Poor Bastard Marvin

Fisking the Occupy London Statement and Demands

2011-11-17T00:53:00.016Z

The angle on these protests seems visceral, supporters feel that they are achieving something by protesting, but I do not.

Here's their statement and my replies:

The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.

The current "system" will absolutely continue, and to evolve as it always has done. Undemocratic? We live in a democracy, this literally does not make sense. If one wants "more democracy" then how? What is the policy?

I'd vote for regular, perhaps weekly referenda by text message. Say that and I'll have sympathy with the cause for "real democracy".

Unjust? The world isn't fair. We know that. "We need alternatives" I've been asking these protesters and they have no practical alternatives to the "system".

We are of all ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, generations, sexualities dis/abilities and faiths. We stand together with occupations all over the world.

General statement of inclusiveness. Very nice. All glowy insidey!

We refuse to pay for the banks’ crisis.

Uh-huh. How are they refusing? Are they all about to be arrested for tax evasion? This is not a realistic or grown up statement. I think they mean they are not happy with the actions of the bankers who lied and hid toxic debt brining chaos. Who is?

The banks have recuperated all the money that was poured in to them, and there's a net gain to the government of many millions.

We do not accept the cuts as either necessary or inevitable.

Lunacy. The government had been spending £4 for every £3 is has received. This is the definition of unsustainable?

We demand an end to global tax injustice and our democracy representing corporations instead of the people.

Global tax injustice? What on earth do they mean? It's extremely vague.

Democracies do represent the people. Corporations do sway politics which needs to be looked at. But putting out such broad statements that the country is only represented by corporations and not by people is just ridiculous and counter-productive.

We want regulators to be genuinely independent of the industries they regulate.

First tangible thing so far. Hardly an alternative to the "unsustainable system", but positive nonetheless.

We support the strike on the 30th November and the student action on the 9th November, and actions to defend our health services, welfare, education and employment, and to stop wars and arms dealing.

More generalised tribal left idealism. No cuts! Etc. Crazy. We'd be kicked out of Europe altogether. Nobody would do any business with us. The economy would implode leading to disaster for all of us.

Stop wars. Uh-huh. So Saddam, the Taliban and Gaddafi remain in power. The Arab spring may not have happened at all, or delayed by years. Genocide may occur unimpeded if we "never go to war".

Arms dealing. Same noise for years, nice idea but it's not realistically going to "end". Would be a very good and realistic idea to beat the drum for much more ethical based arms dealing, and only selling to democracies would surely be a vote winner.

We want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich.

Market economies have brought great wealth around the world and raised living standards immensely. Socialism has failed the people every time in various ways because you can't control the economy, and you have to have very illiberal laws to protect socialist control.

We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed

Solidarity. OK fine expression emotions.

and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression.

What oppression? What actions? This so vague as to be virtually meaningless. Again this is more of a letting off of steam, expressing a generalised compassion. All very nice but...

This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!

This is what the tiny % of protesters have decided amongst themselves, it's in no way representative of the population, at all. The readership of the Guardian is around 230,000. The readership of the Sun and The Daily Mail is around 7 million.

Populist opinion is indeed a generalised anger at the banks and politicians, however The Sun and Daily Mail readers will not be going in for all the other, let's be a little frank here, slightly dippy-hippy notions of world peace.

Here's their demands happily sitting on the pages of the Guardian.

An end to business and corporate votes in elections, which can outvote residents.

This is something I'm researching... I'll get back to this.

Removal of "secrecy practices", and transparent reform of institutions.

Sounds like a generally good idea. What exactly would happen? Reform? Everything is constantly being reformed and evolving. What specifically are they suggesting?

Decommissioning of the City of London police, with officers put under the Met.

I say this is odd and fringe because I have never in my life heard such ideas. What on earth is the rationale for this?!

Abolition of the offices of lord mayor, sheriffs and aldermen.

No chance, unless a radical left political party gains a mandate from the electorate. As I say, not a chance. These are historical titles and add to depth and culture of the City. Why the rush to eliminate such ceremonial positions? Sounds a like something Robespierre would have said. This is really again, an incredibly fringe demand that would face massive opposition for a host of reasons neither left nor right.

A truth and reconciliation commission to examine allegations of corruption.

We have several apparatus to deal with corruption already. They actually work really quite well generally, but it would depend on one's definition of "corruption". We have officially one of the least corrupt societies in the world, it is worth noting.

Look, no quotes! The BBC discovers peaceful Islam

2011-01-22T16:48:00.003Z

John Mohammed Butt - The Hippy who became an Imam.

Either there's an unbending reverence for this character by the BBC Radio 4 correspondent, or a terrifying fear of being "Islamophobic" - or perhaps a progressive mash-up of the two.

No quotes for "peaceful Islam" here. Because it is certainly, without question, a peaceful Islam. Pass the Guardian, darling.

this promotion of peaceful Islam by the English former hippy has set him on a collision course with militants

It is generally agreed under Islamic law that the penalty for leaving Islam is death for a sane male.

How does this reconcile with John Mohammed Boy here?

If he renounces the death penalty and the rest of the hudud punishments I'm all for this "hippy Imam". If, power to him.

Does this hippy support the death penalty?

Don't blame the West

2011-01-03T17:49:00.002Z

The 'root causes' of Islamist terrorism do not lie in poverty or western imperialism, but an age old conflict between reason and revelation

During the last decade of Islamist terrorism, numerous commentators, particularly those on the left, have adopted a materialist approach to explain why some Muslims want to slaughter guests at hotels in Mumbai or detonate bombs at Christmas festivals in Sweden.

Terrorism, they argue, is rooted in poverty, frustration over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and memories of western imperialism. In other words, so the argument goes, the West itself is to blame for terrorism. If only the West would apologize, make reparations, abandon Israel, leave the Middle East and Afghanistan, all would be well. Or at least that's where the root-cause crowd's assumptions logically lead.

The problem with this materialist view of terrorism is that it largely misses the spiritual motivations that inform Islamist geo-politics. As political theorist Barry Cooper argues in his book, New Political Religions, or, An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, the Islamists, like the Nazis and Communists, are motivated more by a "disease of the spirit" than materialist aspirations. "When ordinary human beings see themselves as specially chosen by God, or even as gods themselves, they are not necessarily psychopaths, but they most definitely are spiritually disordered."

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Uninvited in the comments at Harry's Place.

BBC using quotes for "terrorism" again

2011-01-01T11:47:00.004Z

Despite the mass murder of 21 civilians the BBC feels unable to make a value judgment that this is terrorism, and feels compelled to quote terorrism; as if it were not possible to outright define the event as terrorism.

Egypt bomb kills 21 at Alexandria Coptic church

President Hosni Mubarak urged Egyptians to unite against "terrorism"

Update: This line has now been removed from the article.

HJS & JJ Panel Discussion: Squaring the Circle? Britain & the De-legitimisation of Israel. Just some pictures.

2010-12-13T23:24:00.010Z

This evening I attended a debate at the New West End Synagogue. It is rather beautiful inside.

The event location was kept kept quiet for "security reasons". There were three uniformed police officers and a CST security team scouting the synagogue during the event.

That's a Red Hot Chilli Peppers skullcup. Zionist extremists
everywhere, as you can see with your own eyes.

No radicalism to be found, just calm, collected common sense, mixed with not a little incredulity at the parlous state of the liberal-left that has precipitated, rather than defended against, repugnant and ill-informed rhetoric against the Jewish homeland and Jews themselves.

We popped off a little early for a quick beer and a chat. The police officers were inside keeping warming and looked quite pleased to be in such warm and distinctive surroundings. A nice evening out.

The Relativity of Wrong

2010-11-10T21:18:00.003Z

by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov, moved to write this essay in irritation at a letter received from an English Literature student, quoting Socrates, claiming he was in fact wrong... Amusing and very illuminating. Read the whole thing.

Excerpt below

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.

First, let me dispose of Socrates because I am sick and tired of this pretense that knowing you know nothing is a mark of wisdom.

No one knows nothing. In a matter of days, babies learn to recognize their mothers.

Socrates would agree, of course, and explain that knowledge of trivia is not what he means. He means that in the great abstractions over which human beings debate, one should start without preconceived, unexamined notions, and that he alone knew this. (What an enormously arrogant claim!)

In his discussions of such matters as "What is justice?" or "What is virtue?" he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. (This is called "Socratic irony," for Socrates knew very well that he knew a great deal more than the poor souls he was picking on.) By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.

It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison.

The Most Sensible Summary of the Use of Waterboarding, and Why Isn't Sunny Squealing Yet?

2010-11-09T22:50:00.004Z

I'm surprised Sunny Hundal or his acolytes aren't squealing about this; not that any of them would ever pick up the paper - The Evening Standard - today has an excellent editorial comment George W Bush and the dilemmas of torture

The dilemma involved remains, however, if only such harsh techniques will work in getting an undoubtedly hardened terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk. It is unclear from Mr Bush's comments whether the waterboarding was necessary to extract the information relating to London: he has said only that the “interrogations helped break up plots” and that waterboarding was involved in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other detainees.

The commitment of our security services not to participate in torture is admirable, and we should indeed take a stand against torture where it is used in the service of noxious regimes from Zimbabwe to Burma. Nevertheless, when faced with a threat like that posed by Islamist terror groups, we must reluctantly concede that techniques such as waterboarding may be necessary as a last resort in the defence of our citizens.

Exactamon.

We should, hardly ever, employ torturous interrogation techniques to detainees.

We should never blind ourselves to moral absolutes without consideration for exceptional circumstances. Because that would be fucking stupid wouldn't it?

Merkel Paves the Way for National Socialism (according the The Independent)

2010-10-19T22:22:00.006+01:00

The shibboleth of the Left - Multiculturalism. Speak of it's failure - and you are supporting the Nazis (especially if you are German. Talk about crude stereotypes).

The Independent; The Daily Mail for those who recycle.

Hysterical, deluded, berks.

BBC in Ed Speech Overdrive

2010-09-28T22:07:00.002+01:00

Crikey.

Could you get more of a promotional take on Ed Miliband's appearance as Labour leader?

And who the fuck is that photogenic blonde? Who cares! The BBC are loving it!

CNN Reports on a "survivor" of the "attacked Mavi Marmara"

2010-09-18T15:40:00.003+01:00

CNN breathlessly reports how a "survivor" of the Gaza flotilla incident is sending aid to Gaza to "break the Gaza embargo" - on land, and via Egypt.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/09/18/uk.gaza.convoy/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn

the convoy aims to enter Gaza by land, through the Rafa border crossing with Egypt, Ovenden said. When the three convoys meet in Syria, they plan to be shipped past the point at which the Mavi Marmara was attacked and down to the Egyptian port of Al Arish before going to Rafah, he said.

Most readers of The Guardian website think it was correct to release a convicted terrorist on compassionate grounds

2010-08-20T18:14:00.000+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/poll/2010/aug/20/megrahi-libya-lockerbie-poll

Pat Condell on the "Ground Zero Mosque"

2010-08-20T17:27:00.007+01:00

If I had any readers we could discuss the merits or otherwise of the "Ground Zero Mosque"!

My American friend who works in NYC, a person on the Democrat side of the fence, is against it, as is 61% of New Yorkers. New Yorkers are famed for being politically liberal, the polar opposite of the red neck.

Mr Condell says that the plan is to open the centre on the 11th September. Now THAT IS offensive.

Imagine if the roles were reversed, and Americans planned to build a mega-Church at the site of a drone attack where 100 civilians died in Pakistan, and decided to open it on the anniversary of the atrocity. Insensitive, no?

Incompetence at the Telegraph

2010-08-15T18:00:00.003+01:00

Today's fuck-up at the Telegraph.

This follows a bizarre article a couple of weeks ago about a Muslim MP facing a driving ban.

Are ageing lefties in denial?

2010-07-16T11:00:00.004+01:00

I've thought this for a while now, many people, not just "ageing lefties", people who left University just a few years ago are much the same. The simply won't countenance that many of their views coincide with many modern Wicked Tories.

Why would you be a radical if you think modern society just about works as it is, with it's equality for all citizens, freedom of speech, human rights, justice, liberty etc? What is there to radically change?

BBC News Magazine by John Kelly

A study is being used to support the theory many educated, middle-aged left-wingers are in fact conservatives who can't admit it. Is this true?

But beware, utter arrogant prick alert:

writer and long-standing Labour activist John O'Farrell argues that the Leicester study is far from comprehensive enough to back up the thesis.

But the BBC journalist manages to subtly explain what's actually going on here creating an 'analysis'; based on the Labour activist saying something completely different

But he insists that with age comes experience - and the wherewithal to translate egalitarian principles into practical action.

The Labour activist continues...

"What this comes down to is that right-wingers don't understand us," he says. "They can see why we're on the left when we're students, but they don't get why we would still want to make the world a better place when we're older and better off.

What a prize cunt. So anybody who is not a naive lefty DOES NOT WANT MAKE A BETTER WORLD! Wicked Tories!

Such ignorance seems incredibly prevalent with people who identify with themselves as "left wing". No wonder they have such problems correctly identifying their actual belief systems - many have such deluded views of others.

Pig

2010-06-23T17:20:00.002+01:00

visit Information Liberation for more information

Helping Israel: Ease the blockade

2010-06-16T16:31:00.006+01:00

Fucksake Israel, ease the blockade. No sane person would say allow weapons in to attack Israel, and checking for weapons should remain - but let the rest in. Just do it.

Tony Blair is hopeful he can bash something out over the next few says that would allow this. Let's hope his optimism isn't misplaced.

Western style democracy should always seek the high ground where possible ethically and morally whilst balancing national interest and security. They go hand in hand - to a point.

The most moral or ethical Western democracy is still going to be a target for Islamic terrorism, but less so. I don't mean pansy ethics either - ones with balls, i.e. freedom of speech, the right to offend religion etc.

Update: The Israeli cabinet has voted to ease the land blockade

Peace activists video taking hostages

2010-06-11T07:46:00.002+01:00

via the newly left aligned Charles Johnson

BBC suggests Israel killed fishermen, despite both Israeli and Palestinian sources

2010-06-07T11:11:00.006+01:00

The BBC's Jon Donnison, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, says it is not yet clear exactly what happened.

There doesn't appear to have been much of a dispute in the incident between Palestinian and Israeli sources. It reasonably clear what has happened; given no evidence or claims to the contrary.

But it is not uncommon for the Israeli navy to open fire on fishing boats it feels are too far out at sea, he adds.

Seems rather an odd thing to mention that the BBC isn't sure and that they may have attacked fishermen, surely? I could understand mentioning this if Palestinian sources had claimed this was the case, however they have not.

Update: After several hours the BBC modified the article, they've removed the first statement, and the comment about Israeli navy firing on fishing boats no longer appears to be the BBC correspondants explanation for what happened, it's mentioned as an aside, and marked under 'analysis'.

Well done. One does wonder why the editor of the web page felt it appropriate to present the news story in a "we don't know" and "it could be fishermen dead" angle, for several hours, when there were a number of sources, not contradictory and from both sides that painted some picture of what's likely to have occurred.

via the comments at Harry's Place

Reuters: Photo manipulation, again

2010-06-07T01:06:00.006+01:00

Reuters have again been implicated in photo manipulation. The photos have not been photoshopped as in previous instances however the photos have been cropped, removing knives and blood - telling a very different story. One is plausibly a peace activist and an injured soldier -the other - far from it.

Organizer of "Freedom Flotilla" at Hamas rally

2010-06-06T18:09:00.005+01:00

Transcript here

The usual Islamist claptrap, quite a bit of Allah Akbarring, allusion to a Islam dominating the world, "everything is progressing towards Islam", the lionising of those willing to die for the sake of Allah, "If they kill me – that is martyrdom for the sake of Allah. Allah Akbar".

But surely, simply the fact that the organiser of the "freedom flotilla" is rallying Hamas says everything we need to know?

So, can anybody in their right mind still claim that the "freedom flotilla" was a peace envoy?

More in depth commentary: Gaza Flotilla’s Leader Explains: It was a Jihadist Attack not a “Humanitarian” Operation

Hat Tip: Pisa in the comments at Harry's Place

When Kabul had rock 'n' roll, not rockets

2010-06-06T02:38:00.003+01:00

A record shop

Student nurses at Maternity Hospital, Kabul

I've just stumbled on a wonder - a photobook of Kabul from the '50s. Here's a couple, click the link for the rest.

Christians want part of the pie of offence and outrage

2010-06-06T02:21:00.003+01:00

Hollywood and religion. Double standards, or fair game for satire?

Comedy Central — the same TV network that managed to both anger and bow to Muslim sensibilities in April by airing and later censoring a “South Park” episode portraying the Prophet Mohammad — is now at the center of pre-emptive storm to develop a comedy show about Jesus.

A new coalition of family and religious groups Citizens Against Religious Bigotry has called on Comedy Central not to air the animated series “JC” and asked advertisers to refuse to sponsor it.

The show, billed as being about Jesus trying to live as a regular guy in New York City, is still in the development stage, is not on the air yet, and has not yet been given a green light by the network.

Some humour from Israel: Flotilla - We Con the World

2010-06-06T00:02:00.004+01:00

I can imagine a number of people becoming incandescent with rage on watching this spoof music video.

These Israelis have a point to make, which have no doubt they feel strongly about it, just as their adversaries do; but these people choose to do it through humour rather than rage. Which has to be commendable in my book. It's not at the expense of the Palestinians, it's a shot back at those individuals and organisations that spout a particular sort of ridiculous irrational anti-Israeli and effectively pro-Hamas narrative.

Peter Hitchens on Gaza Flotilla: The Joys of Selective Outrage

2010-06-02T22:34:00.006+01:00

Peter Hitchens, via Atlanticist on Twitter, with a rather unusually good piece on the selective outrage of The Left. I'm not a particular fan of the guy, and rarely there's worth of linking to the Daily Mail; but in this case I'm happy to make an exception.

It's pretty lengthy but well worth the read. A few selections:

Why is it that other countries can and constantly do horrible things, and there's not one tenth of the fuss there is if Israel does the same? And that Arabs can be massacred, tortured , imprisoned, you name it, and if it's done by other Arabs, nobody seems to mind. But if Israelis do it, it's all over the bulletins and the front pages. Why would that be? Well, it could have something to do with the fact that Israel has no oil, and the Arabs have lots, a huge influence on the British foreign Office and the BBC for many decades.

But it's also because that oil also finances some very slick PR, the kind nobody notices *is* PR, a skill Israel has lost - it is in the disastrous position of having everyone know that its propaganda (and it works hard at it) *is* propaganda, its lobbying *is* lobbying etc, whereas Arab lobbying doesn't get noticed and its propaganda is reported as news, which is the real aim of all such operations.

When did you last hear anyone talking about the 'Arab Lobby' in Washington, or in London for that matter? And yet there are such things, though they have nicer names.

...I'd like to see what the Turkish Navy would do to a pro-Kurdish 'humanitarian convoy' heading for its coast, if they ignored instructions to halt. I suspect it wouldn't be pretty

...It emerges that these ships were not entirely peopled by pacifist vegetarian idealists from the Isle of Wight.

....one of these 'activists' is a lawyer who once represented a terrorist for free (his client was the interesting Kozo Okamoto, still in the Middle East and anxious not to return to his native Japan). Mr Okamoto took part in the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which 25 innocents were massacred. Aboard were others who are active supporters of Hamas, the despotic and murderous Islamist rulers of Gaza

The Gaza boat raid: The Daily Mash is there

2010-06-01T16:01:00.001+01:00

ISRAEL JUST MAKING IT EASIER FOR GUARDIAN READERS TO LOOK GOOD

via comments at Harry's Place

Gaza Flotilla: Israel fell for martyrdom plans hook, line and sinker

2010-05-31T20:01:00.004+01:00

Elements of the pro-Palestinian activists expressed their desire for confrontation with the Israelis and martyrdom. Here is an interview with a woman on board before the killings. She says:

Right now we face one of two happy endings: either Martyrdom or reaching Gaza

Here is Hamas TV - Al-Aqsa yesterday on 30th March

The [Gaza] flotilla commander said yesterday: "We will not allow the Zionists to get near us and we will use resistance against them." ... They are people who seek Martyrdom for Allah, as much as they want to reach Gaza, but the first [Martyrdom] is more desirable"

Deadly confrontation had been planned, wished for, by elements on the Gaza flotilla; Israel fell for it hook, line and sinker.

Update: Iain Dale (surprisingly) has surmised my thoughts quite nicely here

Labour's choice for Mayor: Centrist mixed-race female, or old white male who embraces Islamist extremists?

2010-05-26T13:59:00.005+01:00

Yousef Qawadawi with Ken Livingstone

Vote here on the Guardian site for your preference.

Hugo Rifkind: Missing the point on drawing Mohammed

2010-05-25T13:47:00.008+01:00

Hugo Rifkind thinks people who draw Mohammed are "awful people".

I found this stick-man on the interwebs, we don't know his name, but let us hope for all our sakes it's Jack rather than Mohammed!

Afghanistan

2010-05-20T13:43:00.006+01:00

The Finkle

2010-05-19T12:27:00.000+01:00

Good news, boys: we’re not a left-wing nation

The conceit of the left-wing commentariat

2010-05-16T21:29:00.005+01:00

An excellent an article by the Dominic Lawson; Cameron, the Whig in Tory clothing. (the title of will surely have left-wing partisans fuming already, for they = good; everything else = very bad)

...the deep intellectual conceit of those on the left who imagine not just that they are the only people who can be described as “progressive”, but that anyone from a different political tradition has purely cynical motivations, even — or perhaps especially — as a reformer. In the context of the new government, they therefore find it impossible to take at face value Michael Gove’s claims to want to improve the education of the poorest, or Iain Duncan Smith’s desire to rescue an entire generation from the pit of welfare dependency.
It is, of course, the fact that both these Conservatives see private enterprise and the reestablishment of individual initiative and responsibility as the essential components in any solution of these most difficult of social problems which makes them so unacceptable to the self-styled progressives.
Perhaps it is that implacable sense that there is no political moral worth outside the left which led so many of its commentators seriously to suggest that even after Labour’s debacle in the general election, the “only legitimate coalition” was one led by them...

Rod Liddle and Truth and Accuracy

2010-03-29T22:44:00.005+01:00

The complaint to the PCC with regards to Rod Liddles provocative article Benefits of a multi-cultural Britain has been upheld.

Rod Liddle did not take the precautions to actually have cold hard facts to back up all of his assertions. I'd assumed that he had. He hadn't.

He said

The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community

The PPC states

The magazine provided some evidence to substantiate the figures: a BBC report, which quoted an Inspector in the Trident Unit of the Metropolitan police as saying that ‘for three out of every four shootings…in London, the victim and the perpetrator are from the black community’; a Daily Mail article, which reported that ‘124 out of 225 under-18s legally proceeded against for knife offences in the past three months are from the black community’; and a Sunday Times report which stated that ‘71% of people accused of mobile phone theft were black…’

and

the magazine had not been able to demonstrate that the “overwhelming majority” of crime in all of the stated categories had been carried out by members of the African-Caribbean community

Fair enough. Notice they did not refute subsequent substations as inaccurate. The government website Trident states

75% of London's gun crime involves the victim and suspect both coming from the capital's black communities.

The Guardian is there: Roy Greenslade at the PCC censures Liddle and Spectator for fomenting racist myth.

I think you'll find it was for inaccuracy, Roy.

Where I take issue with the knee-jerk partisan lefties is that they provide the foundation for the notion that it's racist to talk about the problem with violence in our young black communities.

75% of London's gun crime is black on black from the governments very own website. Is that a racist myth Roy? Which assertions are racist myths Roy, the ones that do not have freely available stats to back them up? Or all of them?

Rod - stick to the facts mate. If you can't back it up then don't bother.

Losing my religion

2010-03-29T21:49:00.004+01:00

This has to be one of the all time greatest songs of our time, I cannot think of another song that has - I do not know how else to put it - such depth of soul searching.

I'll be mostly listening to REM today.

BBC Impartiality

2010-03-14T11:45:00.006Z

This BBC news article describes the arrest of a senior Hamas leader thought to be responsible for suicide attacks inside Israel claiming the lives of 70 people.

The BBC's official primary concerns are accuracy and impartiality. But when it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, BBC correspondents seem to have particular difficulty with impartiality.

The BBC's Middle Eastern correspondent Barbara Plett said, about the death of Yasser Arafat, who was responsible for many terror attacks on Israeli civilians, from the Telegraph

"When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry . . . without warning." Almost as a footnote, she later admitted that an "ambivalence towards violence" was one of his failings.

The BBC have also spent several hundred thousands of pounds suppressing a report critical of it's Middle Eastern coverage - the Balen report. If an organisation spends hundreds of thousands suppressing a report then you can be pretty certain the contents of the report are incendiary. Boom.

Today's article ends with describing Hamas as

Designated a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US and the EU, it is seen by its supporters as a legitimate fighting force defending Palestinians from military occupation.

In reality of course, Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organisation, and Hamas and their supporters do not even pretend to hide it - their Jew hatred is out in the open, and fighting the "occupation" refers to the whole of Israel.

You could, if you were a BBC journalist, say a lot of things desribing Hamas that would be factually corrrect. You could talk about

Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant provides the following quotation, attributed to Mohammed:

"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."^[51]

The BBC statement begins with stating that Israel and the US designate it as a terrorist organisation, which for many will mean nothing. It's not an objective statement about Hamas, it's methods or it's objectives. Then it goes on to say, almost with a But, it's seen as a legitimate fighting force fighting occupation. And that's how you conclude an article on Hamas? The last words on people's lips?

The BBC have in this case not said anything factually incorrect. It will have no doubt passed numerous compliance procedures on impartiality and accuracy. But as somebody from the BBC once said to me "you can say quite a lot without actually saying very much".

You could criticise me as seeing bias where none exists, of nit picking on wording and the order of statements. There maybe some validity to this point. But, if I may conclude with the impartial statement some people see BBC journalists as mostly biased against Israel and for Palestinian causes, and that they struggle to remain impartial, and sometimes we see this spectacularly boil to the surface, as with the tearful Barbara Plett.

The Guardian equates right wing Tories with Islamic Exremism

2010-03-06T11:37:00.009Z

'Tory madrasa' preaches radical message to would-be MPs

Extremist views include global warming scepticism, being anti-NHS, using water cannons on green protesters, and supporting the use of waterboarding.

Guardian readers up and down the country will actually start to believe that there are Al-Qaeda like elements in the Tory party.

I await for such concerns to be expressed at the large left wing media organisation I happen to work for next week.

Comments on the article are pouring in

That the Tories, both grassroots and Notting Hill mainstream, are in reality a bunch of extremist, ignorant, bigoted scum should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Extremist bigoted scum for not supporting the NHS or global warming theories! And people at work are baffled why I am not left wing, like every other right thinking person. I am not a lefty because I cannot be so irrational, hysterical and deluded - I cannot morally or intellectually begin to equate Tories with Islamic extremists hellbent on murdering everyone they wish.

Here's Dizzy's take

They're nothing but extremists turds and we should all be wetting our pants because one of them, once, at a meeting, somewhere, spoke to someone who brother's girlfriend's mother made a cake that won a competition at a fair that David Cameron judged. Can't you see the connnection? Are you blind!?! Run away! Run away!

And here's the left's kyprotonite, on The Guardian in general, Rod Liddle

By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.

Teehehe.

Norman Tebbit: The Left-wing BNP could cost Labour seats at the general election

2010-01-14T16:12:00.001Z

As promised, today I'm going to say something about the BNP, but first I thought I should explain something to "Fabius", who wonders why, if I care about the plight of the poor, I am a Conservative. Well, that answers itself. I care about the poor not just because I was born one of them, but because they are very expensive people to have about us, and they represent a tragic waste of human material.
Given that socialism has a shocking record on wealth generation, let alone a shocking record of creating authoritarian states, I could never be a socialist. As to what Fabius calls the record of butchery in the British Empire, he must find it odd that the descendants of those who survived our colonial rule come flocking here to live, to work or to seek education. Nor does he seem to understand that, across the world, the greatest butchers have been socialists: Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler – not a free market capitalist, low tax, small government man among them.

Read the rest

Left vs Right: Munir Hussain.

2009-12-20T13:20:00.006Z

BBC

A Buckinghamshire businessman jailed for injuring a burglar who had attacked him and his family plans to appeal against his sentence, his lawyer said.

Munir Hussain, 53, returned to his High Wycombe home to find three intruders who tied him and his family up.

He managed to escape and chased one of the offenders, hitting him with a cricket bat, Reading Crown Court heard.

Hussain's solicitor said he planned to appeal against his 30-month sentence for grievous bodily harm with intent.

We have some responses in the Sunday press, most notably from the left and nominally Labour supporting Observer (Guardian on Sunday), and right and nominally Conservative supporting Telegraph.

In the Red Corner:

What sort of society praises vigilantes with cricket bats?

Far from being a miscarriage of justice, the jailing of Munir Hussain has seen the law working just as it should

In the Blue Corner:

Tories back new rights to help home owners protect themselves from burglars

The Conservatives have backed a new campaign by The Sunday Telegraph for changes to the law to give householders more rights to protect themselves against burglars.

If somebody broke in to your family home, tied up you and your family members at knife point, what would you do? To what extent should the law protect, and protect whom?

A reason why sceptics are worried about the alarmist movement

2009-12-01T16:20:00.001Z

An article at the Guardian claiming that the we're in big trouble - because the ozone layer is shrinking. The panic used to be set on the idea of an increasing hole in the ozone layer letting through the harmful rays from the sun and the melting of the ice caps.

T'is other way round now, apparrently. But reading the comments at the article gives some insight in to the minds of the alarmists

What is needed is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere: it is relatively easy to achieve and just requires wartime-style action by governments to boost replacement, renewable sources of energy. It's not rocket science and it is doable. So let's get on and do it and stop listening to the moaners and whingers who complain that global warming is all a big conspiracy - are people sick or something?

"We need wind energy, say experts"

2009-11-26T07:36:00.004Z

So said the BBC Radio 4 presenter, Sarah Montague, this morning. She appeared to believe in it herself, and tried to back it up with an incredibly vague "say experts".

Let's us put aside the vague term 'experts'. What experts? Energy experts? Renewable energy experts? Climate change experts? Because renewable energy 'experts' will tell you, they are currently inefficient, unreliable and an expensive form of reliable energy. They are not even contested points! That's not to say that I, personally, in my non-expert opinion, think we should have none.

'Racist' or Racist?

2009-11-25T16:51:00.010Z

The avowedly left -wing newspaper The Guardian has a news report close to their hearts as their lead story, headline Michelle Obama 'racist' picture that is topping Google Images removed.
The impartial BBC, also covers the story prominently (more often than not taking the lead on story prominence from The Guardian), headline as Michelle Obama racist image sparks Google apology.

No quotations. The problem is that a picture cannot logically be unequivocally considered racist because of differing definitions of racism and of interpretation, The Guardian know this and have sensibly put racist in quotation marks. Yet the impartial BBC's headline does not, implying that the picture is unequivocally racist.

I personally do believe it to be a clearly racist and offensive picture, before Sunny Hundal pops over to call me a frothing rabid extremist. But then I do not claim to be scrupulously impartial. Let us play the devil's advocate. Why do the impartial BBC sub editor(s) feel so unquestionably confident that the picture is racist? They believe that any objection at all is patently incorrect? What exactly is racism? Is it an objective thing that we can palpably touch and feel?

Still, odd, to me at least, that The Guardian, which does not have a pretence of impartiality has avoided value judgements on this news story, with the converse with regards to our dear Beeb. In this instance the Guardian have reported the facts; "Google had refused to remove the offensive image from its picture search listings, despite complaints that it is racist" [my emphasis added]. Whereas the BBC says, not that there have been complaints that it is racist, but that it IS racist.

"Electing Police Chiefs would Undermine Democracy"

2009-11-21T14:00:00.002Z

The Tories plan to ensure that police commissioners are accountable and elected by the public. Sounds like an excellent idea. We have so many unelected officials dictating our lives, why not start a process where people in authority are actually accountable to the electorate?

The police chiefs aren't happy of course, they could be out of a job, but the counter-argument seems to me ridiculously oxymoronic. They are saying that having elected police commissioners would undermine democracy. What a bizarre statement.

Sir Hugh Orde hits out at Tory police plans

Sir Hugh said any idea the police were under "political influence" could undermine democracy.

Political influence undermining democracy? So being accountable to the people you serve is undemocratic?

Devil's Kitchen says my thoughts in his usual no holds barred style.

Labour not too keen on free speech and democracy

2009-10-24T14:00:00.004+01:00

Ministers warn of poll boost for BNP after Question Time

Perhaps we should ban Labour from appearing on the box, lest they get a poll boost too.

It's the biggest story on the Guardian website. But sometimes we all agree that gagging is immoral.

Muesli munching, goatee stroaking, free range, bollock free, nampy pambies...

2009-10-24T13:43:00.005+01:00

are imposing their fucking stupid ideologies, on the rest of us:

BBC's attempt at re-writing nursery rhymes to be happy fucking clappy liberal hippy shite. No longer did Little Miss Muffin run away from the spider who sat down beside her. No. She fucking well made friends with it! LITTLE MISS MUFFET MAKES FRIENDS WITH SPIDER. Wtf guys.

And...

More Guardian obsessive compulsive disorder from Waltham Forest and Newham councils which have decreed that schools must close for Muslim, Sikh and Hindu holidays. Jews outnumber Sikhs in the area yet their holidays are not in the socialist council decree. Wtf guys? At least attempt some consistency you fucking heathens.

Update: Private Eye reports the two councils have had this policy since the 80's!

PC FAIL: School says no to 500 year old traditional English folk dance because somebody might take offence... of the traditional black face paint

2009-06-29T19:04:00.012+01:00

from the right wing tabloid let's kill teh immigrants... The Guardian newspaper.

A troupe of morris dancers who smear black makeup across their faces as part of their traditional costume were prevented from performing at a primary school in Gravesend, Kent, because of fears that they could cause offence. Peter Hargreaves, of the Motley Morris group, said the school asked if they would perform without blackened faces but they refused. Hazel King, headteacher at Chantry primary, said: "We found ourselves weighing up any potential offence versus not wishing to compromise the morris dancers' tradition. It's a 'damned if we do, damned if we don't' scenario."

Welcome to the 21st century where "potential" "offence" means that traditions that stretch back centuries are effectively completely censured by imagined "offence" - that terrible and pervasive disease of modern times, anyone can catch it any time and the results are dire. A bit like swine flu.

Sorry to be so boorishly predictable and terribly "right wing", but I wonder if any ethnic dances or expressions will be redacted or withdrawn for potential offence at this school? I wonder if some of the less than Gentlemanly verses from the Quran will be censured during Religious Studies? ... I wouldn't mind so much -- if there was a hint of consistency in any of this hyper-political correctness guff.

UK Prisons are "universities of terror"

2009-06-13T12:54:00.003+01:00

So says Professor Michael Clarke at The Independent.

The director of Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) warned a series of successful police operations have turned prisons into "universities of terror".

He said security services may look back at the last eight years as a "golden age of counter terrorism" marked by success and good luck.

Mr Clarke said: "The phenomenon will not wither away in the near future: it is likely to be generational.

"All the available evidence is that radicalisation of alienated Muslim youth in the UK can taken place very rapidly as long as it is based somewhere on personal contact."

Mr Clarke said the evolution of recruitment and terrorist techniques of British cells is "entirely possible" as they learn from their mistakes.

He added: "Most of the plotters have left behind a trail of forensics behind that has led some police professionals to predict that this will seem like a golden age of counter terrorism, when we were both successful and lucky."

Prison staff urgently need to be trained to combat radicalisation and prison gangs need to be severely dealt with.

There's been a terrible mixup... you're son is black

2009-06-13T11:38:00.004+01:00

...there was a terrible mix-up when the wrong sperm was mistakenly used by the hospital fertility clinic the couple attended in their hope of becoming parents.

The result is that while Keith, 47, and his 46-year-old wife Catherine are white, their son is black.

Hahahaha! Hahaha, hahaha. I'm sorry it's just the way they have managed to word it. From none other than the Daily Mail.

"James W. Von Brunn and the Poison of Racist Collectivism"

2009-06-11T12:22:00.001+01:00

On Wednesday, according to news reports, James W. Von Brunn, a longtime belligerent racist and anti-Semite, walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and opened fire, murdering a security guard before he himself was shot and neutralized. Good people everywhere recognize the vicious criminality of his attack, and the particular insidiousness of his motivation to lash out where he did.

In reflecting on this tragedy, it is an appropriate time to contemplate the sanctity of innocent life, the horror that is unleashed by bigotry and intolerance, and the fragility of peaceful human relations. We should all be thankful that such hate-motivated violence is rarer in modern America than it has been in other places and times.

Unfortunately, many commentators have found a political, even partisan, lesson to be learned. They have said this vindicates the Department of Homeland Security document circulated earlier this year that warned against "right-wing extremists." Specifically, they have said that those who criticized the report were wrong all along.

But what were the criticisms? I recall no one arguing that anti-Semitic murderers were not criminals whose acts were horrific and uncivilized. There was no critic of the report, so far as I know, who complained that such antisocial elements as Ku Klux Klan members, Timothy McVeigh wannabes, and bigoted criminals, did not deserve the condemnation that all of civil society heaps upon them.

The problem with the report was that it painted all so-called "right-wing extremists" with an absurdly and obscenely broad brush. It lumped together the above violent agitators with peaceful political activists and recently returning veterans. It warned about people who are anti-government, anti-Federal Reserve, anti-gun control, anti-illegal immigration and anti-abortion.

Read the rest

YouGov president 'startled' that 59% of BNP voters were Labour sympathisers

2009-06-08T16:04:00.003+01:00

YouGov President Peter Kellner gives his views on the findings of their unique survey into BNP voters and their attitudes

But perhaps the most startling finding came when we tested anecdotal reports that many BNP voters were old Labour sympathisers who felt that the party no longer speaks up for them. It turns out to be true. As many as 59 per cent of BNP voters think that Labour "used to care about the concerns of people like me but doesn’t nowadays".

Channel 4 News

It begs the question why would it be such a surprise?

I think the answer lies in the BNP = right wing meme, which fails at many levels with their socialist and protectionist economic ideas, Griffin's sniping at privatisation and big greedy corporations etc. As Dizzy put it the other day; the BNP are ignorant white-power socialists.

Fascism and National Socialism were seen as "the third way, neither right nor left". It's true they incorporate elements from both left and right. So how exactly does the ring-wing tag make sense?

Muslims, Fuck Yeah!

2009-05-30T01:57:00.004+01:00

Muslims opposing the scum bag wankers

I thought the Daily Mail was supposed to be the 4th Reich... Perhaps they have let their propaganda department slip...

Hat tip HP

The Guardian's Dream Team, Che and Fidel, And What You Can Really Achieve!

2009-05-27T14:44:00.005+01:00

The lessons of Che and Fidel

The friendship of Guevara and Castro reminds us what Latin Americans can achieve by taking politics into their own hands

Oh what one can achieve! Oh my! If only!

Well here's a few pointers on what they could achieve; courtesy of Edmund Standing @ Harry's Place

1. Hatred. Che wanted to see 'Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine'. He considered Americans to be 'hyenas … fit only for extermination'.
2. Mass murder. Che wanted to launch a nuclear attack on New York City. He desired 'atomic extermination' of the 'hyenas' (read civilians) who lived there and in November 1962 he boasted to The London Daily Worker of the nuclear weapons, 'We would have used them against the very heart of the US, including New York City'. Even Che's sympathetic interviewer from the Daily Worker considered him to be 'crackers from the way he went on about the missiles'. It's only thanks to the intervention of Nikita Khrushchev that Che's plans came to nothing.
3. Terrorism. With the nuclear attack plans shelved, Che instead attempted to launch a terrorist campaign in New York City. Had it have worked, Macy's, Gimbels, Bloomingdales, and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal would have been hit with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. To give some perspective, the 2004 Madrid train bombings used 100 kilos of TNT and killed and maimed almost 2,000 people.
4. Sacrificing the people of Cuba. At the First Latin American Youth Congress in July 1959, Che proudly claimed: 'These people [of Cuba] you see today tell you that even if they should disappear from the face of the earth because an atomic war is unleashed in their names … they would feel completely happy and fulfilled'.
5. Executions without trial. Che delighted in ordering and carrying out executions and considered the need to present a legal case and to give the accused the right to defend him or herself to be 'archaic bourgeois details'. 'I don't need proof to execute a man, I only need proof that it's necessary to execute him!', Che declared in 1959.
6. Persecution of gay men. In Che's Cuba, 'effeminate behaviour' became a crime and gay men were consigned to forced labour camps with the words 'Work Will Make Men Out of You' posted over the entry gates.
7. Totalitarianism. Che demanded that 'individualism must disappear!' Perhaps his greatest support for this principle is found in his relationship with the USSR. Indeed, according to KGB official Alexander Alexiev, 'Che was practically the architect of the Soviet-Cuban relationship'

Those whom get all dreamy eyed about these despots, are frankly, cunts.

And while I'm there; there's too many of these trustafarians and the prolier-than-thou champagne socialists like privately educated Zoe Williams (who think that privately funded schools should be banned and kids educated there should be 'sent to the back of the queue') who actually get paid to write this kind of crap for the Guardian.

Israel stands ready to bomb Iran's nuclear sites

2009-04-18T12:13:00.002+01:00

Okay, okay, these stories have been ten-a-penny for the past few years. But with the right-wing that have been given a mandate by the Israelis this could prove to be a major set back for the Islamic Republics' nuclear dreams.

The Times

Due to an administrative error, Millions of prayers are void

2009-04-05T21:53:00.002+01:00

Oops.

Some 200 mosques in Islam's holiest city, Mecca, point the wrong way for prayers, reports from Saudi Arabia say.

All mosques have a niche showing the direction of the most sacred Islamic site, the Kaaba, an ancient cube-like building in Mecca's Grand Mosque.

But people looking down from recently built high-rises in Mecca found the niches in many older mosques were not pointing directly towards the Kaaba.

Some worshippers are said to be anxious about the validity of their prayers.

In the thick of the skinny latte riot

2009-04-05T20:34:00.001+01:00

I get a call that says it’s all kicking off round the corner: “They’ve arrested the giant bunny.” The police cordon closes in to practise the ancient Metropolitan tactic of crowd control by bladder control: after four hours of pelvic clenching, Tank Girl activists will be reduced to promising, crosslegged, that they will never ever have another contrarian thought if they’re just allowed into the bogs at Starbucks.

I show the top lackey of the capitalist conspiracy my press pass. “Take your glasses off,” he says. “What’s the name on the card?” Well it’s mine of course. “Okay. You can go. Nice outfit.”

A few streets away on Bishopsgate it’s another world. I know it’s another world because there are lots of banners saying what we need is another world. One huge one says “Nature doesn’t do bailouts”. It seems to me nature has been doing nothing but bailing out for 10m years. This is the climate camp, a tented suburb of whimsy with Buddhists chanting meditations for peace, teachins, sit-ins, afternoon tea and quite a lot of snogging, scratching and nit-picking.

These are the young people who you’d be proud to have as children: committed, caring, visionary, smiley and moral without prudery. You just wouldn’t want to talk to them much, or share a towel. I bump into Emily Sheffield, deputy editor of Vogue. She's here with a photographer, an assistant and a picture editor. They’re doing a story on pretty eco-warriors. She tells me they were caught in that beastly cordon and the police wouldn’t let them out.

Read the rest, by AA Gill in The Times

BBC's 1Xtra: A Positive Force?

2009-03-17T22:17:00.002Z

Rightnotracist.org has an article on and is planning a series focusing on the 1Xtra music station, suggesting that they are "actually pumping out a lot of subversive and negative content".

Some lyrics RnR has picked up on

Dappy:
One Day I Had to Punch up This One Youth for Tryin Make a Fool of Me
In My Hood theres Only So Many Opportunities
Look, I Carry a Tool [=weapon, looks like he means gun] for My Pride and My Jewelry
Now I Find Myself Stuck Serving the Community

Look At All These Youths Today
Rollin Round with 38s [=guns]
Stickin Breddas [=stabbing or sticking up other blokes] For the White Gold Chains Like*sound of gunshot*
Look I Didnt Mean To Hurt You Mate
Faze:
Back In the Day I Used To Roll With Like 30 Mates
Never Had Clean Money [=legitimately earned money]
Always Had Dirty Papes [=paper money?]

Being out on the Grind [=the daily grind of selling drugs/hustling] and Washing [=washing rocks of crack cocaine] for like 30 Days

This is was the yoofs are listening too. Not very Reithian is it? Lord Reith famously said the BBC is to educate, inform and entertain. When he said educate, I don't think he meant on the finer details of gang culture...

Can't say I've personally stayed tuned to it longer than a couple of minutes, I often heard Drum & Bass on there, which I have been particularly fond of in the past, though I feel a slight annoyance at the thought that I've seen really quite a small number of black people and Drum & bass events in London. The crowd is mostly white, as are most of the DJ's and producers. I'm a bit confused why the BBC have labelled it as black music, it evolved from early 90's rave music which developed from the late 80's acid house scene. Indeed the comprehensive Wikipedia article makes no mention at all of blackness or black issues, or it's association with black people.

It had nothing to do with colour then, in the early 90's when the rave scene started to split, where you had the various factions, house, techno, hardcore and jungle. Jungle did have some yardie elements in the early 90's but this has long moved away from the evolving scene, which was quite quickly to be known as drum & bass. It does annoy me that the BBC have decided that yup, drum & bass is black. The music is certainly not 'black'. It's multi racial. Hmm. I'll be following RnR on the 1Xtra series of articles closely.

Infallible Pope Says Something Retarded

2009-03-17T16:47:00.005Z

Oh dear...

Pope Benedict XVI has said that handing out condoms is not the answer in the fight against HIV/Aids, as he makes his first visit to Africa as pontiff.

I know that the papists aren't too keen on the old contraception, or sex in general really unless the goal is to sprout another sprog. Sexual intercourse, which apparently unbeknownst to the Pope, is an expression of a very strong and primitive emotion that would require, well, the patience of saint, to abstain from normal life. Newsflash Mr Pope, condoms save lives. Not that I particularly expect the head of a made up religion to be too familiar with that what we commonly refer to as 'reality'.

Update: The Onion is there: Starving Third World Masses Warned Against Evils Of Contraception

"Pro-war locals" marr "anti-war" demonstration

2009-03-12T09:54:00.003Z

The Independent says the locals who were offended (by the soldier parade in Luton picketed by glorifiers of terrorism) as “pro-war” and the Al-Muhajiroun bunch were “anti-war”

…the march was marred by ugly scenes as pro-war locals, enraged by the protesters’ banners proclaiming “Anglian Soldiers: Butchers of Basra” and their chants of “Burn in Hell”, turned on them and began shouting their own abuse. Police were forced to make two arrests and had to protect the anti-war protesters from the angry crowd.

And notice who does the ‘marring’.

What is wrong with the left in this country?

Change.... Wooo!

2009-03-11T21:28:00.002Z

U.S. President Barack Obama will not cut the billions of dollars in military aid promised to Israel, a senior U.S. administration official said Wednesday.

The $30 billion in aid promised to Israel over the next decade will not be harmed by the world financial crisis, the official told Israel Radio. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

Haaretz

Here's Randy Marsh on Obama

Right not Racist

2009-03-10T20:28:00.004Z

from Anti-racism from the Right at Harry's Place

a new blog has been set up in support of anti-racism from the perspective of Conservative voters:

Most people in the UK do not vote for left-wing parties.
Most people in the UK reject what the BNP stands for.
Yet where there is any form of coordinated response to the BNP, it is always run by left wing groups, frequantly far-left groups.
The symbol of the Anti Nazi League was a RED arrow, denoting its socialist roots. We have re-appropriated it as a BLUE arrow, to show that it is not only Socialists who can oppose extremist parties like the BNP.
At marches, demos and events like Rise Against Racism and Rock Against Racism, there is a distinct atmosphere of left-wing, socialist dominance. This makes it very intimidating for anyone who opposes the BNP but does not believe in socialism.
There is a subtle and dangerous implication in these events that ALL people with any kind of right-of-centre political views are not welcome, because they are somehow complicit with the BNP simply on account of their political conscience.
It is patently dangerous and stupid to discourage a whole section of society from registering disapproval of the BNP just because they happen to vote e.g. Conservative.

This is good news, and let’s hope to see more moderate Conservatives standing up in a similar way. There is nothing intrinsically ‘right-wing’ about racial hatred, as segements of the left are currently more than adequately demonstrating. Racism can and should be opposed by all decent people of all political persuasions.

As a Tory myself this gets my full support.

Celeb Gossip! Snoop Dogg belongs to Nation of Islam

2009-03-03T16:13:00.002Z

Reported all around the media, under Entertainment! Gossip! and Bizarre! columns as that celeb rapper Snoop Dogg (who is a massive idol for MILLIONS of young people around the world) who belongs to Nation of Islam.

They all parrot his lines about being for peace etc. The BBC goes one step further and states matter of factly It preaches self-reliance for black people within an Islamic framework.

None of the media articles explain the nature of Nation of Islam. None mention that their leader is banned from entering the United Kingdom. None mention that one of the central tenets of their cult is that Whites and Jews are devils, or at best 'they are potential human beings'. They believe the races should not mix.

Would a white celebrity be able to join a racist cult and get away with a dulcet line about a framework for "self-reliance" on the BBC, and a few parrot lines in the media about "being for peace"?

FFS.

Huffpo Red in the Face Over Fox News Hoax

2009-02-21T19:01:00.003Z

Portfolio.com

Lazy Iraqi Police get motivational speech

2009-02-21T19:00:00.001Z

Brilliant!

Google gone wrong

2009-01-31T14:56:00.002Z

No this site will categorically not harm your computer! I've requested the Googloids reassess the site, which can take weeks apparently. I presume it's some bot, I'd be interested to know how on earth it came to it's decision though!

Err W T F ?!!

Something seems to have gone horribly wrong at Google. I tried to hyperlink 'bot' to Wikipedia - Google says that too is malware!

Free Speech under attack in Netherlands

2009-01-22T09:12:00.001Z

The limits of free speech and Dutch tolerance are to be tested in a court case after judges ruled yesterday that a right-wing MP who compared the Koran to Mein Kampf should be put on trial for inciting hatred and discrimination.

The Times

Gaza: satirizing world media

2009-01-17T10:10:00.001Z

Protesting the war on Hamas

2008-12-30T08:00:00.005Z

Activists in Yemen

Activist in Manhattan, USA

Of course there's legitimate protests against Israeli action resulting in civilian deaths. But the media will generally shy away from pointing out in each protest crowd around the world will be people shouting for Jihad, and people just being openly anti-semitic.

Why does Israels greater enemies not attack?

2008-12-28T21:51:00.003Z

A somewhat sobering analysis by Herb Keinon in the Jerusalem Post [emphasis added]. It's easy for the Western press to lament and ruminate on the actions of the Israeli military from the comfort and security of their flat or house in suburbia in the West. If the UK were bombarded with missiles we would expect no less than a massive and overwhelming response to say to our enemies that is utterly unacceptable, and so that they would be afraid to attack. We in the UK have the Trident nuclear deterrent.

The Hebrew newspapers, over the last few days, have taken to printing on their front pages maps of areas that could be reached by missiles from Gaza. The purpose of these maps is unclear: is it to warn, to educate or to scare?

Either way, the maps miss the mark, for - as most everyone in this country understand inherently - most of Israel can be hit by missiles from somewhere, either from Gaza in the south, or from Lebanon, Syria and even Iran in the north and east. Israel can be hit by Hamas' short range kassams, Hizbullah's mid-range katyushas, or Syria and Iran's long range ballistic missiles.

In short, we are all petty much inside the missile range of our enemies.

Then why don't they strike? Why aren't the missile falling everywhere, at all times, like they have been doing in the communities around Gaza for the last eight years. It's obviously not because Hizbullah or Syria have turned into Lovers of Zion, and it's not because they can't or don't have the ability to strike. They don't fire because they don't want to, because they realize that it they did, they would pay an insufferable price.

Hizbullah has taken a strategic decision that - at least for now - it is not in its interest to hit Israel. The Second Lebanon War, with all its problems, did deliver to Hizbullah and Lebanon a mighty blow, and as a result, there has been some 30 months of quiet in the north. Hizbullah is arming, yet quiet prevails.

Moreover, the London-based newspaper Al-Hayat quoted a Hizbullah source Sunday as saying his organization would not join Hamas and open a second front in the current fighting because it was not interested in a conflict with Israel at this time. In other words, it was concerned about the Israeli reaction.

Trying to duplicate that equation in the south is what lies behind Operation Cast Lead.

The goal is not to take out all the rockets and missiles in the Gaza Strip - at this point a seemingly impossible task - but rather to uproot from Hamas the desire to launch those missiles and rockets by smacking the organization so hard it will think innumerable times before returning to its old modus operandi.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been careful in setting modest goals for the operation: there is no grandiose talk of destroying Hamas, or even destroying their ability to hit Israel. They are talking about changing the security environment in the south, and the way they want to do this is not by uprooting all the missile launchers in Gaza, but rather by uprooting the will inside Hamas to launch their missiles - not because they can't, but because they are simply afraid to.

Israel and Defense: What woud we do?

2008-12-28T14:15:00.004Z

"For us to be asked to have a cease-fire with Hamas is like asking you to have a cease-fire with Al-Qaida," Barak said in an interview with Fox News. "It's something we cannot really accept."

- Israeli Denfense Minister Ehud Barak

Haaretz

BBC article says Iraq has been destroyed

2008-12-16T21:06:00.002Z

Iraq has been destroyed, according to the BBC

Iraqi doctor's road to radicalism

"The destruction of his home country was the catalyst."

Of course before 2003, Iraq was a fully functioning pluralist democracy before Bushs' neo-con war with the Muslims, with no genocide or anything like that, and 100% votes for the ruling party. Beat that! No wonder this NHS doctor wanted to kill people!

Vote for your comic-in-chief, Obama or McCain

2008-10-17T14:30:00.001+01:00

These really are a breath of fresh air

Chris Morris's new film needs funding

2008-10-08T16:43:00.002+01:00

Chris Morris's new film script satirises a British jihad cell and would be suicide bombers.

He's hoping to have it funded by donations. At the moment you just send an email to the address below and then they put you on the mailing list.

fundingmentalism@warpfilms.com

At the moment the detonator's going off and you're part of it but until the effect has gone exponential, your mails are being sorted by one person so bear with me.

Many people have asked us exactly what the Four Lions project is. Clearly we can't launch the film before its been shot, but I've pulled together a few paragraphs from the paperwork that's been flying around. Its shameless hype but its accurate – unlike almost everything you will have read in the press. No one who has read the
script could disagree with a word here.

In three years of research, Chris Morris has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims. Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce.

At training camps young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other's feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says "what was the question again?" On millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank.

Terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five a side football teams. There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry. Terrorism is about ideology, but it's also about berks.

Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge. It understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous. As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis.

As for your offer, we're hoping to set up a one click pay scheme soon. We'll let you know.

Hope that helps

Deirdre Steed.

PS Please pass this on to ten more people.

Boris Johnson should run the Met

2008-10-03T15:18:00.001+01:00

To understand the mentality of our quangocrats and their apologists, read the main story in today's Guardian: "Revealed: the Tory plot that forced out Met chief Blair". Plot? Yes, apparently so. The Grauniad reveals, in shocked tones, that Boris Johnson told Sir Ian Blair to resign. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! You mean a mere politician, a man with the third largest personal mandate in Europe after the French and Portuguese presidents, dared to give more weight to his six million constituents than to a single unelected functionary?

Daniel Hannan at the Telegraph

Alice Walker, writing for the Guardian, wants Britain to be lead by a Fidel Castro

2008-09-21T22:35:00.008+01:00

Alice walker writing at Moonbat central, the Guardian's Comment is Free, wants our country to be like Cuba and be run by a Fidel Castro.

Imagine. A leader not afraid to be out in the streets with them, a leader not ashamed to show himself as troubled and humbled as they were. A leader who would not leave them to wonder and worry alone, but would stand with them, walk with them, celebrate with them - whatever the parade might be.This is what I want for our country, more than anything.

Alice Walker you are one useless, naive, deluded, bourgeois berk aren't you?

From Wikipedia, Cuba - Domestic Politics

No political party is permitted to nominate candidates or campaign on the island, though the Communist Party of Cuba has held five party congress meetings since 1975. In 1997 the party claimed 780,000 members, and representatives generally constitute at least half of the Councils of state and the National Assembly. The remaining positions are filled by candidates nominally without party affiliation. Other political parties campaign and raise finances internationally, while activity within Cuba by oppositional groups is minimal and illegal. While the Cuban constitution has language pertaining to freedom of speech, rights are limited by Article 62, which states that "None of the freedoms which are recognized for citizens can be exercised contrary to... the existence and objectives of the socialist state, or contrary to the decision of the Cuban people to build socialism and communism.^[70] Violations of this principle can be punished by law." Because the means of production are in the hands of the state and under the control of the government, there have been numerous cases where violations of this law have cost dissidents their employment.

Cuba - Human Rights Abuses

The Cuban government has been accused of numerous human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials, and extra-judicial executions.^[85] Dissidents complain of harassment and torture.^[86] While the Cuban government placed a moratorium on capital punishment in 2001, it made an exception for perpetrators of an armed hijacking 2 years later. Groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued reports on Cuban prisoners of conscience.^[87] Opponents claim the Cuban government represses free expression by limiting access to the Internet.^[88]

Human Rights Watch claims that the true number of political prisoners may well be vastly understated.^[89] According to Human Rights Watch, political prisoners, along with the rest of Cuba's prison population, are confined to jails with substandard and unhealthy conditions.^[89]

In the last weeks of March 2003 the Cuban government sentenced 75 members of the opposition to prison terms of up to 28 years. The activists were charged with "disrespect" toward the Revolution, “treason,” and “giving information to the enemy,” in the harshest backlash against peaceful dissent that the island had seen in years.^[90]^[91] Since 2003 human rights supporters have sent thousands of appeals to the Cuban authorities calling for the release of the prisoners. The numbers of recognized political prisoners varies over time, increasing and decreasing with circumstances. However all former political prisoners are subject to arbitrary re-arrest.^[92] Political arrests continue.^[93]

Yet America is the root of all evil, isn't that right? Guantanamo bay! The stolen election from Kerry! America, the fascist state!

Why are there so many useless berkshire hunts that write for the Guardian?

/rant

What knife crime 'epidemic'?

2008-09-21T12:38:00.003+01:00

Lamented Sunny Hundal with his Comment is Free article.

The Telegraph as investigated the issue, see the article Knife crime worse than thought

Police figures released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that forces in England and Wales are on course to record a total of 38,000 serious knife crimes this year – more than 100 a day.

The figure is at least two-thirds higher than last year's total of 22,151 offences, announced by the Home Office in July when it unveiled its first annual count of knife crimes.

The sharp rise has come about because ministers have changed the counting rules, in response to complaints that key categories of crime were excluded from last year's total.

As a result, this year's statistics will not be directly comparable with last year's. Critics said this defeated the purpose of introducing the knife crime count, which was intended to allow police to monitor year-on-year trends.
...The reason for the increase is that knife offences categorised as actual bodily harm, rape, sexual assault or threats to kill, which were all excluded from last year's knife crime count, are all included this year.

Yeh. Why on earth would you include ABH, rape or threats to kill? Don't be silly! That'll put the figures up!

Cases of wounding, grievous bodily harm and knifepoint robbery, which made up the bulk of last year's figures, will continue to be included this year. Mere illegal possession of a knife is not counted in the totals; if it was, the figures would be much higher.
...Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said it was alarming that the Government was underestimating the scale of knife crime.
He said: "Knife crime is a scourge that is harming and all too often destroying young lives up and down the country. You cannot begin to combat a problem if you cannot even measure it accurately."

Sunny says "In practice, that means certain "suspicious-looking" (read: black) kids will be harassed". He thinks that police targeting knife crime will mean black people will be stopped and searched, not because they may look suspicious with their personally aggressive behaviour, their hand in the pants as if they are packing heat, and LA crips style of dress; but because they have darker skin you see. That's because all police are white and racist. You'll see, if police go after knife crime we'll see a stark increase in black catholic nuns being searched and aggressively put in custody. Sure ting.

Tories at 52%

2008-09-17T20:38:00.004+01:00

My membership card to the Evil Club came through today. It was £25 to join for a year. I was hoping to go to the Tory conference. Until I found out it you actually had to pay to go to it, and then realised the cost of hotels, and thought of my paid holiday days being used up at a party political conference. I think I made the right decision.

Iain Martin at Telegraph blog points me to this poll, due to be officially released midnight tonight. Bring on the Cameroonians. We're all tired off this Labour government. You've had your go, now hop it Brown and call an election. (I wont be holding my breath)

Still, there's resurgence in the Labour party ranks for a leadership challenge, and Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, says that Labour is 'finished'.

Palin signed off policy to charge rape victims for test kits, another smear?

2008-09-13T19:12:00.007+01:00

This is one helluva shocker. It seems that Sarah Palin signed off on a policy to charge rape victims' insurance companies for the cost of 'rape kits' which it is believed include emergency contraception - something generally opposed by anti-abortionists such as Palin.

Hat tip: Harry's Place

Update: This repulsive practice is not a one off to Alaska, it's also occurred in North Carolina. Some of the commenter's at Harry's Place are claiming it as another smear, as it's not just happened under Palin as a Republican, but in other states under Democrats too.

Palin did however say the only case abortion would be acceptable, including her own daughter, would be if her life was at stake. So if her daughter were raped, she would still oppose abortion. This thinking really is backwards. Overturning Roe v Wade would be a very bad idea indeed.

The rest of her doesn’t seem so bad. I don’t mind so much that she wants creationism to be taught in schools. She hasn’t actually said she’s a creationist herself. It’s not the end of the world if it’s taught in schools. Kids aren’t stupid. They’ll likely to believe what their parents believe, and argue that case at school. My 2 pence

Yes Prime Minister On the Arabs, Israel and the UN

2008-09-13T15:45:00.003+01:00

Interesting to note their take on the Foreign Office as being very pro-Arab and somewhat anti-Israel, to ensure reliable oil supplies to the UK. And Sir Humphreys's description of the UN is hilarious.

The aim of the game

2008-09-11T12:50:00.002+01:00

An unexpected and brilliantly put article at The Register regarding the liquid bomb plot, by Lewis Page who used to be a mine clearance diving officer in the Royal Navy. My emphasis added.

The message is clear - the British courts are fair, or anyway their juries are. You will be given the benefit of the doubt in a jury trial, even if you are a dark-skinned bearded man with a scary name; even if you have made suicide videos and you admit up front that it was your plan to let off high explosives in a crowded public place. If the prosecutors can't prove beyond reasonable doubt that you were also going to blow up a plane, you still won't be convicted of trying to.
Frankly, if I was the Home Secretary I'd be making a massive propaganda coup out of this - not thinking about wasting a shipload of taxpayers' money on a retrial. (That would be expensive. Lawyers and judges are paid a lot more than either prison guards or surveillance teams, and you'd still need screws and spooks afterwards even if the retrial was "successful".)

It seems that the British security services are pointing the finger at America over the failure to make the airliner charges stick. It's being said that US-inspired haste at the Pakistani end of the operation meant the UK cops had to move too soon, before the bombers had even bought their airline tickets. Everyone's moaning about the pesky Americans going off half-cocked.

But what's the aim of the game here? Is it victory to get a longer jail sentence for a terrorist? One might argue that once you're talking about jail you're talking about damage limitation after a defeat, not victory of any kind.

Victory, you might say, is when a young man meets a Taliban or al-Q recruiter - travelling in Pakistan, at the mosque back home, at university, wherever - and finds himself unconvinced. That sort of genuine and elegant victory, you could argue, is more likely following this week's results - not less.
And it just could be that this time the hasty Americans in Pakistan, triggering an early end to the UK surveillance operation, have actually done us a favour. Possibly the accused men were planning mass murder, as the prosecution contends: but the cause of Western democracy gains a lot more by showing the world the manifold excellences of trial by jury than it could ever lose by failing to make that charge stick.

The Independent: Palin has floored the left

2008-09-09T13:21:00.004+01:00

It is one of the most cherished illusions of the left that conviction politicians of the right are stupid: not just wrong, but actually obtuse. The consequences of such prejudice are obvious: colossal underestimation, leading to blind arrogance, and thus electoral defeat.
Margaret Thatcher – "that stupid woman" – was a great (and grateful) beneficiary of this collective conceit of the British left ; in the United States it was even truer of the career of Ronald Reagan – who also happened to be the most popular American politician of the post-war era.
How, with his simple faith, apparently eternal optimism and starry-eyed reverence for the American flag could Ronald Reagan be anything other than "an amiable dunce"? Only a simple idiot would, as President, dare to denounce the Soviet Union "an evil empire", surely? How could anyone except a man still thinking that he was on a film set possibly say "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall"? Yet when the Berlin Wall was duly dismantled, Reagan's political opponents – who included the entire European social democratic movement – could not bear to contemplate the fact that this ex-Hollywood actor had understood the inherent rottenness of socialist economics far more profoundly than they.

Read the rest

Lefties, if you want Obama to win you're going to need a little humility, a little less arrogance, and just generally a more constructive narrative for America's future. All this bitching creates sympathy for Palin, beseiged by the biased and snobbish media...

Nick Cohen: When Barack's berserkers lost the plot

2008-09-07T12:40:00.004+01:00

My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.

Read the rest.

It doesn't take much for the visceral hatred on the left to bubble to the surface and then the bitching and the smearing starts. As Charles Johnson puts it, partly thanks to the leftist attack dogs, Sarah Palin is now more popular than McCain or Obama.

Paid UN Climate Change Industry Honcho says don't eat meat, save the world.

2008-09-07T12:09:00.004+01:00

This is the front page headline for the Guardian on Sunday's paper, The Observer.

If these muesli munching, carrot sucking bruschetta loving lefties really want to help reduce human pollution and save the planet, best thing they can do is STOP HAVING CHILDREN.

Assuming said muesli munchers will teach their children to recycle their Guardian newspapers, and to to buy only Sainsbury's Organic range till the day they die, an inactive human who just breathes will exhale 350 litres of CO2 in just one day. This does not take in to account all the hot-air that said offspring would produce at dinner parties or any flying around in order to attend climate change conferences.

If all Guardian readers where to take this simple and easy step, the benefit to the planet would be immense.

It's not all doom and gloom

2008-09-06T19:02:00.000+01:00

SIR – The son of friends of ours, recently home from Afghanistan to attend the funeral of a fellow officer who had been killed there, was returning by train to Oxford when he was approached by the guard.

The guard checked his warrant and requested that the soldier follow him. On asking the reason, the guard replied: “Sir, on my train you travel first class.”

Jill Ensom, Kingswood, Surrey

Letters: We should learn from America’s respect for its Armed Forces

Orwell's 1984: Supposed to be a warning, not a policy document for New Labour

2008-09-06T18:17:00.003+01:00

An early 20th century poster for the Conservative party

The Telegraph reports that children as young as eight are being recruited to snoop on their neighbours for councils around the country.

The Telegraph's comment on this made me laugh

It has become a cliché to describe many of the developments in modern Britain as ''Orwellian": the CCTV cameras, the databases, the cloying bureaucracy. Yet the news that children as young as eight are being recruited as local authority snoopers really does come straight from the pages of 1984. In Orwell's dystopian nightmare, the children are encouraged to denounce their parents. When Winston Smith, the book's anti-hero, is being interrogated in prison, his work colleague Parsons is brought in for shouting ''Down with Big Brother".

''Of course I'm guilty!" cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. ''You don't think the Party would arrest

''Who denounced you?" asked Winston. ''It was my little daughter," said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. ''She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact, I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway." Using children to shop adults to local bureaucrats is the hallmark of totalitarian despotisms down the ages. In East Germany - as in 1984 - it was considered a sign of ideological purity rewarded with elevation in the ranks of the party. Here, children are being offered £500. It is grotesque. Orwell's novel was meant to be a warning, not a policy document for a future Labour government.

Heh. Counting the days to a Conservative government...

Scumbag Hoteliers Refuse Room for Soldier back from Afghanistan

2008-09-04T13:33:00.001+01:00

A soldier home on leave after being injured in Afghanistan was refused a room by a hotel when he showed his military ID card at reception.
Corporal Tomos Stringer, 23, from Gwynedd, was visiting a wounded colleague in Surrey when he was turned away from the Metro Hotel in Woking.
He spent the night in his car after being told it was management policy not to accept military personnel

Boycott the Metro Hotel. Call them, email them and complain. I can't help but say this hotelier is a SCUM BAG!

BBC News

Pakistani politician has defends a decision to bury five women alive because they wanted to choose their own husbands

2008-09-01T12:26:00.001+01:00

Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents Baluchistan province, told a stunned parliament that northwestern tribesman had done nothing wrong in first shooting the women and then dumping them in a ditch.
"These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them," he said

Telegraph

An argument against 'centuries-old traditions", if ever there was one. Bewilderingly, these kind of incidents are sometimes filmed on state of the art video camera phones. There have been a number of sharia and 'traditional' punishments filmed on cameras and uploaded to video sites.

Welcome to the 21st Century folks.

A "Community Support Officer" tries to stop somebody filming, even though he has no right to

2008-08-31T20:45:00.003+01:00

via Looking for a Voice

Not only does this CSO have no idea about the law, he's also a completely rude and antagonistic twat, and seeminly having a rather basic command of he English language - he begins to loose the argument, then just starts saying "Shut up! Shut up!". How on earth did this man land the job?

What is being taught in Britain's leading mosque?

2008-08-31T19:39:00.002+01:00

What should be done to a Muslim who converts to another faith? "We kill him," she says, "kill him, kill, kill…You have to kill him, you understand?"

Adulterers, she says, are to be stoned to death - and as for homosexuals, and women who "make themselves like a man, a woman like a man ... the punishment is kill, kill them, throw them from the highest place".

These punishments, the preacher says, are to be implemented in a future Islamic state. "This is not to tell you to start killing people," she continues. "There must be a Muslim leader, when the Muslim army becomes stronger, when Islam has grown enough."

A young female student from the group interrupts her: the punishment should also be to stone the homosexuals to death, once they have been thrown from a high place.

The real question is, how has this been allowed? One cannot, especially after numerous undercover operations by journalists, claim ignorance. We knew this was happening, so why the fuck is it still going on? What the fuck have the authorities done to counter the dangerous bile spouted in Mosques up and down the country? If it wasn't already patently obvious, Channel 4's Under Cover Mosque highlighting some of the shocking extremism being preached in Mosques all over the UK. That was a year and a half ago. So what the fucking fuck?

There is a moral responsibility for these hate sermons to come to an end. You want to stop terrorism? Then you need to challenge bigotry wherever you find it, otherwise you are letting in foster and tacitly allowing it. Bigotry leads to hate, which can lead to despicable murderous acts.

It is also of national security interests to ensure our citizens are not being radicalised against others. What have you been doing, the West Midlands Police since the first Undercover Mosque, apart from attempting to take Channel 4 to court?

Under Cover Mosque: The Return is at 8pm on Monday 21st September on Channel 4. A must watch, methinks.

Quoted from the Telegraph

"Muslim council chiefs try to prevent non-Muslims from eating at Ramadan"

2008-08-28T16:50:00.002+01:00

Muslim council leaders have sparked outrage after trying to ban all councillors eating in meetings until sunset during the holy month of Ramadan.
Politicians have hit out after the move to impose hardline Islamic rules on non-Muslim colleagues throughout September.
The bombshell has been dropped by Labour chiefs of the notoriously loony Tower Hamlets Council in east London.
The storm was sparked by an e-mail sent to all councillors this week highlighting arrangements for Town Hall committee meetings next month, which marks the Muslim fasting period of Ramadan.

Read the rest here

I'm sure Sunny Hundal will be digging furiously to 'prove' this was made up by the Evening Standard or some other right wing tabloid source! Let's wait and see.

Johann Hari: We need to stop being such cowards about Islam

2008-08-14T15:30:00.001+01:00

This is a column condemning cowardice – including my own. It begins with the story of a novel you cannot read. The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed that his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.
You cannot read this story today – except in the Koran and the Hadith. The man Mohamed ibn Abdallah became known to Muslims as "the Prophet Mohamed", so our ability to explore this story is stunted. The Jewel of Medina was bought by Random House and primed to be a best-seller – before a University of Texas teacher saw proofs and declared it "a national security issue". Random House had visions of a re-run of the Rushdie or the Danish cartoons affairs. Sherry Jones's publisher has pulped the book. It's gone.
In Europe, we are finally abolishing the lingering blasphemy laws that hinder criticism of Christianity. But they are being succeeded by a new blasphemy law preventing criticism of Islam – enforced not by the state, but by jihadis. I seriously considered not writing this column, but the right to criticise religion is as precious – and hard-won – as the right to criticise government. We have to use it or lose it.
Some people will instantly ask: why bother criticising religion if it causes so much hassle? The answer is: look back at our history. How did Christianity lose its ability to terrorise people with phantasms of sin and Hell? How did it stop spreading shame about natural urges – pre-marital sex, masturbation or homosexuality? Because critics pored over the religion's stories and found gaping holes of logic or morality in them. They asked questions. How could an angel inseminate a virgin? Why does the Old Testament God command his followers to commit genocide? How can a man survive inside a whale?
Reinterpretation and ridicule crow-barred Christianity open. Ask enough tough questions and faith is inevitably pushed farther and farther back into the misty realm of metaphor – where it is less likely to inspire people to kill and die for it. But doubtful Muslims, and the atheists who support them, are being prevented from following this path. They cannot ask: what does it reveal about Mohamed that he married a young girl, or that he massacred a village of Jews who refused to follow him? You don't have to murder many Theo Van Goghs or pulp many Sherry Joneses to intimidate the rest. The greatest censorship is internal: it is in all the books that will never be written and all the films that will never be shot, because we are afraid.
We need to acknowledge the double-standard – and that it will cost Muslims in the end. Insulating a religion from criticism – surrounding it with an electric fence called "respect" – keeps it stunted at its most infantile and fundamentalist stage. The smart, questioning and instinctively moral Muslims – the majority – learn to be silent, or are shunned (at best). What would Christianity be like today if George Eliot, Mark Twain and Bertrand Russell had all been pulped? Take the most revolting rural Alabama church, and metastasise it.
Since Jones has brought it up, let us look at Mohamed's marriage to Aisha as a model for how we can conduct this conversation. It is true those were different times, and it may have been normal for grown men to have sex with prepubescent girls. The sources are not clear on this point. But whatever culture you live in, having sex when your body is not physically developed can be an excruciatingly painful experience. Among Vikings, it was more normal than today to have your arm chopped off, but that didn't mean it wasn't agony. If anything, Jones's book whitewashes this, suggesting that Mohamed's "gentleness" meant Aisha enjoyed it.
The story of Aisha also prompts another fundamentalist-busting discussion. You cannot say that Mohamed's decision to marry a young girl has to be judged by the standards of his time, and then demand that we follow his moral standards to the letter. Either we should follow his example literally, or we should critically evaluate it and choose for ourselves. Discussing this contradiction inevitably injects doubt – the mortal enemy of fanaticism (on The Independent's Open House blog later today, I'll be discussing how Aisha has become the central issue in a debate in Yemen about children and forced marriage).
So why do many people who cheer The Life Of Brian and Jerry Springer: The Opera turn into clucking Mary Whitehouses when it comes to Islam? If a book about Christ was being dumped because fanatics in Mississippi might object, we would be enraged. I feel this too. I am ashamed to say I would be more scathing if I was discussing Christianity. One reason is fear: the image of Theo Van Gogh lying on a pavement crying "Can't we just talk about this?" Of course we rationalise it, by asking: does one joke, one column, one novel make much difference? No. But cumulatively? Absolutely.
The other reason is more honourable, if flawed. There is very real and rising prejudice against Muslims across the West. The BBC recently sent out identically-qualified CVs to hundreds of employers. Those with Muslim names were 50 per cent less likely to get interviews. Criticisms of Islamic texts are sometimes used to justify US or Israeli military atrocities. Some critics of Muslims – Geert Wilders or Martin Amis – moot mass human rights abuses here in Europe. So some secularists reason: I have plenty of criticisms of Judaism, but I wouldn't choose to articulate them in Germany in 1933. Why try to question Islam now, when Muslims are being attacked by bigots?
But I live in the Muslim majority East End of London, and this isn't Weimar Germany. Muslims are secure enough to deal with some tough questions. It is condescending to treat Muslims like excitable children who cannot cope with the probing, mocking treatment we hand out to Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. It is perfectly consistent to protect Muslims from bigotry while challenging the bigotries and absurdities within their holy texts.
There is now a pincer movement trying to silence critical discussion of Islam. To one side, fanatics threaten to kill you; to the other, critics call you "Islamophobic". But consistent atheism is not racism. On the contrary: it treats all people as mature adults who can cope with rational questions. When we pulp books out of fear of fundamentalism, we are decapitating the most precious freedom we have.

Johann Hari

Interview with Julie Burchill and Chas Newkey-Burden

2008-08-09T20:38:00.003+01:00

The mp3 is here (you can listen through your browser if you have Quicktime installed)

Their new book is called Not in My Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy

I'll let you make your own minds up :)

Quote from Julie Burchhill (okay trying to transcribe after a few beers) : "a coward dies a thousand deaths.... better to die on your feet than live on your knees... the Not in My Name want to live on their knees... and if you have to suck hizbollahs dick to do it to live, they'll happily do it!"

Author of The New Cold War: "How Georgia fell into its enemies' trap"

2008-08-09T15:30:00.001+01:00

When is a victory not a victory? When it dents your country's image, scares your allies and gets you into an unwinnable war with a hugely stronger opponent.
That is the bleak outlook for Georgia this weekend, after what initially looked like a quick military win against the separatist regime in South Ossetia. Georgia's attack followed weeks of escalating provocations, including hours of heavy shelling by the Russian-backed breakaway province and signs of large-scale Russian reinforcement.

Well worth reading the whole thing here. You can get his book here

Where's the left?

2008-08-09T15:03:00.004+01:00

"No war in Georgia! Peace Now! Stop the aggression!"

Where's the outrage? Err, there really isn't any.

Russian officials are saying around 1,500 are dead - in just a few days.

If an Israeli soldier so much as humiliates a Palestinian and it's caught on tape, it's on the worlds' news wires within hours. The 2006 Lebanon War claimed around 1,250 lives - over 33 days. The coverage and the outrage from the left was relentless.

Yet, in just two days, death and devastation is comparable to Lebanon in 2006 (from the Telegraph):

"I saw bodies lying on the streets, around ruined buildings, in cars," said Lyudmila Ostayeva, 50, who fled with her family to Dzhava, a village near the border with Russia.

"It's impossible to count them now. There is hardly a single building left undamaged."

Russian Jets Attacking Georgia's Capital

2008-08-09T13:22:00.004+01:00

Russian jets have carried out strikes on military targets in the central Georgian town of Gori, close to the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Most of the targets seem to have been military bases, but Georgian officials said a number of civilians had died.

BBC News

Amazing coincidence that this starts on the day of the Olympics opening? Looks like they've taken a leaf out of New Labour's book on 'spin'. It was a good day to bury bad news. All the news organisations will now have a balancing act with covering the Olympics in a spirit of joviality, with a measured seriousness regarding military aggression on Georgia.

Give us your fookin' Freedom

2008-07-07T19:46:00.002+01:00

Bob Geldof spoke in Hull, in support of David Davis, about freedom and civil liberties, read it here.

Remembered: London bombings 7th July 2005

2008-07-07T13:45:00.004+01:00

A good and heart-felt amateur video clip. Gregorian chants always do it for me.

Carrying knives - is there a rural/urban divide?

2008-07-07T11:00:00.000+01:00

I claim no particular expertise on the issue of knife crime. But there does seem to be a somewhat-under-mentioned point here. When I was a little boy, it was very common to carry pen knives - looking in the shops at the latest Swiss Army knife with its array of interesting attachments was an innocent pleasure. And when I went to the woods to play as a teenager, I would sometimes carry a knife my sister bought me for my birthday, which I would use to carve bits of wood and help me make my fire, as I imagined myself a mediaeval woodsman or whatever other outdoor frolics I engaged in. As I understood it at the time, knives were only subject to legal control if they were more than nine inches long.

Now perhaps the world has moved on, but I wonder - I think that even in my youth, the flick knife was a known weapon of the young agile urban thug. Could there be a rural/urban divide here - that the knives perhaps even now carried for woodcraft by rural boys being harmless, whilst the knives carried by urban gang members for "self-defence" are much more problematic? It would seem a shame, to me, if we accidentally outlawed innocent outdoor fun because we had forgotten that it was possible, and that many young boys in their hoods and carrying their knives are thinking themselves Robin Hood, not Al Capone.

Andrew Lilico at CentreRight blog

Sniffer dogs to wear ‘Muslim’ bootees

2008-07-07T10:42:00.000+01:00

Police sniffer dogs will have to wear bootees when searching the homes of Muslims so as not to cause offence.
Guidelines being drawn up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) urge awareness of religious sensitivities when using dogs to search for drugs and explosives. The guidelines, to be published this year, were designed to cover mosques but have been extended to include other buildings.
Where Muslims object, officers will be obliged to use sniffer dogs only in exceptional cases. Where dogs are used, they will have to wear bootees with rubber soles. “We are trying to ensure that police forces are aware of sensitivities that people can have with the dogs to make sure they are not going against any religious or cultural element within people’s homes.

The Times

British Reporter Challenges Mugabe at African Union Conference

2008-06-30T21:15:00.005+01:00

Telegraph

Tony Benn Writes for... The Telegraph

2008-06-29T22:21:00.002+01:00

Left supports Right defending liberty

Libertarians from the Left and Right sometimes meet in the middle against an authoritarian state. In 1961, having served for 10 years as an MP for Bristol South East, I was declared disqualified because my father had been a peer and he had died. It was argued that I had inherited his peerage.

A by-election was called, and, despite my disqualification, I decided to contest it to argue a point of principle. Winston Churchill, the former Conservative Prime Minister, sent me a letter of support for which I am, to this day, most grateful.

I must be the only Labour candidate who has ever circulated 30,000 copies of a letter from a Tory leader to my constituents. The law that prevented me sitting in the Commons was later changed as a result of that by-election...

Read the rest

Discrimination and that

2008-06-29T10:12:00.004+01:00

BBC News

An eight-year-old boy has sparked an unlikely outcry in Sweden after failing to invite two of his classmates to his birthday party.

The boy's school says he has violated the children's rights and has complained to the Swedish Parliament.

The school, in Lund, southern Sweden, argues that if invitations are handed out on school premises then it must ensure there is no discrimination.

It's not positive, it's just discrimination

For those of us who grew up believing that discrimination was a bad thing, the Government's official espousal of a "right" kind of discrimination leaves a rather dubious taste in the mouth. As Ms Harman herself says in an interview with this newspaper today: "Once you move to let the cat out of the bag on something like this, you never put it back in."

It is the soft beginning of recruitment-by-quota, a process which creates a breeding-ground for mutterings of preferential treatment. Such mutterings may well be based on spurious perceptions, but "positive discrimination" creates a climate in which they flourish...

Meanwhile, anti-discrimination law at present has one very big moral advantage: it says to everyone, equally, that employers have no right to discriminate against you on the basis of your gender, sexuality, race or religion.

We mess around with that fundamental principle at our peril: kick a hole in it, for whatever reason, and a river of angry resentment flows beneath.

Oxfam: 'Green Policies' Dragging 30 Million into Poverty

2008-06-25T07:49:00.003+01:00

The replacement of traditional fuels with biofuels has dragged more than 30 million people worldwide into poverty, an aid agency report says.
Oxfam says so-called green policies in developed countries are contributing to the world's soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest.

BBC News

Is this the new face of environmentalism, where humans are left to die, in order so affluent Western 'environmentalists' can feel better?