Douglas Murray and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Debate

I've chosen this video of a debate between Douglas Murray and renowned UK Muslim leftist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a columnist for the (self-proclaimed) Independent newspaper, because it is very representative of several things.

Alibhai-Brown starts by saying that the last time the two of them debated they were very civilized and "British", which we must assume she now regrets because this time she was anything but.

Then, after reprimanding Murray for his - in her view - generalizations about Muslims and fundamentalism, she berates British culture which, she says, is a drinking culture. So he is accused of what he does not do and she, on the other hand, does: tarring everyone in a group with the same brush.

After this nice example of inconsistency, we are treated to her description of herself as "very well-integrated", in the same breath as her protest against imposing "Britishness" on everybody living in the UK.

Many similar inanities follow before the conversation begins revolving around freedom of speech and then Iran, Israel and nuclear arms.

About freedom of speech, I'm glad to see that Douglas Murray appears to believe what I believe regarding Holocaust denial. The gist of what he says is that imprisoning David Irving for denying the Holocaust gives the President of Iran, the madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a pretext to accuse the West of double standards by showing its Achilles' heel in the defence of free speech.

Murray seems to think what I also believe about freedom of speech in general, namely that criminalizing Holocaust denial, Nazi and fascist speech is a violation of freedom of expression.

In fact, as many people have observed during the recent Muslim riots against the Muhammad film, making crimes of Holocaust denial and the rest paves the way to the Islamic world's request to impose on the West blasphemy laws outlawing criticism of Islam.

About Iran, the "very well-integrated" Yasmin Alibhai-Brown makes several attempts at morally equating it to Israel and Britain, saying that nobody should have nuclear weapons but, if some countries have them, then all countries ahould be allowed to have them too.

I found the best answer to that in a comment to the video:

In the words of Salman Rushdie:"There is only one group in the world that wishes to get nuclear weapons to use them... radical Islamists". Every country that is armed with them has them for deterrence. There are those who have them not to use them and there are those who want them to use them. Yasmin simply does not get it.

As we well know, Islamists have among their midst many suicide - nuclear or not - bombers.

The most revealing thing in this very enlightening video is the parallel in the irrationality of Alibhai-Brown's performance: she talks as irrationally as she acts irrationally during the discussion.

The lack of logic in her words is not only mirrored but confirmed and reinforced by her continuous interrupting, shouting, patronizing, forcing the others to pay attention to her, treating them like idiots, telling them what to do, pointing fingers under their nose and other hysterical behaviours.

If, at any moment, you may be tempted to take her pseudo-arguments seriously her behaviour serves as a reminder of what degree of irrationality we are dealing with here.

Christmas for Islam is a Crime Worse than Murder

Are you already thinking and dreaming of Christmas?

Enjoy it now because it may not last long.

Watch this beautiful video (the first part is not, but it is educational).

Note: "shirk" is an Arabic term that in Islam means the sin of idolatry or polytheism, the deification or worship of anyone or anything other than Allah.

Shirk is an unforgivable crime when unpardoned before death; Allah may forgive any sin unpardoned before death except shirk.

This is why the Muslim preacher in the video calls Christmas a worse crime than fornication, drinking alcohol and even killing someone.

BBC Question Time Panellist Mehdi Hasan Calls Non-Muslims Animals

On Question Time tonight, the BBC invited as a member of the programme's esteemed panel Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan, former senior political editor of the left-wing The New Statesman and now political director at the leftist website The Huffington Post, regular contributor to The Guardian, in short one of the mainstream Islam's public figures that the UK elites and media are so keen on.

If you want to know a bit more about his views and see how much of a moderate Muslim he is, watch the video above in which he is caught comparing non-Muslims to "animals": so he is speciesist as well as Islamic supremacist.

Hasan is also in support of Iran's nuclear program.

The BBC's invitation of the leader of the BNP Nick Griffin to Question Time, which provoked so many protests, not only pales in comparison but also Griffin, despite the constant attacks he receives, has done nothing to deserve them.

If people want to continue calling Griffin and his party "racist" and "fascist", they have to support these accusations with real evidence, not demagoguery.

Romney Erases Obama Lead among Women

According to a new Associated Press-GfK poll, Romney has erased Obama's previous 16-point advantage among women voters. The poll shows the two candidates still neck and neck, with Romney favoured by 47 percent of the electorate and Obama by 45 percent, a result within the poll's margin of sampling error which is 3-4 points.

Among women, the percentage is identical for both: 47-47, a victory for Romney who was lagging by 16 points a month ago.

Columnist Ann Coulter sums up the current post-debates and immediately pre-election situation rather well:

It must be very stressful [for liberals] seeing Obama go down in the polls even following the debates he allegedly won.

With the economy in the toilet and the Islamic world on fire, when Obama appears in person it’s even worse than if he were sleeping. That’s why – contrary to popular belief – the first debate was Obama’s best performance.

Perhaps if liberals hadn’t coddled Obama his entire life, giving him college acceptance letters, standing ovations and Nobel Peace prizes just for showing up, he would have been more prepared to debate someone a little more challenging than John McCain.

Double Standard of UK Police Wanting EDL Banned

In a video that has now been removed from YouTube, UK-based Muslim preacher Abu Basir al-Tartusi could be seen on a balcony surrounded by Kalashnikov-waving rebels after apparently capturing a hilltop village in Syria.

At a time when a UK-based Muslim preacher is leading an armed gang of more than 100 Islamist fighters in Syria, the House of Lords was told that Muslim women in Britain live in fear because of the spread of unofficial and unregulated sharia courts enforcing Islamic law, poppy sellers will receive protection from Royal British Legion body guards for the first time ever for fear of the repetition of last year's attacks from Muslims, and Woolwich Crown Court heard that a British Al-Qaeda gang planned "another 9/11" to attack the UK with up to 8 suicide bombs by hitting crowded public places to cause “mass death” and “carnage in the name of Allah” because the 7/7 terrorists killing 52 innocent people had not done enough damage, the British police ask Home Secretary Theresa May to ban peaceful marches by the English Defence League (EDL), one of the few organizations who have the courage to protest against the Islamization of Britain (via Christian Defence League).

And all the events described above became news just in the last 4 days. I haven't mentioned the scarce attention that the UK police have dedicated to the decade-long problem of Muslim paedophiles' grooming of young white girls for sex.

Notice that the police have not asked for demonstrations by Muslims or far-left groups to be banned.

Where are the loyalties of the British police? What are their priorities? Protecting the public or enforcing the politically correct ideology of the multiculturalist agenda?

You decide.

How the Media Construct Myths

Sometimes we wonder how it is possible that the public believes so easily what the media and the elites tell them, about Islam and its threat for instance.

I've gained an insight into this by watching the second presidential debate on the TV, after which the media have on the whole immediately screamed victory for Obama because the biased CNN moderator Candy Crowley has wrongly taken the President's side on the question of how he (mis)handled the Benghazi consulate assault, although she later backtracked.

I distinctly heard Candy Crowley say “He did call it an act of terror. It did as well take two weeks... so Governor Romney is right" or something to that effect, but for a while I thought I had imagined this because no-one seemed to have noticed it.

When even Crowley herself explicitly confirmed and repeated that sentence: “I did turn around right after that and say ‘but you are totally correct that they spent two weeks telling us this was about a tape' ...he [Romney] was right in the main I just think he picked the wrong word”, I believed that the question was now settled, that the media could be economical with the truth but not go as far as telling an outright lie.

I must have been naïve, because the next day many media outlets were repeating that Romney got it wrong.

Day by day the evidence is mounting that Obama knew within 24 hours that this was a jihad attack but kept saying it was because of the Muhammad video to cover the failure of his Middle East policies. Even during the same debate he pointed out that he kept his promise of getting Osama bin Laden, as if to imply that al-Qaeda had been defeated.

In fact “former CIA Director Porter Goss told Fox News that, especially in North Africa, Al Qaeda is "much stronger" and "spreading out" throughout the region.”

It is clearer to me now how myths are created by press and broadcasting networks. A little bit at a time, like Chinese whispers: something gets reported in the media with a little subtraction or addition of "facts", then gets repeated with more changes, and so on. In the end, all these misrepresentations accumulate and become an avalanche.

They start by a small distortion here, followed by a minor alteration of the facts there. Gradually. So, unless you have been a very, very attentive reader, listener or viewer - or, more likely, somebody who has followed a particular event or subject for a length of time - you won't realize that what started as A, by slow and stealth transformations, has become B, non-A.

For example, newspapers have been using the expression "anti-Muslim" for the AFDI's subway ads, rather than "anti-jihad". That is intended to subtly instil doubts in readers' minds.

The media add a single piece of the puzzle a day to their complete picture of fabrications. They don't tell you abruptly and overnight that the Muslim Brotherhood is a nice, peace-loving, tolerant organization; no, they insinuate one day that they have renounced violence, they imply the week after that they have changed their radical positions of yore and in a few months, lo and behold, what was a dangerous Islamist association has been transformed into an ally of the West and upholder of freedom and democracy, in a sleight of hand worthy of the best prestidigitator.

What I think happened is that Obama or some-one in his team, easily predicting that during the presidential debate Romney would criticize Obama on his dealing of the Benghazi consulate attack, counted on the fact that Romney had not read the transcript of the speech given by the President in the Rose Garden the day after the assault, because it did not matter, that speech's exact wording is less important than the entire message sent by the President, which was that the attack was a consequence of the Innocence of Muslims film.

So the Obama camp tried and, with the help of the media, succeeded in spinning this story as if Obama in the Rose Garden had actually called the Benghazi assault "acts of terror", whereas in fact he hadn't. He did use the expression "acts of terror" in a general sense, as a conclusion towards the end of the speech, without a specific reference to the incident occurred the previous day in Libya.

He said: "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for."

But when he was talking about that incident specifically, he called it "this type of senseless violence", "brutal acts", and "this attack": no mention of terrorism. "Senseless violence" indeed clearly refers to the reactions to the Muhammad film, since terrorism is violence with a planned objective. That the President did not attribute it to an act of terror is the right interpretation to give to his words in light of his insistence in the following two weeks in blaming the eruption of violence in the Muslim world, from Libya to Pakistan, on the YouTube movie.

As I said, I don't think that all this matters so much per se. What is important is the whole message, posture and policies.

But this is a useful lesson to learn in how the media exercise their deception.

The good news is that people are less and less accepting of this state of affairs. UK newspapers’ sales have been falling for quite some time, and The Guardian/Observer in particular have seen their readership decline, reporting last August an annual loss of around £54m, to the point that both newspapers (The Observer is The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper) are now “seriously discussing” an end to their print edition.

Obama Totalitarian Socialism's Early Signs

I knew that Obama was bad news even before he was elected President.

Four years ago, in 2008, during his first presidential campaign, my blog Of Human and Non-Human Animals was shut down by Blogger.

Not knowing why, I made several searches on Google until I found out that the same thing had recently happened to many other blogs. All these blogs had in common was that they had in any way been critical of Obama.

In a forum I found a very clear and detailed explanation of how the Obama campaign volunteers, many of whom "young, inexperienced, with little knowledge of the Internet" and, I would add, not particularly smart, had gone around the web looking for any minimal sign of dissent with their political star and tried to damage the sites containing these "heresies".

If the site was a Blogger blog, like mine, they flagged it to Blogger.

So I remembered that on this blog of mine, which was all about animal issues - its tagline is "Why giving animals a fair deal is good for humans too" -, I had posted an article entitled Candidates on Animal Rights.

In it I compared the policies of Obama and John McCain on animal issues, and found both of them seriously wanting.

I cannot know for sure, but all the available evidence, including the fact that my blog, like many others which had suffered the same fate, was then reinstated, points to my blog having been shut down for that reason.

This incident to me seemed a shocking display of censorship and curtail of free speech, especially in view of the fact that I hadn't even singled out Obama in my criticism, but had been even-handed with both of the then presidential candidates.

It immediately gave me a sense of bad things to come from Barack Hussein if elected as President of the USA, and this prediction turned out to be accurate.

Incidentally, when it comes to Obama there is always a double standard.

I remember four years ago he was treated by the media as a champion of the animal cause just because he had promised his kids a dog if elected to the White House.

Romney made an excellent joke last night, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner organized by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York to benefit needy children, when he said:

I've already seen early reports from tonight's dinner. Headline: Obama embraced by Catholics, Romney dines with rich people.