Taqiyya and Blasphemy Laws in the UK

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri



In British law, race and religion are increasingly becoming deliberately confused for the purpose of accusing critics of Islam of racism.

A soccer fan was arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after allegedly ripping up pages of the Quran and throwing them at a match. While on bail, he was also banned from attending any football games, visiting St Andrew's - the stadium of the incident -, and going to any city where his team Middlesbrough was playing.

Insults against Islam are taken very seriously in Britain, and the world of soccer is particularly sensitive to them. After the incident, Middlesbrough Football Club suspended six more people, and vowed to ban anyone convicted of the “crime” from the Riverside Stadium, its home ground, for life.

A Middlesbrough club spokesman said it operates a "zero tolerance policy" towards all forms of discrimination, and supports football's pledge to "eradicate racism in all its forms".

Nobody could answer the question of what race Islam is. Muslims belong to all races, including white. But we know that the word “racism” has lost its original sense, and indeed any sense.

Originally the concept of racism had a place and an important role in both ethical and political discourses.

Now it’s best avoided because it’s lost its positive characteristics, its usefulness, and has instead become a tool for intolerance, intimidation, restriction of freedom of speech and other freedoms, in short a means of oppression.

The 19th-century German philosopher Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of modern logic, distinguished between the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning (or reference) and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by the concept.

The sense or connotation is the concept's descriptive qualities.

There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning the narrower the sense and vice versa.

A concept like "universe", just because it has as reference an all-including class of objects, has practically no sense, in that it has very little descriptive, or delimitative, power.

Defining a word means exactly that, giving it borders that restrict it and in so doing make it precise.

Since the word "racism" has started being used to refer to many attitudes, behaviours and ideas that had little or nothing to do with racism in the strict sense, its meaning has become progressively larger and larger, correspondingly decreasing its sense.

When today I hear about someone or something being called "racist", I hardly ever believe that it’s true. The likeliest explanation, I think to myself, is either an umpteenth case of excessive political correctness, or a personal attack. The descriptive capability of the term has got lost or at least dramatically eroded.

There is at the moment a worrying trend: what has for a long time been a common Leftist ploy, the shouting of “racist” to shut down any criticism of Islam, is now tried to be enshrined in British law.

The soccer case is one example of this attempt. Another is what’s happened to Tim Burton, the Radio Officer of the party Liberty GB, which will contest the May 22 European Parliament Elections for Britain (donations to help with the election campaign are welcome).

Burton appeared at Birmingham Magistrates' Court, England, on April 8, charged with racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets in which he called prominent British Muslim Fiyaz Mujhal “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist”.

Mujhal, founder and director of the organisation Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), was exposed by The Telegraph newspaper last year for having massaged some facts and figures about “anti-Muslim attacks” following the Woolwich murder of soldier Lee Rigby. For this and other discrepancies between police official figures of anti-Muslim crimes and the inflated ones of Tell MAMA, the organisation, which had received £375,000 from the UK government, had its public funding discontinued.

The obvious paradox here is that Tell MAMA, clearly in desperate search for “Islamophobic” crimes that could justify its requests for public funds, didn’t find a sufficient number of them of a serious enough nature. So, first it exaggerated them both quantitatively and qualitatively, calling “attacks” simple posts on Facebook and other social media. Then, when this manipulation had become well known, it used the same tactic against the people, like Tim, who called the bluff, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

Burton’s trial has been very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Tim Burton was accused of racially-aggravated harassment for tweets concerning Islam. Not only Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims can and do belong to all races, but also the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct and separate ones.

The Crown Prosecution Service, though, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case was trying to conflate the two because it did not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge – which requires stronger evidence -, so decided to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.

As its website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.

The attempt to “racialise Muslims” clearly exists but not, as Tell MAMA says, on the part of Liberty GB. It exists on the part of British Islam apologists and their allies, the politically correct Establishment.

Since there are no blasphemy laws in the UK and criticism of any religion, including Islam, is theoretically tolerated, only two alternatives are left to British Muslims who want to protect Islam from the expression of the uncomfortable truths of its supremacist and violent nature. One is to invoke the introduction of a blasphemy law; the other, subtler and more effective, is to turn existing equality, anti-racist, “hate crime” laws into a sharia-style blasphemy law.

The Macpherson Report, which followed the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993, reached the conclusion that the British police force is “institutionally racist” and, with the alleged intent of redressing the balance, established that absolutely anything perceived by a “victim” as a racist incident is de facto a racist incident: simple perception becomes legal reality, whether it’s true or not.

This makes the endeavour to legally treat anti-Islam criticism as racist even more dangerous, as it may render it subject to the ruling of the Macpherson Report.

An attempt had previously been made by the Labour government, when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 was passed, to formulate it in such a way that it could criminalise the criticism of Islam, the Quran and Muhammad. This was made impossible by the opposition of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, as well as various evangelical Christian groups which threatened to use this law against the Quran, which is full to the brim with incitements to religious hatred. Therefore the bill had to be amended.

But what went out legally by the door of Parliamentary procedure is now being reintroduced surreptitiously through the window of politically correct police and prosecution establishment.

This is why Liberty GB held a public protest outside the courthouse and considered this trial crucially important.

Firstly, to show to the British and Western public what taqiyya – deception for the good of Islam - is and, given the special position in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims of this divine permission to lie, to show the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it. For this reason, Islam’s scholar Professor Hans Jansen appeared at the trial and gave evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. We christened this a “taqiyya trial”.

Secondly, to defend free speech and stop the effective use of anti-racist legislation as blasphemy laws.


Photo by Gareth Davies (Creative Commons CC BY 2.0).

Tatchell: "Gay" Is Used to Distract People from Homosexuals' Sexuality



I've written about the hijacking of language by the Left and some of its manifestations.

There are many other aspects of it, like the wounds inflicted on grammar by the use of "they", "them", "theirs" in reference to a singular subject. For example: "Everyone knows what they are doing" or "The user must log in with their password". This is done only because it's politically incorrect to use "he", "him", "his", to cover both men and women, as it allegedly gives men a status of superiority (the same as in saying "man" to mean "the human species").

Politically correct writers - like the Australian-born philosopher Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University - instead use "she" to refer to both men and women, at least remaining grammatically correct. If we want children to be properly educated, PC should not override grammar. Writing logically helps thinking logically.

The practice of employing "they" referring to a singular has spread so much that it is now in use even when it's got nothing to do with PC, like in cases where the sex of the subject is known, so either "he" or "she" would be fine. I suppose people say "they" just to be on the safe side as they don't know the rationale behind its use, or they do it even in a totally automatic, thoughtless manner.

There is a particularly interesting case of PC language: the word "gay". The homosexual movement has hijacked what was once a common English adjective meaning something completely different - in fact in many ways opposite - from the sense that has become predominant today thanks to that movement's highly successful efforts, and now we cannot use this word in the original sense any more. That is tantamount to a small group's theft of the language that belongs to everybody.

In the video above George Galloway interviews Peter Tatchell, the UK's number one homosexual activist, about what terms to describe homosexuals would be accepted by the thought police of his movement. In it Tatchell, among other things, explains the origin of the word "gay" in the modern sense of a man sexually attracted by other men.

According to Tatchell, homosexual men's intention in adopting this term for themselves was to distract people's attention from the sexual nature of their condition. I can understand why they wanted to do so: they knew that being associated with anal sex, which is repugnant to most normal people and is medically unhealthy, as medical authorities keep saying - although this is not much reported in the media -, would not be good for their PR and image.

It is a case of dissimulation, if not outright deception. And it is a rare gem that someone involved in introducing one of the most glaring examples of this kind of politically-motivated changes in our language talks about it frankly and openly.

It is not just one of us saying that the Left intentionally changed the meaning of words for political reasons, but Peter Tatchell admitting it in a video interview with George Galloway. We can document a claim with evidence directly from the horse's mouth.

We should not accept this dissembling any more than we accept taqiyya from Muslims. I never use the word "gay" except in inverted commas (unless I want to describe someone who is merry). To do so would be to give in, to help homosexualists in their disguising attempt.

"Homosexual" is an honest word. It is not offensive - in fact, homosexuals who believe this are implicitly admitting to thinking that there's something wrong with their condition. At the same time, it tells things as they are: it describes people who are sexually attracted to the same sex (from the Greek "homos", meaning "same").

Tim Burton's Trial Pronouncements: Good on Taqiyya and Harassment, Bad on Race

Overall, the acquittal of Tim Burton and the judge's rulings on the case were a victory on two fronts and maybe not so much on a third.

The judge ruled that a few tweets, even intemperate and even relating to a Muslim person, cannot be construed as harassment. He clearly said that the Harassment Act was intended for entirely different situations from this one, like stalking somebody or shouting through his letterbox.

He also, if not explicitly accepted, took into account the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya. This can be a turning point for the counterjihad movement. Muslims are generally believed by people in the West when they talk about Islam; in fact they are considered as the experts on this system of beliefs, as one could naturally assume, so they are often asked questions about Mohammedanism by the media in the expectation that they'll throw light on it and help Westerners to better understand it.

But if the Western public can now gradually come to realise that there is a good, inherent reason, rooted in Islam itself, why Muslims are not reliable and trustworthy sources of knowledge on Islam, the discourse on this pseudo-religion in the West may slowly take a different path.

Taqiyya may now be officially established in the British legal system. Although taqiyya itself may not have been part of the judge's ruling, what sets a precedent is that the doctrine has somehow been given official recognition.

There is a hierarchy of the courts in the UK. The basic rule is that a court must follow the judicial precedents from a higher court, but it is not bound to follow decisions from courts lower in the hierarchy. Roughly, the hierarchy is:

1. European Court of Justice
2. Supreme Court
3. Court of Appeal
4. Divisional Courts
5. All other courts (County, Crown, Magistrates, tribunals)

The website e-lawresources explains:

Where the precedent was set by a court of the same level, the court is generally bound by the previous decision, but this is subject to exceptions. Different considerations apply, depending on the level of court, as to whether the court may depart from a previous decision of a court of the same level.

These are the two victories. Where we didn't win is in the District Judge's acceptance that Muslims, although clearly not representing a race in the strict biological sense, can be considered a race when, as a group, treated in a different manner as other groups.

This evidently did not affect his decision, but it shows that the worrying trend of using the terms "race" and "racism" in any way that fits the goals of the politically correct brigade is still alive and well, and supported by even reasonable and intelligent judges like Mr Ian Strongman.

Three Tweets Are Not Racially Aggravated Harassment, Birmingham Court Rules; Taqiyya Doctrine Accepted

On 8 April at Birmingham Magistrates' Court, District Judge Ian Strongman heard a trial of racially aggravated harassment against Tim Burton, 61, a computing consultant from Birmingham and the Radio Officer of the British party Liberty GB.

The reason for the charge was three tweets he sent over a period of a month from early June to early July 2013 to Tell Mama UK, a helpline organisation for victims of anti-Muslim attacks that also serves to monitor and collect data on them, whose director is prominent Muslim Fiyaz Mughal.

Investigations by The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan discovered that, in the wake of the murder of soldier Lee Rigby, Tell Mama had inflated numbers and seriousness of “Islamophobic” crimes, many of which were just posts on social media.

Discrepancies were also found between police figures and the association’s statistics, and this led to Tell Mama’ state funding – which by then amounted to £375,000 – being discontinued.

These revelations inspired Mr Burton to write the tweet “I wish to report Fiyaz Mughal for being a mendacious, grievance-mongering little Muslim scumbag & I want my £214,000 back now.” (a reference to taxpayers’ money) and two other tweets of a similar tone, calling Mr Mughal a “taqiyya-artist”. For these three tweets Mr Burton was accused of racially aggravated harassment.

The concept of taqiyya, part of a well-established Islamic doctrine, is the divine permission and even encouragement for Muslims to deceive non-Muslims to further the cause of Islam, particularly when Muslims are a minority.

The trial lasted all day. The Crown Prosecution Service called Mr Mughal as a witness via a video link. He repeatedly expressed that the tweets made him feel intimidated and targeted for his Muslim faith. On cross-examination, it was revealed that he did not know the meaning of the word “mendacious”, one of the insulting remarks that provoked the trial.

Next, the defendant Tim Burton took the witness stand. He said that his tweets, although in retrospect intemperate, were not intended nor expected to generate distress or anguish in someone like Tell Mama’s director, whose job is to search for and read online posts of analogous kind.

He added that the tweets were a political expression of outrage at the abuse of public money and the encroachment of Islam into British society.

Dutch scholar of Islam Professor Hans Jansen gave evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. He explained that the doctrine of taqiyya is accepted by all Muslim theologians and Quran commentaries, and rejected the prosecution’s and Mr Mughal’s theory that this word refers to a behaviour only found among minority Shia Muslims persecuted by majority Sunni Muslims, or that it is just used by far-right groups to victimise Muslims.

Asked by the defence lawyer if a Muslim could reasonably be offended by being described as practicing taqiyya, the witness replied that he had no reason to, since it is part of the faith he follows.

The District Judge, who had read some of Professor Jansen’s writings before the trial, seemed to find his arguments persuasive.

He found that Mr Burton had a right to free expression and that Mr Mughal had not been caused harassment by the three tweets sent to Tell Mama which were critical of him and his organisation. Mr Burton was acquitted on all charges.

Is Islam a Race? Birmingham Trial Will Tell

On Tuesday 8 April at 10am Tim Burton’s trial at Birmingham Magistrates' Court will settle the question of whether the defendant, by calling Muslim Fiyaz Mujhal “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist” on Twitter, committed racially aggravated harassment, as he is accused of having done by the West Midlands Police.

Mujhal was exposed by The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan for exaggerating the numbers and seriousness of “anti-Muslim attacks” following the Woolwich murder of soldier Lee Rigby, and had his organisation Tell MAMA’s public funding discontinued. Many of these “attacks” were in fact simple posts on Facebook and other social media, similar to the tweets for which Burton is on trial.

Tim is the Radio Officer of Liberty GB, a British newly-formed conservative and patriotic party.

Burton’s trial is very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims belong to all races, including white. Furthermore, the Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct ones.

But, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case the CPS is trying to combine and confuse the two because it does not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge – which requires stronger evidence -, so decides to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.

As the CPS’s own website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.

The attempt to “racialise Muslims” clearly exists but not, as Tell MAMA says, on the part of Liberty GB. It exists on the part of British Islam apologists and their allies, the politically correct Establishment.

Since there are no blasphemy laws in the UK and criticism of any religion, including Islam, is theoretically tolerated, only two alternatives are left to British Muslims who want to protect Islam from the expression of the uncomfortable truths of its supremacist and violent nature. One is to invoke the introduction of a blasphemy law; the other, subtler and more effective, is to turn existing anti-racist, “hate crime” laws into a sharia-style blasphemy law.

An attempt had previously been made by the Labour government, when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 was passed, to formulate it in such a way that it could criminalise the criticism of Islam, the Quran and Muhammad. This was made impossible by the opposition of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, as well as the evangelical group Christian Voice who threatened to use this law against the Quran, which is full to the brim with incitements to religious hatred. Therefore the bill had to be amended.

But what went out legally by the door of Parliamentary procedure is now being reintroduced surreptitiously through the window of politically correct police and prosecution establishments.

This is why Liberty GB will hold a public protest outside Birmingham Magistrates' Court on 8 April at 9am and considers this trial crucially important.

Our intention is twofold. Firstly, to show to the British and Western public what taqiyya – deception for the good of Islam - is and, given the special position in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims of this divine permission to lie, to show the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it. For this reason, Islam’s scholar Professor Hans Jansen is scheduled to appear at the trial and give evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. We’ve christened this a “taqiyya trial”.

Secondly, to defend free speech and stop the effective use of anti-racist legislation as blasphemy laws.

Here are more details on Taqiyya Trials in Europe

The defendant Tim Burton will be on the courtroom steps at 9:15am and then inside the main building from 9:30am ready to be interviewed.

Are only True Beliefs Effective?

I’m interested in the relationship between truth and effectiveness of a belief (or a theory).

Are true beliefs the only ones to be useful, solve problems, achieve goals?

Is there a correspondence between what is true and what is effective?

Positivism says yes (look at the relationship of correspondence between science and technology, its application).

I also say yes: historically it seems true, humankind is ever more effective and has ever more power as scientific knowledge of reality progresses.

Whenever this is not the case, it is because one acts “as if”. That is, it happens if a false belief makes one behave in the same way as a true one.

A good example is: to suffer for the death of a loved one does not serve any purpose. But if somebody simply says that to him/herself, it may have no effect.

If, on the other hand, one thinks: “I’ll see that person again in Heaven”, s/he behaves as one who says: “Suffering serves no purpose”, even though s/he does that by following a, let’s assume, false belief, which in this case leads to the same behaviour that would be inspired by a true belief.

I've assumed, for the sake of argument, that this belief is false, but in reality it would be more accurate to say that it's not certain.

A British Tea Party?

First published on American Thinker.

By Enza Ferreri


If you had had the dubious privilege of watching the BBC’s political debate programme Question Time on March 6, you would have been afforded a glimpse of what immigration and multiculturalism have become in Britain, their consequences for its native residents and the Establishment’s response to both the crisis and the protests about it.

It followed the usual Question Time format, in which members of the public from an always-changing part of the country ask a panel of politicians and other “experts”, such as media people and assorted celebrities, questions of particular importance to them. This episode was filmed in Barking, an area of East London that has been subjected to an invasion – a member of the programme’s audience did use this appropriate term – by many ethnic immigrants over a short time. A look at the studio audience gave an idea of its multicultural composition.

Only one person was allowed to ask a question expressing her deep concerns over immigration, despite the fact that, as the moderator David Dimbleby explained, the programme had had more questions submitted on immigration than on any other topic except Ukraine, which was hot news at the time. He said this twice – once in reply to a politically-correct person who even dared reprimand the BBC for allowing the question to be aired.

The questioner, a native British woman, said that her community had been totally changed by immigration, “they” were a minority there now and Barking was the most terrible place on earth to live at the moment. Amidst a less-than-warm reaction, a man was the only other member of the audience taking her side, saying how the indigenous population was discriminated against while the immigrants had “money thrown at them”. He was jobless and homeless. He became so annoyed by the response he received from the hostile audience and the patronising, condemning panellists that he very ostentatiously put his coat on and left the studio. I’ve never seen this happening before, and I’ve watched perhaps hundreds of Question Time broadcasts.

On May 22nd, Britain will elect its share of Members of the European Parliament. One of the parties on the list will be, for the first time, Liberty GB. I am a member of Liberty GB’s Executive Council and a candidate at the May 2014 European Elections .

Liberty GB (donations towards the electoral effort are welcome) was born a year ago exactly out of this predicament and to give it a real solution, rather than the shrugging of shoulders of the main parties.

Mass immigration and Islamisation are the two greatest threats for the country, clearly related. Other priorities are to sort out the UK’s disastrous economy and to protect its traditions of democratic liberties and freedom of speech: all these problems are somewhat beautifully and – from the viewpoint of their solutions - conveniently interconnected, and we’ll see why.

Liberty GB has been compared to the USA’s Tea Party, and in fact has many similarities with it.

Looking at the Tea Party’s “15 Non-negotiable Core Beliefs” reveals that, apart from the belief about Obama’s stimulus which is specifically American, 13 out of the remaining 14 – the exception is about gun ownership, on which our views vary – are very close to our own core beliefs.

The 15 open with: “Illegal immigrants are here illegally.” It may appear a truism, but there’s an important reason why tautologies like this need to be enunciated, namely that the Left nonsensically tries to deny them and their implications, in the UK as in the USA. You couldn’t find a party in Britain which would agree with that sentiment expressed by the Tea Party more than Liberty GB.

Our manifesto contains “Deport all illegal immigrants” and “Establish a National Border Police Force to tackle illegal entry and other cross-border crime.”

Several Tea Party’s core beliefs, like ours, stress the importance of economic issues and of balancing the respective countries’ budgets.

The Tea Party is internationally renowned for its strong anti-tax stance. Liberty GB has, among its manifesto policies, the implementation of two projects researched and devised by the UK’s TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA): The Single Income Tax Report for the purpose of tax reduction and simplification, and Work for the Dole, similar to the Workfare enacted in America, to train and help people on out-of-work benefits back to work, thus reducing the size of the welfare state and the burden for taxpayers.

“Pro-domestic employment is indispensable.” is another Tea Party’s core belief. That is certainly not less true in Britain.

The UK has a peacetime-record national debt of one and a quarter trillion pounds, or 76.6% of GDP - predicted to rise to 94.30% this year -, growing at a rate of over 5,000 pounds per second.

A University College London’s study covering 16 years, the most far-reaching study ever conducted on the impact of migration on taxpayers, based on official and government figures, concluded that immigrants from outside the EEA (European Economic Area) take £100 billion, or 14%, more in benefits than they pay back in taxes.

What about European immigrants then? They pay 4% more than they take out, while indigenous British pay in 7% less than they receive from the government.

Despite the spin given by the authors of the study and some media that concentrated only on the favourable effect for Britain from European immigration, a look at the whole picture shows that immigration hurts British economy.

While for Third Worlders the negative verdict it’s easy to reach, for Europeans it requires more analysis but is the same.

European immigrants take jobs and pay taxes that the natives would, without foreign competition and with the help of Workfare schemes.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance report Work for the Dole analysis shows that employment today stands at a higher level than ever in UK history, and that 3.5 million new jobs have been created since 1997, but 68% of them were taken by immigrants. Therefore the number of out-of-work welfare claimants remained about the same, as many British people weren’t interested in the new jobs.

This is where all comes together: British identity, economy, welfare and tax systems, size of government.

We need to stop unrestricted immigration, to push welfare claimants to work, to reduce big government and high taxation: it’s all in Liberty GB’s manifesto.

There’s a good reason why human populations have come to be ruled by local bodies, and world government is favoured only by totalitarians like communists and devout Muslims. No country can be morally or politically responsible for what happens in so many others. Human beings, even the relatively more affluent and freer, are not omnipotent supermen or deities, and there’s only so much they can do.

People living in poor parts of the world should not be encouraged by rich nations’ wrong immigration open-doors policies to move there. It’s not just bad for the host countries, but for the ones the immigrants leave behind too.

As Roy Beck aptly and visually explains in the video Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs, even our well-intentioned efforts to relieve world poverty through immigration are never going to be anything more than a drop in the ocean. Not only that: they may paradoxically be counterproductive, by depriving destitute nations of their most resourceful, entrepreneurial, active and skilful inhabitants, who would do well to remain in order to help their own countries out of their quagmire.

After all, we’re not asking them to do anything that European and European-descendent people didn’t themselves do in past centuries, when they also had to fight against poverty, disease and despotism.

The neediest are not the immigrants from the Third World to our shores, who, having the money to pay for the travel, are likely to be less indigent and isolated than their non-emigrating countrymen.

The greatest areas of difference between Liberty GB and the Tea Party are firearms and Islam, perhaps due to the diverse contexts of Britain and America.

Regarding Islam, there isn’t so much a distinction in stance as in emphasis. Islam pervades British life more, and as a consequence it’s far more present in our policies, news, articles, Facebook posts, and the like.

Gun ownership doesn’t have in the UK the same resonance as in the USA. There’s hardly any public discussion, no Constitutional amendment to argue about, and public opinion is rather indifferent.
Britain changed its gun laws to highly restrict their use as a typical kneejerk reaction to a mass shooting - the Dunblane killings -, the kind of response which in the US found a staunch opposition during the hysteria in the wake of the Newtown massacre a year ago.

In 1996 a man walked into a school in Dunblane, Scotland, armed with four handguns, and began shooting, killing 16 children, their teacher, and himself. A year later, private ownership of handguns was almost completely banned. Penalties can be up to 10 years’ imprisonment. Tens of thousands of firearms were handed into the government. It’s not so surprising, if you think that, after all, Piers Morgan is British.

I am in favour of the Tea Party’s position, maybe due to the fact that I have followed the situation in the USA and researched the topic, but, since we have various views within Liberty GB’s Executive Council on this, it’s been decided that we don’t have an official stance.

An idea Liberty GB shares with the Tea Party is the belief in the fundamental importance of Christianity for the historic development and the future resilience of Western civilisation.

We favour immigration of Christians, not only for ease of assimilation, but also because they are by far the most persecuted group in the world. For the same reason we have the manifesto policy of ending foreign aid to countries without a proven record of protection of their minorities, in particular Christians.

Liberty GB also supports Christian values, marriage and traditional families.

What the two, the British party and the American movement, more fundamentally than anything else have in common is the awareness that compromise on core principles does not pay in politics. Conservatives’ abandonment of what defines them doesn’t lead to more popularity and election victories, but to the moving of the political middle ground further and further to the Left, making success more, not less, elusive.

Easy Smears of Political Opponents: An Example

A funny thing happened on the way to Facebook.

A month ago I posted on my Facebook page Save the West a photo by the US Anti-Fur Society of a white fox about to be anally electrocuted for his fur. The fox had overgrown nails for lack of walking on solid grounds, having lived his life on wire cages.

Animals farm-raised for fur are killed by gassing, neck-breaking, injection with poisons and anal electrocution so as not to damage their pelts. Wild fur-bearing animals are killed by clubbing and trapping, suffering agonising deaths.

An otherwise sensible visitor of Save the West, Davy Goossens, was shocked not so much by the atrocity portrayed by the picture - taken from a video - as from what he must have considered a greater crime: that, he claimed, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) had staged a different video of an animal skinned alive for his fur.

That PETA video was not the one I had posted, about the abysmal cruelty of which he had no comment to make.

Nevertheless, I investigated and found this.

From the beginning, I had very strong doubts that PETA, an organisation devoted to the protection of animals, would pay someone to skin animals alive in order to make a video - as was claimed -, and sure enough I found no evidence for that accusation.

I found no mention of this story in any respectable publication. The only link Goossens provided is to a blog, Top Cats Roar, which says: 'PETA ADMITS “SKINNED ALIVE IS A MYTH”', whereas in reality PETA has done no such thing. On PETA's website you still find the same video (that you can see above this article - warning: it's a suffering even to watch it, let alone to be the victim). That blog is clearly not telling the truth about PETA's position, so it is not reliable.

The only source that blog provides to support this alleged, extraordinary PETA's retraction is a link to a non-existing, probably removed, page on a website called Shanghaiist.

Top Cats Roar links to a page in Bradford Telegraph and Argus, a local paper. On this page is an article about a circus and a not-clearly-identified item claiming that "The German High Court found PeTA guilty of paying people to skin animals alive." There is no byline, no link or reference to the source of the news, not even a headline. Not a picture in sight. It does not look like an article but a comment from the public. In fact it's titled "Report this comment". I'm a professional journalist, and I don't recognise this as a proper story. It's very easy, these days, to fabricate a false piece of news online to smear an enemy - even easier than to forge a video -, and PETA has made many enemies in its battles for animal rights.

That's it. All the sources end in this pseudo-article.

Listen to the alleged key "witness" in the case:

The witness who committed this act for PeTA, a videographer, told the court that he didn't understand why they wanted it done that way, but he needed the money. This video was made in a third world country and the prosecutor found the man in the video who skinned the animal.

Let's be charitable and put aside for a moment the style of reporting, which betrays that this cannot be the product of serious journalism. Could this man be a worker for the fur industry just claiming that he's done his job on the request of PETA? Of course he could. What evidence is that? If people could be so easily found guilty on such kind of evidence, we would all be in prison.

Maybe this chap is as reliable as the Chinese farmer who claimed he had electrocuted an alien and kept it in his freezer.

Germany doesn't even have a High Court, it is called Federal Constitutional Court. It's sloppy reporting when dealing with a subject of this kind.

Other links in Top Cats Roar are to pages that have been removed too, like the supposedly original document in German of the German court order against PETA.

There is nothing about PETA on the Court's website.

You find nothing if you google "The German High Court found PeTA guilty of paying people to skin animals alive" except in obscure little sources replicating each other's content.

Nothing in PETA's very long Wikipedia entry.

In fact, PETA didn't need to fake anything because skinning animals alive for their fur is practised.

But Davy Goossens hasn't dropped this subject. Even when I post something not related to it, he occasionally repeats his same comments. Not exactly modestly and politely, he commented on Save the West:

you don't understand how fur trade works... If you want to sell it, you want to get the most money. if you want the most money, you want to sell the best fur. does it really make for too much intellect above your ability to grasp if you skin an animal alive you will ruin the fur?

In fact, he does't really know how these terrible operations work:

Many fur farms skin animals alive to keep the pelts intact from damage that could occur while killing them. To avoid bullet holes, tears or slits from a knife, fur farmers can use methods such as beating the animal, electrocuting them, using poison to paralyse them, or breaking their necks.[16] Although these methods ensure an undamaged pelt, they are sometimes not enough to confirm the death of the animal, leaving the creature to be skinned alive.

Or does he think that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is faking it too when it reports that Raccoon Dogs are Skinned Alive in China? Isn't this a more trustworthy source than the sorry, scruffy ones he referred to?

Political Seismic Shock across Europe

At least one senior Tory politician has realised what the new party Liberty GB has been saying since its inception a year ago.

From "European elite's refusal to accept change is fuelling extremism, warns leading Tory", in today's Daily Express:

Former Defence Secretary Liam Fox believes there will be "a seismic shock" across the continent as support grows for parties such as France's National Front and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands.

In a speech due to be delivered to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Williamsburg, Virginia tomorrow, Dr Fox is expected to blame EU leaders for the rise in extremism, as politicians are failing to represent the fears of the electorate properly.

He is due to say: "The heavily cosseted and pampered European political class in Brussels are only too willing to blame the citizens of the EU for the rise of political extremes on both left and right of the spectrum.

"They seem congenitally incapable of asking themselves whether it is their behaviour and their political brittleness that is the primary driver of this process."

It seems obvious that Fox sees what he calls "rise of political extremes" as something to be avoided, and I agree with him if he refers to communism and fascism.

But, from his references to the Dutch PVV and the French National Front, I suspect that he considers as extremism the totally legitimate and wholly natural resistance of European populations to being invaded, colonised and Islamised.

This confusion is useful to the Conservatives, though, as they can proclaim to be the bulwark against both real extremism and, more importantly, the much more likely electoral threat posed to them by the emerging parties that don't ignore but represent people's worries about immigration and Islam, of which Liberty GB is a still small but unwavering example.

The article ends thus:

Dr Fox's comments come after a ComRes poll published yesterday shows the Conservatives are set to finish third in May's European elections, with Ukip winning the vote.

Commissioned by the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror, the poll puts Ukip on 30 per cent of the vote, Labour on 28 per cent and the Tories on 21 per cent.

Patriotism from Life-Saving to Destructive Force

Below is one of the most lucid and insightful analyses of patriotism I've come across, dissecting the various stages through which this sentiment can go and clarifying at which of them it can or does become toxic.

"All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.", said the Swiss Paracelsus, one of the early chemists, founder of the discipline of toxicology. Even the best life-giving medicine, capable of restoring health if used in the appropriate way, may cause serious harm if misused and administered in the wrong dose.

I have some doubts only about the specific movements to which the poisonous level of patriotism is attributed, and I spot a certain harshness in the way the excerpt treats the USA, one of my favourite countries.

Also notice that, although the passage only deals with country patriotism and references to God and religion in it only concern Christianity, the final stage, the description of the "lowest rung of the ladder" can very neatly be applied to Islamic patriotism (or nationalism).

It is an extract from the upcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick by my friend, author and thinker Alexander Boot. That's how he describes it:

It's a thorough debunking of every political presupposition of modernity. The conclusion is the same as that reached by T.S. Eliot: democracy (the modern, unchecked version thereof) is incompatible with Christianity -- and therefore the Western political tradition. But Eliot had other irons in the fire, which is why he didn't approach the subject as systematically as I try to.

These are Alex's other books.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Obviously Americans were not the first people to love their birthplace. Patriotism may have been the last refuge of a scoundrel to Dr Johnson, and indeed many a scoundrel has used it as such. But there is nothing wrong with loving one’s country, especially if it is lovable. (“For a country to be loved it ought to be lovely” was how Burke put it.) However, patriotism elevated to the perch previously occupied by religion is always pernicious. Here it would be useful to consider various levels of patriotism as expressed through everyday phrases uttered to describe them. This is best imagined as a ladder, with degrees of patriotism forming descending rungs.

“I love my country” sits at the top. This is a laudable statement. The country in which one is born and grows up does not have to be ideal any more than a woman has to be ideal to be loved. Whether it is perceived as perfect or flawed, one’s own country offers the degree of intimacy, warmth and shared historical memory that is keenly felt and cherished. Like two siblings who possess a knowledge inaccessible to a stranger, countrymen – regardless of their individual differences – are united by a bond as strong as it may be invisible to outsiders.

To expand on this observation, earlier I pointed out the intellectual weakness of the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” But the phrase is unassailable on a sub-intellectual level: a nation truly becomes one when most people in it regard most of the same truths as self-evident. In that sense the American states had been united even before the Declaration – that is, united in what most of their denizens accepted as axiomatic. Such shared knowledge and mutual understanding indeed come close to the feelings of two siblings: in that sense, brotherly love and love of one’s country are similar.

Nor is there anything wrong with regarding one’s country as unlike any other. All countries are different; if they were not, we would not have so many different countries. This is so obvious that one would think it hardly needs saying. But of course what matters here is not the text but the subtext: when people insist that their country is exceptional, they usually do not mean ‘different from…’, they mean ‘better than…’. They are entitled even to that opinion, as long as they recognise that tastes may differ.

Moving down a step, “I love my country, right or wrong” begins to be problematic. However, the problem is not insurmountable: after all, though we like for something, we love in spite of everything. A normal son cannot always stop loving his mother just because she is a compulsive shoplifter. Nor will a normal mother stop loving her son even if he boasts a string of juvenile convictions before his sixteenth birthday. So perhaps Burke’s aphorism quoted above ought to be ever so slightly modified. A country has to be lovely to be liked – loving it is a slightly different matter.

Another step down, and we overhear the statement “I love my country because it is always right.” Between this step and the previous one a line was crossed separating patriotism from jingoism. No country is always right. The belief that one can be is as false as it is widespread at the American grassroots.

When such sentiments are translated into action, we begin to leave behind the rivers supposedly flowing with milk and honey and approach a swamp fuming with putrid emanations. Implicit in this statement is tribal, what before the advent of political correctness used to be called Hottentot, morality: if I steal his cow, that is good; if he steals my cow, that is bad. It took several millennia of civilisation to overcome such tribalism, and by the looks of it the job has never been finished.

Another step down, and the morass sucks us in waist-high. Here one hears “My country is always right because it is guided by God in everything it does.” Typically this has nothing to do with any true religious faith: after all, Christ was unequivocal in stating that his kingdom was not of this world. America or any other country is ‘under God’ because everything is – but only for that reason.

At this level ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘a city on a hill’ are joined by the ‘Third Rome’ of Russia (replaced for a few decades by a more aggressive communist messianism) and the ‘Gott mit uns’ of the SS. The underlying assumption is that our actions cannot be judged by infidels, only by God, and he has given us an open-ended endorsement. Thus anything we do is justified simply because we do it.

The lowest rung reaches to the bottom of the swamp, where real creepy-crawlies take refuge. Here the sentiment is “Because our country is guided by God, it is our duty to impose our ways on others, whether they want it or not. Others may be either seduced or coerced, it does not matter which, as long as they join the fold.” Since no real faith in God underlines this feeling, the explanatory clause at the beginning of the sentence may at some point be dropped for being superfluous.

Only Americans and Russians ever descend this ladder below the top two rungs in noticeable numbers, and only Americans hardly ever stumble along the way. Also unique to America is the heavy representation of this genre of patriotism in the political mainstream. In other countries it is usually relegated to the lunatic fringe, an area inhabited, say, by France’s Front National, German neo-Nazis or our own dear BNP. Other places also have individuals prepared to dive headlong into the swamp of sanctimonious jingoism, except that in those places such willing divers do not represent the dominant, nor even influential, ethos.

Multigenderalism on Facebook

After multiculturalism, now we have multigenderalism.

The Telegraph reports that, whereas until recently people had to identify themselves as "male" or "female" when they signed up for a Facebook account, from the last Valentine's Day, 14 Feb 2014, Facebook has offered users the choice of no fewer than 50 gender options, including "intersex" and "androgynous".

Politically correct imagination - with its triumph over nature and reality - knows no boundaries. I don't really think that this news requires much comment.

A Tale of Two Conferences

I recently attended two conferences. One left me full of enthusiasm, the other dispirited. The former was the Campaign for an Independent Britain's rhetorical-question-titled conference “Can Christianity and the European Union Survive One Another” on February 22. The latter was the London Evening Standard's “London Needs More Immigration” debate on March 3.

All this shows very clearly why opinion polls and other demographic or epidemiological (in medicine) studies need samples which are highily representative of the populations surveyed in order to have any meaning at all.

Neither meeting's audience was representative, both were very much self-selected, which explains my elation at the first and frustration - if not despair - at the second.

All three speeches at the Christianity and EU discussion were excellent and inspiring. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s was my favourite. His speech “Christian Europe or Federal Europe” I consider one of the best I’ve heard in a very long time. He went through a concise but complete history of the close relationship between Christianity and the West, covering all the important points in a short time, and in so doing answering some of the questions I had in my mind. An illuminating speech.

Last but not least, to see a large room full of Christians and other people quite enthusiastic and prepared to do something about Christianity was a novel, rare, wonderful experience. Admittedly, the average age was very high, which could be the only worrisome aspect.

The audience at the London immigration debate was larger, several hundred people, on average younger and multicultural.

The speakers were lacklustre, and some, like Labour MP for Tottenham David Lammy, seemed more suitable to address a kindergarten assembly than a gathering of adults interested in political issues. Suffice it to say that, for him, immigration's gift of Kylie Minogue to London was a good enough reason to support the population replacement the city has been going through.

To me, a long-time sufferer of addiction to Question Time (often a stressful experience), the discussion was very evocative of the BBC program, in that the views expressed seemed so much at odds with both reality and what people in the street would say.

Where the 70% of people in Britain who want immigration to be reduced or stopped completely - although apparently they are 65% in London, which is still two thirds anyway - had been hiding during the ES debate I don't know, but they certainly were not there.

A vote was taken at the end, which showed a majority in favour of the motion “London Needs More Immigration”. That's why George Whale of Liberty GB, who also attended the conference, suggested as this article's title "London Surrenders".

Questions that should have been asked at the immigration debate but never were

1) So far we've talked about immigration, but not much about immigrants. A particularly numerous group of them is Muslims. If the panellists take a look at a map of the world and listen to international news, they'll see that in every country in which Muslims reach a certain number - they don't need to be the majority, only a sizeable minority -, they try to impose sharia law on everybody and often use violent means to that end. What makes the panel think that Britain, once Muslims become 10, 20, or 30 percent of the population, will be the exception to the universal rule?

2) Member of the panel and Labour MP for Tottenham David Lammy said that immigration should not be stopped - far from it -, but all debate on immigration should, as it's toxic, like the debate on abortion in America. Although I disagree on his suggested repression of freedom of speech, I find his parallel appropriate. I'd also add that the reason why both debates are toxic and divisive is the same. Abortion on demand was undemocratically imposed on the American people, the majority of whom were opposed to abortion, by a in which not a law of the US Congress, but unelected judges of the Supreme Court liberalised it in the landmark Roe v. Wade case ruling. Similarly, mass and uncontrolled immigration from all over the world was imposed on the British by successive governments which never bothered to consult the opinion of the people about this huge social experiment which was going to change their lives forever in the most dramatic of ways. Doesn't the panel think that divisions within a nation are created by undemocratic and unpopular decisions of the ruling elites, which lead to forced conformism by a part of the population and opposition by the other?

3) Panellist Tessa Jowell, Labour MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, and others have claimed that resistance to change is a major reason for the hostility towards uncontrolled immigration. Does the Right Honourable Dame Tessa believe that all change should be welcome just for the sake of novelty? Should Germans have been happy when Hitler, who represented lots of changes, became chancellor?

4) If immigrants are so beneficial for London's (and one presumes Britain's) economy, how is it that, after many years of this beneficial open-doors immigration policies, the country has a national debt of one and a quarter trillion pounds, a peacetime record, equivalent to 76.6% of GDP (the highest ratio to GDP since World War II and predicted to rise to 94.30% under current trends) - although, factoring in all liabilities including state and public sector pensions, the real national debt is closer to £4.8 trillion, some £78,000 for every person in the UK -, growing at a rate of over 5,000 pounds per second? To give you an idea of how fast public debt is growing, it was only £0.53 trillion, less than half, in 2008.

Could this be because the present immigration and welfare policies, working together, are bankrupting Britain? Don't take my word for it. The most far-reaching study ever conducted on the impact of migration on taxpayers, a University College London’s study covering 16 years, concluded that immigrants from outside the EEA (European Economic Area) take £100 billion more in benefits than they pay back in taxes. Non-Europeans immigrants dig a deep hole in our finances: the amount taken in benefits and services by them is 14% higher than money put back.

European immigrants pay 4 per cent more into the tax system than they take out, while British-born people pay in 7 per cent less than they receive from the state.

But this does not mean that, as the spin goes, immigrants positively contribute to Britain. It just means that a high number of even hard-working European immigrants hurts the British economy, as they take jobs that would otherwise be filled by British people, who in turn because of that are on the dole and a burden for taxpayers. If natives did those jobs, they would contribute to the revenue the same amount of tax as the immigrants, instead of living on benefits.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) report Work for the Dole shows that it’s not true, as we often hear, that the jobs simply aren’t there, particularly with the difficult economic situation. Its analysis shows that 3.5 million new jobs have been created since 1997, and that employment today stands at a higher level than at any time in UK history. As 2.5 million jobs were created since 2000, out-of-work welfare claimant rolls stayed about the same. UK welfare claimants were not moving into work as jobs were created, while 68% of the jobs created were taken by immigrants prepared to work hard rather than rely on benefits, and while many British people on out-of-work benefits evidently weren’t interested in the new jobs.

Stopping uncontrolled immigration, combined with a plan for helping and training natives on the dole to get into work - as outlined in the TPA’s document -, is what is needed, and this is what the Liberty GB party has in its manifesto policies.

The question for the panel is: why don't you all stop talking nonsense and start joining and voting for Liberty GB?

Kent Tenants Evicted While Immigrants Move In

First published on Liberty GB's European Election website

by Enza Ferreri


Landlord to evict British families on benefits to make room for Eastern European migrants, headlines the Mirror.

The landlord in question is Fergus Wilson, who owns over 1,000 properties around the Ashford area, in central Kent. He explains that he has issued eviction notices to all of his 200 tenants who depend on welfare to cover their rent.

The reason is very simple: in the last two years, while none of his tenants who work has defaulted, more than half of those on housing benefits have. Many of the evicted tenants will be replaced by Eastern European immigrants with jobs, whom he describes as “a good category of tenant who don’t default on the rent."

Mr Wilson is the rule rather than the exception. The National Landlords Association says that as many as 4 out of 5 of its members won't even consider renting to anyone on benefits.

What happened is that rent prices have gone up due to increased demand for accommodation caused by immigration-fuelled population explosion, while housing benefits have been reduced by the Coalition that needs to find a way to stop the economic blackhole created by the past Labour government from expanding and swallowing up the whole country.

Mr Wilson is right when at the end of the short video he says that the fundamental problem is that there are too many people and not enough houses.

We don't want to apportion blame to anyone here, except the previous and current governments who have allowed this situation to develop. People tend to act on individual self-interest, be they the immigrants who leave their countries looking for a better life and work hard for it, the landlords who operate for profit, or the benefit claimants who find ways to make ends meet and stop paying rent.

It's just the role of those in power to protect the borders and the population of the country who elected them for that purpose. Families and pensioners who were born and bred in Britain becoming homeless because of unregulated and out-of-control immigration is a sufficiently good reason to withdraw votes from the Labour, who are the most responsible for the immigration disaster, and the Coalition partners Tories and LibDems, who haven't done even remotely enough to reverse it.

Liberty GB is the only credible party in the 22 May European Elections which does not compromise on immigration and on putting the interests of British people first.

Nationalism or Patriotism?

Is nationalism a good thing or a bad thing?

Some people say that nationalism is bad, whereas patriotism is good.

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "patriotism" is defined as love for one's country or devotion for it, even to the point of sacrifice. It seems that there is no excess of patriotism in this sense, as it's always positive.

The Merriam-Webster gives this example of use of the term: "You may not agree with him politically, but no one can question his patriotism."

The two examples offered by the same source for "nationalism", on the other hand, are: "The war was caused by nationalism and greed." and "Nazism's almost epic nationalism appealed to downtrodden Germans still suffering the humiliation of being defeated in World War I." Not very nice.

This belligerence associated with nationalism is reflected in the Merriam-Webster's definition of the word, with loyalty to and pride for one's country replacing patriotism's more benevolent connotations of love and devotion. The belief that one's homeland is better and more important than other countries also forms part of the definition, as well as placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups, and a desire to be a separate and independent country.

The motto "My country, right or wrong" should probably sound nationalist, not patriotic, according to these definitions.

Wikiquote would generally agree:

This page is for quotes about Patriotism, which is a term denoting a devotion to fundamental fellowship with other human beings united in common causes, usually related to identified geographic regions or those within particular political associations and boundaries. Frequently compared or contrasted with ideas of nationalism, which are often, but not always, designated as less noble manifestations of similar distinguishing impulses with a greater accommodation of bigotry.

The Oxford Dictionary is more nuanced in its distinction, though. It provides this definition and example for "patriotism":

[V]igorous support for one’s country: ‘a highly decorated officer of unquestionable integrity and patriotism’

and for "nationalism":

Patriotic feeling, principles, or efforts: ‘an early consciousness of nationalism and pride’. An extreme form of patriotism marked by a feeling of superiority over other countries: ‘playing with right-wing nationalism’. Advocacy of political independence for a particular country: ‘Scottish nationalism’.

So, not all nationalism is bad, it implies, only its extreme manifestations.

"Liberals" (a misnomer) can be blamed for many things but not for having too clear ideas. Notoriously Leftist Wikipedia says:

Nationalism is a belief, creed or political ideology that involves an individual identifying with, or becoming attached to, one's nation. Nationalism involves national identity, by contrast with the related construct of patriotism, which involves the social conditioning and personal behaviors that support a state's decisions and actions.

What? Maybe the second sentence's utter confusion explains why at the moment the Wikipedia entry page on patriotism is empty, and the relative Talk page reveals a political-ideological row among its editors that I have no desire to follow in this little semantic tour of mine.

Other sources use "nationalism" and "patriotism" almost interchangeably and think that both can be excessive.

What conclusion to draw from all this? I think that nationalism, as well as patriotism, can be a force for the good. Human beings, like all social animals, need to be part of a group, to "belong", and recognising one's membership of a circle of people inherently has a divisive element. If there is an "us", there must be a "them".

There is nothing wrong in this. Not only is it natural, it is also beneficial in establishing ties and communities and in the organisation of human societies. A world government is only desidered by totalitarians like people who adhere to Islamic law and communists.

To blame nations for wars and national supremacism is like, as Richard Dawkins and his fellow self-alleged - there is no element of novelty in their ideas - "new" atheists do, to blame religions for wars: absurd.

As a zoologist, Dawkins should know that many social animals including human beings, especially the younger males of the species, will fight other groups or individuals. Humans just find more inventive excuses to do so. If you abolish nationhood or religious affiliation, they will make up something else. They've already done so: now that these groupings are less strong than before, they've created more artificial ones, like football teams, as a cause to battle for, sometimes even violently.

My conclusion is simple. Words don't have a magical power. Some semantic disputes are useful to clarify issues while others are pointless. This particular one seems a borderline case to me. But, for purely pragmatic reasons, given a choice, I would opt for the term "patriotism", as it usually - albeit not necessarily - denotes a more benign feeling and less aggressive idea than "nationalism".

Religions Are Not the Same, Not even Monotheistic Religions

The often heard view that all religions are the same or, at least, the monotheistic or so-called Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) are very similar is an extremely fallacious view, with potentially deleterious consequences due to the confusion it generates.

This is another myth of our age. The belief in God is too generic to form a common basis. The Christian God is not the Muslim God, and I'm referring to the concepts of God.

To say that all religions are the same (they all involve a belief in God) is equivalent to saying that all physical theories are the same (they all deal with time and space).

A concept takes its meaning from the theory of which it is part.

So, for example, Newtonian time and space are different from Einsteinian time and space. When a new physical theory (relativity) is developed, it redefines the concepts of the old theory (classical mechanics) in a way which may completely transform and revolutionize them.

So is the same for the concept of God in different religious doctrines.

To Be "Liberal" Means...

To be "liberal" means to say BCE (Before the Common Era) for BC (Before Christ), and never to call the Pope "Holy Father", but to call "Holy city (or town)" every place that Muslims call that way.

Another small detail is to write “the Prophet” Muhammad with a capital P but to write “the pope” with a small p.

Nazism Paved the Way

First published on American Thinker.

By Enza Ferreri



Of all the myriad myths spread at light speed by the enemies of Christianity and astonishingly believed without much critical thought by vast numbers of people, one of the most surreal must be the idea that Nazism was Christian.

This is part of an email I received from Tony, a supporter of my party Liberty GB, who sent me a long list of sharp attacks against Christianity after watching my video What Is Uniquely Good about Western Civilisation Derives from Christianity:

For example Adolf Hitler was a Catholic and included proclamations of his beliefs in his writings, e.g. "We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession." There are many more religious quotes from Hitler here: http://www.nobeliefs.com/speeches.htm

What is totally missed by Tony and, unfortunately, many others is that “positive Christianity” is not Christianity at all, but a way of “restoring the old pagan Nordic values and ‘substitute the spirit of the hero for that of the Crucifixion’.”

Another thing that anti-Christians don’t consider: in Nazi times Germans were overwhelmingly Christian - even despite Nazism’s comprehensive attempts to erase Christianity from Germany and replace it with a neo-pagan religion based on pre-Christian Germanic legends -, and so Hitler had to pay some lip service in public to Christianity. But both what he and the Nazis in power did and what he said in private and is recorded tell another story, much closer to the truth.

Hitler said, as reported in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) :

Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things...

The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity... And that's why someday its structure will collapse... The only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little...

Christianity is an invention of sick brains...

I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.

Very modern, with references to the theory of evolution – in which the Fuhrer was an ardent believer – and the scientific “understanding of the universe” replacing Christianity.

According to the book Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) by Michael Coren, a program listing the main dogmas of the National Reich Church - a Nazi institution intended to eliminate Christianity from Germany and establishing a new pagan religion -, published in 1942 by The New York Times, ended with:

On the day of the foundation of the National Reich Church the Christian cross shall be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels inside the frontiers of the Reich and its colonies and will be replaced by the symbol of invincible Germany - the swastika.

Another lie dear to the Left that has managed to enter the collective mind is that the Popes wanted to get rid of the Jews. Countless rabbis, Jewish leaders and Israeli authorities have recognised the crucial role played by the Catholic Church in helping the Jews. In fact the Church has done more than any other institution to help and rescue Jews from Nazism.

From the Jewish Library website:

The vindication of Pius XII has been established principally by Jewish writers and from Israeli archives. It is now established that the Pope supervised a rescue network which saved 860,000 Jewish lives - more than all the international agencies put together.

The power of propaganda and how easy it is to smear a political or ideological opponent is terrifying.

The danger of a return to values and ideas espoused by the Nazis, that we hear so much about, is real, but doesn’t come so much from the direction of the usual suspects, “Islamophobic”, neo-Nazi groups, as from a far more mainstream, Leftist direction.

The threat has two sources. One is the rise of Islam in the West – aided and abetted by the Left - with its well-known ideological and historical links to Nazism and anti-Semitism. The second source is less well-known. Recent in-depth and ground-breaking historical research, thanks to the opening of national archives - previously closed to the public - after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, has thrown an entirely new light on what nurtured Nazi ideology. We already knew that Hitler and Nazism were neo-pagan and anti-Christian (despite what the Left says), but books like Karla Poewe's New Religions and the Nazis (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK), Gene Edward Veith’s Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) and others, go much further than that.

They reveal a worrisome, sinister similarity between Nazism and current trends, both sharing hostility for the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its ethics and increasingly embracing neo-pagan views. In many way, Nazis were pioneers of what’s happening today. About Nazis, Poewe says:

They also rejected Christian morality. They couldn't stand the Ten Commandments. They were totally against any categorical or timeless morality. They wanted something opportunistic, something that changed with the human circumstances.

These days’ moral relativism in a nutshell.

US historian Veith has a definition for fascism that is undistinguishable from our time’s prevailing ethos: “Fascism is the modern world's nostalgia for paganism. It is a sophisticated culture's revolt against God.”

As the 10 years of historical research by Karla Poewe document, Nazism was ushered in by new religions, chiefly the German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung or DGB), mixing pagan Nordic and Hindu religions.

Mirroring present-day's environmentalism and its pantheism were Himmler's proclamations of the sacred status of German lands. SS symbols, oaths and rituals were derived from ancient German and Nordic mythology. The rooms of their secret meetings were decorated with runes, prehistoric signs supposed to give the power of prophecy to anyone who could read them.

Himmler and Hitler wanted to abolish the "criminal institution of the Christian Church known as marriage", although gave up this goal as unacceptable to contemporary Germans. They’d be delighted to see how much their ideas are being vindicated nowadays.

There was a "secular christening" for illegitimate children, called "SS name-giving", created by Himmler, complete with swastikas and runes.

About homosexuality, Poewe said:

Hauer's DGB bunde shared with National Socialism a tendency toward homoerotism. Hauer himself was permissibly heterosexual, but "homosexuality was very tolerated in these youth movements, and a high percentage of the SA and SS were homosexual or bisexual. People like to think that because Adolf Hitler murdered (SA leader) Ernst Rohm, who was homosexual, he was repressive of homosexuality. But that wasn't the case. It's a myth to think the Nazi movement was against homosexuality. Far from it; it wasn't sexually repressive at all.

So, here we have it: the Nazis paved the way, and now we can follow in their futuristic, progressive path: marriages are in decline, Christianity is dying, illegitimacy is on the rise, paganism seems the way forward, and homosexuality is making great advances towards normal status.


Photo by Marion Doss (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).

Europe Equates Communism with Nazism

Something good is coming out of Europe.

On 6 February the European Union has called on Saudi Arabia to allow public worship for all faiths:

[T]he European Parliament said that while Saudi Arabia was an important strategic partner, Saudi authorities should accept that it is a human right for individuals to worship any religion in public.

Issues like terrorism, Israeli-Palestinian peace, the Syrian conflict, post-Arab-Spring transition, and better relations with Iran, were all key areas in which the EU said Saudi co-operation was needed.

However, it made clear that if this partnership "is to be effective, [Saudi Arabia] must respect basic human rights and civil liberties".

MEPs demanded that the Saudi state show "respect the public worship of any faith and to foster moderation and tolerance of religious diversity".

Saudi Arabia has a poor track record on religious freedom. In February 2013, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al al-Sheikh said it is "necessary to destroy all the churches in the Arabian Peninsula".

Article 23 of Saudi Arabia's constitution says: "The state protects Islam; it implements its Sharia; it orders people to do right and shun evil; it fulfils the duty regarding God's call."

While private practice of non-Islamic beliefs is protected by law, public practice is prohibited and this prohibition is enforced by the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, otherwise known as 'mutawa' or religious police.

However, the line between public and private worship is unclear. In December 2011 a group of Ethiopian Christians were arrested for "illicit mingling" when they met together to pray during Advent.

Mutawa officers patrol the streets enforcing laws such as the strict prohibition of Bibles brought to convert locals, or any form of public worship of a religion other than Islam.

According to the US State Department's Office for International Religious Freedom, Saudi Arabia continues to impose a blanket ban on all foreign non-Islamic clergy entering the country for purposes of conducting religious services.

Apostasy - conversion from Islam to another religion - is a crime punishable by death and Saudi Arabia is one of the last countries in the world where public executions still take place.

The feared mutawa also enforce strict segregation of the sexes and the absolute prohibition on the sale or consumption of alcohol.

They are frequently accused of abusing their powers, particularly when it comes to dealing with members of other faiths.

The call from the European Parliament comes two days after mutawa chief Sheikh Abdul Latif al-Sheikh was quoted in the Saudi newspaper, Okaz, as saying that he would "eliminate" religious extremists within his organisations ranks who are "advocates of sedition".

The European Parliament also called for the Saudi Arabian authorities to improve respect for religious diversity "at all levels of the education system and in the public discourse of officials".

Article 13 of the Saudi Constitution says, "Education will aim at instilling the Islamic faith in the younger generation, providing its members with knowledge and skills and preparing them to become useful members in the building of their society, members who love their homeland and are proud of its history."

The mutawa also enforce a ban on women driving, something the European Parliament also protested strongly against in its recent resolution.

"MEPs urge Saudi Arabia to remove all restrictions on women's rights, including freedom of movement, health, education, marriage, employment opportunities, representation in judicial processes, to promote women's participation in the economic, social, cultural and political life," the European Parliament stated.

MEPs called for an end to the male guardianship system that requires all women to have some form of male legal guardian, usually a father, husband or brother.

On other issues, the European Parliament recognised that new rules have stopped money being directly channelled to terrorist organisations, but MEPs called on Saudi authorities to improve control over the funding of radical militant groups by Saudi citizens and charities.

"Saudi Arabia's financial and political support for some religious and political groups in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia may result in reinforcing fundamentalist and obscurantist forces that undermine efforts to nurture democratic governance," the EU said.

"Saudi Arabia should also stop any financial or military support of extremist groups in Syria and contribute to a peaceful and inclusive solution to the conflict there."

The Saudi Interior Ministry estimates 1,200 Saudis have travelled to Syria to fight there since March 2011.

The Parliament also called for an immediate moratorium on the death penalty, as well as better protections for freedom of expression and the press, both on the internet and through other media, saying such freedoms were "essential in a free society".

The resolution also called on Saudi authorities to work to end recent violent attacks against migrant workers, as well as to release the many thousands who have been arrested and are being kept in makeshift centres.

Adopted by 47 votes to 4, the resolution is scheduled to be put to a vote by the European Parliament in full when it meets in Strasbourg in March.

Furthermore, there has been a new landmark ruling.

The " Grand Chamber" of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has recently ruled about a thorny issue, upholding the total legitimacy of the Polish law that prohibits the use and display of symbols of communist, fascist and Nazi regimes.

The Polish law has been in existence for a few years,

What is really revolutionary in this verdict is not so much its application to fascist and Nazi symbols, which have been considered anathema for a very long time - since the end of the Second World War -, as the fact that it places communism into the same bracket as fascism and Nazism, something that needed to be done.