Does Racism Mean Anything Anymore?

England soccer team's former captain John Terry leaves international football. "England captain John Terry quits international football because he thinks FA have already decided he's guilty of racism charge - even though he was cleared by a court of law" (Daily Mail).

His career is the latest victim (although it sounds odd using that term about ultra-rich and famous soccer players) of the football world and authorities' obsession with racism. Another victim is English football itself, which has lost a valuable player - and God knows they could do with people like that.

Former England manager Fabio Capello acted with much integrity when he stood by Terry and resigned over the FA's decision to strip Terry of his captaincy before his trial.

The absurdity of the accusation of racism moved by the Football Association against him was revealed during the trial, when one after the other several black or half-black colleagues of Terry's testified that he never displayed any racist behaviour, quite the contrary.

What does then "racism" mean? Even if somebody - and I don't know if Terry did, actually he was accused of just saying "black" which can hardly be considered an insult - but even if someone, in a moment of anger during an altercation, especially in a heated, adrenalin-supercharged situation like a soccer match, used a racial epithet that wouldn't mean he is a racist.

If a man's whole behaviour, ideas and attitudes are non-racist, saying "nigger" does not make him a racist.

"Racism" is a much-overused and abused word which, like many others - like "family" - has come to mean whatever anyone wishes it to mean. And I'm not saying that, it's the Macpherson's Inquiry into the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993 which enshrined that, opening the door to the abuses we witness today, with these words: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".

That literally means that a racist incident can be anything, without restriction.

Muslim Radicals with Friends in High Places

Babar Ahmad, Abu Hamza and three other major terrorism suspects will be extradited from the UK to the US in the next few weeks (from the BBC).

The European Court of Human Rights has given its final approval for the extradition.

Notice that the BBC site, in his photo's caption, tries to portray Babar Ahmad as a victim, saying that he has been held in UK custody without trial for nearly eight years, although the reason for that has in fact been appeals and other delaying actions by his lawyers and supporters. One of them is fellow Muslim and politician Sadiq Khan, Former Deputy Leader of the Labour Group, Shadow Lord Chancellor and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice.

Born in England of Pakistani parents, Babar Ahmad is lifelong friend from childhood as well as constituent of Sadiq Khan, who is also the MP for Tooting, South London.

Ahmad is accused of having run a major English-language pro-jihad website, Azzam, which played a crucial role in recruiting Muslims in the West to fight for jihad in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan; money laundering through the website; plotting with US nationals; receiving classified US Naval plans; "conspiracy to provide material to support terrorists, namely the Taliban and the Chechen Mujahideen; providing material to support terrorists; and conspiracy to kill in a foreign country" (from Islam versus Europe).

Since the indictment, Khan has refused to sever his ties with his jihad-supporting friend. Indeed, Khan has shamelessly used his position as Shadow Justice Minister to help Ahmad in any way that he can, demanding that he be tried in Britain rather than extradited to the US, even though the terrorist recruitment website Ahmad is alleged to have assisted was operating out of the US.

Cutthroat Life for Immigrants in South Africa

Hard to be an immigrant in South Africa. Discrimination, assault, threats, harassment are daily for those who chose to leave their countries.

They've come to South Africa to work. But their lives are far from easy. African immigrants from Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia regularly suffer discrimination, threats or police harassment. It is not uncommon for their businesses to be looted or vandalized. They are accused by the South Africans of stealing their jobs. Although South Africa is mentioned as an example for the black continent to follow due to its economic development, the unemployment rate is nearly 25%.

The country has 2 million immigrants on its soil, or 3% of its population. But South Africans take a dim view of the fact that immigrants associate to buy wholesale and sell for less. And they do not hesitate to extend credit to loyal customers. Another advantage of these traders is that they open early and close late. "South Africa is a rather xenophobic country", according to Gwada Majange, spokesman for the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants (CoRMSA). "This year, for example, we had many attacks in the country, primarily targeting owners of grocery stores."

In July, at least 500 people have been displaced after attacks in Botshabelo, a township (slum), while shops were set ablaze in the outskirts of Cape Town. During 2008, the xenophobic riots against foreigners left many dozens of people dead.

Immigrants are excluded!

Immigrants' representatives have accused the authorities of complicity and of supporting this xenophobia. In cities, it is better for immigrants to carry their ID documents when they go out because the police do not hesitate to make life difficult for immigrants who do not have them on, says a Cameroonian. "They arrest people who do not have papers, and even those who do" observed Jean-Pierre Lukamba, vice-president of the African Diaspora Forum, a federation of associations of refugees and immigrants. According to him, "there are regular raids, roundups, sometimes they don't even tell you why they arrest you. Some police officers may even tear your papers."

Discrimination also exists in the health field. In South Africa It is more difficult for an immigrant to be treated. "When you go to the hospital if you do not have papers in South Africa, it becomes very slow. There is a woman who has lost her child because of that", says Marc Gbaffou, President of the Forum.

Similarly, to find a job they face multiple barriers. "A lot of job vacancies are marked 'SA only' or 'Bring your ID' (South Africans only, bring your South African papers, ed.). Immigrants are excluded!", denounces Marc Gbaffou. He thinks that the authorities are lax about the situation and they do nothing to improve the living conditions of immigrants. He was referring to a project that the ANC, the ruling party, wants to put in place to restrict "the right of non-South Africans to buy or manage grocery stores or larger companies without having complied with certain legislation."

For the moment, the authorities have not given more details about this project. Associations fighting for the rights of immigrants are respected in the country. They will not hesitate to voice their discontent.

Source: Afrik

Swedes Tired of Discrimination that Favours Immigrants

For the first time in history, Swedish people have held street protests against the discriminatory treatment they receive at the hands of the local authorities.

In the village of Grums, 80 people defied their fear of being called racist by taking to the streets to protest against the preferential policies for immigrants.

The most astonishing of those has been, apparently (I find it even difficult to believe), to forcibly evict native Swedish tenants, even long-standing, from public housing apartmens and replace them with refugees.

The organizers of the protest hope that this is the beginning of a new grass-root movement that will spread nationwide.

According to Victoria Wärmler [one of the organizers], Grums is far from the only municipality in Sweden where politicians refuse to listen to their constituents. After the protest was announced on Facebook, she received encouragement from several other regions where people wish to protest.

In Sweden, immigration is reaching a critical point, and so is indigenous opposition to it.

The number of Muslims in Sweden and Denmark doubled in 14 years.

This is the resut of research by Dispatch International, a new print and online newspaper created by Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist and Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard, both fighters for freedom of speech and the Islamization of Europe.

The video above shows Lars Hedegaard's speech at the International Civil Liberties Alliance's Conference for Free Speech and Human Rights in Brussels on July 9 2012, at which he was presented with the Defender of Freedom Award.

Right to Bear Arms and Secular State

Europeans don't generally understand that many things that Americans do have the purpose of protecting the individual from the state, whereas the inhabitants of the Old Continent think that they are done for different reasons.

Two of the most illustrative and important cases of this misunderstanding are the right to bear arms and the secular state.

Europeans usually think that the US Constitution's right to bear arms has to do with individual protection from criminality and violence from other individuals. In reality, its main goal is to protect the citizen from the power of the state.

Without this constitutionally-enshrined right only the state, through the armed forces and the police, would be be authorized to have the use of arms, and this is a huge source of power and control.

It's reminiscent of the origin of the expression 'crossing the Rubicon'. The Rubicon is a river in Northern Italy which is sufficiently distant from Rome to have been elected by the ancient Roman Republic as the safe boundary, the defining line which nobody could cross with an army. The Romans knew only too well that weapons are a great source of power.

You must have an enormous trust in a government to allow it to be the only entity to be permitted to carry arms.

In my second example, Europeans in their majority believe that the secular state serves the purpose to protect the state from the power of the Church, whereas the opposite is true: the separation between Church and state has the role of protecting the Church from the power of the state.

Christian Values Erosion Opens the Way to Muslim Polygamy

A typical example of how the erosion of our Christian values has left us without defence against the encroachment of Islam is that of polygamy.

Multiple divorces and remarriages in the West have created a situation which is similar to polygamy with a man or a woman having more than one family. The only difference with Muslim polygamy is that men and women in the Western variant of polygamy are on an equal footing or rather, if there is a discrimination, it is against men.

In these circumstances, Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

As it is, it's not clear what the ethical basis for the rejection of Muslim polygamy should be, since we have allowed things that have similar consequences for the children, for instance, left in many cases without a clear father figure or even without a father at all, as in the case of single-mother 'families'.

In many ways, there are a lot of similarities between Muhammed and Henry VIII: they both formed religious principles around their physical needs and personal desires.

What's Wrong with Tattoos

It's interesting how there are things that we know instinctively and we think that they are just a gut feeling without much empirical evidence to support it, whereas in fact we know these things unconsciously, we know them without knowing why.

I have always found tattoos repugnant but I didn't attach importance to this feeling, one way or the other.

I then read several years ago Theodore Dalrymple's great book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , which I recommend, where he recounts and describes his experiences as a prison doctor, among other things. In it he says that a disproportionate number of prison inmates have tattoos.

So there was something after all in my dislike for these mixtures between body graffiti and self-harm.

In all the intervening years since my reading that the fashion of tattoos has spread a lot, especially among the young.

And now I have just read that the practice of tattoos is associated with many unhealthy and antisocial behaviours, including suicide, aggressive and/or delinquent behaviour, can be psychologically addictive and can lead to infections, according to scientific studies. Research on adolescents has shown a correlation between tattooing and living in a single-parent household, lower socio-economic status, high risk behaviours, substance abuse, violence, sexual behaviour, school problems, eating disorders.

The fact that tattoos have become increasingly fashionable  is part of the "dumbing down" trend especially in teenagers and young adults, the tendency to do one's worst instead of one's best, to try to emulate the lower or even criminal classes, in language, music (or rather cacophony), intellectual pursuits or lack thereof, street fashion, and the like.

This also shows that our gut instincts, although they should not be blindly followed, should at least not be discarded without some thought because there is an adaptive value in them, as psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer explains in Reckoning With Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

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