Senegalese Immigrants in Italy Want Protection Money for Parking

The above video from a local Sardinian newspaper, translated by me, is about a crime of intimidation by a group of Senegalese immigrants in the capital of Sardinia, Cagliari.

A couple refused to pay the "parking fee" to one of them, an extortion since the Senegalese man has no right on the par cark, a sort of protection money. After their refusal, he then tried to sell them his merchandise.

When they refused again, he became menacing and called a group of his countrymen and mates who surrounded the car, not letting the Italian couple get out of it and threatening them, until they eventually called the police. The Senegalese man was also abusive to the police and got arrested for that as well.

This is a common phenomenon in Italy now. For a few decades there have been what Italians call "vu' cumpra'" (the Italian phrase "want to buy?" distorted by the vendors' poor Italian language skills). These pedlars are usually black African immigrants selling their merchandise on beaches, in restaurants, streets, car parks and so on.

Italian blogger Pietro Melis says in his post titled "Here are the fruits of the do-gooders philosophy":

It is not clear why there is no law preventing from staying in Italy those who do not have a legally paid employed position which, in addition, has not been taken away from unemployed Italians willing to do the same job. The others out, return them to their country. For them there is no place.

The do-gooders philosophy, which kills justice, in the confusion between morality and law, has led to the expansion of what Marx called a "reserve army" of the unemployed which has the effect of keeping wages low with the blackmail of dismissal and replacement with a lower-cost unemployed.

The reported episode [described above] highlights an intolerable situation.

These "vu' cumprà'" must get out of the way. Must be driven back to their countries because they are illegal.

They sell ​​merchandise produced outside the law, squat on public land, do not pay taxes and create unfair and illegal competition. And continually bother you on the beach.

But nobody intervenes because of the do-gooders philosophy, lest you get accused of racism. And with this excuse they do what they want, even becoming violent.

They have also for a long time now formed a gang that claims the payment of protection money in addition to the ordinary parking fee, so you have to pay twice. And you have to pay protection money even for parking where there is no fee. Otherwise you may find that your car has been damaged, at least with a mark on the body. And no-one intervenes and throws them out of car parks.

And they are mostly Islamic. We are victims of a policy that has bred a culture of the multiracial and multicultural society, with all the consequences that we can see.

Indigenous crime was not enough. It was necessary to import other crime. Prisons are overcrowded because half the prison population is made up of foreigners. This is the beautiful result of a crazy policy.

Notice how, at the end of the video above, another African immigrant says to the newspaper reporter that he heard the Italian woman use expletives against the Senegalese. The police had no evidence for that and, given the limited command of the Italian language shown by the "witness", it's hard to know what he actually did or did not hear.

Thank God Italy does not have, like the UK, a Macpherson Report dictating: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".

But it's only a question of time.

Misery of Relativism

There is objectivity in epistemology, in matters of what is true or false.

There is objectivity in ethics, in matters of what is right or wrong.

There is objectivity in aesthetics, in matters of what is beautiful or ugly.

The fact that these things are difficult to achieve and that we don't always know if and when we have achieved objective truth or rightness or beauty should not be confused with the fact that they don't exist. That would be confusing the subjective with the objective.

Legalizing Infanticide or Limiting Abortion

UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that the legal time limit on abortion should be halved from 24 weeks as it is now in the UK to 12 weeks, although Home Secretary Theresa May, interviewed yesterday about the extradition to the USA of Abu Hamza and other four suspect terrorists, has made it clear that the government does not intend to follow that recommendation.

On the question of abortion, I think that the debate has been too fixated on some "demarcation points", magic moments where the moral status of the organism would suddenly change.

Typically these are two: the moment of conception and that of birth. No doubt these are crucial biologically, but biology should not necessarily dictate ethics.

The moral philosopher Peter Singer was right when he wrote some considerations to the effect that there is nothing about birth that can alter the morally relevant characteristics of a being.

A foetus one day before birth is very much like a baby after birth. This argument has been used by Peter Singer, and now by others following his argument, to justify infanticide. The BMJ's Journal of Medical Ethics published in February 2012 an article entitled "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?", which repeats what Singer says. This could be the slippery slope that the pro-life campaigners have warned about.

Obama has been accused of legalizing infanticide for voting three times in the Illinois Senate against the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, which was designed to ensure that, if a live baby fully emerged before an abortion was successfully completed, the baby would be saved.

Singer's argument is logic, indeed is what I always thought even before reading his books. But it coud be used in the opposite direction, to cast ethical doubts on the acceptability of abortions in advanced stages of pregnancy. There are foetuses perfectly viable at 6 months, the time when abortions are still allowed by the UK law. Premature babies can survive, sometimes in incubators.

I suggest that maybe we should think in terms of degrees of increasing moral worth, rather than a clearcut demarcation line - be it conception or birth, neither of which per se, and especially birth, is conducive to difference in morally relevant characteristics of the being in question.

The moral and legal answer to the question of allowing abortion should not, perhaps, be a black-or-white yes or no, but depending on many curcumstances, and very prominet among those should be the age of the embryo or foetus.

What is absurd is for women to shut all the discussion by saying "it's my body, so I decide".

It makes as much sense as for a killer to say "I used my hand to kill, the hand is part of my body, therefore no-one can tell me what I can or cannot do with it".

 The fact remains that, even if a foetus is inside a woman's body, it is still a different living, and in some stages sentient being, so should not be treated just like an appendix of her body.

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.

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.

Indian Sikhs Want Rowling Book Banned

Intolerance is contagious. We've just had enough of Muslim riots, and now we have the latest Sikh uproar.

JK Rowling, the British author of the popular Harry Potter series of children's books, has been attacked for her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, by angry Indian Sikhs.

The Casual Vacancy is facing protests in India over its portrayal of a Sikh girl as “mustachioed yet large-mammaried”.

Sikh leaders said they were investigating complaints about the “provocative” language and would demand a nationwide ban on the book if Rowling was deemed to have insulted the faith.

...The Sikh character in The Casual Vacancy is Sukhvinder, the daughter of a surgeon and his parish councillor wife. She is teased for her hairy skin and referred to as “the Great Hermaphrodite” and a “hairy man-woman”.

India’s Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which manages places of worship including the Golden Temple in Amritsar, said yesterday that it had received several complaints. Avtar Singh Makkar, the head of the committee, said the descriptions of Sukhvinder were “a slur on the Sikh community”. He said: “Even if the author had chosen to describe the female Sikh character’s physical traits, there was no need for her to use provocative language, questioning her gender. This is condemnable.”

A spokesman for the group added that its leaders would read the book carefully. “If deemed derogatory to the Sikh faith, we will demand a ban on it. We will make sure it doesn’t sell in India,” he said.

“Reputed authors like JK Rowling need to show respect to all faiths and communities as they are read by millions of people. Sikh believers, including women, are refrained from shaving and trimming their hair. This is a part of our faith and anyone making offensive remarks about it is directly hurting the sentiments of Sikh community.”

The spokesman also claimed that “media bias” against the Sikh faith was partly to blame for incidents such as the shooting of six worshippers at a temple in the US state of Wisconsin in August. An American Sikh student suffered abuse online last month after pictures of her with a beard and sideburns were posted on a social networking website.

Rowling has said she included Sukhvinder’s experiences as an example of “corrosive racism”. She has spoken of her admiration for the Sikh faith and said she was fascinated by a religion in which men and women are “explicitly described as equal in the holy book”.

Ever heard of Jesus Christ, JK? Did you think that Islam is the only religion?

A spokesman for Hachette, Rowling’s publisher, said the remarks were made by a character bullying Sukhvinder. “It is quite clear in the text of the book that negative thoughts, actions and remarks made by a character, Fats, who is bullying Sukhvinder, are his alone. When described in the narrative voice, the depiction of Sukhvinder is quite different to this,” the spokesman said.

Russian Court Bans Innocence of Muslims Film

What are the Russians up to? From the Pakistani The News, Russian court bans anti-Islam film:

MOSCOW: A Moscow court on Monday banned as "extremist" a US-made anti-Islamic film that fed deadly protests across the Arab world but whose showing was backed by human rights supporters in Russia.

Moscow's Tverskoi District judge sided with prosecution arguments presented in court that the low-budget "Innocence of Muslims" production "promoted the rise of religious intolerance in Russia."

"The prosecution's motion has been satisfied," a court spokeswoman told AFP by telephone.

But liberal activists and some officials urged the authorities to back free expression and not use the controversy to further a clamp down on rights under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia's human rights ombudsman testified at the hearing Monday that he was against the film's prohibition while a group of artists and liberal media personalities urged Putin not to be swayed by the global militant attacks on US targets.

"The darkest forces of global terrorism are trying to scare our civilisation and force us to accept their will," reads the open letter to Putin.

"Ban neither this film nor any other works of art that disturb religious extremists," it urged. (AFP)

I don't like this last paragraph, that seems to try to compare Innocence of Muslims, which is just a film that says things, mostly taken from the official biography of Muhammad, that Muslims don't like to hear, so violates no law and is a simple exercise of freedom of expression, with the Pussy Riot hooligans who did violate the law by trespassing into a cathedral and then, by "bravely" denying having been in the church, deprived themselves of the possibility of receiving a lenient sentence through apologizing for their act.

"Religious extremists" is also a misleading expression, intended to muddy the waters regarding the vast difference between Islam and Christianity.

Christians don't like "works of art" like "Piss Christ" or the Venice Film Festival's Special-Jury-Prize winner Paradise: Faith or the painting of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung of a few years back, but by and large they accept freedom of speech.

Muslims, like communists, fascists and all totalitarians, are deadly enemies of free speech.

Germany: Whole New Neighbourhoods without Churches

In Germany, architecture is being "de-Christianized". Entire new neighbourhoods and urban areas are being built without a church in them: churches are just not planned in the projects, as if nobody even thought of them.

The German Catholic news site Kreuz reports on this phenomenon with examples from an article by architecture critic Dankwart Guratzsch in the daily Die Welt.

In Stuttgart, a large new district was built for 12,000 residents without a church.

In Hamburg, another new neighbourhood for 12,000 residents was created without a church. Not only that: to realize this project, 19 churches were closed down, probably because they were in the way. Made disappear in the blink of an eye. Under the pretext that nobody had requested them.

Some people, however, did protest, and to make them happy they were provided with a small chapel with just thirty chairs, hidden on the ground floor of a battered-facade office building.

This does not look like an accident, but a plan to make the signs of Christian faith disappear in a cold, calculated, cruel way.

Writing in Die Welt, Guratzsch quotes the son of the great philosopher Hegel, Immanuel Hegel, who advised: "Build churches!". Because, adds Guratzsch: "To build churches means to build communities. When the faithful are deprived of the visible testimony of public recognition of their values, the latter are also weakened for the believers themselves".

Guratzsch recalls how the same was happening during the time of the German Democratic Republic, communist Germany: churches were being demolished to humiliate, offend, isolate religion and inculcate atheism.

A Europe without churches and without strong Christian roots and values will be much more vulnerable to a threat similar to communism: Islamization.

Where are British moderate Muslims?

Jihad Watch has just published my article Where are British moderate Muslims?

If there are moderate Muslims in the UK, this is the moment for them to make their voices heard.

Pakistan’s Railways Minister has offered $100,000 for the murder of the filmmaker of The Innocence of Muslims.

In any civilized country, he would be not only fired from his cabinet position but also arrested for the crime of incitement to murder. Instead, Pakistan’s Prime Minister has excused him, and people in his country have demonstrated in his support.

Pakistan is a member of the British Commonwealth. Its High Commissioner to the UK, the equivalent of ambassador for Commonwealth countries, has defended the Railways Minister in an interview with Sky News.

Various British Muslims have also been interviewed, and they invariably expressed the opinion that, if freedom of speech should be protected, then the Pakistani minister is within his rights to say what he wants, and after all, he only hurt one person, not many like the controversial filmmaker. This is Muslim logic for you.

All this is reminiscent of what happened at the time of the Salman Rushdie affair, when opinion polls among British Muslims were showing the majority in favour of the fatwa against the writer.

Let’s not forget that many UK Muslims have come here from Pakistan, so much so that the derogatory term for Asians in Britain is “Paki”.

When we consider Pakistan, the country’s blasphemy law and its use to persecute Christian minorities in the most shameful way and the support that this law enjoys among the Pakistani population, and then we look at this latest episode of a government minister publicly inciting to murder with impunity and people taking to the streets defending him, we have to draw the conclusion that, if there are moderate Muslims in Pakistan, they must be very few or very silent or both.

Is the same true of British Muslims, many of whom are of Pakistani extraction?

Interestingly, Muslim figures prominent in the UK, always displayed for public consumption as representatives of moderate Islam, have turned out, under greater scrutiny, not to be so moderate after all.

Member of the House of Lords Lord Ahmed “savagely attacked Tony Blair for giving Salman Rushdie a knighthood, ...threatened to mobilise 10000 Muslims to prevent democratically elected Dutch MP Geert Wilders from speaking in Parliament, this is despite his own invite of the anti-semitic Israel Shamir who has been accused of denying the holocaust”.

The Pakistani-born peer also said: “Even if I have to beg I am willing to raise and offer £10 million so that George W Bush and Tony Blair can be brought to the International Court of Justice on war crimes charges”.

Former Deputy Leader of the Labour Group, Shadow Lord Chancellor and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice Sadiq Khan “is the lifelong friend of Babar Ahmad, a man indicted in the US on charges of ‘conspiracy to provide material to support terrorists, namely the Taliban and the Chechen Mujahideen; providing material to support terrorists; and conspiracy to kill in a foreign country’. Ahmad ran a website recruiting jihadi militants to go and fight the Russian in Chechnya and Coalition troops in Afghanistan. When arrested, he had in his possession plans for an American carrier battle group with written notations on it like ‘vulnerable to RPG’”.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan, former senior political editor of The New Statesman, on separate occasions called non-Muslims people of no intelligence and compared them to animals and cattle (in so doing revealing, on top of everything else, his speciesism).

And former co-chairman of the Conservative Party Baroness Warsi, unelected, appointed to the House of Lords, amidst public expenses frauds scandals, breachings of both the Ministerial Code and rules on financial declarations, found time to run a business her partner in which, Abid Hussain, has been a leading member of Hizb ut Tahrir, a radical Islamic group the Conservatives promised to ban when they were in opposition.

Disliked by Tories, called by one of them “the worst party chairman” we've ever had, Warsi, who is of Pakistani origin and maintains strong ties with that country, has now more power than ever, with two crucial cabinet posts and a seat at the National Security Council.

What Life in Islamized England Is Like

This video shows a reporter interviewing two women in Burnley, Northern England, on what their lives and those of people like them have become since their town has been populated by large numbers of Muslims.

Burnley is close to Rochdale, where grooming and sexual abuse of white young girls by Muslim men was allowed to continue for a decade by police and social services too politically correct to intervene.

Never Say Muslim Paedophile in Rochdale on the BBC

Last night I watched on the BBC the political debate programme Question Time. One of the questions from the studio audience to the panel of politicians, media people and other commentators was about the scandal provoked by the sexual abuse of white underage girls by Muslim men in Rochdale, Northern England.

Everyone in the programme uttered the usual platitudes and was ready to condemn the local police and social services for failing to act, but everything that was said, without exception, points to this: all the people participating in the debate are conniving with the cover-up, by sharing the very same ideology and fear - call it political correctness if you like - that caused it in the first place and, if they had been in the same position of responsibility as those police and social services, they would have done exactly the same.

How do I know that? Because, during the whole discussion, the words "Muslim" or "Islam" were not uttered even once. It must have been a feat.This is the final total score of expressions used in reference to the perpetrators or in association with what they did:

Asian males: 1

Catholic Church: 1

Catholicism: 1

Church: 1

People involved in this case: 1

People: 1

The accused involved: 1

Islam: 0

Muslims: 0

If you looked at those numbers without knowing what happened, you would guess that it was something to do with the Catholic Church - which obviously had nothing to do with it, but the mainstream media are always happy to drag it into any scandal, true, partially true, false, imagined, dreamed at night, it doesn't matter.

Labour Party's Deputy Leader Harriet Harman was particularly pathetic in her use of the most tortuous arguments to deny that the police had fear of accusations of racism or Islamophobia with consequent possible punishments as their motivation not to investigate and prosecute.

Buffoon, sorry, comedian Steve Coogan made a display of periphrases and circumlocutions, and every few words stopped in his tracks. Here is what he said when asked to explain the police's behaviour, complete with ums, pauses and hesitations:

"I think that that there's there's um... um... one thing that... We don't know the full facts, so we don't know. There's the inference that um... has been made in some quarters that it may be about the um... um... um... the religious dimension um... to this of the accused involved um... and whether um... because of sort of religious sensivitives um.. there may have been recalcitrance on the part of the police. Now, that's always a political hot potato, everyone you know wants to talk about is the perception of mysogyny in certain religions, and I'd say that that is true um... of certain aspects or certain people within Catholicism and um.. and also you know um... other religions, I don't think that any religion has a monopoly on this."

If these people couldn't even bring themselves to say the word "Islam" or "Muslim", so paralyzing is the taboo of accusing this doctrine or its followers in their mind, imagine whether, had they been in the shoes of those services whose duty was to investigate someone they can't even name, the outcome could conceivably have been different.

The show was a cover-up pointing the finger at another cover-up.

What's Wrong with Innocence of Muslims?

Vile, disgusting, blasphemous, defamatory, crude, boring, undignified: these are a bunch of the derogatory adjectives (generally the same, repeated ad nauseam) used innumerable times to describe the film Innocence of Muslims posted on YouTube.

What is exceedingly hard to find, in all the judgements written and spoken by its detractors, is a discussion of its contents and a reasoned, argued reply to them. In other words, the reasons why this film should be considered vile, disgusting etc.

If there is something that shows how these people, usually leftists and assorted anti-West ideologues, have totally lost not only the intellectual battle but also the intellect is this condemnation of a movie, that in most cases they haven't even seen and know nothing about, only on the basis of the say-so of Muslim mobs and leaders. They are so immersed in their suspended-reality world populated by myths like religion of peace, moderate Muslims and Islamophobia that they don't even recognize the necessity of arguments and reasons (or even reason, in the sense of rationality).

UK Papers Have Few Readers? Tax Internet Users

Leftists love the state, and the bigger it is the better.

The government is there to solve all our problems, they think. So why not use goverment intervention to save from failure UK liberal newspapers whose readership is constantly declining because people got fed up of finding in them the same old Marxist propaganda and anti-Western, pro-Islam, pro-immigration enthusiasm which is now less and less shared by the general population, who now has the free (in every sense) alternative of the internet?

This was the idea of a journalist of - surprise, surprise - The Guardian, the paper's executive investigations editor David Leigh.

His proposal is splendid from a communist viewpoint, and atrocious for everybody else: everyone in the UK with a broadband connection account should be imposed a £2 a month broadband levy, with which to create a fund to be distributed to newspapers in proportion to their UK online readership.

So, as is the usual knee-jerk response of the Left, rather than addressing a problem with a real, concrete solution to it (like, in this case, improving the quality of their rags by better meeting the demands of their potential readership), they want to ask the government to "solve" the problem by pouring more money into it (the "progressives" answer to everything, which achieves nothing except increasing public debt).

And how do you collect this new public money? By raising taxes, of course.

Most British newspapers sales are falling. Last month, The Economist says, the Guardian Media Group "reported an annual loss of around £76m ($121m). Its newspaper unit lost £54m".

Leigh thinks that the solution he proposes is "obvious", but even the online comments to his article clearly show that he is in a tiny minority to believe that although, as is often the case, people like him are probably deluded into thinking that they represent majority views.

And these are also the same "progressives" who keep telling us how they, unlike the nasty Tories who are out of touch with ordinary people, feel our pain in these difficult economic times and know how hard it is for families to get by. And yet they want households to fork out more money just to compensate the financial losses of those papers that people are not prepared to spend money to read.

So for what should they be worth saving?

Geller's Anti-Jihad Ad Makes Headlines

Courageous USA counter-jihadist activist Pamela Geller, Executive Director of the of American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), has brought anti-jihad to national and international media attention, with her ad in New York subway.

The poster, which is a response to anti-Israel ads previously displayed there, has been repeatedly vandalized since its first day, Monday.

Says Pamela Geller about this vandalism:

In a rational society, it would be looked down upon, but more importantly, the defacement is a metaphor for this entire conversation. Hundreds and hundreds of anti-Israel posters ran all over the country. Not one was defaced. One anti-jihad poster goes up, and it's defaced within an hour, while its creator faces defamation, smears and libel. Islamic supremacists and leftist thugs criminally defaced these ads within an hour. This is a physical manifestation of the entire conversation, or lack thereof. Anyone who speaks about jihad and sharia is attacked, defamed, destroyed -- just like these ads. This is exactly what’s happening in the media regarding jihad coverage in general. Anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-sharia hate is all over the airwaves, but anyone who dares to speak the truth about Islam and jihad in the media is immediately smeared and defamed. You can't have this conversation in the media, any more than I can present these pro-Israel ads, and receive any semblance of fair treatment.

New, Expletive-Laden Pro-Obama Ad

What's ridiculous about the new pro-Obama ad by actor Samuel L. Jackson is that a child features in it proclaiming the anti-Romney manifesto without obviously having a clue of what she's talking about: very much like the adults in the pro-Obama camp.

The video is full of expletives, and the young girl is also cursing.

And, in case for some strange reason you need a further good motive not to re-elect the incumbent with one of the worst records in American history, this should settle it: he has Madonna's support.

Madonna urged to vote for Obama, offering as the only valid argument that “For better or for worse, all right, we have a Black Muslim in the White House. Now that is some amazing ****. It means there is hope in this country.” Talking about color-blindness.

Blasphemy Laws Would Ban Islam

Of all the things being written on the subject of the Innocence of Muslims film and the reactions to it in the Islamic world calling for anti-blasphemy laws to be imposed all over the globe, the one I found most impressive and illuminating is that of Islam and Arabic scholar Raymond Ibrahim.

It is so self-evident that it's incredible no-one else has thought about it. And by revealing either Islam's internal contradictions or (more likely) Muslim lies, it offers the solution to the current conundrum and predicament. Those strategic, deceptive Muslim claims of wishing to protect all religions provide a clear way out.

If any politician or mainstream media outlet has the courage to dare touch the taboo subject of Quran and other Islam's sacred texts and use this logic, beautiful in its simplicity, we will have the answer to give to the Muslim world.

All links are in the article How 'Religious Defamation' Laws Would Ban Islam.

As the Islamic world, in the guise of the 57-member state Organization of Islamic Cooperation, continues to push for the enforcement of "religious defamation" laws in the international arena—theoretically developed to protect all religions from insult, but in reality made for Islam—one great irony is lost, especially on Muslims: if such laws would ban movies and cartoons that defame Islam, they would also, by logical extension, have to ban the religion of Islam itself—the only religion whose core texts actively defame other religions.

If films and cartoons defame Islam, the Quran itself defames other religions.

To understand this, consider what "defamation" means. Typical dictionary-definitions include "to blacken another's reputation" and "false or unjustified injury of the good reputation of another, as by slander or libel." In Muslim usage, defamation simply means anything that insults or offends Islamic sensibilities.

However, to gain traction among the international community, the OIC maintains that such laws should protect all religions from defamation, not just Islam. Accordingly, the OIC is agreeing that any expression that "slanders" the religious sentiments of others should be banned.

What, then, do we do with Islam's core religious texts—beginning with the Quran itself, which slanders, denigrates and blackens the reputation of other religions? Consider Christianity alone: Quran 5:73 declares that "Infidels are they who say Allah is one of three," a reference to the Christian Trinity; Quran 5:72 says "Infidels are they who say Allah is the Christ, [Jesus] son of Mary"; and Quran 9:30 complains that "the Christians say the Christ is the son of Allah … may Allah's curse be upon them!"

Considering that the word "infidel" (or kafir) is one of Islam's most derogatory terms, what if a Christian book or Western movie appeared declaring that "Infidels are they who say Muhammad is the prophet of God—may God's curse be upon them"? If Muslims would consider that a great defamation against Islam—and they would, with the attendant rioting, murders, etc.—then by the same standard it must be admitted that the Quran defames Christians and Christianity.

Similarly, consider how the Christian Cross, venerated among millions, is depicted—is defamed—in Islam: according to canonical hadiths, when he returns, Jesus supposedly will destroy all crosses; and Muhammad, who never allowed the cross in his presence, ordered someone wearing a cross to "take off that piece of idolatry."

What if Christian books or Western movies declared that the sacred things of Islam—say the Black Stone in the Ka'ba of Mecca—are "idolatry" and that Muhammad himself will return and destroy them? If Muslims would consider that defamation against Islam—and they would, with all the attendant rioting, murders, etc.—then by the same standard it must be admitted that the hadith defames the Christian Cross.

Here is a particularly odious form of defamation against Christian sentiment, especially to the millions of Catholic and Orthodox Christians. According to Islam's most authoritative Quranic exegetes, including the revered Ibn Kathir, Muhammad is in paradise married to and having sex with the Virgin Mary.

What if a Christian book or Western movie portrayed, say, Muhammad's wife, Aisha the "Mother of Believers," as being married to and having sex with a false prophet in heaven? If Muslims would consider that a great defamation against Islam—and they would, with all the attendant rioting, murders, etc.—then by the same standard it must be admitted that Islam's most authoritative Quranic exegetes defame the Virgin Mary.

Nor does such defamation of Christianity occur in Islam's ancient texts only; modern day Muslim scholars and sheikhs agree that it is permissible to defame Christianity. Qatar-based "Islam Web" even issued a fatwa that legitimizes insulting Christianity.

Now consider the wording used by Muslim leaders calling on the U.N. to enforce religious defamation laws in response to the Muhammad film on YouTube, and how these expressions can easily be used against Islam:

The OIC "deplored… an offensive and derogatory film on the life of Prophet Muhammad" and "called on the producers to show respect to the religious sentiments held sacred by Muslims and those of other faiths."

But what about the "offensive and derogatory" depictions of Christianity in Islam's core texts? Are Muslims willing to expunge these from the Quran and hadith, "to show respect to the religious sentiments held sacred … by those of other faiths," in this case, Christians?

Turkish Prime Minister Erodgan said the film "insults religions" (note the inclusive plural) and called for "international legal regulations against attacks on what people [not just Muslims] deem sacred."

Well, what about the fact that Islam "insults religions"—including Judaism and all polytheistic faiths? Should the West call for "international legal regulations against attacks on what people deem sacred," in the case of Christianity, regulations against Islam's teachings which attack the sanctity of Christ's divinity, the Cross, and Virgin Mary?

Even Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti—who a few months ago called for the destruction of all Christian churches in the Arabian Peninsula (first reported here)—is now calling for a "global ban on insults targeting all" religious figures, while the Grand Imam of Egypt's Al Azhar is calling for "a U.N. resolution outlawing 'insulting symbols and sanctities of Islam' and other religions." Again, they, too, claim to be interested in banning insults to all religions, while ignoring the fact that their own religion is built atop insulting all other religions.

And surely this is the grandest irony of all: the "defamation" that Muslims complain about—and that prompts great violence and bloodshed around the world—revolves around things like movies and cartoons, which are made by individuals who represent only themselves; on the other hand, Islam itself, through its holiest and most authoritative texts, denigrates and condemns—in a word, defames—all other religions, not to mention calls for violence against them (e.g., Quran 9:29).

It is this issue, Islam's perceived "divine" right to defame and destroy, that the international community should be addressing—not silly cartoons and films.

Ahmadinejad Meets Black Racist Farrakhan

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met with the Nation of Islam Minister and black supremacist Louis Farrakhan.

Ahmadinejad is in New York this week for the 67th Session of the United Nations General Assembly. A photo on an English translation of Ahmadinejad’s personal website shows Farrakhan sitting at the same table as the Iranian President, smiling in front of an Iranian flag, during a meeting of Ahmadinejad with the "leaders of Abrahamic religions".

Farrakhan is anti-white, anti-American, anti-Semitic. Calling him "racist" is one of the rare occasions when the term is rightly used. What better partner for an Islamic leader of Ahmadinejad's ilk, with the destruction of the West as common objective?

To make things even clearer, last night the Iranian President had "a hush-hush meal with Farrakhan and members of the New Black Panther Party Tuesday at the Warwick Hotel on West 54th Street", the New York Post reported.

It's hard to tell who is worse of the two men. Just to give an idea of Farrakhan's Weltanschauung, he said that in 1985 he was abducted by aliens from outer space:

Farrakhan also recounted what he claimed was a UFO abduction in which Elijah Muhammad warned him of a coming war. Farrakhan explained how after the 1985 event, then-President Ronald Reagan announced that Americans were to have no dealings with Libya and Gadhafi. It was at that point, he said Tuesday, that he understood this was the war to which his UFO experience alluded.

“I wondered then: Was Moammar Gadhafi the man and the war I was told about? While I was in Ghana it crystallized to me that it was Moammar Gadhafi and Libya. This was in 1986,” he said adding that he immediately took a Russian plane to Libya to warn Gadhafi of “America’s plans.”

“I told them my experience,” he said, “and I told them that America was going to bomb their airport, communications, their water project etc.”

According to Farrakhan, an American bomb strike on Libya shortly after his visit there confirmed his belief in his UFO prophecy.

“[Ghaddafi’s] life was spared and I knew then that God had made a brother for me and made me a brother for him and that is how our relationship began.”

Farrakhan also believes that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Zionist conspiracy.

To complete the unholy anti-Western alliance, Ahmadinejad is also supposed to meet Occupy Wall Street anti-capitalist protestors, according to the Iranian regime’s official FARS News Agency.

Italian Reactions to Muhammad Film Protests

Jihad Watch has my article Italian Reactions to Muhammad Film Protests:

The violent attacks on people and symbols representing the USA and the West in the Islamic world are one of those situations in which it becomes clear where people stand.

People are forced to make a choice here: they either point the finger at those whom they consider responsible for having provoked Muslim outrage, in other words guilty of exercising freedom of expression, or recognize that peaceful coexistence cannot be achieved by sacrificing the basic principles of our civilization, and that appeasement only leads to more and more aggressive demands.

It's similar to kidnapping and making ransom demands: governments are reluctant to give in to those requests, because they know that capitulation would encourage further kidnappings. But in dealing with the Muslim world, this logic - in fact any logic - is hardly ever applied.

Appeasement cannot work for the following reasons. Islam and European civilization are incompatible, not just because Islam is bent on destroying anything which is not Islam - what you may call the "supremacist reason" - but also because our fundamental principles and Islam's are in direct, logical contradiction, and trying to reconcile them is like squaring a circle. A conflict of interests can be solved with negotiations and compromises, but a logical contradiction, like that between a square and a circle, cannot be solved at all. We may call this the "cardinal reason".

It's interesting to note that Western authorities recognize the link between the religion of peace, specifically Friday prayers, and violence:

"Meanwhile, police said that German embassies and consulates in Arabic countries would be on high alert after Friday, a religious holiday, as some experts fear that violence could again escalate." (Islam versus Europe)

"France confirmed on Friday it would allow no street protests against cartoons denigrating Islam's Prophet Mohammad that were published by a French magazine this week." (Jihad Watch)

Why is it that when Muslims are closest to their religion, through mosques, Friday prayers, Ramadan, they get more enraged and aggressive?

Another criterion to separate people's positions is by looking at what they think of the "Arab Spring".

The Italian missionary-blogger-journalist Piero Gheddo in an article called "Where has the Arab Spring Gone?", after having praised both the revolts that brought democratically-elected governments in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia ("We cannot think that democracy, freedom of press and speech are positive only for us Christians") and Islam's glorious history ("Muhammad's religion spread by the sword but also gave rise to a civilization of great splendour, admired even by Christian sages and travellers"), writes:

"We live in 2000 AD, Islam still lives, as a culture, religion and worship of its past, in 1400 after Muhammad. It has not yet adapted to modernity. Muslim peoples are attracted to it, while the political and religious authorities try in every way to exploit Islam to save their power.
"Not only that, but there are objective difficulties in saving in the modern world the many good things that exist in Islam: the historical-critical reading of the Quran that would make it contemporary is not allowed because it is the word of God in the literal sense; in Islam there is no comparable authority to the Pope and the Bishops, every mosque or madrassa follows its own way; in Islamic law there is no notion of absolute dignity of every man and woman, which makes all creatures equal in their rights; and finally there is no distinction between religion and politics."

I said that people are forced to make a choice, but it seems that some, like Father Gheddo, are very skilled at avoiding it.

An on-the-fence position has been that of Pope Benedict XVI who, in his trip to Lebanon, invited to peace and dialogue among followers of the various religions. His situation is obviously complicated by his role of head of state and the fear that his words might be the trigger for new attacks on the Christian minorities who are like hostages in Muslim-majority countries.

A more robust answer came from a 2-day international conference on 15-16 September in Florence, organized by the association Una via per Oriana Fallaci on the problem and dangers of Islam, which was also a commemoration of the late Florentine journalist and thinker.

The focus of the conference was on the persecution of Christians inside and outside the Islamic world, Europe's progressive repudiation of its classical liberal values, and the sources of what the participants called "Christianophobia".

Christianophobia derives, according to expert on geopolitics Alexandre del Valle, from four myths, one of which is

"The myth that Islam is compatible with freedom and that Islamic violence against Christians is only a reaction to wicked behaviours on the part of Christians in the past as well as today. The current violence is excused as indignation provoked by the film The Innocence of Muslims, considered blasphemous by many Muslims, even if its contents have the sacred texts of Islam as their sources."

I must admit that I don't particularly like the neologism "Christianophobia", simply because unintentionally it seems to legitimize its counterpart "Islamophobia" from which it is probably derived, and in so doing it establishes a prima facie, superficial equivalence between the two religions.

Nevertheless, it seems to be in fashion in the current Italian debate, partly because of the recent Venice Film Festival's screening of Paradise: Faith by Ulrich Seidl, a movie that has as its highest point a sequence in which the protagonist, actress Maria Hoffstatter, engages in autoeroticism using a crucifix.

The double standards between the treatment of Muslim and Christian sensitivities, in this case as in that of the "Piss Christ" "artwork", are so blatant to provoke nausea.

"Violence explodes in the Muslim world. Western politicians compete in apologizing for the blasphemous Islam film. Do we need to burn down embassies and kill for someone to apologize for the blasphemous movie about Christianity which received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival?" asks the blog Basta Bugie (Enough of Lies).

The question of free speech and where, if anywhere, the line should be drawn is worth exploring, maybe in another article. But that double standards should not be tolerated is so simple that does not require further analysis.

Continue reading.

Freedom of Speech Replaced by Sharia

Blogger Diana West has a very good article, "Trading the First Amendment for Sharia":

This is no media flap. This is war. Islam is attempting to dominate the West by attacking the basis of the West – freedom of speech. Our leaders won’t tell us that because too many of them have already surrendered. They deplore the violence against our people and our sovereign territory, yes, but their priority is not to defend free speech but to see that Islamic speech codes are enforced. They have already decided to discard liberty for Shariah. The U.S. government and the Islamic bloc known as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) couldn’t be more in sync on this vital issue.

How to get around the First Amendment? Through “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last year. She was speaking about the so-called Istanbul Process, the international effort she and the OIC are spearheading to see Islamic anti-”blasphemy” laws enforced around the world.

Since last week, the Obama administration has made not one but two attempts to persuade YouTube to remove “Innocence of Muslims,” the Islamic riot-button du jour. The administration has denounced and practically jumped up and down on the video clip as “the cause” of Islamic rampaging. (To its credit, YouTube owner Google so far has refused.)

Amid the rioting, President Obama called on Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan for political support. Erdogan obliged by condemning violence against U.S. personnel in Libya, but he identified the video as “provocation” – indeed, all the more reason for blasphemy laws. When free speech “is in the form of a provocation,” Erdogan said, “there should be international legal regulations against attacks … on religion.” There should be domestic laws, too, he said, continuing: “Freedom of thought and belief ends where the freedom of thought and belief of others starts.”

A video in no way limits the freedom of thought and belief of anybody. This is another example of the tortuous logic of the Muslim world which, not incidentally, has never been able to reconcile Islam with Aristotle, the founder of formal logic.

That’s not how it works in the West. But such Shariah norms are what all of Islam – not just a “tiny band of extremists” – is pressing on us. A survey of the week’s news in the Islamic world reveals that whether terror kingpins (Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and Indonesia’s convicted Abu Bakar Bashir) or Islamic scholar (Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed el-Tayeb), whether smashing U.S. Embassy windows in Yemen or meeting in the offices of the Arab League, whether Pakistani lawyers or Hamas fighters, whether under U.S. sanctions (Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) or an Obama ally (Turkey’s Erdogan), the Islamic world is speaking in one voice. Criticism of Islam must be outlawed, and violators punished.

And more audaciously than ever. Just this week, an Iranian group increased the bounty on Salman Rushdie’s fatwa’ed head to 2.5 million euros for “insulting” Islam 23 years ago in his novel “The Satanic Verses.” The influential Union of Islamic Scholars, headed by Muslim Brotherhood spiritual adviser Yusuf al-Qaradawi, demanded that Pope Benedict XVI apologize for his 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, linking Islam and violence. Egyptian cleric Ahmad Fouad Ashoush issued a fatwa (death sentence) against the cast and crew of “Innocence of Muslims.” The Pakistani government declared a national holiday for anti-U.S. protests. And the Egyptian government, still begging for U.S. cash, not only sentenced an Egyptian Christian to six years in jail this week for “insulting the prophet” (and Egypt’s president and a lawyer), it also issued arrest warrants for six U.S.-based Egyptians who made the “offending” film and pastor Terry Jones for promoting it.

This is what a world without the First Amendment looks like. In the eyes of the Obama White House, however, the First Amendment is just an obstacle to synchronicity with the Islamic world. They are right, of course. That makes it our lifeline to liberty.

Obama Supporters Hate Romney Not for His Failures, but Successes

Ruthie Blum was on the TV channel Russia Today last night, in one of those albeit too frequent instances of the "Cross Talk" debates in which one person is on the opposing side of the other two debaters plus the "moderator" Peter Lavelle.

The subject was the relationship between the USA and Israel.

I was so annoyed that she was shouted down every time she opened her mouth (and the few words she managed to utter pointed to something worth listening to) that I googled her and found this insightful piece about the so-called Romney's "gaffe" on the 47%, which is not really a gaffe at all. Here is an excerpt:

Ironically, many of the very analysts who grasp that America is not at fault for the bashing it is receiving from the Islamic world find it hard to acknowledge that Romney is not to blame for every surge Obama enjoys in the polls. Never before has an incumbent with this abysmal a record been given such a break by the media and the public.

...Which brings us back to Romney's comments, made months ago, that caused such a stir this week. In the first place, he was not speaking on a podium in a public forum, but among a small group of sympathizers with whom he could be blunt about his strategy.

Secondly, when he said that he would “never convince [the 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what] that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives," he was referring to his inability to garner their electoral support. He was not saying that, if elected, he would not become their president. He was asserting that he would not be able to cause them to adopt his position on personal responsibility.

Third: Everything he attributed to the people who adhere to Obama’s worldview is accurate. Obama believes that government is the key and the solution to everything. It is no secret that socialism is the system suited best to people who see themselves as victims, and who consider the government to be both at fault for their plight and responsible for rectifying it.

These are the people who scream “pro choice” in relation to abortion, for example, but who expect the government to fund the termination of their pregnancies when their choice not to use birth control leads to unwanted consequences.

These are the people who think the “millionaires” aren’t paying enough taxes, but who go on the government dole when those “fat cats” (aka the industry bosses who provide them employment) are forced to shrink or dissolve their businesses when hindered financially.

These are the people whose handouts and bailouts and subsidies force the government on which they so depend to raise everybody else’s taxes.

Yes, these are the people who will never vote for Romney — and not because of his “gaffes,” but rather due to his views on how to stop the vicious cycle and downward spiral caused by government control and intervention.

Islamists hate America not for what it does wrong, but for what it does right. Obama supporters hate Romney not for his failures, but for his successes. It is this that the conservative camp should be shouting from the rooftops. Anything else they have to say on the matter should be reserved for the privacy of their own homes — minus the video cameras.