Taqiyya Trials in Europe

First published on Raymond Ibrahim site.

By Enza Ferreri



The issue of taqiyya – the religious permission, indeed virtue, of Muslim deception to infidels for the good of Islam – is such a uniquely crucial aspect of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially, like in the West, when the former are a minority and the latter a majority, that there have been at least a couple of trials in Europe revolving around it, one recent and the other current.

In May 2013 there was a legal case in Italy in which a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khalid Chaouki, a Moroccan Muslim immigrant to Italy and now MP, sued another Moroccan immigrant, Souad Sbai, a woman journalist and former Italian MP who had accused him of practicing taqiyya when he was saying that he had renounced the Brotherhood while in fact he still ’shared its goals and ideas of dangerous, extreme Islam’. He lost the case.

In Britain, in the last few days of 2013 Tim Burton, the Radio Officer of the newly-formed Liberty GB, an outspoken counterjihad, pro-Western and Christian civilisation party, got into trouble.

I have to declare an interest in the matter since I am the party’s Press Officer. Liberty GB has some similarities to Holland’s Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, although in no way, having started as recently as March 2013, it’s as yet so popular. We are running in the coming elections for the European Parliament in May.

Tim Burton has been charged by the Police with racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets and is soon due to appear in court.

At this point I must introduce the individual he tweeted about, a prominent albeit colourful Muslim whom Tim called ‘a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist’ on Twitter. He is Fiyaz Mujhal, founder and director of Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), an organisation that acts like a sort of helpline for the victims of ‘Islamophobia’ and in so doing monitors the entity of what it must consider a grave social problem.

If you are looking for a balanced assessment of the impact of Muslim crime, violence, stealth jihad and terrorism on British society you will not find it on Tell MAMA’s literature or website. But you’ll see plenty of examples of ‘hate’ towards Muslims, a great number of which in the form of films, books, political campaigns and, of course, ‘cyber harassment’, ‘cyber bullying’, ‘cyber abuse’, ‘cyber incitement’, ‘cyber threats’, ‘cyber stalking’, or ‘cyber hate’ – which is what got Tim in a legal jam.

Tell MAMA and the other organisation founded by Mr Mujhal, Faith Matters, had been successful in their demand that the UK Home Office ban Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from entering the country.

The group has a Working Definition of Anti-Muslim Prejudice that includes ‘insults or attacks against Islam’, of which it’s safe to assume well-documented criticisms will be seen as examples. It is also good at crafting new expressions like ‘Anti-Muslim Cultural Racism’, which is Liberty GB’s sin in Tell MAMA’s eyes, as it describes us as ‘guilty of racialising Muslims’. How somebody can achieve such a feat is anyones’s guess.

In its ardour to chastise Liberty GB, Tell MAMA says something which goes beyond matters of opinion and is factually wrong: ’Halal slaughter and meat would also be banned (but no mention of kosher)’. We do object to kosher too and we say it clearly.

What prompted Tim Burton to label Mr Mujhal on Twitter “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqqiyya-artist” and “a lying Muslim scumbag” were some revelations appeared in The Daily Telegraph. In the wake of the beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby in a London street by two jihadists crying “Allahu Akbar” and giving the Quran as their motive in May of last year, Mr Mujhal in June reported

“a wave of attacks, harassment, and hate-filled speech against Muslims … an unprecedented number of incidents”, including “a rise in street harassment of Muslims – unprovoked, opportunistic attacks from strangers as Muslims go about their lives”.

He added: “Over the past week or so, these sorts of hate crimes have noticeably increased in number and, in many instances, become more extreme.

“The scale of the backlash is astounding … there has been a massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice. A sense of endemic fear has gripped Muslim communities.”

The media, especially the BBC, have accepted the claims without question. A presenter on Radio 4’s influential Today programme stated that attacks on Muslims were now “on a very serious scale”.

Talk of a “massive anti-Muslim backlash” has become routine. And it is that figure issued by Tell Mama – of, to date, 212 “anti-Muslim incidents” since the Woolwich murder – which has formed the basis of nearly all this reporting.

But when journalist Andrew Gilligan investigated a bit further, it turned out that 57 per cent of the 212 reports referred to activity occurring just online, like postings on Twitter and Facebook, a further 16 per cent of the 212 reports had not been verified and not all the online abuse even originated in Britain.

Contrary to Tell MAMA’s claims of a climate of violence, only 17 of the 212 incidents, 8 per cent, involved the physical targeting of people and there were no attacks on anyone serious enough to require medical treatment.

The organisation has received a total of £375,000 from the UK government. But as a consequence of these revelations and even previous discoveries of discrepancies between its figures and police official figures – showing Tell MAMA’s inflated rates of and increase in anti-Muslim crimes – it had its public funding discontinued.

This hasn’t stopped its activity, though:

Mujhal asserted that tougher sentences were needed to tackle Islamophobic crime, noting that the guidelines by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to monitor social media were “not fit for purpose”.

“They raised the bar of prosecution significantly.

“Now unless there is a direct threat to somebody on Twitter or Facebook, the CPS will not prosecute. The CPS is just plainly out of sync with reality.

“We also need more robust sentencing. In one case, a pig’s head was left outside a mosque and the perpetrator came away with a community sentence.

Perhaps the lawsuit against Tim Burton is part of this campaign which seems apparently to target in particular social media.

Liberty GB is trying to make taqiyya the keystone of this trial. Given the special position of taqiyya in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially in non-Muslim-majority countries, if we, by making this case public, manage to make the British and Western people understand the meaning and nature of taqiyya, we will have managed to make them understand the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it.

The Western public has been misled about Islam and believes that the ‘religion of peace’ is fundamentally similar to Christianity in its ethical outlook. Replace God with Allah, Jesus with Muhammad, and you still have the same moral commandments: love your enemies, be benevolent towards non-Muslims, and thou shall not lie or give false testimony. If the authority of a court can establish that taqiyya was indeed practised, Westerners can start to see that lying to them is not only allowed but encouraged by Islam as one of the means of submitting them to it, which is the final goal. As a consequence of this, people in the West may gradually become more and more reluctant to accept everything that Muslims say about Islam and may begin to doubt all the distortions they are currently fed.

One issue that we intend to bring to public attention is this: how can a Muslim’s swearing on the Quran in court be accepted as declaration of the truthfulness of his testimony when the very book he is swearing on gives him divine permission to lie?

Green Taxes Cause Energy Prices Hikes

No politician or mainstream media outlet is saying why shale gas from fracking may not reduce, as it should, consumers' utility bills.

The reason why energy bills in Britain are so high and will continue to soar is largely the ever-increasing cost of that “green energy” imposed to us by the Climate Change Act of 2008, pushed through Parliament by Ed Miliband, then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who recently proposed to halt price hikes made inevitable by his own policies.

Week after week we saw on the panel of Question Time, on BBC1, one or another Labour politician accusing the UK's "big six" (or seven) energy companies of increasing their bills and blaming the coalition government for letting them get away with it.

Nobody can say that the Labour Party is incapable of the most incredible hypocrisy. This is why UK electricity prices are so high:

Tony Blair's Labour government introduced in 2002 the Renewable Obligations Order. This system obliges companies supplying electricity to purchase an annually increasing proportion of their electricity from so-called green or renewable (non-fossil) sources. This means they have to pay inflated prices, which they pass on to their customers through their electricity bills.

Blair announced in May 2002 plans to meet Britain's Kyoto and EU targets, and in March 2003 the government published an Energy White Paper on the UK's future energy strategy. In its Section 4.7 it says explicitly:

We have introduced a Renewables Obligation for England and Wales in April 2002. This will incentivise generators to supply progressively higher levels of renewable energy over time. The cost is met through higher prices to consumers. By 2010, it is estimated that this support and Climate Change Levy (CCL) exemption will be worth around £1 billion a year to the UK renewables industry. [Emphases added]

The same White Paper estimated that meeting the carbon reduction targets would increase household energy bills by up to 15%.

The reason for this is that the renewables are very expensive, and in particular the offshore wind farms on which both the previous and this government are so keen are the most costly of all fuel sources.

As investigative journalist Christopher Booker righty says:

Politicians are complaining about rises in fuel bills that are largely the result of their own actions.

If you exaggeratedly tax companies in the pursuit of a "green energy" policy that follows the diktats of a discredited, if not outright refuted, theory like AGW (anthropogenic global warming), the inevitable result is higher prices for households and, in extreme cases, fuel poverty.

The coalition government is not much better than its socialist predecessor.

A few months ago SSE, one of the UK's six biggest energy companies, increased its prices by a further 8 per cent, and tried to explain that what made that price hike inevitable was the 13 per cent rise in the company's costs, two-thirds of which were due to “green” taxes and the soaring cost of connecting new wind farms to the grid.

While SSE called for a curb on these green levies – such as the crazy “carbon tax”, designed eventually to double the cost of electricity from fossil fuels, which still supply 70 per cent of our needs – the only official response was a fatuous call from our energy minister, Michael Fallon, for consumers to boycott SSE. Mr Fallon was oblivious to the fact that his Government’s policies will soon force all other energy companies to follow suit.

In the meantime, a new brand of criminals have emerged: the "energy thieves", utility clients who tamper with meters to steal their gas and electricity and in the process put the lives of neighbours at risk. Refusing to pay also means that their costs are passed on to honest customers.

This is exactly the scenario described by Milton Friedman as incentives for immoral behaviour brought about by bad laws, of which our Climate Change Act is a perfect example.

Photo of the Romney Marsh Wind Farm, on the Kent/East Sussex border, in England, courtesy of the website Britain Gallery

Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller Are still Fighting Back against Their Ban: Help Them



The 25 June 2013 is a significant date not only in the history of the counterjihad movement but also in the history of freedom of speech in one of the countries that most contributed to its establishment: Britain.

That is the date on the letter to Robert Spencer announcing the UK Home Secretary Theresa May's decision that he should

be excluded from the United Kingdom on the grounds that your presence here is not conducive to the public good...

The Home Secretary notes that you are the founder of the blog Jihad Watch (a site widely criticized for being Islamophobic). You co-founded the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, both of which have been described as anti-Muslim hate groups.

So those were the reasons given for Spencer's and fellow founder of American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and SIOA Pamela Geller's ban.

As Robert Spencer put it at the time:

Muhammad al-Arifi, who has advocated Jew-hatred, wife-beating, and jihad violence, entered the U.K. recently with no difficulty. In not allowing us into the country solely because of our true and accurate statements about Islam, the British government is behaving like a de facto Islamic state. The nation that gave the world the Magna Carta is dead.

Al-Arifi is just one of the many Islamists admitted to Britain, in this case just a few days before Spencer's ban. The interesting thing about him is that he's the author of these words:

Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer. Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight.

Robert Spencer, according to the Home Office, instead wrote this:

...it [Islam] is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society because media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.

The grammatically and logically confused quotation is unlikely to be literal, as anyone who's read Robert's prose will easily realize. Nevertheless, what distinguishes the latter extract from the one immediately above? They both equate Islam with war against infidels, but one - Al-Arifi's - approvingly, and the other - Spencer's - disapprovingly:

[I]t is perfectly acceptable to speak about jihad violence in the UK, as long as you’re for it. If you oppose it, watch out...

This is even more true in view of the fact that the purpose of the two anti-jihad campaigners' visit to Britain was to lay a wreath at a memorial for British soldier Lee Rigby - murdered by two jihadists on a London street on 22 May - on Armed Forces Day, 29 June.

Immediately after the ban, The British Society For Freedom of Speech published the online petition Allow Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer to Speak in UK, which has so far collected almost 10,000 signatures, including mine.

On 2nd July, Spencer and Geller fought back with an appeal against their ban and instructed lawyers in the UK.

A couple of weeks ago, two judges decided to uphold the Government’s exclusion on Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller from the UK.

But that's not the end of it. A fund has been established to help the lawsuit against the entry ban.

They know that it’s not going to be easy:

The entire British government and media elite is determined to appease Islamic supremacists and discredit and silence the defenders of freedom. We will have to hire a top British legal team that can navigate through all the roadblocks and obstacles that the Home Office puts up.

It’s going to cost us upwards of $25,000.

So, please help them fight the ban: donate via Paypal to americanfreedomdefense@aol.com .

Nazis Ordered: Remove All Christian Crosses and Spread Paganism

I've shown in the first and second articles of this series - concluding with the present article - that Hitler was neopagan and anti-Christian and that the new pagan religions that developed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s gave Nazism part of its ideological foundations.

It is only to be expected, then, that the Hitler regime tried to tear German society away from Christianity and return it to pagan beliefs. While Hitler made public proclamations that he would protect Christianity in order to be acceptable to the German people who were in their majority Christian, his recorded private statements and his actions tell a very different story.

Many absurd, unbelievable claims about Hitler's presumed Christianity have been made and, in this day and age when anything about Christianity, even the most preposterous assertion, as long as it's bad of course, is accepted as undisputable fact, Michael Coren has produced an excellent book, relatively short and easy to read, which I recommend to everybody who is interested in the truth. It is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) . In it he says:

In January 1942, the New York Times, certainly not now and not really even then a particular friend of Christianity, published a thirty-point program listing the central dogmas of the National Reich Church, a body established by the Nazis to replace Christianity and to eliminate Christian ideas from the next generation of young Germans. It's significant that the Times published this, because if such an internationally important newspaper was aware of Nazism's hatred of Christianity, we can be sure it was a known and accepted fact elsewhere.

This is the final statement of the program of dogmas:

On the day of the foundation of the National Reich Church the Christian cross shall be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels inside the frontiers of the Reich and its colonies and will be replaced by the symbol of invincible Germany - the swastika.

And this is from another source that, like the NYT, can be accused of anything but conservative, pro-Christian bias, Wikipedia:

In power, the Hitler regime conducted a protracted Struggle with the Churches. Hitler moved to eliminate political Catholicism, while agreeing a Reich concordat with the Holy See which promised autonomy for the Catholic Church in Germany. Hitler then routinely violated the treaty, moved to close all Catholic organisations that weren't strictly religious, and permitted a persecution of the Catholic Church... He angered the churches by appointing the neo-pagan Alfred Rosenberg as official Nazi ideologist, and generally permitted or encouraged anti-church radicals such as Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann to conduct their persecutions of the churches.

Hitler was a Social Darwinist, and as such he believed that the universe is governed by the struggle between weak and strong, ideas that ran counter to Christianity, then prevailing in Germany.

The Nazis promoted paganism before and especially after coming to power in 1933.

Soon after coming to power they replaced Christian holidays and festivals with pagan ones such as "The Day of the Summer Solstice" and "The Day of the Winter Solstice". Wedding ceremonies were celebrated according to neo-pagan rites:

"After the bridal couple's exchange of rings, the votive warden pronounces the blessing: Mother Earth, which lovingly bears us all, and Father Sky, who blesses us with his light and his weather, and all the beneficent powers of the air, may they rule over you until your destiny is fulfilled." [Once again, we see the evidence of the pagan: the Co-Rulership of the god and goddess are recognized, and once again, the creature is worshipped rather than the Creator.]

Crucifixes were gradually removed from hospitals and schools. Just as it's happening in our days.

Schools were massively targeted as part of a strategy to deChristianize the young. In 1935, Christian prayers in schools were stopped, and from 1941 onwards all lessons concerning Christianity were banned for all students over 14. Schoolchildren were taught what the Nazis called the "glorious pre-Christian German history".

The Nazi Teachers Association actively discouraged its members from taking religious education, and many teachers of religious studies (who were all required to be licensed by the state) inculcated neo-paganism into their pupils. Later on, teachers were explicitly and totally forbidden to attend voluntary religion classes organized by the Catholic Church.

The Nazis even used former Christian religious facilities, seized by the government, as schools where students were trained in male supremacist ideology, through the works of homosexual theorists like Otto Weininger.

Rites and ceremonies from Germany's pagan past were held all over the country. All Nazi meetings and rallies, under the shadow of flaming torches and where slogans full of hate and violence were shouted, were following pagan ceremonies undistinguishable from those held thousands of years before at pagan temples and altars.

The Nazis also used art to re-awaken paganism, using ancient Greek concepts and symbols and imitating Greek statues, showing strong men and women of the Aryan race. Hitler admired the Spartan model and dreamed of a superior race created by eugenics.

Laurence Rees, the contemporary British historian who wrote, directed and produced many BBC series and documentaries on the Second World War and in particular on Nazism, in his book (also on DVD) The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) described the thrust of Hitler's semi-autobiographical work Mein Kampf (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) as "bleak nihilism" revealing a cold universe with no moral structure other than the fight between different people for supremacy:

What's missing from Mein Kampf, and this is a fact that has not received the acknowledgement it should—is any emphasis on Christianity.

And this despite the fact that Germany, Rees noted, had been Christian for a thousand years. So, he concluded:

The most coherent reading of Mein Kampf is that whilst Hitler was prepared to believe in an initial creator God, he did not accept the conventional Christian vision of heaven and hell, nor the survival of an individual "soul"... we are animals and just like animals we face the choice of destroying or being destroyed.

Hitler believed much more in, and was much more influenced by, Charles Darwin than Jesus Christ.

It's not entirely surprising that today, like in Hitler's day, we witness a return to paganism in conjunction to a return to strong nationalist sentiments. We should be wary of nationalism, which is not bad per se at all, in fact can be a positive force, but taken to extremes can become very irrational and dangerous, as indeed Hitler's example illustrates.

The danger of a return to values and ideas espoused by the Nazis is real, but doesn’t come so much from the direction of the usual suspects, “Islamophobic”, neo-Nazi groups, as from a much more mainstream, Leftist direction. The threat has two sources: one is the rise of Islam in the West – aided and abetted by the Left - with its well-known ideological and historical links to Nazism and anti-Semitism. The second source is less well-known. Recent historical, in-depth and ground-breaking research, thanks to the opening of national archives - previously closed to the public - after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, has thrown an entirely new light on what nurtured Nazi ideology. We already knew that Hitler and Nazism were neo-pagan and anti-Christian (despite what the Left says), but books like Karla Poewe's New Religions and the Nazis (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK), Gene Edward Veith's Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) and others go much further than that.

Regarding Poewe's work, which took 10 years of painstaking historical research, I can only agree with this review:

Inevitably claims that deny that Nazism was rooted in Christianity draw fire. As a scholar in modern and early modern Europe at the University of Victoria, I affirm this book as extremely well researched. The onus is on those who would disprove its assertions to do more thorough research--a daunting challenge indeed. The Nazis were as hostile to Christianity as to Judaism. The preparation for the ascendency of National Socialism provided by the advocates of new religions like Jacob Wilhelm Hauer is a sobering reality that needs to be understood more widely today.

It's an eerie feeling to recognise that Nazis, as I showed in the previous two article of this series, shared our days’ most cherished and growing ideas, from the normalisation of homosexuality to the decadence of the family, from the rise and destigmatisation of illegitimacy to the pantheism and anti-human feelings of environmentalism.


Photo by Marion Doss (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).

The New Pagan Religions that Built Nazism

This is the second article of a series of three.

There are many variations within neopaganism, deriving from the fact that it collects a large number of geographically diverse faiths with some common threads, but all neopagans agree on one crucial point: Christianity must be, if it is not already, defeated.

As showed in the first article of this series, Hitler's Neopaganism and Anti-Christianity, and in anthropologist and historian Karla Poewe's book New Religions and the Nazis (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , being neopagan in the 1920s and 1930s was deeply linked to opposition to the Jewish-Christian tradition.

The book reveals a major, so far neglected, element of Nazi history: the contribution of the so-called new religions, defined as non-established religions, to the emergence of Nazi ideology in the twenties and thirties in Germany.

This book is not to be overlooked or underestimated because it's the result of a 10-year ground-breaking research in the German Federal Archives in Berlin and Koblenz. It was researched from original documents, letters and unpublished papers, including the SS personnel files held in the German Federal Archives.

The fall of the Berlin Wall gave Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis' author, access to the archives of the Berlin Mission Society. In 1995, while working in these archives, she discovered a great amount of material regarding conflicts between members of the Berlin Mission, a Christian missionary society, and the Nazis.

Karla Poewe is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Calgary, in Canada, and Adjunct Research Professor at Liverpool Hope University, in England. She was interviewed by the Calgary Herald after her book came out:

"The new religions that developed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s ushered in National Socialism and nurtured it," Poewe said.

"There were constant battles in the 1920s between Christians and the members of these new religions, because they identified Christianity as a kind of Jewish imperialism. They wanted nothing to do with it, so they came up with their own version. They tried to build a genuine German religion."

Because the Nazis were "on the far right," as a nationalist movement, they tend to be misinterpreted as a more extreme version of Christian conservatism. But "they weren't trying to conserve anything," Poewe said. They were rather extreme radicals, trying to overthrow completely the 1,000-year tradition of German Christianity -- replacing the cross with the swastika.

"There's a big mistake in identifying National Socialism as a Christian movement," Poewe said.

"There was a Deutsche Christen movement, but they weren't Christian at all. They rejected the Old Testament, Jesus had to be an Aryan, they were hostile to St. Paul, and they emphasized (the Gospel of) St. Mark. They remained in the church, but rejected everything Christian like the Trinity. Christ was at best a good philosopher." [Emphases added]

Poewe researched the former German missionary Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who in the 1920s founded the German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung or DGB), mixing Nordic and Hindu religions with Germanic idealistic philosophy. This new religion was intended to express the essence of National Socialism and the New German Man, as found in the the SS.

We have to consider the state of major turmoil into which the First World War threw Germany. The loss of the war and and the punitive, draconian conditions of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany produced general discontent and resentment. Therefore Germans, and in particular intellectuals, took political, ideological and religious matters into their hands with the purpose of achieving national regeneration.

By fusing politics, religion, theology, Indo-Aryan metaphysics and Darwinian theory they intended to create a new, genuinely German, pagan-faith-based political movement: that was National Socialism.

Hauer, founder of the DGB,

is particularly interesting, Poewe said, because he sought the pagan roots of German religion in Hinduism. In pre-history, the Aryans who invaded northern India were the same race as those who later became Germans. And Hauer found the warrior universe of the Bhagavad Gita particularly inspiring -- "it fed him the kind of moral relativism he sought," Poewe said.

"The rejection of Christianity was due to the fact that it is universal, and they wanted something local" -- the Volkisch (folk) phenomenon. "They rejected the universalist. They wanted something with a historical-genetic-racial link to them," Poewe said.

"They also rejected Christian morality. They couldn't stand the Ten Commandments. They were totally against any categorical or timeless morality. They wanted something opportunistic, something that changed with the human circumstances." [Emphasis added]

Sounds familiar. Where have I heard this before? There are no moral absolutes, anything goes, we just want to be happy, we indeed have a right to be happy: that's all there is to ethics. It sounds very, very modern. It's today's prevailing ethos, complete with the jettisoning of Christianity.

Add to that our own revival of eugenics, wide use of science in reproduction and epidemic of abortions, and Nazism looks more and more like a pioneering movement.

And Christian universalism, mentioned in the quotation, is indeed a profound antidote to racism, now as in Hitler's time.

Unsurprisingly, Poewe observed that former Nazis were prominent in the German New Age movement of the 1970s.

The Nazi movement "took elements from the Christian religion, but it didn't mean they were Christian. They also took things from Hinduism, from Buddhism -- Tibetan Buddhism was particularly popular among the SS. From this they concocted a mythology that gave them a picture of the world that appealed to them. They wrote about it, novels, plays, poetry. It was very political, in some ways pantheistic."

And here's another element of great modernity in Nazism:

Hauer's DGB bunde shared with National Socialism a tendency toward homoerotism. Hauer himself was permissibly heterosexual, but "homosexuality was very tolerated in these youth movements, and a high percentage of the SA and SS were homosexual or bisexual. People like to think that because Adolf Hitler murdered (SA leader) Ernst Rohm, who was homosexual, he was repressive of homosexuality. But that wasn't the case. It's a myth to think the Nazi movement was against homosexuality. Far from it; it wasn't sexually repressive at all," Poewe said. [Emphasis added]

It all fits nicely.

Third part tomorrow.


About the photo: it is a visual demonstration of the links between paganism and Nazism, as described in Nicholas Clarke's book Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

Homosexuals Are a Law Unto Themselves

In Redbridge, a London suburb, police have been visiting designated 'Public Sex Environments' (or 'PSEs', including public parks) advising male homosexuals of the risks of indulging in public sex, lest some "homophobic" crime is committed.

Another politically correct nicety in the headline of the newspaper article linked to above, beside "homophobic crime", is "outdoor sex spots", similar to picnic spots or panoramic places.

The same article says that public sex is illegal, but there's no suggestion of police arresting the exhibitionists or telling them to do their dirty business at home - which would also be safer for them, without the taxpayers' having to pay the police for this extra, unnecessary work.

And apparently this is happening all over the country, from Scotland to leafy Surrey, the worst affected county. There are now hundreds of public spaces unofficially legitimised by the police as 'Public Sex Environments'.

George Whale of Liberty GB has written a very good article on this, "Dirty Exhibitionists and the Police Who Give Them Tea and Biscuits".

When I saw the title, I thought the tea and biscuits were metaphorical but, lo and behold, they are as literal and concrete as you and me:

This from the Surrey Comet:

"Illicit thrill-seekers on the look-out for sex at cruising and dogging spots in Surrey have been provided with £120 worth of tea and biscuits by Surrey Police. Surrey Police admitted providing hot beverages and snacks between May and July at the Hog's Back Cafe, a well known cruising spot between Guildford and Farnham.

"It is believed neighbourhood officers and the lesbian and gay liaison officer (LAGLO) have also gone down to the woods to have a chat with people using a 'dogging' site at Wisley Gardens just off the A3 near Cobham."

Why the police do nothing is explained by the kind of politically protected people who are most likely to indulge in these activities:

Meanwhile in Scotland:

"A horrified East Kilbride mum is warning parents to be aware after her children witnessed an unsavoury incident at a local beauty spot.

"The Westwood woman, who did not wish to be named, told the News her 15-year-old son spotted two male pensioners involved in a sex act in the bird hide at Cathkin Marsh.

"Shockingly, the recent incident at the 'dogging' hotspot reportedly took place in the middle of the afternoon."

This is from the article about Redbridge linked to above:

Pc Anton Brown, an LGBT liaison officer for Redbridge, said: “Thefts, robberies, rape and other violent assaults take place at these locations and victims are scared to report them as they do not want to be ‘outed’. They are often men who have sex with men but don’t necessarily identify as being gay.”

That a double standard is applied - there is a law for homosexuals and a law for everybody else - is obvious from this:

Every morning before opening his cafe on Ockham Common in Surrey, Stephen Bungay collects a bin-bag full of debris from outside his kiosk including sex toys and latex gloves. He says that the rangers from Surrey Wildlife pursue dog-walkers who fail to pick up dog-mess, but he has never seen them ask a cruiser to pick up their condoms.

In an email George says: "When did public spaces where people might stroll with their dogs or kids become officially designated 'Public Sex Environments'? And how do we get these politically correct plods to do their sodding job?"

The first is a rhetorical question. In fact there is no legal designation of 'Public Sex Environments'. They are just well known, established areas where individuals meet for sex. There are even police detailed guidelines on how to manage and police PSEs.

This is the umpteenth example of how the law is twisted to accommodate homosexuals, Muslims and all other groups that are by definition "victims".

Hitler's Neopaganism and Anti-Christianity

The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things...

The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity... And that's why someday its structure will collapse... The only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little...

Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery...

I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors - but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.

Who said this? It sounds very much like Richard Dawkins, with its reference to evolution and science ("When understanding of the universe has become widespread") as antithetical forces to Christianity, not to mention its prediction of the latter's death.

The literary style isn't quite his, though. Sounds more baroque and archaic.

In fact it was said between 1941 and 1944, by a certain Adolf Hitler, and is found in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

One of the myriad unfounded accusations levelled at Christianity these days is the claim that Hitler was a Christian. The reality is that he was not a Christian at all, but very close to paganism.

Paganism is a generic umbrella term that encompasses various and different beliefs of pre-Christian European peoples, from classical Roman and Greek to Norse and Germanic.

Although Europe's paganism was replaced by Christianity, it did not die. In the 16th and 17th centuries some European thinkers began to rediscover paganism.

To its rebirth contributed in particular the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the movement of thought whose political result was the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries inspired by the Jakobin ideology made use of signs of pagan mythology.

The Jacobins, leaders of "The Terror", the bloodiest period of the French Revolution, were influenced by neopaganism and hated Christianity. Before Nazism, they first embodied the connections between neopagan ideas and violence.

They propagated a widespread rejection of Christianity, and establiahed a new "religion of reason", based on pagan symbols rather than Christianity.

Neopaganism also played a big role in 20th-century violent ideologies like Nazism and fascism. The American historian Gene Edward Veith, in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , defined fascism thus:

Fascism is the modern world's nostalgia for paganism. It is a sophisticated culture's revolt against God.

From an early age Adolf Hitler had a lifelong passion for pagan legends, which explains his obsession with Richard Wagner's music, with its "only grandiose themes" of "gods and heroes". Wagner's operas are said to have had a profound, almost religious effect on the Fuhrer.

Not only Hitler, but also many of his associates were fascinated by the history and mythology of the German Volk, which helped shape the political activities of these men.

The legends of German mythology, substantially the same as the Norse ones, are completely pagan and pessimistic in nature. The Earth and Heaven were destined to be utterly destroyed by the Frost Giants, in a final great battle between Good and Evil, in which Evil was predestined to win and the whole of creation to be destroyed. The only ray of light in all this darkness was the idea that dying a heroic death would make everything else pale into insignificance. This notion of heroism and fighting to the death against all odds was very congruous with the fanatic loyalty wanted by Hitler and Himmler.

Wagner held anti-Semitic views, and took great pride in being a member of the "German race" and in his German ancestry. He wrote that he considered himself "the most German of the Germans".

Head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, who studied books on Germanic lore, mysticism, and secret societies, came to regard Hitler as a god, another sign of non-Christian, pagan religiosity.

The secret initiation ceremonies of the SS were dominated by references to the ancient Germanic sagas. The Nazi Party was called by Hermann Esser "an association of visionaries, worshippers of Wotan", a Germanic god.

Presenting a similarity to today's environmentalism with its pantheistic streak were Himmler's proclamations of the sacred status of the German lands and peoples as a faith. He used ancient German and Nordic mythology as a source of the SS symbols, oaths and rituals. The rooms of their secret meetings were decorated with runes, prehistoric signs supposed to give the power of prophecy to anyone who could read them. The very symbol of the Schutzstaffel, twin twisted lightning bolts to indicate SS, is a runic symbol.

Initially Himmler wanted German women to adopt the same moral code of the heroines of ancient German legends, although he later changed his view to encourage them to have as many children as possible, whether they were married or not. He and Hitler had considered abolishing the "criminal institution of the Christian Church known as marriage", but realised that Germans were not yet ready for such a radical idea. How happy these supreme Nazi leaders would be if they could see what is happening now in our society.

As a ceremony for illegitimate children Himmler created a "secular christening", called an "SS name-giving", in which the child was wrapped in a blanket covered with embroidered swastikas and runes and set before an altar, with the parents laying their hands on him and solemnly speaking his name. For their birthdays these children received by the SS a gift of candles, manufactured at no charge by the prisoners at Dachau.

Himmler's mystical zeal exasperated even Hitler sometimes, although only temporarily and he never tried to rein it in. Hitler wrote:

What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start that all over again. We might as well have stayed with the church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave ...

And about Himmler's archeological excavations:

Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts ... All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. Instead Himmler is making a great fuss about it all. The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these revelations.

This is the first article of a series of 3. To be continued tomorrow.


Photo by surfstyle (Creative Commons CC BY 2.0).

Has Science Eliminated God?

Certainty is a feeling, an emotion. Reason, on the other hand, gives rise to doubts and uncertainties.

Science is rational, and exactly for that reason it is uncertain, which is what many people fail to appreciate. A widespread myth is that reason brings about - and knowledge means - certainty.

This is what causes all the confusions of the kind that surrounded vaccines and autism in Britain a few years ago, for example, and the general confusions about probability and risk: what causes them is the fact that people expect certainties from science. Instead, in reality science is made up of theories and hypotheses, which may be refuted now, or temporarily confirmed until they are refuted and replaced by a better theory later. That's how science progresses.

Reason can be used to arrive at certainties, but not at pieces of knowledge. This is the case when reason is used in logic, but only because in logical deductions we never arrive at new knowledge.

It is certain that, in a logical deduction, if the premise is true the conclusion is always true, but only because the conclusion does not say anything which was not already contained in the premise. A very simple example is: "If A and B are both true, then A is true".

The logical conclusion makes what was already contained in the premise explicit, that's why, if the latter is true (or better, well founded), so is the former. But this process does not originate new knowledge. It is a process of transformation of one statement into another, not of discovery.

This is why non-philosopher atheists like Richard Dawkins generate confusion among their followers: because they themselves are confused in the first place.

To identify science with rationality, although correct - even if we must add that science is only one among the various rational activities of the human intellect, not the only one as Dawkins et al seem to believe, and a religion like Christianity, for example, is another -, condemns science to perpetual uncertainty.

Furthermore, science does not establish the limits of rationality, but only those of possibility. In other words, what science does is to say: "This is not possible because it goes against the laws of nature". But it doesn't tell you, within the multiple, mutually-contradicting possibilities, which is the true one.

It must remain understood, however, that the best scientific theory we have could be wrong and one day refuted.

But even presuming that it won't be, science - both as a whole and as single scientific theories - rules out, as I was saying, physical (or empirical) impossibilities, namely the phenomena that go counter to the laws of nature (i.e. the laws of science), but among the various remaining possibilities cannot tell you which is the true one.

That's why saying that science has eliminated God (a creator of everything) is absurd. For as long as a creator of everything remains compatible with the laws of nature, as it has always been and it is even more now that the Big Bang theory presumes a period preceding the birth of the universe in which laws of nature did not exist, the hypothesis of God as creator is a possibility. Science can ony tell you that it is possible, and not if it's true or not.

Atheists, and not only the people that Dawkins managed to mesmerise but the British zoologist himself, don't seem to properly grasp what they are saying. And I'm not referring to God or religion, but to science: they misunderstand science itself.

I am willing to admit that Dawkins is aware of many of the things I said, that's why he always uses qualifiers like "almost certainly" or "probably" when he says that God doesn't exist or that science leads to that denial. However, he doesn't act or write as if he had any doubts at all. And, as I said at the beginning, certainty is an emotional state, not the product of rational thought.

Who knows, maybe science, born out of Christianity, with the first scientists wishing to understand God's work - the creation - through it, after a period in which it's been dominated by naturalism (only nature exists) aka materialism (only matter exists), will turn out to be just the way in which in the end humanity arrives at God, which was science founders' original intention.

Photo "Sunset" courtesy of the website Human Health and Animal Ethics

Nothing Is Wrong with Satanism, You Bigot

We've gone full circle now.

First, Christianity was the main spiritual force of the West, so much so that the latter was known as Christendom.

Then, atheism prevailed, followed by paganism, and now it looks like Satanism is being recognised as a legitimate... what? Religion? Faith? Spiritual orientation, which anyone is entitled to practice as much as a sexual one?

And why not? After all, why should we discriminate? Discrimination is the last, or one of the last, remaining sins. And this applies to every sense of the word, good as well as bad, as in "taste discrimination" to indicate refinement, or in "discrimination between right and wrong". The only exception is reverse discrimination, which is always a virtue because it is meant to fight discrimination - if it sounds absurd it's because it is.

Satan worshipers want 7-foot-tall statue of devil put at Oklahoma state Capitol, headlines the UK's Daily Mail:

• The New York-based Satanic Temple formally submitted its application to a panel that oversees the Capitol grounds
• The application includes an artist's rendering of Satan as Baphomet, a goat-headed figure with horns, wings and a long beard
• They want it to sit where a Ten Commandments monument sat in 2012
• In the rendering, Satan is sitting in a pentagram-adorned throne with smiling children next to him.

This satanic group claimed that, if the Ten Commandments could have a monument, so should their idol figure. Thinking otherwise would be discrimination. Now, tell me: how can anybody these days object to such an argument?

It's the same line of reasoning that led to the passing of homomarriage laws in various countries: if people of different sex can get married, why discriminate against same-sex couples?

And, if the West is now post-Christian, why should we give Christianity a special place, especially after the influx of so many cultural enrichers who adhere to different religions, sometimes having a moral code directly opposite to our own - Islam springs to mind -, which is derived from Christianity but people have forgotten where it comes from and think it arose from nothing, the same as the universe, life and cosnciousness? We are used, by now, to the idea that something comes from nothing: that this is so counter-evidential, that nobody has ever experienced, witnessed this type of occurrence doesn't trouble our "scientific-minded" atheists half as much as the idea of a creator of all that exists.

'The statue will also have a functional purpose as a chair where people of all ages may sit on the lap of Satan for inspiration and contemplation.'

The Satanic Temple maintains that the Oklahoma Legislature's decision to authorize a privately funded Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol opened the door for its statue.

The Ten Commandments monument was placed on the north steps of the building in 2012, and the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sued to have it removed.

Perhaps we should have Nelson removed from his column in Trafalgar Square, and demand in his place a statue of Hitler, Stalin or Britain's own serial killer John Christie.

Why the Satanist statue should be allowed, or even considered as it seems to be, but not Hitler's, I doubt that anyone can provide good reasons for, that can be accepted outside of psychiatric hospitals of course.

On its website, the Satanic Temple explains that it 'seeks to separate Religion from Superstition by acknowledging religious belief as a metaphorical framework with which we construct a narrative context for our goals and works.

'Satan stands as the ultimate icon for the selfless revolt against tyranny, free & rational inquiry, and the responsible pursuit of happiness,' the website says.

Exactly. Call a nurse, please.


Photo by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).

First They Came for the Christians and I Didn't Speak Out Because I Wasn't a Christian

I am reproducing the last two paragraphs from Raymond Ibrahim’s fundamental book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK ):

The return of the persecution of Christians under Islam is the most visible aspect of a larger and more dangerous phenomenon: the return of Islam as a global force. The West ignores those being crucified again at its own peril — bringing to memory the words of German pastor Martin Niemoller, who came to understand — but only after being sent to a concentration camp during World War II — what it meant to face a totalitarian ideology hostile to all who reject it:

First they [the Nazis] came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

It may seem relatively peaceful now in Western countries, and we all have a natural tendency to avoid facing problems if we possibly can.

What happens to Christians at the hand of Muslims (the massacres of villages, burning of churches, beheadings, climate of constant fear) in remote parts of the world - even assuming that we somehow got to know about it amidst the silence and dissembling of our media and leaders - doesn't touch us, we think, so we prefer not to be troubled by it.

Even when something closer to home occurs, like the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby by a Muslim jihadist in a London street, or the use of British white girls by Muslim paedophile and sex slave rings, we continue to believe that these incidents are not part of a major trend, and we keep sleeping serenely.

But history has repeatedly shown that we should take the first hints because, if we wait for the macroscopic signs, they may be easily recognisable for a reason: the problem has become so big that we can no longer address it without violence and tragedy.

Muslims Killed 500 Christians in Nigeria

The religion of peace in action in Nigeria.

A quarter of the inhabitants of a village, about 500 Christians, were killed by Muslims. Some Muslim villagers who knew of the premeditated attack left without warning the Christians.

A man in the video says that Christians have not retaliated. He wants the world to know that "Christians never fight with Muslims. All that happens is always Muslims attacking Christians, in some cases Christians defending themselves."

We should be aware that whenever we hear or read, on our media, of "sectarian" violence, if it concerns Muslims and Christians it is not true. Violence is only from one side, and is brutal, as in this case, with children slaughtered and people's heads cut in two.

God Is a Not a Delusion but a Sensible, Rational Hypothesis

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what atheism is or entails. The fact that many - albeit not all - atheists declare that they have no faith or believe in nothing, in itself shows that they have not really taken the time and effort to understand the implications of the position they hold.

The question of God is the question of the origin of things. It is a typical philosophical, and more specifically metaphysical, question.

When Richard Dawkins or people like him compare the idea of God to that of fairies, they are hopefully disingenuous - the alternative being downright stupid.

The concept of God is a necessity in one of the two fundamental explanations of the origin of everything. The other explanation is chance. Fairies do not appear in either.

The question of God is also related to the question of what is the ultimate reality: mind or matter.

Philosophers have debated this issue since the beginning of their profession, answering that it is the former in the case of idealists, or the latter if they are materialists.

The vast majority of classical philosophers throughout the ages, including our time, have rejected materialism and think that mind is the ultimate reality. That doesn't mean that all idealists believe in God - although a great proportion does -, but that a simple materialism as the one espoused by Dawkins (I am referring to him because he is, by his own behaviour, the most vocal and visible of contemporary atheists) is generally found deeply unsatisfactory by those whose profession is to critically analyse common ideas and question what is often accepted unthinkingly.

Dawkins is not a philosopher himself. By training and trade he is a zoologist. But when he talks about religion he steps ouside his scientist's boots and puts on a philosopher's hat. Nothing wrong with that, provided he knows what he's talking about.

The first thing to notice here is how much many people, probably taking their cue from public figures like non-philosophers Peter Atkins, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, have trivialised the issue of belief in God as if it were simply the battle of the old versus the new, the forces of obscurantism v enlightenment, ancient v modern, irrationality v reason, superstition v logic, backwardness v progress, and obviously religion versus science.

The reality is that the battle of ideas surrounding the existence of God has always been present in the history of philosophy, and thinkers have predominantly tended to side with the belief in God.

That Christianity has a solid rational foundation in centuries of philosophical thought is something that - I suspect from the comments they leave in public forums - would surprise many atheists.

That among the greatest philosophers of all time are saints and founders of the Church like St Augustine, St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas might shock them even more.

But let's get back to the question at the beginning of this article. Numerous - I presume the most naive - atheists appear to be convinced that not believing in God does not entail anything, and that it is just the default non-choice - in the same way as their guide and model Dawkins would consider not believing in fairies the default position.

The reality is different.

There are only three possible answers to the question "Does God exist?".

One, the easiest and probably preferred by lazy minds, is to sit on the fence and declare neutrality explicitly or, simply by not engaging with it, implicitly.

The second is to say that the universe (or universes) have an intelligent designer, God.

The third answer, atheism, in denying the second one is by mere logic taking the opposite view. If there is no design, we are left only with chance. If there is no mind, we are left only with matter.

I'll explore these ideas in more detail in other articles. For now, I'm anticipating that the theoretical, non-observational assumptions are necessary and very strong on both sides of the controversy.

There is no default opinion, no path of less resistance. Both stances require faith, and a belief that has many holes in the evidence for it.

The commonly-held opinion that atheism is not a faith - like a religion of its own kind - is totally unfounded.

Rational arguments live on both sides of the fence, not only one. And so do emotional stances or intuitive statements.

And, if anything, the most logically cogent reasons and scientifically powerful evidence seem to be increasingly supporting the belief of a mind creating all that exists. The progress of science, with theoretical constructs in physics that are necessary for explanation but escape observation, on one side, and the practical impossibility of matter, life and consciousness all originating by chance, on the other, far from supporting the atheist belief seems more and more to confirm the theist one.

The Philosopher Who Gave the New Atheists Their Theoretical Foundations Became Convinced that God Exists

British professor Antony Flew wrote over thirty philosophical works which established the foundations for atheism for half a century.

His 1950 paper "Theology and Falsification" was the most reprinted philosophical publication of the 20th century.

In December 2004 Flew announced in a symposium and subsequent video that he had completely changed his view and now, based on scientific evidence, believed that God exists.

In 2007 he wrote the book There Is a God (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , subtitled How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

This is the man without whose ideas the various Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dennett, Wolpert, Stenger, (not to mention Christopher Hitchens and Pat Condell) et al, none of whom is a philosopher, would not have had rational arguments to support their faith: atheism.

So it's not surprising that, when on 9 December 2004 the international journalist agency Associated Press gave the world the news about the British Professor of Philosophy's "conversion" with the headine "Famous Atheist Now Believes in God: One of World's Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, Based on Scientific Evidence", atheists became hysterical.

Roy Abraham Varghese, in his Preface to There Is a God, wrote:

"One atheist Web site tasked a correspondent with giving monthly updates on Flew's falling away from the true faith. Inane insults and juvenile caricatures were common in the freethinking blogosphere. The same people who complained about the Inquisition and witches being burned at the stake were now enjoying a little heresy hunting of their own. The advocates of tolerance were not themselves very tolerant. And, apparently, religious zealots don't have a monopoly on dogmatism, incivility, fanaticism, and paranoia.

"But raging mobs cannot rewrite history. And Flew's position in the history of atheism transcends anything that today's atheists have on offer."

Photo of sea sunset courtesy of the website Human Health and Animal Ethics

Queen Christmas Message Does Not Mention the Plight of Christians

Happy Christmas everyone!

I watched the Queen's 2013 Christmas message on the BBC.

It would have been nice, if she hadn't told two lies, one by action and one by omission.

The former was: "For Christians, as for all people of faith, reflection, meditation and prayer help us to renew ourselves in God's love, as we strive daily to become better people."

It's quite obvious that not in all faiths believers strive to become better people, unless we consider as self-improvement perfectioning suicide-bombing and beheading skills in order to impose one's faith - to be specific, Islam - to the whole infidel world with whatever available means.

And this takes us directly to the lie by omission. Her traditional Christmas message could have been a good opportunity for the Queen to remind her subjects not just in Britain but also in the rest of the Commonwealth that not all Christians are free to celebrate Christmas.

For years now, Christmas has been a time when Christians in many parts of the world - thanks to some faithful of the "religion" mentioned above, in their striving for self-amelioration - are routinely massacred and have to fear for their lives more than ever.

At least 38 Christians have just been killed and 70 wounded in Baghdad by two car bombs, one on Wednesday targeting a Christian market and the other on Christmas Day outside a church, targeting the faithful after a service.

On December 21 in Syria, some of those heroic freedom fighters that Obama and Cameron are so eager to help, anti-Assad "rebels" - otherwise known as bloody, murderous, kill-the-infidels-wherever-you-find-them jihadists - fired multiple mortar shells on a church, killing 12 Christians and injuring many others.

The Christians, clearly having a different concept from Muslims of what self-betterment is, were distributing charity help to the local population.

And, to get closer to the Queen's own home turf, the Commonwealth includes superb examples of countries whose Muslim majority takes a special pride in becoming better and better people at discriminating against and ferociously persecuting the Christian minority.

One of them is Nigeria, which has been rightfully called the most deadly country to be a Christian. Another is Pakistan where, after many years of continuous attacks on the Christian community, 2013 has been one of the worst of them. In September, 96 people were killed and 130 wounded in twin suicide attacks on a church in Peshawar, the most deadly attacks of this kind since independence.

Why hasn't the Queen, who always talks about the Commonwealth in her Christmas messages and this year expanded on the Commonwealth Games, found in herself the courage to speak up for the millions of her fellow Christians who are subjected to psychological and physical torture just for their belief in the same Jesus Christ whose birth we are today celebrating (in case someone, among the trees, cards, shopping and central London's "winter" lights, had forgotten)?

ObamaCare: A Word of Warning from Britain

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


In light of the ongoing ObamaCare debacle, it can be interesting to see how a state-run national health system free for all, like Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) – Obama’s favourite model -, has failed to deliver.

The UK is one of the few countries in the world – mostly concentrated in Europe - to have completely free universal health provision. It sounds cuddly and comfy, but, like in all utopias and fairy tales, reality is a different matter.

The NHS is Britain's sacred cow. No party, if it wants to be elected, can scrap it or reform it in any real sense. All parties have to recite the mantra: "The NHS is safe with us. We are ring-fencing the NHS".

In 2009, British Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, interviewed on Fox News (see above video) about the impending Obamacare, warned Americans that the NHS is a “60-year-old relic” and claimed he “would not wish it on anyone”. Hannan was then condemned back home as “evil”, “unpatriotric” and “a traitor”.

Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson said that the NHS is “the closest thing that the British have to a religion”. And Labour politicians managed to create a climate in which this institution was considered sacrosanct, untouchable by criticism.

But it’s becoming increasingly impossible now to keep that pretence.

The NHS, born on 5 July 1948, is the first system of free universal medical care ever established. The 1942 Beveridge Report, influential in founding the UK’s modern welfare state of which the NHS is part, was conceived and implemented during a special time, when the population was not only ethnically and culturally homogenous, but also feeling like a great family, bound together by the heroic struggle of WW2.

The fundamental principles of the NHS, then as now, have been: 1) services provided free at the point of use; 2) services financed from central taxation; 3) everyone eligible for care (even people temporarily resident or visiting the country).

According to Treasury figures, NHS spending almost doubled in real terms from £57 billion in 2002/03 to £109 billion in 2012/13, and is forecast for £129 billion in 2014.

Britain spends 18.5% of its annual budget on health, the second highest expenditure.

The NHS has always been beleaguered by problems and cash crises, and needing reform.

All “reforms” attempted through the years have only amounted to internal changes and restructurings - giving similar bodies different names. The current “reform” is no exception. Crisis has always been the NHS’s permanent condition.

Its original ideal is too expensive even in the best conditions and, with health care becoming more costly and population ageing, the conditions are going to worsen.

But more money doesn’t mean better care. Department of Health reports admit that, despite significant and consistent increases in funding, hospital productivity has fallen.

A study in the prestigious Lancet of health data over 20 years in 19 countries shows Britain lagging behind in 12th place.

The BBC reported on the research:

Many deaths happen because the NHS is not good enough at preventing people getting sick or because treatment does not rival that seen elsewhere in Europe, says Mr Hunt who is responsible for health policy in England.

By cancer survival rate comparisons, the NHS is one of the worst health systems in the Western world, even overtaken by former European communist countries.

The remedies are worse than the ills. After having created problems and produced terrible results, governments, to save their face and not risk losing votes, try to find band-aid solutions that make things even worse.

One instance of that is setting targets, which has led to patients being neglected to meet them:

Another example occurred at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust, where over three years from 2005 between 400 and 1,200 patients died needlessly as managers ruthlessly cut costs — particularly nursing numbers — to meet targets the Labour government laid down to win ‘foundation’ hospital status.

Doctors were diverted from critically-ill patients in order to deal with less serious cases to meet the target of discharging all patients from Accident & Emergency units within four hours of admission.

Vulnerable patients were left starving, in soiled bedsheets or screaming in pain. Some became so dehydrated they drank from flower vases…

Apparently, the [Francis] report will damn not just the Mid-Staffordshire management but a ‘culture of fear’ from Whitehall down to the wards, as managers became fixated on meeting targets and protecting ministers from political criticism.

Countless families in Mid-Staffordshire have been left grieving for loved ones who were, in effect, killed by the National Health Service.

This is by no means an exceptional case. Inquiries follow scandals and are followed by new horror stories.

Top public health officials, from the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt down to Medical Director of NHS England Sir Bruce Keogh, have acknowledged that in many cases patients were abused, neglected and bullied, and have expressed serious concerns about the service at some NHS trusts.

In July of this year, 14 trusts were found to have unusually high mortality rates. In August, up to 42,000 deaths a year due to kidney failure were linked to dehydration in patients who were not given water by NHS staff. In September, it was discovered that 13,000 every year die of sepsis because of delays in diagnosis and treatment – negligence which also costs the NHS more money. In October, we had: the previous Labour government was accused of a pre-election cover-up about hospitals with higher-than-normal death rates, “with inspectors finding blood stains on floors and curtains and badly soiled mattresses”; NHS doctors were discovered to have been routinely giving performance-enhancing drugs to patients to “enhance their recovery rates”; and NHS managers getting hundreds of thousands of pounds in redundancy just before being given other NHS jobs – this was due to the latest NHS “reform”, which is simply a reshuffling. In November, it was found that NHS dementia patients were left hungry for hours and not given medication at the right time; a £200 million NHS fraud scandal was uncovered, with patients illegally claiming free services, and dentists, agencies and firms working for the NHS committing fraud and sending false invoices; 19 more hospitals were investigated over their links to allegations of sexual abuse by late TV celebrity Jimmy Savile, making a total of 32; it was discovered that the NHS spent nearly a fifth of its budget for maternity services on clinical negligence insurance in England in 2012, nearly £500m; there was news that Colchester hospital has been fiddling with patient records to improve its waiting times for cancer treatment, with potentially life-threatening consequences. In December, it’s been disclosed that up to 170 operations are cancelled at the last minute each day by NHS hospitals for bed shortages, faulty equipment and lack of staff.

This is just a sample, in no way a complete record. Not bad for less than a half year’s work.

A former London correspondent for Time sounds very reassuring:

Health care was more psychically seamless in the U.K. Nobody worried about going bankrupt if they got sick.

Nobody goes bankrupt individually, but everybody will go bankrupt with the rest of the country because the NHS and the whole welfare state are taking Britain to the verge of economic collapse, with an unsustainable and growing national debt.

Tim Kelsey, a director at NHS England, the central body in charge of the health service, warned in July:

We are about to run out of cash in a very serious fashion... our analysis will disclose that by 2020 there will be a £30bn funding gap in the healthcare system. [Emphasis added]

Senior NHS doctors and managers said that up to 20 hospitals across the country may have to close to save the NHS from financial ruin.

Although the American system of employer-provided medical care is different from the British system, comparisons of the latter with Medicare, Medicaid and Obama’s “vision” for public healthcare can be made. When healthcare is mostly paid by a third party, there’s little incentive to economize on it, and as a consequence expenditures rise dramatically. Late US economist Milton Friedman would call the NHS a plan for the “socialisation of medicine”, flawed like all government programmes to control social fields.

Two weeks ago, during a visit to Vladimir Bukovsky, I asked him if he thought that looking after the health of a whole country is a task a government can be efficient at. He replied: "There are very few things that governments are efficient at".

Interestingly, the US has always been used as a bogeyman to scare Europeans into believing that they need universal healthcare. Look at what happens in America, where there is no state-run health system, Leftists and media say.

However, that the question "Are you insured?" asked in US hospitals is caused by lack of free healthcare for all, European-style, is far from the truth. It was free medical care provided by employers during the war - to attract workers at a time of price and wage controls - that led to the current situation in the US. Most Europeans have never heard of the existence of Medicare and Medicaid, and believe that Americans who can’t afford insurance are practically left to die.

For Sexual Relativism and Homophilia the Tide Is Turning

There are undoubted similarities between Muslim activists on one hand and LGBT and feminist activists on the other.

Both groups want to impose their views - and now, with same-sex marriage, laws - on everybody else.

And both react badly when they don't succeed.

At the moment, as I previously wrote, the trend towards total normalisation of homosexuality is experiencing a setback. Maybe people start having enough of it, and are waking up.

The above video shows events on 23rd-25th November, when a loud and threatening mob attempted to storm the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista (John the Baptist) in Argentina.

In the video, 7,000 lesbian and pro-abortion feminists mock, abuse, spray-paint, sexually harass, spit on and physically assault 1,500 young Catholic men just for forming a human shield, standing and praying around their own Cathedral, so that the activists could not storm in, desecrate and ransack it. Displaying their "tolerance", the feminists spray-paint writings the nicest of which is "Burn the church".

Then they burn an effigy of Argentinian-born Pope Francis. The similarity of behaviour with Muslim crowds is astonishing. The feminist, LGBT mob even ululates, as Muslim women do. Savagery replicates barbarism.

Many other similar attacks have been perpetrated against Christians, churches and other Christian symbols by homosexual activists, feminists and - guess whom - Muslims. Assaults that, had they been directed against the perpetrators themselves, would have been called "hate crimes", but committing them against Christians, for some inexplicable reason, makes them OK.

In Croatia, on 1st December people voted in a referendum to support the definition “marriage is matrimony between a man and a woman”, definition which will now become part of the country's constitution. 450,000 petition signatures were necessary to call for the referendum, but the pro-family campaigners collected 750,000 in only two weeks in a country of about 4.4 million (this would be the equivalent of getting 54 million signatures in the United States).

Two thirds of the electorate voted in favour of this new Constitutional Amendment: 66% to 34%. Liberty Counsel website elaborates and accuses:

Earlier this year, the Croatian government drafted a bill that would create homosexual “life partners.” Recognizing this as a step towards same-sex marriage, the Catholic Church organized the citizens’ referendum. The citizens stood strong against government, media, and even international pressure.

“The Obama administration is working to undermine marriage and family around the world,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel.

According to a White House fact sheet outlining President Obama’s actions, Advancing LGBT Rights at Home and Abroad, the Obama administration is actively proliferating homosexuality around the world:

• Working with the Global Equality Fund, LGBT Global Development Partnership, and government and private-sector partners to train LGBT leaders;

• Working with our embassies overseas and civil society on the ground to develop strategies to advance LGBT status in countries around the world;

• Supporting resolutions specific to LGBT issues;

• Cosponsoring the UN Human Rights Council resolution on LGBT rights; and

• Ensuring that LGBT persons are included in broader human rights resolutions.

In 2014 the United States will host an international conference of homosexual donors and activists to coordinate and strategize LGBT international public policy initiatives.

“The memories of so-called ‘progressive’ regimes controlling society are fresh in the minds of Eastern Europeans. They know if the people stand united, they can overcome these ‘progressive’ ideals that wreak havoc on families and communities,” Staver points out. Croatia joins Serbia, Montenegro, Poland, Hung[a]ry, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Latvia in passing laws to affirm natural marriage.

“President Obama’s anticolonial ideology is shrinking America’s influence in national political affairs, but he is a colonist when it comes to forcing his anti-God and anti-values ideology upon foreign countries. Obama’s ideology is morally bankrupt and anti-American,” says Staver. [Emphasis added]

Indeed, Eastern European countries, although generally poorer than their Western counterparts, seem to be more politically aware and intelligent than those. Having experienced socialism (for Marx, the first stage towards communism) and a communist government, they know what those evils really are like, and correctly recognise Western "liberal" agendas in various areas, from the welfare state to the normalisation of homosexuality (not to mention transexuality), as different faces of the same monster they knew in the bad old days.

In Croatia, the referendum campaign came in response to proposals by the current Leftist government to extend marriage-like benefits to homosexual partners. Having witnessed what happened in the West, where this kind of stealth approach has led to homomarriage and same-sex couples' adoption rights - and we haven't seen the end of the process yet -, the Christian, pro-family activists have been endowed, so to speak, with the power of prediction and been able to stop this train of events before desensitisation stepped in and it became too late.

Similar story in Slovenia, Croatia’s neighbour which shares borders with Italy and Austria. In March 2012 the people of Slovenia rejected Leftist social engineering by repealing a new “Family Code” adopted the year before by the Slovenian Parliament, which would have cleared the path towards complete equalisation of the homosexual and conjugal marriage and towards homosexual child-adoption. It was the first referendum of this kind in an EU member state, and is likely to become an important point of reference for any further legislation in this area in Central Europe.

The piece "Croatia: post-communist nomenklatura wants to re-define marriage, but civil society resists", written before the Croatian referendum, explains:

In both Slovenia and Croatia, the debate around so-called “LGBT rights” evidences the growing disconnection between the ruling classes (which, due to their lack of genuine moral and intellectual qualities, one would hesitate to describe as “elites”) and the population. In both countries, politics and economy are under the control of a small – mostly ex-communist – nomenklatura seeking to ingratiate itself with the influential pressure-groups that currently act as opinion-makers throughout the greater part of Western and Northern Europe. These elites believe that, in order to be worthy members of the EU, their countries need to recognize same-sex “marriages”, and be it against the declared will of the people.

The nomenklatura’s contempt for democracy becomes apparent in a statement by the country’s president Ivo Josipović, a former communist, who said he had doubts “whether we need such a referendum”. The Minister of Social Politics and Youth, Milanka Opačić, called the referendum “expensive and completely unnecessary”. In addition, the Prime Minister of Croatia, Zoran Milanović, called the referendum “completely pointless” and said that “this will be the first and last time that such a referendum is announced”.

Pointless? Yes, because the government appears determined to simply ignore the outcome of the plebiscite. The Minister or [sic] Public Administration, Arsen Bauk, has defiantly announced that, in case the referendum is successful (and the introduction of same-sex marriages thus becomes impossible), a new bill will be drawn up to grant homosexual partnerships the same legal rights as marriages. Since the fall of Communism, one has never seen a Croatian politician treating a democratic expression of the electorate’s will with such arrogance.

However, arrogance and brazen contempt for democracy are by now known to be the trademarks of the homosexualist lobby. It suffices to remember the way in which the French government violently cracked down on the peaceful participants of a demonstration against the re-definition of marriage, or the fact that the European Commission funds the budget of ILGA-Europe, a radical homosexualist lobby group, with more than 1 million Euro of taxpayer’s money every year – a contribution without which this fake “non-governmental organization” would simply cease to exist.

But in the meantime, the real civil society is slowly awakening. The foreseeable outcome of the referendum in Croatia will provide further encouragement. [Emphasis added]

I conclude with Matt Barber, who writes in WND's article "America's chief export: Immorality":

Indeed, under this president, America’s chief export has become immorality. Sexual deviancy, murder of the unborn, redistribution of wealth and other evils have been sanitized and propagandized as “basic human rights.”

Thus, when this arrogant man stands before the U.N. and decries those nations that refuse to embrace his special brand of pagan relativism, we shouldn’t be surprised if those nations push back.

And so they push back...

For instance, there has been, of late, great weeping and gnashing of teeth among mainstream media – and other circles of intolerant “tolerance” – over successful efforts by several foreign governments to stem the tide of “LGBT” propaganda within their own sovereign borders.

Russia, India, Croatia, Peru, Jamaica and even Australia, for instance, along with other nations, are now moving to inoculate themselves from the fast-metastasizing cancer of sexual relativism.

Having witnessed, from afar, the poisonous results of such propaganda here in the U.S. (the hyper-sexualization of children, the deconstruction of natural marriage and family, the rampant spread of sexually transmitted disease, religious persecution and the like), there seems an emerging global recognition that the radical “LGBT” agenda – a pet cause of Obama’s – is not about securing “human rights,” but, rather, is about promulgating moral wrongs.

The world is finding that forcing others to “tolerate” – indeed, to celebrate – unfettered licentiousness, under penalty of law, is as harmful to society as is said licentiousness to those who practice it...

While America may be lost (though I pray not), it would seem that her traditional values – values still shared by many, if not most, of the American people – are, nonetheless, gaining momentum abroad.

And that is encouraging.

Now let’s pray those values come full circle.