fear. But that’s an opinion and the very argument testifies to a news media that is hardly able to distinguish fact-based reporting from opinion-mongering.

Finally there is something Orwellian about describing political or religious views in terms usually employed for mental illness. It skips past discussing what people believe or do to claiming intimate knowledge of their motives and passing judgement on their sanity. It’s reasonable for the AP to opt out of such heavily politicized and inaccurate language that claims to report on the state of mental health, rather than the state of events.

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.

Peter Hitchens, Will Self and Gay Marriage on Question Time

On the BBC's political debate program Question Time last night, panellist Will Self lived up to his auto-referring surname (the only thing that it's not his fault) by doing his best to shut up everyone who dissented with his views by calling them "homophobic" or "racist", according to the subject under discussion, whether it was same-sex marriage or mass immigration. When the argument was about drug policy, his tactic was slightly different: since the words "addictophobic" or "substancist" (discriminating against those who take illegal substances) have not (yet) been invented, he accused those with different ideas of simple, old-fashioned ignorance of the data.

Will Self is a writer and a Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, which is a very sad illustration of the standard of what these days passes for college brainwashing, sorry, education.

Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens was the only one of the five panellists with something intelligent and sensible to say, beyond the ideological irrationality (Will Self), political interests (MPs Justine Greening and Stella Creasy) or simplistic platitudes (Lord Bilimoria).

Hitchens' first intervention, about PM David Cameron's ill-conceived backing of "gay" marriage in church, was not very forceful, though. He just dismissed the subject as unimportant and preferred to concentrate on attacking Cameron more generally. But after two people from the audience spoke out clearly against it, he must have found the courage he lacked at first in the culturally Marxist environment of Question Time, very hostile and aggressive to his positions, and regained the dignity of expressing deeply politically incorrect views.

But the real highlight of the program was the two members of the audience, a white man and a black woman, who had the courage to declare their opposition to homosexual marriage and even more, in the woman's case, to openly state that love of God is the basis of her opposition, facing derision, laughter among the crowd, and isolation.

I haven't seen this kind of thing for some time, and only recently I've noticed people who stand up for Christianity in a public way, like for example X-Factor star Jahmene Douglas, who professed his Christianity on the show, and said he wants to raise the moral standards in pop music.

What is interesting are also two observations.

One is that many of these Christians without fear, like Jahmene and the woman in the Question Time audience, are black or have a black parent. In our politically correct times, this gives them an advantage over whites (although it's obviously unfair, and whites should be treated with the same consideration too): it's much more difficult for "ethnic Europeans" to argue aggressively with blacks. In the case of the lady opposed to same-sex marriage, for example, to call her "homophobic", the usual reply PC people resort to, would make them feel uncomfortable because that could clash with their feeling that they are probably racist in calling a black, particularly a woman, names.

The second thing to note is that the two members of the Question Time audience who stood up for Christian values were not treated with the same intolerant derision. The black woman got a better reception than the white man, and for that I have already given a reason in the paragraph above: PC.

There is, however, another reason. The guy was apologetical. When asked about his views, he started by saying: "With the greatest respect to homosexual couples", then he rested his position on the argument that same-sex marriage is "ontologically impossible", a philosophical argument which does not hold much water but - this is my hypothesis - he thought would give him a defence against charges of homophobia, based, as it seemed to be, on higher grounds than prejudice.

The woman, instead, did not refrain from using the name of God and the Bible to support her views, and did not try to diminish or compromise her positions.

I believe that, as the recent disaster of Romney's defeat in the American presidential election shows, we should stop apologizing for our opinions and stop feeling that we have to defend ourselves.

People who have politically incorrect views that run counter to the current dominant orthodoxy, which generally speaking is cultural Marxism, should not make any attempt to dilute them: that is a losing strategy.

If you think something, say it loud (metaphorically) and clear. Others are more likely to take what you say seriously if you do not sit on the fence and, who knows, there may be some-one among them who was just waiting to take the plunge him/herself or somebody who wants a real alternative to the current climate of thought oppression and free speech censorship.

X-Factor Star, Committed Christian Jahmene, Wants to Raise Standards in Music

The very talented and exceptionally moving singer Jahmene Douglas, who was the runner-up in The X Factor pop music contest last night and whom producer Simon Cowell said he is planning to give a recording contract, is a really good role model and some-one to watch for.

In an interview with The Daily Mail 3 days ago, Jahmene said that he used to pray to give himself strength through the torment of living with his abusive dad Eustace.

The 22-year-old from Swindon recalled about his father: "He didn’t want us to go to church. He stopped us from going to Sunday school".

‘But when you do go to the bottom of the bottom, you realise everything that is important. I’m not here for money and fame and all that stuff. I have my own priorities and try to keep myself grounded in what my mission is.’

Which is? ‘A lot of singers have forgotten they have a responsibility through influencing people - mainly the younger generation. So all these foul songs - they don’t realise how badly they’re poisoning children’s minds. I’m trying to bring back the class of the olden days and hopefully set some standards.’

In Ella’s last week, Jahmene, who doesn’t drink, refused to join the other contestants in performing Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night. He says: ‘The lyrics weren’t just about alcohol, they mentioned threesomes.

‘The first line was: “There’s a stranger in my bed.” I was thinking about Ella, who’s only 16, and how it would be for her to sing lyrics that open this whole world of ménage à trois, getting naked and drinking.

‘The contestants were 100 per cent behind me. So the production team changed the song. A song has to be something I feel deeply about. I’ve turned down a lot of songs because of the message.’

Jahmene is truly made of steel, despite appearing painfully nervous most of the time.

...‘Winning can mean a lot of things. There’s winning the competition, then there’s making an album and being successful - that’s the winning for me. If I’d left two weeks ago but made an album that was successful and made a difference, I would have won.

...‘When all hope was gone, I used to get on my knees and pray for the strength to change things. I think the fact I’m here now proves my prayers have been answered. The X Factor is a massive platform to help change things for someone else.’

Jahmene is a committed Christian and had no problem, in these days when being Christian is seen as politically incorrect and not "cool", in professing his views on The X Factor program. For example, when he was asked what album he would like to make he replied a Gospel music album. When he was asked what kind of music he would have liked as one of the one-week themes for the show, he answered "‘Team Jesus’ Gospel".

He then introduced The X Factor to his local church's Gospel choir, with which he regularly sings, and to his pastor.

This is the first time in a very long time that I see Christianity and the most popular music associated in such a public, high-profile way.

"For every action there is a reaction" is not just Newton's third law of motion in classical physics, but on many occasions in history it has seemed to govern human behaviour too.

The 18th-century Enlightenment with its focus on reason was followed by 19-century Romanticism with its attention to emotions; the rise of communism in early 20th-century Italy was followed by the fascist regime trying to put a stop to socialists and communists taking power, and the defeat of fascism was followed by a resurrection in communist influence.

Early, pre-Socratic Greek philosophy saw a series of philosophers radically contradicting the principal ideas of the philosophers preceding them.

Maybe in the coming years, after many decades of erosion of Christianity and attacks on Christian values from numerous fronts in the West, we will be witnessing a reaction in the form of young people like brave, strong Jahmene, who will show rejection of this trend and will express that they do not want Christianity to be put aside in a corner to die in our societies and say that they want to bring Christian principles back into the public sphere.

Yes, There Is a Link between Islam and Paedophilia

People often make comments to the effect that there is no relationship between being Muslim and paedophilia, that this non-indigenous religious group has been unjustly targeted.

As an example, here's what I found posted in a student forum:

What I've never been able to grasp is why whenever middle-eastern men commit a crime, they are not identified by their nationality, but by their religion? This is blatantly an attempt to make Islam look bad. If a brit were to rape a teenager, it wouldn't say "Chrisitan [sic] male rapes teenager". How do you even know that these people are in fact muslims? Is it their names?

This might seem irrelevant, but if their seemingly muslim heritage is the only thing that links them together, then it is not at all an epidemic. I could just as easily find an epidemic of increasing Christian murderers in the UK.

PS: I'm not a muslim myself. I just find this extremely hypocritical.

Someone else in the forum corrected the poster saying that these childrens' sexual abuse crimes are not commited by "middle-eastern men" but mostly by UK Pakistanis.

Putting aside the factual errors of the comment quoted above and its naivety, it nevertheless expresses a recurring opinion that we hear frequently.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

First, far from being targeted, Muslim paedophiles have been let off the hook for decades by police, social services and media, who were too afraid to establish the connection between Muslims and paedophilia and left them undisturbed to go about their business sometimes for as long as 40 years.

It is interesting to note that one of the people responsible for the cover-up, Joyce Thacker, Rotherham Council's Strategic Director of Children and Young People’s Services, is the same woman who took three children away from their foster parents because these were members of the right-wing UK Independence Party. In the end, both these scandals helped UKIP and the BNP achieve second and third place in the recent Rotherham by-election, which gave UKIP in particular a record result.

Second, even today, after the truth has been exposed, there is a strong reluctance in public discourse to make this link, reluctance of which the comments I described above are an example. Just look at this video clip of an episode of the BBC programme Question Time to see a glaring case of people falling over backwards in order not to say the "M" word. So great is in many the fear to be called racist and Islamophobic, that they resort to any way to avoid saying "Muslim" and "paedophile" in the same breath, even if it means offending others.

Non-Muslim Asians like Hindus and Sikhs have resented the fact that Muslim paedophiles have been called "Asian men", implying an involvement of the Asian community as a whole which does not exist.

And, as is so blatantly and painfully obvious in the Question Time video clip, Catholicism and the Catholic Church have been dragged into this discussion for no other reason than to distract the public, to draw attention away from the fact that the paedophiles we are talking about are indeed Muslim.

So other, innocent religious groups have been unjustly blamed to avoid accusing the real culprits.

Third, there is a high statistical correlation between the UK's Muslim community and paedophile gangs. The Times and The Daily Mail in 2011 reported some illuminating figures:

Charities and agencies working in conjunction with the police to help victims of sexual abuse in such cases have publicly denied there is a link between ethnicity and the on-street grooming of young girls by gangs and pimps.

But researchers identified 17 court prosecutions since 1997, 14 of them in the past three years, involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by groups of men.

The victims came from 13 towns and cities and in each case two or more men were convicted of offences.

In total, 56 people, with an average age of 28, were found guilty of crimes including rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child.

Three of the 56 were white, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and a majority were members of the British Pakistani community.

Those convicted allegedly represent only a small proportion of what one detective called a ‘tidal wave’ of offending in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and the Midlands.

The fourth is a very strong argument that goes straight to the core and deep to the foundations of the correlation between Islam and paedophilia.

Islam does not forbid paedophilia, indeed it allows and even rules about it. The following Quranic verse refers to times when divorce is allowed  - notice "those too who have not had their courses", meaning prepubescent girls (wives) who had not started menstruating:

And (as for) those of your women who have despaired of menstruation, if you have a doubt, their prescribed time shall be three months, and of those too who have not had their courses; and (as for) the pregnant women, their prescribed time is that they lay down their burden; and whoever is careful of (his duty to) Allah He will make easy for him his affair.

Qur'an 65:4

And from the Bukhari, a collection generally regarded as the most authentic of all hadith (saying or act of Muhammad) collections:

The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with 'Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death). Bukhari 7.62.88

"Allah's Apostle said to me, "Have you got married O Jabir?" I replied, "Yes." He asked "What, a virgin or a matron?" I replied, "Not a virgin but a matron." He said, "Why did you not marry a young girl who would have fondled with you?" Bukhari 59:382

Another hadith compilation confirms what he meant by "young girl":

'A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported: “Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) married me when I was six years old, and I was admitted to his house at the age of nine.” (Sahih Muslim 3309)

It seems hard to believe that Islam has no problem with paedophilia if you don't know that Muhammad, who is for Muslims the ideal man, the "perfect example", the supreme example of conduct, the model to follow and imitate, just as Jesus is for Christians, was indeed a paedophile. He married Aisha, one of his wives, when she was 6 and had complete sexual intercourse with her when she was 9.

The argument that in those times the law and public moral code were different is irrelevant here. First of all, a religion, to be worthy of that name, must give ethical guidance and directions. The self-proclaimed founder of a new religion who passively follows the diktats of contemporary mores without questioning them, without having a vision for the future - as Jesus Christ did, whose ethics is modern and in fact pioneering even today, after 2 millennia -, does not deserve the title of prophet and his is not a religion.

Secondarily, that argument must be overturned. Paradoxically, saying that Muhammad just followed the rules of his day not only gives him and his pseudo-religion the coup de grace, but also encapsulates in one sentence what is wrong with Islam: a 7th-century AD warlord who was simply a slave of his time, killing, slaughtering, having multiple wives, having sex with children, was no better and no worse than many others of his contemporaries; but what has made him so perverse is that he enshrined all these terrible behaviours into moral guidelines for the posterity, so that what could have been consigned to history long time ago, barbarism, gratuitous violence, oppression of women, paedophilia - among his other abominable activities -, has now been set in stone for all future generations to obey to and adopt as an ideal way to conduct one's life.

And this leads us to the fifth point, that paedophilia is commonly practiced with the blessing of the law in Muslim countries today, in 2012, as child marriage. From WikiIslam:

A second look at the question; was Muhammad a pedophile? One of the most disturbing things about Islam is that it does not categorically condemn pedophilia. Indeed, it cannot, for to do so would draw attention to the pedophilia of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Many Muslims cannot condemn pedophilia even if they would like to, for they would have to abandon Islam. Muslims tacitly approve of pedophilia, even if they are embarrassed to say so. So mesmerized are Muslims by the example of Muhammad's pedophilia that they are unable to categorically denounce pedophilia or feel shame. It is prevalent in many Muslim countries disguised as child marriage. The UN is today trying to stop the evil of child marriage among the backward Islamic regions of Asia and Africa. The future of some 300 million young girls depends on it.

Scholar of Islam Raymond Ibrahim writes:

Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: "Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed."

The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl "a divine blessing," and advised the faithful: "Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house."

Rotherham By-Election: UKIP Is Second, BNP Third

In a historic victory for the UK Independence Party, it has achieved a record second place in the by-election held in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

It has been the highest percentage of the vote ever achieved by the party in any parliamentary election: 21.8%. This is the second time UKIP's candidate Jane Collins has come second in a by-election, after having won 12.2% last year in neighbouring Barnsley Central.

It was also a victory for the British National Party, which came third, before Respect and the Tories.

The fact that the Labour-run Rotherham Council had removed children from a foster home only because the foster couple are members of UKIP may have played a role in the results of the election, which was won by Labour in this safe seat for the left-wing party.

Rotherham was also one of the Northern English towns where Muslim paedophile gangs were allowed to groom and prey on youngsters without being disturbed by local police or social services or, for that matter, by the media, not for months or years but for decades. Even now, after all this has come to light, the media are still keeping silent on the matter, and an official inquiry into child sex gangs has failed to highlight the targeting of white girls by Pakistani Muslim men.

This scandalous neglect of duty and cover-up may also have helped the politically incorrect UKIP and BNP to win supporters.

The by-election was caused by the resignation of Labour MP Denis MacShane, called by some "MacShame", who as a journalist was sacked by the BBC for gross dishonesty, as an MP was found by the standards watchdog guilty of having submitted 19 false invoices "plainly intended to deceive", and who began his career as president of the NUJ (National Union of Journalists) by creating the NUJ Guidelines on Race Reporting in the 1970s, which dictated the very same kind of journalistic self-censorship, when it comes to ethnic and non-indigenous religious groups, that stopped the media from reporting and exposing scandals like the widespread paedophilia described above.

Labour Haemorrhaging Votes to UKIP in Rotherham in Guy Fawkes' Blog was written before the election results were known:

Outside of the Leveson bubble there are some actual, real, political events also going on today. Perhaps most interestingly the by-election in Rotherham. Labour’s nerves are reaching a crescendo, and not just due to the prospect of the Homeland candidate splitting the left-wing vote. This morning Peter Watt warns that the party are losing votes to UKIP by the bucket full:

“UKIP will take votes from Labour as well as the Tories in Rotherham today…the assumption that UKIP is just a threat to the Tories is dangerous and the fact that the Rotherham foster-carers were former Labour voters is not really a surprise. The quicker we wake up to the fact that most voters are not like people who attend Labour party meetings the better. Some of them even read the Daily Mail.”

While Harry Wallop notes in the Telegraph:

“Today, Rotherham goes to the polls in a parliamentary by-election. That all the talk is about Ukip rather than Labour, which has provided the town’s MP since 1933, is a remarkable turn of events…Despite the momentum, Ukip is still small, with a mere 19,000 members – the equivalent of just a few tables of pub drinkers in each constituency. But these sums appear to hold little truck in Rotherham, where the lack of jobs and prospects are the main concerns.”

UKIP’s price in Rotherham has come in to 8/1. Guido reckons that Labour are still going to take their ‘safe seat’, but numbers are going to be very, very interesting…

HuffPo: Hamas Tactic Is to Require Israel to Cause Civilian Victims

Has the world finally come to its senses?

Even far-left publications recognize that Hamas is the most responsible for what is going on in Gaza or at least open the debate to this view.

After The Guardian, now The Huffington Post has started publishing commentaries defending Israel. Criminal and civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz writes in "Hamas' Tactic: Require Israel to Cause Civilian Casualties" in the HuffPo:

As the rockets continue to fall in Israel and Gaza, it is important to understand Hamas's tactic and how the international community and the media are encouraging it. Hamas's tactic is as simple as it is criminal and brutal. Its leaders know that by repeatedly firing rockets at Israeli civilian areas, they will give Israel no choice but to respond. Israel's response will target the rockets and those sending them. In order to maximize their own civilian casualties, and thereby earn the sympathy of the international community and media, Hamas leaders deliberately fire their rockets from densely populated civilian areas. The Hamas fighters hide in underground bunkers but Hamas refuses to provide any shelter for its own civilians, who they use as "human shields." This unlawful tactic puts Israel to a tragic choice: simply allow Hamas rockets to continue to target Israeli cities and towns; or respond to the rockets, with inevitable civilian casualties among the Palestinian "human shields."

Every democracy would choose the latter option if presented with a similar choice. Although Israel goes to great efforts to reduce civilian casualties, the Hamas tactic is designed to maximize them. The international community and the media must understand this and begin to blame Hamas, rather than Israel, for the Palestinian civilians who are killed by Israeli rockets but whose deaths are clearly part of the Hamas tactic.

Every reasonable commentator has agreed with President Obama that Hamas started this battle by firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians. Every reasonable commentator also agrees with President Obama that Israel has the right to defend its citizens. But many commentators fault Israel for causing Palestinian civilian casualties. But what is Israel's option, other than to simply allow rockets to be aimed at its own women and children. As President Obama observed when he went to Sderot as a candidate:

"The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if...somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

Israel should continue to make every effort to reduce civilian casualties, both because that is the humane thing to do and because it serves their interests. But so long as Hamas continues to fire rockets from densely populated civilian areas, rather than from the many open areas outside of Gaza City, this cynical tactic--which constitutes a double war crime--will guarantee that some Palestinian women and children will be killed. And the Hamas leadership prepares for this gruesome certainty by arranging for the dead babies to be paraded in front of the international media. In one such case, the Palestinian radicals posted a video of a dead baby who turned out to have been reportedly killed in Syria by the Assad government, and in another case, they displayed the body of a baby who had been killed by a Hamas rocket that misfired, falsely claiming that it had been the victim of an Israeli rocket.

As Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan has said, the Israeli Army does "more to safeguard civilians than any Army in the history of warfare." This includes dropping leaflets, making phone calls and providing other warnings to civilian residents of Gaza City. But Hamas refuses to provide shelter for its civilians, deliberately exposing them to the risks associated with warfare, while it shelters its own fighters in underground bunkers.

The Hamas tactic is also designed to prevent Israel from making peace with the Palestinian Authority. Even Israeli doves are concerned that if Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank, Hamas may take over that territory, as it took over Gaza shortly after Israel ended its occupation of that area. The West Bank is much closer to Israel's major population centers than the Gaza. If Hamas were to fire rockets from the West Bank at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel would then have to respond militarily, as it has in Gaza. Once again, civilians would be killed, thus provoking international outcry against Israel.

What we are seeing in Gaza today is a replay of what happened in 2008 and 2009, when Israel went into Gaza to stop the rocket fire. The result was the Goldstone report which put the blame squarely on Israel. This benighted report--condemned by most thoughtful people, and eventually even critiqued by Goldstone himself--has encouraged Hamas to go back to the tactic that resulted in international condemnation of Israel. This tactic will persist as long as the international community and the media persist in blaming Israel for civilian deaths caused by a deliberate Hamas tactic.