Libyan Soldiers Bring Mayhem to Cambridgeshire

Great and greatly funny article by my friend, the brilliant author Alexander Boot. Below is part of it.

An update. Now 300 soldiers are guarding out 240 Libyan cadets. Cameron insists we won't grant them asylum.

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But God forbid our leaders utter a single word suggesting they realise that the West and Islam are irreconcilable – that even in its present debauched state our civilisation simply can’t accommodate Islam as a dynamic force within our borders.

Yet our electorate has been corrupted to such an extent that, for any ‘statesman’ to be politically successful, he has to be politically correct. Hence the respect, both preached and practised, for any religion or civilisation, provided it isn’t Christian.

Hence also the criminal stupidity of our leaders who destroyed the demonstrably un-Western but still workable power balance in the Middle East to plunge the region into a blood-filled abyss of violence and unrest.

Now that the violence looks as if it’s about to spill over way beyond Iraq, Syria and Libya, our governments are reviewing their options.

One of them is yet another direct military intervention, and we all know how hugely successful this has proved so far.

Another is to intervene by proxy, using Iran (what with the Nato member Turkey refusing to play) to do the fighting for us. Ancient Rome had that kind of arrangement with the Vandals, remember how that turned out?

We may suffer the same way, since the inevitable price for Iran’s involvement will be the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons, and you aren’t getting three guesses to figure out how they’ll be used.

The third option is related to the second: arming and training those local groups we perceive as our friends. ‘Perceive’ is the operative word: there are no groups in the Islamic world that are genuinely friendly to the West.

Some, however, are ready to fake amiability for tactical reasons, something we accept as the real thing. Both sides are perfectly aware of the ad hoc nature of any such alliance, invariably underpinned as it always is by background hostility.

They pretend to be our friends, we pretend to believe them. However, the two sides still diverge in one important area. They have a long-term strategy, we can’t think beyond the next election.

That’s why we refuse to recall that every time we trained and armed Muslim soldiers in the past they eventually turned their weapons against us. Who do you think armed the Taliban? Al-Qaeda? Saddam? Gaddafi? Isis?

Training thousands of Libyan soldiers at our Cambridgeshire base is a sign that we’re as ever prepared to equip our future enemies while pretending they’re our present friends.

We simply refuse to admit that our quarrel isn’t with this or that Islamic faction but with Islam as such. Well, if we still haven’t realised that there’s a clash of civilisations under way, we ought to be thankful to the Libyan soldiers for clarifying the point.

Since arriving in June they’ve succeeded in turning their corner of sleepy Cambridgeshire into a scaled-down version of Tripoli’s outskirts.

The Libyans went on an alcohol-fuelled rampage and there I was, thinking Muslims were supposed to be teetotal. A few of them spent £1,000 on booze in a single visit to a supermarket, an amount that buys a lot of mayhem.

Two of the soldiers have now been charged with raping a man, who presumably was wearing a provocative business suit. Not to discriminate, three others are being held on remand for several counts of sexual assault against women.

These peccadilloes were augmented by attendant charges of theft and threatening behaviour towards a police officer, which is legalese for head-butting. (Since no one has suggested that ‘Glasgow kiss’ be renamed ‘Tripoli kiss’, I’m hereby putting this initiative forth as my own.)

Anyway, this is where our MoD officials unveiled their comedy routine, and I thank them for making my morning so much more upbeat for it.

In a nutshell, the training programme, originally supposed to last until the end of the month, is being terminated effective immediately, and no future training will be done in Britain, what with the UK’s surfeit of tasty men and women roaming the countryside freely.

Instead of describing this simple development in this kind of language or, as would be my preference, more colloquially, the MoD spokesman delivered his first knee-slapping line:

“We have agreed with the Libyan government that it is best for all involved to bring forward the training completion date”. (“We can’t have too many raping and thieving Muzzie soldiers about…”)
Encouraged by the outburst of laughter, he continued in the same vein: “There have been disciplinary issues.”

I suppose homosexual rape, sexual assault on women, theft and head-butting a cop could be described that way for comic effect, but, playing it straight, I’d have settled for ‘crimes’ instead.

And then came the kicker, having punters rolling in the aisles: “As part of our support for the Libyan government, we will review how best to train Libyan security forces – including whether training further tranches of recruits in the UK is the best way forward.” (“…and neither do we want them to darken our doorstep ever again.”)

To add a few delicious touches to the stand-up gig, several Libyan soldiers, presumably not the defendants, have requested political asylum in Britain. And their government has so far failed to pay for the programme, while not offering much hope it’ll do so in the future.

Oh well, we’ve made our bed of nails, so we must lie in it – and it’s no laughing matter.

Why Communism Dominates in the West

"Red Herrings" is a brilliant historical article by Andrew C. McCarthy that explains one of the most important reasons of the current dominance of the Left in the West (and more than that).

It's a review and a defence of Diana West's book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , which was published last year and provoked much controversy, as you can gauge from the review itself.

The way Joe McCarthy has been treated in America reminds me a bit of the way Enoch Powell has been treated in Britain: both were fundamentally right and both were vilified. But Farage wouldn't say that - especially about the latter - in a million years.

The only misconceived thing of the article is when it quotes Diana West's favourable view of "Enlightenment logic".

The Enlightenment has brought to Europe the first sparkles of totalitarian thought. Marx was an intellectual heir to the Enlightenment.

The problem is that we ourselves have been indoctrinated by intentional "disinformation" - possibly of Soviet origin -, and it takes us time to get through the fog.

Here's part of the very long article:

Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really “win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our nation more vulnerable.


To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the other, detractors who blame FDR’s indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death throes.

I was a federal prosecutor in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. We indicted the offending jihadist cell for levying a terrorist war against the United States. Several of the terrorists had been major mujahideen figures. Their lawyers thus thought it exculpatory to claim that they could not have conspired to wage jihad against America; after all, they had actually been allied with America in the jihad against the Soviets. The provocative claim was implausible as a defense, the Soviets having left Afghanistan (and the USSR having collapsed) years before the Twin Towers bombing. Still, it is standard procedure to investigate even dubious defense claims. Hence, my unwitting stumble into a heated controversy.

The cia and Reagan administration veterans passionately proclaimed that the $3 billion in aid and armaments funneled to the mujahideen—matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia, with Pakistani intelligence as our “cut-out” for deniability purposes—was an unvarnished triumph. The war became the Soviets’ Vietnam, bleeding the Red Army to death even as a humiliated Kremlin buckled under the pressure of Reagan’s arms build-up. In sum, I was told, “Look, we liberated half the world from Communist tyranny. Case closed.”

Yet, it wasn’t that simple. The mujahideen begot al Qaeda. A fifth of the U.S. aid, plus most of the Saudi contribution (real money in those days), was channeled to virulently anti-American terrorists. They proceeded to take their jihad global . . . eventually to Manhattan. The rest is history—the history we’ve been struggling with for two decades.

Belgium To Ban Ritual Slaughter, Sign Petition

The petition "Stop the barbaric slaughter without stunning of animals under the guise of religion" has almost reached its target of 4,000 signatures.

The petition, which I've also signed, is addressed to the Belgian politician Ben Weyts, who is Flemish Minister for Animal Welfare, and to Janez Potočnik, the European Commissioner for the Environment.

Ben Weyts said on the Belgian television show De zevende dag on the VRT network that he would actively pursue a total ban on ritual slaughter. The ban, he added, could be implemented by 2015, as well as further legislation.

In the meantime, Weyts called for Muslims and Jews to adhere to current laws, which allow animal slaughter without previous stunning to be carried out only in licensed abattoirs.

The cabinet office of his Belgian government counterpart, Wallon Minister for Animal Welfare Carlo Di Antonio, indicated it would "take the same shape as that suggested by" the Flemish Minister.

Please sign the petition now:

The slaughter of animals without stunning is not only barbaric, it is also very painful as vets proclaim for years. Waiting animals know exactly what is going to happen, they are stressed by the smell of blood, urine, feces, by the cries of fear and pain of the animals slaughtered in front of and before them. Muslims do not have a valid reason to slaughter animals in such a cruel way: apparently nowhere the Koran states that animals may not be stunned for slaughter! As well for the Jews: Kosher slaughter is as reprehensible as halal ! There is no immediate or painless killing for slaughter without stunning. We live in the 21st century. Peoples knowledge has grown such as the means to slaughter animals painless. If you really want to hold on to the tradition of 'cutting throats', then just do it to animals who were stunned before slaughter! That is not only human, it is a form of respect! Or do Muslims nor Jews need to respect animals? I do not believe that. Religion should never be an excuse to let animals suffer ! Stop the slaughter of animals without stunning worldwide. Provide a law that forbids slaughter without stunning in Belgium and Europe, and hopefully the whole world will follow. Do it now !

Europe Is Rising against Islamisation



Maybe the tide really is turning.

I remember when, in the late '60s and the '70s, hardline socialist and communist groups were still struggling to get their message accepted in Europe and the West generally. They were a tiny minority then, and their agenda seemed very far-fetched and out-of-synch with ordinary people and mainstream views.

It also looked liked it was going to remain that way. When, later on, I heard them screaming "Free Nelson Mandela", I didn't think it was going to happen. And now we know: it has happened, and much more than that has materialised.

Political correctness, which is nothing else but cultural Marxism, has become mainstream, indeed the orthodoxy and the dominant ideology.

As things turned one way in a manner that a few decades ago seemed impossible, thay can wery well turn the other way, even if we find it difficult to believe now.

In Italy, 100,000 people protested against illegal immigration, Islamisation and the European Union earlier this month at a Lega Nord (Northern League) rally in Milan.

In Germany, last Sunday about 4,800 people took to the streets of Cologne. The protest was planned by Hooligans gegen Salafisten (Hooligans against Salafists), abbreviated as HoGeSa, who had previously organised similar demonstrations in several German cities, including Essen, Nuremberg, Mannheim, Frankfurt and Dortmund. Their name derives from the fact that they belong to rival football fan clubs and are now banding together through social media.

More than 5,000 people had registered their attendance to the Cologne march on Facebook, claiming to travel from around Europe. At the event, there were clashes with the police and a thousand of counter-demonstrators. Several policement were injured.

A new demo is programmed in Berlin for 15 November and another in Hamburg, but there is talk that they may be banned. From Reuters:

The hooligans - as they term themselves - want to stage a protest against ultra-conservative Islamic Salafists at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate on Nov. 15, a week after the capital celebrates the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Berlin's senator for interior affairs Frank Henkel told ARD television he had heard talk of 10,000 people wanting to attend.

"We will do everything we can to ban the demonstration," said Henkel. "We are experiencing a new quality, a new dimension of street violence and militancy. (In Cologne) it was clear from the start that it was not about a political statement but seeking physical clashes, especially with the police."...

Salafists advocate a puritanical form of Islam and the BfV [Germany's domestic intelligence agency] says their numbers in Germany are rising, along with the number of potential recruits for Islamic State.

The BfV estimates that 450 people have travelled to the region from Germany to join radical jihadist forces.

Another componenet of this continental movement of resistance is Cities against Islamisation . Initiated as far back as January 2008 by Filip Dewinter of the Flemish independence party Vlaams Belang, it is a pan-European alliance that includes Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain.

Italy: 100,000 in Anti-Immigration Demo

An estimated 100,000 people protested against illegal immigration, Islamisation and the European Union at a rally organised by the Lega Nord (Northern League) in front of Milan's Cathedral, the heart of the city.

The crowd was so enormous that it took two hours for everybody to get to the vast square.

Demonstrators were holding banners saying "No to mosques", "Fewer illegals = fewer diseases", "Less money to refugees", and "If I catch Ebola I'll infect Alfano". Angelino Alfano is Italy's Minister of the Interior, responsible, among other things, for internal security and immigration.

The main message was similar to that of my party Liberty GB in the UK: in social priorities Italians must come first, otherwise it is reverse racism.

This was the first major event organised by the Northern League under the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, followed with interest in Central and Southern Italy as well.

"Stop the invasion" was the demonstration's slogan, with the objective of stopping the Mare Nostrum operation, Italy's mission of rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean - called "Mare Nostrum" (our sea) by the Romans, but ironically not ours even around our coasts any more.

Said Salvini in his speech at the rally: "Like other countries, we have to use Navy ships to defend our borders and not to help the people smugglers." The Italian term for a person who ferries illegal immigrants to Italy by boat for a high fee is "scafista".

A few days later, in Strasbourg, the Northern League's leader discussed these issues with his party's French ally in the European Parliament, Front National's Marine Le Pen. Together they'll call for the suspension of the Schengen Treaty and for border control. The League identifies mass immigration as a source of unfair competition against the unemployed Italian workers.

As in Britain with the EDL, a counter-demonstration was held a few hundred yards away by the "anti-fascist" radical Left. And, like in here, the massive deployment of security forces ensured that there was no contact between the two camps.

Wearing a T-shirt, Salvini led the march to the Piazza del Duomo suggesting slogans through a megaphone, and when it got in front of Palazzo Marino, home to Milan City Council, he stopped the march to shout at Mayor Giuliano Pisapia: "We do not want the new mosque in Milan."

The Northern League has gone from strength to strength and is now a force to reckon with, in Italy. But, unlike a party like the UKIP in Britain, it has a firm anti-Islam position. I cannot imagine Farage yelling against mosque building.

Illegals with Scabies Disinfected, Italy Chastised



The tragedy of the "boat people" in the Mediterranean is now in the news more than ever.

130 migrants were presumed dead after two boats capsized on 2 October.

This date is so close to the anniversary of the first tragedy of that kind. Just a year before,

On October 3, 2013, the 368 [in fact, 366] bodies laid out on the wharf at Lampedusa marked a watershed in the history of immigration — in the Mediterranean and perhaps even the world.

The latest events have led to a rethinking of immigration policies. First by Italy:

Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano called for the Mare Nostrum surveillance-and-rescue operation to shut down in favor of ''European action able to show that Europe takes charge of its own border'', during a visit to Tunis on Friday, the first anniversary of the Lampedusa shipwreck in which 366 immigrants died.

The debate was then extended to Europe.

The UK government is being chastised by the Left - and not only - for its refusal to support migrant rescues in the Mediterranean:

Foreign office minister says that providing comprehensive rescue cover in the Mediterranean is encouraging more migrants to make the dangerous journey and risk their lives.

Even The Telegraph joins the condemnation, with this ridiculous headline:

Drown an immigrant to save an immigrant: why is the Government borrowing policy from the BNP?

This is where the death spiral into a political bidding war on immigration leads us.

And yet, generosity is like everything else: you can have too much of a good thing.

This furore reminds me of another case, in which it was Italy that received international scorn for doing the right thing.

After the Ebola outbreak, it's useful to revisist that episode from last December, when Italy was severely criticised in the most absurd way just for trying to prevent contagion and an epidemic by spraying with a disinfectant the guests of a reception centre on the island of Lampedusa, the destination of thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants from Africa.

This is how the BBC reported the story, to which the above video refers:

Footage filmed secretly on a mobile phone appears to show detainees being forced to strip naked in mixed company while a worker hoses them down.

The man who took the video - an unnamed Syrian refugee - says the migrants are being treated like "animals".

The camp houses people from Africa and the Middle East who make the dangerous crossing to Italy by boat...

The images, which were broadcast on state television, show migrants queuing up in a crowded, open-air courtyard.

One after another, in cold, winter conditions, they have to strip completely naked.

The man who filmed the scene says this is apparently an effort to combat the skin condition, scabies, and that both men and women have to go through it every few days.

The illegal immigrants were disinfected by means of a hose spraying a substance protecting them from scabies.

This, nothing more than a mass shower, prompted a national inquiry, with Italian politicians and media condemning such a treatment that made the centre look like a "concentration camp".

How can a country which had received more than 40,000 illegals in just a few months wash them one by one? As an Italian blogger put it:

If you import Africa, your country will look more and more like Africa.

The press melodramatically and hyperbolically described the shower as "dehumanising" as well as freezing, but people's comments to those articles were overwhelmingly of a different opinion. Just a sample:

Don't be ridiculous. Being freezing cold in Lampedusa, that's big news! They have scabies and who knows what else. Disinfecting them is the least. First of all, no-one has invited them; second, if they want to keep scabies, lice etc. they can stay in their own countries...

15 degrees is not a freezing temperature, they can always go back and keep their scabies and whatever else they have. In case you didn't know, there have been 7 cases of scabies in an elementary school in Parma. Who knows how it got there, and what other filth they are bringing here...

If 15 degrees is cold for them, how can the illegals migrate to Sweden or Germany, as they say they will, and survive?...

Maybe the shower rooms have been destroyed like everything else [a reference to previous episodes of rioting and vandalism by illegals attacking the reception centre]...

Shame on you Lefties, it's all your fault, you wanted the immigrants to appear humanitarian; and now you're paying the consequences!...

If they had remained in their own countries they would still have scabies......

The real shocking images are not these, they are those of the victims of the increasing number of crimes committed by illegals.

Frontex, the European Union Agency for border management, has released data according to which, in the first four months of 2014, landings of immigrants in Italy have increased by 823% compared to the same period last year. And from early May things have got even worse.

Not only the immigrant reception system is collapsing under the weight of these figures. Another consequence of this invasion is the impossibility to control who is coming, with the probability of health emergencies increasing all the time.

The migrants are from countries with serious health problems and travel in poor hygienic conditions, therefore can be carriers of infectious diseases.

Diseases like polio and tuberculosis, disappeared from our countries, are coming back to Europe, carried by immigrants. The city of Syracuse, in Sicily, has a tuberculosis incidence not unlike that of a Third World city, because of the many illegal landings.

There have already been cases of immigrants with scabies amidst the general Italian population.

Scabies is a serious and extremely contagious disease, and can only be eliminated by the method used in Lampedusa. It is in the interest of both Italians - in case anybody still cares about them - and illegals that the latter are sprayed with disinfectant, as many of them are contracting the illness in the asylum centre itself from other guests.

Brigitte Gabriel Exposed by Pat Buchanan

The great Pat Buchanan mauling on video the moronic Brigitte Gabriel who can’t answer even one of his very apt questions. She can’t answer because she has a totally wrong view of Islam as divided between moderate and radical, when in fact there is no moderate Islam. The militant Muslims will always win as they have the Islamic scriptures on their side.




Why We Care for Animals and Muslims Don't



Malay Muslims have discovered dogs:

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 19 — A group of Muslims get acquainted with a dog at the ‘I want to touch a dog’ event at 1Utama’s central park earlier this morning. Around 200 dogs and their owners volunteered for the event, which sought to break cultural norms against dogs among Malaysia’s majority Malays.

The video on the Malay Mail Online website quoted above is a mixture of people who surround a dog as if they'd never seen one in their entire lives, and other people who wash their hands after having touched a dog, considered by Islam an "impure" animal. In a photo, some participants even wash their feet (don't ask me why).

From an article on the same Malay paper:

Being able [sic] take her two dogs to a public event attended by fellow Malay Muslims was liberating for Rina Z, who has been caring for dogs for the past 12 years.

As a lady in a hijab cautiously bent down to pet her dog, Kirby, Rina reminisced over the disapproving stares fellow Malays would shoot at ‘tudung’ — the local term for hijab — wearing women walking an animal that is culturally considered “haram” [sinful, forbidden].

“I have a friend who wears a ‘tudung’ who helped walk my dog, and this woman just went up to her and started questioning her; ‘You are a Muslim? You are a Muslim?’ And then she went on and on lecturing her on how it’s not right (for a Muslim to handle dogs),” Rina said.

“Being a Muslim dog owner, you tend not to publicise the fact that you own dogs because you run the risk of becoming a social outcast... but I think it’s time to share the love,” she added, as Kirby meekly sought out his owner for reassurance among the deluge of people stopping by to touch him.

The event was organised by Syed Azmi Alhabshi, who just desired to touch a dog, and we all know that the best way to do that is to stage a mass gathering of dogs and their human companions in your city's central park: otherwise how on earth do you ever get to see a dog, let alone touch him? It stands to reason.

The great pioneer Alhabshi is shown in a picture while he's realising his great ambition and touching a dog for the first time in his life, while the dog looks positively terrified (dogs apparently have an instinct for spotting mental disorders in humans).

Still, Alhabshi is to be praised for doing his bit for introducing Muslims of Malaysia to dogs.

In fact, he's a real martyr for a good cause (I'm not joking here), as for his ‘I want to touch a dog’ event, part of his charity work, he's received death threats and accusations of apostasy by many fellow Muslim-Malays online:

The Malays, furious at his audacity in organising an event to educate the public on Islam’s stance on dogs, have circulated his mobile number online, while on WhatsApp, messages claiming he is a Christian in disguise have spread like wildfire.

Once easily reachable through his phone or Facebook, Syed Azmi has now gone virtually underground, but on Facebook, his friends, family and neighbours in Taman Tun Dr Ismail have been responding to the threats on his behalf.

However, the threats, most of them posted as comments to a Facebook post by Ustaz Mohd Kazim Elias, which condemned the event, are numerous and filled with hate.

Here's a little taste of a few of them:

[T]his organiser cannot differentiate between what is right and wrong, has a shallow understanding of religion and likes to destroy Islam and should be stoned to death...

Let me give the organiser a beating so that he can gain some reason...

I hope this cursed person dies from dog bite.

But I like this most:

Another Facebook user, Yusoff Hj Ashaari, said that on top of taking action against Syed Azmi, the public should find the women who posed with the dogs at the event, and pull of [sic] their scarves to see if they wore crucifixes or were concealing tattoos. “Ustaz, this organiser really is a dog,” said Han Khalief.

I like it because it shows that, while we in the West don't realise how much we owe to Christianity, people in non-Christian parts of the world well realise that. In this case love for animals is associated with Christianity. True, what these people have in mind may just be the suspect, however absurd, that Christians are trying to undermine Islam by subverting its precepts on dogs.

But there is much more than that, as demonstrated by the fact that an animal welfare movement only developed in the Christian part of the world.

Animal welfare and love for animals developed from the compassion inspired by Christianity.

If we - or some of us - don't attribute the ending of the practice of animal sacrifices and respect for animals in general to Christianity, in the other parts of the globe they do:

The practice [of ritual slaughter of animals] is now far less universal than it was once, and in Christian countries it is generally looked upon as one of the basest expressions of primitive superstition. There is, for instance, hardly a book written to defend the “civilizing” role of the white man in India, which does not give publicity to that gruesome side of Hindu religion, through some bloodcurdling description of the sacrifices regularly performed in the temple of the goddess Kali, at Kalighat, Calcutta.

You will want to know how the story ended. Was our martyr stoned to death? No, or at least not yet.

He apologised:

“With a sincere heart, my intention to organise this programme is because of Allah SWT and not to memesongkan (distort) the faith, change religious laws, make fun of ulamas (religious scholars) or encourage liberalism,” he told the media today.

Ah, and don't forget - although you may be forgiven for forgetting - that Malaysia is a moderate Muslim country.

Muslims and Militant Secularists Increasingly Attack Christians in Europe

The above photo represents a graffito found a month ago in Vienna, on the ground of a popular walkers' and bikers' promenade outside Augarten Park.

It says: "Occupy all churches! We will rise!" (Besetzt alle Kirchen. We will rise.)

This kind of direct threat to Christians has become increasingly common in Europe.

A voluntary, non-profit organisation based in Vienna, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe , has been established, and issued a report documenting 241 cases of intolerance and attacks against Christians and their institutions in 2013.

Among them are arson, gun attacks, bombs and Molotov cocktails.

Anti-Christian graffiti were sprayed on the outside wall of a cathedral in Austria, reading: "We do not want your crosses" and including a swastika. So much for the ridiculously false claim, much beloved by so many "free-thinkers" and Leftists, of a closeness between Nazism and Christianity. In fact, these Neo-Nazis are continuing a florid anti-Christian tradition going all the way back to the Führer.

Dr. Gudrun Kugler, director of the Observatory, explains: "The increasingly secular society in Europe has less and less space for Christianity."

No doubt many of these aggressive acts will be the work of Muslims, whose number, like that of anti-Christian threats, is also increasing in Europe. But not all this violence is caused by Muslims: some of it comes from intolerant secularists.

For example, among the most recent cases are a Coptic church set on fire in Berlin, but also another Berlin church seriously damaged because it offered its premises to abortion opponents. Secularist attacks were not limited to property: Christians peacefully assembled at the so called “March for life”, a pro life demonstration in Berlin, were targeted by Left-wing extremists who showered them with colour paint, insulted them and shouted vulgarly.

And in the night between 25th and 26th September a pharmacy in Neukölln, Germany, was vandalised because of the owner Andreas Kersten’s refusal to sell the morning-after pill, which he explained as motivated by reasons of conscience.

On a website of self-proclaimed “anti-fascists”, the authors of this vandalism confess to the act. They say: “Whoever refuses the women's right to self-determination for reasons of conscience shall not be surprised to find his shop vandalised for reasons of conscience.”

Who said that Stalinism is dead?

The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe is on Facebook and Twitter.

Public Spending Needs a Drastic Reduction: Not Plan B but Plan Liberty GB

Despite all talks of austerity, £1,521.2 billion was the UK’s public debt at the end of the financial year 2013/14, as much as – be prepared for this, but probably you already are - 87.8% of GDP.

The Office for National Statistics, the source of these data, in a recent release also informs that this debt represented an increase of £100.6 billion compared to the end of 2012/13.

Still according to the ONS, government borrowing, excluding the effects of bank bail-outs, was £11.8 billion in September 2014, £1.6 billion higher than September 2013.

Without all their many zeros, these figures may look less catastrophic than they actually are, but are still impressive.

Economists had predicted that borrowing would not increase. Even worse, the government had. Chancellor George Osborne in March pledged to cut the budget deficit by more than 10% over the next 12 months.

According to some calculations, our national debt grows by £15,510 every three seconds.
What happens to individuals and families also happens to governments. Spend more than you have, and you end up in debt. Keep doing it, and the debt accumulates. The more debt you have, the more debt interest you must pay. Last year, Britain's debt cost the taxpayers more than £50 billion in interest payments: about half of the NHS budget and more than the entire defence expenditure.

Reducing the debt is a political priority. Raising tax rates hurts the economy, as has been repeatedly shown. Therefore, we can effectively decrease the debt only by bringing down spending, which would not be difficult to achieve if we cut waste.

The Liberty GB party has various common-sense policies to achieve this goal, including:

• abolishing purposeless quangos
• reducing the public sector's unnecessarily high number of employees and other wasteful departmental expenditures
• halting mass immigration, thus decreasing its enormous expenditure on benefits; diversity policies; education; health; translation services; extra police, prison, judicial and intelligence services; and so on
• ending health tourism
• ending non-emergency aid to all countries, except those with a proven record of protection of their minorities, in particular the one which is by far the most persecuted minority in the world: Christians
• limiting the funding of schools by central government to a base amount, adjusted to the cost of living of the area, with any extra spending raised by the local authority
• leaving the NHS free at point of delivery, but not in any circumstances. There must be a limit to the expenditure for each person paid for by public purse, that could vary with age and other conditions. This will mean that the elderly and people with chronic or serious conditions, who have more justified need for health care, will have a higher limit. The NHS money will be conditional on the patient's following the doctor's prescriptions, in particular the lifestyle recommendations
• devolving healthcare decision-making to the local level to enable services to target local needs and to cut out higher layers of bureaucracy
• implementing "Work for the Dole" (also known as "Workfare"), to help benefit claimants back to work
• removing benefits for people under 25 who refuse to take up offers of work, training or education. In those cases they should be the responsibility of their parents. This could incentivise them to become active members of society
• stopping giving free council or council-funded accommodation to unmarried mothers under 25, who must remain the responsibility of the pregnant girl's parents. The rate of teen pregnancy would dramatically decrease, as has been evidenced in the US when welfare has been withheld
• seriously cracking down on benefit fraud
• ending benefits for children resident outside the UK.

Radical Muslim, Moderate Muslim

Well put.

There is also another way to distinguish between Muslims of various degrees of militancy. Rather than the self-contradictory expression "moderate Muslims", invented by the West for tactical (read "cowardly") reasons and not used by the Islamic world, I prefer to call "devout and observant Muslims" the Mohammedans who are usually referred to as "radical and extremist", with the implication that those of them who are not covered by this description are not Muslim in the truest sense.

Ignorance and Illogicality of Many Atheists

I often share on my personal Facebook page posts by Freedom From Atheism Foundation (FFAF) .

This group provides many snappy and ready quotations, slogans and images that are perfectly suited to Facebook and in general to today's many time-poor and attention-span-even-poorer people.

The problem is that somebody who hasn't bothered to take the effort to examine a topic like the existence of God needs much more than a few lines or a graphic, which is why I think that I'll put the brakes on this habit of mine.

The last straw has been the following exchange of comments after I posted the above graphic "Atheist Dark Ages":

Inge Naning Communism is a political correct religion.Has nothing to do with atheism.

Nick D'Aloise Has nothing to do with atheism? That's a stretch.

Inge Naning It's about control.
Atheism is only about not to believe in a god.

Enza Ferreri Atheism is profoundly connected with communism, both ideologically (read your Marx again - or for the first time, as the case may be) and historically.

Inge Naning Karl Marx was a jew and a Bolshevik. The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Tsar was overthrown. Then the Bolsheviks came to power. If they used atheism dosent mean that atheists are communists. 90 % of inmates in a prison likes tomatoes. It doesn't mean that all people who likes tomatoes are criminals

Enza Ferreri Correlation doesn't imply causation, true. But, when Marx writes "Religion is the opium of the peoples" and later all states founded on his theories are atheist and ruthlessy persecute and massacre the faithful, you do have causation beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Louis Lalande I guess when Hitler said he was here to do the will of god that makes Christians Nazis? No? Oh, double standards.

I was about to reply to the last comment when I realised that, if I answered each individual comment, this business could go on forever.

It also made me accept that this subject is not suitabe for treatment by way of soundbites.

I don't blame these commenters for not knowing much of history, religion, logic and probably a lot more. The state of education these days is appalling. In addition, they have been subjected to atheist and communist propaganda, going hand in hand, maybe throughout their lives.

But I feel the duty to put things right. What Louis said is factually wrong and logically fallacious.

Let's start with facts. He writes: "when Hitler said he was here to do the will of god that makes Christians Nazis?".

What Hitler meant by "God" has nothing to do with Christianity. Hitler despised Christianity almost as much as Richard Dawkins does.

Nazism tried to establish a religion which was a mixture of different things, but fundamentally it was pagan, therefore much closer to current atheists' heart than to Christians'. It certainly was not Christianity. And the Nazis' actions are as diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Gospels as they can possibly be.

The Nazis were indeed enemies of Christianity and the Church.

I have already covered at length this subject, and, rather than repeating what I've written, I refer you to the articles linked to above.

This brings us to the logical defects of Louis' comment. The other commenter defending atheism, Inge, made recourse to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in logic when she claimed something - I'm interpreting - to the effect that the association of atheism with communism is coincidental. Very likely, judging from the context of all her comments, her total ignorance of Karl Marx and the fact that another atheist of my personal acquaintance had used exactly the same argument, this has all the appearance of a standard reply that ordinary atheists have learned from their betters (but are they their betters?).

Anyone with a minimum knowledge of Marx - Inge doesn't even have that: "Karl Marx was a Bolshevik", she shamelessly declares, whereas the Bolshevik, "majority", faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was established in 1903, when Marx had been dead and buried in London's Highgate Cemetery for 20 years - knows that atheism is one of his foundational principles, and that any society he envisaged had to be atheist as a sine qua non: no atheism, no Marxist society.

In addition, Marx is not only the most influential communist thinker but also the only one who inspired and informed all communist societies that ever existed.

Socialism and communism in general, anyway, are awash with atheism. One of the slogans of anarchism, also called "libertarian communism", for example, is: "No God, no state, no servants or masters."

Even contemporary communists, like John Lennon, imagined

there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

And no religion too...

Imagine no possessions...
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

When atheists who know next to nothing about Marx are confronted with these facts, they have to resort to something else. So they come up with a parallel with a supposedly "Christian" Nazism.

Beside being historically false, as I explained above, this pseudo-argument is also illogical.

I don't need to pursue this point as the claim is based on a factual untruth. But I want to, as it shows how often these supposed "freethinkers", who have made a stand for reason and logic, in defending atheism fail miserably on both.

Even if Nazism had been Christian - which is thoroughly false -, in this case postulating that the two - Nazism and Christianity - were related more than just coincidentally would indeed be a blatant example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. There is nothing connecting them inherently, causally, ideologically, doctrinarily. So much so that it would have been impossible for Nazism to be Christian. Which is why it wasn't.

Ethics and Christianity Syllogism

Premise 1
Ethics consists in subordinating the short term to the long term. The longest-possible term is eternity. A doctrine that makes you think in terms of eternity provides the greatest-possible frame for ethical thought and behaviour.

Premise 2
An ethical doctrine that includes eternity will maximise ethical effects, provided that it teaches to do good. If it teaches to do bad, like Islam, it does the greatest opposite: it maximises evil thinking and doing. Christianity is an ethical doctrine that includes eternity and teaches to do good.

Conclusion
Ergo, Christianity maximises ethical thinking and doing, compared with both Islam and atheism or agnosticism.

Anti-Semitism Claims Are Made Too Often

No-one doubts that there will be people who hate Jews.

The most obvious example is devout and observant Muslims, who are commanded by their religion to do so. They are also ordered to hate Christians, but for some reason the latter injunction doesn't evoke even a fraction of the emotion inspired by the former, despite the fact that an infinitely higher number of Christians than Jews suffer the consequences of this today.

Incidentally - this is not relevant to the rest of the article -, I've found what I consider a better way to distinguish between Muslims of various degrees of radicalism. Rather than the self-contradictory expression "moderate Muslims", invented by the West for tactical (read "cowardly") reasons and not used by the Islamic world, I prefer to call "devout and observant Muslims" the Mohammedans who are usually referred to as "militant and extremist", with the implication that those of them who are not covered by this description are not Muslim in the truest sense.

Going back to the main topic, the reason why Islamic Jew-hatred provokes much more indignation than Islamic Christian-hatred is not difficult to understand. It's because anti-Semitism is - or rather has become - another buzzword of the politically-correct language of today's ideological orthodoxy. According to this prevailing dogma, being against Christians does not even remotely approach the same level of sinfulness as attacking Jews.

Accusations of anti-Semitism, without reaching the absurdity and scope of charges of Islamophobia, have nevertheless something in common with them. They say: there is a protected group here, designated as victim, that shouldn't be messed with, or else.

This is not healthy, as it doesn't effectively distinguish real Jew-haters from people who simply have criticisms to make which, as in the case of Islam or Muslims, may be directed at Judaism or Jews.

This is something I have observed over time, but a particular direct experience of it brought it home to me more forcefully.

It all started with the short post "Wrong to Have Animals Killed in War" I wrote on this blog a couple of months ago, prompted by the news of an Israeli military dog killed in a Gaza blast who saved her handler's life.

This elicited two responses which - although one is anonymous - I think came from the same people, as they are worded almost identically.

The first you can see on the post page as a comment:

time I took my Jewish support away from LIbertyGB
there were dogs used in WW2
the Isola da [sic] Elba is over-run with homeless cats
they eat live animal sushi in Japan
but look...can we talk about all this instead of being enemies?

The next day an email was received by my party Liberty GB from two Jewish ladies who were supporters, asking: "Can you please remove this blog?"

The rest of the email is a repetition of the above comment, and ends with: "Why pick on us Jews, clearly singled out?"

Now, one can disagree with my opinion. I have been involved all my life in the movement for animal equality, and I know we are a minority. But no-one can say that my post was anti-Semitic.

Predicting that in these days of heightened sensitivities about anything somebody could - wrongly - read it that way, I wrote (and this is the whole of my comment, the rest of the post being two lines of news):

I have to say that I consider immoral to have dogs or other animals take part in military operations - be it Israeli or any other - as they cannot give their consent.

The "non-anti-Israel" disclaimer is one fifth of the entire text.

I didn't scour the annals of war history to find an apt anti-Semitic episode I could exploit in order to express my hatred of Jews, as these ladies seem to believe. The reason why the post was about an IDF (Israel Defence Forces) canine is simply because it's seeing that news item that inspired it. If I had spotted a similar event in the context of any other army I would have written the same, mutatis mutandis.

What is sinister about these responses is their demand of the removal of my blog, whatever that meant. I'm not sure if these ladies actually know how these things work, but it's immaterial. The spirit of strict censorship - anything we don't like must be removed - is there in full view.

Also unpleasant is the remark "the Isola da [sic] Elba is over-run with homeless cats". Since I am Italian, it looks like a clear tit-for-tat and ad hominem attack. They can be excused for not knowing that I am a lifelong animal activist, but not for neglecting to try to find out something about the context before launching themselves into indictments for anti-Semitism.

Just browsing my blog would have shown them that I've written in support of Israel several times, and would have displayed my animal-rights credentials.

It's a small thing, you may say, and I would agree, if it were not indicative of a much wider and greater phenomenon, of which I was reminded when I read the following in Takimag:

He [American Congressman Jim Traficant] also gained infamy (along with Patrick Buchanan) for opposing the deportation to Israel of John Demjanjuk, whom Traficant insisted had been misidentified as notorious concentration-camp guard “Ivan the Terrible.”

Since Patrick Buchanan is the author of a book I'm reading with great interest, Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, that made me curious to find out more.

It turned out that the case of Ukrainian John Demjanjuk, first sentenced to death by an Israeli court for being the infamous "Ivan the Terrible" guard in Treblinka, the German concentration camp, and years later acquitted by the Supreme Court of Israel because Ivan Marchenko had been established as the real "Ivan the Terrible", is very interesting.

In the clearly not anti-Semitic Kyiv Post, Ukraine’s English-language newspaper, lawyer Andriy J. Semotiuk writes:

While I was not immersed in the case, over the years I became increasingly alarmed by the legal deficiencies that were evident in the prosecution of his case in the United States, then in Israel and finally in Munich.

I don't want to reproduce here all the story of Demjanjuk and his case, which you can follow by reading the links.

Gitta Sereny, an Austrian author of Jewish descent who investigated and wrote extensively about the Third Reich's extermination camps and is another unlikely anti-Semite, had this to say:

From the start of the trial I was concerned that a man was being tried whose identity was in question. My friend Albert Spiess, the German prosecutor of the Treblinka trial and the trial of Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, considered the identification procedure that had been applied in Israel and which produced the identification of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible to be unacceptable. He had told the Israelis, who had invited him to testify at the trial, that he would have to say so in court, at which point the invitation, not surprisingly, was withdrawn.

So, Buchanan and Traficant, who as the Takimag article says gained "infamy", were right all along: Demjanjuk had been misidentified as "Ivan the Terrible", and the latter was finally found to be another man, Marchenko.

That didn't save Buchanan and Traficant from being accused of anti-Semitism over this episode.

I repeat what I said earlier: anti-Semitism, like anti-Christianity, exists. But it is bandied about too often and too often wrongly.

The kind of defensiveness that leads to imputations of Jew-hate whenever there is a disagreement is too similar to "Islamophobia" for comfort, and doesn't help to isolate and address the real anti-Semitism as it confuses the latter with so many "cry wolf" false alarms.

Marseille Is No Longer a European City

The city in the pictures is Marseille, France's second largest city, for many years considered as one of the cleanest, most beautiful cities in the world. See what it looks like now.

In her best-selling book The Force of Reason, the great, pioneer counterjihad writer Oriana Fallaci talked about Marseille as a symbol par excellence of the devastation, ugliness and filth brought by the Muslim invasion of Europe.

Europe, she wrote, is becoming unrecognisable. Marseille is "no longer a French city, it is a Maghrebin city".

Arabic ​is the first language spoken in Marseille, and French only the second.

95% of the students in the city's Collège Edgar Quinet are now Muslims.

No wonder Gaddafi once said in a speech that there was no need to invade Europe because in 20 years Europe would be Muslim.

Europe, with its political fear, spiritual decadence and weakness, and obsequiousness towards Islam, is the first battleground for Muslims in their quest to conquer and subjugate the world.

The Apprentice Gets the Sharia Treatment

You know that Islamisation has become a normal part of British life, acceptable and widely accepted, when one of The Apprentice BBC series' would-be tycoons, competing for the quarter-of-a-million pounds that Alan Sugar - now Lord - will invest in a new business idea, is a woman in hijab.

This is a high-profile TV program, and with the X-Factor one of the most popular. The new series has just started Tuesday 14 October.

Seeing this Muslima acting in a typically Western way - namely trying to make tons of money with little concern for anything else, as money is now our God -, discussing fashion issues with the other girls in her team - despite the fact that her market stall only sells "Asian" fashion, of which I suppose her headscarf is an example -, and simply - if you can take your mind off her Islamic headdress - appearing normal, will do wonders to make the British people view the presence of Muslims in their midst as an everyday occurrence, especially for those who don't yet have the pleasure to experience this phenomenon first hand in their streets or countryside. The soap opera East Enders has already done that, but then everybody knows that London is a different country.

Since sooner or later Muslims will be a majority in Britain and sharia will become the law of the country, the BBC, by trying to make us get used to it, is probably thinking that it's doing us all a big favour.

Ebola Could Mutate into an Airborne Virus; "Bar Entry from Affected Countries" Says Liberty GB

Tuesday during a House of Lords debate Labour's Lord Robert Winston, a medical doctor who has presented scientific TV programs, said that Ebola could mutate into an airborne virus that is caught like a common cold.

He was reacting to Health Minister Earl Howe's remark at the House of Commons that the Ebola risk to British people "remains low".

At the moment the disease is passed through bodily contact or fluids such as blood and sweat, but the contagion risk would increase if the virus became airborne.

Lord Winston asserted: "I am slightly concerned about the possible risk of seeming a little complacent about saying that this is low-risk. We know that viruses mutate, for example, and we know that the Ebola virus can mutate."

He was echoing a similar concern expressed on US television by an expert on the Ebola virus, Purdue University virologist Dr. David Sanders, who has been studying this virus since 2003.

Sanders made his concern known after – in the first person-to-person transmission of Ebola on US soil - Texas Presbyterian Hospital nurse Nina Pham contracted the virus from Thomas Duncan, a Liberian patient who, if proper controls had been in place, should not even have been in America . The associate professor of biological sciences explained: “So we actually have the data that show that Ebola enters into lung tissue from the airway side. This was done with human lung tissue. And it enters by the exactly same side of the cell as influenza enters cells. So it clearly has that inherent capacity to get into the lungs from the airway”.

In another interview he had warned: “So this argues that Ebola is primed to be able to have respiratory transmission... We need to be taking this into consideration – what if. This is not a crazy what if. This is not a loud what if.”

The US Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), a global leader in addressing public health preparedness and emerging infectious disease response, about a month ago had already reported: ”We believe there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.”

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, harshly criticised in the States for their mishandling of the crisis, seem to start accepting this possibility.

The heightened risk of contracting Ebola due to respiratory transmission, if confirmed, will and should put more pressure on British authorities to stop potential carriers from entering the UK.

President Obama has been accused of putting American lives at risk for the sake of political correctness, by refusing to suspend travel visas from Ebola-affected countries.

Here in the UK, Public Health England and Border Force officials admitted that there is no fixed plan on how to deal with people who have visited affected countries but refuse to give details or to have their temperature taken.

Screening for Ebola has started at British airports but it emerged that the process is voluntary.

Keeping in mind that “After Ghana and Gambia, the UK has the third highest risk globally because of the large number of people and flights from the epidemic region to London”, the Liberty GB party believes that the first step to protect the British public is to bar from entry to the UK people from the Ebola-stricken countries.

NUS Rejects Anti-ISIS Motion as "Islamophobic"

You have to see it to believe it.

A student of Kurdish descent has submitted a resolution to the UK's National Union of Students (NUS) to condemn the Islamic State, but the motion has been rejected because it offended the sensibilities of the Union’s Black Students Officer (BSO) who led a voting bloc to defeat it.

The NUS considers the ongoing conflict with ISIS to be “Islamophobic”.

You couldn't make this up. At least they recognise that ISIS represents Islam, and is not some totally extraneous group that for some hard-to-fathom reason has decided to associate itself to the "religion of peace" while beheading people like there's no tomorrow.

From Breitbart London:

One member of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) group took to his blog to bemoan the fact the Union’s Black Student Officer could railroad the motion apparently by virtue of race alone. Complaining of the excessive power the Liberation campaigns enjoy he said: “the idea is widespread that if a Liberation Officer opposes something, it must be bad… people see or claim to see debate on the Middle East as something that the BSO should somehow have veto power over, regardless of the issues and the arguments made”.

Apart from the purported Islamophobia that supporting a minority group being raped and murdered by the Islamic State implies, the involvement of the United States in the conflict appears to have caused the greatest division among the various elements of the NUS, as the traditional bête noire of right-on student politics is flying air-missions in support of the Kurdish army.

The NCAFC blogger was realistic about the utility of American intervention, remarking: “the Kurds and Yazidis thus far would not have been able to survive if it had not been for aid from the Americans. Calling simply for an end to this intervention is the same as calling for the defeat of the Peshmerga forces by ISIS”.

As the motion was defeated by a combination of abstainees and the BSO power of opinion setting, in the words of the angered bloggers this time the NUS thought it preferable to “sit back and watch the slaughter” than to ally themselves with a “pro USA intervention” vote.

Biggest Scientific Study Suggests Life after Death

"First hint of 'life after death' in biggest ever scientific study", headlines The Telegraph, going on to say: "Southampton University scientists have found evidence that awareness can continue for at least several minutes after clinical death which was previously thought impossible".

Does this prove that there is life after death and that God exists?

Of course not, but it shows without a shadow of a doubt that there are many phenomena and events that science doesn't explain about the nature of consciousness and of the mind in general.

Someone's answer to that migtht be that science will one day explain everything: but that belief requires a deep faith in itself. Even though the object of that faith is science and not God, faith it is.

What is paradoxical about the way in which atheists - "unbelievers" is a misnomer, as they do believe without empirical or rational foundation in many things -, since 19th-century positivism to today's Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, have associated decline of religion with progress of science is that the advances in the latter, if anything, have demonstrated to us how many things in the universe, life and mind science doesn't understand, most notably their origin. And there are very good reasons to predict that it never will, as they probably require other constructs, other ways of thinking and other kinds of explanantion.

The connection between the brain, a material object, and the mind, or rather how the physicality of the former can produce the non-physicality of the latter, has not become clearer the more it has been studied and researched by science, but in fact the opposite has occurred: the questions have multiplied, while the answers have diminished in proportion.

It's perfectly true that it's in the nature of scientific investigation that every new problem solved, every new question answered gives rise to new problems and questions, which inspired one of the greatest philosophers of science, Sir Karl Popper, to title his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest.

But there is a difference between the type of investigation in which science excels, where satisfactory theories that can survive rigorous tests are reached, and the type of investigation which displays an exponentially increasing discrepancy between problems and their solutions.

What the neo-positivists of the early 20th century, like the Vienna Circle - thinking that they were following Ludwig Wittgenstein but in fact misinterpreting him -, were saying was that questions which cannot be answered by mere logic and empiricism (hence one of their names, "logic empiricists") should not be asked and pursued. Metaphysics and theology were nonsense. This was a way of limiting all intellectual search of knowledge to science.

This position has serious limitations. First a logical one: it is a self-contradictory position. If anything beyond the realm of science is nonsensical, what these philosophers (and their heirs today) are saying is nonsensical too, as it does not limit itself to logic and empirical evidence: they are engaging in metaphysics as well, albeit to oppose another metaphysical view.

And this takes us to its second serious limitation: if even people who have postulated boundaries for intellectual investigation cannot confine themselves to them and remain within them, that by itself is an indication that those boundaries are too narrow and unsatisfactory. And that science cannot provide all the answers that are necessary for a curious mind to be satisfied.

Even more, what if science itself, as it seems to be the case the more it expands and deepens, points to something outside itself?

From The Telegraph article:

The largest ever medical study into near-death and out-of-body experiences has discovered that some awareness may continue even after the brain has shut down completely.

It is a controversial subject which has, until recently, been treated with widespread scepticism.

But scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria.

And they found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.

One man even recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room.

Despite being unconscious and ‘dead’ for three minutes, the 57-year-old social worker from Southampton, recounted the actions of the nursing staff in detail and described the sound of the machines.

“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” said Dr Sam Parnia, a former research fellow at Southampton University, now at the State University of New York, who led the study.

“But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.

“The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.

“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”

Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived and of 140 surveyed, 39 per cent said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated.

Although many could not recall specific details, some themes emerged. One in five said they had felt an unusual sense of peacefulness while nearly one third said time had slowed down or speeded up.

Some recalled seeing a bright light; a golden flash or the Sun shining. Others recounted feelings of fear or drowning or being dragged through deep water. 13 per cent said they had felt separated from their bodies and the same number said their sensed had been heightened.

Dr Parnia believes many more people may have experiences when they are close to death but drugs or sedatives used in the process of rescuitation may stop them remembering.

“Estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best.

“Many people have assumed that these were hallucinations or illusions but they do seem to corresponded to actual events.

“And a higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.

“These experiences warrant further investigation.“

Dr David Wilde, a research psychologist and Nottingham Trent University, is currently compiling data on out-of-body experiences in an attempt to discover a pattern which links each episode.

He hopes the latest research will encourage new studies into the controversial topic.

“Most studies look retrospectively, 10 or 20 years ago, but the researchers went out looking for examples and used a really large sample size, so this gives the work a lot of validity.

“There is some very good evidence here that these experiences are actually happening after people have medically died.

“We just don’t know what is going on. We are still very much in the dark about what happens when you die and hopefully this study will help shine a scientific lens onto that.” [All emphases added]

It's Not Bias that Makes US Whites Wary of Blacks

Whites walking down Main Street with an AK-47 are defenders of American values; a black man doing the same thing is Public Enemy No. 1.

These are the words of Charles Gallagher, professor at La Salle University in Pennsylvania and "a sociologist who studies race", according to a CNN article on guns-race relationship.

The assumption is that Americans are biased against black people.

The reality is very different. The picture above, taken in August of this year, shows some of the over 30 members of the all-black Huey P. Newton Gun Club "gathered to march through South Dallas with rifles, shotguns, and AR-15s. The group eventually entered a restaurant with their weapons while Dallas police officers were inside eating lunch."

But the police hardly looked at them.

Sociologist Gallagher doesn't accuse white Americans buying a gun of being racist en masse, only of "being human, of unconsciously absorbing stereotypical attitudes about black men and violence that are as old as America itself."

But here as well what he says is far from the truth. You don't find those stereotypical attitudes in US white culture, dominated by political correctness and guilt feelings about American past.

Quite the opposite. Hollywood portrays much more frequently whites than blacks as criminals. The mainstream media are so sensitive to this issue that The Associated Press Stylebook, containing the United States' (and internationally) most authoritative guidelines for reporting, prescribes:

Racial identification should not be included in any story unless such reference is clearly relevant to the story or when part of a detailed description of a fugitive.

Gun Watch comments:

The downplay of black predominance in crime is so great, that most people in urban areas now assume that if the race of the perpetrator is not mentioned, they are black. It is an open joke. The AP attempt to prevent a stereotype, has become emblematic of the social engineering by the old media. It has had some effect, but reality overrides it.

The reality is represented by the official statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice:

[For homicide] 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).

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

And this is not the only relevant figure. You'll find more of them here: US Racist and Capital Crimes Have a Black Hue .

Clacton Question Time Possible Bias

If you've ever watched the political debate program Question Time on the BBC, you'll have noticed that the audience in the studio - that asks the panelists topical questions - is constantly predominantly belonging to the Left and extreme Left of the political spectrum, and doesn't seem to be in tune with - let alone representative of - the general public opinion.

To dispel doubts of bias, the BBC once explained that its criterion for choosing the audience is that the latter should represent the various proportions of political views of the local population. Each show has a different location in a British town or city and, according to this criterion, when the broadcast is in Bath, the studio audience should include roughly the same proportion of Conservatives, Labour etc found in Bath.

How can the BBC explain, then, the kind of treatment (not quite lynch mob but getting there) reserved by the members of the audience to the UKIP's Economic spokesman and MEP Patrick O'Flynn on the last Question Time, Thursday 9 October in Clacton on Sea, Essex?

That same day, the by-election held in the Clacton constituency had returned a massive majority for UKIP with nearly 60% of the votes, the highest ever percentage increase (from 0 to 60) in a by-election in British history.

And yet, anyone watching the program would have thought that the people of Clacton viscerally hate the UKIP and love Labour, which came a lame third in the electoral results with just over 11% of the votes.

The possible explanations are prima facie two: either the BBC takes a long time to catch up with public opinion, or the apparently impartial criterion it indicated as the basis for its choice of audiences is not the one actually used.

London Says "Ban Jihadis" as New Terror Plot Is Discovered

Last Tuesday 7 October counter-terrorism officers and armed police have arrested four jihadists plotting a "significant" terror attack in London, and are still interrogating them.

One line of enquiry is that the group was plotting a Mumbai-style gun attack in the capital.

Scotland Yard and the MI5 suspect that the plot was linked to the Islamic State, the first plot directly inspired by the IS. At least one of the four men in their early 20s arrested had recently returned to Britain from Syria.

The police are convinced we are in a more intense phase of Islamic terrorism, increased by the threat of Muslim fighters coming back from their involvement in the Syria and Iraq violence.

Referring to the latest foiled plot, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, speaking to BBC London Radio, gave a grave warning: "[I|t is a quite serious case.

"It is one of a series of arrests that we have had over the last few weeks which taken together for me confirm that the drumbeat around terrorism has changed.

"It's a more intense drumbeat - we are having to be more interventionist and a lot of it is linked back to Syria and Iraq."

It looks like public opinion is getting the message loud and clear, as a Wednesday's YouGov poll showed that three out of four Londoners (74%) think that Britons who have travelled to Syria or Iraq to fight with extremist groups should be banned from returning to the UK.

This is what my party Liberty GB says, and it's been part of our policies regarding Islam since the beginning of the present crisis.

If we break down the survey results, it's interesting to see that women (at 77%) more than men (70%) are in favour of banning jihadists from entering the country.

But only 49% of people aged 18-24 support it, which is the unmpteenth confirmation that lowering the voting age is a bad idea, and it should in fact be increased.

In the last few weeks extra armed patrols have been employed all over London due to fears of increasing Islamic terrorism.

This plot has been foiled, but how long before another one cannot be stopped and we have a new atrocity?

And how long before the public realises that Islam is the problem and the number of Muslims who are sworn enemies of Britain - tiny minorities or not - is very large and counting?

Politically Correct Language Thoughts

If a prostitute is a sex worker, is a thief an expropriation worker? And a hitman a dispatch worker?

If a homosexual is gay, is a necrophiliac happy?

If Before Christ is Before the Common Era and Anno Domini is Common Era, is Jesus Christ a common good?

If a person who criticises Islam is suffering from Islamophobia, is a person who criticises him suffering from Islamophobiaphobia?

If someone opposed to Third World immigration to the West is a racist, is someone in favour of it a Westist?

If believing that a woman should cook is misogynist, is believing that a man should do the dishes misandrist?

If someone who researches evidence on the subject of the Holocaust is a Holocaust denier, is someone who is engaged in research on any historical subject a history denier?

If a person who doubts anthropogenic global warming theory is a climate change denier, is a person who doubts flat earth theory a flat earth denier?

YouTube without PC Censorship

I want to tell you about a free-speech answer to YouTube: it's called LivingScoop.

The people behind it have contacted me asking me to spread the news of its existence and its need of promotion and financial support.

LivingScoop declares to be "the first and only video sharing site with unlimited free speech and freedom of all expressions".

The problem with YouTube is that it is relatively easy to violate its terms of service. How many times have we clicked on a link to a YouTube video and found that it had been taken down? Counterjihad and other politically-incorrect clips are particularly vulnerable to this fate.

It seems that many videos violating YouTube's guidelines can remain on the website without any trouble, as long as no-one complaints. But, if there is a sufficient number of complaints about a video, it will be removed until it's reviewed by YouTube's staff. And we know how good Muslims and Leftists are at acting in concert to get what they want (just look at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in the United Nations).

Besides, YouTube is owned by Google, which is itself an ideologically Left-of-centre company, a fact that shouldn't inspire total trust.

LivingScoop is different. The LivingScoop management has sent me this message, which I reproduce faithfully:

Livingscoop is one of the key front line Websites in the fight against Islamization of Western countries. Very big blogs like PI-News in Germany use Livingscoop to host their videos safely, and Livingscoop was also notably used to host video interviews with Robert Spencer or with Wafa Sultan.

Meanwhile, these days Livingscoop needs support over the short term in order to face costs, and provide support for necessary technical improvements on the mid-term.

Please, donate to Livingscoop to help us develop and add technical improvements, such as a new own video player, a general HTML5 video format working better with iOS devices, and an upgraded great version of our â "Live Reporter" real time streaming app, etc.

>>> Use the Paypal "Donate" button visible on all pages of Livingscoop. <<<

Feel free to pass on this message to your friends, relatives, networks.

The more support Livingscoop gets, the more sustainable and efficient it is to provide everyone's daily freedom of expression and to offer a strong, safe and reliable platform for anti-jihad videos.

Thanks!

www.livingscoop.com