BBC Unconvinced that Syrian Christians Are under Threat

Last night the BBC reported about the plight of Syrian Christians.

It's a monumental effort for the BBC to cover the topic of Christians persecuted just for being Christian. Despite the daily constant coverage of events in Syria it has talked of the country's Christians perhaps only once before, in April with a short report. And when it does it's always in an iffy way, as if it couldn't bring itself to accept that it's a real problem.

The newsreader who introduced the short, filmed report was so unfamiliar with the topic that, just before giving the percentage of Christians among Syrians, she hesitated and then got it wrong by a long shot, saying 2% instead of 10%.

The programme mentioned an interview with a woman whose "family had fled Syria for Lebanon because it was simply too frightening now for Christians, she insisted."

The report concluded:

The events of the Arab Spring have revitalised Syria's Brotherhood.

However one of the group's leaders, Molham al-Drobi, told the BBC that Christians had nothing to fear.

The Muslim Brotherhood would not try to establish an Islamic state.

"We are not working towards a religious state," he said.

"We don't think Syria is a place where you could have a religious state because Syria has different religions, different ethnic groups, different races."

That does not seem to have deterred Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood from its intention to impose Sharia law on all Egyptians, as this video of President Morsi, translated by MEMRI, shows:





Why should we believe what Brotherhood members say to us Westerners? Do they have any interest in telling non-Muslims what their intentions are? We know the answers to these questions, especially in the light of the Islamic doctrines that consider lying to unbelievers in order to further Islam's cause permissible and even desirable. War is deceit.

Wake Up, Animal Rights People!

To see that the animal movement has left the initiative of fighting against the huge spread of halal meat in Britain to the BNP, who organized a protest in Sunderland against Subway sandwich shops selling it (and there many of them all over the country) is shocking and saddening.

I wrote in Islam in the UK, in my site Britain Gallery:

When I first arrived here, the word “halal” was unknown to everybody except the people involved in animal welfare, who knew that the Islamic method of slaughter was bad news indeed for the animals. Now you only have to take a 30-minute drive around London (any part) and you’ll see dozens of Halal signs in shops and restaurants.

It's true that animals should not be killed for food, as vegetarian nutrition is not only adequate but in fact much better for human health than meat eating. It's true that animals always suffer during the process of farming - especially industrial farming -, transport to the point of slaughter, and in the slaughterhouse due to terror and maltreatment. It's true that even so-called "humane" slaughter can sometimes go wrong and animals may be conscious when their throats are cut or they are otherwise killed.

But we can point out all these things and still be opposed to halal and kosher methods of slaughter.

Stunning animals before slaughter is certainly better than not doing that, whatever else is true about farm animals exploitation and suffering.

Sweden has banned ritual methods of slaughter, so this shows that it is a realistic objective in the UK as well.

To find out what ritual slaughter involves, read this post and watch the video.

There is a growing opposition to halal meat among the British people, based on both animal welfare and the just rebellion against being disposessed of the culture and ethics of one's own country.

We should be at the forefront of this protest, which can ony be good for animals because, among other things, will provide a model example of a widespread protest for animal welfare popular among the general public.

This is only one of many ways in which Islam is an obstacle to animal liberation and animal welfare. In the Netherlands, when Muslim politician Hasan Küçük, a Turkish-Dutch representative on The Hague city council for the Islam Democrats, called for a ban on dogs in The Hague, Holland's third-largest city, because dogs are "unclean" in the Islamic legal tradition, it was left to Paul ter Linden, representative of Geert Wilders' PVV on the city council, to reply: "In this country pet ownership is legal. Whoever disagrees with this should move to another country." The Dutch Party for the Animals, whose proposal to make The Hague a dog-friendlier city had prompted Küçük's call for banning dogs, was silent.

Since the number of Muslims in the UK and Europe is doubling faster than you can say "Ramadan", there will be many more times in the future when we'll face this choice: are we going to give in each time? In the long battle ahead are we going to choose political correctness or the animals?

New Study Shows Half of USA Global Warming is Artificial

Meteorologist Anthony Watts, author of one of the best known and most widely read global warming skeptical blogs, Wattsupwiththat, has released a scientific discussion paper challenging the data used by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to support its climate change claims.

Watts and the study's other authors concluded: "reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward." [Emphasis added]

Breitbart interviewed one of the paper's co-authors, Dr. John R. Christy, climate change expert of international fame, who said:

In 2010, the World Meteorological Organization adopted a new standard for temperature collection stations. This discussion paper is the first to apply that standard. The finding is that when the new class scheme was applied to weather stations, the stations considered compliant had cooler trends than non-compliant stations. [Empahsis added]

The first application of the recent WMO-approved standard, then, led to a correction of the temperatures downward.

The study's lead researcher Anthony Watts' decision to pre-release it as a discussion paper for public review, before peer-reviewed journal submission, is new in academic research. Climate change "converted skeptic" Richard Muller is the only researcher to have done this before.

Halal Games and Anti-Jihad War Apparatus in Islamized London

Jihad Watch has just published my article Halal Games and Anti-Jihad War Apparatus in Islamized London, that I reproduce here:

by Enza Ferreri

London is the most Islamic city to have hosted the Olympic Games ever. There are at least 1 million Muslims thought to live in London, although the figure is likely to be higher.

And these Olympics will be dominated by Islam in more than one way.

London 2012 are the first Games to which every participating country has sent female athletes. Saudi Arabia, Brunei and Qatar had never sent women to the Olympics before. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), under pressure from human rights groups, wanted female athletes from Muslim countries to participate, and threatened Saudi Arabia with a ban in order to achieve that result.

However, the International and the London Olympic Committees had to make many concessions. Behind the conspicuous hijab-wearing women in the Opening Ceremony Athletes’ Parade, and the amazing IOC decision to allow a Saudi woman to compete in hijab against judo rules banning fighters from wearing a head covering on safety grounds, there is much more, hidden from public view.

After the UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission’s request to have Olympic dates changed so that they would not overlap with Ramadan was rejected, the organizers have bent over backwards to accommodate Muslims.

London will make Olympic history by having for the first time an Olympic Village with areas designated for Muslim prayers. A team of Muslim clerics is available to athletes and officials, and there are faith rooms at the rowing and canoe sprint village and the sailing village. All restaurants and dining facilities at the Athletes’ Village will be open 24 hours to allow Muslims to eat in the permitted hours during Ramadan.

Halal meat and meals are available at all times in the athletes’ dining facilities, and are very likely to be served to non-Muslims too outside the Olympic Village.

Ramadan and the Olympics overlapped before, but never once had the Committee changed anything to pander to Muslim participation. Even volunteers have been trained absolutely not to hurt Mohammedan sensitivities, albeit inadvertently, and to answer questions in Islamically correct ways.
Everyone is to be reminded that within the Olympic site food can be eaten before dawn and after dusk.

And, as The Daily Mail reports:

Ramadan is set to add to London’s Olympic traffic woes as thousands of Muslims squeeze into non-Games lanes to worship at the many mosques that surround the Olympic Park.

Every year during the month of August, vast crowds of worshippers descend on east London — one of the most concentrated Muslim communities in the country — for nightly prayer.

Local councillor Abdal Ullah said the influx of people to the area, between central London and Stratford, will play havoc with Games road links and traffic hotpsots.

The district surrounding the Olympic Park is home to more than 250,000 Muslims and almost 100 mosques.

The Olympic Park is in East London, an area which has had more Islamic terror suspects arrested in recent years than any similar-sized area not just in Britain, but in the whole of Europe.

The BBC reported that a senior security services official had told the TV channel that the biggest threat to the Olympics comes from British Muslim extremists, and intelligence services are taking the threat of “a homegrown terror attack” during the Olympics very seriously.

Adding to their concerns, the intelligence official continued, is that for the first time in many years the Games are taking place during Ramadan, so they have to be particularly “sensitive and effective.”

In a video interview, a former extremist explained to the BBC that Muslim terrorists may strike during the sacred month of Ramadan thinking that it will be an opportunity for going to heaven.

Foiling attacks has occupied the police and security services for months, the BBC said, and the threat is very real.

And this leads to another record: the most security-conscious, heavily guarded Olympics. The greatest mobilisation of military and security forces in the UK since the Second World War, with more troops deployed than in the war in Afghanistan, and the most heavily secured event in London”s history, are still more records.

Eleven miles of electric fencing charged with 5,000 volts of electricity and topped with razor wire separating the Olympic site from the rest of London; entrances to major venues guarded by soldiers, and surrounding streets patrolled by police heavily armed with automatic weapons, a rare sight in Britain; one of the Royal Navy’s largest warships docked on the river Thames as a staging post for military helicopters, some carrying snipers and special forces personnel ready to take out dangerous elements; another of the world’s most advanced warships also stationed on the river; 6 missile sites dedicated to intercepting hostile aircraft; surface-to-air missile systems, scanning the skies to down any airborne threats, installed on the roofs of residential buildings; advanced fighter jets patrolling the sky above London; 4 of the most advanced aircraft developed by the European Union enforcing a strict no-fly zone around the city; unmanned drones flying above London to provide surveillance for security forces; helicopters with powerful imaging equipment to identify faces, clothes, even the smallest detail on any suspect individuals; thousands of street cameras feeding data to face-recognition software to spot any known hostile person from the crowds.

Armed FBI, CIA and Interpol officers in their hundreds are in London to help Scotland Yard.
Londoners do not forget the tragic link between Islamic terrorism and these games: London won its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games on 6th July 2005, the day before the 7/7 bombings.

Welcome to the Halal, Ramadan, Jihad Games.


Photo by UK Ministry of Defence (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).

P.S. 7W6XBCCTKP85 = is my unique Technorati code, every blog has a different unique code.

Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?

The great German philosopher Hegel wrote something that is true as well as poetically beautiful, namely that philosophy is like Minerva's owl, that only takes flight at dusk.

What he meant is that the awareness of a historic period takes place at the end of it.

In history there is a constant shift of power, the dominant orthodoxy changes, and often the oppressed become oppressors and vice versa. And yet generally society, public opinion continue to see things as they used to be in a past age, to believe that today's victims are the same as in a previous historical time and those in power now are those who were in power yesterday, whose power is in fact largely gone.

You can see that every day when men and whites are discriminated against, yet people still believe that women and blacks are victims of discrimination. Homosexuals are classical oppressed of yesterday who are now - or rather the homosexual activists are - oppressing and persecuting whoever disagrees with them. Their "rights" trump everyone else's, in particular those of Christians, as the clergy of the Church of England who will soon be forced to marry "gays" in church well knows.

Another example of this Hegelian Minerva's owl syndrome comes from a part of the counterjihad movement. Some people in it, like the blog Islam versus Europe, say that human rights are practically responsible for all evils on earth, or at least in the West.

Whether they mean the ethical and political concept of human rights or the way it has been legally applied by - especially international - courts is a little ambiguous - although it has been better specified after my pointing out these ambiguities -, but it does not matter so much from their perspective because they are not in search of theoretical clarifications but of short- or medium-term strategic solutions to the problems caused by mass immigration and Islam in the West, or rather just in Europe. So they happily neglect the question of the validity of the concept because only its space-temporal consequences of here and now are important for them.

Minerva's owl comes into this because the anti-humanrightists (I had to find a shorthand, and this is the best I came up with) rely heavily on Samuel Moyn's book The Last Utopia, which is a classical case of misunderstanding of the historic myopia Hegel highlighted with his metaphor.

Moyn says that the great moral and political achievements of the last couple of centuries, like the abolition of slavery, owe nothing to the principle of human rights because this expression and idea only became popular in the 1970s. This allegedly helps the anti-humanrightists in their argument that nothing good has ever come out of human rights.

Aside from the literality of this approach (was the radio invented only when the term became widely used?), Moyn's fundamental error is that he thinks that historical figures and movements should be aware during their lifetime of their future role in history.

What Moyn says about human rights is true of most other constructs, constantly applied with hindsight to past events. History is a continuous re-interpretation of the past in light of the present. So there is nothing new or exceptional, no conspiracy here.

Specifically, the concepts of rights, natural rights and God-given rights in ethics were established by modern philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), John Locke (1632 - 1704) and the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, continuing a Christian tradition, so well before the 1970s.

It is no coincidence that suffragettes were calling for women's rights to vote and black leaders for civil rights.

The danger of not having any ethical theoretical foundation and relying just on democracy purely intended as majority rule, as anti-humanrightists advocate, should be obvious when analysing when that approach could take.

If the majority were allowed to rule without any ethical guidance or restraints, you would have nothing to oppose a majority group who decided to enslave and exploit for their own benefit, even in the cruellest and most violent way, a minority group.

One of the problems, these counterjihadists say, is that "rights conflict with one another so someone has to decide on their relative weights".

This is common to all laws. That's why there are judges. It is fallacious to think that this problem is limited to human rights. No law, legal or ethical principle has absolute validity. Even the most basic concepts, like individual freedom, have only relative validity. One person's freedom ends when another person's freedom begins. If a man had absolute individual freedom, he would become a despot, like the tyrants of the past.

So, in the same way as we don't consider the limits to the principle of individual freedom and the balancing act that we need to perform in its application sufficient reason to reject it, neither should the principle of human rights be discarded because "Rights conflict with one another so someone has to decide on their relative weights".

As anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the law will tell you, each law has only a limited scope, and often different laws contradict each other. There is always someone who "has to decide on their relative weights".

In fact, coming back to the issues of immigration and Islam, if there is a problem it is that human rights have not been protected and respected enough, be it those of the native Western populations, or of people dissenting from the politically correct line.

The examples that the anti-humanrightists give as reasons in support of their cause are in fact better viewed as the opposite.

I will explore them in a forthcoming post.

New Archbishop of Glasgow Under Fire for Comments on Homosexuality

Or rather for telling the truth.

A conservative Catholic just appointed as archbishop of Glasgow has been condemned for appearing to link the death of a Labour MP last year with his homosexuality.

Philip Tartaglia, whose appointment as the next archbishop of Glasgow by Pope Benedict was made public on Tuesday, suggested the premature death of David Cairns, a former minister, was connected to his sexuality, when he spoke at an event this year.

Cairns, himself a former Catholic priest and a widely respected Scotland Office minister, died unexpectedly aged 44 last year from complications from acute pancreatitis, shocking his family, friends and colleagues.

Tartaglia is an outspoken critic of Scottish government proposals, due to be published imminently, to legalise gay marriage and is also tipped as a successor to Cardinal Keith O'Brien as head of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland.

Currently bishop of Paisley, Tartaglia suggested at a conference on religious freedom and equality at Oxford University in April that there may have been hidden or unexplained links between Cairns's premature death and his sexuality.

In response to a question from an audience member about the suicide of a gay author in the US, the bishop said: "If what I have heard is true about the relationship between the physical and mental health of gay men, if it is true, then society is being very quiet about it.

"Recently in Scotland there was a gay Catholic MP who died at the age of 44 or so, and nobody said anything, and why his body should just shut down at that age? Obviously he could have had a disease that would have killed anybody. But you seem to hear so many stories about this kind of thing, but society won't address it."

Tartaglia's remarks were condemned by Cairns's partner, Dermot Kehoe, and Tom Harris, the Labour MP for Glasgow South, blogger and a close friend of Cairns, who became the first former Catholic priest to sit in the Commons after winning Inverclyde in 2001. Harris said the bishop's comments were "ill-informed tripe".

Kehoe, who was Cairns's partner for nearly 15 years, told the Scotsman: "This is genuinely very upsetting and painful for David's family and friends. I can't believe that someone who claims to be a man of God and is seeking to give moral leadership should speak from such a position of ignorance.

"I don't care what his views on gay marriage are, but to bring in my dead partner to justify those views is wrong."

Harris wrote to Tartaglia, describing his remarks as "hurtful and ill-informed" and urged him to reconsider them.

His letter says: "I was privileged to be one of David's closest friends. His friends and family have spent the last year trying to come to terms with his tragic loss from complications arising from acute pancreatitis.

"Your public assertion that David's illness might in some way be connected to his sexuality and lifestyle was not only unsupported by any evidence, but was, I fear, unworthy of your position as a leader in the church."

A spokesman for Tartaglia said: "Responding to a question from an audience member, Bishop Tartaglia agreed that the health risks of same-sex behaviour were largely unreported.

"He mentioned the premature death of a young high-profile gay MP in this context. There was no intention to cause offence and he regrets that anyone may have been upset.

"In the case of the MP concerned, his funeral was conducted in the Catholic church and pastoral support offered to his family and friends." [Emphasis added]

The archbishop was addressing a real problem that the mainstream media don't want to face. Regardless of specific cases, medicine considers anal sex - when is the last time you even heard or read this expression? - to carry more risks than other sexual activities. Even the ultra PC NHS says so.

An additional problem is that many deaths related to AIDS - of which the main way of transmission is from man to man, at least in the West ("In 23 European countries, the new cases of HIV in men who have sex with men rose 86 percent between 2000 and 2006.") - are from diseases resulting from the weakening of the auto-immune system due to AIDS.

Landmark Case: US Government Argues that Islam is Political

Pamela Geller, at Atlas Shrugs, reports about the developments of a landmark case in which she is involved, and which could have momentous consequences for the counterjihad movement not just in the States but everywhere.

What began as a clear first amendment issue has exploded into a landmark case regarding the status of Islam as a political entity. Today the Detroit Transit Authority (SMART), a government entity, argued before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that our "Leaving Islam" ad was political because Islam is political. At least two of the three judges seemed to go along.

If the Court rules against us, it will be ruling that Islam is political and that Sharia is a political program -- something that other government agencies have strenuously denied. If that happens, will Islam and Sharia deserve the protection of a religion?

The case was argued today before 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Raymond Kethledge, John Marshall Rogers and Algenon L. Marbley. Chris Hildebrand, the lawyer for Detroit SMART, began by referring to and based his whole argument on our recent victory over the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority in another First Amendment case about a completely different ad (a pro-Israel ad). Hildebrand argued that the Judge in that case, Paul Engelmayer, had said that that ad was political, and thus that the MTA had to accept it in accord with their guidelines. Hildebrand asserted that our "Leaving Islam?" bus ad, which Detroit SMART rejected, was also political, and thus was rightly rejected by SMART, which (in contrast to the MTA) does not take political ads. His client, said Hildebrand, does not reject ads because they're provocative (as he claimed that ours was), or controversial, but because they're political, and SMART does not and will not take political positions.

Judge Rogers then told him that he had gotten SMART into a "blurry area" to be making a distinction between the political and religious. Hildebrand countered that while the ad may be anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, and anti-Sharia (actually it was designed wholly and solely to offer help to people whose lives were threatened), it was also political. Judge Marbley then pointed out that an imam, who would issue a fatwa (referring to the part of our ad that asked, "Is your family threatening you? Is there a fatwa on your head?") was not an elected official.

Hildebrand then dropped the bomb that has extraordinary implications for the debate about anti-Sharia laws and the status of Islam in the United States: he said that yes, imams have a religious function, but they also "control Sharia law," and Sharia is political. Marbley said that that might be so in Iran, but not in Detroit, where they had a purely religious function. Hildebrand then dug in even deeper, saying that imams in Dearborn deal with Sharia on both a religious and political basis. When Marbley then asked him how our ad was different from one that SMART accepted from an atheist group, calling on people to become atheists, Hildebrand said that it differed because Islam is not only religious, but also a "political series of laws." Marbley then pointed out that the same thing could be said about the Catholic Church, since the Vatican was a political entity, and that could be used to rule out advertising from Catholic groups. Hildebrand then argued that our ad was both religious and political, and that the reference to a fatwa made it primarily political and not religious -- which would only be true if Sharia itself is primarily political and not religious.

Judge Kethledge seemed to go along with this argument, telling our own lawyer, Robert Muise (who ably argued for our side), that Sharia is "arguably" political as well as religious. Judge Rogers then outrageously compared our ad to an ad repeating a vile and disgusting blood libel against the Jews as part of Jewish law (which it most certainly is not, but the death penalty for apostasy most certainly is part of the sharia) -- showing the truth of his and Marbley's admission that they knew next to nothing about Islam (or Jewish law). Clearly they were unaware of Islam's death penalty for apostasy. If they did, they would never have said that our public service ad constituted "scorn and ridicule."

Kethledge clearly had his mind made up already, getting testy with Muise and helping Hildebrand with his case, inviting him when he returned to the stand to explain why our ad -- designed to save lives -- constituted "scorn and ridicule" of Muslims and thus was also disallowed on those grounds according to SMART's guidelines. This entangled SMART in a self-contradiction: Hildebrand said that they didn't disallow our ad because it was "controversial" but also that our ad constituted "scorn and ridicule" -- but none of the judges seemed to notice and certainly no one challenged Hildebrand on this. Hildebrand did not, and could not, explain why our ad constituted scorn and ridicule, and instead simply kept asserting that it did. He did not argue his case persuasively, but with Kethledge and also Rogers so clearly on his side, he had a clear advantage.

If SMART wins, however, the implications for the status of Islam and Sharia as political will be enormous. Incalculable. SMART may end up winning the battle for Sharia in the U.S., but losing the war. [Emphasis added]