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Thursday, 8 August 2013

Halal: A Taste of Terror


First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


“Beware! Halal food funds terrorists.” Stickers with this slogan were sold in July by a candidate of the Australian political party One Nation, and condemned by the country’s Multicultural Affairs Minister Glen Elmes as “offensive, grotesque and designed to inflame hatred.” He added: “People are encouraged to put the stickers on food products in supermarkets, which isn’t just racial discrimination, it’s also vandalism.”

What the sticker says, though, is apparently taking place in the USA and Canada where Campbell’s Soup and other companies have paid the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) for their halal certification, in France, where it is claimed that 60% of halal food is controlled by organizations belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and the so-called “halal tax” is the organization’s main source of funding. In the UK, major supermarket chain Morrisons is not only indirectly but even directly giving money to the Islamic National Zakat Foundation. I’ll explain what that is about in a minute.

“Ritual slaughter” is the slaughter of animals for food following religious prescriptions. The Muslim method to produce halal (“lawful” or “permissible”) meat consists of cutting fully conscious animals’ throat while the name of Allah is uttered and letting them bleed to death. The Jewish method of producing kosher meat shares with the Muslim one the fact that the animal is not stunned before being killed.

Laws of Western countries generally require that animals are stunned to render them unconscious before slaughter, but allow exceptions for both Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter.
Government advisory bodies, like the Farm Animal Welfare Council and the British Veterinary Association in the UK, have produced reports and made declarations saying that ritual slaughter causes ”intolerable cruelty” and have repeatedly demanded that it be banned.

The Muslim Council of Britain claims that most halal meat comes from stunned animals, but in reality a very low voltage is used in their electrocution, resulting in inadequate stunning.

This makes it objectionable to most non-Muslims on animal welfare grounds. Christians and others – Sikhs in Britain currently have an anti-halal petition – also consider the utterance of Allah’s name at the moment of slaughter as idolatry.

And a major concern is that halal meat is just no longer for Muslim consumption, but is sold to “infidels” in ever greater quantity the world over.

To get an idea of the extent of this phenomenon, one of the most influential halal certification bodies, the Halal Food Authority, now estimates that a staggering 25% of the entire UK meat market is halal. But Muslims are about 5% of the UK population, therefore there is as much as 5 times more halal meat than Muslims.

In Britain halal meat is routinely served and sold to non-Muslims who don’t even know that they’re eating it, let alone want to do so. Schools, hospitals, hundreds of restaurants and pubs, sporting venues like Wembley football stadium and Ascot race course, all the main supermarkets chains – none excluded – fast-food and pizza chains have been drawn into what commercially must look like a win-win situation for them: Muslims complain and demand halal, non-Muslims don’t complain, adapt and tolerate. Especially if they’re not informed and food is not properly labelled.

In dhimmi Britain, when pork or other non-halal food is accidentally discovered in school menus, as recently happened, it causes a fervor, hits headlines, the food is immediately removed and the responsible sacked, but it’s nearly impossible to have halal meat – which non-Muslims don’t want – removed from schools or at least not served to unbelievers. In an increasing number of schools halal is the only meat served. Is the only way to ban halal food in schools to “contaminate” it with pork, as someone suggested?

What’s happening with halal is that we are experiencing for the first time in the West Islamization on a large scale. Great numbers of people are forced to live according to Sharia law whether they like it or not, which is the essence of Islam and its supremacist nature.

Christian Concern reported the words of the Operation Nehemiah Halal Campaign, run by the Barnabas Fund:
There is an open campaign by Islamic food agencies to integrate halal into the mainstream market and to extend it to non-Muslims. The World Halal Forum held its annual conference in London earlier this month (November), and has identified the UK as a pilot project for halal in Europe…

The spread of halal is often part of the commitment to Islamic mission (dawa) and the Islamisation of non-Muslim societies. The imposition of sharia practices on non-Muslims may be interpreted as an act of Islamic supremacy.”
That it is a question of supremacy and economic profit and not religious compliance is shown by the fact that Islam specifically exempts its faithful from the obligation to eat halal food if none is available:
He hath only forbidden you dead meat, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and that on which any other name hath been invoked besides that of Allah. But if one is forced by necessity, without wilful disobedience, nor transgressing due limits,- then is he guiltless. For Allah is Oft-forgiving Most Merciful. Quran (002:173)
Every time you drive around London you are subjected to the sight of myriad halal signs, a constant reminder of the transformation of Britain into an Islamic country. You can even measure this process of Islamization by the number of halal signs that you see multiply in the same streets and areas.

If women in the hijab and burka are the visible representation of Muslim presence in the West, halal signs are the visible symbol of Muslim supremacism taking hold of it – at least women who veil themselves don’t impose their dress code on others.

We are witnessing a Muslim takeover of an increasing share of the food industry and other industries, with consequences on the job market of Britain, a nation with a high level of unemployment, especially among the young. Halal products include not just meat, but also a long list of goods containing slaughterhouse by-products like gelatin and collagen, which are ingredients in many various foodstuffs – from Easter eggs to cat food – cosmetics, toiletries, pharmaceuticals, and other products.

It is a multi-billion dollars industry, and growing.

All halal products require certification by a Muslim agency, which the agency is paid for.
The principle of “zakat” in Islamic law makes it obligatory for all Muslims to give 2.5% of their income to charity – only in aid of their coreligionists, of course. Zakat has to be distributed among 8 categories of recipients, one of which is the jihadists fighting in Allah’s cause. From Mission Islam:
Zakat can be given in the path of Allah. By this is meant to finance a Jihad effort in the path of Allah, not for Jihad for other reasons. The fighter (mujahid) will be given as salary what will be enough for him. If he needs to buy arms or some other supplies related to the war effort, Zakat money should be used provided the effort is to raise the banner of Islam.
According to Islamic law, it would not be permissible, or “halal,” for Islamic organizations providing halal certification not to pay zakat, which under Islamic law is obligatory for all Muslims, on the fees they charge.

Therefore, whenever you buy one of the many halal-certified products increasingly found in our Western countries, even without your knowledge and against your will, you are indirectly contributing to Islamic terrorists, killers of Christians in the Middle East, al-Qaeda-linked groups and so on. Buy halal and you fund jihad against Israel.

Many Islamic “charities” have known links to terrorism and Islamic extremism. In early July the Gatestone Institute published a report documenting the many links discovered between the Islamic Relief Worldwide charity, with headquarters in the UK, and terror groupswith an anti-Western agenda. Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) consists of a “family of fifteen aid agencies” which “aim to alleviate the suffering of the world’s poorest people.” What looks like an innocuous — indeed philanthropic — charity is, according to this report, “an extremist organization with a pro-terror agenda… [which] has worked with a significant number of organizations linked to terrorism.” Western governments, the United Nations and the European Union should be more careful about whom they donate their money to, since they all gave tens of millions of dollars to IRW, whose most important branches include Islamic Relief UK and Islamic Relief USA. The report says:
IRW’s accounts show that it has partnered with a number of organizations linked to terrorism and that some of charity’s trustees are personally affiliated with extreme Islamist groups that have connections to terror.
Those organizations and groups, over the years, have included Hamas and Hamas-related bodies like Al Wafa and Al Tzalah; terrorists in Chechnya; al-Qaeda; the Yemeni Al-Eslah organization, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood; terrorist and Muslim Brotherhood groups operating in various European countries; and many more.

What makes IRW, which is one of the world’s largest and most influential Islamic charities, more dangerous is that it has acquired legitimacy among Western politicians and public figures. Even heir to the British throne Prince Charles has expressed support and appeared at IRW events. But there has been very little scrutiny of IRW and its branches.

In sum, although halal is on its surface an animal cruelty concern, it is also a crucial area of conflict between the West and those who want to force Islam, literally, down our throats. It also empowers Muslims culturally, ideologically, politically and, last but not least, economically, in a terrifying way.

Wednesday, 7 August 2013

Egalitarians Want Us All Poor or Dead

Mc jobs


I remember that Paola Cavalieri, the editor of the Italian journal Etica e Animali, once said to me: "If human beings have privileges at the expense of nonhuman animal suffering, it would be best if none of them existed: at least we would all be equal".

There is a deep truth in that: egalitarianism, taken to its extreme consequences, would lead to total destruction of all sentient life. Being dead is the only state in which we are all equal. Life is diversity itself.

I was reminded of that when I heard on the radio a discussion about zero-hours contracts, under which an employee must be available for work as needed, will only be paid for the hours worked, and has no guaranteed hours each month.

The recent concerns expressed arise from the emerging of new figures indicating that there could be as many as four times more people than previously thought in zero-hours jobs. The research suggests a million people could be working under them.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development surveyed 1,000 firms and found that up to 4% of the UK workforce were on such contracts.

Zero-hours contracts are on the rise, and is predicted that they will continue to increase, because employers more and more try to find cost-effective ways to meet short-term staffing needs.

Fast-food, catering, hotel, shop-assistant jobs are the most common occupations under these contracts, and also some NHS jobs.

Business Secretary Vince Cable is now concerned that, he said, there is "some exploitation" of staff on these contracts, and he started a review into the state of zero-hours contracts.

A ban on this hiring method is unlikely because many workers actually prefer it, like flexible hours and want to work only occasionally, around existing commitments, but we may see the usual government meddling, restrictions and regulations.

But why on earth should anyone want to force businesses to employ on a regular contract people they don't need or more people they can afford?

This can only lead to potential employers being increasingly wary of hiring, and to a rise in unemployment.

Don't they see that overregulating and interfering is a recipe for more destructive economic outcomes? The labour market must be subject to the same economic (not political) laws of the market as everything else. This is the only way that a modern society can be productive: call it capitalism if you like. The alternative, socialism, makes everybody poor.

But maybe that's what egalitarians really want. As Paola Cavalieri, they prefer everybody to have nothing, which is the only sure way to erase all income disparities.

Monday, 5 August 2013

Christianity Gave Birth to Science

Jesus Christ


Science is the systematic application of a logico-empiricist method to look at and understand things, and was born in Christian Europe first with the Scholastic philosophy and then with Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei.

The necessary foundation for scientific research is the belief in one God that created a universe regulated by immutable laws which can be understood by man exactly because God's mind and man's are similar except in extent. The Christian God is a person.

Galileo famously talked about the "book of nature", that scientists try to read, being written by God. This is possible because both God and man have a similar mind. If you read a book, you think you can understand the author because you speak the same language and your mind works in an analoguous way. Galileo also said that the book of nature is written in mathematical language.

The ancient people who went closest to developing science were the Greeks. But they were hindered by their polytheism and, after the 4th century BC, by the dominance of the Aristotelian method.

The latter consists in deducing phenomena from fixed principles. The many, capricious deities of the Olympus were also an obstacle to the rise of scientific thought, not being believed capable of creating a rational universe.

As historian of science Bernard Cohen (1914-2003) wrote, ancient Greeks were interested in explaining the natural world only through abstract general principles. The first technical innovations, dating back to prehistoric ages, Greco-Roman times, the Islamic world and China, were not science but are best described as observations, knowledge, learning, wisdom, arts, trades, crafts, technology, engineering. Even without telescopes, the ancient excelled in astronomic observations but without connecting them to testable theories.

It is no coincidence that many of the disciplines which are now part of science were once part of philosophy.

Science is made of theories which are subject to independent confirmation or falsification. The intellectual achievements of Greek or Oriental philosophers were either fruit of atheoretical empiricism or non-empirical theories.

Historian of science Harold Dorn considers the Greeks' atheoretical knowledge a barrier to the birth of science in Greece and Rome and also in the Islamic world, which preserved and studied Greek teachings.

This in no way diminishes the immense value of Greek culture and its great impact on Christian theology and European intellectual life. However, as historian of religions Rodney Stark observed, the birth of science was not the continuation of classical knowledge but the natural consequence of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God and, to love Him and honour Him, it is necessary to have a profound appreciation of the wonders of His actions.

The Chinese, when they came into contact with Western culture, found the idea of laws of nature and an order in the universe absurd. We now take it for granted, but it is by no means an easy notion to arrive at.

Bertrand Russell found the absence of science in China puzzling, but in fact it is understandable, since the Chinese scholars did not assume the existence of rational laws. Therefore, over millennia, what was sought was "enlightenment", not explanations.

British biochemist and science historian Joseph Needham (1900-1995), who devoted most of his career to the history of Chinese technology, reports that in the 18th century the Chinese rejected the idea of a universe governed by simple laws capable of being investigated by man - idea brought to them by Western Jesuit missionaries. Chinese culture, according to Needham, was not receptive to such concepts. He concluded that the obstacle to science in China was its non-Christian religion, because that prevented the development of the conception of a heavenly, divine legislator imposing laws on non-human nature. The Chinese believed that the natural order was not established by a rational individual being.

Saturday, 3 August 2013

Zimmerman Attorney To Fight Prosecution over Withholding Evidence




Mark O'Mara, the attorney of acquitted George Zimmerman in the highly-politicized trial for the murder of black Trayvon Martin, said that his fight with the prosecution is not yet over.

America's career anti-racists, the Left and the mainstream media had convicted Zimmerman long before the trial, because for them it is axiomatic that a black must necessarily be innocent, so, despite all the evidence in support of the neighbourhood-watch volunteer Zimmerman (who is of mixed white-Hispanic parentage) and his plea of self-defence, in their prejudiced eyes he must have been guilty of murder.

But people with a bias don't have scruples about playing dirty. Defence attorney O'Mara pointed out the struggle he went through to get evidence from the prosecution team:
He cited the picture of a bloodied Zimmerman, taken the night Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, as an example.

"It is undeniable that they had a plan in mind, with the 15 months that we had to get ready, of keeping information from us, and I don't say that lightly, I really don't," O'Mara told the group.
A member of prosecutor Angela Corey's own team testified that prosecutors had kept evidence from O'Mara, for which he was fired and is now suing her office.
"You have this type of gamesmanship for the sole purpose of trying to deny a fair trial and, as it turned out, try to convict an innocent man," said O'Mara.

O'Mara has filed a motion that will be heard by Judge Debra Nelson.

He claims prosecutors purposely withheld evidence from him and the defense team.

Channel 9 has learned that O'Mara could go after Corey. She called Zimmerman a murderer on national television after the trial.

"He could bring civil action against Angela Corey for statement she made outside the courtroom. Also, he could file a grievance against her with the Florida Bar," WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said.

Sheaffer asked O'Mara whether he intends to drop the issue.

"I am not done with that motion. I'm not done with Angela Corey. And we are going to be seeing more of each other. We'll see how that turns out," said O'Mara. "This is because this is not supposed to be how we practice as lawyers."

Channel 9 contacted Corey's office for a response, but the call was not returned.

Friday, 2 August 2013

How Muslims Did Not Invent Algebra

Citadel Hill, Amman, Jordan


Continuing on the theme of what Muslims did - or more likely did not do - for the world, there is a widespread misconception that they "invented algebra". Maybe this fallacy is due to the fact that "algebra" is a word of Arabic origin, but historical questions are not solved by etymological answers.

Yes, the English word "algebra" derives from the Arabic. So does "sugar" (from the Arabic "sukkar") but that doesn't mean that Muslims invented sugar.

The word "algebra" stems from the Arabic word "al-jabr", from the name of the treatise Book on Addition and Subtraction after the Method of the Indians written by the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who translated, formalized and commented on ancient Indian and Greek works.

It is even doubtful whether al-Khwārizmī was really a Muslim. The Wikipedia entry on him says:
Regarding al-Khwārizmī's religion, Toomer writes:

"Another epithet given to him by al-Ṭabarī, "al-Majūsī," would seem to indicate that he was an adherent of the old Zoroastrian religion. This would still have been possible at that time for a man of Iranian origin, but the pious preface to al-Khwārizmī's Algebra shows that he was an orthodox Muslim, so al-Ṭabarī's epithet could mean no more than that his forebears, and perhaps he in his youth, had been Zoroastrians."
In all likelihood he was a Zoroastrian who was forced to convert (or die) by Muslim rulers because Persia had been conquered by the Islamic armies and that was what Muslims did (and still do wherever they can). That could easily explain the "pious preface to al-Khwārizmī's Algebra".

Wikipedia also says:
In Renaissance Europe, he [al-Khwārizmī] was considered the original inventor of algebra, although it is now known that his work is based on older Indian or Greek sources.
There is archaeological evidence that the roots of algebra date back to the ancient Babylonians, then developed in Egypt and Greece. The Chinese and even more the Indians also advanced algebra and wrote important works on the subject.

The Alexandrian Greek mathematician Diophantus (3rd century AD), sometimes called "the father of algebra", wrote a series of books, called Arithmetica, dealing with solving algebraic equations. Another Hellenistic mathematician who contributed to the progress of algebra was Hero of Alexandria, as did the Indian Brahmagupta in his book Brahmasphutasiddhanta.

With the Italian Leonardo Pisano (known as Leonardo Fibonacci, as he was the son of Bonacci) in the 13th century, another Italian mathematician, Girolamo Cardano, author in 1545 of the 40-chapter masterpiece Ars magna ("The great art"), and the late-16th-century French mathematician François Viète, we move from the prehistory of algebra to the beginning of the classical discipline of algebra.

Even Bertrand Russell, who in no way is a critic of the Islamic world, writes in the Second Volume of The History of Western Philosophy:
Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy, and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs. Writers in Arabic showed some originality in mathematics and in chemistry--in the latter case, as an incidental result of alchemical researches.

Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be underrated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization--education, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism--the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth. In each case the stimulus
produced new thought better than any produced by the transmitters--in the one case scholasticism, in the other the Renaissance (which however had other causes also).
You can see that to say that Muslims invented or pioneered algebra is a gross misrepresentation.

In conclusion, there are various attempts at historical revisionism as far as Islamic contributions to the world are concerned. These attempts are more political propaganda than academic scholarship. After all, taqiyya, lying to the infidels to advance Allah's cause, is permitted, and even prescribed, to Muslims, and jihad does not just consist in violent aggression or terror attacks: it can be gradual, by stealth, through indoctrination and false reassurance.


Thursday, 1 August 2013

Islamic "Science" and Other Nonsense




Above is the video of a BBC lynch mob against Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League, during the programme called - a misnomer - FreeSpeech on BBC3. It is not free speech if you verbally abuse and even incite to murder someone for exercising his right to free speech, as it happens in this "debate".

Interestingly, the comments to the video on YouTube reveal how the audience was cherry-picked by the BBC to fit its political bent and in no way represents the British general public. That's reassuring, because a country whose population the studio crowd faithfully represented would be a cross between the Soviet Union and Pakistan.

Horrendous ganging up against one person by clueless people - or worse - is a more apt description of the situation. A bloke in the video, apparently a "musician" I'd never heard of called Akala, who talks about Islamic culture pioneering mathematics and science, must have been listening to Obama instead of going to school. Has he ever heard of Euclid, the father of geometry, and Pythagoras? Muslims did not pioneer anything. All they did was translate intellectual treasures from the original Greek into Arabic. The numbers we use and call "Arabic" were actually developed in India and translated from Sanskrit into Arabic, hence their name.

Islamophile Barack Hussein Obama has been big on the subject of "Islam Has Contributed To The Character Of Our Country" in his celebration of Ramadan, recently but not for the first time. He also mentions "Muslims who helped unlock the secrets of our universe", whose names he must have been hard pressed to find because he didn't say them.

In reality, science and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, which is why, despite the propaganda, there are no Muslim scientists in the history of the Islamic world. The only rational thinkers of some influence that world has produced, Averroes and Avicenna, were not real Muslims, but apostates. Avicenna (980-1037) was an Aristotelian who tried to reconcile formal logic with Islam and failed. Averroes (1126-1198), also influenced by Aristotle, had his works burnt and his disciples persecuted.

The very notion of God in Islam, a being whose power is so absolute that cannot be limited by reason, logic or the laws of nature, and who can at any moment change the order of the universe at his will - if Allah arbitrarily so commands, tomorrow the sun will not rise - makes it impossible to have a Muslim science. Science, a systematic method of looking at things combining empiricism and logic, developed only in Christianity.

Even putting aside this little faux pas, that mercifully for Akala - who is a writer, artist and entrepreneur, no less - nobody disputed (another indication, if necessary, of the lacklustre intellectual standard of this audience), it was evident that Robinson's opponents, namely the whole studio, couldn't stand up to him.

Siara Khan never defined "racism" and how opposition to Islam could be racist. Muslims can be of all races.

The tone of the debate and the level of the participants are demonstrated to be low by the fact that, while all the "debate" - which mainly consists in hurling abuse of "racist" at Tommy Robinson - revolves around racism, you have right from the start something contradicting that premise: a white Muslim. Racism is unjust discrimination on the basis of race. If you "discriminate" against all races, whites included, you discriminate against no race, ergo you are not racist.

Wednesday, 31 July 2013

UK National Debt and Welfare State

Niccolo' Macchiavelli statue, Piazzale degli Uffizi, Florence


The UK national debt at the end of the first quarter of 2013 amounted to £1 trillion and 377.4 billion, or 90.7% of total GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

Considering that Britain is the sixth richest country in the world, this is an astonishing figure. Could it have to do with how the economy is managed by our government?

The government is spending more money than it can tax, so it needs to sell bonds (called "gilts") to domestic and foreign investors. Gilts must be repaid in full, with interest. Unpaid loans form the UK's national debt. That debt is enormously growing.

What we have now is a peacetime record. The last time Britain borrowed so much money was during and after the two World Wars.

Spending by the government is similar to spending by the individual in that it can be divided into two types: to produce and to consume.

Spending for welfare state items like benefits and pensions is the most obvious consumption expenditure; health and education can also consume money, especially when they don't deliver.

In all these cases, the money, once spent, has gone forever, there is no return on it.

Spending productively is investing, and the money spent repays itself. The government does that when it invests in infrastructure like energy, transport and communication systems. These will help the country's businesses, increase productivity, generate jobs.

When people demand that the government "create jobs", they often have in mind what Labour did in the interminably long years it was in power from 1997: create redundant, unproductive public-sector jobs draining money from the public coffers. Not all of these jobs are redundant, of course, but a surplus of them just to keep people in employment is.

The government's role is not to create jobs, but to put industry and commerce in the best condition to create them.

The government has a choice: spending - and borrowing - to maintain and even increase our gargantuan welfare system or invest in infrastructure.

There is a limit even for our corrupt, indebted government to how much it can borrow. Money which is spent on benefits will not be invested in infrastructure.

This is why we are caught in this vicious circle of ever-increasing national debt spiralling out of control.

The British government, like Obama's America and the ideologically Leftist political elites of other Western countries, enacts policies not dictated by economic sense but political expediency.

Unfortunately, as Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.

Democracy, combined with high levels of prosperity, has led to a system in which the politicians bribe the electorate with welfare cheques, food stamps in the USA, and other freebies.

Their preferred choice to be elected is the easiest way, the path of least resistance of liberally giving handouts to voters, putting into practice the long-established crooks' method of spending other people's money with largesse. Why should they care? It's not theirs.

While they are getting elected and re-elected, in the meantime this economic policy can only produce a long-term effect: if the public money is consumed but not invested productively it will constantly decrease, and can only be replaced and repaid by higher tax rates and higher levels of borrowing.

Both of these are deadly for the economy. Higher rates of taxation discourage business and therefore productivity, leading to less hiring and more unemployment. This also results in lower tax revenue, even if the rates are high, because there is less wealth to tax. Elevated fiscal rates have the other undesirable effect of leaving less disposable income available for consumer spending, thus diminishing the demand for products.

Higher levels of public borrowing increase national debt, therefore interest and eventually, due to creditors' mistrust causing reduced credit rating, the interest rates at which the country can borrow.

Britain has recently lost its top triple A credit rating with some agencies.

This is how the government spends our money:
  1. Pensions - 21%
  2. Health care - 18%
  3. Welfare - 17%
  4. Education -13%
  5. Interest - 7%
  6. Defence - 6%
  7. Protection - 5%
  8. Transport - 3%
  9. General government - 2%
The public finances are dominated by the welfare state, which comprises the first 4 biggest items in the budget. The welfare budget includes pensions and tax credits, as well as unemployment, child support, housing, sickness, council tax and other benefits.

The 5th item is the interest on our debt, which exceeds defence, protection - which encompasses protection from crime, emergency services, public order and safety - and transport. The projection is that by the end of 2013 interest will have become the 4th largest public expenditure, overtaking education.

The original purpose of the welfare system was to give a safety net to people in exceptional circumstances but, due partly to the new Marxist idea of redistributionism - redistribution of wealth in society, which in no way should be a democratic government's function - and partly to politicians' tactic of bribing voters with benefits, it has grown into something completely different, which is not just suffocating but slowly killing the economy.

If public money were spent more on investments to help productivity, there would be less need for dole payments. It's a question of rational choice and correct priorities.

Tuesday, 30 July 2013

The Revival of British Patriotism?

UKIP electoral victory

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri

Beside the birth of Prince George, the most significant event to take place in Britain over the last few months has been the incredible rise of a small party opposed to immigration, multiculturalism, the European Union, same-sex marriage — in short, all the things loved by the main parties and ruining Britain.
Coming almost from nowhere, with support of barely 5% of the population, the UK Independent Party (UKIP) had a historical victory in November 2012, achieving a record second place in the by-election held in the northern town of Rotherham to replace the resigning local Member of Parliament. It was the highest percentage of the vote ever achieved by UKIP in any parliamentary election: 21.8%.

This “safe seat” was previously held by Labor, which has provided the town’s MPs since 1933.
Another “far-right” party, the British National Party (BNP), came third, following the extreme-left, Islamophile Respect and the Conservatives.

The fact that the Labor-run Rotherham Council had removed children from a foster home only because the foster couple are members of UKIP played a role in the election results. The thought-police behavior of the council nauseated many.

Rotherham was also one of the numerous English towns where Muslim pedophile gangs were allowed to prey on white girls without being disturbed by local police, social services or the media for 20 years.

This shameful neglect of duty and cover-up, recently brought to light, may have won supporters for the BNP, which first alerted the public to the scandal years ago, but was ignored amid accusations of racism.

Then in February, in another by-election, UKIP did even better, polling 27.8% of the votes, coming in a close second to the Liberal Democrats, and pushing the not-so-conservative Conservative Party into third place.
In that by-election, in Eastleigh, southern England, 55% of all votes went to candidates who opposed the new same-sex marriage law about to be introduced in Britain. Many blamed the Conservative Party’s third place on its leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, who pushed for that law, the same man who had called UKIP supporters “closet racists, loonies, nutters and fruitcakes.”
And finally, in what was described by UKIP leader Nigel Farage as a “game changer,” reshaping British politics possibly forever and making it no longer a three-party, but four-party system, the UKIP stormed the May local elections throughout England and Wales, getting a quarter of the vote nationally, with an astonishing gain in number of seats from 8 to 147.

While someone described the Conservative Party in the coalition government as being on the left of the U.S. Democrats, there have been comparisons made between UKIP and the Tea Party.

Alas, the UKIP, in its ascent to power, has undergone a transformation. Its policy to put an end to the age of “mass uncontrolled immigration” through a 5-year-freeze on immigration and a cap of 50,000 people per annum on future immigration, its main selling point, is under review.

Its positions on Islam have increasingly shown signs of the same battered wife syndrome that has long affected the British elites vis-à-vis the religion of peace, to the point that UKIP is now indistinguishable on this issue from the three mainstream parties — Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats.

A revealing example was a UKIP politician’s announced visit to a mosque in Scotland, the destination of a school trip that was opposed by almost a third of the schoolchildren’s parents. The man, Jonathan Stanley, said:
I am in no way condemning these parents, but I do not agree with this decision, and so I want to go and reassure the Muslim community.

Contrast this with the position of the BNP, whose Scottish organiser backed the parents:
Unlike UKIP, we fully back the growing number of parents who we feel are saying No to their children being taken to mosques, as if Islam is a part of Scottish heritage and culture, it is not. They are told all about the wonders of Islam, but there is no mention of Islam`s horrific Sharia law, no mention of women being classed as second rate beneath men, as per scriptural understanding. It`s all about cultural conditioning.

The problem with the BNP, though, is that it’s often been accused of having anti-Semitic and racist elements in its midst and even leadership.

How can UKIP take such a nonchalant approach to mosques, when we know that a high number of them are a hotbeds of Islamism and jihad?

Only Saturday, July 27th, the East London Mosque hosted a fundraiser for Cageprisoners, an Islamic charity for Muslim terrorists in prison, including those held at Guantanamo, calling for them to be freed.

These are busy days for British jihadists and counter-jihadists. This is the same mosque about which George Whale of Liberty GB sent a letter of protest to two MPs, which complained about the hundreds of people praying outside the mosque and occupying the pavement, something that has been going on for at least the past three years.

Liberty GB – to which I belong – was formed last March to fill the gap in British politics that exists between the UKIP, a clear Islam appeaser, and parties like the BNP with a less-than-clean reputation.

The party stands for Christian civilization, human rights, animal welfare, capitalism, and against jihad, multiculturalism and mass immigration, and it will contest the 2014 European Elections with its chairman Paul Weston as a candidate.

Liberty GB is part of the increasing British resistance to the Left’s imposition of its various politically correct agendas. This movement includes patriotic, nationalist groups and parties misleadingly called “far right.”

Paul Weston told me:
The rise of so called “right-wing” parties is logical and inevitable. If the Left control the institutions and the Left carry out the policies of mass immigration and divisive multiculturalism, then they can only realistically expect others to resist this path to national suicide. It is not about “right-wing ideology” to combat the Left on this issue, it is about national, racial and cultural survival – a perfectly natural, moral and civilised reaction to an unnatural, immoral and barbaric process propagated by the wicked and genocidally racist Left.
Weston is not new to Americans. He was in the U.S. early last year and made a speech hosted by Act for America in New York, warning America not to go down the same path Britain has taken. He’s planning another visit to the States in September or October.

Could the softening of UKIP’s positions explain its sharp decline in opinion polls, already evident in June and now even more pronounced? It was supported by 18% of respondents in May, 12% in June and now just 7%.

Could UKIP be repeating the mistake the GOP made in choosing half-conservative Romney as a presidential candidate? Maybe people want a clear, uncompromising message and don’t trust U-turns.

There has recently been in Britain a proliferation of nationalist groups and parties.

One of the best-known is the English Defence League (EDL), which is not a party, but a street protest movement. Among the parties, in addition to those already mentioned, are the British Democratic Party and English Democrats, and among the non-party groups are Britain First and England National Resistance.

This fragmentation is a good thing and a bad thing. On one hand, it is a sign of excessive discord and therefore weakness, which may be the result of the difficulty of doing political work when one is constantly accused of the worst thought crimes under the sun.

On the other hand, this mushrooming of truly conservative organizations is a sign of how dissatisfied the British public is with the vast shift of the nation’s politics to the extreme left. Being Christian in the UK is regarded as something to hide, to be ashamed of. The “culture wars” that in America are still being fought are over in Britain, having been won by the “progressives.”

The birth of future king Prince George may indicate that some elements of traditional British culture and institutions are still alive and kicking, the monarchy being the best example.

But we’re not so lucky. Even that is under threat of corruption from the Islamophile monarch-in-waiting Prince Charles, who doesn’t recognize the primacy, let alone uniqueness, of Christianity, and from the new same-sex marriage law, which would lead to problematic legitimacy of heirs to the throne.


About
Enza Ferreri is an Italian-born, London-based Philosophy graduate, author and journalist. She has been a London correspondent for several Italian magazines and newspapers, including Panorama, L’Espresso, and La Repubblica. She is on the Executive Council of the UK’s party Liberty GB. She blogs at www.enzaferreri.blogspot.co.uk.

Tories' Fear of UKIP Creates Useless Ads

Go home or face arrest - UK government billboard against illegal immigration


The UK's Immigration Minister Mark Harper on The Daily Mail defends a government campaign of mobile billboards aimed at illegal immigrants telling them to go home or be prepared to be arrested.

He says:
But the reaction they have generated from the Left and the pro-immigration industry has been astonishing. They have denounced that simple message as ‘racist’.

Let me clear this up once and for all – it is not racist to ask people who are here illegally to leave Britain. It is merely telling them to comply with the law.

Our campaign targets illegal immigrants without any discrimination at all between them. By no stretch of the rational imagination can it be described as ‘racist’.

Furthermore, the campaign is not meant to, and does not, discourage legal immigrants who have earned the right to live or settle in Britain. To claim that the poster campaign is unfair to legal migrants is silly.
And that's the problem. This campaign does nothing about the too many immigrants who are or, like the Romanians and Bulgarians, are shortly going to come here legally.

Nor, for that matter, can do much about illegal immigrants. They know they are illegal: if they wanted to obey the law of the country they wouldn't have entered Britain. A billboard will not make law-abiding people of them.

But what the Conservatives want is just to appear to do something. The UK Independence Party, although opinion polls show that its support is fast declining, has already made its impact felt through the fear it has instilled in the pseudo-conservatives.

Is Sex outside the Sphere of Morality?

Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
"Sex raises no special moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by having sex.) Accordingly this book contains no discussion of sexual morality."

This is from the introductory pages of Practical Ethics (Amazon US)Practical Ethics by Peter Singer , (Amazon UK) by the influential contemporary moral philosopher Peter Singer, a Leftist utilitarian with whose views, I hasten to add, I agree on other major issues, such as animal liberation and equality.
In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State by Charles Murray
I used to believe that sex had nothing to do with ethics, long before I read Peter Singer.

I now think that I was wrong and Peter Singer still is.

The effects of the “sexual revolution” promoted by the 60s “liberation movements” have been:

1) increase in the number of single mothers and illegitimate births, with the social consequences of increases in welfare dependency, unemployment rate and crime rate, put simply a growth in the phenomenon that sociologist Charles Murray calls “the underclass”. I refer you to his books Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (Amazon US) , (Amazon UK) Charles Murray, Losing Ground; The Underclass Revisited (AEI Studies in Social Welfare Policy) (Amazon US)The Underclass Revisited (AEI Studies in Social Welfare Policy) by Charles Murray, (Amazon UK) ; In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State (Amazon US)In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State by Charles Murray, (Amazon UK) , because these connections are well documented there, socially and statistically.

2) increase in child molestation, children's sexual abuse and paedophilia. In a world where everyone seems to be enjoying “sexual freedom”, no wonder paedophiles will be feeling that they are the only ones excluded from the party.

3) increase in teenage sex

4) increase in teenage pregnancy

5) increase in sexual transmitted diseases among children and teenagers

6) large increase in sexual trasnsmitted diseases among adults

7) creation and perpetuation of the AIDS epidemic.

How’s that for the consequences of something that should raise no ethical question, from the viewpoint of a consequentialist philosopher like utilitarian Singer?

The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values by Tammy Bruce
A writer who has intelligently explored this subject is Tammy Bruce, author of The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values (Amazon US)The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values by Tammy Bruce (Amazon UK) .

Tammy Bruce is an unusual writer, in that she is a lesbian feminist, actually a former activist and leader in both gay and women’s movements in the USA, who denounces what she calls the Left Elite of which she was part before leaving in disgust.

She puts in direct connection the Left’s agenda and the homosexual and feminists movements with the repercussions of sexual freedom I listed above, of which she holds Leftists responsible.

Friday, 26 July 2013

Fellow Traveller Obama Lauds Ho Chi Minh

Barack Hussein Obama


If someone, especially a public figure, praised Hitler, he would certainly be called all names under the sun, and in particular "nazi" and "fascist".

How is it, then, that top political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic can express admiration for the worst communist dictators and killers with impunity, as if they had eulogized great statesmen or munificent philanthropists?

If commending Hitler makes you a nazi, doing the same with Ho Chi Minh should make you a communist. Fair is fair. But not in the world of the left-dominated media and "progressive" elites.

This is exactly what Barack Hussein Obama did during the visit Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang at the White House.

Obama is not unique. When Venezuelan communist President Hugo Chavez, who had praised the infamous terrorist Carlos the Jackal and Mugabe, died, it turned out that he had many friends among our Western leaders, including British politicians William Hague, George Galloway, hard-left Labour Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn.

From PJ Media (emphases added):
President Obama hailed hard-core communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh today as a pretty open guy who was actually inspired by the Founders...

After meeting with the leader of a country that persecutes and imprisons bloggers and priests, suppresses media and any form of political dissent and uses forced labor, Obama said they “discussed the challenges that all of us face when it comes to issues of human rights.”

“We emphasized how the United States continues to believe that all of us have to respect issues like freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly,” the president continued. “And we had a very candid conversation about both the progress that Vietnam is making and the challenges that remain.”

The visit by Sang, he said, “signifies the maturing and the next stage of the development between the United States and Vietnam.”

Obama said Sang concluded the meeting by sharing “a copy of a letter sent by Ho Chi Minh to Harry Truman.”

“And we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson. Ho Chi Minh talks about his interest in cooperation with the United States. And President Sang indicated that even if it’s 67 years later, it’s good that we’re still making progress.”

Sang said the pair “had a very candid, open, useful and constructive discussion.”
These are excerpts from "The Blood-Red Hands of Ho Chi Minh", published in Reader’s Digest in November 1968 (emphases added):
Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or any one else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC [Vietcong] delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way...

Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled...

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical... While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of napalm, casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler...

Hence the enemy has largely succeeded in casting himself in the role of noble revolutionary. It is long past time for Americans, who are sick and tired of being vilified for trying to help South Vietnam stay free, to take a hard look at the nature of this enemy.

Bloodbath Discipline.

The terror had its real beginning when Red dictator Ho Chi Minh consolidated his power in the North. More than a year before his 1954 victory over the French, he launched a savage campaign against his own people. In virtually every North Vietnamese village, strong-arm squads assembled the populace to witness the “confessions” of landowners. As time went on, businessmen, intellectuals, school teachers, civic leaders — all who represented a potential source of future opposition — were also rounded up and forced to “confess” to “errors of thought.” There followed public “trials,” conviction and, in many cases, execution. People were shot, beheaded, beaten to death; some were tied up, thrown into open graves and covered with stones until they were crushed to death, Ho has renewed his terror in North Vietnam periodically. Between 50,000 and 100,000 are believed to have died in these blood-baths — in a coldly calculated effort to discipline the party and the masses. To be sure, few who escape Ho’s terror now seem likely to tempt his wrath. During the 1950s, however, he had to quell some sizeable uprisings in North Vietnam — most notably one that occurred in early November 1956, in the An province, which included Ho’s birthplace village of Nam Dan. So heavily had he taxed the region that the inhabitants finally banded together and refused to meet his price. Ho sent troops to collect, and then sent in an army division, shooting. About 6,000 unarmed villagers were killed. The survivors scattered, some escaping to the South. The slaughter went largely unnoticed by a world then preoccupied with the Soviet Union’s rape of Hungary.


Photo from mediajorgenyc

Thursday, 25 July 2013

Petition against Italy's Freedom-Killing "Homophobia Bill"

Gay Pride in Genoa, Italy


In Italy, several websites are collecting signatures for a petition opposing the "bill against homophobia and transphobia".

It is an oppressive, totalitarian and dangerous piece of legislation, threatening freedom of speech and religion. The petition has already collected 24,000 signatures (including mine) in a few days.

The Italian Parliament's lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, is about to discuss a new "bill against homophobia and transphobia". If approved, this law would have serious repercussions on the fundamental human rights recognized by the Italian Constitution, including the right to freedom of thought (art. 21) and freedom of religion (art. 19).

Under this law, people could be indicted (and subject to imprisonment up to one year and six months) for:

1. urging MPs not to introduce a gay marriage law;

2. proposing to deny children's adoption to homosexual couples;

3. thinking of organizing a propaganda campaign to oppose the introduction of a gay marriage law;

4. saying publicly that homosexuality is a "grave depravity," quoting the Scriptures (Genesis 19.1 to 29; Rm 1.24 to 27, 1 Cor 6:9-10, 1 Tim 1:10.);

5. declaring publicly that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered" (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona Humana Declaration)

6. maintaining that homosexual acts are "contrary to natural law," because "they preclude the sexual act from the gift of life and are not the result of a genuine affective and sexual complementarity" (art. 2357 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church).

This law would ban any organization, association, movement or group "inciting" to prevent homosexuals from marrying and adopting children (imprisonment from six months to four years for participants, from one to six years for founders and leaders).

This law would introduce for the first time in the Italian legislation the definition of "gender identity" as "the perception that a person has of himself or herself as belonging to the male or female gender, although opposite to his or her biological sex", pace the principle of legal certainty and objectivity of the offence.

This law allows for citizens to be subjected to a sort of re-education through a further punishment - to be served "at the end of the jail sentence" - consisting in work "in support of associations for the protection of homosexual persons."

In fact homosexuals already enjoy the legal instruments provided by the Italian penal code against all forms of unjust discrimination, violence, offence to personal dignity.

The bill on homophobia, therefore, has no reason to enter the country's legal system.

Opposing it means fighting against the risk of a dangerous violation of the freedom of expression of religious thought and belief, the foundation of all civil liberties.


Photo by daameriva

Monday, 22 July 2013

Current Riots Are the Perpetuation of What Caused the Death of Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin


From the article "Dr. Carson: 'Tone Down Rhetoric' on Race" :
Trayvon Martin probably had a "fight-or-flight" frame of mind the night he was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, Dr. Ben Carson said on "Fox News Sunday."

Carson, speaking to host Chris Wallace from Sun Valley, Idaho, said youths who grow up in inner cities experience the world differently than those who grow up "in a gated community in Palm Springs."

"You have a situation where you have a young black male walking home, not doing anything incorrect, and he ends up killed, and nobody suffers any consequences," Carson said.

"On the surface, that would appear to be a gross miscarriage of justice. Those of us in leadership positions need to be looking for things that we can take out of this situation that will be helpful, not things that inflame the situation.

Let's tone down the rhetoric and recognize that we the people aren't each other's enemies," he said.
Carson said he is from an inner city and "when you grow up in that environment, you develop a different type of philosophy."

"Trayvon Martin may well have had that philosophy and went into this fight-or-flight mode," Carson said.
Yes, it's a bad philosophy to bash someone's head for no reason. If Martin is the victim of somebody or something, he's the victim of that horrifying idea that blacks are always the victim and must always be prepared to react with violence, the same idea that we now see in action in all those so-called "demonstrations" which are in fact looting and vandalism sprees, fomented by the rhetoric of career "anti-racists" who are in reality the true racists, the various Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons, a group which now seems to include Barack Hussein Obama as well.


An Island in Revolt: A Window into Europe’s Future

People fleeing unrest in Tunisia are escorted by Guardia di Finanza police officers as they arrive at the southern Italian island of Lampedusa


First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri

One could be justified for being perplexed about Pope Francis’s choice of Lampedusa, a tiny island off the coast of Sicily and Italy’s — indeed Europe’s — southernmost tip, as the destination of his very first official visit, which took place on July 8. Not a world capital, not a place in some important geopolitical region of the globe.

What is significant, even symbolic, about Lampedusa is its geography: The small island, with a population of 5,000, is positioned in the middle of the Mediterranean, making it close to the Muslim world, even closer to Tunisia than Sicily.

These two conditions explain what’s been happening to Lampedusa for over a decade, and how it could be a miniature model of the whole of Europe in the not-too-distant future.

Since at least 2001, Lampedusa has been a primary entry point into Europe for immigrants, mostly illegal from Africa. Tens of thousands have been landing here over the years, peaking during the “Arab Spring.” In 2011, according to a report of the United Nation’s Human Rights Council, “[a]pproximately 60,000 irregular migrants arrived [in Italy] as part of the 2011 influx from North Africa,” mainly from Tunisia and Libya. Around 50,000 of these came to Lampedusa.

Over 10,000 received residence permits on humanitarian grounds, because the Italian government declared a state of humanitarian emergency in February 2011, subsequently extended until December 2012.

In Lampedusa, the temporary immigrant reception center where outsiders were accommodated and sent to other facilities where they could request asylum, became so overcrowded that thousands of people had to sleep outdoors and in shelters provided by the local parish and ordinary Lampedusans.

The immigrants, among whom were suspected escaped prisoners, were given temporary visas and then gradually transferred to mainland Italy and other EU countries, but there were many times when the number of newcomers was higher than that of the locals.

On those occasions, when natives were outnumbered, there were tales of local women having to be accompanied everywhere to protect them from immigrants’ unwanted attention, sacked shops, apartment doors forced open, people returning home to find Tunisians sitting at the dining table eating and, after the intruders’ departure, some householders even discovering faeces inside saucepans.

The island became what one newspaper called “a huge immigrant camp.”

Maybe expecting to find a hotel reception and with scarcely a thought about the crisis they were creating on the small island, the illegal immigrants were complaining, as in the video below, describing what they found in Lampedusa as “shameful” and pontificating “the reception is zero” as if they were giving a hotel review on TripAdvisor:





This video confirms what Lampedusa Mayor Bernardino De Rubeis said: “We have here young Tunisians who arrogantly want everything immediately, just like criminals, ready to endanger our lives and theirs.” He later added: “We’re in a war, and the people will react. There are people here who want to go out into the streets armed with clubs.”

The reception center was burnt down twice by the migrants, during inmate riots in February 2009 and in September 2011. The media blamed everyone for the arson: the Italian government, the provisional Tunisian government, the EU; all except the actual perpetrators. In April 2011 the illegals set fire to a guest house where they were staying at the expense of a charity organization, and threw rocks at the police.

Without the reception center, they had to be accommodated in hotels and tourist villages, which are virtually the place’s only economic resources.

Aliens overwhelmed the 5,000-inhabitants island and took advantage of their hospitality, subjecting the place to unusually high levels of violence and crime. Lampedusa is a micro-representation of what will happen to Europe if both current Muslim immigration and European demographic trends continue, when the proportion of natives and migrants will be the same in Europe as it’s been in Lampedusa. The islanders’ reaction, a small civil war, could also represent a prediction of future continent-wide events.

At the height of the immigration flux, confronted with an unprecedented crisis and left to their own devices to deal with it, the people of Lampedusa used “direct action” methods.

They stopped the Italian Coast Guard patrol boat, loaded with still more “rescued” North Africans. Women occupied the harbour and docks, chained themselves, overturned wheelie bins and blocked the road. Fishermen pulled boats to the entrance to the harbour. “Nobody enters here any more,” the women shouted from the quay where patriotic flags were flying. To chants of “freedom!” they raised a banner: “We are full.”

The island descended into chaos. An urban riot occurred, with violent clashes between hundreds of Tunisians, police and locals. Many were injured. Three Lampedusans tried to assault their mayor, who barricaded himself in his office with a baseball bat for self-defence, while outside dozens were protesting against him and the immigrants, who wandered around the streets after having burnt down the reception center.

Islanders attacked journalists and TV crews. Tunisians and Lampedusans threw rocks at each other after illegals had threatened to explode gas cylinders near a petrol pump.

The reality is that this was a pseudo-humanitarian crisis: the illegals overwhelmingly were not refugees but economic migrants. What’s for years been called an “emergency” continues. Every day there are new arrivals.

The number of immigrants to Italy from the Mediterranean is growing. In the first 6 months of 2013, 7,800  of them arrived on Italy’s southern coasts, compared to 3,500 in the first 6 months of 2012. About three quarters landed on Lampedusa from Africa, the rest disembarked on Italy’s south-eastern coast in Apulia from Greece and Turkey.

The Pope, unfortunately, seems to have gone to Lampedusa in order to make everybody feel guilty for the immigrants, those lost at sea and the survivors. He condemned the “globalisation of indifference”; he talked about “the frontier of the desperate” and tragedies of people crossing the sea to seek a better life.

His sermon’s been received with mixed reactions. While Italy’s Prime Minister Enrico Letta has promised to put into practice the Holy Father’s appeal through more European co-operation (nothing new here, Italy has unsuccessfully tried for years to pass the buck to Europe), the political Right hasn’t been so keen.

Fabrizio Cicchitto, of Silvio Berlusconi’s party, PDL, pointed out that religious preaching is one thing, but a country’s management of such a complex and even intractable problem as illegal immigration — further aggravated by the presence of criminal groups — is another.

Erminio Boso of the secessionist, “far-Right” Northern League has been more outspoken: “I don’t care about what the Pope did. Indeed, I’m asking him to give land and money for the extra-comunitari [immigrants from outside the European Union]. I’m defending my own land.”

The Italian blog Diavoli Neri has made the interesting observation that the Vatican City State’s law declares that those found in its territory without authorization may be expelled, subject to fine or imprisonment. Further evidence, it concludes, that the Papal sermon, as so often, was beautiful and touching, but government laws are another matter.

A Northern Italian radio phone-in program aired irate messages from its audience: “I would have expected a few words [from the Pope] for those who are killed and raped by them [the immigrants]“; “As a Catholic I’m outraged. I’ve never heard this or another pope worry for the massacres that they commit”; “We have to prevent them from coming here. Let’s shut everything up and start thinking as a macro-region.”

Much of the immigration debate in Italy centers on whether to give citizenship to Italian-born children of immigrants, a worrying prospect considering that one third of the so-called “new Italians” are Muslim.

Particularly vociferous in support of the proposal is the Minister for Integration, Congolese Cecile Kyenge, who claims that this would “acknowledge a path to integration of the parents.”

Italians should look more closely at the experience of countries with a longer history of Third-World immigration, like Britain, where Muslim immigrants of second and third generation are more devout, orthodox and radicalized than their parents and grandparents. Something similar happens in Germany. Rather than a “path to integration” we witness a “path to Islamization.”

Either Kyenge doesn’t know what’s going on in the rest of Europe – where the policies she recommends are bringing to ruin entire countries – or she knows it very well, in which case she is a dangerous woman.

It’s already taking place in Italy too: among the hundreds of second- and third-generation immigrants leaving Europe to fight alongside the jihadist rebels in Syria there are 45-50 who lived in Italy.

In conclusion, the lesson from the Lampedusa experience is that there’s a limit to what indigenous populations can take. While it’s true that the most common reaction of native Europeans to Third-World non-military invasion so far has been leaving the city or country where this colonization occurs, it may not stay like this forever. There could sooner or later be a breaking point.

Friday, 19 July 2013

Journalist Enza Ferreri Joins Liberty GB Executive Council

Liberty GB leaflet against halal meat and the Islamisation of Britain


Below is an announcement from the website of my party Liberty GB. Above is our new leaflet against halal meat and the Islamisation of Britain.


We are delighted to welcome Enza Ferreri to the Liberty GB Executive Council, to fill the currently vacant role of Press Officer. Enza is an experienced journalist who has written many outstanding articles for this website and for major European and US websites, and has helped shape Liberty GB's philosophy and policies. She will be an invaluable addition to the team.

******

I am Italian, I was born and grew up in Viareggio, a seaside resort on the coast of Tuscany, a few miles from Pisa, whose university I attended.

I came to live in London in 1984 partly because I loved England (and partly because I've always wanted to be where I was not).

My attraction for Britain began when I was 13, in 1967, due to my fascination with the Rolling Stones and 'Swinging London'. The fact that I've always been a passionate animal lover and Britain had then the most advanced animal welfare movement in the world reinforced my preference. I saw Britain as a land of freedom and solid moral values.

You can then imagine my disappointment when I witnessed Britain descend into the current multicultural abyss. I may as well have gone to Pakistan, Nigeria, Lybia or Egypt.

I don't want to convey the impression that I don't love Italy. Typical to my nature, since I've been here I started seeing my country of birth's good aspects, such as the fact that Italy is home to the greatest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and to half of the world's great art treasures.

My being Italian can actually help our party establish connections with like-minded parties in Italy.

One thing I had was a good education, in which Italy, in fairness, excelled, at least at that time. The secondary school I attended was the Liceo Classico, where among other things I studied Latin and ancient Greek, for which I am grateful because this is the basis – along with Christianity – of Western civilisation. Latin is a very logical language and it teaches you to think analytically. Later I got a degree in Philosophy from the University of Pisa. I am interested in the theoretical foundations of things, in philosophy and science.

But I also want practical action, to make a change in the world. That's why I became a journalist, corresponding from London for the Italian press, initially almost exclusively on animal issues. I saw journalism as a political activity.

I suppose this is why Liberty GB offered me the role of Press Officer. I have a fair idea of how the media think, what interests them in a story.

When Liberty GB was formed I immediately became very enthusiastic about it. I believe our party has enormous potential. People are deeply disappointed with the current political elite and the social chaos it has created. They are unhappy about the results, but don't yet clearly see the causes. Liberty GB will grow and achieve its goals if we manage – and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to do so – to explain that what people don't like in today's Britain is caused by the current dominant political ideology, cultural Marxism, and give them a much better, constructive alternative.

It ain't over yet. Demography is not our destiny. If it were, then we would easily win the battle, because we are still the great majority. But the majority is not fighting Islamisation. Why? Because it has been indoctrinated by 6-7 decades of cultural Marxism.

We need to reverse that brainwashing. That is our priority. To fight Islam, mass immigration, the EU or any other evil the Left has thrown at us, which are the symptoms, without addressing the ideology they stem from, which is the disease, would be like curing a headache without treating the underlying brain tumour.

Antonio Gramsci was right: we need to win the cultural war and wake up the consciousness of people before we can win the political war. The Left did it and won; now it's our turn, we'll do the same.

This is why militant atheists like Pat Condell and the late Christopher Hitchens who are anti-Christianity as well as anti-Islam help, whether they like it or not, the Islamisation of Britain. I believe that without Christianity, at least as a system of ethics if not of theology, Britain will become Muslim. Unlike individuals, societies cannot be atheist. For reasons of space, I'll explain why in a future article. Suffice it to say that Christianity has always been the great target of socio-communism and other would-be destroyers of Western civilisation.

And also, this is why what Americans call the 'culture wars', on issues like abortion on demand, the fatherless society, the destruction of the family and the normalisation of homosexuality, must necessarily be fought if we want to go to the root of the problem and not just deal with the surface. We should devote more attention to the same-sex marriage bill about to become British law, a terrible blow to both the institution of marriage and freedom of speech, since opponents will be silenced in any possible way. Our enemies, the elites, the establishment, will get stronger because of that.

I think that campaigns with very specific targets – an example of which is our anti-halal-meat campaign about to be launched with leaflets and a petition – are very useful because, by focusing on a particular topic, they may attract more attention and unite people on something they feel strongly about. It's a little bit like the tactic used by magazines of focusing on an individual case of a person or a family when introducing a wider topic. People relate better to a larger issue by starting with a particular, specific way of looking at it. Other examples, in relation to Islam, may be anti-mosque and anti-paedophile-rings campaigns.

Halal meat is an ideal target not only because many people care about the animal welfare concerns ritual slaughter raises and are not prepared to tolerate it, but also because it very clearly demonstrates the impossibility to accommodate our values with those of Islam and how in this conflict we'll always lose since Islamic supremacism will force itself on us and we'll have no choice but submit to Sharia law. Non-Muslims are, against their knowledge, eating halal meat, whether they like it or not.

Liberty GB's Executive Council comprises very able people, each with different skills and expertise that complement and complete those of the others.

I can see no reason why we should not succeed.

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Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Black Racist Crime Is an American Epidemic




This is more shocking than anything I expected.

One of the many cases of racially-motivated violence of blacks on whites in the USA happened in June in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where a black male attacked random white people, unprovoked, punching them several times with a glove containing shards of glass and throwing chairs at others. Witnesses say he made racially charged comments during the attack. One of the victims was a 7-month pregnant woman induced into labour due to the assault.

The African-American economist and socio-political theorist Thomas Sowell, referring to the book described in the article below, wrote: "Reading Colin Flaherty's book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of this problem is even greater than I had discovered from my own research."

From the article "Black racism in Florida: “Polar bear hunting” is illegal" by Dr. Richard Swier (links are in the original):
Are you familiar with the Knockout Game? It is a racially motivated violent game that targets whites. In Florida it is called ”polar bear hunting” and it is illegal.

How is it played?

You start with a group of blacks that number anywhere from 3 to 30 people. As a group, they search for white people, preferably alone, elderly and somewhat defenseless. If they can’t find any, Asians are the next ethnic group targeted. When a target is selected, at least one of the blacks approaches the target and then suddenly sucker punches them in the face as hard as they can. If the victim is knocked out, the person that hit them wins. If the victim is not knocked out, then you continue to hit and kick them until you’re too tired to hit anymore or until the person is dead.

Knockout has become all too common in St. Louis, Missouri. In the past two years, there have been at least 100 Knockout victims, some of which have died. In 2011, one victim was Matt Quain, who was jumped by a group of black teens and beaten, suffered numerous abrasions to his face along with a broken jaw. One of the teens involved in the attack was Demetrius Murphy, a member of one of the most heinous groups in St. Louis known as the “Knockout Gang”...




Colin Flaherty has documented this epidemic of black mob violence in his new book “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The return of racial violence and how the media ignore it.” Flaherty documents, “The Midwest state fair with a ‘Beat Whitey Night?’ Or the Black Beach Week that turns a town into a ‘living hell?’ Or the school principal who blamed Asian students for being racist after suffering years of abuse? The eleven episodes of racial violence on the Fourth of July 2012? Some involving more than 1000 black people?”

Knockout is a racial hate crime that is being ignored and swept under the rug by black social leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Sr. and the media. If a group of whites played Knockout and targeted blacks, Sharpton, the media and the national press would be giving it the coverage of the George Zimmerman trial, but since it’s blacks targeting whites, everyone just turns their heads and says nothing.

According to US and World Report, “A poll released Wednesday [July 3, 2013] by Rasmussen found African-Americans are more likely to be viewed as racist than whites. Thirty-seven percent of poll respondents said “most black Americans” are racist, compared to just 15 percent who said most whites are racist and 18 percent who said most Hispanics are racist.”

Hunting “polar bears” adds fuel to the black racist fire.