Welfare State, Students, Immigration

In the UK there is a constant talk of the need for immigrants’ skills and an endless repetition of the fact that there are many necessary jobs and positions which would be left vacant without immigration.

Let’s see. Is it the number of unskilled and manual workers which is not high enough to fill the vacancies?

In that case, why are there millions of people on welfare in Britain?

In the United Kingdom, 5.6 million people of working age are not working and receive state hand-outs in various forms – and this number has remained stubbornly high even at times when the economy has grown (it has been over 5 million for more than a decade).

It is a well-known fact that the system is abused and the welfare money goes to many people who don’t or shouldn’t really need it, but that’s what happens.

And if the labour force which is needed and imported from abroad is composed of skilled, professional and intellectual workers, why are all the university students supported in their studies by the taxpayers through various public grants and loans not available to fill these positions?

Because, having removed the market as the force to influence people’s choice in university courses and careers, we end up with a great number of the university population specializing in ‘media studies’ and other subjects which are of no or little relevance to the country’s economy, while the much-needed skills are overlooked.

After all, if the state is paying for somebody’s studies, why should that person or his/her family bother so much about what course or faculty to choose? It is not an investment to consider carefully.

So, British taxpayers are in the enviable position of having to support an enormous number of unemployed unskilled or semi-skilled people because ‘there are no jobs’, having to pay for students’ education and, on top of all that, being told that they have to put up with huge figures of immigration because ‘there are not enough workers and skills in this country’.

Clash of civilizations?

Q: So, we are now facing "the clash of civilizations": the West and Islam, two civilizations which are equally great.
A: Yes.
Q: On one side, we have the civilization that gave the world democracy, the concept of rights, Roman law, Greek tragedy, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Darwin, modern science, technology, Michaelangelo, Caravaggio, Raphael, Giotto, Brunelleschi, perspective in art, Picasso, Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, Verdi, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Euclid, Saint Peter's Basilica, the Empire State Building, Kant, Voltaire, ...
A: OK, let me stop you. We've got an idea.
Q: On the other side, we have the civilization that gave the world the Koran, a few pretty mosques, the numbers notations we use...
A: No, actually the numbers we use were invented in India. We call them Arabic only because they reached us through Arabic translations of the original Sanskrit texts.
Q: Even the zero?
A: Yes, the zero as well is an Indian invention.
Q: OK, so on the other side, we have the civilization that gave the world the Koran, a few pretty mosques, and er... a few pretty mosques.

With Gays and Blacks, We Have Gone to the Opposite Extreme

The problem is that people don’t seem to be able to find the right middle.

There was a time when homosexuals were wrongly persecuted, when they couldn't even be open about their homosexuality, and that certainly was a bad state of affairs. Luckily we have gone past it and that’s fine.

But people are so afraid that we could go back to that time that any criticism of homosexuality is taken as a sign of "anti-gay" discrimination: this is the opposite extreme, in which the persecution and discrimination are actually at the expense of those who disagree with the orthodox, dominant ideology that homosexuality must be perfectly OK from all viewpoints, medical, psychological and ethical, which is not necessarily the case.

The wide acceptance of the idea that homosexuals should be free to declare their homosexuality, that others should not look at them as they did in the past, that they should be treated like everybody else, is positive, it's an improvement.

This does not necessarily mean that homosexuality is a good thing for those involved as well as for society at large.

That’s where we should try to find the right middle. We should be able to - we should feel mature enough as a society to - recognise that having an accepting attitude towards homosexuals does not imply thinking that homosexuality is just another sexual orientation, like heterosexuality, or lifestyle, and that there's no problem associated with it. These are two different things.

A similar mistake has been made with blacks, Jews, and in relation to all those bigoted and discriminatory positions of the past, which have now been transformed into the opposite extreme, as if to guard ourselves against the possibility of relapsing into those bigoted ideas. That is not the right approach, going from one wrong extreme to the other wrong extreme is not the way to prevent the first wrong extreme. It’s actually the opposite.

That's what happens in the sphere of immigration and racism.

There is now a severe repression of ideas in people, who can’t say anything negative about blacks or Muslims, or - although not half as much as a few years ago - express negative positions about immigration, without risking accusations of racism. Even disagreeing with Obama - who is probably the worst president of the US so it’s easy to disagree with his policies - is enough for being called a racist. Criticising Israel, although people who do are usually wrong, attracts labels of anti-Semitism which are not necessarily correct, and so on.

So there is a situation in which you go from one extreme to the other for fear of relapsing into the first extreme, whereas in fact it’s much more likely that you’ll relapse into it if you got it wrong the second time round again. For instance, the current ferocious repression of anything that may be even remotely construed as racist or anti-Semitic or Islamophobic or homophobic may produce a climate to which people in the end will rebel, and in such a rebellion against the thought police system they will risk reverting to the original wrong ways again.

1968 Greens, Reds, Pinks and the Normalisation of Paedophilia

The Left, red or green (it's usually both), tends to have no moral objection to the normalisation of paedophilia, the next step after the normalisation of homosexuality.

People on the Left, which includes "gay" activists, have in recent years kept this issue quiet without wishing to disclose their real intentions to the public to avoid the probable risk of jeopardizing their goal of normalising homosexuality, but, now that they have won that battle after achieving homomarriage, that acceptance of paedophilia is part of their agenda will become increasingly explicit.

I want to clarify that I am totally for protecting the environment, but not environmentalism, an offshoot of socio-communism that has hijacked the conservation cause for the Left.

Just before the German elections, a Pedophilia Scandal: Old Document Haunts Green Party Candidate:

Leading Green Party candidate Jürgen Trittin is under heavy scrutiny this week after researchers found his name on a decades-old paper supporting pedophiles.

With the general election only days away, the Green Party's top candidate Jürgen Trittin is under fire over a document more than 30 years old. The party manifesto, which he approved, advocated legalizing sex with minors.

The latest politician to be dragged into the Green Party's pedophilia scandal is Jürgen Trittin, the party's top candidate in the upcoming federal election. He was responsible for a 1981 election platform that included a call for the decriminalization of sex between children and adults.

The platform belonged to the Göttingen branch of the Alternative Green Initiative List (AGIL), a forerunner of the current Green Party, and was uncovered by political scientists Franz Walter and Stephan Klecha of the Göttingen Institute for the Study of Democracy. The organization was hired by the Green Party in May to investigate the party's affiliations with pedophile activists in the 1980s.

In an essay for the left-leaning Die Tageszeitung newspaper on Monday, Walter wrote that Trittin, at the time a student who was running for city council, was one of five members of an editorial board that signed off on the election manifesto. The document called for sex between children and adults to be made exempt from punishment, so long as it involved neither violence nor the threat of violence.

As Walter explains, it was not uncommon for the AGIL to take over the platforms of minority interest groups [like homosexuals and paedophiles].

Jürgen Trittin told Die Tageszeitung that the researchers' findings were correct. "It was simply taken for granted that we adopted one-to-one the demands of various fringe initiatives, such as those of the 'Homosexual Action Göttingen,'" Trittin said. "The responsibility was mine and it's a mistake I regret."...

The Green Party is spending more than €200,000 ($267,000) on the study to investigate its past history of support for pedophiles. The price tag is a handsome sum, considering the party's annual budget of €5 million, and suggests the party is eager to clarify and resolve the murky chapter in its history.

That history caught up with the party earlier this year, when comments on children's sexuality in the 1975 autobiography of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Green Party representative in the European Parliament, resurfaced in the media.

The most recent revelation comes at an unfortunate time for the Green Party. With less than a week to go before Germany's general election, Trittin's political opponents have already begun to exploit the issue to discredit his campaign.

"Trittin needs to consider whether he really is the right man to be fronting the Greens," said Philipp Missfelder of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Alexander Dobrindt, general secretary of the conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), told the website of the magazine Focus that Trittin should withdraw from his position as the Green Party's leading candidate in the election.

Regarding 1968 revolts' hero, revolutionary and anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Wikipedia writes:

In 1978 an edition of Pflasterstrand, an alternative magazine Cohn-Bendit edited, described being seduced by a 6-year old girl as one of the most beautiful experiences the author had ever had...

Cohn-Bendit published a number of provocative statements regarding "sex with children" in the 1970s and early 1980s, notably in his 1975 book "The Great Bazaar" where he describes erotic encounters with five-year-olds in his time as a teacher in an anti-authoritarian kindergarten. He has been accused as advocating pedophilia since at least 2001. This controversy re-erupted in 2013; as Cohn-Bendit received the Theodor Heuss Prize, there was a rally by anti-pedophilia activists. The affair triggered wider research into the pro-pedophilia activism which prevailed in the German Green Party (without direct involvement on the part of Cohn-Bendit) well into the 1980s. An article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung uncovered numerous "repulsive" passages (abstoßende Texte) in Pflasterstrand, a leftist magazine which appeared under the editorship of Cohn-Bendit, and cited a 1978 defense of Cohn-Bedit's of this editorial practice, as well as an appearance of Cohn-Bendit in a French television talkshow in 1982 where he described being erotically undressed by a five-year-old. Cohn-Bendit reacted to these allegations by claiming that his descriptions of erotic encounters with pre-pubescent girls were not based on true events but were merely intended as what he today calls "obnoxious provocation" aimed at questioning sexual morals at the time that "shouldn't have been written that way."

Cohn-Bendit is accused of endorsing sex with children and may even have practiced it.

In his 1975 book "The Great Bazaar" he wrote: "It happened several times, that a few children would open the fly of my pants and begin to stroke me. That represented a problem."

These leading figures are only a side of the problem. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, paedophiles were part of it. Some documents show that the influence of paedophiles on the party was much stronger than previously thought.

At the first party convention the platform was shared by "Urban Indians," who wanted the "legalization of all affectionate sexual relations between adults and children." In the early years there were in the German Green Party groups which advocated the liberalisation and decriminalisation of sex with children, among which was the "Working Group on Gays and Pederasts."

From Spiegel:

He is a boy, roughly 10 years old, with a pretty face, full lips, a straight nose and shoulder-length hair. The wings of an angel protrude from his narrow back, and a penis is drawn with thin lines on the front of his body.

The 1986 image was printed in the newsletter of the Green Party's national working group on "Gays, Pederasts and Transsexuals," abbreviated as "BAG SchwuP." It wasn't just sent to a few scattered party members, but was addressed to Green Party members of the German parliament, as well as the party's headquarters in Bonn...

No political group in Germany promoted the interests of men with pedophile tendencies as staunchly as the environmental party. For a period of time in the mid-1980s, it practically served as the parliamentary arm of the pedophile movement.

A look at its archives reveals numerous traces of the pedophiles' flirtation with the Green Party. They appear in motions, party resolutions, memos and even reports by the party treasurer. That is because at times the party not only supported its now forgotten fellow campaigners politically, but also more tangibly, in the form of financial support...

[P]edophiles, noisy and wearing colorful body paint, were often a visible part of Green Party gatherings.

Left and Right: Do These Words Mean Anything?

Is Ron Paul a left or right winger?

He is a Republican, so on the face of it you would say he's on the right.

But his foreign policies, particularly his pacifist stance and opposition to American military interventions, place him on the left.

Not only that. He, like other Republicans and conservatives, is a libertarian.

Let me start with a little historical digression.

The first time I came across the word "libertarian" it was in conjunction with "communist". Communist libertarians is another name for anarchists: that's how many anarchists in the 19th century were called, to distinguish them from individualist libertarians like the French Proudhon, the man who wrote "Property is theft".

This association between libertarianism and anarchism should not be surprising, since anarchy, as its Greek origin indicates (privative alpha + arkhe, power), is the absence of a state, and libertarianism is the drive towards decreasing the size and reach of the state. So anarchism is, in some way, just the extreme form of libertarianism.

And here we have a clear paradox of the left-right divide in politics: anarchism is a classical leftist movement. At the time of the First International, Karl Marx and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famous disagreements did not focus on the goal: they both wanted the same thing, the abolition of the state. Their disagreement only concerned the means to reach that goal: Bakunin advocated the establishment of anarchism immediately after the proletarian revolution, whereas for Marx after the revolution there was to be a transitory phase, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he (obviously wrongly) thought would eventually dissolve itself to give way to anarchism.

So, we have a political position typically associated with the right, libertarianism, which is just on the same spectrum of opinions of Marxist and anarchist aspirations.

What is ironical, of course, is also to think of classical communists wanting to abolish the state, albeit only after establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, when today leftists the world over are trying to increase the size of governments beyond any autocrat's wildest dreams.

The problem is also to do with the meaning of the terms "freedom" or "liberty" which, like "justice", can have diametrically opposed interpretations.

In the case of justice, some people believe that what is just is that everybody, irrespective of what good or bad, much or little they have done, should get identical outcomes and have as much as possible the same: they see justice as a leveller.

Others think that justice means rewarding people for what they have done good, punishing them for what they have done bad, and doing neither if people omitted to do good or bad: they see justice as a life guidance, something that guides you to make the right choices.

The latter definition, in my view, is the one that is likely to produce better results in helping people to express the best of themselves and achieve their potential, whereas applying the former interpretation of justice almost inevitably leads to complacency and even downright abuse.

As for liberty, Marx stretched its meaning beyond recognition, in a way reminiscent of the Orwellian 1984's "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is knowledge". He thought that liberty meant giving people everything they needed, he was thinking of freedom from need rather than freedom from the controlling power of others, be they the government or other citizens.

The latter is clearly the historical liberal interpretation and the most commonsensical use of the word.

It is no coincidence that the communist and even socialist distortion of the meaning of freedom has led to some of the most oppressive, repressive and liberty denying regimes the world has ever seen.

Since "libertarian" derives from "liberty", again it is no coincidence that the conflict of opinion surrounding the latter is transferred into the controversy around the former.

In conclusion, my answer to the question that forms the headline of this article is that the words "left" and "right" in politics still have a meaning, in the sense that they represent real differences in world views about humanity, society and government, albeit not as clear cut and defined as some would have it.

I don't expect to treat this issue exhaustively in an article, but it's fair to say that the demarcation lines are much more blurred than is usually thought.

In particular, what I find objectionable is some behaviour, much more often seen in people on the left, of referring to the opposite end of the spectrum, in this case "right wing" or "fascist", as an epithet to shut down debate in the absence of valid arguments.

The fact that there is a certain overlapping, historical and ideological, between right and left makes this behaviour even more irrational.

I started with Ron Paul as an example of a difficult definition, now I'll give the example of myself: on most things I would be classified as being on the right, but I am a supporter of animal rights. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.


Photo by George Kelly

Global Warming or Global Control?

Well done to Australia's new Prime-Minister-Elect, the conservative Tony Abbott.

He pledged, as his two top priorities, to stop the tide of asylum seekers to the country and to scrap the highly unpopular tax on carbon emissions. Both very admirable intentions.

Cutting CO2 does nothing for the environment but a lot for the economy: it destroys it.

The environmentalist movement is fundamentally socio-communist. It has proclaimed itself the only saviour of the earth, but the reality is that one does not need to agree with its pseudo-scientific, highly ideological theories or belong to it to care about the environment.

Being Leftist, environmentalists want to see the role of the government expand and its control over individuals and businesses snowball.

Communism is internationalist in nature - "Workers of the world unite!", Karl Marx said. The first socialist upheaval, the Russian Revolution, was supposed to spread to other countries and only reluctantly, when that became impossible, the idea of "socialism in one country" was accepted.

An old dream of communists is that of a world government. This internationalism (and transnationalism) is another of the many aspects in which Muslims and Leftists are similar - along with promising paradise on earth, being utopian and therefore authoritarian and dictatorial - , and which make them such ideal allies.

"Global warming" is the perfect pretext for global governance and control. Not coincidentally Canadian communist Maurice Strong, a great believer in world government, was behind the project of establishing the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The world government - "global problems require global solutions" - that environmentalists and people like Strong have in mind is such that in comparison the European Union pales into insignificance.

The most absurd aspect of any kind of policy designed to tackle climate change is that, even if the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory were true, which is highly doubtful, there is very little we could do to stop this alleged Armageddon.

One thing on which even the warmists agree is that anything we could do - even if we completely stopped carbon emissions, shut down our economies and returned to a primitive society - would, at most, delay the catastrophe by a few years.

In addition, since the Kyoto Protocol is not binding for countries like China and India, by far the most populous, carbon-emitting nations in the world, even that small delay would not be achieved.

That in itself is enough to show that saving the planet is not the reason and the purpose for all this gigantic tumult and scare. Frightening people is a very good way to control them, and whoever controls the energy production and consumption - by dictating what individuals and companies can and most importantly cannot do - controls the economy and therefore the world.

Obama's Top Aide: No Concrete Evidence of Assad's Responsibility for Gas Attack

A survey by The Associated Press of members of the US House of Representatives shows that, of all those declaring a position, 6 times more respondents were or were leaning towards opposing military intervention in Syria than supporting it.

This anti-war skepticism corresponds to that manifested in recent polls by the American public, even among those who believe that Assad is responsible for the chemical attack.

This allegation is far from established beyond a reasonable doubt, as has been admitted even by Obama's Chief of Staff.

The number of people killed by the sarin attack on August 21 in Syria is disputed. The US cites intelligence reports saying that over 1,400 people died, and the Anti-Assad Syrian Coalition, in Washington to lobby members of Congress to vote in favour of an American intervention in the war, claims the number is even higher.

But in fact only 502 have been confirmed dead.


http://www.chron.com/news/politics/article/US-Common-sense-test-holds-Assad-responsible-4796462.php

Going to War to Help Jihadists? Here's an Idea!

It makes me furious when I hear US Secretary of State John Kerry or other people like him say that we must not remain idle but respond to the atrocity committed by Assad in using chemical weapons against Syrians.

For many years now hundreds of thousands of Christians have been persecuted, massacred and ethnically cleansed predominantly by Muslims the world over. Every five minutes, it has been calculated, a Christian is killed just because of his faith and nothing else. This is in addition to all the other causes for which Christians as well as non-Christians are killed, like wars, civil wars and so on.

Does this not constitute an atrocity, in Kerry's, Cameron's, Obama's, Hague's, Hollande's estimeed opinion?

Judging from their actions it doesn't: they have hardly uttered a word about this crime of the greatest magnitude, let alone expressed the intention to go to war because of it.

If your predisposition to moral outrage is so selective as to become criminally discriminatory, if the expression "double standard" is as weak to describe your behaviour as that of a man jumping into a pond to help person A keep her hair dry while letting person B drown, you have lost any credibility in claiming ethics as the reason for your actions.

What, if not morality then, could be the motive of Kerry, Obama and their gang of interventionists?

You'll forgive me if I cannot find any without the consultation of a standard psychiatry text, which I don't have handy at the moment on my holiday in St Ives, Cornwall.

Unless the decisive reason against going to war on the side of Assad's opponents, the "Syrian" (20 percent, though: 80 percent are foreign jihadists going wherever non-Muslim infildels can be killed and Sharia states imposed) rebels dominated by Al-Qaeda and other terrorist elements, gives us some clue to at least Obama's desires.

The rebels have made clear their intentions of moving their jihad warfare to Europe and America when they're done with Syria. Once Syrian Christians will be dead, or have fled the country, or converted to Islam, or accepted subjugation to their Islamic masters and paid the special jizya tax imposed on non-Muslims, once all the other niceties of sharia law will be forced on Syria, the jihadists' task there will be accomplished, finished, and they'll have to find somewhere else to do their good work.

Since, thanks to our wonderful, progressive program of encouraging invasion from the Third World, celebrating diversity and welcoming Islam, many of these jihadists are European, nothing will be easier for them than coming back home and putting to use the various techniques and skills they've acquired in the Syrian war: there is nothing like hand-on experience for mastering a job to perfection.

America will be next too.

Given that Barack Hussein Obama was born and raised a Muslim and has never failed to show the strength of his ties with and admiration for his old religion, the only reason, unlikely as it might be, for the senseless act of helping Muslim terrorists in their program of Islamisation of all countries, including ours, can only be that this does not appear senseless to someone who shares the same Islamic ideals.

I'm sincerely hard-pressed to find other motivations that don't involve a study of the level and pathology of the mental faculties of the war hawks (with apologies to these magnificent birds of prey for the unflattering comparison).

Welfare Reform Is as Necessary as Immigration Reform

It is no coincidence but on the contrary highly significant that the British modern welfare state was born after the Second World War.

Having fought together against Hitler provided that sense of unity that is necessary for people to willingly financially support total strangers.

For a welfare state to succeed that sense of an entire society's belonging figuratively to the same family is a conditio sine qua non. Another necessary condition is a general sense of trust, the perception that the welfare recipients will not exploit and take advantage of the welfare donors' generosity.

Both these indispensable conditions have now been lost.

Immigration is undoubtedly a cause of this loss, but it is not the only one. The welfare state over the long decades of its existence has produced what American sociologist Charles Murray and others call the "underclass" (incidentally another sign that the US, contrary to European popular opinion, does have an extensive welfare state too).

The underclass is a new social class, it is no longer the working class. It is not characterised by its economic status so much as by its behaviour, mores and ethos.
It has a disproportionately high illegitimacy rate, school drop-out rate, unemployment rate and crime rate. It is anti-social in its outlook, attitudes, rules and codes.

In the US the underclass is disproportionately black but in Britain it is mainly formed by indigenous Britons.

This is why only solving the problem of immigration will not solve the welfare problem.

That pro-welfare consensus after World War II does not exist any more. Now the opposite consensus exists.

One of the purported reasons for the creation of the welfare state was the desire to reduce income inequality (or relative poverty), portrayed as a cause of social unrest.

I don't know if enough evidence exists that income inequality causes social unrest. As is well known, correlation is not causation.

Social instability is more likely to be caused by poverty - real, absolute poverty in relation to one's needs, not the feeling of envy generated by looking over the fence at the neighbour's garden and seeing there rare orchids not found in one's own pretty but not luxurious garden - not income inequality. Moreover, it is caused by agitprop elements who keep telling people that they are treated unfairly (a bit like the US black leaders, that author Tammy Bruce calls "merchants of misery", who have made a career out of perpetuating in blacks a never-ending sense of victimhood and desire for retribution).

At the moment, much of Western social unrest is caused by the disastrous effect of governments' overspending, mostly due to elephantine welfare states.

US Racist and Capital Crimes Have a Black Hue

There are far more blacks on Death Row in the United States than whites, and this is attributed by the usual suspects, namely the mainstream media and Lefties, to - you'll never guess - racism.

This is an exampe of the kind of pro-black, anti-white prejudice that we have to constantly endure from the self-proclaimed "progressives" (who are anything but):

Today people of color continue to be disproportionately incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts.

The much simpler, Occam-razor-obeying in its parsimony, explanation is that blacks commit disproportionately many more crimes, including capital ones.

American blacks perpetrate almost 8 times more murders per capita than whites.

These are the U.S. Department of Justice official statistics:

The demographic characteristics of homicide victims and offenders were different from the characteristics of the general population.

This means that some race, sex and age groups are disproportionately represented in murder statistics.

Based on available data from 1980 to 2008—
Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders. The victimization rate for blacks (27.8 per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000). The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

Males represented 77% of homicide victims and nearly 90% of offenders. The victimization rate for males (11.6 per 100,000) was 3 times higher than the rate for females (3.4 per 100,000). The offending rate for males (15.1 per 100,000) was almost 9 times higher than the rate for females (1.7 per 100,000).

Approximately a third (34%) of murder victims and almost half (49%) of the offenders were under age 25. For both victims and offenders, the rate per 100,000 peaked in the 18 to 24 year-old age group at 17.1 victims per 100,000 and 29.3 offenders per 100,000.

So, basically blacks are much more likely to commit murder than whites, in the same way that men and youngsters perpetrate more homicides than women and people over 25. The difference is that, although it is well known and accepted that males and young people offend more, we don't read or hear in the mainstream media that blacks offend more, even if the public is not stupid and suspects it.

While whites are 82.9% of the American population, they only execute 45.3% of all murders. Conversely, blacks, who are just 12.6% of the population, carry out an astonishing 52.5% of all homicides.

The different rates of victimization (6 times higher for blacks) and offending (8 times higher for blacks) for murder quoted above also belie the "black-on-black" crime narrative which the media love and use to try to shelter blacks from the accusations of racism and hate crimes that would arise spontaneously by looking at the statistics. Blacks commit more attacks on whites than on other blacks. From the New Century Foundation's report The Color of Crime:

Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

Oh, look who is racist now!

The blog of my friend, author Alexander Boot, has some more statistics:

What about interracial crimes then? There’s no shortage of those, according to the FBI study for 2007, cited in Pat Buchanan’s book Suicide of a Superpower... Blacks also perpetrated 14,000 assaults on white women – with exactly zero committed by white men on black women.

Buchanan himself adds:

If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

A reference to the pamphlet Black Skin Privilege, by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, can provide us with the appropriate conclusion by means of the following considerations:

Black sin privilege has created an optical illusion in the liberal culture that white on black attack are commonplace events when in fact there are five times as many black attacks on whites as the reverse. As Horowitz and Perazzo note, in 2010, blacks committed more than 25 times the number of acts of interracial violence than whites did.

UK Muslims Back 7/7: So What's New?

This is another article transferred from my older blog which I'm closing down, still relevant today.

---

A 7 August 2006 survey reveals that almost a quarter of British Muslims believe the July 7 terror attacks in London, the worst the city has ever seen in its long history, were justified because of Britain's support for the war on terror.

And nearly half of the UK Muslims questioned said that the 9/11 attacks on New York were a conspiracy between the US and Israel.

The survey found Muslims under the age of 24 were twice as likely to justify the 7/7 attacks as those aged over 45.

A third of those polled said that they would prefer to live under Sharia law in the UK rather than British law.

Now the question is: what is the news value of these results?

Only if you are a liberal, a leftie or a person brainwashed by politically correct propaganda, this may seem shocking to you.

Let’s face it: the Muslims living or trying to live in the West are extremely lucky that the Western people do not know almost anything about Islam.
Ignorance is the greatest ally of the Islamic world or, to paraphrase a famous song, Western ignorance is a Muslim’s best friend.

The majority of people of Western countries, understandably, do not want to read the Koran and do not want to know about the Muslim doctrine. Who can blame them? It’s one of the most uninteresting theories ever developed, philosophically it’s a non-entity.

Unfortunately, its importance does not derive from its non-existent intellectual worth: it stems from the terrible power it holds on people who culturally and morally belong to a different age from ours, from its political significance.

Who else in the West should know anything about Islam? The media people, like all those on the left of the political spectrum, are completely naïve in their misunderstanding of the Muslim world. They erroneously believe that everybody is the same, that all humans of all races, cultures and latitudes want the same things and share the same values, which is obvioulsy not true. So they attribute to Muslims the same desires, intentions and attitudes of mind that they have, so losing any possibility of grasping the first thing about them.

One detail particularly revealing of this huge incomprehension, a funny one too, occurred when Channel 4’s Jon Snow, during the TV broadcast yesterday of his survey of UK Muslims, talked in sheer puzzlement to the camera about a Muslim bloke who had just tried to convert him to his own religion: “He tried to convert to Islam even me!” he cried, in true disbelief, as if the young chap had attempted something amazing and not simply done what was the most natural thing to him, what the Koran demands him to do with any means.

For the Koran, the whole world must become Muslim one day.

The advertisng blurb for this recent survey was “You’d better know him better” next to the picture of a Muslim lad.

But the point is: we know who Muslims are already, or at least the Western authors, political thinkers and philosophers who have not been blinded by the current media propaganda and political orthodoxy know.

Whenever some Muslim commits an atrocity, you watch the news coverage and what do you get? TV crews interviewing Muslim leaders, “scholars” and common people about whether that is the “real Islam” or “what the Koran says” or not.

But you never see or read anything in the mainstream media that shows the other side of the coin, a different opinion.

This biased, one-sided reporting is the equivalent of a situation in which some staff of a large corporation, like a multi-national for example, committed something illegal or damaging to the public health or the environment, and the only people that journalists bothered to interview, the only ones asked to voice their opinion on the matter, were the spokespersons of the company involved itself.

Socialism Is Ethically Wrong

The fact that communism, or even socialism, cannot be implemented in reality, is by now widely accepted; even Leftists and liberals, if unhappily and grudgingly, had to surrender to the overwhelming historical evidence which has accumulated especially in the last 2 or 3 decades, showing that a socialist economy is almost a contradiction in terms, and a society based on those principles is barely feasible, and certainly not a happy one.

But hardly anyone seems to question the ethical validity of socialist ideas. In the mind of most people, they still inhabit the moral high ground.

In fact, I believe that socialism not only starts from premises which are wrong factually, but it is also wrong ethically.

First of all, let's start from explaining what wealth is. There is a common misconception that wealth is a theft of sort, that people become rich by taking from others.

I don't think that this idea began with socialism. The French libertarian socialist, or anarchist, Proudhon, famously said: "Property is theft", but I don't think that he was original in that.

No, it seems to me that, when you lack something, to blame someone else for your want is one of the simplest, most instinctive of all human impulses: envy.

The thought behind this seems to be that there's only a given, limited amount of goods, and if somebody has more, then it follows that somebody else must necessarily have less.

There's a long history of that idea, perhaps beginning with humanity itself, through Robin Hood to modern-day socialists.

It is a misconception, due to a failure to understand the nature of wealth. Wealth is essentially created, not given.

If anybody is in any doubt about it, they just have to think of these two countries: Iran and Switzerland.

Nature has given an enormous wealth to the former, in the form of oil (although the reason why oil is "black gold" has to do with the huge economic and historical development of the West, and the need of Western societies for it) and natural gas. Iran has the world's largest proved natural gas reserves, and the world's fifth largest proved crude oil reserves. And yet, it is the 75th country in the world for Gross Domestic Product based on Purchasing-Power-Parity (PPP) per capita.

The Swiss live in an extremely hard habitat, a region of high mountains very unsuitable, on the face of it, to human settlement and economic prosperity. Still, the Swiss have the 9th highest Gross Domestic Product based on Purchasing-Power-Parity (PPP) per capita in the world.

It is obviously the use that both these populations have made of their natural resources that has made them rich or poor, not those resources in themselves. And that use stems from a conscious choice of those people, which in turn comes from their mindset, their way of thinking.

And here we arrive at one of the many hypotheses and fundamental parts of his theory that Karl Marx got wrong: the idea that human beings are dominated by the ineluctable laws of economics, which in turn are governed by the dialectic of history and eventually of nature.

For both Marx and Sigmund Freud humans are not free agents, but subject to deterministic principles. They go against the Christian concept of free will, which is not only closer to the truth, but also positively guides human behaviour, so it is pragmatically useful.

Instead, psychoanalysis and Marxism, two theories of huge influence, one in the personal the other in the public sphere but both profoundly affecting the cultural and political life of our time, have done a lot of damage through the creation of a highly destructive way of thinking that denies free will.

It's true that most individual human beings only use a little part of their potential. That doesn't imply the flattering idea, which has sometimes been expressed, that everybody is potentially an Einstein or a hidden genius.

It just means that most human beings don't fully realize how much control they can have on their lives, how much difference a choice rather than another can make on one's destiny.

You Don't Need to Be Racist to Be Racist

This article in FrontPage Magazine, headlined "Oprah: Just Because You’re Not Racist Doesn’t Mean You’re Not a Racist" , reminds me of what happened in Britain when the Macpherson's Inquiry into the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993 enshrined that racism does not need to exist in reality for someone to be guilty of it, opening the door to the abuses we witness today, with these words: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".

So what if racism in America is at an all-time low? So what if the vast majority of Americans are not only not racist, but actively anti-racist? That’s not enough for Oprah. “A lot of people think if they think they’re not using the n-word themselves, they physically aren’t using the n-word themselves, and do not harbor ill will towards black people that it’s not racist,” she said in a comment that is as challenged syntactically as it is intellectually.

This is paranoia of the highest sort. And it is absolutely crippling to America’s future. If a huge number of Americans believe that racism that is not present in action nonetheless lurks beneath the surface of our life, waiting to burst forth in a conflagration of hate such as that which allegedly claimed Trayvon, there can be no shared future.

But many on the left, including Oprah, apparently don’t want a shared future. They want emotional blackmail. The corollary to the belief that racism hides in the nooks and crannies of the white personality is the belief that the only way to expunge such racism by embracing the philosophy of people like Oprah. If you see The Butler, you’re buying a racial indulgence; if you vote Obama, you’re buying a racial indulgence...

That seems to be the perspective not just of many black Americans like Oprah and Daniels, but the perspective of many in various minority communities. For example, in California, Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a law declaring that transgender children must be allowed to enter bathrooms of their choice and join sports teams of their choice. The idea here is that this will minimize bullying, as though most Americans bear children with gender identity issues some sort of ill will. The truth is far simpler: Americans have a right to worry that their children will feel uncomfortable in a bathroom next to someone of the opposite sex, no matter what that person believes him or herself to be. That’s not wrong. That’s normal. But the onus has now been placed on children without gender identity issues to explain why they feel uncomfortable at the urinal next to a girl, even if they’ve never bullied a transgender child.

That’s nasty. More than that, it’s an attempt to shape values by implying that everyone is in need of having their fundamental racism, sexism, homophobia overcome by government action. Americans have nothing left to discuss. America is now a country where whites are often perceived as racist until proven innocent. And the only way to prove yourself innocent is to perform acts approved by the leftist establishment.

None of this helps black Americans. All it does is perpetuate power for those who divide us in pursuit of political gain. Hillary Clinton, who has begun touring the country invoking the supposed racism of voter ID supporters, is merely the latest race hustler to attempt this pernicious trick. Unfortunately, it seems to work. And that means that Oprah’s racial narrative is far more influential than The Butler’s.

Immigration or Invasion?

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


What we insist on calling “immigration” from the Third World to Western European countries like Britain is a historically new phenomenon, for which a case can be made that other, more appropriate terms should be used — like “colonization” and “invasion.”

The definition of “colony,” from which the word “colonization” is derived, is: a) a body of people living in a new territory but maintaining ties with their homeland or b) a number of people coming from the same country, sharing the same ethnic origin or speaking the same language, who reside in a foreign country or city, or a particular section of it.

Either could apply to the people coming to live in Europe from Asia and Africa.

In reference to colonization, dictionaries add “relating to the developing world,” but this is only because colonization primarily occurred there in the past. Word meanings have to change to adapt to the new historic realities.

Similarly, the expressions “native” and “indigenous” previously referred to the original inhabitants of non-European continents, whereas now they are used to describe Germans, French, British, Swedes, Dutch and so on.

“Invasion” has three main meanings: a) the act of invading, especially the entrance of an armed force into a territory to conquer; b) a large-scale onset of something injurious or harmful, such as a disease; c) an intrusion or encroachment, an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity.

The latter is a perfectly apt description of what is happening in Western Europe.

Even “ethnic cleansing” could be used, since local populations are being replaced by different ethnic groups. London, for instance, is no longer a white-British-majority city, although mainstream media like the BBC and London’s own paper, the Evening Standard, barely mention it, to say nothing of the city mayor Boris Johnson.

From Wikipedia:

The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group.”

[...]

Terry Martin has defined ethnic cleansing as “the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory” and as “occupying the central part of a continuum between genocide on one end and nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration on the other end.”

European native populations are being replaced because many locals, tired of being colonized, flee their countries, cities or neighborhoods.

The proportion of white British Londoners fell drastically from 60 percent in 2001 to 44.9 per cent in 2011, partly due to the arrival of so many foreign nationals and partly to a mass exodus of white Britons. David Goodhart, director of Demos, writes in The Financial Times:

Over the decade between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of white British Londoners fell by more than 600,000 (17 per cent). That is about three times the fall over the previous census period, 1991 to 2001.

“Most of the leading academic geographers did not expect London to become a majority minority city for another 20 or 30 years – they underestimated the extent to which white British people have opted to leave an increasingly diverse London,” says Eric Kaufmann, an academic at Birkbeck College who is leading a project on “white flight” at Demos, the think-tank I lead.

Six hundred thousand is a big city disappearing in just 10 years.

Are we sure that Londoners have abandoned their city because of this “cultural enrichment”? Looking at the areas where white flight mostly occurs provides reasonable evidence that they do: the most multi-racial districts tend to experience high levels of it.

What the large-scale influx of foreigners to Europe can no longer be called is “immigration.” Immigration is what you have when, for example, small groups of French go to live in Britain or the British in Spain.

What distinguishes invasion from immigration are three things: the volume of people involved in the movement, the span of time and frequency of these movements — the same number of people moving to live in a country over 4 years as opposed to 400 years — and the kind of people, in particular how similar or alien to the natives they are, and how easily or improbably they’ll integrate.

The sheer numbers of people who have come to live in the UK in the last few decades have negatively affected the indigenous population’s quality of life in a serious, profound way, even assuming that those people were all law-abiding, upright citizens, which they are not.

There are many areas where this is occurring, including jobs, social services, education and public health – with tuberculosis constantly rising largely due to immigration.

A classic example is the current housing shortage. The UK is suffering its worst housing crisis in modern history. Two or more household units cram into one dwelling, and young people, not being able to afford to move out, live with their parents.

It would be trivializing the issue to say that all housing problems are created by immigration, but it’s impossible to deny the obvious fact they are exacerbating it.

There are other factors contributing to the housing crisis, including the very low interest rates, which result in fewer forced sellers, and the welfare system that, by underwriting sometimes exorbitant rent bills for people who’ve never worked, indirectly encourage landlords to charge more, thus driving up both rental and purchase prices for those who do work.

But one of the main causes is the high number of immigrants increasing the demand for dwellings, while the supply remains low, therefore pushing up house buying and renting prices.

Liberal commentators say that there is no evidence for that, but the evidence is in the most self-explanatory statistics: the more people are in the country, the more properties are needed.

Most immigrants rent, rather than buy, a property in the first 5-10 years since their arrival, which inevitably increases rental prices for everyone, including the indigenous people.

Social housing is also in limited supply. Therefore, the immigrant population that takes a share of it deprives the natives. The percentages are roughly the same: 17 percent of British live in council-rented accommodations, 18 percent of foreigners do.

Leftists and charities would want the government to “build more affordable housing” and “enough homes to meet demand” rather than limit immigration, although it’s difficult to see why the government should act like a construction company in preference to a body that protects and defends the country’s borders.

Overpasses for Obama's Impeachment

Via Facebook.com



This is something I like very much. We should do more things like it:

The New Fad Taking The Country By Storm: "Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment"

The group “Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment” held rallies around the country this weekend calling for Obama’s impeachment. The group lists 12 reasons for Obama’s impeachment on their website and has quite the following on Facebook. It’s the next big thing.

They have a Facebook page, Overpasses for Obama's Impeachment, with currently 35,108 likes (including mine) and 37,700 talking about this.

Their website is Impeach Obama.

Christianity Is a Crime Punishable by Death under Sharia Law

I'm in the process of transferring here the articles I had on another, older blog which I'm closing down. They are still relevant, showing how things haven't changed at all in the Islamic world but maybe - just maybe - have developed a little bit chez nous.

The Guardian article that I quoted from in here might have still made today the same unfounded, false claims that death for apostasy is not part of Islam that it made then. But, while it's becoming more and more obvious every day that the Muslim persecution of Christians throughout the world is the greatest humanitarian disaster of our times, and while we are in the middle of a proper, probably irreversible, ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Middle East and the media, while pretending to ignore it, cannot possibly be totally unaware of it, the justifications given by this Grauniad hack for the horror being commited against the story's poor innocent man by reference to colonialism ("The age of classical colonialism may have passed but where once the blunderbuss came as an adjunct to the bible, today it has been replaced by the rice bowl.") - even accusing missionaries of only pretending to give aid -, or by reference to "well-intentioned desire to protect cherished beliefs", would today be considered beyond the pale even by Leftist standards. I hope.

------------------------------------------------

The news

Sunday, March 19, 2006.
KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan man who allegedly converted from Islam to Christianity is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death, a judge said Sunday.

The hypocrisy of the Muslims

"We are not against any particular religion in the world. But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law," the judge said. "It is an attack on Islam. ... The prosecutor is asking for the death penalty."

No, they “are not against any particular religion in the world”.
Except that they consider being Christian a crime punishable by death.
That’s not being against a religion, is it?

The response of Western media

I watched a Channel 4 report on this, that made it sound as if Abdul Rahman (this is the name of the Christian man) was mad (it reported that he was mentally ill), and as if the Afghan government wasn’t all that bad.

Or, look at the Guardian Online. “Don't make a martyr” is the headline, and the article by a Faisal Bodi (isn’t it a name that says it all?) says:

Sending Abdul Rahman to the gallows would indict Islam on a charge of which it is wholly innocent.

Nobody likes a turncoat. Whether it's a scab crossing a picket line, or a footballer joining his club's arch rivals, the consequences of defection will usually haunt them for life.

It's a cross that Abdul Rahman, the Afghan convert to Christianity, is currently having to bear.

By the way, the explanation for his madness could be this one, from two comments posted on Jihad Watch by the same person. One is:

As I noted here, the idea that Abdul Rahman is insane is a more or less clever attempt to please both the irresistable force of Afghanistan's allegiance to Sharia and the immoveable object of American presence and pressure.

Officials say the man, Abdul Rahman, will be released from custody soon.

Who will protect him from raging Sharia-minded mobs when he is freed?

And the second comment is:

Sarinwal Zamari may be floating this idea to extricate the Karzai government from the tight place this case has put it in. It is a common view among Muslims that only someone who is insane, corrupt or under immense pressure would convert from Islam to Christianity, so this angle will make sense to those in Afghanistan who want Abdul Rahman's blood. Likewise it will get them out of holding the trial without their having to say or do anything contrary to traditional Muslim apostasy law. This could be the perfect pirouette to allow Karzai to save face with both camps.

Why Muslims Are Necessarily Fundamentalists

There is an incompatibility between Islam and the ideas which are fundamental to Western civilization.

There are logical contradictions between the principles at the basis of Islam and the West. One cannot resolve logical contradictions, they cannot be solved in the way that problems can. You simply cannot square a circle.

It’s got nothing to do with terrorists, or fundamentalists, fanatics, or Islamic radicals of various sorts.

I’m here talking about mainstream Islam and the fact that it is in serious, direct and open contradiction with principles which are at the core of Western civilization and form the very basis on which all our Western world is erected.

I am not talking about issues like the treatment of women. Islam’s treatment of women is only one aspect, one application of the much more general problem of Islam’s incompatibility with Western principles which I am about to discuss.

There are several elements in Islam which conflict with and contradict Western core principles. Here I'm outlining one of them.

All Muslims believe (and they must believe, I mean it’s not open to interpretation or dispute) that the Koran is the actual word of God. They think God himself dictated it word by word to Mohammed.

Christians think that the Bible was written by human beings: that leaves a lot open to different interpretations and variations in opinion, and it leaves a lot of room for mistakes.

But for Muslims, none of this tolerance and flexibility is possible. Every true Muslim must believe in the complete, literal truth of every word of the Koran.

So, basically, every Muslim is a fundamentalist. That old, tiresome, repeated ad nauseam distinction between Islamic fundamentalists and the “benign” majority of mainstream Muslims is much less important than it is constantly portrayed to be.

This fact in itself, that all Muslims believe in the literal truth of the Koran (no word of the book can actually be disputed) “invites trouble”, opens the gate to all the flood of problems that we have continuously witnessed in the history of Islam. It is a veritable Pandora’s box.

The funny thing is that Muslims themselves have used this argument in order to justify their own intransigence and intolerance, for instance when they try to justify the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

And I want to remind that, when in Muslim communities living in Britain there were episodes of public burnings of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in the streets, it wasn’t a minority of fundamentalists who were doing and justifying the burnings. On the contrary, it was the Muslims’ majority.

Whenever I watch a TV debate or interview involving Muslims, hardly ever I see the interviewer or participant in the debate ask a Muslim person (supposedly a member of the tolerant Muslim majority who has no problems with Western values) what s/he thinks of the fatwa against Rushdie. That question, and especially its answer, obviously would immediately show an unbridgeable gulf between the supposed “tolerant Muslim” and the rest of us, and would expose this construct of the “tolerant Muslim” for what it is: a myth.

To clarify a possible misunderstanding, I am not here talking about personality traits: I don’t mean “tolerant” in the sense of nice, decent, pleasant, likeable person. I’m sure that there will be many Muslim individuals who fit the latter description. But their “tolerance”, or rather lack of it, is nothing to do with their personal characteristics: it’s not a matter of personal choice. They have no choice. If they are Muslim, they must think that the Koran was indeed written by God through Mohammed’s hand, and therefore it necessarily follows that they cannot tolerate a work like The Satanic Verses: to them it will be tantamount to blasphemy, an insult to God himself.

Photo by George Daley

We Cannot Protect British Culture without Christianity

If we want to protect and preserve British traditional culture and values, we cannot do it without Christianity. Not only has Christianity been part of them since time immemorial but also they couldn't continue their existence without it.

An anecdote. I was in Steyning, in Sussex, in the Downs, not far from the sea. Our car had broken down. It's a beautiful village (or perhaps a small town now) in the South-East of England, the constituency that my party Liberty GB has chosen for the 2014 Euro Elections. Without enrichers in sight - except for one very kind black bloke who offered to help -, it looked like England may have been pre-enrichment. Very well preserved, with lovely Tudor houses, quaint, there was a building covered in Union Jacks and portraits of the Queen, you've got the idea. Every time we asked the locals for directions to the centre of the village, they directed us to the church.

The question about atheism and religion is simple. Individuals can be atheist, societies cannot. Atheists can be upright, moral individuals. But most people who follow the idea of a Godless world end up behaving in unethical ways, like irresponsibly having children out of wedlock they cannot provide for; treating their sexual life as a drug or alcohol (which they may also be addicted to); repeatedly having late-term abortions which more and more resemble infanticides; becoming addicted to consumerism and material things - kindly called "shopaholics" - to fill their empty lives and ending up with debts they cannot repay; neglecting their elderly parents; putting other people's and their own health at risk with promiscuous heterosexual or homosexual sex; and committing crimes. These people may not necessarily call themselves "atheist", but they have abandoned a moral system which for them would in the past have been dependent on the idea of God.

Think of this. If prisons, punishments and the penal system were abolished tomorrow, there are people who would continue to act more or less in the same way as before. But do you really believe that all members of society would?

There are many who, either because of limited intelligence or other factors - emotional, for example - don't live an ethical life without something guiding them from the outside (a condition that the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant called "heteronomy").

You may ask: what about those atheists who are behaving morally?

There is a risk in that too. A risk of erosion. The majority of atheists or agnostics among us have parents who believed in God, or grandparents, and so on. We have been educated in a Christian or Jewish way which has influenced our outlook, even if this can go back a few generations. But over time those values will become more and more diluted in people and therefore in the education they impart to their children. Gradually, maybe slowly, they will weaken or even disappear.

British culture has its roots in Christianity. It is its breeding ground.

Christianity has a solid rational basis. It has been studied and systematised by philosophers, first in the Middle Ages with the Patristic and Scholastic movements. It has incorporated Aristotelian logic. People like Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens who tell you otherwise are zoologists or journalists, not philosophers of religion, not even philosophers of science. They have no in-depth knowledge or understanding of this subject. If we lose Christianity, we end up believing in all sorts of superstitions, as it's already happening with the increase in the number of people who believe in astrology, spiritualism, all sorts of cults, New Age doctrines, "alternative" medicine, and so on.

And also, let's not forget that reason has its limits. It is rational to understand that reason is not everything.

No society has ever been without religion. If we lose Christianity, we will fall prey to other, much worse, religions or pseudo-religions, like, um, let me think, Islam for instance.

The State of UK Immigration Debate in 2005

I've just found something I had written in February 2005, at a time when questioning government's immigration policies in the UK was no longer considered downright racist like in, say, the 1990s, but not yet mainstream political discourse at it has become now. I publish it here because it shows the road we've travelled.

---------------------------------------

In January 2005, the UK television channel ITV showed a program, called Vote For Me!, described as a political reality show, in which some so-called members of the general public, all with passionate political views, contested to get a public phone vote. The winner of Vote For Me! moved forward to the opportunity of standing for parliament.

There was also a panel of 3 judges and a studio audience, but they didn't actually affect the vote in the end.

At the time the ITV website said: “But that was what Vote For Me! was about: giving real people with real issues a voice. But more than that, Vote For Me! gave you, the people, the chance to choose a representative. A person who could honestly claim to be: 'The People's Choice'.”

That was the blurb: the reality was quite different, in that the program tried in every way to influence the result, and in the end it was rumoured that ITV was not happy at all with it, to the point of regretting having made the show.

The winner was a Rodney Hylton-Potts (pictured above), somebody whose views you can easily call politically incorrect.

Listen to what he said in interviews after his victory:

“All three judges urged viewers to vote me off. The show started as being light-hearted. But as it progressed it changed. In fact, it changed following my mention of a policy of nil immigration. At that point, it turned into a different animal.”

In fact, after having watched that, in the face of escalating insults from the panel "judges" and continuous booing and jeering from the TV studio audience, Rodney Hylton-Potts obtained such an astounding victory from the public at home, which almost looked like an opinion poll result, I decided to look for myself at what the British public actually thought of current immigration policies.

What I found supports, confirms and vindicates Hylton-Potts ideas.

For example, this article in The Guardian of January 19, 2004, with the headline “Four out of 10 whites do not want black neighbour, poll shows”. The article says:

Four out of 10 white people do not want an Asian or black Briton as their neighbour, according to a survey published this week. The opinion poll found rocketing concern about immigration and asylum.

The Mori survey for Prospect magazine found that 39% of those asked would prefer to live in an area only with people from the same ethnic background. Forty-one per cent of whites and 26% of ethnic minority people surveyed wanted the races to live separately. Over half of all ethnic groups wanted to live in diverse areas.

Bobby Duffy, research director at Mori, said: "We have overestimated the progress we have made in race and immigration issues. I'm surprised about such a high finding as people are usually reticent because they worry about being judged by the interviewer, so this finding is worrying."

The poll shows that the issue of race and immigration has risen up the list of people's concerns, and is now the third most important, ahead of crime, defence and the economy. The issue is ranked the most important by 29%, behind education on 33% and the NHS on 41%. Ten years ago the figure was below 10%.

If the Mori research director mentioned in the article is worried about those results, what about the next?

A YouGov/Economist survey in December 2004 gave the following results.

Of the people polled, 74% agree with the statement "Too many immigrants are coming to Britain."

Asked about the problems caused by immigration - and remember, this is important, that it was a one-answer question, so people could only choose one among some possible answers - 53% think that immigrants are putting too much pressure on public services, and as many as 25% (one quarter) think that immigration is upsetting the racial balance in the country.

To the question "Do you think people in your neighbourhood would approve or disapprove if more people from each of the following groups moved to your area?", the majority of people answered "Disapprove" when the group in question was Black Africans (43%), Iraqis (64%), Pakistanis (56%), West Indians (41%). The majority answered "Not mind" when the group in question was Australians (63%) and Polish (50%).

Some people might rush to say: racist.

But this is a too hasty and harsh judgement of public opinion.

Look at this interesting result: the only other group was Romanians and, although last time I checked these are white, the majority said: "Disapprove" (48%).

So, something else is at work here.

Could it be that common people have a better instinct than politicians, the media, and the intellectual elite?

And it's the same all over Western Europe.

From The Scotsman of 27 May 2004:

A new opinion poll which sampled opinion across ten countries found the majority of people in Britain are supportive of religious tolerance - but still believe that immigration has damaged the country.

The research triggered a mixture of disbelief and concern from mainstream political parties yesterday, amid fears that asylum is becoming a growing issue ahead of the 10 June European Parliament elections.

Ipsos, a Paris-based polling firm, found 60 per cent believing that immigrants were a bad influence on Britain - the highest proportion of all countries surveyed.

France, where the far-right National Front came second in the presidential election two years ago, emerged as one of the more moderate countries in the study with only 53 per cent arguing that migrants made the country worse.

But seven out of ten in France said that religious diversity within a country is to be welcomed, and three-quarters said that immigrants arrive to take the jobs which native Frenchmen refuse to do.

The same split reaction - welcoming religious pluralism but fearing that immigration has been harmful overall - also characterised Spain, Germany and Italy.

Ipsos, which conducted the poll with the Associated Press, admitted that its findings contradict widespread feeling that Britain - with its long history of migration and colonisation - is more relaxed about multiculturalism.

For that last statement, read: we thought that we had done a much better job at brainwashing the British public than we actually, demonstrably have.

And, finally, consider this: pollsters, namely the professionals in the field, think that polls, particularly online polls, are likely to produce more liberal responses than in the electorate as a whole.

Liberty GB: UK's Best Party for Geert Wilders' European Coalition

When we at Liberty GB first heard that the leader of the PVV Geert Wilders is looking to form an alliance with like-minded parties in Europe to fight next year's European elections, our immediate thought was that we are the right party to represent Britain in that alliance.

The party Liberty GB is very new, as it was formed in March of this year. The Executive Council comprises Chairman Paul Weston, Party Nominating Officer George Whale, Culture Officer Jack Buckby, Policy Officer Stephen Evans, Associate Matthew Roberts, IT Officer and Treasurer, and me as Press Officer.

Liberty GB is a patriotic, counter-jihad party for Christian and Western civilisation, freedoms, animal welfare, capitalism, progress in ideas and society.

It arose from the need to fill a vacuum that existed in British politics between the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and parties like the British National Party (BNP) with a reputation of anti-Semitism and racism.

The country's three main parties - Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats - are clearly creating, rather than solving, the problems facing Britain, but they are not the only ones to appease Islam and compromise about immigration, having recently been joined in those endeavours by UKIP, despite its initial promise of real conservatism.

An example of UKIP's concessions regarding the debate over immigration is an interview that in late July party leader Nigel Farage gave to the most Leftist mainstream paper in Britain, The Guardian. In it Farage castigates the late Conservative Member of Parliament Enoch Powell for his famous "Rivers of Blood" speech of 1968.

Powell was prescient in warning his countrymen about the serious dangers of mass immigration from the Third World, which had then only started and had not yet reached the astronomical levels of later decades. He said:

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre...

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

His predictions were correct in every respect: the indigeonous population has indeed been overwhelmed by huge numbers of immigrants and subjugated by the politically correct race-relations industry. The last sentence, which gave the speech its name, is a reference to the Latin poet Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid.

But, rather than applauding Powell and blaming his opponents, in the interview Farage blamed the parliamentarian for the opposition his speech encountered, siding with the Left who strumentalised the metaphorical, indeed poetic, part of the speech - the one containing the word "blood" - to make the whole thing appear like the utterances of a violent fanatic who wanted, rather than predicted, blood:

He [Farage] said: "The Powell speech was a disaster. Everybody ran scared of discussing this for decades. Now, I think what Ukip has done is to help make immigration a sensible, moderate, realistic, mainstream debate."

UKIP's previous 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, which is the party's main selling point, is under review, with a possible increase in the cap.

The disappointment with the UKIP felt by many supporters could 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%.

Islam, one of the major problems facing Britain and Europe today, indeed in many ways the most important problem, since it is a question of our own survival, receives so little attention from UKIP that a search for the term "Islam" on its website produces only 6 results. In some of them Islam is mentioned in the context of foreign policy, like the possible British intervention in the Syrian war or how to interact with "moderate Muslim states". In 5 cases out of those 6, the word "Islam" is accompanied by the qualifying adjective "extreme", "extremist" or "fundamentalist", and in the 6th is part of the phrase "puritanical and intolerant strain of Wahhabi Islam".

No results for "halal" on the UKIP's site.

On ritual slaughter this was the policy in the 2010 General Election Party Manifesto:

UKIP believes that the UK should examine the pros and cons of proposals to insist on pre-stunning through a Royal Commission. The Commission should study examples from Denmark, New Zealand and others and evaluate whether the religious exemptions which cause suffering to animals should be repealed or not, or whether a requirement for pre-stunning be introduced.

Contrast that with what Liberty GB is saying and doing.

We have an extensive plan of action on how to limit immigration and on how to deal with Islam.

We think that the distinction between Islam and "extreme" Islam is spurious, because Islam, wanting world domination and global imposition of its law with any means, is intrinsically extreme. It is also fundamentalist because it preaches that the Quran was written by Allah and dictated to Muhammad through the Archangel Gabriel, so, being directly the word of God and not - like the Bible - written by men, must necessarily be taken literally.

We know that Islam is not a religion but a political ideology worse than fascism and communism, and that it is wrongly and unjustly protected by freedom of religion.

Indeed the Liberty GB website has devoted many articles to exposing Islam, including essays which criticise historical revisionism of the Crusades and the imaginary contributions of Islam to science and mathematics that inhabit Obama's mind.

Unlike UKIP, we are well aware of the no-go areas, of the whole communities that live by Sharia law, of how mosques disrupt neighbourhoods and are a hotbed of militancy, in short of the many forms taken by stealth jihad in our countries.

Of all these, none is more dangerous and insidious than halal meat, which is why Liberty GB has made it the target of a particular campaign. Halal is Islam's Trojan horse to penetrate and conquer our lands. It is the first giant step of our Islamisation.

In a similar way in which magazines, for example, introduce to the reader and explore a wide topic by focusing on particular individuals affected by it, it is easier for people to concentrate their attention and energy on a specific issue like halal, through which all of Islam in the West can be targeted, rather than tackling the whole subject of Islam. Besides, halal is arguably the most detested aspect of our Islamisation.

In addition, Halal in Britain and in the West generally, being a multi-billion-pound industry, empowers Muslims economically and there is ample evidence that it finances jihad and terrorism all over the world.

A ban on ritual slaughter is part of our manifesto.

We think, like Wilders, that Christians are our allies.

We stand for Christianity as an ethical as well as a theological system, therefore accepting that there can be, as the great Oriana Fallaci declared herself, “atheist Christians” or “agnostic Christians”.

We exist not just to attract people, but also to change them in order to change the status quo. We won’t change anything if we don’t change what people think. This is the cultural battle that the Left has fought and won until now, and that we know we must fight in order to win.

We don’t want to do what UKIP has recently been doing. We don’t blindly follow public opinion, we change it, and this is our unique selling proposition.

Decades of socio-communist propaganda have resulted in many people having very confused ideas about Christianity, about which they only know or believe they know bad things.

Jesus Christ declared all men to be equal. Both the doctrine and the history of Christianity vouch for its solid egalitarian, anti-discriminatory stance. When we say that we are Christian, ethically even if not necessarily theologically, we are implicitly saying that we are anti-racist without even having to say it explicitly. It was Christians who abolished slavery first in the Roman Empire and then in the 19th-century United States. No other religious group has ever done that. It has been Christians, today as in the past, who have gone to all the most inhospitable corners of the globe to help the poor of all races for nothing in return.

I'll conclude with this comment on the current first place of the PVV in the Dutch opinion polls, which I find particularly true and useful for us:

A smart party primes voters for the realization that it was right all along. A stupid party “evolves” and tosses aside its positions and becomes discredited and indistinguishable from the ruling party.

Ignorance of Islam Is No Excuse

The unfortunate article published on The Telegraph "Islam is way more English than the EDL" is a classical example of the most myopic and ignorant journalism. The author, Tim Stanley, has no idea of what Islam is, and yet insists in writing about Islam.

Just read this:

By contrast, most Muslims cling on to values that were once definitively English and that we could do with rediscovering. Islam instructs its followers to cherish their families, to venerate women [by beating and stoning them], to treat strangers kindly [by beheading them], to obey the law of any country they are in (yes, yes, it really does) [by imposing sharia law everywhere by hook or by crook], and to give generously. One recent poll found that British Muslims donate more money to charity than any other religious group.

Pity he doesn't know that the Quran prescribes to believers only charity for other Muslims, not infidels.

He is also unacquainted with the fact that one eighth of Muslim charity - zakat - must go, according to Islamic law, to jihadists fighting in Allah's cause: terrorists, killers of Christians in the Middle East, Hamas, al-Qaeda-linked groups and other such nice company.

The Muslim website Mission Islam clarifies it:

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.

Which explains why one of the world’s largest and most influential Islamic charities, the Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), much loved by clueless Prince Charles and given tens of millions of dollars by the European Union, the United Nations and Western governments, is, according to an extensive amount of evidence gathered and recently published by the Gatestone Institute, “an extremist organization with a pro-terror agenda":

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.

These include Hamas, al-Qaeda, terrorists in Chechnya, and other terror and Muslim Brotherhood groups in various parts of the world.

But Tim is adamant that Islam represents traditional English values worth rediscovering. What he writes next makes you think of a borderline case of a person living in a parallel universe:

Much is written about the need for Muslims to integrate better into English society, although I'm sure 99 per cent of them already do [they integrate even better into English prisons]. But I hope they retain as much of their religious identity as possible – it is vastly superior to the materialist, secular mess that they're being compelled to become a part of. [I'm really curious to know who compels them: it must be the invisible man, because I've never seen such a person or persons.]

...But its [sic] precisely because I'm a traditionalist that I look at Islam and see much to admire – ordered, sensitive to the sacred, civilised.

I suppose that it's because Islam is so civilised that Muslim countries are among the poorest, most violent, most illiterate, inhumane, politically unstable and backward countries in the world, and the people living there can't wait to leave those places to come and inhabit our materialist mess.