Anti-Halal-Festival Petition Signed by Thousands

A big thanks to the 3570 plus people who signed the petition started by Pete Williamson "Ban Halal Food Festival from taking place at London Excel".

An astonishing number of people in just a few days and in itself a great achievement, showing what we can do when we are well organised and determined.

Pete says: "Unfortunately we have not been able to stop the repulsive Halal Food Festival. What we have achieved is to heighten awareness of this wicked practice that is the Halal method of slaughtering animals. People from all over the world, as members of the British public, have signed the petition and left hundreds of comments. In fact I have decided to leave the petition open, if for no other reason than to display and archive all the wonderful comments."

Question Time: Insane People Denying the Obvious

What fun I had last night watching Question Time on the BBC.

Author Will Self (his name is oddly suited to him, but then everything about the man is weird) is always very entertaining. This time he surpassed himself, by denying that terrorism is a problem - especially, God (or rather Allah) forbid, Islamic terrorism.

This pearl of wisdom came in answer to a question from the audience about the risk of a terror attack in Britain after what happened in Kenya.

We are living in constant anxiety about something that doesn't exist, he pronounced referring to terrorism, just ten minutes before expounding, during a discussion on the HS2 high-speed rail project,  his various conspiracy theories about the government being in the pocket of road lobbyists and similar sinister people.

The UK Independence Party (UKIP) candidate and Daily Express journalist Patrick O'Flynn dared defy this usual, BBC-chosen, Leftist audience by mentioning that multiculturalism has a responsibility for the terrorist threat in Britain.

A not so good - in the usual sense of difficult to answer - question, rhetorically and rebukingly intended, came from a woman in the public, who asked something to this effect: why do we always associate terrorism with Islam?

The answer could certainly have occurred to even the most brainwashed, or rather braindead, politically correct Marxist Islamophile on the globe, and was promptly provided by O'Flynn himself. Because we are talking about an Islamist terror group committing an atrocity in Kenya, was his self-evident reply.

He could easily have added the Muslim attacks on churches in Pakistan, the daily Islamic suicide bombers in Iraq, the violence spread by Muslims in Borneo and in the Philippines. These are just a few of the many Islamic accomplishments of the past week or so, the results of a few good days' work.

To his credit, the UKIP man was the only one to mention the constant, relentless persecution of Christians in Muslim-majority countries. Well done to him for reminding - or informing? - people of a subject that almost nobody would touch with a barge pole.

Of all those parties represented on the panel, UKIP is certainly the least bad. Nevertheless, O'Flynn didn't attract public attention to the fact that the profound link between Islam and terrorism - and not just terrorism, but indeed all violence against non-Muslims - goes well beyond the recent events in Kenya.

This is what my party, the newest and most honest British party, Liberty GB, would have done, if one of us had been sitting at that desk.

I missed some of the first part of the programme, in which they discussed Labour's energy price freeze policy. Considering that Labour is almost single-handedly responsible for the skyrocketing utility bills of recent years - that created Britain's new fuel poverty - due to the previous government's senseless subsidy of wind power and other "renewables", that discussion would have been amusing to see.

Watching Question Time is always a comical experience. When you see it you have to laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh.

Welfare State, Students, Immigration

In the UK there is a constant talk of the need for immigrants’ skills and an endless repetition of the fact that there are many necessary jobs and positions which would be left vacant without immigration.

Let’s see. Is it the number of unskilled and manual workers which is not high enough to fill the vacancies?

In that case, why are there millions of people on welfare in Britain?

In the United Kingdom, 5.6 million people of working age are not working and receive state hand-outs in various forms – and this number has remained stubbornly high even at times when the economy has grown (it has been over 5 million for more than a decade).

It is a well-known fact that the system is abused and the welfare money goes to many people who don’t or shouldn’t really need it, but that’s what happens.

And if the labour force which is needed and imported from abroad is composed of skilled, professional and intellectual workers, why are all the university students supported in their studies by the taxpayers through various public grants and loans not available to fill these positions?

Because, having removed the market as the force to influence people’s choice in university courses and careers, we end up with a great number of the university population specializing in ‘media studies’ and other subjects which are of no or little relevance to the country’s economy, while the much-needed skills are overlooked.

After all, if the state is paying for somebody’s studies, why should that person or his/her family bother so much about what course or faculty to choose? It is not an investment to consider carefully.

So, British taxpayers are in the enviable position of having to support an enormous number of unemployed unskilled or semi-skilled people because ‘there are no jobs’, having to pay for students’ education and, on top of all that, being told that they have to put up with huge figures of immigration because ‘there are not enough workers and skills in this country’.

Clash of civilizations?

Q: So, we are now facing "the clash of civilizations": the West and Islam, two civilizations which are equally great.
A: Yes.
Q: On one side, we have the civilization that gave the world democracy, the concept of rights, Roman law, Greek tragedy, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Darwin, modern science, technology, Michaelangelo, Caravaggio, Raphael, Giotto, Brunelleschi, perspective in art, Picasso, Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, Verdi, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Euclid, Saint Peter's Basilica, the Empire State Building, Kant, Voltaire, ...
A: OK, let me stop you. We've got an idea.
Q: On the other side, we have the civilization that gave the world the Koran, a few pretty mosques, the numbers notations we use...
A: No, actually the numbers we use were invented in India. We call them Arabic only because they reached us through Arabic translations of the original Sanskrit texts.
Q: Even the zero?
A: Yes, the zero as well is an Indian invention.
Q: OK, so on the other side, we have the civilization that gave the world the Koran, a few pretty mosques, and er... a few pretty mosques.

With Gays and Blacks, We Have Gone to the Opposite Extreme

The problem is that people don’t seem to be able to find the right middle.

There was a time when homosexuals were wrongly persecuted, when they couldn't even be open about their homosexuality, and that certainly was a bad state of affairs. Luckily we have gone past it and that’s fine.

But people are so afraid that we could go back to that time that any criticism of homosexuality is taken as a sign of "anti-gay" discrimination: this is the opposite extreme, in which the persecution and discrimination are actually at the expense of those who disagree with the orthodox, dominant ideology that homosexuality must be perfectly OK from all viewpoints, medical, psychological and ethical, which is not necessarily the case.

The wide acceptance of the idea that homosexuals should be free to declare their homosexuality, that others should not look at them as they did in the past, that they should be treated like everybody else, is positive, it's an improvement.

This does not necessarily mean that homosexuality is a good thing for those involved as well as for society at large.

That’s where we should try to find the right middle. We should be able to - we should feel mature enough as a society to - recognise that having an accepting attitude towards homosexuals does not imply thinking that homosexuality is just another sexual orientation, like heterosexuality, or lifestyle, and that there's no problem associated with it. These are two different things.

A similar mistake has been made with blacks, Jews, and in relation to all those bigoted and discriminatory positions of the past, which have now been transformed into the opposite extreme, as if to guard ourselves against the possibility of relapsing into those bigoted ideas. That is not the right approach, going from one wrong extreme to the other wrong extreme is not the way to prevent the first wrong extreme. It’s actually the opposite.

That's what happens in the sphere of immigration and racism.

There is now a severe repression of ideas in people, who can’t say anything negative about blacks or Muslims, or - although not half as much as a few years ago - express negative positions about immigration, without risking accusations of racism. Even disagreeing with Obama - who is probably the worst president of the US so it’s easy to disagree with his policies - is enough for being called a racist. Criticising Israel, although people who do are usually wrong, attracts labels of anti-Semitism which are not necessarily correct, and so on.

So there is a situation in which you go from one extreme to the other for fear of relapsing into the first extreme, whereas in fact it’s much more likely that you’ll relapse into it if you got it wrong the second time round again. For instance, the current ferocious repression of anything that may be even remotely construed as racist or anti-Semitic or Islamophobic or homophobic may produce a climate to which people in the end will rebel, and in such a rebellion against the thought police system they will risk reverting to the original wrong ways again.

1968 Greens, Reds, Pinks and the Normalisation of Paedophilia

The Left, red or green (it's usually both), tends to have no moral objection to the normalisation of paedophilia, the next step after the normalisation of homosexuality.

People on the Left, which includes "gay" activists, have in recent years kept this issue quiet without wishing to disclose their real intentions to the public to avoid the probable risk of jeopardizing their goal of normalising homosexuality, but, now that they have won that battle after achieving homomarriage, that acceptance of paedophilia is part of their agenda will become increasingly explicit.

I want to clarify that I am totally for protecting the environment, but not environmentalism, an offshoot of socio-communism that has hijacked the conservation cause for the Left.

Just before the German elections, a Pedophilia Scandal: Old Document Haunts Green Party Candidate:

Leading Green Party candidate Jürgen Trittin is under heavy scrutiny this week after researchers found his name on a decades-old paper supporting pedophiles.

With the general election only days away, the Green Party's top candidate Jürgen Trittin is under fire over a document more than 30 years old. The party manifesto, which he approved, advocated legalizing sex with minors.

The latest politician to be dragged into the Green Party's pedophilia scandal is Jürgen Trittin, the party's top candidate in the upcoming federal election. He was responsible for a 1981 election platform that included a call for the decriminalization of sex between children and adults.

The platform belonged to the Göttingen branch of the Alternative Green Initiative List (AGIL), a forerunner of the current Green Party, and was uncovered by political scientists Franz Walter and Stephan Klecha of the Göttingen Institute for the Study of Democracy. The organization was hired by the Green Party in May to investigate the party's affiliations with pedophile activists in the 1980s.

In an essay for the left-leaning Die Tageszeitung newspaper on Monday, Walter wrote that Trittin, at the time a student who was running for city council, was one of five members of an editorial board that signed off on the election manifesto. The document called for sex between children and adults to be made exempt from punishment, so long as it involved neither violence nor the threat of violence.

As Walter explains, it was not uncommon for the AGIL to take over the platforms of minority interest groups [like homosexuals and paedophiles].

Jürgen Trittin told Die Tageszeitung that the researchers' findings were correct. "It was simply taken for granted that we adopted one-to-one the demands of various fringe initiatives, such as those of the 'Homosexual Action Göttingen,'" Trittin said. "The responsibility was mine and it's a mistake I regret."...

The Green Party is spending more than €200,000 ($267,000) on the study to investigate its past history of support for pedophiles. The price tag is a handsome sum, considering the party's annual budget of €5 million, and suggests the party is eager to clarify and resolve the murky chapter in its history.

That history caught up with the party earlier this year, when comments on children's sexuality in the 1975 autobiography of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Green Party representative in the European Parliament, resurfaced in the media.

The most recent revelation comes at an unfortunate time for the Green Party. With less than a week to go before Germany's general election, Trittin's political opponents have already begun to exploit the issue to discredit his campaign.

"Trittin needs to consider whether he really is the right man to be fronting the Greens," said Philipp Missfelder of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Alexander Dobrindt, general secretary of the conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), told the website of the magazine Focus that Trittin should withdraw from his position as the Green Party's leading candidate in the election.

Regarding 1968 revolts' hero, revolutionary and anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Wikipedia writes:

In 1978 an edition of Pflasterstrand, an alternative magazine Cohn-Bendit edited, described being seduced by a 6-year old girl as one of the most beautiful experiences the author had ever had...

Cohn-Bendit published a number of provocative statements regarding "sex with children" in the 1970s and early 1980s, notably in his 1975 book "The Great Bazaar" where he describes erotic encounters with five-year-olds in his time as a teacher in an anti-authoritarian kindergarten. He has been accused as advocating pedophilia since at least 2001. This controversy re-erupted in 2013; as Cohn-Bendit received the Theodor Heuss Prize, there was a rally by anti-pedophilia activists. The affair triggered wider research into the pro-pedophilia activism which prevailed in the German Green Party (without direct involvement on the part of Cohn-Bendit) well into the 1980s. An article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung uncovered numerous "repulsive" passages (abstoßende Texte) in Pflasterstrand, a leftist magazine which appeared under the editorship of Cohn-Bendit, and cited a 1978 defense of Cohn-Bedit's of this editorial practice, as well as an appearance of Cohn-Bendit in a French television talkshow in 1982 where he described being erotically undressed by a five-year-old. Cohn-Bendit reacted to these allegations by claiming that his descriptions of erotic encounters with pre-pubescent girls were not based on true events but were merely intended as what he today calls "obnoxious provocation" aimed at questioning sexual morals at the time that "shouldn't have been written that way."

Cohn-Bendit is accused of endorsing sex with children and may even have practiced it.

In his 1975 book "The Great Bazaar" he wrote: "It happened several times, that a few children would open the fly of my pants and begin to stroke me. That represented a problem."

These leading figures are only a side of the problem. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, paedophiles were part of it. Some documents show that the influence of paedophiles on the party was much stronger than previously thought.

At the first party convention the platform was shared by "Urban Indians," who wanted the "legalization of all affectionate sexual relations between adults and children." In the early years there were in the German Green Party groups which advocated the liberalisation and decriminalisation of sex with children, among which was the "Working Group on Gays and Pederasts."

From Spiegel:

He is a boy, roughly 10 years old, with a pretty face, full lips, a straight nose and shoulder-length hair. The wings of an angel protrude from his narrow back, and a penis is drawn with thin lines on the front of his body.

The 1986 image was printed in the newsletter of the Green Party's national working group on "Gays, Pederasts and Transsexuals," abbreviated as "BAG SchwuP." It wasn't just sent to a few scattered party members, but was addressed to Green Party members of the German parliament, as well as the party's headquarters in Bonn...

No political group in Germany promoted the interests of men with pedophile tendencies as staunchly as the environmental party. For a period of time in the mid-1980s, it practically served as the parliamentary arm of the pedophile movement.

A look at its archives reveals numerous traces of the pedophiles' flirtation with the Green Party. They appear in motions, party resolutions, memos and even reports by the party treasurer. That is because at times the party not only supported its now forgotten fellow campaigners politically, but also more tangibly, in the form of financial support...

[P]edophiles, noisy and wearing colorful body paint, were often a visible part of Green Party gatherings.

Left and Right: Do These Words Mean Anything?

Is Ron Paul a left or right winger?

He is a Republican, so on the face of it you would say he's on the right.

But his foreign policies, particularly his pacifist stance and opposition to American military interventions, place him on the left.

Not only that. He, like other Republicans and conservatives, is a libertarian.

Let me start with a little historical digression.

The first time I came across the word "libertarian" it was in conjunction with "communist". Communist libertarians is another name for anarchists: that's how many anarchists in the 19th century were called, to distinguish them from individualist libertarians like the French Proudhon, the man who wrote "Property is theft".

This association between libertarianism and anarchism should not be surprising, since anarchy, as its Greek origin indicates (privative alpha + arkhe, power), is the absence of a state, and libertarianism is the drive towards decreasing the size and reach of the state. So anarchism is, in some way, just the extreme form of libertarianism.

And here we have a clear paradox of the left-right divide in politics: anarchism is a classical leftist movement. At the time of the First International, Karl Marx and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famous disagreements did not focus on the goal: they both wanted the same thing, the abolition of the state. Their disagreement only concerned the means to reach that goal: Bakunin advocated the establishment of anarchism immediately after the proletarian revolution, whereas for Marx after the revolution there was to be a transitory phase, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he (obviously wrongly) thought would eventually dissolve itself to give way to anarchism.

So, we have a political position typically associated with the right, libertarianism, which is just on the same spectrum of opinions of Marxist and anarchist aspirations.

What is ironical, of course, is also to think of classical communists wanting to abolish the state, albeit only after establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, when today leftists the world over are trying to increase the size of governments beyond any autocrat's wildest dreams.

The problem is also to do with the meaning of the terms "freedom" or "liberty" which, like "justice", can have diametrically opposed interpretations.

In the case of justice, some people believe that what is just is that everybody, irrespective of what good or bad, much or little they have done, should get identical outcomes and have as much as possible the same: they see justice as a leveller.

Others think that justice means rewarding people for what they have done good, punishing them for what they have done bad, and doing neither if people omitted to do good or bad: they see justice as a life guidance, something that guides you to make the right choices.

The latter definition, in my view, is the one that is likely to produce better results in helping people to express the best of themselves and achieve their potential, whereas applying the former interpretation of justice almost inevitably leads to complacency and even downright abuse.

As for liberty, Marx stretched its meaning beyond recognition, in a way reminiscent of the Orwellian 1984's "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is knowledge". He thought that liberty meant giving people everything they needed, he was thinking of freedom from need rather than freedom from the controlling power of others, be they the government or other citizens.

The latter is clearly the historical liberal interpretation and the most commonsensical use of the word.

It is no coincidence that the communist and even socialist distortion of the meaning of freedom has led to some of the most oppressive, repressive and liberty denying regimes the world has ever seen.

Since "libertarian" derives from "liberty", again it is no coincidence that the conflict of opinion surrounding the latter is transferred into the controversy around the former.

In conclusion, my answer to the question that forms the headline of this article is that the words "left" and "right" in politics still have a meaning, in the sense that they represent real differences in world views about humanity, society and government, albeit not as clear cut and defined as some would have it.

I don't expect to treat this issue exhaustively in an article, but it's fair to say that the demarcation lines are much more blurred than is usually thought.

In particular, what I find objectionable is some behaviour, much more often seen in people on the left, of referring to the opposite end of the spectrum, in this case "right wing" or "fascist", as an epithet to shut down debate in the absence of valid arguments.

The fact that there is a certain overlapping, historical and ideological, between right and left makes this behaviour even more irrational.

I started with Ron Paul as an example of a difficult definition, now I'll give the example of myself: on most things I would be classified as being on the right, but I am a supporter of animal rights. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.


Photo by George Kelly