Women and Children First? Only Thanks to Christianity

My friend, Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci, has translated this article by Rino Cammilleri from La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana.

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An ancient law of the sea says that, when at risk of shipwreck, women and children must be helped into the lifeboats first. This is what was done on the Titanic, in the most notorious shipwreck in history. On that famous ship the orchestra continued to play to buoy the courage of those who were doomed to drown, including the musicians themselves. And a Catholic priest gave confession and absolution to all those who asked for them, himself going down with the ship. Old-fashioned gentlemen?

Nope, Christians. Because the unwritten rule of «women and children first» dates back to when Christianity empowered the weak and commanded the strong to take care of them. Before then, it used to be the law of the jungle that applied, because not even the super-civilized Romans gave any weight to women and children.

Please take note, as you rummage in your historical and anthropological reminiscences: only in Christian civilization has there ever been the habit of treating women and children with kid gloves, so much so that even today, when anyone holds the door open for a lady, he is termed “chivalrous” [deriving from the French “chevalier”, or “knight”]. This is a reference to the “macho” warrior whom the Church had taught to defend the widow and the orphan, the poor man and the oppressed.

For example, when the much-praised Native Americans (once known as redskins) travelled, the squaw went on foot, laden down with the luggage and with her papoose on her back; the husband was up front, riding a horse.

Assuredly, many of the gentlemen who went down with the Titanic were not religious at all, and many were Freemasons and anti-papists. But they were born and raised in a culture that was nineteen centuries old, a culture that could hardly avoid calling itself Christian, as even liberal Benedetto Croce had to admit.

Now let's listen to soprano Dimitra Theodossiou, one of the passengers on the Italo-Greek ferry that went up in flames a few days ago: «I was beaten and dragged down, as they tried to pull me off the ladder. But I reacted vigorously. I said: 'It's our turn!'».

Her words were confirmed by many other female passengers who underwent the same treatment. The men in the helicopters did indeed try to embark the women, children and the elderly first. But among them «there were at least some fifty men (…) who, in order to take their places, beat them, pulled their hair and threw them out».

In this reported sentence, the phrase omitted and replaced by dots included: «mainly Turks, Iraqis and Pakistanis». One of the rescue pilots said: «In order to try to save the children, the women, the elderly and the wounded first, as we always do, I had to yell and threaten to go away in my helicopter and leave them all there, over and over again.»

«As we always do». Quite. But not in the places of origin of those who (in the words of a Greek truck driver aptly named Christos) «had no consideration for the women and children at all».

However, why should the protagonists of this act, which to us is simply disgraceful and cowardly, be ashamed of themselves or feel like vile human beings? In their “culture” (I place the word decidedly in inverted commas) the women and children don't count at all.

These men have on their shoulders fifteen centuries which have accustomed them to thinking in this way. Back when I was studying Political Science, there was still a subject called Comparative Cultural Anthropology. That was before political correctness and relativism rendered it useless, as the 1968 protesters spread the idea that the Sioux were better than the cowboys and that the English first, and all the other Westerners after them, needed to be taught everything by Hindu gurus.

Today, whoever dares say that our civilization, moulded by Christianity, is superior to all the others risks a jail sentence or at the very least a lynching in the media. Yet the very ideology of relativism has been possible only in a Christian environment, and politically correct thinking itself believes it is superior to all the others.

What ludicrous imbecility this is, however, was summed up best by one of the men shoving the women aside in order to take their places in the rescue seat: «Why, aren't we all supposed to be equal?». What he implied was that, now that women have achieved equality, they can no longer expect preferential treatment. But it just so happens that he was universally deprecated (by the ex-Christians [or post-Christians]).

There's nothing to do: the latest ideology in vogue (again, among the Westerners) is no match for a culture that has become rooted in consciences precisely because it is the closest to the project that the Creator had in mind. And those who try to save their skins by climbing into lifeboats in place of women and children still remain cowards and vile human beings.

UK: Benefits Pay Much More than a Job

Here's a well-researched and well-argued article that, after investigation, reliably shows that the presence of food banks doesn't mean that welfare cheques are not high enough, but only that "sometimes the state messes up benefit payments and leaves nasty delays. They prove that people aren’t good at managing money. They suggest that not everyone puts rent and food before fags and booze (but we don’t want to get into a discussion about the deserving and the undeserving here). They confirm that supply creates its own demand."

My disagreement with the writer is that she seems to be in favour of a welfare state, even overly munificent, and that she attributes the current state of affairs - in which working members of society practically support and maintain in a comfortable lifestyle generation after generation of non-working members - to the altruism of individuals.

I think instead that people pay excessive taxes not because they are philanthropic but because they don't have the courage to rebel against them, as they haven't had the courage to rebel against Islamisation and unlimited immigration.

Spontaneous, individual charity is a sign of a moral spirit and improves the character of the giver without corrupting that of the recipient. Imposed charity is just tyranny by the state.

Below are the astonishing results of the author's research, confirming what we already knew, namely that benefit claimants are paid for doing nothing much more than the average worker earns for devoting almost half of his waking life to a job.

Having read a good amount recently on food banks in the UK this week, I had a little wander around the benefits system. I looked at a postcode in the southeast of England to see just how much you get from the welfare state in the UK if you aren’t working at all.

I started with a couple with two children and added up their housing benefit, jobseeker’s allowance, tax credits and child benefit. The result? A tax-free income of £24,269. That’s the equivalent of an earned (and hence taxable) income of £32,000. That’s very significantly more than the number we are always given as the UK’s average wage.

Then I looked at a single mother with two kids. Her payments come out to just under £24,000, so again an earned income equivalent of just under £32,000.

Finally, I looked at a single unemployed man of working age. His benefit payments in the same area come to a tax-free total of £12,300 with £7,600 of that being housing benefit. I then looked up the accommodation available to rent at that price or less in the area. Rightmove provided 68 pages of possibilities.

Now, none of these amounts add up to fortunes. But they don’t add up to anything approaching absolute poverty either. Live frugally and stay out of debt, and things should be fine. Not exactly luxurious, but fine.

"US Voters Are Stupid", That's How Obamacare Was Passed

Jonathan Gruber is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) health economist who was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) in America, modelled on the UK's NHS.

Not once, but twice he has been caught on tape saying that the "stupidity of the American voter" made a certain amount of duplicity necessary to the passage of Obamacare.

The first time was during the panel sessions at the 2013 Annual Health Economics Conference, the video of which you can see above. (The relevant remarks are at 20:25.) The video surfaced in November of this year.

"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [Congressional Budget Office, a federal agency that provides budget and economic information to Congress] did not score the mandate as taxes," he said. "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the 'stupidity of the American voter' or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

"In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which explicitly said that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed," he added. "You can't do it politically, you just literally cannot do it. It's not only transparent financing but also transparent spending."

The National Interest observes in the piece "How One Man Could Obliterate Obamacare":

Obamacare is largely a Medicaid expansion plus churn between old health-insurance plans and new Obamacare-compliant ones, so far achieving modest gains in coverage at the cost of higher premiums and reduced access for many.

It's hard to imagine the stupid American voter would be enamored of this, if smart people like Jonathan Gruber had deigned to explain it to them at the time.

Liberals quickly disowned Gruber's impolitic observations. Some even insisted it was the most transparent debate ever, as suits the most transparent administration in history...

Gruber-gate is important for a few reasons besides the normal political "gotcha" game. First, it reminds us that Obamacare's losers will remain a vital part of the repeal constituency. The mobilization of such people was essential to rolling back the Medicare catastrophic coverage expansion of the 1980s, one of the most prominent examples of a broad-based entitlement being repealed in the post–New Deal era.

Second, it is a fitting window into how the technocrats view the masses. You might have liked the health plan you already had, but Jonathan Gruber knows it was bare-boned and terrible. The liberals truly are the best and the brightest.

But the excuses about his speech subsequently offered by Gruber, the Democrats and their supporters have been refuted by similar utterances on his part.

Another video surfaced showing Gruber speaking at an October 2013 event at Washington University in St. Louis, once again claiming that the Obamacare's authors took advantage of the "stupid" American people.

Referring to the so-called "Cadillac tax" on high-end health plans, he said: "They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference."

Republican Senator John Barrasso told Fox News: "It confirms people's greatest fear about the government. Remember, it was [California Democrat] Nancy Pelosi who said first you have to pass it before you get to find out what's in it.

"We knew it was written in a way that it was really deliberately written to deceive the American people, and now people are paying the price."

And that's not enough:

The Obamacare architect had already become Exhibit A in the Halbig v. Burwell case, now on its way to the Supreme Court, which could potentially make people who bought health insurance through the federal exchange ineligible for subsidies.

Little-noticed comments made by Gruber in 2012 could unravel the Affordable Care Act and offer the law's conservative challengers a major boost in the most high-profile ongoing challenge to undo it.

Republicans say they will try once again to repeal the health-care law, described by Robert E. Moffit, senior fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, as a disaster, or at least change its most controversial provisions.

UK Kids Think Jesus Is a Footballer

This is a conversation I heard. She: "Do we have a card with Jesus on it?" He: "No, we only have Christmas cards".

This exchange may go some way to explain the tragicomic results of recent research.

A survey of 2,000 UK families carried out in early December showed that a third of children aged 10-13 do not know that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus.

It’s shocking but hardly surprising, as Christ has been progressively removed from Christmas.

But the problem does not concern just kids. According to the same survey, half the population considers Jesus’s birth irrelevant to their Christmas celebrations, and only 1 adult in 10 can correctly state 4 facts about the Nativity.

Therefore, it’s safe to assume that the children just reflect the ignorance and disinterest of their parents.

The research was commissioned by the campaign group Christmas Starts With Christ. Francis Goodwin, a campaigner for the group, said: “There is a problem with political correctness in schools. They think they should not focus on the Christian roots of Christmas because of inclusivity.”

Schools are becoming so “inclusive” that many of them are not putting on Nativity plays for fear of offending people of different religions, and this survey shows in very clear, ominous terms the consequences of that trend.

Then there is the research conducted by the online parenting group Netmums, which found that only 1 in 3 schools are staging a traditional Nativity play this month.

The research also unearthed that schools these days prefer to stage modern musicals instead. Almost half of them now perform “modernised” Christmas shows with footballers - which could explain the results of another survey, below - and punk fairies in place of the shepherds, Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus. 1 in 8 school plays will have no religious references at all, but only eco-warriors or aliens or Elvis.

If we don’t stand up for Christianity, the religion that has given birth to and sustained the West will disappear from our lands. We, or our descendants, might discover that this loss spells the end of Western civilization, as an infinite number of signs already indicate.

Another survey was conducted a few days ago at London’s Brent Cross Shopping Centre, a veritable pre-Christmas nightmarish place. The association of Christmas with shopping persists. This is most incongruous, as the materialism and acquisitiveness of which Christmas has become the expression is totally at odds with the Christian message.

In this research, more than half of 5-to-12-year-olds thought that Christmas Day is Santa Claus' birthday.

A total of 1,000 children at Brent Cross were shown an iconic image of Jesus and told that it portrayed Jesus.

Then they were asked: who is Jesus Christ?

The options were:

a) A footballer for Chelsea
b) Son of God
c) TV presenter
d) X Factor contestant
e) An astronaut.

20 per cent of the children chose a), Chelsea player.

The presence, described above, of footballers in schools' Nativity plays "made relevant" to the present day could bear some responsibility for creating this confusion in kids.

It gives an entire new meaning to “Jesus saves”, as Alex Boot shows in the satirical title of his post.

Beginning of an Italian Civil War against Immigration

For once we have riots that are not by anti-white black protesters — to whose violence Ferguson, among others, has accustomed us — but by indigenous Europeans defending their land against invaders.

In Rome, on the night of 10–11 November, a group of residents of the Tor Sapienza suburb living in public housing attempted to assault the local centre for refugees and asylum seekers incongruously named “Il sorriso” (The Smile), throwing stones and bottles and setting dumpsters on fire, amidst broken glass and screams of “We want to burn you”.

The reception centre houses over 40 youths — Gambians, Congolese, Ethiopians and other Africans, plus Afghans and Syrians — rescued from their boats crossing the Mediterranean.

The local residents have long been concerned about health and crime issues associated with Il sorriso and, after their complaints to the authorities went unheeded, they took matters into their own hands.

“The tension” said Tommaso Ippoliti, president of the Tor Sapienza Committee, “is skyrocketing. For years this neighbourhood has been abandoned, you cannot go out at night, and lately assaults and thefts have increased. A few days ago a girl walking her dog was molested in the park in mid-afternoon. As a committee we distance ourselves from the violence of last night, but people are rightly exasperated. We demand more security.”

“Police are scarce and the city has not responded to requests for more security and better controls of the migrant centres,” he added.

Burglaries, thefts from cars, physical attacks are of concern, but so is the deterioration of the area, including the poor lighting in the local park.

That’s why on 10 November about 150 people took to the streets for a spontaneous demonstration for “greater security in a neighbourhood overrun by immigrants,” and then the protest degenerated into incidents of urban warfare.

Subsequently, a rally of over 400 people representing more than a thousand local families was held on 11 November, leading to another protest outside the shelter. In the evening, 50 people launched cherry bombs, firecrackers and other objects — according to some witnesses even tear gas — against both the refugee centre and the police in riot gear permanently guarding the reception centre from the night before. Some cars were torched to stem the charge of the police aimed at dispersing the protesters. Two people, including a policeman, were taken to hospital with minor injuries.

Guests of the immigrant centre responded by throwing objects from their windows.

“It was a spontaneous action of some exasperated residents. It is not a question of racism, we’re just tired, we can’t take it anymore. In recent days there have been muggings, attempted rape and burgled apartments”, Ippoliti explains. “We are not extremists.”

There are at least three reception centres in the area, and a great number of immigrant squats and Roma camps.

The squalid public housing estate where the Italian protesters live, right in front of the modern reception centre for the immigrants, tells a lot of the whole story. Native residents rightly feel that a lot of taxpayers’ money is diverted into financing the business of “accoglienza” — welcoming and pampering foreigners — and not into addressing the pressing needs of Italians, at a time when Italy is undergoing its greatest economic crisis since the end of World War II.

The size of the crisis has led to cuts to local authority and welfare budgets, and buses are always too few and too crowded.

Tor Sapienza, on the eastern outskirts of Rome, is one of the worst suburbs of the capital, and often called a “dumping ground”.

It’s on this kind of peripheral neighbourhoods — the most affected by the crisis — that the burden of accoglienza is always shifted throughout Italy. In the central parts of town there are no refugee centres. The worse the area, the more negatively and seriously immigration is going to affect it.

Once again, as throughout the West, the costs of immigration fall disproportionately, if not exclusively, on the working and middle classes of the countries being inundated by non-European immigration, while elites can safely ignore the problems.

People of Tor Sapienza interviewed by Italian TV networks say that they are forced to go out in the morning carrying a knife for fear of assaults, and that in the area every 100 metres there is an apartment building of squatters while “our own people have no home.”

They say that men and women are unemployed. A girl says that she’s about to lose her job and her mother and brother are jobless, so she’s going to ask for the hospitality of the immigrant centre: 30 euros a day, accommodation, food, and cigarette voucher— not a bad deal.

Romanians have taken over the estate’s underground garages to live in. Why not? Police, says a man, never come to this area. Dozens of shop and market-stall owners have stopped business for fear of crime. Immigrants have even illegally built small houses.

Italians who don’t get the public housing they applied for are furious that immigrants get immediate accommodation.

They accuse the shelter’s guests of having taken over the children’s playground, which is full of broken bottles. A woman says that they defecate and urinate in public.

Still another reminds everyone of the complete lack of reciprocity when she says: “If I went to one of their countries they would kill me.”

“It’s not enough that immigrants walk around the estate on Viale Giorgio Morandi naked and throw things off balconies. Nobody can sleep because of the loud music,” complains resident Antonella Simoni.

“We feel like strangers in our own homes, surrounded by immigrants, nomads, transsexuals, pickpockets, and drunks,” adds Tullio.

No wonder the far-Right anti-immigration party Northern League reached 13% of preferences in the last opinion poll, for the first time becoming Italy’s third party, ahead of the 12.5% of Forza Italia, a party that was in government for many years, with its leader Silvio Berlusconi being Prime Minister four times.

In October the Northern League organised a demonstration in Milan attended by 100,000 people against illegal immigration, Islamisation and the European Union.

The protest of Tor Sapienza inhabitants is not the first in Rome in recent months. In September another suburb, Corcolle, protested against a refugee shelter after a string of assaults on bus drivers.

In the end the reception centre’s guests in Tor Sapienza were transferred for their own protection to another suburb, possibly even worse, the aptly-named Infernetto , which has already declared it doesn’t want them.

The urban warfare surrounding Il Sorriso centre has attracted lots of media coverage in Italy, where the mob has been accused of racism.

The various suburbs of Rome have united in a city-wide Coordinamento di Ribellione comprising 45 neighbourhood committees, which organised a massive demonstration against the mayor Ignazio Marino in which the protesters were wearing Pinocchio masks of his face. “The people will take this country back!” was the slogan.

The unrest has spread not only to other districts of Rome but also to other Italian cities.

There is talk of a new Italian civil war. The media are now saying that this was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the difficult cohabitation between Italians and immigrants has led to the explosion of social tensions accumulated over the years.

The rage is also directed, among others, at nomads, gypsies, squatters and immigrant occupants of public housing. Italy, like Britain, has a serious housing shortage. Also, since it is part of the Eurozone, Italy — unlike Britain — is in an economic straitjacket, and many people can’t pay their rent.

To date, Italy has rescued 160,000 people from the Mediterranean.

I asked my friend, journalist Alessandra Nucci, who lives in Italy, to give me her opinion on the Tor Sapienza incidents. This is her answer:

I think that the writing was on the wall, it was inevitable.

You fill us with paupers, this year thousands at a time have entered the country, you keep them in style and you shower them with compassion.

For years they’ve been given all: subsidised credit, public housing, professional courses, and on top of that praise and esteem.

How can you expect Italians, who have had everything taken away from them, including their good name and recognition for having shared their own country with others, not to get furious?

Eric Garner: A Tragedy, but Not a Murder

As the protest over his death has reached London, we can say that what happened to Eric Garner, whatever his faults, is certainly, tragically terrible. If I had been a police officer I probably would have stopped holding him down when I heard "I can’t breathe!", but then I'm not a police officer used to dealing with criminals lying all the time, including Garner himself who - as is shown in a distressing video that includes his altercation with the police before his arrest - had possibly been lying to the police until a few seconds earlier, when he was claiming he was doing nothing. It was probably a case of cry wolf.

And New York City policeman Daniel Pantaleo was supposed not to let go of Garner, it was his job not to do so.

Garner did not die from strangulation. According to city medical examiners, he was killed by neck compression, along with "the compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police". The cops were holding him down by sitting on him, with an arm around his neck, which contributed to, but did not cause, his death.

Contributing factors were his obesity and various ailments, including bronchial asthma, heart disease, hypertensive cardiovascular disease. Without them, as Rep. Peter King said, he would not have died.

After Garner was handcuffed and had passed out, the police did no Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on Garner because, they say, he was still breathing, and it would be improper to do CPR on someone who was breathing on his own.

The police maintain that, before Garner passed out, there was no reason to believe that he was in serious condition, because they assumed that, if Garner was unable to breathe, he would also have been unable to speak. The medical examiner found no damage to Garner's windpipe or neck bones.

He was put in an ambulance, where he suffered cardiac arrest, and was pronounced dead at the hospital about an hour later.

This is what Pat Buchanan says in "Racist Cops—or Liberal Slander?":

Why would a Staten Island grand jury not indict Pantaleo for murder or manslaughter in the death of Eric Garner? In a word, intent. Did Pantaleo intend to kill Eric Garner when he arrived on the scene? Did Pantaleo arrive intent on injuring Eric Garner? No and no.

Pantaleo was there to arrest Garner, and if he resisted, to subdue him and then arrest him. That was his job. Did he use a chokehold, which the NYPD bans, or a takedown method taught at the police academy, as his lawyer contends? That is for the NYPD to decide. The grand jury, viewing the video, decided that the way Pantaleo brought down Garner was not done with any criminal intent to kill or injure him, but to arrest him.

Garner’s death, they decided, was accidental, caused by Pantaleo and the other NYPD cops who did not intend his injury or death, with Garner’s asthma and heart disease as contributing factors. Now that grand jury decision may be wrong, but does it justify wild allegations of “racist cops” getting away with “murder”?

This reflexive rush to judgment happens again and again.

I think that the New York case - Garner's death - is more nuanced than the Ferguson one, but the grand juries' decisions were right in both cases.

Given the outrage that dominates much of the mainstream media over a grand jury's decision not to indict officer Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, here are 11 crucial facts about the Eric Garner case that the media are not going to tell you:

1. There is no doubt that Garner was resisting an arrest for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes. Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik put it succinctly: "You cannot resist arrest. If Eric Garner did not resist arrest, the outcome of this case would have been very different," he told Newsmax. "He wouldn't be dead today.

"Regardless of what the arrest was for, the officers don't have the ability to say, 'Well, this is a minor arrest, so we're just going to ignore you.'"

2. The video of the July 17 incident clearly shows Garner, an African-American, swatting away the arms of a white officer seeking to take him into custody, telling him: "Don't touch me!"

3. Garner, 43, had history of more than 30 arrests dating back to 1980, on charges including assault and grand larceny.

4. At the time of his death, Garner was out on bail after being charged with illegally selling cigarettes, driving without a license, marijuana possession and false impersonation.

5. The chokehold that Patrolman Daniel Pantaleo put on Garner was reported to have contributed to his death. But Garner, who was 6-foot-3 and weighed 350 pounds, suffered from a number of health problems, including heart disease, severe asthma, diabetes, obesity, and sleep apnea. Pantaleo's attorney and police union officials argued that Garner's poor health was the main cause of his death.

6. Garner did not die at the scene of the confrontation. He suffered cardiac arrest in the ambulance taking him to the hospital and was pronounced dead about an hour later.

7. Much has been made of the fact that the use of chokeholds by police is prohibited in New York City. But officers reportedly still use them. Between 2009 and mid-2014, the Civilian Complaint Review Board received 1,128 chokehold allegations.

Patrick Lynch, president of the New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said: "It was clear that the officer's intention was to do nothing more than take Mr. Garner into custody as instructed, and that he used the takedown technique that he learned in the academy when Mr. Garner refused."

8. The grand jury began hearing the case on Sept. 29 and did not reach a decision until Wednesday, so there is much testimony that was presented that has not been made public.

9. The 23-member grand jury included nine non-white jurors.

10. In order to find Officer Pantaleo criminally negligent, the grand jury would have had to determine that he knew there was a "substantial risk" that Garner would have died due to the takedown.

11. Less than a month after Garner's death, Ramsey Orta, who shot the much-viewed videotape of the encounter, was indicted on weapons charges. Police alleged that Orta had slipped a .25-caliber handgun into a teenage accomplice's waistband outside a New York hotel.

76 Arrested in London Die-In for Garner

Why can't the majority of black people and the rioters accept that the reason blacks are much more likely to get into trouble with the police is because they are much more likely to commit criminal acts, both serious and petty, and the reason they are much more likely to be harmed is because of the way they interact with the police, resisting arrest or even assaulting the officers?

The question is rhetorical. They don't accept this because it's always difficult for every human being to recognise one's faults - or, as in this case, the faults of the group one identifies with. For rioters and looters there are added motives: regardless of whether they really believe that Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin et al were victims of the police or of their own behaviour, they get a reward, material or psychological or both, from screaming and stealing.

Now the "protests" have come to London. Last night at the Westfield Shopping Centre (Europe's largest), in West London, demonstrators staged a "die in" over the death of Eric Garner and clashed with the police. 76 were arrested, which is an indication of the high numbers involved in this ridiculous pantomime.

But it wasn't just idiotic, it was deeply damaging. In such a bad economic climate, shops lost thousands of pounds of revenue from Christmas sales. And dozens of police and security guards were deployed, who could have been used to fight the crime that these "protesters" are implicitly supporting and now committing.

High-end stores and outlets at the shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush were forced to close, with terrified customers and staff barricaded inside, as no fewer than 600 militants staged a mass "die in" by sprawling on the floor in the centre’s atrium from 6pm yesterday. They chanted Garner’s last words as he was restrained by chokehold: "I can’t breathe!".

I wish we could easily gather so many people to demonstrate for worthy causes instead.

Several of these criminals "charged around" in front of terrified shoppers.

The arrests were for criminal damage and public order offences.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “Shortly after 8.20pm, a group of protesters broke away from a larger group and attempted to force entry to the shopping centre assaulting security staff and causing damage to property... one man was further arrested on suspicion of assault."

A shop worker said: “It was pretty scary. They were charging around and we just didn’t know what would happen next. We thought, to protect everyone, we would lock the doors."

Witnesses commented that it was over the top.

Some questioned the point of the “die-in”, and a police officer told a demonstrator: “This is the worst protest ever. There’s no message.”