What Is Zionism?

The chap of the blog quoted below, Robert Lindsay, claims to be a Leftist, but, if he is, he's a very unusual and unusually insightful one.

I don't think, as I've always said, that we can solve the Islam problem in the West if we don't first understand why we've opened the doors to it.

And I now start realising that we must understand the role that Jews have played in this process.

Jewish leaders and organisations have been incessantly promoting mass immigration and multiculturalism in the Diaspora countries of the West, where they are a minority and where they have been trying to attack the majority culture of White Christians. They perceive it is in their interest as an ethnic and religious group to destroy the White and Christian characteristics of the Western societies where they happen to live but for which they don't feel loyalty.

In diametrical opposition to the "liberal" values they espouse when predicating tolerance of diversity and welcoming of immigrants in the West, in their state, Israel, these same Jewish elites support a racist immigration policy based on genetic Jewishness and want to impose an ethnonationalist society.

The American citizens who, through their taxes, have paid enormous amounts of money to support Israel wouldn't be able to emigrate there, unless they were pedigree Jews.

Some excerpts from Robert Lindsay's "What Is Zionism?":

What is Zionism anyway? I see Zionism every day on the net. In a nutshell, most Zionists, but not all, argue that both the formation of the state of Israel and the settler-colonial project that created it were right, just and proper.

A principal Zionist argument (though not shared by all Zionists) is this:

1.Jewish land, not Arab land – All of Israel is Jewish land. The Arabs have no right to any of this land.

Several arguments are used to defend this view:

1.Historical- Jews had a continuing presence in the land for 3,000 years, so therefore it is their land. The Arab presence is illegitimate. When the Zionist project began, there were only a few Arabs in Palestine anyway, and they were the ancestors of Arabs who invaded Jewish land in 640 and have been occupying Jewish land ever since.Arabs never controlled Palestine anyway, and all Palestinians are Arab invading colonists who have no right to be there and need to go back to Arabia where they came from. Jews were completely in their right to reclaim their homeland after so many years in exile.This is one of the most vicious and wicked Zionist arguments, and it is extremely popular amongst the hardest of the hardline, blood-and-soil, organic nationalist types.One can argue that this is the philosophy that it is at the core of the mindset of the leaders of the Zionist movement from 1897 to the present. It is this argument, that, like most primordialist ethnic nationalist projects that rose out of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1800’s, is most similar to Nazism.On the other hand, all modern ethnic nationalisms (in particular Arab nationalism, Indian Hindu nationalism, Lebanese Phalangist nationalism and all of the ethnic nationalist projects that swept Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s) came from the same 19th Century core as Nazism, so it is somewhat unfair to single out Zionism in that regard.

2.Religious – God gave the land to the Jews. It is Jewish land and will always be so. God watches over the Jews and Israel, and no one can mess with them. Anyone who messes with the Jews or Israel gets punished by God. This is obviously a favorite of conservative Zionists, though some secular liberal Zionists use it too, usually cynically in an effort to get Gentile Christians to go along with the project.

3. Holocaust – Jews needed a safe haven in Israel due to the Holocaust, and it was ok to throw out the Arabs to get this haven. A favorite of liberal Zionists, many of whom are ignorant of the specifics of the project. When questioned, many of this type will insist that no Arabs were thrown out to make the Jewish state. Apparently the land was just empty or something.

4.Freedom From Persecution – Related to the above. Jews have been persecuted everywhere they have been, so it is reasonable for them to have their own state where they can be safe. A favorite of more liberal Zionists. One of their favorite lines is that Zionism is “affirmative action for Jews”. Micheal Lerner of Tikkun is fond of that phrase.

5.UN and League of Nations – These two organizations agreed to give away Arab land to Jews for a homeland at different times. Therefore, Israel is legitimate. Once again, a favorite of more liberal Zionists and folks who are fond of the UN and international law.

6.Self-determination and National Liberation – All other ethnic groups have a right to self-determination on their homeland, and many have developed national liberation movements to obtain their nation-state. Zionism is the Jewish equivalent. This argument is a favorite of Zionist liberals and Leftists.

7.British Donation – Britain gave the land – British land – to the Jews. Therefore, it is the Jews’ land. This one is also a favorite of more liberal Zionists, because it avoids the question of whether or not Israel is Jewish land.

A number of the National-Religious types (see arguments A and B above – they are typically combined into a highly toxic form called National-Religious Zionism) claim that the land of Israel extends from the Nile to the Euphrates. It encompasses most of Lebanon and Syria, all of Jordan, part of Iraq, all of the Sinai, part of Arabia and all of Kuwait.

There are actually a fair number of Zionists who feel that all (or some) of this should be reconquered.

When an aide to President Truman visited the Holy Land around 1947 to try to understand the Zionist-Arab conflict, he said that all of the Jews he met there held the Nile to Euphrates view. He also noted that they did not like to talk about it too much, and they seemed to want to keep it a sort of secret, as if they were afraid of the reaction of outsiders if they learned of the Zionist plans.

Despite super-liar and modern-day Crusader Daniel Pipes’ articulate lie, The Nile to Euphrates Calumny, Nile to Euphrates Zionists are not mythological, and I have run across them fairly regularly on the Net, especially lately.

Does Mr. Pipes feel that I have hallucinated all of these Greater Israel types? Were they all just Arab agents out to make the Zionists look bad? Inquiring minds want to know. Mr. Pipes or his supporters are encouraged to email me here to explain how it is that I keep running into these nonexistent phantasms.

A lesser view holds that “Eretz Israel” at least covers all of Green Line Israel, all of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. Some also include the Sinai Peninsula (or at least a small part of it up to the Wadi Arish) and southern Lebanon to the Litani River.

A map demonstrating Zionist armed settler-colonialism in action. Note the progressive loss of Arab land to Zionist colonization. This was deliberate and planned from the very start. It all stems from the Zionist principle that all of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights is Jewish land and that the local Arabs are “squatting” on Jewish land and live there only at the whim of the Zionist owners.

Presently, the project is to make the remaining Arab enclaves so miserable that the Arabs will leave and then the Zionists can colonize their land.

This is a Minimal Greater Israel view and is very common. It was the “minimal view” adopted by the “progressives” of Left Socialist Zionism under David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel. It could logically be called Minimal Greater Israel.

Ben-Gurion’s ideological opponents, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists, held similar views, except that they typically claimed all of Jordan for the Jewish state also.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement. He authored The Iron Wall in 1923, in which he openly advocated a Zionist settler-colonial movement, to be implemented by armed force backed by an imperial power. The reason armed force was needed, he said, was because of inevitable Arab resistance. Before that, Zionism had been largely focused on buying out the Arabs’ land, then throwing them off the land and settling it with Zionists.

A poster for the Irgun Zionist armed guerrilla group. This was one of the three major armed Zionist guerrilla factions in Palestine. It focused on attacks against both the British and the local Arabs. Note that Irgun claimed that not only all of Palestine, but also all of Jordan, was Jewish land, to be cleansed of Arab “squatters”, and to be conquered by force (note the rifle).

Irgun dissolved after the founding of Israel, and since then Mainstream Revisionist Zionism has gone pretty quiet about claims to Jordan. Look carefully at the map to see that Irgun also claimed the Golan Heights for the Zionists.

I have recently met Zionist Jews on the Net who are still upset at the British and the League of Nations for “promising” all of Jordan to the Zionists in the early 1920’s, and then “going back on their word”. Actually neither party did any such thing, and such thinking is based on a misreading of the League of Nations Mandate.

In a recent interview, a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, a very powerful, very militant Jewish Zionist group in the US, noted with a twinkle in his eye that all of Jordan was actually part of Israel and implied that Israel should conquer it at some future time. The attitudes of ZOA fanatics are rampant amongst the neoconservatives who were associated with the Bush Administration.

The notion of Greater Israel, not some phony notions about buffer zones or security zones, is and was the real reason for the occupation and colonies in the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and the Sinai, and for the occupation of Southern Lebanon.

As you can imagine, this political project, Zionism, terrifies the Arabs and sends them into conniptions. My opinion is that Zionism is poisonous and that no people should have to put up with such a dangerous project, least of all the backwards Arabs.

There is a lot of nonsense about Greater Israel on the Internet, with devious Zionist sophists like Pipes holding that it is just a deranged, paranoid Arab fantasy. On the other hand, many anti-Zionists, especially Islamists, insist that all Zionists hold the radical Nile-to-Euphrates view.

As you can see above, that is not the case. The truth is that some Zionists do hold the Nile-to-Euphrates view, but the Israeli government does not, and most major Israeli political parties and political figures do not either.

The Minimal Greater Israel project described above is much more common and relevant. Anti-Zionists should focus on the minimal project for now and forget about the Nile To Euphrates project until we get some evidence that it amounts to more than the ravings of some Zionist radicals...

Many anti-Zionists (especially progressives and Leftists) believe that all of the Jews can stay in Israel, but that they must share the state and land with the Arabs and dismantle the Jewish state.

This view has been espoused by the leadership of the DFLP and PFLP leftwing Palestinian armed fronts, some members of the PLO, the Hamas Charter, an Islamic Jihad leader in an interview 13 years ago, and Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi, who proposed a state called Izratine.

This view has been quite popular with Palestinian Christians and secularists like Edward Said, Mazin Qumsiyeh and Ghada Karmi.

In general, the vast majority of anti-Zionists do not advocate killing all the Jews in Israel, though I have heard some Arab hotheads say that on the Internet. No Arab or Muslim armed group (including Al Qaeda) takes that position, to my knowledge.

Yet this is a staple of Zionist propaganda – that all anti-Zionists and armed anti-Israel groups are all intent on “carrying out a second Holocaust”. If it were true, it would be an excellent reason to support Israel, but there is little evidence for this...

Getting back to Greater Israel, the Internet is full of statements by Zionist fanatics fantasizing about Greater Israel. They are not made-up lies but instead are well-documented statements. Here is one by David Ben-Gurion (formerly David Green):

David Ben Gurion, Report to the World Council of Poale Zion (the forerunner of the Labor Party), Tel Aviv, 1938. Cited by Israel Shahak, Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1981.

“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria, and Sinai.”

Keep in mind that this frighteningly fanatical statement was uttered by the founder of the state of Israel, a socialist, a liberal and a moderate. Note that his rightwing opponents were even more extreme. Note also that his rightwing Revisionist opponents were the forerunners of the modern-day Likud and Kadima Parties, not to mention the many smaller rightwing parties.

Counterjihad and Anti-Semitism

It never ceases to surprise me how people in the counterjihad movement are so well versed in recognising the epithet "Islamophobe" as the censoring, insurmountable obstacle to open criticism of Islam that it undoubtedly is, but are incapable of seeing "anti-Semite" as, mutatis mutandis, having exactly the same function.

Or maybe there is another possibility: have they been trained only too well by the real movers and shakers of the counterjihad movement?

Genuine Refugees Will Be Helped but It’s Dangerous Not to Keep Out Bogus Ones

We keep hearing about tragedies involving immigrants, often hundreds of them, dying in the attempt to reach Europe and the UK.

Only a few hours ago came the news that the Italian Coast Guard has just rescued from the Mediterranean in only 24 hours nearly 1,000 Libyan migrants heading for Europe. At least 10 people died when their vessel capsized in freezing waters.

The rescue occurred off Porto Empedocle, in the Sicilian Channel, the stretch of water between Sicily and the North coast of Africa. You can see the video of the rescue operation above.

Less than a month ago, we heard about the 300 migrants who presumably “drowned in the Mediterranean Sea after three rubber boats carrying refugees from North Africa to the Italian island of Lampedusa were reported missing, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.”

In reporting that news, the Leftist newspaper The Independent implies that not enough is being done to save lives, and some people, shocked by such headlines, may also think that more efforts should be made to help these immigrants.

Many of these criticisms come from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as can be seen in this video:

But the UN is not always right in its approach to European and UK’s immigration policies. For example, Francois Crépeau, the Canadian who is the UN’s special rapporteur on migrants’ rights, claims that Britain and other EU countries should provide free access to health care, education and housing to not just legal but also illegal immigrants and find homes for a million asylum seekers.

Add to this that the UN has a former Marxist as a special rapporteur on housing, the Brazilian Raquel Rolnik, and a radical feminist as special rapporteur on violence against women, South African Rashida Manjoo - who claimed that “sexism in Britain was the worst she had seen in the world despite her visits to dangerously repressive countries such as Bangladesh, Somalia and Algeria” -, and you get the impression that the UN is not always to be trusted and that many UN tsars “are promoting their own bizarre Leftist agendas”, as The Express put it.

Crépeau (mind you, not “Crapeau”) told The Independent: “The fantasy is that there is a core British culture that was created probably 2,000 years ago and carried on, and now it’s being threatened by all those barbarians that are coming to our gate.”

UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage was quick to respond: "More people came to Britain in 2013 than came between 1066 and 1950. That gives you a sense of perspective of where we are with this, so he is talking utter baloney.”

UKIP MEP David Coburn added: "It is the usual tosh. He has no understanding of the economic problems that this is causing the United Kingdom. And as for the cultural aspect, quite frankly he knows nothing of our country and it's not for him to decide what we feel."

And UKIP’s migration spokesman Steven Woolfe reiterated: “Mr Crepeau epitomises why so many people in Britain dislike interfering international bureaucrats. He is an unknown and unrecognisable bureaucrat.”

The UK, as revealed by the latest official figures earlier this month, remains Europe’s biggest ”magnet for migrants”.

Just to get an idea of the astonishing demands placed on Britain by its massive immigration, consider that at the UK's biggest primary school, Gascoigne Primary School in Barking, East London, only one in 10 pupils speaks English as first language - down from nine out of 10 in 1999. Now they speak no fewer than – wait for it - 60 different languages.

The UN’s various commissars obviously don’t care if British culture is going to be totally buried under this avalanche of foreign influx. But we do.

The genuine asylum claimants among the immigrants are only a minority and there is already a legal procedure for refugees and asylum-seekers to apply for entry to the UK:

Asylum applicants or 'asylum seekers' are individuals who come to the UK and apply for protection as refugees. A refugee is someone who has fled his or her own country, and cannot return for well-founded fear of persecution there. The UK adheres to UN and European agreements on refugees and human rights and therefore must not return asylum applicants to a place where they are likely to face torture or persecution.

Asylum adds to the UK resident population in several ways. First, it adds to the legal, permanent ('settled'), population. A minority of applicants gain permission to stay in the UK ('leave to remain'), and may remain long enough to settle in the UK. Leave to remain might mean official recognition as a refugee or permission to stay for 'humanitarian protection' (HP) or through 'discretionary leave to remain' (DL). In each case, the protected individual can stay in the UK for five years and then has the opportunity to apply for indefinite leave to remain.

Second, asylum adds to the temporary population. Applicants who are unsuccessful and eventually leave the UK nonetheless will live in the UK for some time as they await a decision. Any such applicant who lives in the UK for at least 12 months is classified as a 'long-term international migrant'.

A third group is more difficult to count – individuals whose applications for asylum have been rejected, but who have not departed the country. Some of this group applies for 'hard case support' (aka Section 4) while awaiting departure, and are tracked in Home Office data. Others may have departed outside of official removal or voluntary departure schemes; still others may remain illegally in the UK out of contact with immigration control, and thus uncounted.

The Home Office counts applications, decisions (initially and on appeal), and grants of leave to remain for asylum applicants. This includes dependents that arrived with the main applicant as part of the initial application. These data provide good estimates of the first two routes into the population for asylum seekers: 1) those who gain leave to remain in the UK, and 2) those that live in the UK temporarily while their cases are in process. The challenges in understanding the make-up of the third group, those whose application have been rejected but still remain here without legal permission, are discussed in the Evidence gaps and limitations section.

So the UK is not barring asylum seekers, but needs to deal firmly with those queue jumpers who prefer to use "refugee" status to justify their illegal immigration into their destinations of choice.

We are not selfish and inhumane in our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, but at the same time we must protect our borders and our culture if we want to survive as a race and a civilisation from these invasions.

Recent news shows that now more than ever Britain needs to be careful about whom it lets in.

ISIS is now controlling Libya's coasts and decides who is going to Italy by the immigrant boats. ISIS wants to send its own operative cells and jihadists to the island of Lampedusa, off Sicily - and then on to the rest of Europe, including the UK.

White Britons Oppose Jews and Muslims over Animal Slaughter

Published on The Occidental Observer

By Enza Ferreri


Thanks to the British brilliant organisation Animal Aid (AA) which has secretly made the above film, the assertion that animals are pre-stunned in many halal abattoirs is exposed as a deception in graphically traumatising images.

The scene is Bowood Yorkshire Lamb halal slaughterhouse in Thirsk, in the north of England, the tenth abattoir in which Animal Aid’s hidden cameras have filmed undercover since the charity’s ongoing investigation into UK slaughter practices started in January 2009.

What is significant is that Bowood is also the first halal slaughterhouse filmed by AA, which – as always – didn’t know what it would find. It didn’t know, for example, that it was halal. And so, the first halal abattoir investigated happens by sheer chance to be one of the few – so it is claimed – that don’t stun animals before the killing.

The UK’s law, like many other Western countries’, requires slaughterhouses to stun animals before they are killed to minimise suffering, but it allows exemptions for Muslim and Jewish producers due to their religious prescriptions. For meat to be considered permissible, namely kosher under Jewish law or halal under Islamic law, the animal must be fully conscious when slaughtered.

Barbaric ritual slaughter is regrettably something else on the long list of what Judaism and Islam have in common.

So Muslims and Jews once again are united in cruelty, to defend their ancient (“primitive” would be better) practices against the Western civilising influence, which owes a lot to Christianity.

Modern ritual slaughter in Judaism and Islam is closely related to animal sacrifice.

Many religions practice animal sacrifice even today, including Hinduism. Christianity exceptionally doesn’t.

This is because, while in ancient times, as well as in many contemporary non-Western cultures, people believed that the death of a sacrificial (in some cases human) animal was necessary in order to approach God or the gods, Christians think differently. They believe that, since Jesus had shed his own blood and offered a perfect sacrifice, there is no more need of animal sacrifice, because the door is now open to access God. After Jesus' sacrifice, Christians rejected animal sacrifices, and this has created in the Christian West a culture averse to them.

If we don't associate the ending of animal sacrifices with Christianity, in the other parts of the globe they do.

On the subject of offerings of animals, Judaism and Christianity are so entirely different that we cannot even talk of a Judaeo-Christian tradition. There are two distinct traditions, going in opposite directions. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then it is highly significant that on animal sacrifices the Old Testament and the New have led to antithetical practices.

Today Jews and Muslims want to force advanced White countries to accept practices that our animal welfare laws, reflecting a more humane culture, forbid. And so far, with some exceptions (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark), they have generally succeeded.

A case of such capitulation has been the Netherlands in 2012, when the country’s Lower House of Parliament passed with 116 votes to 30 a bill banning all ritual slaughter, introduced by the Animal Rights Party. The bill had the support of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party.

Guess what happened next. Haaretz reported at the time:

Israel's leading rabbi has warned Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders that his party's support for a ban of ritual slaughter of animals in the Netherlands is "anti-Semitic" and could drive away the country's Jewish community.

The Upper House of Parliament, the Senate, then rejected the bill. "Anti-Semitic" is the magic word to end all arguments.

What is particularly harrowing is that Western non-Muslims and non-Jews unknowingly eat meat and consume other products of such cruel methods of slaughter.

Going back to the video recently released by Animal Aid (which comes with the warning that it contains images some viewers may find distressing), among other things it shows slaughtermen hacking away and sawing at the throats of still-conscious sheep, belying the claims often made by ritual slaughter supporters, both Jewish and Muslim, that the animal doesn't suffer because death is inflicted through "a single cut made with a surgically sharp knife".

AA says:

With fly-on-the-wall cameras, it [Animal Aid] captured the horrifying yet routine abuse and taunting of thousands of sheep, and the shambolic set-up that guarantees animals will suffer...

Additionally, many of the sheep in our film are not dispatched with a single clean cut but have their throats hacked at repeatedly with a knife that is either blunt or being used ineptly…

In one instance it took five attempts to sever blood vessels.

During the course of our investigation, we discovered a remarkable weakness in the application of the law that requires all animals to be stunned prior to being killed unless the meat is intended for Muslim or Jewish consumers. The regulatory body, the Food Standards Agency, acknowledged to Animal Aid that any slaughterhouse can practise non-stun slaughter without demonstrating that the meat is destined for religious communities. [Emphasis added]

Translation: if you eat meat in Britain or in any other country with a Muslim and/or Jewish community, you will very likely eat meat from animals slaughtered in the same way as in the video above, too horrific even to watch.

The British halal market may be worth as much as £2billion a year, with more than 100 million animals killed in this way annually. It is calculated that the halal share of the meat market in the UK is about 5 times the percentage of Muslims in the country’s population, which means that kafirs are bound to buy halal or have it served on their plate.

Jewish and Muslim religious authorities assert that death by the shechita or halal methods, without pre-stunning, is instantaneous and painless. A body of evidence demonstrates that this is not a credible position, and our new footage removes any remaining doubt.

Rather than animals being treated with compassion and being uninjured prior to the fatal cut, we see them routinely treated with gratuitous violence and contempt.

Halal is probably one of the most, if not the most, sensitive issue in many European countries, including Britain, which is capable of mobilising native Whites against Islamic invasion.

Due to the antagonistic pressure from a large and growing number of people, Muslim associations have started claiming that many halal abattoirs pre-stun animals. Whether this is true or not is difficult to say. A sure problem is that, even when stunning is applied, the stunning is light and ineffective, so as not to compromise the Islamic requirements of keeping the animal alive: for example, the voltage used in electric stunning may be too low.

In the UK, there has been a sharp 60% rise last year in the number of sheep and goats killed without stunning, due to stronger campaigning by Muslims who believe that stunning killed animals.

A revealing incident showed how little importance Muslim lobbies give to animal welfare when compared to protection of Islamic practices. Last summer, research was published indicating that many chickens are still conscious and suffer pain when they are slaughtered, but that higher levels of shock would guarantee they were insensible.

As a result, European Union laws were introduced forcing many abattoirs to use a more powerful electric shock.

In the UK, the implementation of such new rules was put on hold due to Muslim leaders’ complaints that the new levels could kill birds before they could be slaughtered, meaning they would no longer be halal.

British Veterinary Association president Robin Hargreaves said: “Failure to implement the new regulations risks a percentage of chickens being ineffectively stunned, thus compromising animal welfare.”

The video footage released by Animal Aid in early February and given wide publicity in the British press has increased pressure and intensified demands for a complete ban on ritual slaughter.

A petition championed by the British Veterinary Association demanding that slaughter without pre-stunning be outlawed has crossed the threshold of 100,000 signatures, which means that it had to be debated by the House of Commons. A debate took place on the 23 February, eagerly followed in the Israeli and Jewish media with the predictable accusations of anti-Semitism.

The British Veterinary Association (BVA), along with the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, are UK scientific bodies which have always maintained that ritual slaughter causes great unnecessary suffering to animals and must be banned.

The BVA has now warned ministers that they “simply cannot ignore the strength of public feeling” over this issue.

A concurrent petition organised by Animal Aid to make CCTV mandatory for all slaughterhouses has also passed the 100,000 mark.

No slaughter is cruelty free, and earlier films by AA at slaughterhouses that did use stunning had nevertheless shown animals being punched in the head, burnt with cigarettes, beaten with sticks, given electric shocks with stunning tongs, thrown and kicked.

Kate Fowler, AA’s head of campaigns, said:

All four conveyor operators we filmed over three days [at Bowood] abused animals to varying degrees, while the slaughterers looked on unmoved.

This is the 10th slaughterhouse in which we have filmed undercover, and it is the ninth to be caught breaking animal welfare laws.

None of the abuses we uncovered would have come to light without our cameras being in place, even though there is a Government-appointed vet at each slaughterhouse.

There is now in the UK a wide mobilisation against Muslim and Jewish methods of slaughter, with the British Veterinary Association (part of the Establishment, certainly not a fringe group) heading it.

Even the moderate Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals – the world’s oldest animal welfare organisation, founded in the 19th century with the blessing of Queen Victoria – calls for an end to Muslim and Jewish slaughter methods.

The British Government repeatedly said it has no intention of banning religious slaughter as it wants to respect the rights of Jewish and Muslim communities to eat meat in accordance with their beliefs, a line that Prime Minister David Cameron maintained during a recent visit to Israel.

It's not surprising that the Government doesn't want to change the law, given the strength of the Jewish lobby in Britain. Indeed, a documentary made by the TV network Channel 4 a few years ago provided evidence of the extent of power over politicians and media held by this interest group, called in the film "the most effective lobby" in the country. You can see it here:

Extreme Centre: People Doing Nothing when Action Is Necessary

I have read the novel expression "the extreme centre".

The context (it was the title of the book The Extreme Centre: A Warning by horrid UK-Pakistani neo-Marxist Islamophile, anti-Western, anti-White Tariq Ali) doesn't matter. These words struck me because we are in a situation in which not to take sides is - paradoxically - extreme.

If your civilisation and race and the religion of your forefathers are on the brink of extinction and you prefer to stand aside and do nothing, you are extreme, no matter how many more people are doing the same.

"Extreme" here is used not in the statistical sense of far-from-average but in the sense of describing an action or omission whose consequences are going to be momentous.

Israel Is for Jew-Friendly Free Speech Only

And I thought that Israel was all for free speech!

Didn't Netanyahu attend the Paris demonstration of the world leaders in support of freedom of expression, even to the point of physically pushing his way to the front?

From "Israel Demands UN Condemn Iran's Holocaust-Themed Cartoon Contest":

Israel’s top representative to the United Nations is demanding that the world body condemn the Iranian government for hosting a contest featuring Holocaust-themed cartoons.

Ron Prosor wrote a letter over the weekend to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and global delegates urging them to publicly censure the contest, which is scheduled to take place this coming April.

The contest organizers said the event is a response to the massacre of journalists at the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo last month. The magazine was targeted due to controversial cartoons it had published depicting Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, in humorous situations.

The organizers argued that the event is in line with Western values that preserve humans’ right to freedom of expression.

The contest winners will receive awards, while one cartoon will be chosen for exhibition at a museum featuring Palestinian works of art in Tehran.

Israel: Modesty Patrols, Orthodox Power

Did you know that in certain neighbourhoods in Israeli cities women are welcomed by signs inviting them not to enter the area unless they are dressed "modestly"?

How much do Gentiles in the West know regarding Israel - beyond the headline news about bombings of Gaza - and Judaism generally?

So-called "modesty signs", like the one pictured above, for years have been a common sight in ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods of Jerusalem.

They usually say: “Please do not pass through our neighborhood in immodest clothes” followed by a rather detailed description of the permissible clothing, for example "closed blouse, with long sleeves, long skirt, no trousers, no tight-fitting clothes."

Women are asked to obey the imposed dress code in wordings such as this: “Please do not disturb [or offend or violate] the sanctity of our neighborhood and our way of life as Jews committed to G-d and His Torah."

I wonder how many women dress according to the above description but, apart from Muslim women, my guess is that they are not numerous. To see what Jewish Orthodox women look like, see the photo above the post.

That's probably why Judge David Gideoni, who ruled in favour of a group of women who started a legal battle to have the signs removed, wrote: "The signs were meant to limit the use of the public domain by all women. This could create an expectation or understanding that the area in which the sign was posted belongs in practice to a certain population."

But what aggravates the problem is that Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods are not in remote areas: they are central parts of a big city. Many of these districts contain or are next to public buildings, offices or institutions, like health clinics and government departments. Jerusalem women need to travel to such places and, when they do, they shouldn’t be left with the choice of changing their clothes or being verbally or even physically harassed.

NBC News reports:

In Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where the rule of law sometimes takes a back seat to the rule of God, zealots are on a campaign to stamp out behavior they consider unchaste. They hurl stones at women for such "sins" as wearing a red blouse and attack stores selling devices that can access the Internet.

In recent weeks, self-styled "modesty patrols" have been accused of breaking into the apartment of a Jerusalem woman and beating her for allegedly consorting with men. They have torched a store that sells MP4 players, fearing devout Jews would use them to download pornography.

"These breaches of purity and modesty endanger our community," said 38-year-old Elchanan Blau, defending the bearded, black-robed zealots. "If it takes fire to get them to stop, then so be it."

Many ultra-Orthodox Jews are dismayed by the violence, but the enforcers often enjoy quiet approval from rabbis eager to protect their own reputations as guardians of the faith, community members say. And while some welcome anything that keeps secular culture out of their cloistered world, others feel terrorized, knowing that the mere perception of impropriety could ruin their lives.

"There are eyes and ears all over the place, very similar to what you hear about in countries like Iran," says Israeli-American novelist Naomi Ragen, an observant Jew who has chronicled the troubles that confront some women living in the ultra-Orthodox world.

The violence has already deepened the antagonism between the 600,000 haredim, or God-fearing, and the secular majority, which resents having religious rules dictated to them.

Religious vigilantes operate in a society that has granted their community influence well beyond its numbers — partly out of a commitment to revive the great centers of Jewish scholarship destroyed in the Holocaust, but also because the Orthodox are perennial king-makers in Israeli coalition politics.

Thus public transport is grounded for the Jewish Sabbath each Saturday, and the rabbis control all Jewish marriage and divorce in Israel.

In recent years, however, the haredim have eased up on their long campaign to impose their rules on secular areas, and nowadays many restaurants and suburban shopping centers are open on the Sabbath.

These days, most vigilante attacks take place in the zealots' own neighborhoods.

...The unidentified, 31-year-old woman had left the ultra-Orthodox fold after getting divorced, according to the indictment filed by the Jerusalem district attorney's office. The indictment said her assailant tried to get her to leave her apartment in a haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem by gagging, beating and threatening to kill her. He was paid $2,000 for the attack, it said.

A 17-year-old who moved to Israel from New York five years ago said she was hospitalized after being attacked with pepper spray by a crowd of men outraged that she was walking down a Jerusalem street with boys.

"They can burn in hell," said the girl, who would identify herself only as Rivka.

She lives in Beit Shemesh, a town outside Jerusalem where the vigilantism has been particularly violent. Zealots there have thrown rocks and spat at women, and set fire to trash bins to protest impiety. Walls of the neighborhood are plastered with signs exhorting women to dress modestly — spelled out as closed-necked, long-sleeved blouses and long skirts.

'Stupid troublemakers'
The state, catering to religious sensitivities, subsidizes gender-segregated bus routes that service religious neighborhoods. Ragen and several other women challenged the practice in Israel's Supreme Court after an Orthodox Canadian woman in her 50s told police she was kicked, slapped, pushed to the floor and spat upon by men for refusing to move to the back of the bus.

Another Beit Shemesh girl, who asked to be identified only as Esther, said zealots threw rocks, cursed and spat at a friend for wearing a red blouse — taboo because the color attracts attention.

...But the rabbis are afraid to condemn them, says Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, another community member.

"They can't come out against zealots who champion modesty. Here and there they write against violence, but the militants ultimately set the tone," he said.

Stores are targeted too.

'This store burns souls'
In August, a Jerusalem man was placed under house arrest on suspicion he set fire to a store in a haredi district of the city that sold MP4 players.

"It started about six months ago. They would come into the store, about 15 of them at a time, screaming, 'This store burns souls!' and they would throw merchandise on the floor and threaten customers," said 31-year-old Aaron Gold, a haredi worker at the Space electronic store.

One Friday night, just before the Sabbath was about to begin, "they smashed a window, doused the place with gasoline and lit a match," Gold said.

Now, a big sign behind the counter says, "All products sold in this store are under rabbinical supervision. By order of the rabbis, no MP4s are sold here."

Clothing stores that sell clothes regarded as provocative have been vandalized, and bleach thrown at merchandise.

Suspicion sparks attack
Girls have been expelled from school after being seen talking to boys, a punishment that ruins their marriage prospects.

"It could be very innocent; she could be talking to her brother," Ragen said. But once thrown out of school, "no one — NO ONE — will take you in," she added.

In one case, the violence reached the highest levels of haredi society.

Three years ago, a son of Israel's Sephardi chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, was accused of kidnapping a 17-year-old boy, beating him at knifepoint and terrorizing him with snarling dogs because he had sought the attentions of the accused's unchaperoned sister.

The son was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail.

His sister married a different suitor the following year. [All emphases added]

Reading all this, I can't help being reminded of the Islamic world in so many ways.