How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

This is the second part of the article "The Looting of Italy" by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci.

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How the Looting Works

I will venture to suggest that there must be a blue-print out there on how to manage a country after a revolutionary takeover, such as what has been done to Italy (and to Venezuela? Cuba? China? Russia?)

I would say that basically, after A) overwhelming the system (the Cloward-Piven strategy), the revolutionary leader will aim at B) impoverishing the middle class in order to prevent its every chance of rebelling. This can be done in various ways, which should include: 1) continuous price hikes in utilities, 2) a credit crunch, 3) tax-tax-tax, 4) media influence used to a) scare investors away b) deflect attention from what is really going on and c) create an iron-clad reputation for the revolutionary “good guys”, 5) sale of the nation’s property at bargain prices.

This sequence is coming full circle in Italy.

A. Overwhelming the system. In the years prior to 2011 the hard-working Italian people had been saddled with a bloated bureaucracy and progressively swelling taxes, due to the unquenchable demands imposed on our welfare system by competing leftist and populist parties, goaded on by trade unions with a finger in every pie. I think that the most telling examples of legislation foisted on the people were a law that was passed by another technocratic administration in 1992 (also unelected but at least concerted by the elected political parties) whereby immigrants over 65 were entitled to old-age pensions (whether or not they had paid into the pension funds), and a law of 2007, passed by ex-EU-Commission President Romano Prodi, whereby the old-age pensions were extended to the relatives of immigrants who joined them in Italy. In 2009 the Conservative government managed to limit this provision to relatives who could prove they had at least lived in Italy for ten years, but the burden on Italy’s budget remains enormous and climbing. It is estimated that in 2015 Italy's old-age pensioners coming from outside the EU will cost over €1.5 billion yearly.

All this preceded Prime Minister Mario Monti [unelected, invited by President Giorgio Napolitano to form a new technocratic government in 2011], who was called in precisely to put a stop to it, lower the debt and put Italy back on course. But what he did was the exact opposite, in other words:

B. Adding taxes upon taxes, wiping out liquidity, scaring investors away, protecting certain privileges and playing the media with expertise. Very creative.

He then proceeded to the bargain sale of the family jewels.

It goes like this.

Italians, who are notoriously very attached to their offspring and grandchildren, were used to judiciously setting aside their savings, usually investing them in real estate. This was highly prized collateral that should have avoided all the pernicious alarmism about the national debt.

But the alarms were contrived (See this video where Monti states that crises are good events). Having set inordinately high property taxes, Monti crippled their prices, thereby reducing at the wave of the magic wand the value of Italy’s financial collateral.

Then Monti announces that Italy is all set to sell off huge amounts of prestigious state-owned real estate.

Funny, the Bank of Italy announced the very same thing more or less at the same time. Which means glutting the housing market with fine property from one moment to the next. The technocrats know that the glut will make the tax-depressed prices collapse even lower, but it will appear as if it were no one’s fault, apart from the usual culprit: the free market. This way they can sell off the family jewels at bargain prices to their foreign friends (the rest of us in Italy not having the liquidity left, as explained above).

This is a tragic déjà vu.

For the modern-day looting of Italy began back in June 1992, with the now notorious, but then super-secretive, meeting on the HMS Britannia, anchored off the shores of Latium, the region of Rome. The British royal family yacht had been lent for the occasion to a group of Anglo-American financiers. Among the guests was today’s President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi.

What did these invisible financiers want from Italy? Well, just as they do today, they wanted to get their hands on Italian banks and telephone and energy companies: the “family jewels”. Their main target is probably ENI [Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, Italian large multinational] – but more about that later.

To go about this they had to speed up the changing of paradigm, making politics subordinate to the economy, and making the economy in turn to hinge on volatile finance.

In 1992, Italy’s IRI (Institute for the Reconstruction of Italy), the world’s largest state-run holding company, began to sell off its assets, at bargain prices, thereby starting the rush that has led to an avalanche of private industries to follow suit and seek a foreign buyer for their “Made in Italy” products in order to escape the combined stranglehold of bureaucracy and taxes. In the intervening 20 years, hundreds, if not thousands, of famous Italian brand names have been sold off to foreign companies.


The Attack in the Press

Reputation is everything, in a globalized market where traders encounter no restrictions to gambling with their own or other people’s money and are therefore in a position to cripple banks, currencies and entire countries. Demolishing investor confidence in a country can cost it millions, in the higher interest rates needed to attract buyers of its bonds. Disparagement by competitors is also a good way to increase investor interest in alternative bonds. In practice, as a piece in the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore put it, “the worse the reputations of Italy and Spain, the lower the interest rates on German bunds”.

Normally ignored in the general press, except to confirm uninformed clichés about things like the mafia and corruption, Italy started being described in the financial press as a basket case, hovering on the verge of disaster due to the size of its public debt, at the beginning of 2011. Despite its (then still) humming industries, mostly healthy banks and debt-free, educated, well-to-do population – conditions that are more than enough to guarantee secure payment of a country’s sovereign bonds - the press portrayed Italy’s condition as being desperate and placed the blame on the shoulders of the nation as a whole.

In actual fact, the situation was only desperate because of an uninformed international press pretending it is informed while choosing its sources only from among the “progressive” liberal press that mirrors their own biases. And the blame should actually be laid where it belongs, for example at the door of the decades-long unreasonable demands and manipulations of domineering communist parties and trade unions with a finger in every pie: a tale of warning that bears out the Cloward-Piven strategy of instigating the downfall of a capitalist society by overwhelming the system with massive demands. It could be a useful read for the U.S. before it finds itself winding up in the same spot.


Some Technical Notes, by Way of Explanation

Up until the single euro currency was invented, Germany was the “sick man of Europe”, mainly due to the fact that Western Germany had absorbed impoverished and backward Eastern Germany (Prussia) in one swallow, sharing with it the strong Deutschmark as its currency, with no adjustment. The Germans are still having to pay a tax for the support of ex-East Germany, but the common currency has enabled them to spread the burden onto all of the other members of the EU as well.

Since the introduction of the euro in 2001 German exports have soared, and every year there has been a surplus in Germany's accounts and a consequential mirror-image deficit in the accounts of the rest of the euro-zone countries.

There are many little details that have favored the image of Germany presented to the world as the most prosperous, honest, solid, upright and reliable country in the EU, or maybe the world. Things like the liabilities from the Kreditanstaltfurwiederaufbau which they don't include in the official accounts, so that they don’t come to bear on the total debt. Or the covert bailout they received when, as revealed by Bloomberg, Germany was allowed to spread its exposure to Greece onto all of the other EU countries. Most outrageous of all: the arms deals foisted on Greece, which in order to gain Germany’s assent to the bailouts was bullied into handing over a sizeable amount of said bailouts back to Germany itself, settling its debts for a purchase of submarines!


So Who Is Bailing Out Whom?

Bailouts are carried out in order to help a country’s creditors as much as the country itself. This is particularly obvious in the case of Greece, which Germany and France cynically compelled to use a considerable part of its bailout money (borrowed from the EU, at interest) to pay off previous purchases of German submarines and French helicopters. Percentage-wise, with respect to its exposure to Greek debt, Italy has contributed more than any other country to Greece’s bailout. But while the Greek government was forced to pay for German submarines (at least one of which doesn’t even stand up straight), as well as for French helicopters, it neatly rescinded its contract for Italian fighter planes, with no penalty attached .

Of the total €340 billion granted to Greece in official loans, only about 15 billion came directly from Germany, which corresponds to only 68.6% of Germany’s exposure in terms of the Greek bonds held by its banks. France, also imperilled by a possible Greek default, has contributed an even smaller proportion: 21% of its exposure. Conversely, Italy which, having relatively few Greek bonds, was one of the countries least at risk, has forked out 214.6% or more than double its exposure. According to some accounts, it was Berlusconi’s attempt to refuse this apportionment, balking at the Italian tradition of meekly accepting unfair conditions, that unleashed German fury against Italy, an account confirmed by ex-Spanish Premier Jose Zapatero who in his memoirs tells of the irritation against Italy's Prime Minister and the Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti at the G-20 meeting in Cannes, in September 2011, a little over a month and a half before their ouster.

Most unfair of all is the fact that, despite being lumped into the “PIIGS” [Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain] group, Italy, which has never received a penny of the 285 billion lent out to the other troubled countries, actually contributed a hefty 55 billion to bail-out Greece, Spain and Portugal. This is:

- money we must borrow at some 6% while getting a 3% interest in return.

- money that contributes to increasing not only the recipient countries’ debt, but also our own debt, for which we are fined by Brussels and reported on as profligate spenders!!


The Press: Conniving or Incompetent?

So which country do you think is being trumpeted by the international press as being the one and only magnanimous and put-upon benefactor of all things European? Italy, which is shouldering a share of the bailout which is wildly disproportionate to its exposure? Of course not. As always these days, when something is being meted out to enhance reputation and/or the economy, Germany is on the receiving end.

Here are some other examples of pernicious press incompetence.

On August 7th 2011 Fox News’s Shepard Smith suddenly came out with "A couple of weeks ago there was a run on the banks in Italy"... which was totally made up. Italy has had to cope with lots of problems but so far never any runs on banks! Who fed Fox News that lie?

When the “humanitarian” bombing of Libya was being carried out and the papers were dwelling on the situation in Northern Africa, The Washington Times wrote that Italy was "the former colonial power in Tunisia". Of course, Tunisia was a French colony, as were Algeria and Morocco. Of all the territories in North Africa, the only one that was a colony of Italy's was Libya, which it accrued in 1911, as the Ottoman Empire was starting to disintegrate, and held only until World War II. With all the North African autocrats suddenly being presented in their worst colors, singling out Italy, the least of the colonial powers, as the colonial power par excellence is particularly unfair.

Whether out of ignorance or interest, The Daily Telegraph wrote in a front-page headline in 2012 that “Spain and Italy are to be bailed out”, while it was Spain that was to be bailed out, with Italy shouldering 20% of the cost.

At the end of June 2012 an opening headline piece in The New York Times informed the public that our unelected, then Prime Minister Mario Monti had been doing wondrous things, and would do even better if it were not for those petulant little nuisances, the political parties, who are reluctant to let him take the tough decisions he would like.

Actually, things are the other way round! Monti enjoyed the unmitigated praise and support of an unprecedented majority of Parliament from both sides of the aisles. He was able to do whatever he pleased and they ratified, very few questions asked.

And unfortunately, what he did amounted to grinding the Italian economy to a halt, ruthlessly imposing punitive taxes on everyone and everything, giving our money away as if it were everyone else’s due, and pretending slow-motion to do something to help companies that were struggling not out of lack of business or readiness to work hard, but for want of liquidity. Not that the state coffers are empty, they’re not. Italy has the wherewithal to settle these overdue accounts, but can’t do it because of treaties such as the European Stability Pact which requires us to keep the money on hand. Businessmen have been committing suicide by the dozens, and one of the reasons was and is that they await payment for services rendered to the state, yet are required nonetheless to cough up income taxes immediately to that same inflexible state.

All this, and more, notwithstanding, The NYT certified that Monti was unquestionably competent and did more in his first six weeks in power than the entire political class had done in the preceding ten years!

In actual fact the Monti government did pitifully little, apart from eliminating some remaining early-retirement loopholes. Now Italians must stay at work (if they have it) until they are 67, while Germans retire earlier and the French only recently raised their retirement age from 60 to 62.



Read the two final parts of the article:

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

The Looting of Italy

This is an article that was written and sent to me by Alessandra Nucci, an Italian journalist and friend. It describes what the European Union has done to Italy. Since it's a very long article, I've broken it down in 4 parts. Here is the first part.

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How would you feel if for years you had been picking up shipwrecked penniless migrants from Africa, dumped by criminal agents all over the Mediterranean, ferrying them to your shores and taking them in by the thousands, only to see yourself made the butt of sarcasm, reproaches and even pecuniary fines for not doing enough?

How would you feel if the EU, to which you have contributed and continue to contribute billions, were to ignore your pleas for help, and yours alone?

How would you feel if you were to help debtors out to the tune of billions of euros, then were to find yourself painted in the media as being a spendthrift recipient of bailouts?

How would you feel if in order to bail other countries out, you had to borrow money yourself, at double the interest, ruining your own credit rating while praise is heaped on the borrower countries for their newly shining performance?

These are just a few examples of what has been happening in the last several years to Italy.

At the end of June 2012, and then again at the beginning of July, the headlines in the international press carried news of the “bailout of Spain and Italy”, placing the two on the same level. Yet it was Spain that was being bailed out while Italy is the third most generous contributor to the funding.

This is just the latest blow to the reputation of the euro-zone’s third-largest economy (and the world’s eighth largest), dealt like all the others in a seemingly innocent manner by an international press which is either superficial or conniving in what amounts to the looting of Italy.

By looting I mean the process of cheapening the country, its name and its worth by means of discredit nonchalantly but relentlessly sown in every possible way and direction, from within and without, to drive the value of its assets down and make them more … affordable. This has quietly been going on since 1992, but was stepped up with a double-barrelled aggression, on a military and financial level, in 2011.


The Philosophical Divide

The world, and the stock markets, are being told today that the countries insultingly referred to with the acronym "PIIGS" are a bunch of lazy, irresponsible spendthrifts who, after piling debt upon debt, are now squandering other people's hard-earned money. Therefore they deserve whatever degree of impoverishment they may get. Well, the truth is mostly the exact opposite. The financial élite gathered around the EU buildings in Brussels have been quietly at work undermining the economies of Southern Europe, out of the need to save their own.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the “PIIGS” countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) all have a historically Catholic or Christian Orthodox background, which the common assumptions underlying the culture have maintained as a basic frame of reference, even if the number of liturgically-practicing faithful is at a minimum. On the other hand, the countries that are aggressively posing as having been economically wise and virtuous (Germany, France, Belgium) are leaders on the road to the predominance of a secular culture.

In Italy’s case, we are clearly a big disappointment to the EU secularists. Once the showcase land of successful inroads against Catholic norms (our 1978 law provides abortion free of charge to all, within the first three months of pregnancy, for whatever reasons of health, including the prospective mother’s psychological duress), Italy now identifies with a firm and widespread resistance against the pressure of gay lobbies and pro-euthanasia activism (described in my piece “The Struggle For Italy’s Soul”).

The last straw, to the pagans in Brussels, was probably the march in Rome organized by the Forum of Families in 2007, which mobilized over a million people in defence of heterosexual marriage. Oh, yes, and also the sensational defence of the Crucifix upheld by Italians of all stripes, including agnostics and even a few atheists, against a decision by the Court in Strasbourg in 2006 to prohibit its being exhibited on classroom and courtroom walls. Italy appealed the decision and won, but the occult powers that inhabit the EU-governing bodies have dug in their heels and clearly intend to make us pay for it. Their objective? Nothing less than physically taking over the country, thereby finishing the job that had been started in the mid-nineteenth century.

The irony of this all is that Italian citizens find themselves being told they must look up to those who have cleverly installed themselves in power, and be grateful to those who are actually ruining the economy under the guise of fixing it. Like the Masonic élite who took power in the nineteenth century, they are impoverishing us while declaring themselves Catholic, and then coming, like the elders to Job, to lecture and teach us our lessons.


Before Prime Minister Mario Monti

Until ex EU commissioner Mario Monti was sent in to help, Italy was doing better than all of the other EU countries, bar only Germany. We had a higher surplus than France, a higher surplus than the UK, and only a slightly lower surplus than Germany. Our banks had almost none of the toxic assets that glutted the banks of France and above all of Germany. Our unemployment was manageable. Our companies and trade marks were and still are so successful that they are constantly being bought up by foreign companies.

All this was despite the vast amounts of money that Italy shelled out to line the coffers of the European Union. According to the official data released by the EU Commission, the balance of payments from Italy surpass incoming funds by 25 billion. By Italian official accounts the real amount is 40 billion.

Yes, we did have a huge public debt, but the private debt was almost non-existent, which, together with the solid economy, guaranteed that the bonds would be paid back. In other words, our debt, like Japan’s even bigger one, was manageable.

Some figures? Italy’s GDP in 2010 was $2.1 trillion. We were the 8th exporters in the world ($448 billion foreign exports), and the 6th preferred nation for investors (source: World Bank). Unemployment was at a manageable 8.3%, which was lower than the euro-zone average of 10.2% and also lower than the US's 9.1 % - and that is despite our very high population density.

Without the interest on our national debt, we would have been way past France and Germany. The prospects for 2012 were that France would have a deficit of 2.4% of its GDP while Italy was predicted to have a 2% surplus, which was to be even greater than Germany's, forecast at 1.4%.

The debt was bringing us down, of course, but the real debt parade, which must include private debts, has the United Kingdom in n.1 position. The international media, however, take care not to point that out, as they considerately avoided making a fuss when then Prime Minister Gordon Brown turned the UK into the first European country to nationalize a bank (Northern Rock) to prevent it from failing, in 2008.

So, well, Italy had it fairly good. Russia guaranteed the flow of oil from the North, and Libya guaranteed it from south of the Mediterranean. Most importantly, a costly treaty with Libya had finally put a stop to the flow of illegal immigration that had been overwhelming the country, weighing down on the economy (and the debt) and almost literally crowding out Italians themselves, thanks to Leftist quotas discriminating against Italians.

Why am I writing all this in the past tense? Because this was the situation before Nato’s 2010 attack on Libya, pretending Gaddafi was killing his own people, and before 2011 when ex EU commissioner Mario Monti was sent in to help. Mr Monti’s CV reads like a page out of a book on conspiracy theories. He is a past official advisor to Goldman Sachs and to Moody’s, president of the Trilateral Commission for Europe and a member of the Bilderberger clique. Since his sudden appearance on the scene in mid-November 2011, not elected but appointed single-mindedly by our ex(?)-communist President Giorgio Napolitano to head the Italian government, Italy’s sole negative economic index, the public debt, rather than diminishing has soared. At the end of 2011 it was 1897.9 billion euros, four months later it was 1948.5 billion: a 50 billion increase in a matter of 120 days. And we are now officially in a recession, whose beginning is vaguely being retro-dated to precede November’s unacknowledged coup d’état.


Read the second, third and fourth parts of "The Looting of Italy":

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

Richborough Roman Port and Global Warming

I'm honoured that one of my websites has been quoted and linked to in a comment to an article in the famous website Watts Up With That?, considered the world's number one scientific site taking a critical approach to global warming and climate change.

The article in question is "Sea Levels are Never Still", and it explains something of which people, used to the alarmistic noise about rising sea levels due to "climate change", may not be aware:

Sea levels have been rising and falling without any help from humans for as long as Earth’s oceans have existed.

The fastest and most alarming sea changes to affect mankind occurred at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Seas rose about 130m about 12,000 years ago, at times rising at five metres per century. Sea levels then fell as ice sheet and glaciers grew in the recent Little Ice Age – some Roman ports used during the Roman Warm Era are now far from the sea even though sea levels have recovered somewhat during the Modern Warm Era.

One such case of a Roman port now disappeared is that of Richborough, in Kent, which was the main port of Roman Britain, linking the British province to the rest of the Roman empire. My travel website Britain Gallery describes it in the article "Sandwich, Deal, Walmer, Richborough", and a comment to the Watts Up With That? post quotes from it:

Not far from Walmer are the remains of the Richborough Roman Fort and Amphitheatre, considered by English Heritage possibly the most symbolically important Roman site in Britain, “witnessing both the beginning and almost the end of Roman rule here”. Although it is now 2 miles from the sea because silted up, Richborough was in Roman times a major natural harbour providing a safe route from Europe to the Thames estuary.

Going back to the scaremongering tactics of the warmists, it's to be observed that from 15,000 years ago to 8,000 years ago sea level rose about 14mm a year, whereas it is currently rising at about 1mm a year, and this rate has not changed much with the great industrialisation since 1945.

There are many factors changing the sea level - melting of glaciers; warming and expansion in volume of the seas; extraction of groundwater ending up in the sea; sediments and debris washed into the sea by rivers, storms and glaciers; even tectonic forces -, and human emission of CO2 has hardly a role in them.

Figure by Robert A. Rohde made available under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Mainstream Media Bordering on the Criminal

Yesterday I travelled on London buses from around noon to 5pm, in the Western part of town. During all that time I saw relatively few white faces, and the ones I did see were generally builders, so in all probability Poles.

On the bus I read a discarded copy of the London free paper Metro, carrying the irresponsible front-page headline "Student is murdered 'for being a Muslim'".

Irresponsible because, when I read the actual article, the alleged motive for the killing of Nahid Almenea in Colchester, Essex, on Tuesday morning was nothing more than a wild conjecture.

The only reason for thinking that the University of Essex female student from Saudi Arabia was murdered for being a Muslim is her dress:

Det Supt Tracy Hawkings said: ‘At the time she was wearing a dark navy blue full-length robe, called an abaya, and a patterned multi-coloured headscarf, known as a hijab.

‘We are conscious that the dress of the victim will have identified her as probably being a Muslim and this is one of the main lines of the investigation, but there is no firm evidence at this time that she was targeted because of her religion.’

In fact, there seems to be another, possibly more promising line of investigation:

Her murder is the second fatal stabbing in the town within three months, prompting police to issue a warning to residents not to walk on their own in isolated areas while they hunt for the killer...

Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Worron said there were "obvious similarities" with the murder of James Attfield, a vulnerable man with brain damage, who died after being stabbed more than 100 times in a park in Colchester in March...

“Both victims sustained frenzied knife wounds. Both were on secluded paths in parks used by members of the public."

Which is why the police have warned all residents of the area and not just Muslims wearing their traditional garb.

Nobody knows exactly the motive for the murder, therefore the headline on the front page of Metro was written either by a Muslim or by someone who likes to see "hate crime" everywhere and is not concerned about stirring up trouble.

Very telling is the way the Metro article ends, with a quote from Fiyaz Mughal, an old friend of my party Liberty GB, against a member of which he lost a lawsuit for racially aggravated harassment:

Fiyaz Mughal, of support group Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks, said: ‘Visibly Muslim women are the ones targeted at a street level for anti- Muslim comments and general abuse.’

How reliable Mughal's words are can be assessed by considering the careless way in which he treated the facts and figures relating to what he calls "anti-Muslim attacks" after the Lee Rigby murder in Woolwich on 22 May 2013.

Nevertheless, Metro considered this man's opinion worth of finding and publishing.

But that's not all. A paper read by millions, due to its free availability in a great city like London and its public transport system, should be more cautious about presenting hypotheses as facts, especially of this kind and especially on its front page, seen on bus and train seats by a multiple of the number of those who actually read the article:

Meanwhile, a British extremist fighting in Iraq appeared to use the murder to encourage followers in the UK to commit revenge attacks on non-Muslims.

The purported British member of Isis, the fanatical Islamic force leading an insurgency in Iraq, said Muslims should "take up a knife and kill as they did in Colchester".

A tweet under the name of Abu Rashash Britani, who has previously said he would bring Isis' brand of bloody attacks to Britain, said: "These kuffar [non-Muslims] getting out of hand, dare they touch a #Muslimah.

"I call upon any brother to take up a knife and kill as they did #colchester."

Comparing Ms Almanea’s death to the to murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Greenwich last year, the tweet added: "#colchester attack is cowardly act. At least when our noble brothers, killers of #leerigby did so they killed a soldier not a civilian.

"I pray a revenge attack takes place in #uk against those enemies of #Islam n #Muslims."

When you think of how the mainstream media are ready to condemn any justified and even necessary criticism of subjects like Islam or immigration as they claim that these incite to racist violence - another unfounded allegation -, the same media's gratuitously stirring up Muslim aggression against native Britons, in full knowledge of how volatile and easy to inflame Muslims can be, borders on the criminal.

An Islamic Trojan Horse Inside of Britain

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


It's not enough that in Britain non-Muslim children in publicly-funded schools, Islamic and non, are served halal meat - from animals whose throat is cut without proper stunning, according to the Islamic rite -, often without knowing it (and even British forces have been discovered to be subjected to the same treatment).

Now schools in the UK are increasingly becoming the battleground of a war between radical Islam and the hopeless, dhimmi British "authorities", if this is the right term to use in the face of limp-wristed inaction.

I'm not the only one to have thought of a military metaphor. In the media, an alleged Islamic plot to take over schools has become a "Trojan horse".

A country in whose capital city the most popular baby name for boys is Muhammad and the fourth most popular is Mohammed is doomed.

The gradual but inevitable progression of Muslim demographics brings with it the equally inexorable advancement of Islamic tactics’ getting more and more aggressive and oppressive.

This is not the first time that the ongoing process of Islamisation of British schools has found its way into the news. Official inspections, Department of Education involvement, school authorities without answers: we’ve been here before and, I dare say, we’ll be here again.

Above I’ve used the expression “radical Islam” - although I don’t see how Islam can be non-radical – for a specific reason. Sometimes this distinction is useful, if misleading.

What's happening in British schools? We have to be clear here. Bear with me, as the saga is still unfolding and mysterious.

First, there is a current, run-of-the-mill (“moderate”, shall we call it?) management of many Muslim schools - publicly funded, of course - which does nothing wrong, according to the government’s education regulator Ofsted, except segregating boys and girls, “restricting” music and art classes although they are demanded by the national curriculum, requiring girls to wear headscarves, in short educating children according to the Islamic way of life.

I would contend that this is Islamisation of schools through and through. But no, Ofsted says, these are all positive things, expressions of Muslim identity and faith.

So, the brouhaha is just about a number of schools which risk becoming “really” Islamised and are investigated as possible targets of an "Islamic takeover", which goes even much further.

“Operation Trojan Horse” has become the nickname of an organised attempt by Islamists to co-opt schools in England and run them according to Muslim beliefs.

It all started with a leaked letter, whose authenticity is still in question, discovered in March 2014 and alleged to be from Islamists in Birmingham, central England - the second largest UK city, home to a great Muslim population - outlining plans to take control of schools there and possibly in other cities.

A month later Birmingham City Council said it had received hundreds of allegations of similar plots over a period of 20 years.

Investigations by Ofsted and the Education Funding Authority in 21 Birmingham schools did find evidence of an orchestrated Islamist campaign to target particular schools, and that head teachers had been "marginalised or forced out of their jobs".

Six schools were placed in special measures after inspectors found systemic failings, including failure to take adequate steps to safeguard pupils against extremism. Thirteen more were found wanting. Ofsted’s investigations later expanded into schools in East London, Bradford and Luton, all areas with large Muslim populations.

But, typically, only 2 schools had their funding terminated by the government.

In the aftermath, Education Secretary Michael Gove said that all UK schools must promote "British values".

The question, indeed the problem that has caused this whole crisis to develop, is that nobody seems capable of defining what British values are any more.

My bet is that, if Gove could provide a clear and precise definition of that concept, Birmingham schools would not have been the object of a concerted attempt of turning them into breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists in the first place.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, with the perfectly straight – or, lest I’m discriminatory, should I say gay as well as straight – face of someone who’s taking his own words very seriously, has attempted to lists some of these elusive British values: freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility, and respect for British institutions.

I’ll say that Islamic leaders will find no reason to object to any of those.

Cameron suggested "freedom". Muslims see this as, for instance, freedom of religion, which in their case means freedom to teach kids how to cut fully-conscious animals' throats during the religious and family festival of Eid, and then progressing to teach them how to become suicide bombers (which is the problem now under investigation).

Another example of freedom is that of Muslim girls to wear what my friend Alex Boot calls "the traditional Halloween garb” even when it’s not Halloween.

Tolerance is very, very acceptable for Muslims: to them it means that we must tolerate whatever they do and say, without the need for them to reciprocate and tolerate us infidels.

Respect for the rule of law: perfect. They mean sharia law, of course, and they do respect it, without a doubt.

Belief in personal and social responsibility. The responsibility towards the Ummah, the wide community of all Muslims, is well understood and accepted by Mohammedans. That’s why Islamic charity is only directed at Muslims. Personal responsibility is also viewed favourably by Muslims, as shown by restraint in dress code, alcohol consumption, dietary limitations and so on.

Respect for British institutions may seem trickier at first sight, but not when you consider that they are planning to take over all these institutions, and they’ve already made a good start with schools. Once the afore-mentioned “British” institutions become what Muslims want them to be – outcome which appears to be more certain and speedy by the day -, they’ll have no problem in respecting them.

Cameron has fallen here into a little logical trap of circularity: you cannot use the definiendum – the word to be defined – in the definiens – the definition. You cannot explain Britishness with another reference to it.

But never mind. He’s still achieved a remarkable feat: giving a definition of British values so generic and vague that we can all agree with it, in a great multicultural, multireligious (or, not be discriminatory, multi-non-religious), multiethnic feast.

Of course, in order to give flesh and real significance to the concepts he chose, he would have been forced to introduce taboo words, like, off the top of my head, “Christian”.

The reason why "British values" has become a concept without meaning is the same why the European Union cannot find a unifying factor for Europe.

I've heard endless discussions on how we don't know what Britishness is, or Europe for that matter.

But it's obvious that, if you deny or remove the whole historical process that gave birth to - and the cultural foundations that sustain - the identity of a nation or part of the world, you end up with a shapeless, amorphous entity. You should then not be surprised that you cannot define it.

These days the dirty words, the 4-letter words that we cannot pronounce and therefore can't be used to define us are "Judaeo-Christian".

Judaeo-Christianity is what unifies Europe and what is at the core of Britain.

Britain is Christian. Its history demonstrates it, its Constitution confirms it.

If this had been recognised, Islam in Britain would not have been allowed to make the progress it has made.

The main characteristic and chief function of definitions is that they must be able to exclude as well as include. An all-inclusive definition means nothing.

The Latin verb “definire”, from which the English terms with the same root derive, literally means “to delimit, to place a boundary or border around” something.

That’s why in today’s world, in which all must be included – literally (haven't we de facto abolished all borders?) as well as metaphorically -, to say or think something meaningful has become almost impossible, and when someone does it he risks imprisonment. Even more difficult is to do something that makes sense – as the British government wonderfully exemplifies.

What’s Next for Britain?

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


After an earthquake, we gather the pieces hurled and scattered all over the place by the magnitude of the event, we put them together and reconstruct.

The big question in British politics is who is going to win the 2015 General Elections for the British Parliament, which will produce the majority to form the new government.

The local and European elections have been much anticipated before and analysed at length afterwards because they are supposed to give an idea of the next occupant of 10 Downing Street, the British Prime Minister’s residence.

But the new four-main-party-system that UKIP has introduced by storm makes these predictions much more complicated. UKIP has been the nightmare of pollsters and number crunchers, who admit defeat in appraising the current and, more importantly, future situation.

Without UKIP, it would be relatively easy to forecast next year’s results. If, as it’s often the case, on May 22 the incumbent party in government had fared badly and the opposition well, it would be seen as a sign that it’s time for the usual reversal of roles between them.

But now the Labour Party in opposition, although electorally performing better than the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in the government coalition, has also haemorrhaged a stream of votes to UKIP. Therefore its percentage in the polls is not as much higher than the Tories as it should be for a safe victory prediction in 2015.

On the other hand, most votes for UKIP have come from the Conservatives (Prime Minister David Cameron’s party). This means that these two parties of the Right will be forced to share votes at the General Elections too, thus reducing the Tories’ chances to win. But by how much we don’t know, because a certain numbers of people who vote for UKIP at the European Elections won’t do so when it comes to electing the UK Parliament and deciding the next Prime Minister.

It may seem appropriate to choose UKIP, a party which is largely one-issue (leaving the European Union), at the Euro polls, but from the national government many voters, albeit sympathetic to Farage’s views, want something more. They require a wide range of policies that will affect their lives, on the economy, education, health, crime, welfare, housing, employment, and so on. It’s difficult to know how many will desert UKIP for the Tories next year.

The three main parties, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats - often placed in the same bracket and derisively called “LibLabCon” to indicate that what they have in common is much more significant than their differences, giving the electorate no real choice –, inevitably did not understand or take on board the message of the vote.

In order to do so they would have to change what they are to become something completely different. All their existence, aims and policies are predicated on carrying on as usual, offering the country more of the same, the only difference being in degree. Yesterday it was recognition of same-sex civil unions, today the law on same-sex marriage. Today it’s racist to quote Churchill’s anti-Islam words, tomorrow it will be racist describing a pet as “a black cat with a bit of white”.

Incidentally, many votes were lost by the Conservatives to UKIP because of the Tory Prime Minister’s David Cameron insistence on making homosexual marriage legal.

All the three main parties are egalitarian and strict followers of political correctness. They give the public what they want, not what people ask. They vilify people for asking it, explicitly or implicitly calling them names. They never stop to wonder whether people might be right; at most they express sympathy, understanding and “concern” for how people feel, not so subtly implying that those feelings are irrational and based on false perceptions, whereas reality is what the business of politics is all about so those feelings should be disregarded.

This sums up the reasons why many voted UKIP:

Despite all of this, I will vote UKIP at the Euro-elections, and there are two main reasons for this: first, that I wish to carry the message, very strongly, to the LibLabCon alliance that they do not have a right to be in government, they do not have a right to power—something that Labour and Conservatives have, I think, utterly forgotten (leading inexorably to a corruption almost as total as the Republicans and Democrats in Washington).

Some pundits informed us that UKIP’s voters are mostly men, over 50, blue collar. Implicit in this announcement is the view that such demographics should say a lot about UKIP, specifically how bad it must be if it attracts predominantly people of this despicable sort.

It’s reminiscent of the media in the US and elsewhere, which at the time of the presidential elections were highlighting how Mitt Romney was disproportionately preferred by men, with the same ominous implications of backwardness and “uncoolness”.

Similarly, a frequent attack against counterjihad websites is that their readers are mainly males.

I know that, despite being a female, I’ll be accused of sexism and misogyny for saying this. Does everybody ignore or pretend to ignore that the overwhelming majority of philosophers, scientists, inventors, artists, musicians, authors, historians, industrialists – in short all those who have pushed the human machine forward, the makers of human progress – have been men? If it had been left only to women, we don’t know how far from cave dwelling we would be today.

For whatever reason, this is simply the historical reality. Socialists, feminists and their useful idiots may think whatever they like about the causes of this 100-percent-true fact, but they shouldn’t be allowed to be so disingenuous as to pretend that women are the only force for improvement and progress in human affairs.

That London is not part of the UK any more, due to its strong immigrant and Muslim presence, and is becoming increasingly so, was confirmed once again by the last vote pattern.

London is the only region where UKIP is still struggling, whereas Labour is doing fine. Immigrants in general and Muslims in particular tend to vote for the Labour Party, which has opened wide the doors of the country to them when in government, is overgenerous in its welfare policies for everyone –natives, foreigners legally or illegally here – and is Islamophile to the point of destruction, sorry, distraction.

This is only one of several cases in which the Muslim vote has shaped European politics in recent times. In some cases it’s proved decisive: the analysis of the various groups’ votes showed that, without Muslims in France, Sarkozy would have won, so the election of socialist Francois Hollande as President was determined by the followers of Islam.

What’s in the future for UKIP and for Britain?

The UKIP will try to get its first Member of the British House of Commons elected on this 5 June, at the Newark, Nottinghamshire, by-election, caused by the suspension from Parliament and subsequent resignation as MP of Patrick Mercer.

European UKIP representatives, including Farage, have said that at the General Elections of 2015 they'll target and concentrate their efforts particularly on those constituencies where they already have councillors or have done well in the local elections. They say that this has been the successful strategy of the Lib Dems, who have been in a similar position of outsiders in the past.

In the long term, Farage aims to repeat the destruction of Canada’s Conservative Party two decades ago, when the rebel Right-wing Reform Party, that many compare to UKIP itself, caused another political earthquake.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Farage said that a Canadian-style Tory meltdown “could happen” in Britain. Canada’s century-old ruling Conservative Party was destroyed overnight in the country’s 1993 election by the populist, low-tax Reform Party, which had been called “racist, sexist and homophobic”, some of the epithets thrown at UKIP, along with the “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” that PM Cameron used for UKIP supporters.

The split in Canada’s Centre Right enabled the Liberals, Canada’s equivalent of our Labour Party, to take power.

But after ten years of infighting, the Reform revolution succeeded. The Canadian Alliance, a merger of Reform with the ruins of Canada’s old-style Tories, led to former Reform official Stephen Harper becoming Prime Minister in 2006.

Farage compared attacks on himself to those on Reform Party leader:

‘They called him a Right-wing extremist, a nutter, away with the fairies, he’ll never get anywhere and what happens? They won one by-election, a schoolmistress way out West, who resisted every bribe and temptation to rejoin the Conservative Party.

‘Now you have a Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who was first elected on a Reform ticket, as were half the Cabinet.

‘Don’t think this can’t happen here. The public want something different. We are catalysing a big change in British politics on fundamental issues that have been brushed under the carpet and ignored by a completely out-of-touch career political class for too long.’

In all this euphoria, we mustn’t forget UKIP’s limitation, first of all that the party’s not opposed to Islam. In fact, it even has British parliamentary candidates who openly advocate Sharia law, like Dean Perks:

"Sharia law, in my opinion, works as a prevention. And prevention is better than cure. If you think you're going to get your hands chopped off for pinching something, you won't pinch it."

A UKIP council candidate who tweeted that Islam is "evil" was suspended from the party. Farage distanced himself from his own immigration spokesman, Gerard Batten, who had proposed a special code of conduct in the form of a charter calling on Muslims to accept equality, reject violence and accept the need to modify the Quran, which Muslims had to sign. And in public speeches UKIP leader is careful to limit his comments on Islam to politically correct ones.

Even more tellingly, membership of UKIP is forbidden to current or even previous members of the English Defence League and other groups who are outspoken on the Islamisation of Britain and dare hinder it.

"Earthquake" in the UK

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


"An earthquake" is how the United Kingdom Indepence Party (UKIP) called what happened Thursday 22 May, when all Britain voted to elect its share of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and various parts of the country voted to elect local councils.

While the results of the Euro Elections were not announced until Sunday to wait for the results of the whole European Union, where some countries voted later, the local elections results were known immediately, and were pretty much as Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, described them: an earthquake.

In a country with a three-main-party system (Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats), the UKIP became firmly established as the fourth party. It didn't gain overall control of any local council, but that doesn't tell the whole story.

Labour won 338 more councillors than it previously had, the Conservatives were down 231 councillors, the Liberal Democrats took a bashing losing 307, as many as 40 percent, of their councillors, and UKIP went from 2 to an astonishing 163 councillors, turning from a fringe, tiny party into a serious contender for government.

But it was tonight, at the European Elections, that UKIP got a real triumph. Not only it topped the polls with more votes than all other parties for the first time in its history, but also its victory marked the first time in which a nationally-held election has not been won by either the Conservative Party or the Labour Party since 1906.

This historical event upsets all the current paradigms of British politics. For a start, it makes it much more difficult to predict future election results, first of all the 2015 general elections for the British Parliament, the "real" polls that will decide who's going to govern the UK.

A three-party system is easier to understand and forecast than a four-party one. Without UKIP, Labour might have been cast as the next British goverment, benefiting from the dissatisfaction from the supposed "cuts" and "austerity" measures that the present coalition of Tories and LibDems in goverment had to enforce to heal at least in part the ruinously irresponsible economy and welfare policies of the past Labour administration.

Something similar happened in other parts of Europe, hence the BBC's headline "Eurosceptic 'earthquake' rocks EU elections", in reference to the parallel result of Marine Le Pen's Front National which won a record victory in France.

Back in the UK, the Liberal Democrats were almost wiped out from the European Parliament, being left with just one MEP of the 11 they previously had. This is Catherine Zena Bearder, standing in the South East, the largest region in the UK, where my party, one-year-old Liberty GB, got 2494 votes.

These results show a clear shift in public opinion towards a decidedly anti-immigration, anti-European-Union stance.

The reaction of the (previously) three main parties and of the liberal media is interesting because it shows that they simply didn't get it.

They cling to justifications, rationalisations, excuses, pedantic nitpicking, like "it hasn't been an earthquake because UKIP has no control of a single council", or "it's just a temporary protest vote, they'll come back to us".

The Lib Dems project onto the UKIP's future what happened to them. They, never genuinely contemplating the possibility of being in government, were ruined by their experience in power, where they didn't keep their utopian promises to the electorate, and in an act of wishful thinking predict that the same will happen to UKIP.

My favourite is the reaction of Labour. Faithful to their Marxist heritage, they explain everything away with the economy. People on the doorstep tell us that they are not concerned about immigration per se, they say, but only about its economic consequences for jobs, wages, housing and so on.

We'll sort these things out, they continue, the usual Labour way, by wasting more of public money and increasing taxes.

They don't realise that no people "on the doorstep" will tell any Labour representative that they don't want immigration for reasons of culture and identity, not just economics, lest they'll be considered racist by the aforementioned Labour person.

And UKIP took votes from all parties, including Labour, whose traditional base of working-class voters got progressively dissatisfied with it.

People who until now voted for the mainstream, Establishment parties - and people who didn't vote at all - have decided to stop being silent and taken action by choosing a party that says many of the things they think but cannot express.

We all take great hope and encouragement from this trend.

It took UKIP 20 years from its foundation to get to this point, and it struggled for recognition for a very long time.

There was a time when a vote for UKIP was considered wasted, but it turned out to be instrumental in putting pressure on the Tories on the issue of leaving the European Union. There will be a time when voting for Liberty GB will put pressure on UKIP on the issue of addressing the threat of Britain's Islamisation, on which Farage's party has so far been persistently silent.