Black Pete, Symbol of Dutch Resistance against Invaders, Wins

Saturday, in the Dutch historical city of Gouda, the police arrested no fewer than 90 people, protesting both for and against the "Black Pete" blackface character appearing at a children's party marking the beginning of the traditional pre-Christmas, gift-giving festival of Saint Nicholas.

"Sixty people were arrested for demonstrating in unauthorised areas, and 30 for disturbing the peace" said police spokeswoman Yvette Verboon.

You may wonder what could happen during a festive gathering, held to celebrate the arrival of St. Nicholas, to cause such a law-and-order turmoil.

It's our old friend political correctness at work, with attendant accusations of racism. The word "black" means all the difference in the world. We'll have to abolish it from our vocabulary, we cannot use it any more without provoking mayhem.

Not even children and, as in this Dutch case, their events are immune from the PC clutches, as we know from the over 30,000 nursery toddlers and school children labelled racist or homophobic over minor squabbles in one single year in the UK, where schools are forced to report un-PC words used by kids to education authorities, which keep a register of "incidents". These records can remain on file, and schools will provide future employers or universities with them as a pupil's reference, with the potential to blight a child for life.

Back in Gouda, thousands of parents and their young children - some with their faces painted black - gathered in the the city's market square where the celebration was taking place to welcome the national arrival of Sinterklaas (St Nicholas) and his black-faced helpers on a white horse.

A TRADITION WHICH DIVIDES A NATION

According to Christmas folklore in Holland and Belgium, Black Pete (Zwarte Piet in Dutch) is the jolly companion of Saint Nicholas, who climbs down chimneys to help him deliver presents to kids.

The character has a long history. The Dutch celebrate the Sinterklaas festival during a period that culminates on Saint Nicholas Day, 5 December. The beginning of the festivities coincides with St Nicholas' arrival by boat accompanied by Black Pete, or rather hundreds of Black Petes packing the flotilla following the saint’s vessel. St Nicholas then rides a white horse through the streets, escorted by the Black Petes amusing children as they hand out sweets and treats to them.

It's a fun, joyous time for kids and adults, seen as the highlight of the year.

Dutch cities take it in turn to host the start of the annual festival. This year, the national event of Saint Nicholas' arrival aboard a steamboat from Spain kicked off in Gouda on 15 November, broadcast live on Dutch national television and looked forward to by children.

The actors and revellers portraying the Black Pete character are white people who traditionally paint their faces black, sport frizzy hair, golden earrings, large red lips and gaudy, bright-coloured Medieval costumes.

Across the Netherlands, celebrations in which Saint Nicholas comes to town surrounded by Black Petes have been attacked by "anti-racism" campaigners. The critics, including a group called "Zwarte Piet is Racism", claim that Pete is a racist stereotype from the colonial era, and "liberal" politicians have called for the character to be abolished.

This antagonism has led to an increasingly acrimonious polarisation of the Dutch society, because the overwhelming majority of the country supports Black Pete. A poll showed that more than 90% of the Dutch reject the idea that Black Pete is racist and would not change his appearance.

And, in a population of less than 17 million, over 2 million people signed a Facebook petition last year, calling on Black Pete's appearance to remain the same.

While the Facebook page "The Dutch 'Black Pete' tradition is racism" has a risible number of 198 "Likes", the Facebook page "Pietitie" in Pete's support has 2,012,438 "Likes". It says: "Don't let the Netherlands' most beautiful tradition disappear."

This FB page is Holland's most popular ever.

Kudos to the Dutch. Make no mistake. This is not just to maintain a nice tradition and a children's festival, important as it is. This is a movement to resist invaders who try to impose their ways and wills on the colonised Europeans.

The Dutch say Black Pete is harmless fun, an integral part of Dutch culture that is now under fire from outsiders. As Dutchman Marco put it: "This is how I celebrate, how my grandmother and grandfather and parents celebrated, and I don't think it's racist."

The Dutch Freedom Party, with its leader Geert Wilders, has proposed legislation that would enshrine Pete's black colour in law.

Martin Bosma, the Freedom Party's culture spokesman, said: "Ministers and mayors are working to give this loyal helper another colour. That must not happen. Our culture should not be damaged from on high. This law must protect Black Pete."

Belgium, where Black Pete is also a popular character and the same pre-Christmas celebrations take place in many cities, faces similar problems.

Human rights activist Maria Hengeveld, who writes for the Africa is a Country website, claimed: "In general, attacks on Zwarte Piet are widely interpreted as attacks on (white) Dutchness and threats to (white) children's right to jovially celebrate their 'cultural heritage'". She went on to argue that politicians, lawmakers and big businesses "are sensitive to public feeling" on the issue. As an example, Albert Heijn, Holland's largest supermarket chain, went back on its promise to ban Black Pete from its stores after a huge public outcry.

Even the country’s Prime Minister Mark Rutte, probably sensing that the electorate wouldn't be pleased with anything different, has backed the side that favours Black Pete.

VICTORY FOR BLACK PETE

This shows what a united, determined nation can do. Some meddling from the UN was revoked:

The [Facebook] page, attracting over a million likes in just one day, followed a letter from the UN's human rights body announcing an investigation and warning the Dutch that the [Black Pete] character is a "racist stereotype".

Marc Jacobs, a Belgian Unesco representative, the UN's cultural organisation, has denied that the Jamaican who signed the letter, was authorised to do so.

"She's just a consultant who abused the name of the UN to bring their own agenda to the media. All the hoopla that Shepherd has caused with her letter is nothing more than a bad move in the game of pressure groups in the Netherlands," he told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper.

The letter, on headed, official UN high commission for human rights paper, was sent to the Dutch government expressing concerns over the tradition and accusing the authorities of failing to react to complaints of racial discrimination.

Verene Shepherd, who said she was the chairwoman of a UN investigation into the Sinterklaas festival earlier this week called on the Dutch to ban Black Pete.

And last week the highest administrative court in the Netherlands, the Council of State, overturned the ruling of a lower court which had called Black Pete "a negative stereotype" that "infringes on the European treaty of human rights".

The Council of State refused to rule on whether the character was racist.

SCUFFLES IN GOUDA

The procession in Gouda was marred by scuffles, whether between the occasion's supporters and protesters, some of whom were wearing T-shirts saying "Black Pete is racist", or between protesters and police is not clear. Probably both, because the protesters did not remain in their cages, the only place suitable for them.

The Dutch police were forced to make dozens of arrests because protesters moved to the centre of the Medieval city, where the festival was taking place, to demonstrate, instead of staying in designated protest areas outside Gouda's market square. When they were asked to leave the square, they refused and the police took the necessary measures.

Public prosecutor spokesman Wouter Bos said all those held for demonstrating in the wrong place were anti-Black-Pete protesters and they would be fined 220 euros each. Not much of a punishment.

Some children got mixed up in the trouble, and Gouda mayor Milo Schoenmaker said the atmosphere had been "vicious". "It's a pity that adults from outside the city felt the need to demonstrate among the children at the end of the procession," he told the national news agency ANP.

The Netherlands' Prime Minister Mark Rutte joined the debate, supporting the controversial ceremony: "Everyone can talk about Black Pete's colour. But we should not disturb a children's party in this way" he told broadcaster NOS. The clashes made him “deeply, deeply sad”, he said.

For the first time, in an attempt to mollify the critics, the mayor introduced other coloured Petes, like "Cheese Petes" with yellow faces, "Stroopwafel Petes" with striped, light brown faces resembling a Dutch biscuit of the same name, and "Clown Petes" with white faces.

This didn't placate demonstrators and made many people angry.


CONCLUSION

"Black Peter is black," said the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. "We cannot do much to change that."

Well said. Aren't tradition and national folklore values to respect a bit more, and the hypersensitivities of minorities, who are after all uninvited guests to the Netherlands treated with great generosity, a bit less? Why should the Dutch, as well as the rest of white Westerners, be the only ones expected to make sacrifices of their identity?

American Whites a Minority by 2050

If current worldwide demographic trends continue, whites are seriously an endangered race.

A new baby boom of Hispanic, Asian and black children will make whites a minority in the USA by 2050.

White birth rates in America are falling, while immigrants and minorities are having more children.

The population surge does not derive directly from immigration, but rather from immigrants alreday in the USA having children.

This is in the new book Diversity Explosion (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) by Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.

The book contains highly detailed charts and maps showing how falling white birth-rates and rising minority birth-rates will change the way the United States looks and votes forever.

The population of mixed-race Americans will dramatically increase, nearly tripling, in the next 50 years.

The Brookings Institution appears fairly liberal, but the book itself has precious information.

From The Daily Mail:

There are already nearly as many non-white babies being born as white children, according to Census Bureau statistics. It's only a matter of time before minorities children outnumber white ones.

The result, Frey tells the Atlantic, will be very similar to the Baby Boom after the Second World War - except this time it will be minority children being born.

'Back in the 1950s, we had a lot of Americans across the board in their childbearing years - we had all these babies,' he said.

'Now, that's really only the case for some of the newer minorities.'

And it's not just cities that will be changing. The suburbs are already becoming more diverse and are likely to become progressively less white year after year.

Between 2000 and 2010, the population of Hispanics in suburbs grew by more than eight million. Major cities added just three million Hispanics.

Islam between Illusion and Reality

A new article by our guest writer Cassandra.

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

Imagine, if you can, a fairy tale where a mother teaches her toddler that wolves are simply big, furry, friendly dogs that love a good cuddle. Although she and her child live in a village, nestled against a hillside, in a lush valley where humans and wolves exist in close proximity to each other, she doesn't warn her little girl that wolves are dangerous.

Instead, as well as teaching her daughter that wolves are just big, furry, friendly dogs that love a good cuddle, she also teaches her that it is deeply wrong, even evil, to think the opposite. She explains that this is a bigoted way of thinking. It is what the people of the village thought in the past, and it led to warfare and unbridled hatred towards noble, peaceful wolves. So, although now and again news spreads throughout the village that a wolf has taken a child in the night, the mother continues to assure her daughter that it is the worst thing imaginable to even think about being wary of wolves.

It might make for a marginally entertaining fairy-tale: one that I may write some day, but the mother would surely be the villain of the story. In that fairy tale rather than referring to the Big Bad Wolf, it would be more fitting to refer to the Big Bad Mum.

Something similar is happening today in the West in relation to Islam. We see the effect of it whenever its followers do something so atrociously violent that the media cannot ignore it, and our rulers rush out to defend the reputation of Islam by telling us that it is a religion of peace. It would be "Islamophobic" not to think so, and there is nothing worse than that. However, if a Muslim does something good, the good act can, and most likely will, be attributed to Islam. The implication being that Islam is good, and that it only inspires good acts in people.

I am not saying that all Muslims are violent or dangerous. What I am saying is that this new dogma being adopted in the West - that there is nothing negative, violent or threatening in the doctrine of Islam - is not just false, it is also dangerous. To cajole people into thinking that Islam poses no danger to them on penalty of being deemed "Islamophobic" is to force people to irrationally view something which is a potential danger to them as harmless. This puts lives at risk. Since one of the prime duties of government is to protect the lives of the governed, this is a dereliction of duty on the part of our rulers.

But it is more than that, because it also shows that, although they like to portray themselves as people who care about the weak and vulnerable in society, the opposite is true. They do not in fact care about their people - weak, vulnerable or otherwise. What they do care about is maintaining the status of their ideology and quelling opposition to the type of society that they have engineered through mass immigration. If their citizens, old and young, male and female, suffer or die as a result, that is a price worth paying. They are worthy sacrifices to the Moloch that is multiculturalism.

This point was made clear recently here in England where staff members at Rotherham council were reported to have been reluctant to identify the ethnic origin of child abusers for fear of being considered "racist". They would no doubt have been equally nervous about identifying the religion to which these men belonged for fear of being considered "Islamophobic". It was later reported that child abuse files went missing from the council's archives.

Of course there are many peaceful Muslims who do not do everything that their religion demands, but there are many Muslims that are not peaceful and who do follow their religion to the letter. The current UK terrorist "threat level" is set at "severe", which means that "a terrorist attack is highly likely". Which supposedly means that one should be particularly vigilant as to "suspicious" behaviour. At the same time, since Islam is a "religion of peace" from which only good actions can possibly come forth, people like the staff members at Rotherham council would supposedly be reluctant to report any "suspicious" behaviour on the part of a Muslim for fear of being deemed "Islamophobic".

It is the same insidious dogma which has led to the kidnapping and/or murder of well-meaning Westerners attempting to help people in the Middle East, the most recent example of which is the murder of American citizen Peter Kassig. The American president has already taken the opportunity to use the beheading of Mr Kassig by a Muslim who justified his actions in Islamic terms, and who belonged to a group calling itself the Islamic State, to defend the reputation of Islam. President Obama is reported as having said: “ISIL's actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own”. He failed to highlight the fact that Peter Kassig “adopted” Islam while a captive whose life was at the mercy of his Muslim captors. He also failed to highlight the fact that Mr Kassig had “adopted” the only religion that mandates death for those who apostatise from it.

Others who have followed President Obama's way of thinking include two female Italian aid workers, Greta Ramelli and Vanessa Marzullo, kidnapped by Muslims in northern Syria. And Theo Padnos, whose story I recommend that you read in its entirety. It shows precisely how the “Islam is a religion of peace” dogma renders people unable to recognise danger.

And, lest anyone should think that this is just a European problem, in the US children are also being indoctrinated in school to believe that Islam is a religion of peace.

We should observe not only the strange phenomenon of Western leaders rushing to defend the reputation of Islam, but also that the West is subtly introducing blasphemy laws when it comes to that religion, under the guise of "hate-speech" laws. In parts of the world where Muslims are a majority, it is anathema to say anything that may tarnish Islam's reputation. The reputation of the ideology must be maintained at all costs. It is even more important than the human being. As such, the human being may be punished or even destroyed for the sake of preserving the status of the doctrine. That is the kind of society that we are drifting towards. It goes against the worldview developed in the West where the individual is central and respect for the individual trumps - or used to trump - any other ideology, thus producing the notion of freedom of speech. Respect for the individual and respect for freedom of speech are two sides of the same coin.

Leaders in Muslim-majority countries and Islamic leaders in this country fear that Muslims will connect the dots by looking at the effect of Islam across the modern world and reach the common-sense conclusion that it is not a good religion and they will therefore abandon it. Leaders in the West fear that their citizens will look at the effect of Islam across the modern world and reach the conclusion that is not a good religion, and therefore that the multicultural project which feeds its growth here in the West is not a good thing either. Both know that, once the illusions they have fostered are shattered, it will be impossible to reconstruct them.

World's Largest Solar Plant Is a Failure

"The largest solar power plant of its type in the world [the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, in California] - once promoted as a turning point in green energy - isn't producing as much energy as planned."

Why aren't I surprised?

"One of the reasons is as basic as it gets: The sun isn't shining as much as expected."

A bit like the wind doesn't blow as much or as little as expected, which is why wind farms are useless.

And that's not all. The worst is this: the Ivanpah solar power plant is killing nearly 30,000 birds per year. Birds are being scorched to death mid-air in the idiotic quest for "clean" energy.

Federal wildlife investigators visited the plant and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one "streamer" (as the birds are called for the smoke plume that comes from them as they ignite in midair) every two minutes.

They are now proposing to build an even larger, new 75-storey plant, to be located near a huge bird sanctuary.

From Associated Press:

Sprawling across roughly 5 square miles of federal desert near the California-Nevada border, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System opened in February, with operators saying it would produce enough electricity to power a city of 140,000 homes.

So far, however, the plant is producing about half of its expected annual output for 2014, according to calculations by the California Energy Commission.

It had been projected to produce its full capacity for 8 hours a day, on average.

"Factors such as clouds, jet contrails and weather have had a greater impact on the plant than the owners anticipated," the agency said in a statement.

It could take until 2018 for the plant backed by $1.6 billion in federal loan guarantees to hit its annual peak target, said NRG Energy Inc., which operates the plant and co-owns it with Google Inc. and BrightSource Energy.

"During startup we have experienced ... equipment challenges, typical with any new technology, combined with irregular weather patterns," NRG spokesman Jeff Holland said in a statement. "We are confident that Ivanpah's long-term generation projections will meet expectations."

The technology used at Ivanpah is different than the familiar photovoltaic panels commonly used for rooftop solar installations. The plant's solar-thermal system - sometimes called concentrated-solar thermal - relies on nearly 350,000 computer-controlled mirrors at the site, each the size of a garage door.

The mirrors reflect sunlight to boilers atop 459-foot towers - each taller than the Statue of Liberty. The resulting steam drives turbines to create electricity.

When the $2.2 billion complex opened, Energy Department Secretary Ernest Moniz called it a "symbol of the exciting progress" in renewable energy.

While the agency still says the project remains in good standing, Kaitlin Meese, an analyst at research firm Bentek Energy, said its early production figures "do not paint a strong picture for solar-thermal technology development."

The operation of such plants is highly dependent on weather conditions, and predicting when and how strongly the sun will shine is not a perfect science.

A little bit of inefficiency with mirrors can translate into a loss of power output ranging from small to significant, said Dr. Neil Fromer, executive director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at the California Institute of Technology.

Norway Says Enough, Deports Record Numbers of Immigrants to Reduce Crime

The Norwegian paper The Local reported in September that asylum seekers and illegal immigrants (euphemistically called "persons living in Norway without papers") are over-represented in the country's crime statistics:

Asylum seekers and visa-less immigrants in Norway are charged with twice as many crimes per head of population as Norwegians, but still account for a very small proportion of overall criminality, a new report has said. [Emphasis added]

The authors of the report from the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI), in the typical, apologetic style of officialdom, felt compelled to add: "This is so little that it has minimal significance to the big picture of crime in Norway." This reservation echoes the way in which in Britain figures are twisted and contorted to portray immigration, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as economically beneficial to the UK.

But on this occasion there has been a sort of social experiment carried out in Norway in the last couple of years, that empirically disproves the "minimal significance to the big picture of crime" fabrication.

Norwegians have progressively become aware of the link between crime and immigration. A November 2013 survey revealed that over half of the capital Oslo's residents feared street crime due to the rise in muggings. It got so bad that even the new Prime Minister, Conservative Erna Solberg, declared that immigrant parents should control their mugger kids.

Oslo saw 120 robberies in October [2013], more than any other city in Scandinavia. There were just 78 robberies recorded in Copenhagen and only 63 in Stockholm.

That something has started to change in Europe is obvious from the response from Norway's immigrant politicians, who agreed that young gang members are mostly foreigners and their parents could do more.

"I think actually Erna's hit the nail on the head here," said Abid Raja from the Liberal Party. "It's time to get past worries over making immigrant parents feel stigmatized. It is mainly young people from immigrant community who commit these robberies."

Action followed words. Last year the brand new government elected in Autumn - a minority coalition of Conservatives with the right-wing, anti-immigration, populist Progress Party, that has replaced a Labour government - started cracking down on immigration.

Progress, created 40 years ago, is in government for the first time.

Among the tougher measures implemented was that deported foreign criminals who return to Norway now face 2 years’ jail, a 10-fold increase in the penalty from 35 days, a measure that had the unanimous support from all parties.

But the most important policy introduced has been the vast increase in number of deportations.

In 2013, a record number of 5,198 foreign citizens were expelled from the country, an increase of 31% from 2012, when 3,958 people were deported.

Frode Forfang, head of the UDI, put it simply: "We believe that one reason for the increase is that the police have become more conscious of using deportation as a tool to fight crime.”

The number of deportations increases from one year to the next and one month to the other.

In October 2014, 824 people were forced out, which is the highest number of people deported in a month in the history of Norway’s National Police Immigration Service (PU).

This has established a new record, beating the previous record set in the month before, September 2014, with 763 deportations.

The National Police Immigration Service (Politiets Utlendingsenhet) has released latest figures showing in the last six months [from the article's date, 3 July 2014] an average of 18 illegal immigrants per day were deported from Norway. This figure is up from 13 deportations for the same period last year.

The main reasons for deportations are people not having valid residence visas or being involved in crime. During the first half year this year, 3,167 people were forced out of Norway, 1,237 of whom had criminal convictions, newspaper Dagbladet reports.

Kristin Ottesen Kvigne, head of the police immigration service, told the newspaper: "We are at our highest number of illegal immigrants ever and deportation is a policy the government wants".

The service has a target of 7,100 people to be deported by the end of 2014.

What has the result been?

PU head Kristin Kvigne, in an interview with the Dagsavisen newspaper, said that the increased deportations save Norwegian society much money. It costs money to try people in the courts and to jail them.

She explained that people have been deported because their asylum applications have been rejected in terms of the Dublin Agreement, the international agreement which governs asylum seeker applications.

If the current trend continues, the PU will “reach its target” of deporting at least 7,100 people this year, meaning that at least 20 per day are being sent home.

Of the 5876 people deported this year so far, the majority have already been found guilty of criminal acts, Kvigne said. She said it was thus “important to view the high number of deportations made by PU in the context of falling crime rates across the country.”

She said that Norway has a voluntary repatriation program, where “asylum seekers” are paid to return to their home countries, but few take up the offer and most have to be forcibly deported.

Patriotism Means Uncovering the Truth

Unfortunately I'll have to skip tomorrow's London Forum meeting.

But I wish to write about the topic of one of the announced speeches, by Richard Edmonds: "Bad Nenndorf – a Nuremberg Trial for Allied War Criminals". The subject is described as "the tragedy of Bad Nenndorf where in the aftermath of WWII British torturers, many of them later emigrating to Israel, killed dozens of National Socialist sympathisers including girls belonging to the BDSM."

Richard Edmonds is a British nationalist who is capable of criticising his country when necessary, who rightly doesn't believe that patriotism means defending the indefensible.

I'd never heard of this Allied interrogation centre, a secret prison established after the British occupation of north-west Germany in 1945, so I did some research and here's what I've found.

This is Wikipedia's brief introduction to it:

The Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre was a British Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre in the town of Bad Nenndorf, Germany, which operated from June 1945 to July 1947. Allegations of mistreatment of detainees by British troops resulted in a police investigation, a public controversy in both Britain and Germany and the camp's eventual closure. Four of the camp's officers were brought before courts-martial in 1948 and one of the four was convicted on charges of neglect.

Hundreds of mostly German prisoners after the end of WWII were held in a camp converted from a mud bath complex - with the former bathing chambers becoming prison cells - in Bad Nenndorf, a spa town near Hanover.

Although British authorities tried to keep this centre hidden from public scrutiny, in December 2005 investigative reporter Ian Cobain wrote an article published in The Guardian, based on information he had obtained from a Freedom of Information Request to the Foreign Office. He described Bad Nenndorf in powerful terms:

Britain's secret torture centre. The interrogation camp that turned prisoners into living skeletons.

German spa became a forbidden village where Gestapo-like techniques were used...

CSDIC [Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre], a division of the War Office, operated interrogation centres around the world, including one known as the London Cage, located in one of London's most exclusive neighbourhoods. Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.

As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. Last week, Foreign Office files which have remained closed for almost 60 years were opened after a request by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. These papers, and others declassified earlier, lay bare the appalling suffering of many of the 372 men and 44 women who passed through the centre during the 22 months it operated before its closure in July 1947.

They detail the investigation carried out by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward, following the complaints of Major Morgan-Jones and Dr Jordan. Despite the precise and formal prose of the detective's report to the military government, anger and revulsion leap from every page as he turns his spotlight on a place where prisoners were systematically beaten and exposed to extreme cold, where some were starved to death and, allegedly, tortured with instruments that his fellow countrymen had recovered from a Gestapo prison in Hamburg. Even today, the Foreign Office is refusing to release photographs taken of some of the "living skeletons" on their release.

Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. A significant number, however, were industrialists, tobacco importers, oil company bosses or forestry owners who had flourished under Hitler.

By late 1946, the papers show, an increasing number were suspected Soviet agents. Some were NKVD officers - Russians, Czechs and Hungarians - but many were simply German leftists. Others were Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they were genuine defectors.

Of many of these men Scotland Yard detective Hayward said that there were not charged with any crime but on the contrary were willing to help, were detained for no reason at all, and died of malnutrition and lack of medical care. Inspector Hayward reported: "There are a number against whom no offence has been alleged, and the only authority for their detention would appear to be that they are citizens of a country still nominally at war with us." Cobain goes on to explain an important part of the problem:

Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of Bad Nenndorf, 12 were British, a combination of officers from the three services and civilian linguists. The remaining eight included a Pole and a Dutchman, but were mostly German Jewish refugees who had enlisted on the outbreak of war, and who, Inspector Hayward suggested, "might not be expected to be wholly impartial".

Cobain has penned other articles on the subject for The Guardian and written a book on the history of torture perpetrated by British officials during and after the Second World War, entitled Cruel Britannia (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) . The book was published in autumn 2012, when one of his essays appeared in the Daily Mail with this headline, upsetting but truthful:

How Britain tortured Nazi PoWs: The horrifying interrogation methods that belie our proud boast that we fought a clean war.

James Heartfield, in the book Unpatriotic History of the Second World War (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , writes:

Internal investigations revealed that torture was rife at Bad Nenndorf, and that many had died of injuries or of starvation.

Why, then, were there so few convictions?

After, in 1946 and 1947, several Bad Nenndorf inmates were taken to nearby hospitals and some died there, the doctors reported these cases. A court of inquiry was appointed, followed by a full enquiry by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward. By June 1947 Hayward had amassed an enormous amount of evidence in support of the allegations of ill-treatment and use of methods which were extreme even for a harsh military prison holding suspected Nazi war criminals.

His report led to the camp's closure the following month, and to the courts-martial of the camp Commandant Lt Col Robin Stephens, the medical officer and two interrogators in 1948.

Hayward had found that interrogators and guards were not likely to be impartial towards the prisoners because of the criteria used in their selection, among which knowledge of German language and hatred for Germans were predominant. The most likely new recruits, as a consequence, were Austrian and German Jewish refugees. One such recruit was Lt Richard Oliver Langham, one of the interrogators to be court-martialled.

News of the courts-martial reached the papers, in particular The Times and The Daily Express.

The book Liberal Democracies at War: Conflict and Representation (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , edited by Andrew Knapp and Hilary Footitt, gives some idea of why these men were acquitted or convicted on minor charges, like neglect rather than manslaughter.

The Times's coverage of the courts-martial well reflected the spirit of the time and its little appetite for getting to the truth and giving a just punishment which was unpalatable for so many reasons, not least as an admission of guilt involving the war effort itself. That spirit was probably behind the excessive leniency of the court.

This latter topic is too long for the present article, and may be worth covering in a separate one.

Question Time Shows Equality's True Meaning

When people say that they want equality, what they often actually mean is that they want to be more equal than others.

This can be seen in the case of the extortionist rob-the-rich taxes that people of the Left advocate as a means to wealth equality. In this case they want to be more equal by arrogating for themselves – or for the state acting on their behalf – the power to steal from the rich without being prosecuted, which puts them above the law against theft that applies to everyone else.

In last night's Question Time in Cardiff, this was brought home rather nicely when the leader of Plaid Cymru Leanne Wood, supporting a request from a member of the audience, called for Wales to be treated with parity with Scotland in relation to England. She went on to ask for Wales to be given more money, specifically an additional £1.2 billion a year. In response, another panellist in the debate, Labour's First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones, uttered his only sensible sentence of the entire evening, when he pointed out the paradox of Wood‘s wanting at the same time more money from London and more independence from it.

She retorted that she does want independence for Wales but not before the playing field has been levelled up. At that point the moderator David Dimbleby gave everybody some sobering figures: Scotland gets per head over £10,000, Wales almost £10,000, Northern Ireland £10,800 and England £8,500.

Now, that's what the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish call equality.

But not the English.

"Gay" Leader Sentenced for Paedophilia

You won't see the news in the mainstream media. After all, this is not a priest.

44-year-old Stefan Johansson, former President of the RFSL (Riksförbundet för homosexuellas, bisexuellas och transpersoners rättigheter), or the National Association for the Rights of Homosexuals, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, was sentenced on 24 October to five years in prison and ordered to pay 60,000 euros for pain and suffering caused by rape, pimping and paedophilia.

Founded in 1950, the the National Association for the Rights of Homosexuals, Bisexuals and Transsexuals is Sweden's largest organization of its kind, with more than 6,000 members. The RFSL was recognised in 2007 by the United Nations as a non-governmental organisation with consultative status. In Sweden, the RFSL was in 2009 one of the main promoters of the legalization of homosexual marriage.

According to the indictment, he administered alcohol and drugs to minors in order to have sexual intercourse with them, and he also alleged to have embezzled $ 3,000 that were supposed to be donated to AIDS research.

On his Facebook profile, he published among other things, an invitation to a [sic] "Education Day", which was organized on 18 July 2013 for "LGBT people with experience in the sale of sexual services" and specializes in "young people who prostitute themselves on the Internet".

The Homo-Imperial Association as an Offshoot of the Gay Lobby ILGA

The RFSL was the Swedish branch of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), which in turn has promoted pedophilia for about ten years and is certified there at the UN as a non-governmental organization with consultative status, the European Section and in the EU , The RFSL always maintained pedophile contacts to a workgroup as well, which have campaigned for the legalization of sexual relations between adults and minors.

ILGA has openly revealed since 2001 that the majority of their funding is obtained directly from the European Commission. The gay lobby is thus financed by the European taxpayer. And the rich. In 2012 alone, 1,017,055 euros flowed from the EU Commission in the ILGA-coffers. That's more than 52 percent of the annual budget. Over such a windfall, other, more widely socially relevant associations were also pleased.

Gay lobby: Funds Come From the EU and George Soros

Among the other sponsors, there is the ubiquitous in the left-liberal spectrum, financier George Soros, who contributed 200,000 euros, which is more than ten percent of the total budget. ILGA today enjoys consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). This is a position that was long been denied it, because the homo-association refused to condemn "sex between adults and children". But then it was possible that the gay lobby has brought this last dam to collapse, without having to relinquish these positions.

And now Johansson's conviction follows, who was certainly not in the last rank of gay lobbying. Most media take no notice of such news, however. With their gender-ideological blinders on, they do not see what they do not want to see. A flimsy pretext can always be found where the crimes are trivialized. Most editors are also much too busy to demand ever new and radical gay rights, as they would deal with the dark side of their ideological zeal. Self-criticism anyway, has not been a strength of ideologues nor of those who ride the waves of fashion. The results of this attitude are known. Stefan Johansson is one of them. Only: The public should know nothing of it if possible.

How to Make Immigration Look Good

They've done it again. Here's the umpteenth attempt to portray immigration as economically useful for Britain, if undertaken by selecting only a particular group of immigrants for a carefully chosen period of time.

The media report that a new study by University College London (UCL) claims that immigrants to the UK from the 10 newest EU countries (those that joined the EU in 2004) have benefited the British economy. In the years to 2011, it says, they added £4.96 billion more in taxes than they took out in public services.

It turns out that this is not so much a new study as a revision of a previous one whose faults had been rightly criticised.

The original University College London’s study (conducted by Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, CReAM for short), published in November 2013, was the most far-reaching study ever carried out on the impact of migration on taxpayers, covering 16 years from 1995 to 2011, based on official and government figures.

It concluded that immigrants from the EEA (European Economic Area) contribute 4% more in taxes than they take out in benefits. Non-Europeans immigrants, on the other hand, are a financial burden: they take in benefits and services £100 billion (or 14%) more than they put back.

CReAM also found that British-born people pay into the Exchequer 7% less than they receive from the state.

So, because that study includes both European and non-European immigrations, it calculated an overall net benefit of £25 billion to the UK from recent migrants, which it described as "a very sizeable fiscal contribution".

But, if you analyse further, you see that, as explained above, non-European immigration, far from contributing positively, is a huge economic burden for Britain. So there is no rational motive to support that type of immigration on financial grounds.

But there’s more. A more in-depth assessment of the fiscal effects of immigration to the UK published in March 2014 analyses the CReAM research. This study, by Migration Watch UK, found some serious faults in the CReAM paper.

Migration Watch experts found, for example, that its authors themselves, even using their over-optimistic calculations, had found a cost to the UK from migrants of £95 billion between 1995 and 2011, but they had buried the figure, which could only be found at the end of their paper but was not mentioned in their text.

Migration Watch also makes clear that the the CReAM study's authors, Dustmann and Frattini, have overstated revenues and understated expenditures for the migrants arriving after 2000. Among the extremely unrealistic assumptions made by CReAM is that even the most recent arrivals contribute as much as long-term migrants and the UK-born, whereas both their younger age and lower incomes make this highly unlikely.

When these over- and under-estimations are adjusted, the result is – assuming that Dustmann and Frattini were otherwise correct - an overall fiscal cost of migration to the UK of £148 billion (more than £22 million a day) during the 1995-2011 period.

Interestingly, the two academics did not reply to these criticisms but only made vague remarks about "derogatory language seemingly attempting to undermine our reputation".

This was the preamble, the story so far.

Now CReAM has published a revised version of its November 2013 original study discussed above. The authors claim they have made "robustness checks", taking into account some points raised by Migration Watch.

This new paper only concerns itself with immigrants from the so-called A10 (Accession Ten) countries, namely those that joined the EU in 2004: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. They have been making a postive contribution of almost £5 billion between 1995 and 2011.

The problem, according to Migration Watch chairman Sir Andrew Green, is cherry-picking. The overall effect of immigration resulting from this study – although not publicised in headlines - is now a fiscal cost of £114 billion as a best-case scenario and £159 billion at worst, therefore higher than the previous CReAM paper's calculation of £95 billion.

He said to the BBC:

If you take all EU migration including those who arrived before 2001 what you find is this - you find by the end of the period they are making a negative contribution and increasingly so.

And the reason is that if you take a group of people while they're young, fit and healthy they're not going to be very expensive, but if you take them over a longer period they will be.

Anthony Reuben, head of statistics for BBC News, added:

If we are only interested in tax and benefits, the perfect person for the economy would arrive the day after they finish education, work for 40 years, not have children and then leave the day after they retire.

It is no surprise, then, that the relatively young, already educated migrants from EU accession countries are closer to that model than people who have arrived in Britain longer ago, or indeed the population in general.

The big question that this research does not address is what happens to those migrants in the future; in particular, will they stay in the country after they retire?

And also, what effect if any have they had on the amount of in-work benefits and out-of-work benefits paid to the rest of the population?

Sir Andrew Green also said:

This report confirms that immigration as a whole has cost up to £150 billion in the last 17 years. As for recent European migrants, even on their own figures - which we dispute - their contribution to the exchequer amounts to less than £1 a week per head of our population.

And, if even the BBC admits that "over the longer term, immigrants to the UK had been a burden on the state", it must mean that as far as immigration is concerned we'got to the end of the road.

Labour's Immigration Plan Is Unravelling

This article is by our guest writer Cassandra.

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

Did you notice the shift in British 'Left-wing' orthodoxy? You might have missed it if you weren't paying attention since our 'progressive' overlords changed tact without acknowledging what they had tried to do, and what they had in fact succeeded in doing, to British society since circa 1997.

It is now apparently acceptable to criticise the open-door policy to immigration that this country has had over the last decade and more. A policy which, for the most part, it still has today. Even the leadership of the Labour party has come out of the 'bigot' closet to admit that perhaps, just maybe, the level of immigration into Britain has been a tad high. They've even gone as far as to admit responsibility for the dramatic demographic changes that many cities have undergone and, what's more, to reluctantly admit that the 'pace' of immigration has been a little too fast for some people's liking.

What the intelligentsia more broadly (not just the Labour party and their clique) has not admitted responsibility for, however, is its attempt to indoctrinate and cower people into allowing it to continue its grand project unopposed by condemning those who opposed it as 'racists', 'bigots', 'xenophobes' etc. What project is that, you ask? Why, the project, as revealed by Labour speech-writer Andrew Neather, of opening up 'the UK to mass immigration' thereby transforming the make-up of British society in order to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date'. Opposition to that project was quelled through the dogma that opposing it automatically made one a 'racist', a 'bigot' and a 'xenophobe' – all very bad things. So bad, in fact, that there was nothing worse than to be labelled as such.

That dogma was not something that the party attempted to impose by itself. Its law-making power and control of the education system was not enough. The media were roped in to help to impose a fog of fear and silence upon society. Comedians were used to poke fun at anyone who dared to step out of line.

These tools worked together so effectively that average people came to police themselves. They came to learn, by indoctrination, what the right things to think and say about immigration were. Moreover, they imbibed all the buzz words ('racist', 'bigot' etc.) to be used against those who did not conform in order to pressure them into conforming. It didn't matter that, if pressed, most of the people using those words couldn't actually provide a clear and precise definition of their meaning, as long as they understood when to apply them - i.e. when somebody is critical of immigration -, and understood that, in applying them, they proved to themselves and their overlords that they belonged to the 'right' group. They learnt from our 'progressive' rulers that language is a weapon to be used with extreme prejudice against the enemy in order to inoculate yourself from the very same treatment that you yourself give others - thereby perpetuating the system.

So what happened? Why the change? What made the 'progressives' who sought to bully an entire society into conforming to their ideology abandon their dogma to such an extent that they now talk in the same vein as the very 'racists' and 'bigots' they once condemned?

Part of the truth is that their success, such as it has been, has been a superficial one. It was never really more than skin-deep. Of course they succeeded in creating an atmosphere wherein people felt that they had to keep their true feelings about immigration unvoiced, but they did not succeed in actually forcing people to abandon those views. There remained a silent majority who was waiting for its opportunity to express its true feelings, and that opportunity came in the form of the UK Independence Party (UKIP).

That party refused to be cowered although it was demonised (and continues to be demonised) for criticising immigration. Seeing this, the silent majority used UKIP to express its own views through the ballot box, so that the party came to speak for that silent majority. The people came to see the demonisation of themselves and their views in the demonisation of the party, and reacted accordingly by supporting it.

It is the success that UKIP has had most notably during the 2014 European elections, and more recently at the Clacton by-election, that has caused the Labour Party to begin to scurry around trying to find some way to show that it 'understands people's feelings' about immigration. It has made Labour aware not only of the failure of its grand project, but also the flimsiness of the tools with which it, and the intelligentsia that it represents, used (and continue to use) to impose its orthodoxy upon British society.

What happens when the threat of being condemned as a 'racist' and a 'bigot' is no longer an effective means of scaring people into conformity and into voting the way that you want them to? What happens when pillorying them as uncouth and absurd no longer works to turn them into passive, malleable group-thinkers? What happens is that our 'liberal' rulers get an inkling into their own weakness. They are floating in dinghy upon a sea of opinion that is diametrically opposed to their own. They are trying to keep the waves from swallowing them up, and they realise that their only weapon is flimsy. Their only weapon is words.

What happens when 'sexist' and 'homophobe' no longer calm the waves? What happens when 'islamophobe' falls on deaf ears? You may soon find out, comrades!

Libyan Soldiers Bring Mayhem to Cambridgeshire

Great and greatly funny article by my friend, the brilliant author Alexander Boot. Below is part of it.

An update. Now 300 soldiers are guarding out 240 Libyan cadets. Cameron insists we won't grant them asylum.

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

But God forbid our leaders utter a single word suggesting they realise that the West and Islam are irreconcilable – that even in its present debauched state our civilisation simply can’t accommodate Islam as a dynamic force within our borders.

Yet our electorate has been corrupted to such an extent that, for any ‘statesman’ to be politically successful, he has to be politically correct. Hence the respect, both preached and practised, for any religion or civilisation, provided it isn’t Christian.

Hence also the criminal stupidity of our leaders who destroyed the demonstrably un-Western but still workable power balance in the Middle East to plunge the region into a blood-filled abyss of violence and unrest.

Now that the violence looks as if it’s about to spill over way beyond Iraq, Syria and Libya, our governments are reviewing their options.

One of them is yet another direct military intervention, and we all know how hugely successful this has proved so far.

Another is to intervene by proxy, using Iran (what with the Nato member Turkey refusing to play) to do the fighting for us. Ancient Rome had that kind of arrangement with the Vandals, remember how that turned out?

We may suffer the same way, since the inevitable price for Iran’s involvement will be the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons, and you aren’t getting three guesses to figure out how they’ll be used.

The third option is related to the second: arming and training those local groups we perceive as our friends. ‘Perceive’ is the operative word: there are no groups in the Islamic world that are genuinely friendly to the West.

Some, however, are ready to fake amiability for tactical reasons, something we accept as the real thing. Both sides are perfectly aware of the ad hoc nature of any such alliance, invariably underpinned as it always is by background hostility.

They pretend to be our friends, we pretend to believe them. However, the two sides still diverge in one important area. They have a long-term strategy, we can’t think beyond the next election.

That’s why we refuse to recall that every time we trained and armed Muslim soldiers in the past they eventually turned their weapons against us. Who do you think armed the Taliban? Al-Qaeda? Saddam? Gaddafi? Isis?

Training thousands of Libyan soldiers at our Cambridgeshire base is a sign that we’re as ever prepared to equip our future enemies while pretending they’re our present friends.

We simply refuse to admit that our quarrel isn’t with this or that Islamic faction but with Islam as such. Well, if we still haven’t realised that there’s a clash of civilisations under way, we ought to be thankful to the Libyan soldiers for clarifying the point.

Since arriving in June they’ve succeeded in turning their corner of sleepy Cambridgeshire into a scaled-down version of Tripoli’s outskirts.

The Libyans went on an alcohol-fuelled rampage and there I was, thinking Muslims were supposed to be teetotal. A few of them spent £1,000 on booze in a single visit to a supermarket, an amount that buys a lot of mayhem.

Two of the soldiers have now been charged with raping a man, who presumably was wearing a provocative business suit. Not to discriminate, three others are being held on remand for several counts of sexual assault against women.

These peccadilloes were augmented by attendant charges of theft and threatening behaviour towards a police officer, which is legalese for head-butting. (Since no one has suggested that ‘Glasgow kiss’ be renamed ‘Tripoli kiss’, I’m hereby putting this initiative forth as my own.)

Anyway, this is where our MoD officials unveiled their comedy routine, and I thank them for making my morning so much more upbeat for it.

In a nutshell, the training programme, originally supposed to last until the end of the month, is being terminated effective immediately, and no future training will be done in Britain, what with the UK’s surfeit of tasty men and women roaming the countryside freely.

Instead of describing this simple development in this kind of language or, as would be my preference, more colloquially, the MoD spokesman delivered his first knee-slapping line:

“We have agreed with the Libyan government that it is best for all involved to bring forward the training completion date”. (“We can’t have too many raping and thieving Muzzie soldiers about…”)
Encouraged by the outburst of laughter, he continued in the same vein: “There have been disciplinary issues.”

I suppose homosexual rape, sexual assault on women, theft and head-butting a cop could be described that way for comic effect, but, playing it straight, I’d have settled for ‘crimes’ instead.

And then came the kicker, having punters rolling in the aisles: “As part of our support for the Libyan government, we will review how best to train Libyan security forces – including whether training further tranches of recruits in the UK is the best way forward.” (“…and neither do we want them to darken our doorstep ever again.”)

To add a few delicious touches to the stand-up gig, several Libyan soldiers, presumably not the defendants, have requested political asylum in Britain. And their government has so far failed to pay for the programme, while not offering much hope it’ll do so in the future.

Oh well, we’ve made our bed of nails, so we must lie in it – and it’s no laughing matter.

Why Communism Dominates in the West

"Red Herrings" is a brilliant historical article by Andrew C. McCarthy that explains one of the most important reasons of the current dominance of the Left in the West (and more than that).

It's a review and a defence of Diana West's book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , which was published last year and provoked much controversy, as you can gauge from the review itself.

The way Joe McCarthy has been treated in America reminds me a bit of the way Enoch Powell has been treated in Britain: both were fundamentally right and both were vilified. But Farage wouldn't say that - especially about the latter - in a million years.

The only misconceived thing of the article is when it quotes Diana West's favourable view of "Enlightenment logic".

The Enlightenment has brought to Europe the first sparkles of totalitarian thought. Marx was an intellectual heir to the Enlightenment.

The problem is that we ourselves have been indoctrinated by intentional "disinformation" - possibly of Soviet origin -, and it takes us time to get through the fog.

Here's part of the very long article:

Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really “win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our nation more vulnerable.


To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the other, detractors who blame FDR’s indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death throes.

I was a federal prosecutor in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. We indicted the offending jihadist cell for levying a terrorist war against the United States. Several of the terrorists had been major mujahideen figures. Their lawyers thus thought it exculpatory to claim that they could not have conspired to wage jihad against America; after all, they had actually been allied with America in the jihad against the Soviets. The provocative claim was implausible as a defense, the Soviets having left Afghanistan (and the USSR having collapsed) years before the Twin Towers bombing. Still, it is standard procedure to investigate even dubious defense claims. Hence, my unwitting stumble into a heated controversy.

The cia and Reagan administration veterans passionately proclaimed that the $3 billion in aid and armaments funneled to the mujahideen—matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia, with Pakistani intelligence as our “cut-out” for deniability purposes—was an unvarnished triumph. The war became the Soviets’ Vietnam, bleeding the Red Army to death even as a humiliated Kremlin buckled under the pressure of Reagan’s arms build-up. In sum, I was told, “Look, we liberated half the world from Communist tyranny. Case closed.”

Yet, it wasn’t that simple. The mujahideen begot al Qaeda. A fifth of the U.S. aid, plus most of the Saudi contribution (real money in those days), was channeled to virulently anti-American terrorists. They proceeded to take their jihad global . . . eventually to Manhattan. The rest is history—the history we’ve been struggling with for two decades.

Belgium To Ban Ritual Slaughter, Sign Petition

The petition "Stop the barbaric slaughter without stunning of animals under the guise of religion" has almost reached its target of 4,000 signatures.

The petition, which I've also signed, is addressed to the Belgian politician Ben Weyts, who is Flemish Minister for Animal Welfare, and to Janez Potočnik, the European Commissioner for the Environment.

Ben Weyts said on the Belgian television show De zevende dag on the VRT network that he would actively pursue a total ban on ritual slaughter. The ban, he added, could be implemented by 2015, as well as further legislation.

In the meantime, Weyts called for Muslims and Jews to adhere to current laws, which allow animal slaughter without previous stunning to be carried out only in licensed abattoirs.

The cabinet office of his Belgian government counterpart, Wallon Minister for Animal Welfare Carlo Di Antonio, indicated it would "take the same shape as that suggested by" the Flemish Minister.

Please sign the petition now:

The slaughter of animals without stunning is not only barbaric, it is also very painful as vets proclaim for years. Waiting animals know exactly what is going to happen, they are stressed by the smell of blood, urine, feces, by the cries of fear and pain of the animals slaughtered in front of and before them. Muslims do not have a valid reason to slaughter animals in such a cruel way: apparently nowhere the Koran states that animals may not be stunned for slaughter! As well for the Jews: Kosher slaughter is as reprehensible as halal ! There is no immediate or painless killing for slaughter without stunning. We live in the 21st century. Peoples knowledge has grown such as the means to slaughter animals painless. If you really want to hold on to the tradition of 'cutting throats', then just do it to animals who were stunned before slaughter! That is not only human, it is a form of respect! Or do Muslims nor Jews need to respect animals? I do not believe that. Religion should never be an excuse to let animals suffer ! Stop the slaughter of animals without stunning worldwide. Provide a law that forbids slaughter without stunning in Belgium and Europe, and hopefully the whole world will follow. Do it now !

Europe Is Rising against Islamisation



Maybe the tide really is turning.

I remember when, in the late '60s and the '70s, hardline socialist and communist groups were still struggling to get their message accepted in Europe and the West generally. They were a tiny minority then, and their agenda seemed very far-fetched and out-of-synch with ordinary people and mainstream views.

It also looked liked it was going to remain that way. When, later on, I heard them screaming "Free Nelson Mandela", I didn't think it was going to happen. And now we know: it has happened, and much more than that has materialised.

Political correctness, which is nothing else but cultural Marxism, has become mainstream, indeed the orthodoxy and the dominant ideology.

As things turned one way in a manner that a few decades ago seemed impossible, thay can wery well turn the other way, even if we find it difficult to believe now.

In Italy, 100,000 people protested against illegal immigration, Islamisation and the European Union earlier this month at a Lega Nord (Northern League) rally in Milan.

In Germany, last Sunday about 4,800 people took to the streets of Cologne. The protest was planned by Hooligans gegen Salafisten (Hooligans against Salafists), abbreviated as HoGeSa, who had previously organised similar demonstrations in several German cities, including Essen, Nuremberg, Mannheim, Frankfurt and Dortmund. Their name derives from the fact that they belong to rival football fan clubs and are now banding together through social media.

More than 5,000 people had registered their attendance to the Cologne march on Facebook, claiming to travel from around Europe. At the event, there were clashes with the police and a thousand of counter-demonstrators. Several policement were injured.

A new demo is programmed in Berlin for 15 November and another in Hamburg, but there is talk that they may be banned. From Reuters:

The hooligans - as they term themselves - want to stage a protest against ultra-conservative Islamic Salafists at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate on Nov. 15, a week after the capital celebrates the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Berlin's senator for interior affairs Frank Henkel told ARD television he had heard talk of 10,000 people wanting to attend.

"We will do everything we can to ban the demonstration," said Henkel. "We are experiencing a new quality, a new dimension of street violence and militancy. (In Cologne) it was clear from the start that it was not about a political statement but seeking physical clashes, especially with the police."...

Salafists advocate a puritanical form of Islam and the BfV [Germany's domestic intelligence agency] says their numbers in Germany are rising, along with the number of potential recruits for Islamic State.

The BfV estimates that 450 people have travelled to the region from Germany to join radical jihadist forces.

Another componenet of this continental movement of resistance is Cities against Islamisation . Initiated as far back as January 2008 by Filip Dewinter of the Flemish independence party Vlaams Belang, it is a pan-European alliance that includes Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain.

Italy: 100,000 in Anti-Immigration Demo

An estimated 100,000 people protested against illegal immigration, Islamisation and the European Union at a rally organised by the Lega Nord (Northern League) in front of Milan's Cathedral, the heart of the city.

The crowd was so enormous that it took two hours for everybody to get to the vast square.

Demonstrators were holding banners saying "No to mosques", "Fewer illegals = fewer diseases", "Less money to refugees", and "If I catch Ebola I'll infect Alfano". Angelino Alfano is Italy's Minister of the Interior, responsible, among other things, for internal security and immigration.

The main message was similar to that of my party Liberty GB in the UK: in social priorities Italians must come first, otherwise it is reverse racism.

This was the first major event organised by the Northern League under the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, followed with interest in Central and Southern Italy as well.

"Stop the invasion" was the demonstration's slogan, with the objective of stopping the Mare Nostrum operation, Italy's mission of rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean - called "Mare Nostrum" (our sea) by the Romans, but ironically not ours even around our coasts any more.

Said Salvini in his speech at the rally: "Like other countries, we have to use Navy ships to defend our borders and not to help the people smugglers." The Italian term for a person who ferries illegal immigrants to Italy by boat for a high fee is "scafista".

A few days later, in Strasbourg, the Northern League's leader discussed these issues with his party's French ally in the European Parliament, Front National's Marine Le Pen. Together they'll call for the suspension of the Schengen Treaty and for border control. The League identifies mass immigration as a source of unfair competition against the unemployed Italian workers.

As in Britain with the EDL, a counter-demonstration was held a few hundred yards away by the "anti-fascist" radical Left. And, like in here, the massive deployment of security forces ensured that there was no contact between the two camps.

Wearing a T-shirt, Salvini led the march to the Piazza del Duomo suggesting slogans through a megaphone, and when it got in front of Palazzo Marino, home to Milan City Council, he stopped the march to shout at Mayor Giuliano Pisapia: "We do not want the new mosque in Milan."

The Northern League has gone from strength to strength and is now a force to reckon with, in Italy. But, unlike a party like the UKIP in Britain, it has a firm anti-Islam position. I cannot imagine Farage yelling against mosque building.

Illegals with Scabies Disinfected, Italy Chastised



The tragedy of the "boat people" in the Mediterranean is now in the news more than ever.

130 migrants were presumed dead after two boats capsized on 2 October.

This date is so close to the anniversary of the first tragedy of that kind. Just a year before,

On October 3, 2013, the 368 [in fact, 366] bodies laid out on the wharf at Lampedusa marked a watershed in the history of immigration — in the Mediterranean and perhaps even the world.

The latest events have led to a rethinking of immigration policies. First by Italy:

Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano called for the Mare Nostrum surveillance-and-rescue operation to shut down in favor of ''European action able to show that Europe takes charge of its own border'', during a visit to Tunis on Friday, the first anniversary of the Lampedusa shipwreck in which 366 immigrants died.

The debate was then extended to Europe.

The UK government is being chastised by the Left - and not only - for its refusal to support migrant rescues in the Mediterranean:

Foreign office minister says that providing comprehensive rescue cover in the Mediterranean is encouraging more migrants to make the dangerous journey and risk their lives.

Even The Telegraph joins the condemnation, with this ridiculous headline:

Drown an immigrant to save an immigrant: why is the Government borrowing policy from the BNP?

This is where the death spiral into a political bidding war on immigration leads us.

And yet, generosity is like everything else: you can have too much of a good thing.

This furore reminds me of another case, in which it was Italy that received international scorn for doing the right thing.

After the Ebola outbreak, it's useful to revisist that episode from last December, when Italy was severely criticised in the most absurd way just for trying to prevent contagion and an epidemic by spraying with a disinfectant the guests of a reception centre on the island of Lampedusa, the destination of thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants from Africa.

This is how the BBC reported the story, to which the above video refers:

Footage filmed secretly on a mobile phone appears to show detainees being forced to strip naked in mixed company while a worker hoses them down.

The man who took the video - an unnamed Syrian refugee - says the migrants are being treated like "animals".

The camp houses people from Africa and the Middle East who make the dangerous crossing to Italy by boat...

The images, which were broadcast on state television, show migrants queuing up in a crowded, open-air courtyard.

One after another, in cold, winter conditions, they have to strip completely naked.

The man who filmed the scene says this is apparently an effort to combat the skin condition, scabies, and that both men and women have to go through it every few days.

The illegal immigrants were disinfected by means of a hose spraying a substance protecting them from scabies.

This, nothing more than a mass shower, prompted a national inquiry, with Italian politicians and media condemning such a treatment that made the centre look like a "concentration camp".

How can a country which had received more than 40,000 illegals in just a few months wash them one by one? As an Italian blogger put it:

If you import Africa, your country will look more and more like Africa.

The press melodramatically and hyperbolically described the shower as "dehumanising" as well as freezing, but people's comments to those articles were overwhelmingly of a different opinion. Just a sample:

Don't be ridiculous. Being freezing cold in Lampedusa, that's big news! They have scabies and who knows what else. Disinfecting them is the least. First of all, no-one has invited them; second, if they want to keep scabies, lice etc. they can stay in their own countries...

15 degrees is not a freezing temperature, they can always go back and keep their scabies and whatever else they have. In case you didn't know, there have been 7 cases of scabies in an elementary school in Parma. Who knows how it got there, and what other filth they are bringing here...

If 15 degrees is cold for them, how can the illegals migrate to Sweden or Germany, as they say they will, and survive?...

Maybe the shower rooms have been destroyed like everything else [a reference to previous episodes of rioting and vandalism by illegals attacking the reception centre]...

Shame on you Lefties, it's all your fault, you wanted the immigrants to appear humanitarian; and now you're paying the consequences!...

If they had remained in their own countries they would still have scabies......

The real shocking images are not these, they are those of the victims of the increasing number of crimes committed by illegals.

Frontex, the European Union Agency for border management, has released data according to which, in the first four months of 2014, landings of immigrants in Italy have increased by 823% compared to the same period last year. And from early May things have got even worse.

Not only the immigrant reception system is collapsing under the weight of these figures. Another consequence of this invasion is the impossibility to control who is coming, with the probability of health emergencies increasing all the time.

The migrants are from countries with serious health problems and travel in poor hygienic conditions, therefore can be carriers of infectious diseases.

Diseases like polio and tuberculosis, disappeared from our countries, are coming back to Europe, carried by immigrants. The city of Syracuse, in Sicily, has a tuberculosis incidence not unlike that of a Third World city, because of the many illegal landings.

There have already been cases of immigrants with scabies amidst the general Italian population.

Scabies is a serious and extremely contagious disease, and can only be eliminated by the method used in Lampedusa. It is in the interest of both Italians - in case anybody still cares about them - and illegals that the latter are sprayed with disinfectant, as many of them are contracting the illness in the asylum centre itself from other guests.

Brigitte Gabriel Exposed by Pat Buchanan

The great Pat Buchanan mauling on video the moronic Brigitte Gabriel who can’t answer even one of his very apt questions. She can’t answer because she has a totally wrong view of Islam as divided between moderate and radical, when in fact there is no moderate Islam. The militant Muslims will always win as they have the Islamic scriptures on their side.




Why We Care for Animals and Muslims Don't



Malay Muslims have discovered dogs:

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 19 — A group of Muslims get acquainted with a dog at the ‘I want to touch a dog’ event at 1Utama’s central park earlier this morning. Around 200 dogs and their owners volunteered for the event, which sought to break cultural norms against dogs among Malaysia’s majority Malays.

The video on the Malay Mail Online website quoted above is a mixture of people who surround a dog as if they'd never seen one in their entire lives, and other people who wash their hands after having touched a dog, considered by Islam an "impure" animal. In a photo, some participants even wash their feet (don't ask me why).

From an article on the same Malay paper:

Being able [sic] take her two dogs to a public event attended by fellow Malay Muslims was liberating for Rina Z, who has been caring for dogs for the past 12 years.

As a lady in a hijab cautiously bent down to pet her dog, Kirby, Rina reminisced over the disapproving stares fellow Malays would shoot at ‘tudung’ — the local term for hijab — wearing women walking an animal that is culturally considered “haram” [sinful, forbidden].

“I have a friend who wears a ‘tudung’ who helped walk my dog, and this woman just went up to her and started questioning her; ‘You are a Muslim? You are a Muslim?’ And then she went on and on lecturing her on how it’s not right (for a Muslim to handle dogs),” Rina said.

“Being a Muslim dog owner, you tend not to publicise the fact that you own dogs because you run the risk of becoming a social outcast... but I think it’s time to share the love,” she added, as Kirby meekly sought out his owner for reassurance among the deluge of people stopping by to touch him.

The event was organised by Syed Azmi Alhabshi, who just desired to touch a dog, and we all know that the best way to do that is to stage a mass gathering of dogs and their human companions in your city's central park: otherwise how on earth do you ever get to see a dog, let alone touch him? It stands to reason.

The great pioneer Alhabshi is shown in a picture while he's realising his great ambition and touching a dog for the first time in his life, while the dog looks positively terrified (dogs apparently have an instinct for spotting mental disorders in humans).

Still, Alhabshi is to be praised for doing his bit for introducing Muslims of Malaysia to dogs.

In fact, he's a real martyr for a good cause (I'm not joking here), as for his ‘I want to touch a dog’ event, part of his charity work, he's received death threats and accusations of apostasy by many fellow Muslim-Malays online:

The Malays, furious at his audacity in organising an event to educate the public on Islam’s stance on dogs, have circulated his mobile number online, while on WhatsApp, messages claiming he is a Christian in disguise have spread like wildfire.

Once easily reachable through his phone or Facebook, Syed Azmi has now gone virtually underground, but on Facebook, his friends, family and neighbours in Taman Tun Dr Ismail have been responding to the threats on his behalf.

However, the threats, most of them posted as comments to a Facebook post by Ustaz Mohd Kazim Elias, which condemned the event, are numerous and filled with hate.

Here's a little taste of a few of them:

[T]his organiser cannot differentiate between what is right and wrong, has a shallow understanding of religion and likes to destroy Islam and should be stoned to death...

Let me give the organiser a beating so that he can gain some reason...

I hope this cursed person dies from dog bite.

But I like this most:

Another Facebook user, Yusoff Hj Ashaari, said that on top of taking action against Syed Azmi, the public should find the women who posed with the dogs at the event, and pull of [sic] their scarves to see if they wore crucifixes or were concealing tattoos. “Ustaz, this organiser really is a dog,” said Han Khalief.

I like it because it shows that, while we in the West don't realise how much we owe to Christianity, people in non-Christian parts of the world well realise that. In this case love for animals is associated with Christianity. True, what these people have in mind may just be the suspect, however absurd, that Christians are trying to undermine Islam by subverting its precepts on dogs.

But there is much more than that, as demonstrated by the fact that an animal welfare movement only developed in the Christian part of the world.

Animal welfare and love for animals developed from the compassion inspired by Christianity.

If we - or some of us - don't attribute the ending of the practice of animal sacrifices and respect for animals in general to Christianity, in the other parts of the globe they do:

The practice [of ritual slaughter of animals] is now far less universal than it was once, and in Christian countries it is generally looked upon as one of the basest expressions of primitive superstition. There is, for instance, hardly a book written to defend the “civilizing” role of the white man in India, which does not give publicity to that gruesome side of Hindu religion, through some bloodcurdling description of the sacrifices regularly performed in the temple of the goddess Kali, at Kalighat, Calcutta.

You will want to know how the story ended. Was our martyr stoned to death? No, or at least not yet.

He apologised:

“With a sincere heart, my intention to organise this programme is because of Allah SWT and not to memesongkan (distort) the faith, change religious laws, make fun of ulamas (religious scholars) or encourage liberalism,” he told the media today.

Ah, and don't forget - although you may be forgiven for forgetting - that Malaysia is a moderate Muslim country.

Muslims and Militant Secularists Increasingly Attack Christians in Europe

The above photo represents a graffito found a month ago in Vienna, on the ground of a popular walkers' and bikers' promenade outside Augarten Park.

It says: "Occupy all churches! We will rise!" (Besetzt alle Kirchen. We will rise.)

This kind of direct threat to Christians has become increasingly common in Europe.

A voluntary, non-profit organisation based in Vienna, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe , has been established, and issued a report documenting 241 cases of intolerance and attacks against Christians and their institutions in 2013.

Among them are arson, gun attacks, bombs and Molotov cocktails.

Anti-Christian graffiti were sprayed on the outside wall of a cathedral in Austria, reading: "We do not want your crosses" and including a swastika. So much for the ridiculously false claim, much beloved by so many "free-thinkers" and Leftists, of a closeness between Nazism and Christianity. In fact, these Neo-Nazis are continuing a florid anti-Christian tradition going all the way back to the Führer.

Dr. Gudrun Kugler, director of the Observatory, explains: "The increasingly secular society in Europe has less and less space for Christianity."

No doubt many of these aggressive acts will be the work of Muslims, whose number, like that of anti-Christian threats, is also increasing in Europe. But not all this violence is caused by Muslims: some of it comes from intolerant secularists.

For example, among the most recent cases are a Coptic church set on fire in Berlin, but also another Berlin church seriously damaged because it offered its premises to abortion opponents. Secularist attacks were not limited to property: Christians peacefully assembled at the so called “March for life”, a pro life demonstration in Berlin, were targeted by Left-wing extremists who showered them with colour paint, insulted them and shouted vulgarly.

And in the night between 25th and 26th September a pharmacy in Neukölln, Germany, was vandalised because of the owner Andreas Kersten’s refusal to sell the morning-after pill, which he explained as motivated by reasons of conscience.

On a website of self-proclaimed “anti-fascists”, the authors of this vandalism confess to the act. They say: “Whoever refuses the women's right to self-determination for reasons of conscience shall not be surprised to find his shop vandalised for reasons of conscience.”

Who said that Stalinism is dead?

The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe is on Facebook and Twitter.