Time To Give Pakistan the South-African Treatment

Jihad Watch has published my article "Time To Give Pakistan the South-African Treatment":

It may seem an unlikely possibility, now that the Islamic world is demanding sharia, in the shape of anti-blasphemy laws, to be imposed all over the globe and Muslim Baroness Warsi, newly-appointed Minister for Faith (i.e. Islam) in the UK government, has signed during the UN recent meetings a surreal agreement between the UK, that old -- and now former -- defender of democratic freedoms, and the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) pledging that the UK and the OIC will "work together on issues of peace, stability and religious freedom", but sometimes attack is the best form of defence.

South Africa was isolated by the international community due to its apartheid policy, which put pressure on Pretoria and played a role in ending the apartheid. The British Commonwealth, of which the country was part, turned out to be particularly important in this process.

During the apartheid, the British felt particularly responsible for what they believed to be South African discriminatory policies because of the strong ties the UK had with that country through the Commonwealth, the international organization that comprises almost exclusively Britain’s former colonies.

In 1958 the African National Congress made an appeal for international solidarity. The Christians and other non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan may be too demoralized and terrorized to even ask for outside help.

I am not here making comparisons between Pakistan and South Africa, which since the end of the apartheid seems to have deteriorated.

The only leaf I am taking out of the South African book is the way international repudiation of a regime or treatment considered as odiously unfair can be an effective weapon against it.

Pakistan, another member of the British Commonwealth, has already been suspended from the Commonwealth twice: in 1999 after Musharraf seized power in a coup, and in 2007, because of its imposition of emergency rule, until “full restoration of fundamental rights and the rule of law“, for its "serious violation of the Commonwealth’s fundamental political values.

Isn’t Pakistan’s treatment of its Christians “a serious violation of the Commonwealth’s fundamental political values”?

Let's see.

The Constitution of Pakistan (PART III, Chapter 1) says: “A person shall not be qualified for election as President unless he is a Muslim of not less than forty-five years of age and is qualified to be elected as member of the National Assembly.”

In addition, the Constitution (PART VII, Chapter 3A) rules that non-Muslims cannot be judges in the Federal Shariat Court, which has the power to abrogate any law considered un-Islamic.

At least since the 1990s, we have started to learn how Pakistani Christians suffer the worst forms of discrimination only because of their religion.

The infamous Pakistani blasphemy law mandates that anyone who offends the Quran must be punished, even with the death sentence.

A 1998 United Nations document on “Prevention of Discrimination against and the Protection of Minorities”, mostly concerned with Pakistan, says: “The use of an accusation of “blasphemy” -- an ill-defined term which can be expanded to mean anything that any accuser dislikes -- merits serious attention. Some accusations of “blasphemy” can be ill-disguised death threats - as was the case in 1994 regarding the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Sudan, Mr. Gáspár Biró - and when they are not, they can be considered as sufficiently dangerous to lead to kowtowing, and even censorship at the United Nations”.

Since 1994, Amnesty International has been calling for a change in that law because it is used as a tool against religious minorities:

AI is concerned that a number of people facing charges of blasphemy, or convicted on such charges have been detained solely for their real or imputed religious beliefs. Most of those charged with blasphemy belong to the Ahamdiyya community but Christians have increasingly been accused of blasphemy, among them a 13-year-old boy accused of writing blasphemous words on the walls of a mosque despite being totally illiterate. The following case histories are supplied: Anwar Masih, a Christian prisoner; Arshad Javed, reportedly mentally ill, sentenced to death; Gul Masih, a Christian, sentenced to death; Tahir Iqbal, a convert to Christianity, died in jail while on trial; Sawar Masih Bhatti, a Christian prisoner; Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, Muslim social activist; Chand Barkat, a Christian acquitted of blasphemy but continuously harassed; Hafiz Farooq Sajjad, stoned to death; Salamat Masih, Manzoor Masih and Rehmat Masih, three Christians.”

In 1996, another Christian, Ayub Masih, was incarcerated in solitary confinement for two years, convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death in 1998 due to a neighbour’s accusations that he supported Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. Eventually his lawyer proved that the accuser had used the conviction to force Masih's family out of their land and take control of the property.

It is supposed to be in connection with this episode that the Pakistani Catholic Bishop John Joseph killed himself in 1998 to protest the blasphemy laws, for the repeal of which he had been campaigning. Before his death, Bishop Joseph had publicly declared that the charges against Ayub Masih were false, and fabricated to force 15 Christian families to drop a local land dispute with Muslim villagers.

Since then the story has just been a repetition of many similar cases, so much so that even homosexual and human rights activist Peter Tatchell – not exactly a friend of the Church – has condemned persecution of Christians in Pakistan, and the Pakistan United Christian Welfare Association has demanded a separate province in Pakistan to protect the country’s around 2.8 million Christians from persecution.

One of the most recent horrors is that of the 11-year-old Christian girl threatened to be burnt alive by a Muslim mob for another false “blasphemy” accusation, while her family and several other Christian families were driven out of their homes in terror.

And Hindus are also an oppressed minority in Pakistan.

The UK’s National Secular Society, whose president Terry Sanderson said: “There is certainly a need for some kind of inter-religious understanding among OIC member states, a number of which suppress Christianity and other religions in a brutal and merciless fashion”, may also be in favour of pressure brought on Pakistan, which is certainly one of the most serious offenders among the OIC’s member states Mr. Sanderson is referring to.

Other campaigns of international political, financial, economic, cultural and sporting sanctions against Pakistan should also be conducted, as they were against South Africa.

South Africa’s bans from sporting events were employed as an effective instrument of pressure, and so could be banning Pakistan from Commonwealth Games, Cricket World Cup, and the like.

Obama Was Born and Raised a Muslim

If anyone in the USA, for some extraordinary reason, is still in doubt about whom to choose for President, I recommend two things. The first is an empiricist approach: you have tried one candidate and he failed, you haven't tried the other. In experimental science it would be reasonable to choose the not-yet-tried possibility.

The second thing is, if you haven't already done so, to read "Obama's Muslim Childhood" by Daniel Pipes.

The discovery that Obama has been wearing for over 30 years a ring with the first part of the Islamic declaration of faith, the Shahada, “There is no god except Allah”, will make sense to you if you read it, because you'll realize how important Islam has been in the President's life. WND's Jerome R. Corsi, who has written several books on Obama, explains:

The Shahada is the first of the Five Pillars of Islam, expressing the two fundamental beliefs that make a person a Muslim: There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet.

Sincere recitation of the Shahada is the sole requirement for becoming a Muslim, as it expresses a person’s rejection of all other gods.

Egyptian-born Islamic scholar Mark A. Gabriel, Ph.D., examined photographs of Obama’s ring at WND’s request and concluded that the first half of the Shahada is inscribed on it.

“There can be no doubt that someone wearing the inscription ‘There is no god except Allah’ has a very close connection to Islamic beliefs, the Islamic religion and Islamic society to which this statement is so strongly attached,” Gabriel told WND.

Let's go back to Pipes' long and very well-researched article. After observing that the incumbent accuses his rival Romney of hiding some of his biographical details, it says: "A focus on openness and honesty are likely to hurt Obama far more than Romney. Obama remains the mystery candidate with an autobiography full of gaps and even fabrications".

A list of Obama's clashes with the truth and inaccuracies about himself - like "He lied about never having been a member and candidate of the 1990s Chicago socialist New Party", or his claim that he was born in Kenya - follows, before Pipes gets to the main topic of his essay, which is Obama and his campaign's lies about Obama's Muslim childhood.

The President, repeatedly although in a contradictory fashion, has denied having ever been a Muslim.

Pipes, through a painstaking fact-finding work, shows that Obama was born and raised as a Muslim, and while in Indonesia he went to Koranic classes "studying 'how to pray and how to read the Koran,' but also actually praying in the Friday communal service right on the school grounds", attended the local mosque, wore sarongs, garments that in Indonesian culture only Muslims wear, and took part in advanced Islamic religious lessons which included the difficult task of reciting the Koran in Arabic. None of this was inevitable, because in Indonesia ""Muslim students were taught by a Muslim teacher, and Christian students were taught by a Christian teacher".

In summary, the record points to Obama having been born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and having lived for four years in a fully Muslim milieu under the auspices of his Muslim Indonesian stepfather. For these reasons, those who knew Obama in Indonesia considered him a Muslim.

"My Muslim Faith"

In addition, several statements by Obama in recent years point to his Muslim childhood.

(1) Robert Gibbs, campaign communications director for Obama's first presidential race, asserted in Jan. 2007: "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago." But he backtracked in Mar. 2007, asserting that "Obama has never been a practicing Muslim." By focusing on the practice as a child, the campaign is raising a non-issue for Muslims (like Jews) do not consider practice central to religious identity. Gibbs added, according to a paraphrase by Watson, that "as a child, Obama had spent time in the neighborhood's Islamic center." Clearly, "the neighborhood's Islamic center" is a euphemism for "mosque"; spending time there again points to Obama's being a Muslim.

Particularly crucial is the section of the article concerning how Obama interacts with - I was temped to say "fellow" - Muslims, acting as if they were indeed his coreligionists. He acts and tells them things that a Christian, as he says he is, would never do and say, like talking about Jesus as a dead prophet.

When addressing Muslim audiences, Obama uses specifically Muslim phrases that recall his Muslim identity. He addressed audiences both in Cairo (in June 2009) and Jakarta (in Nov. 2010) with "as-salaamu alaykum," a greeting that he, who went to Koran class, knows is reserved for one Muslim addressing another.

Obama, in addition, has an exaggerated sense of the importance of Islam and Muslims, to the point that he hugely "overestimates both the number and the role of Muslims in the United States," which "smacks of an Islamist mentality".

So it's not surprising that

Muslims cannot shake the sense that, under his proclaimed Christian identity, Obama truly is one of them.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister of Turkey, has referred to Hussein as a "Muslim" name. Muslim discussions of Obama sometimes mention his middle name as a code, with no further comment needed. A conversation in Beirut, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, captures the puzzlement. "He has to be good for Arabs because he is a Muslim," observed a grocer. "He's not a Muslim, he's a Christian," replied a customer. No, said the grocer, "He can't be a Christian. His middle name is Hussein." The name is proof positive.

The American Muslim writer Asma Gull Hasan wrote in "My Muslim President Obama":

I know President Obama is not Muslim, but I am tempted nevertheless to think that he is, as are most Muslims I know. In a very unscientific oral poll, ranging from family members to Muslim acquaintances, many of us feel … that we have our first American Muslim president in Barack Hussein Obama. … since Election Day, I have been part of more and more conversations with Muslims in which it was either offhandedly agreed that Obama is Muslim or enthusiastically blurted out. In commenting on our new president, "I have to support my fellow Muslim brother," would slip out of my mouth before I had a chance to think twice. "Well, I know he's not really Muslim," I would quickly add. But if the person I was talking to was Muslim, they would say, "yes he is."

Obama's middle name Hussein is again considered one of the reasons.

In conclusion, available evidence suggests that Obama was born and raised a Muslim and retained a Muslim identity until his late 20s. Child to a line of Muslim males, given a Muslim name, registered as a Muslim in two Indonesian schools, he read Koran in religion class, still recites the Islamic declaration of faith, and speaks to Muslim audiences like a fellow believer. Between his non-practicing Muslim father, his Muslim stepfather, and his four years of living in a Muslim milieu, he was both seen by others and saw himself as a Muslim.

This is not to say that he was a practicing Muslim or that he remains a Muslim today, much less an Islamist, nor that his Muslim background significantly influences his political outlook (which, in fact, is typical of an American leftist). Nor is there a problem about his converting from Islam to Christianity. The issue is Obama's having specifically and repeatedly lied about his Muslim identity. More than any other single deception, Obama's treatment of his own religious background exposes his moral failings.

Questions about Obama's Truthfulness

Yet, these failings remain largely unknown to the American electorate. Consider the contrast of his case and that of James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces. Both Frey and Obama wrote inaccurate memoirs that Oprah Winfrey endorsed and rose to #1 on the non-fiction bestseller list. When Frey's literary deceptions about his own drug taking and criminality became apparent, Winfrey tore viciously into him, a library reclassified his book as fiction, and the publisher offered a refund to customers who felt deceived.

In contrast, Obama's falsehoods are blithely excused; Arnold Rampersad, professor of English at Stanford University who teaches autobiography, admiringly called Dreams "so full of clever tricks—inventions for literary effect—that I was taken aback, even astonished. But make no mistake, these are simply the tricks that art trades in, and out of these tricks is supposed to come our realization of truth." Gerald Early, professor of English literature and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, goes further: "It really doesn't matter if he made up stuff. … I don't think it much matters whether Barack Obama has told the absolute truth in Dreams From My Father. What's important is how he wanted to construct his life."

How odd that a lowlife's story about his sordid activities inspires high moral standards while the U.S. president's autobiography gets a pass. Tricky Dick, move over for Bogus Barry.

Obama has a disproportionate desire to appeal to, as well as appease as we saw in the case of the Muhammed film, Muslims. The head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Charles F. Bolden, Jr., explained that Obama "wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering." Which incidentally is not even remotely as great as Obama seems to believe. But that's for another post.

It's up to Americans to decide if they want to re-elect a President who lies in matters of personal identity, especially religion, which has obvious, major ethical implications. In comparison, as Pipes points out, Romney's "prior tax returns, the date he stopped working for Bain Capital, and the non-public records from his service heading the Salt Lake City Olympics and as governor of Massachusetts" are of little importance.

And it's up to Americans to decide if they want to re-elect a President who has Muslim background and sympathies, in a world where the West's need to distance itself from the Islamic world, to reaffirm its values of democratic freedoms against a Muslim world that tries ever more aggressively to impose its Sharia's blasphemy laws on it, to recognize with dispassionate eyes potential enemies emerging from the "Arab Spring", and to deal with a nuclearizing Iran, increases by the day.

There is a saying: "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic". I was brought up a Catholic and I know that, although I consider myself now an atheist Christian, as Oriana Fallaci described herself, so, not believing in God, I am not a Catholic any more, family upbringing and childhood impressions remain with you all your life. I suspect the same applies to Obama, and all the above rich and detailed information confirms it.

If I were American, I know what I would do.

UK Asian Machete Gangs Battle in the Streets

The Accrington Observer (via Christian Defence League) reports these events in Accrington, a town in Northern England:

Rival gangs brandishing hammers and machetes clashed on the streets of Accrington.

Around 20 Asian men are believed to have been involved in fought middle of a main road on the outskirts of the town centre.

A 36-year-old man suffered a broken jaw after being clubbed to the back of his head with a hammer during the brawl at around 10pm on Saturday.

Shocking CVTV images of the fight show hooded figures squaring up before the gangs fled as police moved in.

Witnesses described the clash as 'something you would see in America' and some said violence had been brewing at either end of Blackburn Road all day.

Detectives have made three arrests but said they don't know why the violence had taken place.

Detective Inspector Jill Johnston said the brawl may have been pre-planned.

She said 10 extra officers were sent out on patrol in the town centre and surrounding areas following the fight.

DI Johnston, of Accrington CID, said: “For that many men in their 20s and 30s to be fighting in the street, not near a pub or nightclub, is rare.

“Whether it is two groups who have arranged a fight, I don't know.

“It is possibly a dispute between two local Asian families or groups. They are old enough to know better.”

She added: “We are trying to make some sense of it all. We have CCTV footage of the incident. It appears that one group has gone to the scene in vehicles and then entered into a fight.

“We are trying to piece it all together and are hoping to make some more arrests.”

The incident took place at around 10pm on Blackburn Road in Accrington, close to Swiss Street.

Residents said traffic was held up as the gangs fought in the road.

When the police arrived the men all made off.

One businessman, who asked not to be named, said: “It was lads from the top and bottom ends of town.

“There was about 20 lads - some were in cars and were ramming people on the road.

“It looked like a gangland and is a big concern as I live and work around here with my family.”

He added: “They started clashing and waving hammers and machetes around like crazy.

“It was just mad and was going on though the whole day with little clashes. It just came to a head and ended in a big me-lee. It was something you would see in America.”

One Blackburn Road resident, who declined to be named, said more cameras and street patrols are needed.

He said: “We don't know who they were or what it was about. It's very worrying when something like this happens near your home.”

The article refers to "Asian men" and does not indicate whether there is further information about them.

But it's useful to add that Accrington is near Burnley, where this film documenting how large numbers of Muslims have affected local people's lives was made, and Rochdale, where Muslim men groomed and sexually abused white young girls for a decade, undisturbed by police and social services too frightened to intervene.

Douglas Murray Video on Iran and Israel on the BBC

Douglas Murray is a very brave British commentator, not afraid of defying the political correctness dominating every UK public debate, even when he has to face the sancta sanctorum of that orthodoxy: the BBC.

Douglas Murray is former director of the British think tank Centre for Social Cohesion and is now an associate director of another UK think tank, the conservative, pro-Israel Henry Jackson Society.

Stephanie Cutter: "Benghazi Only an Issue Because of Romney & Ryan"

From RedState "Obama Campaign Official Stephanie Cutter: Benghazi Terrorist Attack ‘Only an Issue because of Romney and Ryan’":

STEPHANIE CUTTER: In terms of the politicization of this — you know, we are here at a debate, and I hope we get to talk about the debate — but the entire reason this has become the political topic it is, is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It’s a big part of their stump speech. And it’s reckless and irresponsible what they’re doing.

BROOKE BALDWIN: But, Stephanie, this is national security. As we witnessed this revolution last year, we covered it–

CUTTER: It is absolutely national security–

BALDWIN: –it is absolutely pertinent. People in the American public absolutely have a right to get answers.

Newcastle Muslim Players Not Wearing Club Shirt with Wonga Logo

Demba Ba, Papiss Cisse, Cheick Tiote and Hatem Ben Arfa, four Muslim players of the English Premier League team Newcastle United, could refuse to wear their club's new shirt.

Newcastle United's new sponsor is the loan company Wonga, and Islamic Sharia law forbids interest on money lent. Interest is not paid on Islamic bank accounts.

This Islamic prohibition on interest is the reason why the UK's previous Labour government secretly created a loophole allowing Muslims to take a property mortgage without paying interest, which also makes it cheaper for them than for everybody else.

We are all equal before the law but some are more equal than others. When some non-Muslims discovered the loophole and exploited it for themselves, the discovery caused outrage among the British public opinion who was until then unaware of this privilege given to Muslims.

Now the Muslim players of Newcastle United may decide not to wear the shirt with the logo of Wonga.

What is puzzling, though, is that they wore shirts with logos of previous sponsors like Virgin Money, as can be seen from the video above, which was lending money with interest.

This is very similar to Muslims rioting in half the globe for a video posted on YouTube when there are dozens or even hundreds of similar videos on the internet, many of which can be considered as much or even more offensive to extra-sensitive Muslims.

Could it be that we see here the well-known problem of Muslim inbreeding at work?

How To Lie to the Infidels

Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan held a rally against CIA drone attacks in Pakistan. Of course, you never hear him complain about what Pakistani Muslims do to the country’s Christians with its infamous blasphemy law.

But that is the thing: whereas the traditionally Christian countries of the West always point the fingers at themselves first and foremost, Muslims hardly ever criticize their own, preferring to find faults with other people. That moral difference is, among many others, due to the gulf between our different roots: Christianity and Islam.

We’ll hear a lot of talk on how drones have the effect of radicalizing young Muslims and similar inanities. All they need to get radicalized and become jihadists is not drones, but a good copy of the Quran and, if they are illiterate, someone to read it to them.

Throughout the last decades there has always been a purported “reason” why Muslims became terrorists, except the real one: their pseudo-religion.

Let’s get a clear insight from the horse’s mouth. In the article I was a fanatic… I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist, former British jihadist Hassan Butt candidly explains the “double-talk” used by Islamists. To us, the enemy, they use the propaganda of Muslim tit for Western tat, retaliation for what we supposedly did to them. But in reality the hostility towards the kuffars (highly derogatory Arabic term for non-Muslims) is eternally founded on Islamic theology and does not require pretexts or excuses.

This auto-biographical article is precious because it is one of the few instances in which Islamists tell the truth to us infidels.

Butt wrote after the London and Glasgow terrorist plots:

I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this “Blair’s bombs” line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4′s Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: “What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.”

I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I’d be laughing once again.

And he’d be laughing again now, hearing that CIA drones are the new excuse du jour.

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.