Lampedusa, Italy. Part I: What Happened in 2011

During the "Arab Spring", the tiny island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily, due to its unfortunate vicinity to North Africa saw the arrival of around 50,000 migrants mostly from Tunisia and Libya in 2011.

We know that the use of words like "invasion" or "flooding" is considered racist by the liberal media, but how else is it possible to describe this situation?

Lampedusa has a total population of just over 6,000 people only when you also include the inhabitants of the nearby island of Linosa, with which it forms Italy's southernmost local council.

Invasion does not need to be military. Any violation of a sovereign country's borders is a crime and an aggression.

There was even an allegation that some women had been thrown overboard by the migrants during the sea crossing from Africa to prevent the overloaded boats from capsizing, according to an eye witness aboard the boats.

The many thousands of immigrants and refugees fleeing the chaos of the "revolution", among whom were suspected escaped prisoners, were then gradually transferred to mainland Italy and other EU countries, but there were repeated times when the number of newcomers was higher than that of locals.

On those occasions when natives were outnumbered, there were tales of local women having to be accompanied everywhere to protect them from immigrants' unwanted attentions, sacked shops, flats' doors forced open, people returning home to find Tunisians sitting at the dining table eating and, after their departures, some householders even discovering faeces inside saucepans.

The island just became what one newspaper called "a huge immigrant camp".

Maybe expecting to find a hotel reception and with scarcely a thought about the crisis they were creating in the small island, the illegal immigrants were complaining, as in the above video, describing what they found in Lampedusa as "shameful" and pontificating "the reception is zero" as if they had been giving a hotel review on TripAdvisor.

The attitude of the Tunisian refugee in the video is particularly enlightening, showing an entitlement mentality according to which Europe, the land of democracy, justice and human rights, was expected, as was its duty, to give all these things to him and his companions, and Italians should have "taken the time" to provide them with all they needed.

This video confirms what Lampedusa mayor Bernardino De Rubeis said: "We have here young Tunisians who arrogantly want everything immediately, just like criminals, ready to endanger our lives and theirs". He later added: "We're in a war, and the people will react. There are people here who want to go out into the streets armed with clubs".

The one expressed in the film is the typical mindset of many Muslim immigrants to Europe. These are the people usually portrayed as "victims" for whom everything else has to be sacrificed.

And when they don't get what they want, there is trouble. In April 2011 the illegals, unhappy about their accommodation conditions, set fire to a guest house where they were staying at the expense of a charity organization, and threw rocks at the police.

On 20 September 2011, similar story: the immigrants torched the reception centre where they were accommodated, destroying three buildings in the holding facility, and clashed with the police, while the media were blaming for the arson everyone, the Italian government, the provisional Tunisian government, the European Union, except the actual perpetrators. This was the second time that the reception centre had been burnt down by refugees, the first during an inmate riot destroying a large part of the complex on 19 February 2009.

The desperate Lampedusa natives, seeing their predicament not understood or helped by Italian or European authorities, in March 2011 even resorted to stopping for an hour the Italian Coast Guard patrol boat, loaded with still more North Africans, from docking at the harbour, and repeated this sort of "direct action" several times.

Lampedusa lives mainly on tourism, and the thousands of migrants, often behaving not exactly as gentlemen, were making the place inhospitable to visitors. In this financial crisis every job is precious. In 2011, the tourist season started in August, two months later than usual.

In addition, the island did not have the agricultural and water resources to deal with the refugee emergency.

And anyway, the crux of the matter is that people should not be forced into that situation through the moral blackmail accusation of not acting charitably.

Unfortunately these are, as Oriana Fallaci said, the enemies we welcome as friends, and their sob stories seem to have the desired effect on many people, in Italy as all over Europe.

Professional "Anti-Racists" Don't Care about Black and Hispanic Lives

Below is a piece with very enlightening statistics about what groups commits most crimes in New York City, and an even more eye-opening observation about how the stop-and-frisk policies, far from targeting minorities, actually target whites, who commit a percentage of crimes disproportionately lower than other ethnic groups when compared to the rates at which they are subjected to stop-and-frisk.

The author of the FrontPageMag article, John Perazzo, also notes that stop-and-frisk policies “targeting” blacks and Hispanics in minority neighbourhoods favour these groups in virtue of the vast share of police and city resources devoted to protecting their communities. A simple calculation of how these and other policies introduced by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as part of his zero-tolerance crackdown on the city's crime reduced violent crimes reveals that stop-and-frisk saved the lives of over 10,000 black and Hispanic males.

This prompts the question: are the professional "anti-racists", the usual media and lobby-group suspects, really concerned about the welfare of minority groups as they profess, or are they much more concerned about the perpetuation of the "race relations" industry - with all its peddling of ethnic victimization - which also means their own self-perpetuation?

In open defiance of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, New York’s City Council last week passed two bills aimed at curbing the NY Police Department’s practice of “stop-and-frisk,” which has been among the most effective crime-fighting tactics ever employed. One of the bills mandates the appointment of an independent inspector general to monitor the department for evidence that its use of stop-and-frisk may be unfairly targeting blacks and Hispanics; the other opens the door to racial profiling lawsuits against the NYPD. Black Councilman Donovan Richards (D-Queens), who prides himself on being a strong voice against profiling, says that he himself was once “dehumanized” by the experience of being stopped and frisked as a teen, and thus wishes to spare other minority youth the same pain.

In a nutshell, the laws governing stop-and-frisk permit police to briefly detain a person upon reasonable suspicion of his or her involvement in, or intent to commit, a crime—even if there is not yet enough evidence to make an arrest. To justify such a stop, an officer must be able to cite “specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion.” During detention, an officer may question the suspect and, if he deems it advisable, conduct a weapon search by frisking the suspect’s outer garments.

But civil-liberties and civil-rights activists nationwide—and in New York particularly—routinely charge that stop-and-frisk practices are racist because they target nonwhite minorities in disproportionate numbers. Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather MacDonald, who has done immensely important work in researching the facts about stop-and-frisk and placing them in proper perspective, notes that in 2011 in New York City, African Americans, who constituted 23% of the city’s population, were fully 53% of all police-stop subjects. By contrast, whites were 35% of the city’s population but only 9% of stop subjects.

Left-wing outfits like the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights maintain that if the racial makeup of those affected by “stop-and-frisk” does not mirror the racial makeup of the surrounding community as a whole, we can deduce that racism and/or discrimination are at work. But these critics omit the most important facts of all from the equation: In New York City during 2011, black offenders were responsible for 66% of all violent crimes, including approximately 70% of robberies and 80% of shootings. Blacks and Hispanics, combined, accounted for an astonishing 98% of all shootings in the city. Whites, by contrast, were responsible for only 5% of New York’s violent crimes, and scarcely 1% of its civilian shootings.

These plain and inarguable facts explain precisely why the residents of black and Hispanic neighborhoods seem to be “targets” of stop-and-frisk more often than residents of mostly white areas. In some cases, crime rates in minority neighborhoods are literally dozens of times higher than elsewhere.

The statistics above, it should be noted, raise a vital question that merits contemplation: If blacks constitute 66% of all violent offenders but only 53% of stop-and-frisk targets, and if whites are just 5% of violent offenders but fully 9% of stop-and-frisk targets, could it not be argued that it is actually whites, and not blacks, who are disproportionately “targeted” by stop-and-frisk?

And here’s another reasonable question that deserves an answer: While critics claim that stop-and-frisk policies “target” blacks and Hispanics in minority neighborhoods, why do they not also say that such policies, in another sense, selectively favor blacks and Hispanics by devoting a vastly disproportionate share of police manpower and city resources to protecting them and their communities? After all, it isn’t only the perpetrators in those places who are overwhelming black and Hispanic; the victims are mostly members of those demographics as well.

The role of stop-and-frisk in New York increased dramatically after Rudolph Giuliani replaced David Dinkins as mayor in 1994,and was one among a constellation of effective new strategies introduced by Giuliani. Others included so-called “broken windows” policing, which clamped down on petty crimes as a way to also forestall more serious offenses, and the use of COMPSTAT, a computer technology tool that helped pinpoint specific high-crime neighborhoods geographically on a map. The results of Giuliani’s efforts were extraordinary, as evidenced by the fact that during his eight years in office, the incidence of homicide in the city fell from an annual average of 2,085 during the Dinkins administration, to just 649 by the final year of Giuliani’s tenure. From a statistcal standpoint, this was by far the most dramatic crime drop in the recorded history of America, unrivaled by reductions in any other city. The positive trends continued under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg, with total homicides in the city ranging between 471 and 597 during each of his first ten years in office.

Those who have benefited most, by far, from the stop-and-frisk policies put in place by Giuliani (and later, Bloomberg) are the black and Hispanic residents of such traditionally high-crime areas as Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct, Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 81st Precinct, and Harlem’s 28th Precinct. Indeed, blacks and Hispanics have accounted for fully 79% of the decline in homicide victims citywide since 1993. If, from 1993 forward, crime rates would have stayed at their Dinkins-era levels—rather than at the much lower levels brought about by the Giuliani/Bloomberg administrations—more than 10,000 additional black and Hispanic males would have met an early death-by-homicide during the past two decades. Also during that period, the number of rapes that occurred annually in New York City declined by 54.8%; robberies fell by 80.3%; felony assaults dropped by 57.8%; and burglaries were reduced by 84.6%. This means that many tens of thousands of black and Hispanic would-be victims were spared the anguish associated with those crimes as well.

Yet none of these facts matter in the least to our perpetually outraged champions of “civil rights” and “civil liberties,” wedded, as they are, to their quasi-religious conviction that white racism lurks menacingly around every corner and lies at the heart of public policies like stop-and-frisk. Thus do we see the spectacle of New York State Senator Eric Adams, a staunch opponent of “racial profiling,” pining for a return to the halcyon days of the Dinkins administration, when, according to Adams, even current police commissioner Raymond Kelly, who also served under Dinkins, was made of kinder, gentler stuff: “Kelly was one of the great humanitarians in policing under David Dinkins,” says Adams. “I don’t know what happened to him that all of a sudden his philosophical understanding of the importance of community and police liking each other has changed.” The “humanitarianism” that Adams wistfully longs to restore came at a dear price, however, and went a long way toward filling the graveyards of New York.

The Arab Spring in Europe

From The Arab Spring in Europe, in the Gatestone Institute:

In a 1996 interview, Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin stated that "every Arab rule that does not rule by the law of Allah and his religion is to be rejected." That was 17 years ago, long before the so-called Arab Spring, the terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe and the "days of rage" declared by Muslim rioters worldwide; now the breathing spaces between the attacks get shorter, and turn into years of rage.

One would expect that Muslim immigrants, whose children were born in the West, would adapt, become part of the Western society and partake of its freedom -- otherwise, why did they immigrate? What we see, however, is the opposite. The beheading of a British soldier in London, and the murder of a soldier in France, are only the beginning of a wave of violence and a dictatorship of fundamentalists who will call the tune. The wave of riots and vandalism carried out by Muslim immigrants in France in 2005 was just a hint at what is to come. The immigrants are brainwashed in the mosques, the madrasas [Islamic religious schools] and informal discussion groups, all of which represent the West as worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.

Western women in particular are easy prey; it is not difficult to portray them as licentious whores. Since in Muslim culture the honor of a man is dependent on the behavior of his woman (like chattel), especially when it comes to accepting the laws of modesty, chastity and sexual conduct in general, for Muslim men the West has no honor whatsoever. The face of Europe is changing rapidly, as is clear to anyone walking along a street in Paris, London or Berlin. The veiled women are immediately obvious, their hair covered by hijabs or their faces covered with niqabs; their personalities, identities, features and femininity obliterated, their freedom of movement hindered, ground under the heel of religious dictates chained to the past, despite their living in enlightened, progressive Western countries.

Even if immigrants try to adopt the culture of their new countries, the cultural and religious indoctrination breeds only the rejection of all the values of the host country. As Sheikh Yassin put it, "Islam rejects all the cultural and social aspects of the West that contradict Islam and its religious laws [the sharia], for example, we reject women going with the faces uncovered, prostitution and all the immoral aspects of life in the [Western] world."

It was not by chance that the pepper-sprayed "woman in red" became the icon of the struggle against Islamization in Turkey. We saw women at the demonstrations in the main square of Istanbul shouting "Run, Erdogan, run, the women are coming!" The Western world, until now nodding sagely and saying it is a matter of cultural differences, is beginning to realize that it will have to pay a heavy price for its tolerant approach to the murders, "honor killings," rapes, oppression, abuse of and traffic in women and girls -- not only in the Islamic countries but among the Islamic immigrants in the West.

There are, broadly, two different movements, heading in opposite directions: The West looks forward and seeks progress, the welfare of the individual and scientific achievements. The Muslim immigrants, on the other hand, look longingly backward, their faces turned resolutely to the days of Muhammad. For both, the status of women is an indication of the struggle for the face of the West. The gap is widening and the liberal approach is collapsing along with its hypocritical double standards, political correctness and submission to multiculturalism. What we are witnessing is not multiculturalism, it is a violent attempt made by guests in various countries to devour their hosts whole, along with their houses and property, culture and legacy. For anyone who has not been paying attention, the Arab Spring has arrived in Europe, and it would be a good idea to get ready to deal with it.

Hackers' Jihad Attacks from Mauritania

Militant Islam is on the rise. We have to add Mauritania, in Western Africa, to the countries to be worried about. And, despite their Medieval ideas, Islamists are using the new technology.

An Islamist in Mauritania

coordinates a diverse group of hackers targeting websites worldwide in the name of Islam.

Logging on to his computer, he greets his Facebook followers with a "good morning all" in English before posting links to 746 websites they have hacked in the last 48 hours along with his digital calling card: a half-skull, half-cyborg Guy Fawkes mask.

He calls himself Mauritania Attacker, after the remote Islamic republic in west Africa from which he leads a youthful group scattered across the Maghreb, southeast Asia and the West.

As jihadists battle regional governments from the deserts of southern Algeria to the scrubland of north Nigeria, Mauritania Attacker says the hacking collective which he founded, AnonGhost, is fighting for Islam using peaceful means.

"We're not extremists," he said, via a Facebook account which a cyber security expert identified as his. "AnonGhost is a team that hacks for a cause. We defend the dignity of Muslims."...

In April, AnonGhost launched a cyber attack dubbed OpIsrael that disrupted access to several Israeli government websites, attracting the attention of security experts worldwide.

"AnonGhost is considered one of the most active groups of hacktivists of the first quarter of 2013," said Pierluigi Paganini, security analyst and editor of Cyber Defense magazine.

An online archive of hacked Web sites, Hack DB, lists more than 10,400 domains AnonGhost defaced in the past seven months...

"Today Islam is divisive and corrupt," he said in an online exchange. "We have abandoned the Koran."

Mauritanian Attacker aims to promote "correct Islam" by striking at servers hosted by countries they see as hostile to sharia law. "There is no Islam without sharia," he said.

Mauritania is renowned for its strict Islamic law. The sale of alcohol is forbidden and it is one of only a handful of states where homosexuality and atheism are punished by death.

The quality of Mauritania's religious scholars and koranic schools, or madrassas, attract students from around the world. Mauritanians have risen to prominent positions in regional jihadist groups, including al Qaeda's north African branch AQIM.

As hackers from the region organize into groups, the Maghreb is emerging as a haven for hacktivism as it lacks the laws and means to prosecute cyber criminals, Herberger said...

AnonGhost's global reach is its greatest weapon, but it has yet to stage a major attack on a Western economic target.

Most of AnonGhost's campaigns have simply defaced Web sites, ranging from kosher dieting sites to American weapon aficionado blogs, with messages about Islam and anti-Zionism.

It has attacked servers, often hosting small business websites, located in the United States, Brazil, France, Israel and Germany among others.

Mauritania Attacker and the AnonGhost crew say these countries have "betrayed Muslims" by supporting Israel and by participating in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We are the new generation of Muslims and we are not stupid," read a message posted on the Web site of a party supply business in Italy. "We represent Islam. We fight together. We stand together. We die together."

The team has also leaked email credentials, some belonging to government workers from the United States and elsewhere.

As part of a June 20 operation against the oil industry, carried out alongside the international hacking network Anonymous, Mauritania Attacker released what he said were the email addresses and passwords for employees of Total.

Only Blacks Can Be Racist

A busker, a saxophone-playing girl performing the blues song "Minnie the Moocher" outside the Summerfest in Milwaukee, in the US, was physically attacked by three black women saying that a white girl could not play that song.

They punched her in the side of the face and left her bruised.

"Two women, 14- and 24-years-old, were cited for disorderly conduct. A 41-year-old woman was cited for assault and battery and disorderly conduct."

No mention of "hate crime" or racism as an aggravating factor, as would have been the case if the three white women had attacked a black girl.

If People Vote the Wrong Way, Judges Change It: California's Proposition 8

We have just seen the umpteenth example of "“judicial imperialism”, by which unelected judges through their verdicts supersede laws passed by elected representatives of the people".

Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in California, was passed in November 2008 after the California state elections in which 52.24% of the electorate voted in its favour.

So, here we are in the presence of legislation approved not by the elected representatives of the people but, more than that, by the people themselves.

Two homosexual couples, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, and Jeff Katami and Paul Zarrillo, after being denied a marriage licence in California sued to overturn the ban.

Finally, after a lengthy process, Proposition 8 was repealed on 28 June 2013 by court ruling.

The subversion of the popular will by judicial activism is increasing and increasingly worrying, and the so-called "gay rights", a euphemism for the phenomenon of a vociferous and culturally powerful minority taking a morally confused, scared majority - scared of being called "bigot, homophobic" - hostage and imposing its will on the rest of the population, is one of the stages where judicial overreach is played most often, not just in America.

George W Bush, who in comparison to Obama is a first-class statesman whom now Americans have started missing, said about same-sex marriage:

Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.

Professor of Law and blogger Stephen Bainbridge writes:

The founders of our republic set up a carefully nuanced set of checks and balances, but the last couple of generations of Americans have allowed nine unelected old men and women to seize control of a vast array of deeply contentionous social and cultural issues of national import knowing that they are immune from being held accountable for their decisions. Our judges now use the law to impose elite opinion about how society should be ordered regardless of the democratic will. We have become courtroom spectators rather than participants in the democratic process. It is as the famed First Things symposium put it, The End of Democracy.

Telegraph columnist Gerald Warner maintains in his post about California's Proposition 8:

The lobby for same-sex marriage may have made a serious error of judgement in choosing to make this particular law in this particular state a test case. It is a mistake because, in this instance, they are not trying to reverse some local statute of years’ standing, but to negate the majority will of their fellow citizens, recently expressed at the ballot box. It puts the ultra-liberal lobby squarely in confrontation with the defining act of the democratic process: the secret ballot of a universal suffrage electorate.

It also seeks to subvert states’ rights, the issue on which the American Civil War was fought and which is increasingly coming back into focus, as the culture of the liberal east coast relentlessly attempts to override the core values of the more conservative states. Obama’s healthcare legislation is another issue that has lately reinvigorated that antagonism. Modern history and politics are full of startling examples of old fault lines suddenly reopening: who, 50 years ago, would have forecast, for example, that Yugoslavia would fragment so violently? America’s so-called “culture wars” reflect internal tensions and divisions against which the fabric of federal unity may not be indefinitely immune.

Yet the increasing marginalisation of voters’ powers goes far beyond the United States. A referendum result such as Proposition 8, if voted through in Europe, would simply have been negated by the EU, forcing the offending electorate to think again. The major political phenomenon of our times is the increasingly debilitated condition of democracy.

It is interesting to see how the socio-communists, who pretend to be for democracy and freedom, can suddenly reveal their true, historical colours of totalitarianism, whether achieved by revolutionary or, as in this case, judiciary means.

A commenter to the above Gerald Warner post summed it up nicely: "When the lib'rel/progressives don't get what they want, they go to the bench to get things their way".


Photos from PolicyMic

UK: Mainstream Muslims Want Blasphemers of Islam Punished According to Sharia Law

The above video is a Channel 4 (UK TV network) documentary aired some time ago but just posted on YouTube, showing how even those who are considered "moderate" Muslims have for all intents and purposes very non-moderate views, like advocating punishment - in some cases beheading - for those who insult Islam.

Reporter Jon Snow concludes - what a surprise! - that there is no common ground between them and our Western values, like freedom of speech. Therefore, he says, we must self-censor or expect mayhem.

There is a third possibility, Jon: Muslims living in Muslim countries and leaving the Western world alone.