First Obama-Romney Debate

Romney clearly dominated the discussion. Obama lacked bite, probably because he already has four years of presidency behind him, during which he knew that he failed.

Romney was much more concrete, and his superior experience both in business and as state governor of Massachusetts to Obama, whose only experience has been as an inept president, one of the worst in American history, showed.

Obama had four minutes more in the debate than he should have had, but then we know that he is the darling of the media who let him off the hook and let him get away with anything.

When all is said and done, Obama has already had a go at the job and failed at it miserably. At least Romney hasn't tried yet. He should be given the benefit of the doubt.

If I were undecided (and American) that's how I would go about it. It would be the most scientific, empirical, evidence-based method to decide coeteris paribus.

But all the rest is not equal. Romney's arguments are much stronger, more solid and well-founded.

The objection made to Romney by Obama that he didn't give,offer specific enough details of his plans, whether in healthcare, tax or financial regulations, echoed by some commentators, is not a negative point at all. This just highlights the difference between Democrats and Republicans: the latter don't want the President to have a too much detailed plan in advance to impose on the nation, whether people want it or not and whether Congress accepts it or not. Like Obamacare for instance.

The President for them must show flexibility, adaptability, the willingness to compromise with political opponents and above all a clear sense of the limits of government.

This first debate focused largely on the economy,  an area of which - welfare - is the territory of what the media  called Romney’s gaffe, wherewas in fact it was his telling the truth.

Leftist parties - and I'm talking generally here, not just about the US - are often repeatedly voted in power even after failure because of a form of bribe.

There have been cases of political candidates, of all colours, who would pay individuals to vote for them. I think that parties of the Left can do exactly the same although on a much bigger scale: many people vote for them in exchange for benefits, tax credits and all the rest of the enormous welfare machine that was among the causes of many countries' economic collapse.

Melanie Phillips puts it this way: “The general point that too much of America is being sucked into state dependency – and that by increasing their number Obama is effectively gerrymandering the election -- remains a powerful one.”

When people talk about joblessness as if it were an inexorable fate, I find it risible. It’s not all that difficult, even for the not too intelligent, to buy and resell stuff from a market stall, for instance.

People who made a fortune like the British magnate Alan Sugar often started with nothing. Sugar is keen to recount how he began when he was still at school, buying from warehouse and selling to his schoolmates. That doesn’t take a genius or a rich family, does it?

In certain cities, like London (and I suspect there will be cities like that in America), it’s almost impossible not to find a job. It may not be a high-flying post, but there is always some business looking for help.

Similarly, when I hear politicians say that “people are hurting”, I find that an exaggeration. People were hurting during the Second World War, in past ages when they were going hungry, and now in some parts of the Third World.

The reality is that many people in the West had got used to spending more than they had and could afford, and now that they can’t do that anymore they “are hurting”. I suppose you can call it that if you are a shopaholic or if you are addicted to certain material goods, but then it’s a case of withdrawal symptoms so hurting does you good.

The fixation with “keeping up with the Joneses” is something that many will have to learn to discard. But it wasn’t a healthy attitude anyway. There is no harm or “hurt” in that. People just have to learn to live within their means, that’s all. And that includes, first and foremost, the government.

Islam in the UK

This is the view from Londonistan, Absurd Britannia, Eurabia.

Raymond Ibrahim, a scholar of Arab and Islam history born in the USA of Egyptian Coptic parents, often writes about the condition of Christians in Muslim-majority countries, where they are subjugated and oppressed, even when they are a sizeable minority in places like Egypt, Syria and, before the “ethnic cleansing”, Iraq.

This is the complementary view, the one from historically Christian Western Europe, where Muslims are still (although not for long) a small minority, smaller than the Christians in the aforementioned countries. Even in these entirely different situations Muslims, aided by the Left and coward governments, are still acting like masters, thinking that everything is due to them and trying to impose their ideology on everybody else.

I came to live in London from Italy in 1984, and the changes I witnessed since are earth-shattering.

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. In the area where I live in West London, which is by no means a Muslim ghetto because many non-Muslim whites and blacks reside here, in the street you see women whose attire would make the strictest Taliban happy; or at least you think they are women, since all you can see is a walking robe with no eyes.

The following are some among the myriad examples of Muslim intolerance and lack of integration, stealth jihad and creeping sharia in the United Kingdom.

A few years ago a Muslim policeman refused to wear his uniform due to the presence of a cross on it.

The typical phenomenon of Muslim men grooming white young girls, for years denounced only by right-wing groups who as a result were accused of racism and Islamophobia, turned out to be real and now the mainstream media have started covering it.

There have been instances of Muslim girls rejecting their school uniform and demanding to wear Muslim clothing, sometimes even suing the school using the European Convention on Human Rights and winning the case.

Muslim bus and taxi drivers have not allowed on their vehicle blind people with their “unclean” guide dogs and Muslim passengers have objected to them.

British legislation, bending over backwards to accommodate Sharia, has permitted conflicts and contradictions with long-established jurisprudence. Polygamy, despite being forbidden by British law, is now de facto part of it due to a change in the inheritance law which now lets multiple wives inherit from their husband.

Similarly, a loophole created by the previous Labour government allows Muslims to take a property mortgage without paying interest, which also makes it cheaper for them and has now been exploited by non-Muslims who discovered it, causing a minor uproar.

In the UK the police are afraid of Muslims. There have been cases caught on video of Muslim demonstrators pelting with sticks and traffic cones and taunting with shouts of "kuffar" (Islamic  epithet for infidels) the police, who retreated in front of them.

And then there is the classical problem of halal meat, which is being served in British schools, hospitals and other institutions to both followers and non followers of Islam, and brought to international attention when Sarkozy declared his intention to change this situation in France, which is in the same predicament as the UK but a bit less dhimmi. In addition, meat of animals slaughtered with the halal method but still discarded for Muslim consumption because considered “haram” (forbidden) in some other way is being sold to unaware non-Muslims. To their credit British ministers, though, following Sarkozy’s example, have said that they will soon change the law.

Practically, according to a familiar pattern of progression, Muslim populations in countries where they are a tiny minority or in a weak position act differently from their counterparts in countries where they are stronger or more numerous. Therefore Europe, with its policy of appeasement and its Muslim communities’ exponential growth, can expect in a few decades’ time to see the imposition of Sharia law and other effects of Islamic supremacy, unless something (hopefully, Europeans waking up from their sleep) intervenes to alter the current demographic, social and political trend.

Western Europe’s general readiness, in recent years, to discard Christianity may reveal itself a very dangerous experiment indeed for many different reasons, one of which is the fact of depriving itself of a solid bulwark against Islam, stronger than atheism, secularism or liberalism both in the American and traditional European sense.

It is no coincidence that perhaps the country that most has conceded to Muslims and most has renounced for the sake of Islam, the United Kingdom, possibly the only country in the free world where the media, with the exception of a Welsh student rag and a Welsh-language church newspaper, did not reprint the notorious Mohammed cartoons for fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, is also the country which is proudest of its secularism, the only country I know of where before his visit the Pope was threatened with arrest by various fanatical atheists, homosexual activists and assorted militant hotheads.

US Black Mob Hijacks Store: "We Own This"

WND reports on a mob of 40 black people in Detroit moving into a convenience store and not being persuaded to leave.

The news site precedes this report by Colin Flaherty, an award-winning reporter and author of White Girl Bleed a Lot: The return of racial violence to America and how the media ignore it, with these words:

(Editor’s note: Colin Flaherty has done more reporting than any other journalist on what appears to be a nationwide trend of skyrocketing black-on-white crime, violence and abuse. WND features these reports to counterbalance the virtual blackout by the rest of the media due to their concerns that reporting such incidents would be inflammatory or even racist. WND considers it racist not to report racial abuse solely because of the skin color of the perpetrators or victims.)

The owner Man Saus says his business is being held hostage by this group of teens who continually loiter inside and outside of his gas station.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The links in the following report may contain offensive language.

Even the old-timers in Detroit never have seen anything like this: A mob of 40 black people moved into a convenience store and will not leave.

They say they now own it. They eat. Smoke. Cuss.Threaten. Spit. Rob. Sell drugs. All on video.

Police, ministers, neighbors, the store owner and just about everyone else seems powerless to stop them.

“It’s a Bad Crew gas station,” said one of the mob to the local Fox affiliate. “If you don’t know what that is, I can’t even tell you.”

The owner calls police, but nothing happens. The police “come here and then they leave. Two minutes later they (the mob) are back.”

Earlier this month, members of the Perfecting Church, one of Detroit’s largest black congregations, counseled the members of the mob to stop their evil ways.

Nothing changed. Which is not all that surprising: In June, the church’s pastor, Marvin Winans, lost a $15,000 Rolex, a Louis Vuitton wallet with $200 in it and his 2012 Infiniti QX56 SUV after he was carjacked by a mob of 10 black people at a similar convenience store nearby.

See the Big List of black mob violence.

This is the same pastor who gave the eulogy for Whitney Houston. The attackers, Winans told the Detroit News, did not know who he was.

In June, another Detroit convenience store had the same problem: A black mob took over the store, told the owners they now own it, and started robbing and threatening. All on video.

... Nine hours later, police responded. In many cities, police no longer respond to complaints of shoplifting or “loitering” at neighborhood stores.

The mob won’t go away and the police won’t arrest them. But they did have some advice for what this business owner should do: “Hire a security guard.”

Is Assad Worse Than The Alternatives?

While Western leaders were fretting over films and cartoons depicting Muhammad without giving a thought to the killing of many Christians for their faith around the world and especially in Muslim countries, this is what was happening in Egypt.

In events being ignored not only by the Egyptian authorities, but also by the mainstream media and human rights organizations in the West, Muslim terrorists have in recent weeks attacked Christian families and forced them out of their homes and businesses in the Sinai town of Rafah. The terrorists have threatened to pursue their jihad against Christians until all of them leave the Sinai.

This, just one of the many attacks, is the new reality for Christians living in the "liberated" areas of the Middle East after the "Arab Spring".

The persecution of Christians in the Islamic world, ignored by the mainstream media, is habitual, almost chronic and is escalating towards reaching epidemic proportions.

As well documented by the scholar and thinker Raymond Ibrahim at raymondibrahim.com and other sources like persecution.org, barnabasfund.org and aina.org, this persecution takes several forms, ranging from the most violent to the "merely" humiliating: sexual abuse of Christian women; attacks against churches, crosses and other symbols of Christianity; apostasy and blasphemy laws punishing with death those who leave or "offend" Islam; forced conversions to Islam; theft and pillage in place of jizya, the tax imposed on non-Muslims; general treatment of Christians as subjugated and intimidated dhimmis, "tolerated", second-class citizens; physical aggression and murder.

These persecutions derive either from the application of Islamic Sharia law or from the Islamic supremacist ideology.

According to the organization International Christian Concern, an estimated 200 million Christians suffer some kind of persecution worldwide.

The problem has been worsened by the Middle East uprisings which began a year ago. Many thought that the "Arab Spring", led by young, Western-educated people using Facebook and Twitter on their mobile phones, would bring democracy, moderation and reform, stop human rights violations, protect the rights of women and religious minorities, lead to the cessation of terrorism and extremist views.

As authors and commentators with an in-depth knowledge of Islam had predicted in early 2011, far from getting better things have got worse in practically all the above areas. They predicted that Islamists, being the only organized opposition with sufficient money and resources, would replace the dictators who had, at least, one positive characteristic: they were secularists who protected the minorities and guaranteed a certain degree of peace among the various sects, tribes or other divisions in the populations they governed.

In Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya, a survey by Abu Dhabi's Gallup Polls found that people feel less safe now than before the revolts took place.

In all those countries Muslim fundamentalists have now more power than they had before. Now Syria is on the same route.

We can already see what lies ahead when we know that in Syria on February 26, for the first time in Syria's modern history, an armed attack has been made on a Catholic monastery: 30 armed and masked jihadis attacked it demanding money.

The Syrian Christian community has suffered a series of brutal murders and kidnappings, with hundreds of Christians killed so far since the anti-government protests started.

A report from the Barnabas Fund charity says that "children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim." In one tragic case, "a young Christian boy was killed by the rebels, who filmed the murder and then claimed that government forces had committed the act." A kidnapped man "was found hanged with numerous injuries", another "was cut into pieces and thrown in a river".

As Raymond Ibrahim describes, "Christian minorities, who, as 10% of the Syrian population, have the most to gain from a secular government and the most to suffer from a state run by Islamic Sharia law, have no choice but to prefer Assad. ...prefer the devil they know to the ancient demon their forefathers knew."

And another report from the Barnabas Fund says: "Christians have mostly stayed away from the protests in Syria, having been well treated and afforded a considerable amount of religious freedom under President Assad's regime. ...Should Assad fall, it is feared that Syria could go the way of Iraq, post-Saddam Hussein. Saddam, like Assad, restrained the influence of militant Islamists, but after his fall they were free to wreak havoc on the Christian community; hundreds of thousands of Christians were consequently forced to flee the violence. Many of them went to Syria."

This does not mean that all Syrian rebels are Islamists: some are and some are not. But, in conclusion, Islamists are the only ones capable of filling the power vacuum after the toppling of Assad as the only organized opposition and in the meantime, in the chaos created by the unrest, they are the ones who are allowed free reign in their anti-Christian feeling and its expressions in the form of kidnapping, ransoming, pillaging and killing people they consider their enemies and inferiors, the "infidel" Christians.