Europe's Awakening: Switzerland Restricts Asylum, Holland Says No to Islam

How I love and admire Switzerland. Now more than ever.

A vast majority of the Swiss people, 78.5%, have yesterday voted in a referendum, approving the amendments to further restrict the asylum law in the country. All cantons of the confederation have been in favour.

"A big disappointment" commented the result Adèle Thorens, co-chairman of the Greens. "We did not expect to win, but we did not expect a similar result." That the Greens are disappointed is a measure of how good the changes are, at least in relation to the rest of Europe.

The amendments to the asylum law, approved by parliament at the end of last September, are designed to accelerate the formal procedures, revoke the opportunity to apply for asylum in embassies, and no longer recognize conscientious objection as a reason for obtaining the status of refugee.

On the other hand they allow federal authorities to temporarily convert buildings, mostly military, into asylum seekers shelters, even without the consent of the cantons and the municipalities concerned. And they allow the possibility of opening centres for "problematic" asylum seekers.

The Swiss law on asylum had already gone through a series of progressively-restricting changes, all approved by the people.

It's an easy prediction that, if every country in Western Europe were allowed a referendum on asylum and immigration, the result would be similar. It's also easy to predict that no other country would go down the same route as Switzerland, a nation with historical direct democracy roots, exactly because the result would be similar.

Switzerland has planned another referendum for 2015, this time to curb all immigration and not just asylum seeking.

Another poll, this in Holland and not a referendum but simply a public opinion survey, shows, in the words of Geert Wilders, that “The Netherlands has had enough of Islam”:

More than three quarters of the Dutch (77 percent) believe that Islam is no enrichment for our country. More than two-thirds – 68 percent – say that there is enough Islam in the Netherlands. It is striking that a majority of voters from all political parties (from PVV to VVD, CDA, D66, PvdA, SP and 50plus) share this view.

A poll conducted by the research bureau of Maurice de Hond (the Dutch equivalent of Gallup), commissioned by the PVV, among a representative sample of over 1,900 people also shows other striking results:

A majority of 55 percent favors stopping immigration from Islamic countries.

63 percent say: no new mosques.

72 percent favor a constitutional ban on Sharia law in the Netherlands.

64 percent say that the arrival of immigrants from Islamic countries has not been beneficial to the Netherlands.

Nearly three-quarters – 73 percent – of all Dutch see a relationship between Islam and the recent terror acts in Boston, London and Paris.

Anjem Choudary May Soon Lose His Benefits

The movement of public opinion against Anjem Choudary, the UK Muslim welfare scrounger, sorry, recipient and former solicitor who co-founded the now-banned Islamist organization al-Muhajiroun, has always been great, and has become greater especially after the beheading of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich.

Research by the neo-conservative Henry Jackson Society indicates that, in the 12 years up to al-Muhajiroun’s proscription, about 18 % of all those convicted of Muslim terrorism offences had current or past links with the association.

Choudary has a history of leading Islamist groups now banned, like the ominous-sounding Islam4UK.

Patience seems to be running out. Paul Golding, chairman of ther organization Britain First, has posted a YouTube video giving London's Metropolitan Police an ultimatum: if they didn't arrest Anjem Choudary by the now-expired deadline of 29 May he would.

Now even The Sun newspaper has joined the chorus of disapproval, by forming a panel of experts to investigate Choudary and compile a dossier of evidence which lists all his offences. Its conclusion: he has clearly already broken the law and it's now time to act and arrest him for inciting hatred.

The paper's expert panel includes a legal academic, an MP, a former Flying Squad chief, an Islamic scholar and the father of a 7/7 victim.

And it's not all. Anjem Choudary stands to lose his welfare benefits, claimed to be nearly £26,000 a year:

Any claimant whose behaviour is ruled to be deeply offensive or harmful to society would be stripped of their handouts under a new law planned by ministers.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith’s move is aimed at extremists like Choudary — and hate preacher Abu Qatada, who is fighting deportation.

IDS met Home Secretary Theresa May yesterday to plot a joint approach.

Choudary scoops up nearly £26,000 in state giveaways a year — leading to accusations British taxpayers are being forced to fund terrorism.

A source said: “Iain and Theresa have been bothered about the likes of Choudary spewing his bile while taking whatever he wants from the state for some while. But the terrible events in Woolwich have given them fresh impetus to sort out this mess.”

Choudary said murdered soldier Lee Rigby will “burn in hell” and suspect Michael Adebolajo was a “nice man”.

The ex-lawyer, 46, yesterday goaded the police as he boasted of preaching hate without law-breaking.

He taunted top Scotland Yard cop Cressida Dick after she said he uses his legal training to avoid over-stepping the mark.

He wrote on Twitter: “Perhaps she’d be happier if no one knew the law?” But one of his followers was last night charged with inciting terrorism in an online lecture and text.

Secularism’s ‘Progress’: Western Churches-Turned-Mosques Segregating Women

If you've ever had the great fortune of seeing the entrance to a mosque, you'll have noticed that there are two doors: one, the main, huge, is for men, another, small and lateral, for women (as in the picture below of the East London Mosque).

Apparently we need "right-wing groups" now in England to protest sexism, because the Left totally condones it.

The recently-formed England National Resistance (ENR) felt outraged that the North West Kent Muslim Association’s mosque in Crayford High Street has separate entrances for men and women.

Particularly offensive is the fact that this was once a church, now converted into a mosque. Our society, dominated by atheist and Leftist "progressive" ideologies, is certainly making big strides in its advancement from Christianity to Islam, which this Crayford church-turned-mosque well symbolizes.

And everybody knows, or at least our comrades do, that Islam is more progressive than the religion on which the Western civilization was built (Christianity, for those who may not know).

Having separate entrances for men and women, the former much larger and central to represent the higher standing and greater power that Islam gives to the males of the species, is a good way to walk into the 21st century by harking back to the 7th-century cult of Mohammed.

Here are a few examples of how advanced and enlightened Islam is regarding the equality between sexes, which is why it is defended and supported by all good comrades:

"and the men are a degree above them [women]". Qur'an (2:228)

"Your wives are as a tilth unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye will..." Qur'an (2:223)

"And call to witness, from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not found then a man and two women." Qur'an (2:282) In court, the evidence given by a man witness is worth that of two women.

"The male shall have the equal of the portion of two females" in children's inheritance. Qur'an (4:11)

"O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee". Qur'an (33:50) Women are sanctified by Islam to be kept as sex slaves ("those whom thy right hand possesses").

These quotes from the Qur'an are by no means exhaustive of the plethora of recommendations from Allah on how to keep women in a condition of inferiority. But they can be a good introduction.

Let's go back to those reactionaries and retrograde Nehanderthals (they must be, otherwise they would not be "far-right", and if they were not "far-right" they would not be reactionary: perfect Leftist logic, you must agree) of the ENR.

Referring to the mosque in Kent with its separate entrances they said: "To find that fundamental medieval attitude on the streets of Crayford in an ex-Christian church, we were appalled.”

This comment followed complaints on Facebook about the "sexist signs" and the Muslims praying in the street outside the mosque.

So the ENR’s national organiser, Paul Golding, and another member asked the mosque’s imam to remove what the group describes as "sexist and offensive signs" and to cover the Christian cross on the front of the building. According to Golding, the imam agreed to cover the cross but refused to remove the signs.

The ENR, therefore, has started a campaign against the Crayford mosque, which should have included a protest march of 50-100 people through Crayford town centre on Saturday 18 May. The march was cancelled, but the sustained campaign, by leafleting the whole area and staging a series of smaller demonstrations outside the mosque's front door, continues until the place takes down the signs and halts any further segregation of women.

Paul Golding is quite an active chap. As chairman of another organization, Britain First, he has posted on YouTube a video (that you can see above the article) in which he gives London's Metropolitan Police time until the now-expired deadline of 29 May to arrest radical Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary, the leader of Al-Muhajiroun, the banned group which one in five terrorists convicted in Britain over more than a decade were either members of or linked to - including the two jihadists who beheaded British soldier Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich, East London -, and vows to arrest Choudary himself if the Met Police don’t.


Raymond Ibrahim Blog

Neocon Douglas Murray Got It Wrong about Islam

I have always admired Douglas Murray, mostly because of how he courageously stood up for Israel against politically correct inanities, but now I have a problem.

You can see my problem in the above video in which Douglas Murray, "radical Muslism cleric" Anjem Choudary and British convert to Islam - representing the "moderate" Muslims - Julie Siddiqi discuss on Channel Four News the Woolwich attack, and in particular the fact that one of the perpetrators, Michael Adebolaj, had been associated to Choudary and participated in at least one of Choudary's protests.

The media and politicians love to use these classifications about Muslims, like "moderate" and "radical"; I follow the custom but in inverted commas.

The serious problem that I have with Murray's intervention in the Channel Four discussion is that he distinguishes between Islam and militant Islam, and says that most Muslims are peaceful and hunky-dory. I'd like to ask him how he knows that, since most polls of Muslims in the UK contradict what he says.

But, even more importantly, by making such distinctions within Islam he confirms, reinforces and perpetuates the myth spread by Western mainstream media, opinion-makers and political leaders about the peaceful nature of Islam. This misconception is exactly the foundation on which all the irrational policies of all Western countries, none excluded, vis-à-vis Islam in foreign and domestic affairs are built.

That is the pillar of all our dhimmitude and eventual Islamization.

For further evidence, here is another video interview of Douglas Murray, this time with the Canadian TV channel Sun News.

The organization of which Murray is now one of the directors, The Henry Jackson Society - he changes them often, I don't know why - , corroborates my suspicions about his wrong stance on Islam.

The Henry Jackson Society seems to be very misguided in its position on Syria and shamefully underplaying the terrible predicament of Syrian Christians at the hands of the "rebels" (read 95% jihadis).

This piece by the Society's Executive Director Alan Mendoza manages in a relatively short space to cram many more fatal errors about Libya, both the Bosnian and Syrian civil wars, and much else than I thought it was humanly possible.

But maybe it was my mistake not to check Murray's credentials before. All I needed to know was that he is a neoconservative.

UK Muslim Paedophile Rings Are an Epidemic



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is an interesting quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Not Only Islam that Threatens Our Freedoms

If you, like me, are worried about the Islamization of the West because it will erode our civil liberties, like freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, you should carefully consider that there are other trends in our society that have nothing to do with Islam but are taking us in the same anti-libertarian direction, both giving too much power to the government and at the same time paving the way to quasi-totalitarian societies, thus indirectly enabling Islamic supremacism to flourish and do its damage.

I am examining here the case of Britain, but the pattern is similar in many other Western countries. The UK government is trying to make us believe that its proposed introduction of a gay marriage law is a progressive move with the declared purpose of giving gays equal rights of which they are deprived at the moment. But this is not true: in fact homosexuals of both sexes already have equal rights, due to the legalization of civil partnerships.

This is so much true that many gays don't want same-sex marriage. This is from the website Gays against Gay Marriage, and is written by a gay:

I don’t understand the reasoning behind the suggestion that civil unions or some other marriage equivalent, with all the benefits of traditional legal marriage, are somehow not good enough. Olbermann seems to be saying that it is only the exact legal label applied to heterosexual unions — actual “marriage” — that will do. But why? What is the reason that it’s not good enough? Allow me to put my Freud hat on.

For gay supporters of marriage, this may be an attempt to force society to recognize and, well, love their love. It’s a way to make up for the rejection many of them felt by their hick Christian families, or their meathead peers in school as a child. The fact is, they will hate you even more if you are allowed to get married. Now, I don’t deny that it is hilarious and delightful to make bible beaters uncomfortable — the idea of a religious government official forced to legally refer to two men as “husbands” puts a smile on my vindictive face — but inflicting pain on one’s enemies alone is not reason to call for gay marriage.

Ben Summerskill, the Chief Executive of the UK lesbian, gay and bisexual equality organisation Stonewall, the largest gay equality body in Europe, famously said in an interview with Pink News: "Lots of gay and lesbian people don’t actually want marriage". Stonewall refused to endorse same-sex marriage until it was intimidated and pressured to do so by other gay groups: "Mr Summerskill also accused PinkNews.co.uk of running an 'unethical campaign' against Stonewall after it asked every LGBT rights organisation/ political group to outline their stance on marriage equality. Only Stonewall refused to answer."

In an article entitled I'm a gay man who opposes gay marriage. Does that make ME a bigot, Mr Cameron? (a reference to the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's calling of opponents of gay marriage "bigots"), journalist and broadcaster Andrew Pierce wrote (all emphases in this post are mine):

Now, a submission by the Church of England into the Government’s consultation on gay marriage has warned of an historic division between the Church’s canon law — that marriage is between a man and a woman — and Parliament.

It suggests the schism could even lead to ‘disestablishment’, a split between the Church and the State, and the removal of the Queen as Supreme Governor of the Church.

Despite the opposition of every major faith group — notably the Catholic Church — Mr Cameron is arrogantly pressing ahead with an issue which excites his chums in the metropolitan elite, but which disregards the sentiments of millions of ordinary people who, as poll after poll has shown, are against it.

Even some of the Prime Minister’s admirers concede that the policy has less to do with offering equality to the gay community and more to do with decontaminating the allegedly ‘toxic’ Tory brand.

Perhaps the Prime Minister has calculated that anyone who stands up and argues against his proposals will be branded a homophobe and a bigot.

Well, Mr Cameron, I am a Conservative and a homosexual, and I oppose gay marriage. Am I a bigot?

And what about Alan Duncan, the first Conservative MP to come out as gay? Mr Duncan, the International Aid Minister who is in a civil partnership, is implacably opposed to gay marriage.

So is Dr David Starkey, the celebrated historian, who is openly gay...

Yet I understand the Government’s Equalities office, having approached a polling company to test the opinion of the gay community, then decided not to go ahead.

Were the officials worried what the conclusions might be? None of my gay friends want gay marriage to be written into law...

The truth is that no one has been able to explain to me the difference between gay marriage and a civil partnership. I have asked ministers and friends. None has an answer.

But I do. We already have gay marriage — it’s called civil partnership. Why can’t Mr Cameron just leave it there?

A gay man wrote in a letter to a London newspaper:

I am the surviving civil partner of a long-term gay relationship. The state has recognised this relationship fully in all my dealings since my civil partner’s death from cancer in 2007. I do not support 'gay marriage’ because the term adds nothing of substance to what I already have received and needlessly offends some members of certain religious faiths (which, incidentally I do not hold).

One of the first openly homosexual MPs and the first to enter into a civil partnership, former Culture Secretary and Labour MP Ben Bradshaw,

said homosexuals had already won equal rights with the introduction of civil partnerships and had "never needed the word 'marriage' ".

The Labour MP claimed the Prime Minister's motivation was simply to try to show that the Conservatives had modernised their views of society...

"This isn't a priority for the gay community, which already won equal rights. We've never needed the word 'marriage'."

So, if the gay community already won equal rights, why is Prime Minister David Cameron pushing for same-sex marriage?

Cameron is the true representative of a political class that tries to enlarge the size of government and increase what it can control.

Personal relationships don't need to be regulated by the state. The only exception is marriage, for the reason that it is a unique relationship: it has the capability of producing new life, and the role of society is to protect the vulnerable, of whom children are a prime example.

If their parents don't look after children, society will have to. Hence the legalization of marriage between a man and a woman, an institution which pre-dates law and church in human history. There is a rational reason for this legalization, namely to ensure that the natural parents take responsibility for their children in front of society and the law.

No other relationship can produce children, which is why no other relationship needs to be regulated in the same way.

But regulating what does not need to be regulated and legislating on matters that don't require the intervention of the law is what governments do when they want to extend their sphere of influence and grow their power.

We also have to understand the repercussions of this new, proposed legislation on censorship and the freedom of speech, which will be endangered in a way which has echoes of the blasphemy laws demanded by Muslims.

The methods used by Islamic supremacists, like death threats, are also similarly used. MP David Burrowes, during his speech in the Commons debate on the bill, described how he had been called a Nazi and a bigot and subjected to death threats because of his views. "His children had been told that their father is a bigot and a homophobe."

Once the bill on same-sex marriage legalization becomes law, automatically everyone who publicly disagrees with the view behind that law will be doing something at best subversive and at worst illegal.

People can even be threatened with legal action, arrested, prosecuted or otherwise silenced for expressing a different opinion: this is what has been happening in countries where same-sex marriage has been legalized, like Canada for instance.

Since the introduction of same-sex marriage there in 2005, relatively few gay couples got married, but what happened to freedom of speech and conscience is terrifying. Canadian author and broadcaster Michael Coren writes:

In the few debates leading up to the decision, it became almost impossible to argue in defense of marriage as a child-centered institution, in defense of the procreative norm of marriage, in defense of the superiority of two-gender parenthood, without being thrown into the waste bin as a hater. What we’ve also discovered in Canada is that it can get even worse than mere abuse, and that once gay marriage becomes law, critics are often silenced by the force of the law.

...it’s estimated that, in less than five years, there have been between 200 and 300 proceedings — in courts, human-rights commissions, and employment boards — against critics and opponents of same-sex marriage. And this estimate doesn’t take into account the casual dismissals that surely have occurred.

In 2011, for example, a well-known television anchor on a major sports show was fired just hours after he tweeted his support for ‘the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage’. He had merely been defending a hockey player’s agent who was receiving numerous death threats and other abuse for refusing to support a pro-gay-marriage campaign. The case is still under appeal, in human-rights commissions and, potentially, the courts.

The Roman Catholic bishop of Calgary, Alberta, Fred Henry, was threatened with litigation and charged with a human-rights violation after he wrote a letter to local churches outlining standard Catholic teaching on marriage. He is hardly a reactionary — he used to be known as ‘Red Fred’ because of his support for the labour movement — but the archdiocese eventually had to settle with the complainants to avoid an embarrassing and expensive trial…

What has become painfully evident is that many of those who brought same-sex marriage to Canada have no respect for freedom of conscience and no intention of tolerating contrary opinion, whether that opinion is shaped by religious or by secular belief.

There have been a lot of cases in Canada and elsewhere that we can consider big infringements of freedom of speech, concerning people who disagreed with the law.

Legalizing same-sex marriage means that the law is saying that same-sex marriage is right, fair and in fact it's a recognition of equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals, in fact this is the way in which both the bill and the whole debate in the UK are framed.

So, everyone who disagrees with something like this which is put in terms of equality of rights will de facto, automatically become a bigot. This has far-reaching consequences for the freedom of speech. If we are serious about freedom of speech, we should understand all these implications of the bill on same-sex marriage.

In numerous ways not homosexuals themselves, who in many cases are opposed to same-sex marriage, but some homosexual activists are acting like Muslims, in that they are trying to impose their views on everybody else and classifying everyone who disagrees with them as bigot, homophobic in one case and Islamophobic in the other.

Even the ad hoc pejoratives newly created for the purpose of ad hominem attacks are similar, with the insistence on the -phobic suffix. When I say "Muslims" I intend the term in a general sense, not a universal sense, i.e. not every Muslim will comply with what the Quran commands, not every single Muslim will be and do what the Quran preaches, prescribes and requires, but the latter, although not being what every Muslim is and does, is what every Muslim should be and do, hence the generalization, but not universalization, in my use of the term "Muslim" here.

The passing of the law on same-sex marriage would have these serious consequences, among others: teachers in state schools will be forced to teach pupils about it and endorse it, or they may be lawfully disciplined or dismissed; parents will not be free to withdraw their children from such lessons, and legal action could be taken against those who do; children will be taught to disregard their parents' opinion as "bigoted", creating a division between kids and parents; NHS/University/Armed Forces/Police chaplains could be legally fired for expressing disagreement even outside work time; so could public sector workers; foster carers could be lawfully rejected by local authorities if they disagree; registrars will be forced to act against their conscience, and conscientious objectors will be fired; churches, synagogues and other places of worship could be forced to perform same-sex marriages if the European Courts overturn the UK government's position on this issue; the Church of England may have to disestablish or face legal action because, as the established Church, it will be obliged to marry same-sex couples; clergy who disagree with same-sex marriage, but belong to denominations that don't, could be taken to court if they follow their conscience; dissenting faith-based charities will be penalized in a number of ways, from a ban from hiring public facilities to being closed down, as has been the case of adoption agencies.

All this because the UK government has chosen to interfere with people's personal relationships, which it has no business of doing, and to decide what the definition of marriage should be, which society, and not government, should decide.

And not because this is an issue that many people care about, not even many gays. The majority of public opinion is actually against same-sex marriage. Opinion polls indicate that, when the rights offered to homosexual couples through civil partnerships are clearly explained, most people in the UK oppose same-sex marriage.

Many polls have been commissioned by both sides of the debate, but using small samples and therefore unreliable. The largest and most statistically significant poll so far is the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) 2008, which asked:

“About how same sex couples should be treated in law. Which comes closest to your view … they should be allowed legally to marry OR should be allowed legally to form civil unions, but not marry OR should not be allowed to obtain legal recognition for their relationships?”

The result was: 33.7 % replied that they should be allowed to marry, and 62.6 % answered that they should not (putting together the second two responses).

I'll end with a quotation from the article by Andrew Pierce linked to above:

Mr Cameron seems to have learned nothing from the follies of the Labour government when it comes to imposing an equalities agenda on Britain’s leading faiths.

In 2007, Labour passed legislation which effectively ordered Roman Catholic adoption agencies to place children with same-sex couples.

Now I have to declare an interest in this aspect of the argument: I spent the first two years of my life in a Catholic orphanage in Cheltenham run by nuns and, to this day, I am eternally grateful to the Catholic Children’s Society which placed me in a loving home with my adoptive parents, who cared for me as one of their own. But, disgracefully, societies like the ones that rescued me and thousands of other abandoned children have now been forced to close down because the Catholic Church understandably could not accept the Labour government’s diktat — which ran contrary to its sincerely-held beliefs.

As a lapsed Catholic, I am not going to defend that Church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin, but to force its adoption agencies to close on a point of moral principle was a scandal which has resulted in countless vulnerable children being denied the possibility of loving homes. What madness!

And for pity’s sake, which gays would have gone to Catholic agencies in the first place?

Those terribly depressing consequences of Labour’s sweeping changes should serve as a warning as the Tory-led Government presses on with the rewriting of the centuries-old tradition of marriage.

UK Authorities Crackdown on Free Speech in the Wake of Woolwich

Now, finally, the British authorities are determined to do something serious and decisive in relation to the Woolwich beheading.

They have warned, charged, arrested and released on bail several people for making inflammatory and anti-Muslim comments on Twitter and Facebook. Police say people should be careful about what they write on Twitter as the 'consequences could be serious'.

Now you're talking! Our authorities are not cowered into submission by a bunch of extremist, radical, dangerous and murderous Islamists, sorry, Islamophobes!

Two of the men arrested were trying to organise an anti-Muslim protest in Bristol and made racist and “anti-religious” remarks.

I like that "anti-religious". Would they have been arrested for insulting Christianity?

The two Bristol men were held under the Public Order Act on suspicion of inciting racial or religious hatred.

In the meantime, militant Muslims like Anjem Chourdary, who mentored and inspired Woolwich beheader Michael Adebolajo, are living free and on £25,000 a year of tax-payer-funded state benefits.