Coronavirus, Meningitis Tell Us Without Borders We Die

By Enza Ferreri


This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


While all the attention is on Coronavirus, there is another illness that has been on the increase in Italy: meningitis, a disease of generally infectious origin.

Meningitis Risk from African Migration to Italy

Italian doctor Alessandro Meluzzi, while speaking on the topic of coronavirus, also said:

I want to remind everyone present of something that nobody remembers: the very strong growth of meningitis in Italy, especially in Tuscany, is related to the fact that the type C meningococcus [meningococcal type C bacterium], which almost did not exist in Italy, comes from the meningococcus belt. That is the Sahel, from which 90% of African migration to Italy originates.

He concluded by saying: “Let's try to tell that to the President of the Tuscany region. What I mean is that boundaries, like cell membranes, serve to survive.

"It is not a question of racism, this is not the problem, but that of stopping viruses and bacteria, otherwise we are delirious.

"Without borders we die. As cells need membranes and the immune system needs antibodies, borders are necessary for survival."

Meningitis Belt, in Africa

Like Other Parts of the Natural World, We Are Not Interchangeable

Doctor Meluzzi is right.

The idea of a globalised, borderless world is a dystopian view, totally unrealistic and, if tried to put into practice - as many forces are trying at the moment, against people's will - it will lead to chaos and highly destructive consequences.

There is a reason why the various peoples, nations, ethnic groups have spontaneously formed and united themselves into separate societies.

Smaller polities are always easier to manage. This is why larger states are divided into federal states, then counties, provinces, regions and so on.

This is the way men naturally organise themselves, it is an organic process, not one dictated from above like the "one world" idea.

Nature doesn't exist just outside of us. It exists inside of us too.

We worry not to break the balance of non-human nature, what is generally known as the environment or the ecosystem.

But then, paradoxically or at least unreasonably, our culture's dominant ideology (although not shared by most people) holds that human beings are flexible and pliable to a fantastic point, for example holds that a person's sex can be chosen or changed.

Similarly, this powerful ideology maintains that the naturally-developed, organic human societies that have grown out of family and blood ties, together with a shared history, culture and, more importantly, religion, are not necessary and can be replaced by a global society with a world government.

In this view, humans are seen as pawns in a game of draughts or chess, which, being all the same, can move or be moved from one part of the world to another without any serious consequence.

A hypothesis that we are now experimenting on ourselves with disastrous effects.

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SOURCE
Meluzzi: I confini servono a sopravvivere
PHOTO CREDIT
Streets of Italy Deserted

Italy: How a Coronavirus Crisis Became a Disaster

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


Italy early in the coronavirus crisis was the first country in the world for number of Covid-19 cases, with its number of confirmed infections increasing very rapidly day by day, and the whole country was placed under lockdown, as is well known. It is important to understand what happened to provoke this exceptional crisis.

In a previous article we saw that, for fear of labels of racism, by not having quarantined all people coming from China, a measure recommended by the World Health Organisation and followed by many nations, the Centre-Left Italian government has opened the door to the epidemic.

Then we saw that the uncontrolled immigration that for a long time has particularly hit and shaken Italy among the countries of Europe, in addition to bringing security and crime risks posed by undocumented migrants' free circulation, has now turned into another possible dynamite waiting to explode: due to China-Africa close trade ties and the vast presence of Chinese in the continent, Africa can become an incubation venue and transmission channel for coronavirus, which means that lots of African immigrants to Italy may be carrying Coronavirus.

The migrants arriving in Italian ports may have the coronavirus without their knowledge - and without ours. And still without their knowledge they could contribute to spread it throughout Europe.

The consequences, in that case, would be potentially lethal given the absence of sanitary bulwarks in almost all African states.

The infection might spread to Europe through Africa perhaps via Italy.

African Countries at Risk

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was very clear when he said that the "biggest concern", in addition to the epidemic itself, is that the virus may reach "countries with weaker health systems" least able to contain it, and the whole of Africa undoubtedly falls into that category.

Although, when news of the epidemic from China first started spreading, there were no confirmed cases of Coronavirus in Africa, there are now, and escalating fairly quickly.

Doctor Giovanni Rezza, specialised in hygiene and in infectious diseases, senior scientist at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita' (ISS) in Rome, and Director of the Department of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-mediated Diseases, has confirmed that Africa could represent a problem: it is a very populous continent, he said, and has fragile and weak points in the health chain:

African states do not have the same network as European laboratories. And the various types of fever that people can get could be confused with other infections and not be recognised as Coronavirus. This is why international organisations should be on the alert.

Africa, except for a few specialised centres, does not even have the means to recognize this new virus.

Health authorities and researchers fear that the Coronavirus could circulate undetected in Africa, where less advanced health systems could quickly be overwhelmed by a local outbreak.

It's therefore necessary to close the Italian ports to migration.

PHOTO CREDIT
La Gazzetta di Reggio

California: the Islamic Supremacists Next Door

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry, Gays, Equality Is a Different Thing

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

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

It was introduced thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support

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

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

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

Ignore

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

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

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

Election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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."

UK: Man Demoted for His Christian Views Wins under £100 in Compensation Case

A country where you can demote an employee because he does not share your views and get away with it - Mr Smith remains in his demoted position - is getting dangerously close to a totalitarian state where there is control over what people may or may not think.

We can jokingly call it "political correctness" but it is deadly serious.

My definition of political correctness is this: the orthodoxy, namely the ideology that is dominant in both senses of the term - dominant because most widespread, and dominant because it is imposed with non-democratic means, through the use of force.

What I find most ironic is that the people who hold politically correct views and force everyone else to embrace them are the very same people who are horrified at the Counter-Reformation times' Catholic Church's use of dogma and heresy as a way of controlling ideas and hence people.

The only difference between the methods used by the masters of PC and the Inquisition is that in the intervening centuries the penal system of punishment has changed and instead of torture and burning at stake we have destructions of heretics' careers and livelihoods.

A Christian who was demoted for posting his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook will receive less than £100 compensation after winning his legal action for breach of contract.

Adrian Smith, 55, lost his managerial position, had his salary cut by 40% and was given a final written warning by Trafford Housing Trust (THT) after posting that gay weddings in churches were "an equality too far".

The comments were not visible to the general public, and were posted outside work time, but the trust said he broke its code of conduct by expressing religious or political views which might upset co-workers.

To be allowed to upset or offend is the essence of freedom of speech: there is no call for restriction on expression that does not offend anyone.

Mr Justice Briggs, in London's High Court, said the trust did not have a right to demote Mr Smith as his Facebook postings did not amount to misconduct. He added that the postings were not - viewed objectively - judgmental, disrespectful or liable to cause upset or offence, and were expressed in moderate language.

As for their content, they were widely held views frequently to be heard on radio and television, or read in the newspapers. He said he had "real disquiet" about the financial outcome for Mr Smith, whose compensation was limited to the small difference between his contractual salary and the amount actually paid to him during the 12 weeks following his assumption of his new, but reduced, role.

If Mr Smith had begun proceedings for unfair dismissal in the Employment Tribunal, rather than for breach of contract in the county court, there was every reason to suppose he would have been awarded a substantial sum - but Mr Smith had said that by the time he had raised the necessary funds, the time limit for such proceedings had expired.

The judge said: "Mr Smith was taken to task for doing nothing wrong, suspended and subjected to a disciplinary procedure which wrongly found him guilty of gross misconduct, and then demoted to a non-managerial post with an eventual 40% reduction in salary. The breach of contract which the trust thereby committed was serious and repudiatory. A conclusion that his damages are limited to less than £100 leaves the uncomfortable feeling that justice has not been done to him in the circumstances."

Later, Mr Smith said: "I'm pleased to have won my case for breach of contract today. The judge exonerated me and made clear that my comments about marriage were in no way 'misconduct'. My award of damages has been limited to less than £100. But I didn't do this for the money - I did this because there is an important principle at stake."

Matthew Gardiner, chief executive at Trafford Housing Trust said: "We fully accept the court's decision and I have made a full and sincere apology to Adrian. At the time we believed we were taking the appropriate action following discussions with our employment solicitors and taking into account his previous disciplinary record.

"We have always vigorously denied allegations that the trust had breached an employee's rights to freedom of religious expression under human rights and equalities legislation and, in a written judgment handed down on 21st March 2012, a district judge agreed that these matters should be struck out. This case has highlighted the challenges that businesses face with the increased use of social media and we have reviewed our documentation and procedures to avoid a similar situation arising in the future. Adrian remains employed by the trust and I am pleased this matter has now concluded."

Why Paedophilia Concerns Have Come to Override Basic Rules of Law

Whether or not the BBC, as the Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson argues, should prove that the programme Newsnight was not acting with malice towards senior Tory politician Lord McAlpine wrongly accused of paedophilia by an abuse victim, one thing is clear.

The current obsession with paedophilia seems to have erased or greatly diluted the basic legal principles that a person is innocent until proven guilty and, even more importantly, that the burden of the proof is on the accuser.

Paedophilia and, to a lesser extent, rape have become such politically incorrect crimes that they are treated as if they were worse than even murder or mutilation.

Yet losing life or a limb is certainly worse than being a victim of sex crimes.

When another child abuse scandal connected to the BBC, that of Jimmy Savile, emerged, we heard a never-ending number of celebrities and commentators repeating ad nauseam that children must absolutely be believed without a doubt in the world when they make this kind of accusations, almost implying that disbelief is a crime in itself and echoing similar assertions made about rape and women who claim to have been raped.

Nobody should be believed absolutely and undoubtedly: children, adults, women and men. People who say they have been victims of a crime are witnesses; and it is a well known fact that crime witnesses are highly unreliable, as this latest case concerning Lord McAlpine confirms for the umpteenth time.

This applies to all crimes: the least unpopular as much as the most hated ones. It has nothing to do with the severity of the crime, or how much it is disliked, or how strong emotions it arises.

It is a simple rule of law. To punish an innocent is worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

In the case of paedophilia, even accusing an innocent may be worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

"To call someone a paedophile is to consign them to the lowest circle of hell – and while they are still alive" correctly writes Boris Johnson.

But why have we got to this point of insanity, where paediatricians have been lynch mobbed for having the same prefix as paedophiles (from the Greek for "child") in their name and accusations can fly around and be believed so liberally?

The reason is very simple. Starting from the 1960s "sexual revolution", strongly if not entirely consciously influenced by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich theories that repressing sexual impulses is not good for you, sexual activity has been removed from the moral sphere.

Contemporary, influential moral philosopher Peter Singer writes in his Practical Ethics that ethics should not concern itself with sexuality, and that driving a car, due to what he believes to be its environmental impact, raises more moral issues than having sex.

This new dogma has been readily and happily accepted by a majority opinion, leading to such nice results as multiplication of marriage breakdowns, adultery, divorces, broken families, abortions, illegitimate births, multiple partners and fathers, AIDS, increase in sexually transmitted diseases, homosexualist agenda being imposed on everybody, incest and Muslim polygamy made quasi-legal or accepted.

But public opinion, seeing where all this was going, namely that sex with children woud be next on the list of morally permissible activities, strongly drew a line at that. Something similar happened with rape.

Given the very confused ideas about sexuality and morality that prevail in our societies (and I grant that the subject is complex), all the furore about paedophilia (and to a lesser degree rape) derives from and is directly proportional to the eagerness and almost desperation with which all other forms of sexuality have been embraced without a thought in the world.

It turns out that sexual activity is not beyond the realm of ethics after all.

UK Social Services Paralyzed by Political Correctness

The UK's scandals of Muslim paedophilia and police and social services' decade-long inertia about it, recently unearthed, reminded me of what I read several years ago in a book published in 2001, Theodore Dalrymple's great book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , where he recounts a similar story of ethnic abuse of children and social services paralyzed by political correctness and fear. This happened in 1999, which shows how long-established and entrenched these problems are now in Britain.

What is interesting about Dalrymple's narration is that the victim is black. It is evidence that the obsession with racism that seems to have gripped the whole of Britain, from social services to football, from politics to academia to entertainment, is not intended for the benefit of ethnic minorities, who may suffer as well from these unbalanced social views, as is apparent in this tragic case.

Black footballer Rio Ferdinand was penalized by not being called to represent England in the Euro 2012 Cup, for example, to avoid tensions in the team, tensions originally stirred by the Football Association's accusations of racism against the then England captain John Terry for what he had allegedly said in a row with Ferdinand's brother.

Rigid ideological positions hardly ever benefit anyone. I know animal rights people who are so blind in their stern adherence to abolitionism and veganism that they don't really see or indeed care that these strictures may hinder the animal cause, with obvious negative consequences for the animals.

The writer Theodore Dalrymple was a psychiatrist who worked in a prison and in a poor neighbourhood's hospital. In this essay he recalls a 1999 case that hit the headlines, and then describes his own professional experiences of similar episodes of almost murderous negligence due to ideological presumptions or fears of "racism".

The essay, which is a chapter entitled "And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day"of the above book by Dalrymple, is also published online. Here are some excerpts:

The trial in January of Marie Therese Kouao and her lover, Carl Manning, for the murder of their eight-year-old ward, Anna Climbie, caused a sensation in England: not merely because the pathologist who performed the post-mortem on the child said in court that it was the worst case of child abuse he had ever seen, but because of the depths of incompetence and pusillanimity it revealed among the public servants charged with detecting, preventing, and responding to such abuse.

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the competence of our public servants has declined along with our nation's general level of education; but in this case, the authorities conducted themselves with so stunning a lack of common sense that something more must account for it than mere ignorance. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson slightly, such stupidity is not in nature. It has to be worked for or achieved. As usual, one must look to the baleful influence of mistaken ideas to explain it.

Anna Climbie died of hypothermia in February, 1999. Her body after death showed 128 marks of violence, inflicted with leather belts, metal coat hangers, a bicycle chain, and a hammer. She was burned with cigarettes and scalded with hot water. Her fingers were cut with razors. For six months, she had been made to sleep in a black plastic garbage bag (in place of clothes) in a bathtub: sometimes she had been left in cold water, bound hand and foot, for 24 hours. She was emaciated to the point of starvation; her legs were so rigidly flexed that when she was admitted to the hospital the day before her death, they could not be straightened.

It was not as if there had been no warnings of Anna's terrible fate. She was admitted to the hospital twice during the months before she died; doctors alerted the social service authorities to the abuse she was suffering at least six times; and the police also were alerted more than once. No one did anything whatsoever.

Marie Therese Kouao came originally from the Ivory Coast, though she was a French citizen and lived in France for most of her life. She would return to the Ivory Coast from time to time to persuade relatives there to hand over their children to her, so that she could bring them up in Europe, assuring them a brighter future than West Africa offered, she said. She claimed to have a highly paid job at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

She used the children successively entrusted to her care to claim benefits from the welfare system, first in France and then in England. She moved to England with Anna, because the French authorities were demanding the reimbursement of $3,000 of benefits to which she had not been entitled. On her arrival in England, she was at once granted benefits worth, coincidentally, a further $3,000.

When the benefits ran out, she met the driver of a bus in which she traveled, a strange and isolated young West Indian called Carl Manning. He was almost autistic, a social misfit, whose main interests were bus routes and Internet pornography. She moved in with him at once.

... Kouao—the stronger character of the two by far—needed Manning, because he had an apartment, and she had nowhere else to stay; Manning needed Kouao, because she was the only woman, other than a prostitute, with whom he had ever had a sexual relationship. When Kouao began to believe that Anna was possessed by the devil, Manning accepted what she said and joined in her efforts to abuse Satan out of Anna. They took her to several fundamentalist churches, whose pastors performed exorcisms: indeed, on the very day before Anna's death, it was the taxi driver who was taking them to one such church for an exorcism who noticed that Anna was scarcely conscious, and who insisted upon taking her to an ambulance station, from whence she was taken to the hospital in which she died.

... Two distant relatives of Kouao's who lived in England testified that they drew the attention of the welfare authorities to Anna's condition. Nothing happened. A babysitter who looked after Anna when Kouao found work was so worried by her general condition, her incontinence of urine, and the marks on her skin, that she took her to a hospital. There, Kouao managed to persuade an experienced doctor that Anna's main problem was scabies, from which everything else about her followed. Kouao claimed that the marks on her skin were the result of her own scratching to relieve the irritation of scabies.

Nine days later, however, Kouao herself took Anna to another hospital.

... Hospital staff noted that she became incontinent at the prospect of this woman's visits to the hospital, and a nurse reported that she stood at attention and trembled when Kouao arrived.

The doctor in charge of the case duly informed the social worker and the police of her well-founded suspicions. The social worker and the policewoman deputed to the case, both of them black themselves, dismissed these suspicions out of hand, however, without proper investigation, once again believing Kouao's account of the case—namely that Anna had scabies, from which everything else followed. The social worker and the policewoman neither looked at the child themselves nor at the hospital photographs of the child's condition. They insisted that Anna be released back into the care (if that is quite the word) of Kouao—the social worker explaining Anna's evident fear of Kouao as a manifestation of the deep respect in which Afro-Caribbean children hold their elders and betters. The fact that the Ivory Coast is in West Africa, not the West Indies, did not occur to the social worker, whose multiculturalism obviously consisted of the most rigid stereotypes.

On discovering that Anna had been returned to Kouao, the doctor in charge of the case wrote twice to express her grave concern about the child's safety to the welfare authorities, who dispatched the same social worker to Manning's apartment, which she found cramped but clean. That was all she saw fit to comment upon. By then, Anna was kept in the bathtub at night and beaten regularly, with (among other things) a hammer to the toes. Manning was writing in his diary that Anna's injuries were self-inflicted, a consequence of her "witchcraft."

The social worker and the policewoman never went back. They feebly pleaded fear of catching scabies from Anna. Finally, Kouao visited the social worker and claimed that Manning was sexually abusing Anna, withdrawing the claim soon afterward. The social worker and the policewoman assumed that the claim was just a ploy on Kouao's part to obtain more spacious accommodation for herself, and their investigations evidently did not involve examining Anna.

Two months later, Anna was dead.

The case naturally provoked a lot of commentary, much of it beside the point. The social worker and the policewoman had been made into scapegoats, correspondents to the Guardian—the great organ of left-liberal thinking in Britain—suggested; the real problem was a lack of resources: social workers were too overworked and poorly paid to do their job properly. It is amazing how anything can be turned these days into a pay claim.

Doesn't that ring a bell? Cuts explain everything, as the woman in the audience of Question Time said about the little attention paid by the police to the Rochdale Muslim paedophiles (video).

A former social worker, however, wrote to the Guardian and suggested that ideology, particularly in the training of social workers, was the fundamental problem. Here, of course, he went to the heart of the matter. The theme of race, and official attitudes toward it, ran through the Anna Climbie case like a threnody.

So rapidly has political correctness pervaded our institutions that today virtually no one can keep a clear head about race. The institutions of social welfare are concerned to the point of obsession with race. Official anti-racism has given to racial questions a cardinal importance that they never had before. Welfare agencies divide people into racial groups for statistical purposes with a punctiliousness I have not experienced since I lived, briefly, in apartheid South Africa a quarter of a century ago. It is no longer possible, or even thought desirable, for people involved in welfare services to do their best on a case-by-case basis, without (as far as is humanly feasible) racial bias: indeed, not long ago I received an invitation from my hospital to participate in a race-awareness course, which was based upon the assumption that the worst and most dangerous kind of racist was the doctor who deluded himself that he treated all patients equally, to the best of his ability. At least the racial awareness course was not (yet) compulsory: a lawyer friend of mine, elevated recently to the bench, was obliged to go through one such exercise for newly appointed judges, and was holed up for a weekend in a wretched provincial hotel with accusatory representatives of every major "community." Come the final dinner, a Muslim representative refused to sit next to one of the newly appointed judges because he was Jewish.

The outcome of the Anna Climbie case would almost certainly not have been different had the policeman and the social worker at its center been white, but the reasons for the outcome would have been slightly different. As blacks who represented authority—in a society in which all serious thinkers believe oppressed Black to be in permanent struggle with oppressing White—these functionaries had joined forces with the aggressor, at least in the minds of those who believe in such simple-minded dichotomies. Under the circumstances, it would hardly be surprising if they exhibited, when dealing with other black people, a reluctance to enforce regulations with vigor, for fear of appearing to be Uncle Toms, doing the white man's work for him. In a world divided into Them and Us (and it would have been difficult, given the temper of the times, for the social worker and the policewoman to have escaped this way of thinking altogether), We are indissolubly united against Them: therefore, if one of us treats another one of us badly, it is a scandal that we must conceal for our own collective good. A black African friend of mine, who had been a refugee in Zambia, once published an article in which he exposed the corruption of the regime there. His African friends told him that, while nothing he said in the article was untrue, he should not have published it, because it exposed Africa's dirty linen to the racist gaze of Europeans.

In other words, the social worker and the policewoman believed Marie Therese Kouao because they wanted to avoid having to take action against a black woman, for fear of appearing too "white" in the eyes of other blacks. Thus, they resorted to the preposterous rationalizations that the Ivory Coast is an island in the West Indies and that West Indian children stand at attention when their mothers visit them in the hospital.

The white doctor who was taken in by Kouao's ridiculous story of scabies (a diagnosis contradicted both by a dermatologist at the time and at post-mortem) was afraid to appear too harsh in her assessment of Kouao, to avoid the accusation, so easily made in these times of easy outrage, of being a racist. Had she not affected to believe Kouao, she would have had to take action to protect Anna, at the risk of Kouao's accusing her of being racially motivated. And since (to quote another memo from my hospital) "racial harassment is that action which is perceived by the victim to be such," it seemed safer to leave Kouao to her coat hangers, hammers, boiling water, and so forth. It is for this reason, also, that the outcome of the case would have been no different had the social worker and the policewoman been white: their fears would have been different from those of their black colleagues, but the ultimate effects of those fears would have been the same.

Kouao, Manning, and Anna Climbie were treated not as individual human beings but as members of a collectivity: a purely theoretical collectivity, moreover, whose correspondence to reality was extremely slight. No out-and-out racist could have suggested a less flattering picture of the relations between black children and black adults than that which the social worker and the policewoman appeared to accept as normal in the case of Kouao and Anna Climbie. And had the first doctor, the social worker, and the policewoman been less fixated on the problem of race and more concerned to do their best on a case-by-case basis, Anna Climbie would still have been alive, and Kouao and Manning would be spending less of their lives in prison.

I have seen such "racial awareness"—the belief that racial considerations trump all others—often enough. A little while ago I was asked to stand in for a doctor who was going on prolonged leave and who was well known for his ideological sympathy for blacks of Jamaican origin. For him, the high rates both of imprisonment and psychosis of young Jamaican males are evidence of what has come to be known in England, since a notorious official report into the conduct of London's Metropolitan Police, as "institutionalized racism."

A nurse asked me to visit one of the doctor's patients, a young black man living in a terraced house near the hospital. He had a long history of psychosis and was refusing to take his medication. I read his hospital notes and went to his house.

When I arrived, his next-door neighbor, a middle-aged black man, said, "Doctor, you've got to do something; otherwise someone's going to be killed." The young man, floridly mad, believed that he had been cheated by his family of an inheritance that would have made him extremely rich.

Only later did I learn of this young man's history of violence. The last time the doctor for whom I was standing in visited the home, the young man chased him away, wielding a machete. The young man had attacked several of his relatives and had driven his mother out of the house, which she owned. She had been obliged by his threats to seek accommodation elsewhere.

None of his propensity to violence, not even the incident with the machete, appeared in the medical notes. The doctor felt that to record the incidents would "stigmatize" the patient and add to the harm he chronically suffered as a member of an already stigmatized group. Furthermore, to treat him against his will for his dangerous madness—which English law permits—would simply be to swell the already excessive numbers of young black men requiring such compulsory treatment for psychoses caused (my colleague would say) by English racism.

... A young black man, who still lived with his mother, ...had lost so much blood that he required a transfusion before the surgery to repair his tendons could begin. A more determined effort to kill oneself could hardly be imagined. I suggested to his mother that, after his recovery from the operation, he be transferred to a psychiatric ward.

At first, she agreed, relieved at the suggestion. But then another of her sons and a friend arrived in the hospital, and the atmosphere changed at once. You might have supposed from their attitude toward me that it was I who had cut the young man's wrists, barricaded him in the house, and nearly done him to death. My argument that his conduct over the past weeks suggested that he had become mentally disturbed in some way that required further investigation, and that he was in grave danger of killing himself, was called racist: I wouldn't have argued thus if my patient had been white. The hospital was racist; the doctors were racist; I in particular was racist.

Unfortunately, the mother, with whom my relations until the arrival of the two other men had been cordial, now took their part. Under no circumstances would she allow her son to go to a psychiatric ward, where they routinely (and purposely) drugged young black men to death. The brother and the friend warned me that if I insisted, they would get their friends to create a disturbance in the hospital.

... A few weeks later, the young man killed himself by hanging.

At least the family did not have the gall to sue me for not having invoked the full force of the law (as, on reflection, I should have). They did not argue that I had failed to hospitalize him against his will for racist reasons, not caring about the fate of a mere black man—an argument that doubtless would have struck some people as entirely plausible. Indeed, I did not invoke the law for reasons of race, though not for racist reasons: for had the family been white, I would certainly have overruled them. But I had capitulated to the orthodoxy that avoiding race conflict must trump all other considerations, including the mere welfare of individuals. For in our current climate of opinion, every white man is a racist until proved otherwise.

No one doubts the survival of racist sentiment. The other day, for example, I was in a taxi driven by a young Indian who disliked the way a young Jamaican was driving. "Throw that man a banana!" he exclaimed unselfconsciously. His spontaneous outburst spoke volumes about his real feelings.

But the survival of such sentiment hardly requires or justifies the presumption that all public services are inherently and malignantly racist, and that therefore considerations of racial justice should play a bigger part in the provision of services than considerations of individual need. In this situation, black and white are united by their own kind of folie à deux, the blacks fearing that all whites are racist, the whites fearing that all blacks will accuse them of racism.

And while we are locked in this folly, innocents like Anna Climbie die.

The British and Political Correctness

I remember that, when I first came to live in London from Italy in 1984, before political correctness had begun in earnest, I read in books and magazines and heard on the TV many jokes about, say, the French or the Germans which, if they had been about blacks or Muslims, might have started a riot in the ethnic communities areas.

I've never, throughout all the decades I've been living here, seen any sign of discrimination, not even the slightest, tiniest and most insignificant, against Africans, West Indians and Asians, but Europeans were fair game.

Being Italian, it also happened to me sometime to hear jokes or other stereotypes about Italians.

The British then seemed to suffer from a superiority complex and to believe that no one in the world could be as good as they were.

A certain degree of political correctness existed already but, as I said, it was exclusively for the benefit of non-Westerners and anyway not yet as ferocious and draconian as was to become later.

Eventually that political correctness seems to have affected, as if by contagion, unintentionally, Europeans too.

I didn't think that I would ever say this but I would rather change the present time for the days when, yes, the English were a bit insufferable at times with their self-importance, but at least people were freer to speak and they didn't have to censor every word for fear of the thought police as they are now.