Monday, March 31, 2008

How the Leftist Churches Set a Time Bomb for the Democrats

Until the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama's spiritual mentor in Black Liberation Theology, popped out of the woodwork, I didn't even know about BLT -- Black Liberation Theology. But the doctrines of Black Liberation have been preached since 1966 in black churches, with the enthusiastic support of white churches of the Left, notably the United Church of Christ. The Rev. Wright runs an official UCC church.

Though I am not a professional theologian, I daresay that Jesus would not, repeat not, approve of BLT. Because Black Liberation Theology seems to go straight against every single word in the Sermon on the Mount. Odd that the UCC has never noticed that over the last fifty years. In fact, the liberal churches have bestowed great influence and prestige on the inventor of Black Liberation Theology, a Dr. James Hal Cone. Writes Dr. Cone, among other things,

* "Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him."

* "All white men are responsible for white oppression."

* "While it is true that blacks do hate whites, black hatred is not racism."

* "Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man "the devil.""

* "The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples."

* "We have had too much of white love, the love that tells blacks to turn the other cheek and go the second mile. What we need is the divine love as expressed in black power, which is the power of blacks to destroy their oppressors, here and now, by any means at their disposal."

Apparently liberal religious authorities like those at the United Church of Christ love this preaching so much that they have made Dr. Cone a professor at the Union Theological Seminary, the "Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology." It is a stamp of official approval for a peddler of race hatred.

What would Jesus say? Well, we may never know that, but in a month we'll know what Pennsylvania Democrats will say. And if they turn thumbs down on that grandchild of Black Liberation Theology, Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves. Including the Churches of the Left, which have reveled in rage-mongering radical chic since the Sixties.

If you've ever wondered why black people in America have had such a hard time rising in society, even after slavery ended in 1865, even after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, even after affirmative action tilted the playing field in their favor, the answer has to be found in the doctrines that have been preached to blacks by their most powerful leaders. If Black Liberation Theology is to be believed, blacks can never make it on their own. They have to rely on a separatist, rage-filled ideology, supported whole-heartedly by white Leftist churches.

The Left has a long, long habit of shafting the very people is purports to love. Instead, the Left only empowers Leftist elites. Look at the history of the Soviet Union, of Maoist China, of Fidel Castro. Who profited from those regimes except the elites, dining on caviar while ordinary people starved? Today Hugo Chavez is squandering Venezuela's oil wealth on his personal ego trips. It is the poor who suffer from Chavez' caudillismo.

What the Church of the Left have done to poor blacks is just like that. Instead of supporting messages of hope and strength, they celebrated the rage demagogues who keep people in thrall. "Black Liberation" is an enslavement of the mind. If you keep black people popping with anger at whites, half a century after the end of Jim Crow, you are not helping them. You are hurting them.

For the Democrats, who have knowingly supported this corruption of the poor for decades, the churches of Left have set a time bomb. Next month we'll see if it explodes. Maybe it's Divine justice.

Source



Whites Can't Make Blacks Happy

One of the creepy things about our "need to have a conversation about race" is the assumption that whites can somehow make blacks feel better, or be happier, or be more self-accepting. Nobody has the power to do that, except what individuals do for themselves, one person at a time. Most people don't come close to lasting happiness in their own lives. So the popular Leftist charge of America's "institutional racism" comes down to saying that "The Great White Conspiracy is responsible for rescuing you from your bad feelings." That is just cockeyed.

Far too many black people don't feel good about themselves, and are constantly looking for answers from somebody else. That quest for the impossible has been turned into an accusation against the invisible but all-powerful white racist establishment. Michelle and Barack Obama were indoctrinated with those toxic beliefs at Princeton and Harvard, so that they are now making more than a million bucks a year, living in a mansion in Chicago while still feeling sorry for themselves. Give me a break. (Michelle Obama's salary increased by almost 200,000 dollars in one year at the University of Chicago. How many people get that kind of raise?)

No doubt the Obamas tell themselves that they are the lucky exceptions, and that they are just identifying with poor blacks, who surely are out there in the hundreds of thousands. But that's just the self-serving generosity of politicians handing out taxpayer money. The Obamas are rich, highly educated, extremely successful professional politicians. They are the darlings of white liberals. Are they anything more than that?

For politicians, voter dissatisfaction is the fuel of personal careers. You can't get anywhere by promising all the answers to people who don't need you. So the first order of business is to find dissatisfied voters, and if they're not there, stir up some dissatisfaction. That's why Obama needed the Rev -- to get him in good with a proletariat, any proletariat, in this case a black one. If Obama had stayed back in Hawaii or Indonesia, he would suddenly have discovered his inner Hawaiian or his authentic Balinese. Now he is "authentically Black," and the Rev guarantees his blackness. That's why Obama can't renounce the Rev. The Rev is his meal ticket.

Now a preacher in America is very much like a politician. He or she has to get the congregation stirred up, at least enough to pay for his upkeep. The Rev Wright is a fantastically successful politician. The Trinity UCC is a family business, and with DVD sales and televangelism it's making a mint. That's why the Rev has to be so provocative --- to keep his congregation clapping and cheering. Obama learned his rhetorical cadences from the Rev, and probably much else besides. It's been one pro teaching another.

The very notion of "whites" versus "blacks" being like so many M&M's in different candy boxes is a purely political creation. Humans are enormously variable. It makes about as much sense to divide people into sports fans versus music lovers, or fatties vs. skinnies. If politicians could get voting mileage from those divisions, the Left would be telling us all about the oppressive conspiracy against the fat, or the persecuted skinnies all over the world. "Divide and conquer" still works like a charm.

If you think that's exaggerated, just look at the famous classroom experiment in which blue-eyed kids are separated from brown-eyed kids, and one of the two groups is told it's better than the other. It really makes the "bad" group feel terrible about themselves. That's how easy it is to stir divisions among people. Give human beings a flag and a baseball cap with a flashy logo, tell them it's their team, and you can manipulate them for life.

Politicians are expert manipulators, and manipulation works best when people don't think they are being manipulated. That's Obama's biggest talent -- to make the suckered masses feel good while playing on them like an old banjo. So far there's no there there at all -- no substantive ideas that make Mr. Obama any more interesting than the standard-issue ultraliberal Democrat. Oh yes, there's the color of his skin. Big deal.

No, it all goes back to the usual race politics of the post-Civil Rights era, which always needs to pick at that old scab of racism, remind blacks of their old injustices, and convince them that white racism is still keeping them down. It's a disgusting political trick, and many blacks are catching on. If a genuinely self-determining black person ever runs for president without the usual race games, I'll vote for him or her in a minute.

Let a black man say it -- as so many already have, without media support and coverage. Larry Elder's "personal pledge" is one great example. This is the real key to black liberation, just as it has been the key to all the oppressed and persecuted people who rose from poverty and low self-esteem in America.

1. There is no excuse for lack of effort.

2. Although I may be unhappy with my circumstances, and although racism and sexism and other "isms" exist, I know that things are better now than ever, and the future is even brighter.

3. While I may be unhappy with my circumstances, I have the power to change and improve my life. I refuse to be a victim.

4. Others may have been blessed with more money, better connections, a better home environment, and even better looks, but I can succeed through hard work, perseverance, and education.

I'll vote for that.

Source



Looking Past Race: Too many blacks are obsessed with racism

A BOOK REVIEW by John H. McWhorter of "Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card-and Lose"

Larry Elder is the black conservative people love to hate in Los Angeles, where he hosts a top-rated radio show. He is actually more of a libertarian, but even so he voices the heresy that racism is no longer black people's main problem. Presenting these and other forbidden views in his 2000 book, Ten Things You Can't Say in America, he took his place on the list of traitorous black pundits.

But Ten Things You Can't Say was only partly about race issues. In his new book, Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card-and Lose, Elder zeroes in on what ails black America: an obsession with racism. Elder repudiates the "Sharptons, Jacksons, Clintons, liberals who prattle about the `unfinished' business of racism in America, and other public figures, including some sports figures and entertainers-all claiming to `keep it real' by stirring the pot and keeping blacks angry." Even President Bush, when he spoke before the NAACP for the first time in 2006, made headlines by acknowledging that racism still exists. Among race-conscious liberals, acknowledging racism seems as important as being repulsed by the Holocaust.

But is it? Elder quotes James Q. Wilson's 38 most important words for black Americans: "Finish high school, marry before having a child, and produce the child after the age of twenty. Only 8 percent of families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor." Few could deny the wisdom of that counsel, but many fail to see that it logically requires letting go of the racism fetish. As Elder puts it: "Racists do not prevent kids from studying, racists do not demand that men father children outside of wedlock." And further: "Complete and total eradication of racism cannot instill the necessary moral values that create healthy, prosperous communities." Besides, Elder observes, "if racists hold blacks back, they're doing a bad job." In 2003, total earned income by blacks was $656 billion, a sum so large that this "black GDP-if blacks represented their own country-places them within the top sixteen countries in the world."

The book offers Elder's take on almost all of the race-related media dustups over the past several years, from reparations to Barack Obama, and we learn much. For example, shortly before the Duke lacrosse incident, four students from historically black Virginia Union University, two of them football players, were accused of raping a white University of Richmond undergraduate after a party. While the case against the lacrosse players was revealed as a tissue of lies, two of the Virginia Union men were actually convicted, while one pled guilty to lesser charges. Yet there were no aggrieved statements about the culture of football and its link to the abuse of women and other social ills. Because the Virginia Union story was about black-on-white crime, the media had as much interest in it as in a PTA meeting in Akron.

Another lesser-known story encapsulates what irks Elder. In 2005, black baseball great Frank Robinson said of black player Charles Murray, who left the game in the sixties because of racist abuse, "He wasn't strong. He went home. He didn't pursue what he wanted to do in life. He let a barrier prevent him from doing that." The story's reporter, on the other hand, was surprised by Robinson's attitude, seeing Murray's withdrawal as "a sign of quiet dignity."

The reporter would likely see the same dignity in Cornel West's flight from Harvard after the university's president, Lawrence Summers, suggested that he produce academic work rather than rap CDs. For West, the Frank Robinson approach would have been to inform Summers of the three academic books he claimed to be writing at the time, and stand firm. But West chose to decamp to Princeton instead, and it's an indictment of our times that his Murray-like flight seemed, to many, the proper response.

Yet Elder's analysis only takes us so far. He asks: "If so-called black leaders and other influence-makers can simply halt the widespread use of the n-word by rappers and others, why not use this power to deal with urban crime?" He thinks it's because they're lazy: "Crying racism takes less effort than exploring why black children underperform compared to their white and Asian counterparts." Elder fails to see that self-doubt cripples many blacks, leading them to mistake weakness (crying racism) for strength.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 suddenly left black people responsible for proving themselves before they had had a chance to overcome their internalized sense of inadequacy. After centuries of marginalization, this should not have been surprising. There were now two ways for a black person to make his way. He could embrace accountability and work to take advantage of the new opportunities. Or he could fashion a sense of legitimacy by playing the noble victim, exploiting white America's new susceptibility to such postures.

The damaged black soul settles for doubletalk and elided moral vision in seeking self-affirmation. The "victicrats" whom Elder describes are insecure people who would be best off in twelve-step programs. But Elder also implies that such people are more important to the current racial conversation than they actually are. Most are getting on in years, having reached adulthood just as the whites who once barred them from Holiday Inns became hip to "the Negro problem." For blacks of this vintage, the empowering novelty of thumbing their noses at whitey imprinted their worldview permanently. They will remain forever on the barricades, but they are no longer the future.

Black congressional representative Diane Watson, who tartly criticized Ward Connerly for having a white wife, is 74. Charles Rangel, who said after Hurricane Katrina, "George Bush is our Bull Connor," is 77. Al Sharpton is a younger fiftysomething, but old enough to have drunk the sixties Kool-Aid: he has recounted how Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. passed the torch to him during that era.

The important thing to note is that there are no new Al Sharptons or Cynthia McKinneys. Elder's depiction of victimology as common coin is therefore a bit pass,-a good decade behind the times. The race debate has shifted to the center, so that a book like Elder's is no longer even regarded as a dramatic statement.

In any case, to understand that the people Stupid Black Men describes are hurting inside is to understand as well that Elder's title is infelicitous and risks preaching mostly to the converted. That would be a shame, because plenty of black readers, especially of a younger generation, could benefit from the truths he tells.

Source



Of Governors and Call Girls: Some thoughts upon Eliot Spitzer's downfall

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

No doubt it signifies a mixture of moral frivolity and profound lack of sexual imagination, but one of the first questions that occurred to me when I read of Gov. Eliot Spitzer's involvement with a high-class (or perhaps I should say expensive) prostitution ring was: What acts does a woman perform to be worth $3,000 per hour, compared with one who charges "only" $1,000?

Of course, I have long realized that there is a hierarchy among prostitutes, as there is in all professions. My first patient with tertiary syphilis, for example, was an old prostitute, impoverished, raddled, and toothless, who still plied her trade on waste ground for the price of a cigarette. Her pimp was also her husband, and her cries of despair when he abandoned her still ring in my mind's ear. I have never encountered desolation deeper than hers.

Another of my patients was a smartly dressed black woman whom I initially took to be a business executive. She was a dominatrix. She had her own website and flew around the world flogging the prominent of many nations. She was particularly proud of her connection, if that is the word I seek, with a senior judge in one of the southern states of the U.S. She had a large house and an expensive car and was proud of her success. It was skilled work, after all, and she provided value for money, or else her clients would not have retained her services. Many of them, indeed, were in love with her. She was so amusing that I could not condemn her, even in my heart.

This reminds me that prostitutes in literature have generally been treated kindly. No literary intellectual ever won his spurs by denouncing what everyone else had already denounced with pursed lips and a tut-tut. We do not think of Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet as wicked, but rather as good-time girls with hearts of gold. Maupassant's stories favor prostitutes over their respectable, bourgeois clients. In Russian literature, fallen women serve to illustrate the possibility and power of redemption (and the generosity of authors). The demand for paid sex has generally been more severely condemned in literature than the supply.

One might have supposed that in a relatively liberal sexual environment such as ours, the demand for prostitution would decline, but that does not seem to have happened. This suggests that raw, biological frustration of the sex drive is not at the root of the demand. Appetites not only grow with feeding, but diversify with it. The limits or boundaries of licit and illicit change, but the demand for the illicit remains constant.

Mr. Spitzer can hardly have been driven to act as he did by the kind of sexual frustration that is said to be common in Muslim countries, where all contact with females before and outside of marriage is forbidden. He is both rich and powerful, and in our society men of that sort do not usually have much difficulty finding someone with whom to have an affair, if they feel the need. Moreover, one might have expected a man like Mr. Spitzer - who built his career on the prosecution (or was it the persecution?) of very rich men who supposedly had broken the rules without any compelling need to do so - to behave with circumspection, if not extreme caution, with regard to breaking rules, moral or legal. He who rises by moral outrage, after all, tends to fall by moral outrage.

On the other hand, the very dangerousness of what Mr. Spitzer did may have been what made it so exciting to him. For those with such a turn of mind, there are few pleasures greater than that of breaking rules and getting away with it; it heightens the esteem in which they hold their own intellects.

But there are other advantages in resorting to a prostitute. Prostitutes exact no emotional commitment; unlike in a proper affair, the balance of power remains firmly and predictably in favor of the man who hands over the cash. Not only can he suit his tastes and indulge his fantasies, but the possibilities of blackmail, emotional and financial, are much less than with an affair of the heart. Spurned lovers are notorious for seeking vengeance, but prostitutes are professionals, to whom a reputation for discretion and the hope of future business are important. They do not recriminate when their clients no longer come to see them. So there is safety as well as excitement in the transaction.

What of the supply - that is to say, of the prostitutes? Why do they become prostitutes? If there were no necessitous women in the world, would prostitution survive?

It would. Although middle-class sentimentalists like to think that all prostitutes are driven to the profession as snowflakes before the storm, with absolutely no choice in the matter (because no one would do voluntarily what prostitutes do), a moment's reflection shows that this cannot be so. For even if some young women are brought into Europe from Africa and Latin America and forced into sexual slavery, the fact remains that most prostitutes were not forced by circumstances but chose voluntarily to ply this particular trade. No one's circumstances are so dire that they lead to prostitution as surely as life leads to death; if desperate circumstances inexorably made prostitutes, after all, we would have more prostitutes rather than fewer.

Besides, whatever the social origins of most prostitutes, by no means do all of them come from backgrounds of deprivation. Recently in England, in the small town of Ipswich, a man was convicted of murdering five prostitutes (serial killers quite often choose prostitutes, as if to avenge some terrible sexual humiliation). Two of his victims, at least, were of middle-class origin; one had spent her childhood playing the piano and riding ponies. Interestingly, prostitution disappeared from the town in the wake of the murderer's activities, suggesting that this way of earning a living was not an unavoidable reaction to circumstances.

Quite near where I once lived, by a reservoir around which I often took walks, the body of a 16-year-old girl was found. She had run away from her middle-class home to what she thought was the glamour of the streets and of prostitution; she was bored by respectability and the prospect of a normal career. Her pimps had plied her overenthusiastically with heroin; she had died, and they dumped her body in the hope that it would not be found.

The supply side of prostitution, therefore, is not to be laid wholly at the door of desperate material circumstances. How, then, is it to be ranked with mankind's other moral weaknesses? I have discussed this matter with quite a few prostitutes in my clinic, and even those who have not studied moral philosophy have been able to justify their ways to me, if not to God, with plausible and even sophisticated arguments. They would not have been prostitutes, they said, if there had been no demand for prostitutes; and many of their customers, perhaps even most, were drawn from the supposedly respectable portions of society. From what standpoint, then, did society look down on them?

For Mr. Spitzer, I suspect, they would have had nothing but contempt: a stern moralist who was no better than the pathetic traveling salesman who wants a bit of furtive fun, or sexual release, with a rather less expensive prostitute on his nights away from his wife.

"You men!" says Sadie Thompson at the end of Somerset Maugham's great story "Rain," about a Protestant missionary seduced by a prostitute in the South Sea. "You filthy, dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you." The prostitutes would agree with her: For them, Mr. Spitzer would be the exact moral equivalent of the missionary Davidson, who is seduced by Sadie Thompson while he tries to convert her to virtue, and then kills himself by cutting his throat in the tide. He, like Mr. Spitzer, did not live up to his own standards because, in the jaundiced view of the profession, no man ever does.

Besides, asked the prostitutes, in what way is it worse to sell one's body than to sell one's soul? How many people have never done something they knew to be wrong, merely to continue in employment? How many women, not considered prostitutes, have let the material prospects of their suitors affect their decisions to marry them?

All this rationalization, however, founders on one simple question: Would you, I asked them, want your daughters to follow in your footsteps, even if they could earn a lot of money by doing so? Not a single one has ever replied yes to that question; all were vehemently against.

We can call prostitutes sex workers, and prostitution the sex industry, but the oldest profession is also the oldest subject of opprobrium. I shall never forget the immortally distasteful words of a 15-year-old patient of mine, who was very easy with her sexual favors, and who may very well one day have decided to do for money what for the moment she did for fun. "My mum," she said, "calls me a slut. But I'm good at what I do."

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Sunday, March 30, 2008

Islam and Free Speech

The Netherlands is bracing for a new round of violence at home and against its embassies in the Middle East. The storm would be caused by "Fitna," a short film that is scheduled to be released this week. The film, which reportedly includes images of a Quran being burned, was produced by Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch parliament and leader of the Freedom Party. Mr. Wilders has called for banning the Quran -- which he has compared to Hitler's "Mein Kampf" -- from the Netherlands.

After concern about the film led Mr. Wilders's Internet service provider to take down his Web site, Mr. Wilders issued a statement this week that he will personally distribute DVDs "On the Dam" if he has to. That may not be necessary, as the Czech National Party has reportedly agreed to host the video on its Web site.

Reasonable men in free societies regard Geert Wilders's anti-Muslim rhetoric, and films like "Fitna," as disrespectful of the religious sensitivities of members of the Islamic faith. But free societies also hold freedom of speech to be a fundamental human right. We don't silence, jail or kill people with whom we disagree just because their ideas are offensive or disturbing. We believe that when such ideas are openly debated, they sink of their own weight and attract few followers.

Our country allows fringe groups like the American Nazi Party to demonstrate, as long as they are peaceful. Americans are permitted to burn the national flag. In 1989, when so-called artist Andres Serrano displayed his work "Piss Christ" -- a photo of a crucifix immersed in a bottle of urine -- Americans protested peacefully and moved to cut off the federal funding that supported Mr. Serrano. There were no bombings of museums. No one was killed over this work that was deeply offensive to Christians.

Criticism of Islam, however, has led to violence and murder world-wide. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie over his 1988 book, "The Satanic Verses." Although Mr. Rushdie has survived, two people associated with the book were stabbed, one fatally. The 2005 Danish editorial cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad led to numerous deaths. Dutch director Theodoor van Gogh was killed in 2004, several months after he made the film "Submission," which described violence against women in Islamic societies. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch member of parliament who wrote the script for "Submission," received death threats over the film and fled the country for the United States.

The violence Dutch officials are anticipating now is part of a broad and determined effort by the radical jihadist movement to reject the basic values of modern civilization and replace them with an extreme form of Shariah. Shariah, the legal code of Islam, governed the Muslim world in medieval times and is used to varying degrees in many nations today, especially in Saudi Arabia.

Radical jihadists are prepared to use violence against individuals to stop them from exercising their free speech rights. In some countries, converting a Muslim to another faith is a crime punishable by death. While Muslim clerics are free to preach and proselytize in the West, some Muslim nations severely restrict or forbid other faiths to do so. In addition, moderate Muslims around the world have been deemed apostates and enemies by radical jihadists.

Radical jihadists believe representative government is un-Islamic, and urge Muslims who live in democracies not to exercise their right to vote. The reason is not hard to understand: When given a choice, most Muslims reject the extreme approach to Islam. This was recently demonstrated in Iraq's Anbar Province, which went from an al-Qaeda stronghold to an area supporting the U.S.-led coalition. This happened because the populace came to intensely dislike the fanatical ways of the radicals, which included cutting off fingers of anyone caught smoking a cigarette, 4 p.m. curfews, beatings and beheadings. There also were forced marriages between foreign-born al Qaeda fighters and local Sunni women.

There may be a direct relationship between the radical jihadists' opposition to democracy and their systematic abuse of women. Women have virtually no rights in this radical world: They must conceal themselves, cannot hold jobs, and have been subjected to honor killings. Would most women in Muslim countries vote for a candidate for public office who supported such oppressive rules?

Not all of these radicals are using violence to supplant democratic society with an extreme form of Shariah. Some in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark are attempting to create parallel Islamic societies with separate courts for Muslims. According to recent press reports, British officials are investigating the cases of 30 British Muslim school-age girls who "disappeared" for probable forced marriages.

While efforts to create parallel Islamic societies have been mostly peaceful, they may actually be a jihadist "waiting game," based on the assumption that the Islamic populations of many European states will become the majority over the next 25-50 years due to higher Muslim birth rates and immigration.

What is particularly disturbing about these assaults against modern society is how the West has reacted with appeasement, willful ignorance, and a lack of journalistic criticism. Last year PBS tried to suppress "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center," a hard-hitting documentary that contained criticism of radical jihadists. Fortunately, Fox News agreed to air the film.

Even if the new Wilders film proves newsworthy, it is likely that few members of the Western media will air it, perhaps because they have been intimidated by radical jihadist threats. The only major U.S. newspaper to reprint any of the controversial 2005 Danish cartoons was Denver's Rocky Mountain News. You can be sure that if these cartoons had mocked Christianity or Judaism, major American newspapers would not have hesitated to print them.

European officials have been similarly cautious. A German court ruled last year that a German Muslim man had the right to beat his wife, as this was permitted under Shariah. Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, stated last month that the implementation of some measure of Shariah in Britain was "unavoidable" and British Muslims should have the choice to use Shariah in marital and financial matters.

I do not defend the right of Geert Wilders to air his film because I agree with it. I expect I will not. (I have not yet seen the film). I defend the right of Mr. Wilders and the media to air this film because free speech is a fundamental right that is the foundation of modern society. Western governments and media outlets cannot allow themselves to be bullied into giving up this precious right due to threats of violence. We must not fool ourselves into believing that we can appease the radical jihadist movement by allowing them to set up parallel societies and separate legal systems, or by granting them special protection from criticism.

A central premise of the American experiment are these words from the Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." There are similar statements in the U.S. Constitution, British Common Law, the Napoleonic Code and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. As a result, hundreds of millions in the U.S. and around the world enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and many other rights.

These liberties have been won through centuries of debate, conflict and bloodshed. Radical jihadists want to sacrifice all we have learned by returning to a primitive and intolerant world. While modern society invites such radicals to peacefully exercise their faith, we cannot and will not sacrifice our fundamental freedoms.

Source



Gotta Love These Dems

by Evan Sayet

So, let me see if I've got this right... Bill Clinton is "McCarthy," while Bill Richardson is "Judas," Geraldine Ferraro is a "racist" while Jeremiah Wright is the Dem's leading candidate's "spiritual adviser," mentor and close personal friend and guru of the last two decades.

Bill Clinton, when he's not Joe McCarthy, is a "racist," this, just a few years after the Democrats told us he was America's "first black president." Hillary makes up stories about her trip to Bosnia -- not dissimilar in the least to John Kerry's fake stories about Vietnam. 10 years or so ago there was a "vast right wing conspiracy" out to get those lovely, lovely Clinton folks, now it's the Clintons who are corrupt and evil and, well, everything the Democrats denied not all that long ago.

Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman, the great and moral "conscience of the Senate" and the Democrats' choice to be but a heartbeat away from the presidency? Turns out he's a "warmonger" and maybe even a "zionist" (read: Jew), making at least two out of the last five or so Democrat Veep candidates purely evil. We should have known that Lieberman was a Nazi because, that's what the Democrats told us BEFORE he was "the conscience of the Senate," when he asked record companies if they wouldn't voluntarily put warning labels on the musical version of what Jerry Wright preaches to Obama and his kids. Lieberman has had more ups and downs than Bill on a fat chick.

Oh, wait, don't forget John Edwards. He's a guy who ran not once but twice on the incredible dual platform that, in evil, horrible America it is impossible to go from poor to rich and concurrently selling himself as someone who understands the "other" America because he himself went from, uh, poor to rich. Now THAT'S good, no wonder they made him the Veep choice -- bringing us to three out of the last five.

Now, in a move he must have learned from watching John Edwards, Obama is running a campaign as a "post-racial" candidate and, to prove it, he makes a big speech on race, where he throws his white grandmother -- you know, that "typical white person" -- under the bus to defend the hate-mongering of his mentor, friend, spiritual guru and campaign adviser, Jeremieh "God DAMN America" Wright.

At the same time, the man who set out to "prove" that he was post-patriotic by consciously refusing to wear even the tiniest of American flag lapel pins (and whose wife publicly testifies that she has never been proud of America) stands up and makes his pro-Wright, anti-white-grandma speech in front of not one, not two, not three, not four but EIGHT giant American flags.

Welcome to the Democrat Party -- racists, warmongers, liars, cheats and hypocrites... and this is just what they call each other!

Source



Does affirmative action hurt kids?

Yes, says author of new bilingual children's book

It's a publishing first. In his new kids' book, "Joey Gonzalez, Great American," author Tony Robles takes on one of today's most polarizing issues - affirmative action. Using words and pictures that kids can easily understand, "Joey Gonzalez" shows how government programs designed to "help" children are often the ones that do the most harm.

In fact, the idea for "Joey Gonzalez" came about because of the author's own educational experience - one based on merit, not race. "I attended Boys' High School in New York in the '60s," says Tony Robles. "Even though the students were primarily minority and low-income, we were held to strict academic standards. The principal and staff were committed to helping us succeed by showing us that we could compete with anyone." It was this strong foundation in part that led to Robles' successful career in law enforcement.

In today's schools, however, competition has become a dirty word, he says. Affirmative action is a policy, says Robles, that pits kids against each other in all the wrong ways. Instead of being challenged and prepared to compete in the real world, Robles contends that "minority kids learn early on that they will never get the credit they deserve for working hard and trying to succeed on their own." At the same time, other children resent the preferred treatment that their minority classmates receive, and end up resenting them.

In fact, the sorry state of American education is what led Tony Robles to write "Joey Gonzalez." Instead of perpetuating feelings of inferiority and anger, "Joey" challenges the affirmative action mindset using strong and positive imagery.

"By following Joey's adventures, kids get an alternative perspective to the dependency that affirmative action breeds, whether they're black, white or Hispanic," Robles asserts. "The book's goal is to encourage not just ethnic pride, but national and personal pride. Through showing the virtues of self-reliance, 'Joey' helps kids reject the idea that certain people need special preferences simply because they are black or Hispanic."

Source



Mind parasites

A mind parasite is essentially an internalized lie that takes on a pseudo-life of its own. I believe the term is an accurate one, for it is meant to convey the idea that a vital lie that lodges itself in the psyche is not static, but takes on the characteristics of the host, so to speak. I remember once discussing this with my analyst. I don't remember the exact context of the problem I was whining about, but he said words to the effect of, "What do you expect? It's as smart as you are."

In other words, the mind parasite has available to it all of the elaborate machinery of the mind. Therefore, it can easily justify itself, elaborate itself, gang up on the truth, intimidate healthier parts of the psyche. It's like a dictator who uses legitimate means to come to power, but then corruptly uses all of the levers of power to stay there and eliminate opponents.

Those who are in thrall to the lie are by definition slaves. While they may enjoy a subjective sense of freedom, it is an illusion. In fact, they have forfeited their freedom and are attached to a monstrous demon that they have generated out of their own psychic substance, in the same way that a spider weaves a web out of its own body.

Think of a vivid example that is readily at hand -- the Islamists. Is it not obvious that they are absolutely enslaved by artificial beings of their own creation? And that they want everyone else to be enslaved by the same demon? Does this not demonstrate the insane power of demons?

There are personal mind parasites and collective mind parasites. Many cultures revolve entirely around monstrous entities that have been engendered by whole communities, such as the Aztec. Here again, it would be wrong to say that the Aztec had a "bloodthirsty god" -- rather, it clearly had them. Thousands upon thousands of human beings sacrificed to satisfy this god's appetite for human blood, elaborate mechanisms set up to supply fresh bodies, the heart of the sacrificial victim cut out by the officiating priest who would himself take a bite out of it while it was still beating. A whole society of Jeffrey Dahmers trying desperately to allay anxiety by vampirically ingesting the life force of others. The Islamists are just the latest idition of this unconscious anti-religion. But you undoubtedly know some people in your own life who do the same thing -- hungry ghosts who "feed" on the spirit or blog of others.

In all times and in all places, human beings have looked for ways to objectify and worship their self-created demons. This is preferable to having them run around loose in one's own psyche. Take again the example of the Islamist. How would one even begin to tell him: "you have a persecutory entity inside of you that your life revolves around. You have placed it outside of yourself so as to make your life bearable, for it conceals a truth that is too painful to endure."

To a large extent, this dynamic is at the heart of more mundane politics as well. For those who do not experience George Bush as a demon, it is almost impossible to understand those who do, any more than we can really understand the motivations of the Aztec. The collective mind parasite has a grammar and logic all its own, inaccessible to all but initiates into the Lie.

You don't actually want to get that close to an intoxicating Lie of that magnitude. It's not safe. Better to observe it from a respectful distance. Otherwise, you will find yourself pulled down into a false world of counter-lying rather than simple truth. You cannot create an artificial "good demon," which is what secular leftists are trying to do when they aren't creating bad ones. Those who criticize my "negativity" probably think I am engaging in the former -- heatedly countering the lie -- when I am calmly engaged in the latter -- simply affirming the truth that is and has always been. This is the inner meaning of "resist not evil." Resist it in the wrong way, and you come into its orbit.

For as old Anonymous points out, a demon operates through a combination of will and imagination. You may think of perverse will as the male principle and perverse imagination as the female principle. Together they beget the demon child that then controls the parents, taking over both will and imagination. C onsider how so much art and academic nonsense is nothing more than the elaboration of the perverse imagination -- ideological superstructures giving cover to lies of various magnitude. Think of how much "activism" is simply the angry agitation of the perverse will, just the punitive hedonism of a corrupt superego.

This is the inner meaning of "you shall not make for yourself a graven image," for Truth is a living thing, a Being, that cannot be reduced to the idolatrous systems of men, especially corrupted men who do not honor Truth to begin with. Most modern and postmodern ideologies and philosophies are opiates of elites too sophisticated for such powerful pneumaceuticals as Truth.

And this is the inner meaning of "honor your father and mother": not rebelling against received truth and tradition in an adolescent manner, especially before you are even mature enough to understand what it means. But the Obamaniacs will always be with us in one form or another.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Saturday, March 29, 2008

It's not only Britain that has crooked crime statistics. NYC knows how to walk the crooked walk too

A source inside the Manhattan District Attorney's office admitted to me during a telephone conversation yesterday that "hate crimes," specifically those occurring against Jews, are frequently omitted from such classification. Meanwhile, acts that victimize Muslims, regardless of their motivation, are usually reported as "hate crimes." Consequently, crimes against Jews and other religions fail to garner the same media focus as crimes against Muslims and skew the figures used to track criminal motives. Although this is not a new phenomenon, it has recently been accentuated by the incident that took place on a New York subway last week.

At about 6:20 last Tuesday, March 18, 2008, 25 year-old Uria Ohana, a rabbinical assistant, was assaulted by three Muslim men inside the subway station at Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street in Park Slope. As Ohana proceeded through the turnstile, 18 year-old Ali Hussein grabbed Uria Ohana's yarmulke from his head; Ohana gave chase, and was assaulted by Hussein's accomplices who were shouting "Alla hu Akbar" - Arabic for "God is great." The chase ended when Hussein was struck by a vehicle as he ran onto Fourth Avenue. Hussein's friends abandoned him at the scene, fleeing in a late model GMC Suburban.

The incident received very little media attention, and the motive was not initially recorded as a bias or "hate crime." This happens frequently," admitted this source, adding that the pressure from Muslim special interest groups is much greater than from other similar organizations. "It seems that there is a far greater propensity for law enforcement to recognize and classify crimes against Muslims as motivated by religious bias, and there more pressure from watch dog groups to insure that crimes against Muslims are immediately classified as having their origins in religious bias. What it does is that it skews the actual numbers," added this source.

He also stated that since 9/11, law enforcement officials have acquiesced to the pressure and demands by Islamic special interest groups to treat most crimes against Muslims as "religiously motivated," even in the absence of any proof. Acts such as graffiti randomly sprayed on a mosque, for example, is classified as a "hate crime." It does not matter that the mosque might be one of several buildings in a specific area that has been tagged or sprayed by vandals. "We are compelled to classify such acts as having a religiously motivated bias, despite evidence that would indicate otherwise. Ordinarily, people would not think it is such a big deal. But when you have many such incidents, it obviously has a significant impact on criminal statistics. It definitely skews them."

Source



Your government will take care of it: Not in bumbling Britain

At first glance, the Financial Services Authority's review of its own role in the Northern Rock saga reads like a brilliant self-parody. One wonders for a moment whether the author, in a mad moment of Swiftian mischief, has deliberately set out to portray her colleagues as a bunch of Pooterish pen-pushing, paperclip-counters.

There is the slavish and pedantic attention to the trivial detail. "We reviewed 129 files [lever arch or equivalent] ..." the report proudly assures us early on. There's the blizzard of confusing acronyms - MRGD, ARROW, RMPs, C&C, IRMs and HoDs. There's the reluctance to call a spade a spade. "The supervision of Northern Rock was at the extreme end of the spectrum of the supervisory practices we observed." There's the absurd faith in frequency of meetings as the FSA's measure of effective supervision. The more the better, obviously.

There's the obsession with inanimate systems and processes rather than people. Reading the executive summary (we don't get to see the full report for another month), one gets no impression at all that the FSA is staffed by 2,000 educated and thinking human beings - people, we might hope, attuned to the currents in financial markets, understanding of the temptations that might persuade bankers to make reckless decisions and capable of bringing common sense, brainpower and personal judgment to the regulatory process. And there's the bureaucrats' refusal to accept that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the organisation or its philosophy. Or at least nothing wrong that hiring a few more administrators can't solve.

The report is not a whitewash, however. Indeed, by its own lights, the FSA is brutally self-critical. It blasts itself for its lapses of officialdom - the failure to keep good records, the paucity of meetings, the glitches in line management procedures. As such, the FSA risks being accused of abject hypocrisy. These are just the failings it cannot tolerate in the firms in regulates. Poor record-keeping is high up in the FSA's hierarchy of deadly sins.

But the wider message from the report is that the FSA does not try to run a zero-failure City and that the Rock implosion and run would probably have occurred even if the FSA had been operating as it would have liked. Perhaps FSA officials could have impressed their concerns more forcibly on Rock directors, perhaps the bank would have been advised to diversify its funding a bit more, but nobody at Canary Wharf seems to be terribly convinced this would have made a difference.

FSA officials have admitted privately that they would have been unlikely to exert their powers to force Rock to change its ways in those benign, pre-2007 credit market conditions. In short, but for the shortcomings in depositor protection, Rock was, in the eyes of the FSA, just one of those unfortunate things - an inevitable rare failure, but a price worth paying for a system in which competition and innovation are allowed to flourish for the benefit of customers.

It will be a few decades before we know if this is a fair assessment. Any more bank collapses and the FSA's private view that this was a once-in-two-centuries probability event will sound very hollow. Anyway, it is much too early to argue that the price is worth paying when we don't yet know what that price (for taxpayers) will be.

Source



Greatest Generation II

It's better that I'm not near a television this week. I didn't have to witness the talking news heads somberly remind us that the Killed-In-Action count in Iraq has rolled 4,000, and how the war there has been going on for five years. (They say "five" like they wish it had more syllables.) Listening on the radio, do I discern smears of disingenuousness in some of their voices, crocodile tears?

When I see them in the airports, today's service men and women, I don't see people who feel sorry for themselves. I see the proud grandchildren of the greatest generation - Greatest Generation II. And, damn, they are magnificent.

As often as I can, without being intrusive, I speak to them and say thank you. A Lieutenant Colonel and a half-dozen junior officers stand in a circle as he briefs them on their travel plans. I sit a few feet away awaiting a flight and listen in. They look like high school kids to me, maybe college for the LTC, but I recognize the language they speak. It doesn't change. When there's a lull in the conversation, I say, "Excuse me gentlemen, I'm an old vet from Vietnam, and you guys are my heroes. Just want to say thank you." "Roger that, sir," the LTC says.

Another airport, a Spec 4 who looks like he could be my grandson in 10 years happens by with a patch I recognize. "Hey, 82nd." He stops. I stand, shake his hand, and say, "Thank you. Stay safe." (It's the only time I've wished I`d jumped out of a perfectly good airplane so I could have said, "All the way.") He says, "Thank you, sir." I love saying a variation on what he's heard before, "Don't sir me. Just a sergeant once." He gets it and smiles.

An Army Captain sits with his wife and three small children; he's obviously going overseas. He steps away for a moment to go to the ticket counter. I speak to him briefly on his way back to his family. I "sir" him, because he sure deserves it.

To three privates just coming back with the dust still on their boots I say thanks, "Do you guys know you're Valley Forge material?" I think they understand what I mean, but if they don't they will someday. To one young troop with the CIB (Combat Infantryman Badge) looking every ounce the seasoned infantry grunt, I ask, "Has anyone thanked you yet today for your service?" "Yes, sir," he says. "Okay, then hold mine in reserve for when you need one." But I don't think he ever will.

These people project a will that says they know what they're about, and that's all the assurance they need. The "thanks" from civilians - that's just gravy. Today's U.S. Armed Services are almost unique -- all volunteers. How many other American war forces in history can we say that about? The Continental Army of the Revolutionary War. The hodge-podge army that stood with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans in 1814. Hardly a month passes when we don't see a story about how some soldier or Marine who'd been very seriously wounded and goes through months of rehab so he can rejoin his unit. (I don't remember a "her" story, but a female soldier recently was awarded the Silver Star.) At least one Marine returned to Iraq on a titanium leg.

Where in the world do these people come from? Who raised these kids? They're the grandchildren of the greatest generation. And among them, even more amazing, are legal immigrants who earn their citizenship by serving what is not yet their country. That eclipses the pyramids on my list of world wonders. So it's a good thing I can't watch the TV weenies this week mournfully remind us that 4,000 U.S. military personnel have died in Iraq. They don't need to remind us of the cost, or try to provoke our sympathies. We've seen them in the airports. Perhaps, even spoken to one.

Source



The lever and the foundations

The National Review Online describes Islam's public enemy Number 1: a Coptic priest called Zakaria Botros.
Along with fellow missionaries - mostly Muslim converts - he appears frequently on the Arabic channel al-Hayat ... Botros is an unusual figure onscreen: robed, with a huge cross around his neck, he sits with both the Koran and the Bible in easy reach. Egypt's Copts - members of one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East - have in many respects come to personify the demeaning Islamic institution of "dhimmitude" (which demands submissiveness from non-Muslims, in accordance with Koran 9:29). But the fiery Botros does not submit, and minces no words. ... The result? Mass conversions to Christianity - if clandestine ones.
Even if one were not a Christian, it's interesting to ask how one Coptic priest operating on a shoestring wage such successful information warfare? To save money Botros uses the "new media": satellite TV and the Internet. Secondly, he communicaes in Arabic. Thirdly, Botros tackles Islam on its own ground. He is intimately familiar with the Koran and phrases the issues in ways that are not only linguistically familiar to Middle Easterners but in accordance with their categories of thought. According to Raymond Ibrahim at NRO:
Botros's motive is not to incite the West against Islam, promote "Israeli interests," or "demonize" Muslims, but to draw Muslims away from the dead legalism of sharia to the spirituality of Christianity. Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying - not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. - must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire.
Raymond Ibrahim's summary omits one key factor in Botros' success. It is factor hardest for the West to reproduce. Western intellectuals can also use the "new media"; learn to speak in Arabic; even learn Koranic theology. They potentially have everything but the one thing that Botros spontaneously possesses in spades. Faith.

Botros believes he has found the true religion and is eager to tell Muslims about it. Thus he offers them not only a critique of the absurdities of Islam but an invitation to embrace an alternative. He tells them not only what to turn away from but what to turn to. It is this last obstacle which the modern intellectual stumbles over. The modern intellectual can say nothing about what a man should fight or die for. Two generations ago, even non-religious people in the West still had a country, culture or tribe they could feel loyal too. Albert Camus could declare quite seriously that "the French language is my homeland". Although he loved disembodied ideas they never lifted him above loyalty. Explaining why he opposed terrorism Camus said, "I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which one day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother before justice."

Today it is quite conceivable for someone who declares his affection for the English language in America to be accused of "hate speech"; and for a man who compares his grandmother to a ranting demogogue to be likened to Abrham Lincoln. In malls all over the Western world the boomer generation gets teary-eyed over the appeal to believe in nothing.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too


And while those sentiments are all very well they prevent Western intellectuals from taking the last step which Zakarai Botros is capable of. Challenging Islam's roots requires the challenger to have an irrational loyalty to roots of his own. Faith is a special kind of information that arises from providing answers to questions that are undecidable within our formal logical system; that lie beneath the foundations of our civilization rather than in a development of its precepts. It lies within our choice of axioms rather than the theorems that arise from them. And because axioms cannot be proved, "our way of life" will always rest on prejudice -- or if you will -- faith. Like Camus, we can never rise completely above all our attachments and still retain our capacity to act.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Friday, March 28, 2008

British Muslim leader accuses police of being 'over cautious' in stopping Asian gangs pimping white girls

A muslim leader has accused the police of failing to tackle Asian gangs suspected of prostituting young white girls. Officers are accused of being "over cautious" when investigating Muslim criminals because they fear being branded racist. Last night Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, said the police were differentiating between criminals on the basis of race. He claimed, driven by fear of race riots in places like Blackburn and Oldham, officers were "overtly sensitive" and not clamping down on the sordid practice.

His controversial comments in this week's Panorama reignite a massively controversial issue which exploded over a Channel 4 documentary in 2004. That programme which claimed Asian men in Bradford were grooming under age white girls for prostitution was pulled from C4's schedules. This was because police claimed at the time that it could provoke racial violence during the local election campaign.

Now the BBC is to risk the wrath of police officials and campaigners by airing a programme which will look at the same issue. Speaking as part of the Panorama investigation, which airs tomorrow (Thursday), Shafiq said: "I think the police are overcautious on dealing with this issue openly because they fear being branded racist and I think that is wrong." "These are criminals they should be treated as criminals. They are not Asian criminals, they are not Muslim criminals, they are not white criminals. They are criminals and they should be treated as criminals." He said that some of the criminals were Asian gangs looking to supplement their income, after the cost of drugs has fallen over the last few years.

Shafiq said "I am the only Muslim leader in the UK that speaks up against this sort of thing and I do it because these teenage girls are somebody's sisters and they are somebody's daughters. I have got two daughters and I wouldn't want that to happen to my daughters. "If there is a drug dealer grooming a white teenager into prostitution then I don't want the police service or local authority not to be open about it."

Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, also raised concerns about the issue yesterday. He said: "Everybody is affected by political correctness. The reason why it is so important is because things like this. "Young girls are having their lives threatened and ruined because people pussyfoot around and they are too scared to do anything in case they make a mistake and are accused of racism. "That's why we have to tackle the culture of political correctness everybody is affected by and I think the police are probably more affected and hamstrung by it than most organisations."

His comments come as Professor David Barrett of University of Bedfordshire also raised deep concerns about the issue in the BBC1 programme. He claimed evidence suggested that those operating the practice were "absolutely" likely to get away with it. The programme will controversially reveal the ethnic pattern of the crime which is largely Asian in northern England, Afro-Caribbean in the West Midlands and elsewhere white, Turkish and Kurdish.

The Government, reacting to concerns, has revealed it will introduce new crime-fighting targets aimed at specifically combating the little-publicised problem. But there are concerns that the practice, mostly operated by drug dealing gangs, has been of little priority to the various authorities. Figures suggest there are in the region of 5,000 British children being used as prostitutes.

On the programme Vernon Coaker under secretary of state with responsibility for policing reveals the new measures will be come into force next month. The government also plans to introduce a new warning video for use in schools over the issue. But despite funding a Home Office study almost ten years ago which revealed how the problem can be tackled, the police has a low prosecution rate. Coaker told Panorama that using powers under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 there have been just 44 convictions for grooming and pimping young children. Police attempts are said to be frustrated by a code of silence.

Source



A less corrupted generation

Once upon a time there was a no-name generation that went about its business and did not call attention to itself. While the Greatest moved offstage and the Boomers ran amuck, it raised and educated families, laying the groundwork for a prosperous future. Overlooked, ignored by those who followed it, and alone among its peers, this generation may soon see one of its members become president.

Of course, the road will not be smooth. The attack on John McCain's age has only just begun. A mere tittering at present, it will be shouted from rooftops come the fall. In our youth-obsessed society, newness trumps experience. Media central casting gives this older generation a thumbs down, favoring the novel and the different. But Sen. McCain, who will turn 72 in August, still goes about his business with the dogged determination that sustained him through long years in a North Vietnamese prison.

Those of us born in the late 1930s retain only a weak memory of the Great Depression. But we noted well the solemn eyes of our parents and felt, in the marrow of our bones, the values of steadfastness and endurance they embodied.

Mr. McCain's most intense early memories are likely of a time when most men under 40 wore the uniform; and there is a difference, I believe, between those who remember it and those who don't. His country was enmeshed in a battle for its survival. Mr. McCain is the grandson and son of admirals, and Pearl Harbor and the great carrier battles in the South Pacific made a deep and lasting impression upon his childhood.

We remember when the German army had a stranglehold on Europe, and the Japanese on Asia. Those who lived through that eventful period understood the greatness of our nation -- our indispensable nation -- and knew that without it the future of mankind would be dark indeed.

The nightmare of a world at war and the ghastly revelations in its wake are deeply imbedded in Mr. McCain's psyche. Our generation recoiled at the depths of human cruelty -- we saw emaciated Jews liberated by our troops from Hitler's Belsen, and starved death-march survivors of Bataan emerging from incarceration in Japanese hellholes.

Those born later have barely an inkling of the impression those events made, and the deep bond it created with our country. At a time of reckoning, America rose up "in righteous wrath" against history's most evil villains. To have no pride in that significant accomplishment surely seems to John McCain, as it does to me, no less than moral blindness.

In his formative years, Mr. McCain experienced the dawn of a frightening new age. Murderous dictators, with nuclear arms at their disposal, threatened to annihilate those who opposed them. This country, foremost among nations, paid the price to check them. He saw what ill-preparedness and hubris wrought in Korea: We could not withstand the initial incursion, and after finally overcoming it, provoked a Chinese invasion that led to our tragic winter retreat.

Troubled by American complacency in the mid-1950s, Mr. McCain chose to follow his father and grandfather to Annapolis. He earned his flying wings, became a squadron leader on the carriers Forrestal and Oriskany, and was shot down in combat over North Vietnam. His bones broken by a mob that beat him half to death, Mr. McCain was thrown into the Hanoi Hilton where Ho Chi Minh's sadistic henchmen tormented him unmercifully. In a display of character that boggles the imagination, he somehow managed to survive with his identity intact.

While others talk of courage, honor and dedication, John McCain exemplifies those virtues. At a time when America's integrity and purpose were being questioned, his fortitude helped reaffirm our core beliefs. A nation that could produce young men of his caliber could right itself and overcome whatever obstacles it faced. After more than five years of imprisonment, he finally came hobbling home, and with a broad smile and a firm salute, took our collective breath away.

A society that views the tempering of time as an infirmity is a society in trouble. The no-name generation is more vital in its late 60s and early 70s than previous ones in their 40s and 50s. It may struggle for a "misremembered" name on occasion, but it knows far better than its juniors who it is, where it comes from, and for what it stands.

No one better represents this than Mr. McCain. His authenticity, unlike that of his Democratic Party counterparts, is beyond question. What you see is what you get, and what you get is the real thing.

Source



Museums becoming tools for Leftist propaganda

Comment from Australia

By all accounts Dawn Casey, the indigenous woman chosen to be the director of Sydney's largest and most popular museum, the Powerhouse, is a polished performer and formidable administrator. She managed to get Canberra's controversial $155 million National Museum of Australia (NMA) opened on time and on budget in 2001, a feat so fine the builders presented her with a framed piece of the Berlin Wall, on which was engraved, "For making the impossible possible".

But Casey, 57, is also a cultural warrior who believes museums should be political, should showcase "suppressed" voices and a multiplicity of "truths", and should be places of "dissent and debate", as she wrote two years later, in a paper for Australian Museums & Galleries Online. This is presumably what the NMA was all about, conceived by its architect, Howard Raggatt, as "one in the eye for John Howard", with its design modelled on Berlin's Holocaust museum and directly equating Australia's history with the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. Gigantic Braille messages pressed into its anodised aluminium cladding reading "Sorry" and "Forgive us our genocide" were early proof that this was a museum in the business of waging cultural war, despite the softly spoken manner of its well-liked director of four years, Casey.

Black-white relations were summed up by black figures hanging in effigy near a white trooper with a shotgun in his hand. The Anzac tradition was trivialised, with its sole presence a bleached-out statue of a digger. World War II was shoved into the corner of a display case holding Phar Lap's heart. Australia's non-Aboriginal history was treated as a silly joke, summed up in an upside down hills hoist and Victa mowers as the ultimate suburban irony. There was a monument to Gough Whitlam, alone among prime ministers, and suffusing every exhibit what the present director, Craddock Morton, calls a "black T-shirt" view of history; 1970s-style left-wing, and facile.

The arrival of the First Fleet was described in one exhibit as a "biological invasion", but in the Casey era the museum contained next to nothing about the ingenuity, scientific and technological innovations that marked the next two centuries. No Howard Florey. No CSIRO or Qantas. This is a museum as ideological battering ram, not a place for increasing knowledge.

Welcome to the postmodern future of the Powerhouse. After a worldwide hunt, the board has chosen as its director a person who is capable and admirable in many ways, but who, if she sticks to her track record at the NMA, could take the museum down a fraught path. A clue to the nature of the museum is its name, Powerhouse, as the museum was built on the site of an old electricity generation station in Ultimo. It is a science, technology, industry and design museum. Its greatest attractions are a celebration of man's ingenuity and it pays homage to cars and aircraft and space travel. Perhaps that is an anachronism but that's part of the definition of a museum; preserving the past for us to learn from, and wonder at, not twisting it to reflect fleeting modern sensibilities.

The Powerhouse is also popular, and has posted record admission revenues in recent years for shows such as Star Wars and The Lord Of The Rings, with about 200,000 visitors to each. It has become a staple Sydney school holiday outing, with plenty of gadgetry, experiments, virtual reality and genuine science to keep children amused while teaching them about, say, static electricity. In science and engineering, there are not "many truths" and the NMA under Casey was notable, according to the Carroll report of the collection, for its almost complete lack of science, technology and industrial content.

Nick Pappas, president of the Powerhouse's board of trustees, is unfazed by Casey's record at the NMA. He said yesterday Casey was chosen because of her ability and because she is "very good at bringing in audiences and dealing with government in a constructive way". The board, which includes feminist Anne Summers, financier Mark Bouris and educator Judith Wheeldon, didn't even consider the criticism of the NMA's ideological bias under Casey's watch. "We didn't see it as a positive or a negative," Pappas said, adding, ominously, that the Powerhouse is also a museum of "social history" and that Casey has "a very, very broad mandate". It was just such a broad mandate in social history that brought the NMA undone.

Pappas says he also sees the Powerhouse as "a people's museum". "I don't see radical ideology as part of that. It is a place of education and entertainment . but debate is not a bad thing. Museums should never be offensive but they should be challenging." The board's aim, he said, is to better "integrate the museum with the city and integrate it with the public", which they hope is their new director's forte. The previous director, World War I buff Kevin Fewster, who has since taken up a job in London heading the National Maritime Museum, was said to have had too low a profile, despite having brought in record crowds.

Casey, on the other hand, has a high media profile. She will be forever hailed by legions of Howard-haters as the heroine who gave Howard "one in the eye". But while there may no longer be a Howard to kick around, contrary to popular belief, last year's election did not end the culture wars. The left was not suddenly victorious, as signalled by a new prime minister who likes to call himself a conservative.

So while Casey has complained about her conservative critics, and told a Senate estimates committee that it was "extremely unhelpful that in the last few years we have been brought into the culture wars that exist out there", she is being disingenuous. It was Casey, her pet historians and the designers of the museum and its exhibits that deliberately provoked a culture war "in there" when no one was looking. It is difficult to see how Casey's philosophy can find expression at the Powerhouse without drastically changing the nature of the museum.

Source



Australia: Christianity trumps socialism in caring for black kids

Community-run child dormitories should be established in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to ensure children are fed, clothed and bathed, former Australian of the Year Galarrwuy Yunupingu says. Dormitory-style accommodation with cooking, showering and sleeping facilities should be built near schools, Mr Yunupingu told Fairfax. "The missionary days were good. The missionaries looked after the kids much better than the government does today," he said.

Adolescents as young as 12 in his Arnhem Land town of Nhulunbuy were still vulnerable to sexual abuse and manipulation by men selling alcohol, drugs and pornography, despite federal intervention in NT indigenous communities, Mr Yunupingu said. "I see intervention people running around trying to fix doorknobs and broken windows," he said. "What has that got to do with the kids? It's not filling up their stomachs. "There are thousands of kids waking up to no breakfast in these communities ... you can't turn a blind eye to it."

Mr Yunupingu is in Melbourne to address an economic and social outlook conference being held at Melbourne University, where he will say 60 elders of his own people in Nhulunbuy had decided to take a stand against those who had been reportedly abusing the town's indigenous youth.

The NT's Little Children are Sacred report, which prompted the federal intervention, alleged a rampant sex trade in an unnamed community where non-Aboriginal mining workers gave Aboriginal girls aged between 12 and 15 alcohol, cash and other goods in exchange for sex. The community was Nhulunbuy, Fairfax said.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Thursday, March 27, 2008

No way to combat terrorism

The British government have some dangerous bedfellows in their attempt to prevent violent extremism

Should government be picking winners within Muslim communities in order to combat the threat of violent jihadism? And does it work - any more than the corporatist strategy of picking winners among big enterprises succeeded in the 1970s? This approach is a key strand of the Government's new national security strategy, launched last week. The flagship programme for delivering it is the Preventing Violent Extremism Pathfinder Fund (PVE), amounting to 45 million pounds over three years. It was created after the 7/7 bombings, reflecting Tony Blair's belief that the Muslim Council of Britain had not done enough to fight the extremists.

Blair and Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, contended that local authorities, police and communities were best positioned to identify those grassroots Muslim groups who could challenge advocates of violent Islamism.

But key local authorities are now in revolt. According to the Local Government Chronicle, many councils are refusing to adopt a target to "build resilience to violent extremism" for fear of damaging community relations. Their Muslim constituents are said not to like PVE because they think the programme stigmatises them. And non-Muslims are said to resent the fact that Muslim groups seem to be benefiting.

A more serious point is whether local government is able to choose appropriate Muslim partners. Yes, municipalities enjoy on-the-ground expertise. But what kind of grassroots expertise? Can they really discriminate between different varieties of Islamism? If even MI5 finds difficulty drawing the line, what hope for aldermanic worthies?

Earlier this year Paul Goodman, the Shadow Communities Minister, pressed Ms Kelly's successor, Hazel Blears, to confirm that money was not falling into the hands of extremists. Blears could not supply that reassurance, though she is the least blameworthy figure in all this. More than any other Cabinet minister, she "gets" radical Islamism. But it is infernally difficult, even for her, to monitor which groups are worthy recipients and which aren't. It was symptomatic that it took her department six months to answer Goodman's previous inquiries on where the funds were going. And even if they are not going to unworthy causes, are these schemes effective?

The list of grant recipients is strange. Even Conservative councils are not very rigorous in choosing partners. For example the Channel 4 Dispatches programme exposed hate preaching at the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham. A preacher, Abu Usama, urged that homosexuals be thrown from mountains. Yet the Green Lane mosque is one of the partnership organisations approved by Birmingham City Council. Indeed, the Green Lane mosque is also a well-established interlocutor of the West Midlands Police. West Midlands Police still aver that men such as Abu Usama enjoy the "street cred" to stop radicalised young Muslim men from tipping over into violent jihadism.

Kensington & Chelsea Council has turned to the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre to deliver a "parental empowerment programme" that aims "to foster modern, inclusive and Islamically sound relationships between parents and children. Parenting techniques are imparted and discussed from an Islamic and wider social perspective by a trained Muslim NHS psychotherapist."

Why is it the duty of a council to "foster Islamically sound relationships between parents and children"? Who defines what is "Islamically sound"? How does picking a Muslim psychotherapist - apparently on sectarian grounds - help to prevent violent extremism?

Likewise, Westminster City Council relies on the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre (which is not even in the city) to organise a "young people's leadership and debate programme" on foreign policy. Why should Tory councils turn to them, of all people? The centre's name appeared in a statement on the website of Hizb-ut-Tahrir asserting that "the Muslim community in Britain has unequivocally denounced acts of terrorism. However, the right of people anywhere in the world to resist invasion and occupation is legitimate". The statement also denounced the proscription of Hizb-ut-Tahrir - a key objective of David Cameron.

Such partnerships are reflective of the greatest weakness in PVE - and of much the Government's "contest" strategy for combating terrorism. As its name suggests, it is largely about countering violent extremism. It isn't necessarily about countering non-violent extremism.

The interplay between violent and non-violent radicalisation lay at the heart of Mr Cameron's remarkable recent address to the Community Security Trust. Cameron believes that it is not enough simply to be against jihadism on these shores. He is deeply disturbed by the sectarianism of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and associates such as the Cordoba Foundation - which receive PVE funds.

It's as if the Government responded to a violent insurgency from the neo-Nazi terrorists of Combat 18 by turning to Nick Griffin of the BNP, on the ground that he enjoys nationalist "cred" with alienated skinheads. After all, Mr Griffin is non-violent and believes that whites should participate in the political process. Perhaps he might stop bombs from going off. But what price would he exact for it - and what kind of society would we then be living in?

Source



Still plenty of sound values in Louisiana

Not much like California or Britain

Dot Brown's first-graders at East Beauregard Elementary stand a little taller and speak a little louder now as they recite the Pledge of Allegiance each morning. Brown said that's because her students are starting to understand what it means to serve in the military. The children have been corresponding via e-mails, and even "snail-mail," with Sgt. Joey Bartz, the father of one of Brown's students, Maili, since November. Bartz is attached to an Army medic unit serving in Iraq.

On a recent Thursday, the students wrote letters to "Mr. Joey," chatting about everything from classroom assignments to dinosaurs. They also made shamrocks to send him for St. Patrick's Day. "Green is Mr. Joey's favorite color," Brown reminded the students.

It takes about a week for the correspondence flow to go full circle. Brown said students are on constant vigil listening for the "ping" - the noise the class computer makes when an e-mail arrives. "Oh, they can't wait," she said.

Bartz personalizes messages for each of the children. He lists their names and has something personal to say to each of them. When the children send Bartz messages, they write about a sibling or what they had to eat that day. But sometimes the talk becomes more serious, Brown said. "Sometimes they'll tell him things like, 'My papa died' - he's kind of like their Dear Abby," she said. The children ask Bartz about what he eats, where he sleeps and about his job in the Army. In return, Bartz, who is studying to be a teacher, quizzes them about history and math. "He'll ask them things like who was the first president and what is 1,000 plus 1,000," Brown said.

The children also have running jokes with Bartz - ones that only they understand. In their e-mails and letters, students refer to Baghdad as "Baghdaddy," and sometimes call Bartz "Mr. Fancy Pants." "And he plays right along with it," Brown said. "He said that his friends get a kick out of some of the things they say. They have kids, too, and understand."

Brown said it's just chitchat to most, but it means so much more to the class. She said when students learned Bartz would be moving camps and would not be able to write for a while, they were "heartbroken." And when Bartz's correspondence was threatened by a problem with his computer's power cord, the children brainstormed ways to repair it.

Students have also sent Bartz care packages, some filled with candy and colored artwork. Once, when they sent Bartz a pillowcase they made for him, he sent a message back that he had "never slept better."

Brown said she believes the correspondence has also helped Maili deal with her father's absence. "It's funny - sometimes she slips and calls him 'Mr. Joey,'" Brown said. Brown said she thinks it has also helped her class bond. "It has brought them closer," she said.

The students are working to craft a book about a hero in which Bartz is featured as the main character. However, most have never actually met him, and he is not scheduled to return home until November, when the children will have moved on to the second grade and new teachers. Until then, the class will continue doing their duty by offering an unending stream of love, admiration, friendship and support for "Mr. Joey." "I hope he will be able to come to the school when he gets home and meet the students," Brown said. "They would love it."

Source



Nihilism, drugs and Canadian culture

One senses that the Canadians who matter, that is the ruling and sycophantic classes, see our country as some sort of Utopian gateway where no past shall enter. "The future is now!" they proclaim, with the appropriate amount of uncertainty given that one man's Utopia is another man's Dystopia. This is all well and good because Utopia by definition is exclusive rather than inclusive. After all, we wouldn't want "those people" to be part of Canada now would we? They belong to the past - we must keep them there. We must ignore them and rewrite our history to exclude them. We must create a new paradigm where uncommon sentiment replaces common sense and facts are never inconvenient; where indeed the word "fact" has been redefined to mean "feelings" and "intuition" and the ultimate accolade of peer review is, "we feel the same way you do".

The most obvious problem with putting beans in your ears and singing nursery rhymes is that it is indicative of a failure of maturity. Wanting world peace may be a decent sentiment but there is nothing noble about sacrificing your life and the lives of your family and neighbors on the altar of political correctness rooted in a lack of moral courage and a refusal to take effective action. Singing "Koombya" with Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda didn't prevent the genocide and the only school shootings ever prevented by teachers or guidance counselors were when people willing to accept adult responsibility were armed with handguns rather than 911 on speed dial.

You don't have to be Christian or Jewish to know that evil exists, but it helps. When you are faced with evil and it is about to destroy you or someone under your protection there can be no shades of gray. For a relativist pan Gia atheist spiritualist absolute evil does not exist, unless in the guise of holocaust deniers or Danish cartoon publishers or pro-family anti-abortionists or pro gun self defense absolute rightists. When you think about it, is it any wonder people who encourage killing the innocent pre- or near born and won't call it murder; that won't condone the execution of mass or serial murderers let alone those guilty of treason; cannot protect themselves or their children in the real world?

People who are out of touch with reality are not necessarily insane. What is insane is putting these people in charge of dealing with reality. We have to stop pretending public safety can be handled by confidence artists and Canada Council grants. That's how we got "self esteem is more important than accomplishment" and "gun free zones". People who deal in words, acrylics and urine soaked crucifixes are not the best people to ask about self defense. Mention guns and their eyes light up with all the works of art they can create with confiscated heirlooms.

The cops are not much better, at least in Canada. They want the money and the empire that come with "growing market share". The thin blue line of old helped citizens preserve their basic human rights to life, liberty and property. The new reality is a protection racket. The fat blue line dreams of a police state that is already beyond the wildest fantasies of Hitler and Stalin. Why in the name of common sense would we want to create more laws and hire more police? We tried that before and it didn't work then either.

Rita Mae Brown said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results". Let's stop the insanity. Let's forget Utopia for a minute. Let's take the joint out of our mouth, the needle out of our arm and turn off the television set. Let's stop chattering like monkeys. Let's get calm and centered and clear. Let's look evil in the face and not avert our eyes.

The first place we need to recognize evil is in ourselves. For most people the greatest evil they will find in their own soul is cowardice. Not only can they not act heroically but they actively deny others the ability to act heroically. This position denies both the existence of evil and just as importantly the existence of heroism. This is the practical application of nihilism and this is the great malaise of Canada. If morality does not exist or is relative then I cannot be held responsible for being a coward. But to make sure I am not revealed as a coward by the actions of others, I must prevent others from behaving heroically even if by so doing I seal my own doom. See? I told you this was easier for Christians and Jews. If you lack a moral foundation your brain must be ready to explode with antipathy and lack of understanding.

If you are a "person of morality" you know that actual evil exists and further that it must be confronted. The Talmud advises you to smite evil. Jesus advises that a sword is a good thing to have. Even Gandhi and the Dalai Lama have advocated shooting back as a good and reasonable and just response to enemy incoming. Those who were paying attention, especially Jews, learned the lesson of the Warsaw Ghetto - the Holocaust in microcosm. Those who did not are doomed to be forever asking the next Gamil Gharbi if they might be excused from class as a conscientious objector.

What is the most important weapon you can have if you are under attack in oh, a school shooting for example? Did you say a gun? Wrong. That is the second most important weapon you will need. A cell phone with 911 on speed dial? Probably won't save any lives, but if it makes you feel like a hero to call for a cleanup on aisle 9.. If you said the most important weapon against evil is a sense of morality then you get to draw your gun and cap the devil. If you are morally challenged what the hell are you doing with our children? You should be painting murals in a government office or something like that. You certainly shouldn't be passing on your ineffective life skills to our kids. Just because you have the luxury of calling a janitor when a kid pukes in class doesn't mean you get to pass the buck when that same kid's life is in danger.

Do you know what really pisses off the morally ambivalent? The possibility that their students might be equipped to deal with the situation. American College kids are often old enough to serve in the armed forces or as cops. They may be in the ROTC or the National Guard. They may be Olympic shooters or competent club level competitors. They may even have concealed carry permits that kick in when they cross the border. In Canada, most teachers would say, "I don't care about your skills, your training, I don't like guns and I lack your skills and training and if I am going to die then so are you!" How do I know this? I'll show you.

In Israel in the 1970's Palestinian terrorists thought they had found a good gig. "Where will you always find the most vulnerable in society?' they asked themselves. "In schools!" they answered in unison. Rebecca and Wendy and the mayor of Toronto hadn't invented gun free zones yet, so the Palestinians couldn't use the politically correct term, but they recognized reality when they saw it. They shot up a few remote schools killing students, teachers and the odd grief counselor. Israeli parents thought this was a bad thing and wonder of wonders, the school boards thought so too. They didn't waste their time and energy holding candle light vigils for the media, hoping the terrorists would recognize the plaintive tones of "Koombya" as a reaching out in understanding. They recognized evil, they decided to stand up to it, they got guns and they showed up.

Terrorists aren't as stupid as you would think people who become human bombs might be. Every time they tried whacking a school that was armed the terrorists were the ones who got whacked. The terrorists thought this was terribly unfair, but they stopped attacking schools. They tried attacking supermarkets, cafes, busses and soon every time a terrorist whipped out his gun or the trigger on the dynamite stuck up his ass some civilian whipped out a pistol and shot him. Just to make sure, the next passing soldier or cop would pump a few shots into the downed terrorists head. Cleanup on aisle 9. In Israel life goes on and do you know what? There is less crime and less whining about crime in Israel than there is in Toronto or Montreal.

In Montreal when Gamil Gharbi asked the males to leave the room they went without protest. No United Airlines Flight 93 - "Let's Roll!" here. I guess if Flight 93 had been Air Canada it would have hit the White House. But I digress, other than to emphasize that there were no heroes in the room. After the executions started and Montreal's finest had been alerted there were still no heroes outside the building. I'll bet that if one of those women who knew she was going to die had one of the guns sitting unused in a cowardly cop's holster outside it would have made all the difference. And you know what? Those males who left would really feel like shit, knowing that a woman saved a lot of asses that day. Instead of Heroic Empowerment rising on its haunches to tell the tale of hope, we gave birth to the Great Canadian Victim Industry, where all whine the catechism, "woe was us, and we could do nothing, for we were cowards." I think I'll flagellate until my hand grows hairy and I need glasses; but I won't learn from my mistakes because I am still a coward.

One big difference, of course, is that in Israel the terrorists have no redeeming attributes and if they die that is a good thing. Gamil Gharbi was as lacking in redeeming qualities as any Canadian terrorist could ever be. He was a male with a gun. He couldn't get a date if his acne depended on it. Canadianize him by using his French name, Marc Lepine so we don't offend the Arabs; make Canadians think it was the lovable boy next door who went off the deep end; we really need to blame this on the gun because if we don't we will all be exposed as moral cowards.

On the streets of Canada terrorists are not the problem, it is the gang bangers. In Toronto they keep the populace supplied with dope. Your average urbanite knows that even if she doesn't do drugs some of her good friends or those she works with do drugs and "marijuana isn't really a drug so I don't even know where you're coming from".

You are so full of it dear. Students smoke dope. Teachers smoke dope. Parents smoke dope. Bureaucrats smoke dope. Cops smoke dope. Dope is illegal and Al Capone is dead. These days it's not Italians whacking each other on the streets of Chicago, its Jamaicans whacking each other on the streets of Toronto. Or Vietnamese whacking each other on the streets of Edmonton. Or East Indians (sorry, "South Asians") whacking each other in Vancouver or Chinese Triads in Richmond or Canadian Indian (that would be "Native" or "First Nation") gangs on the prairies. Canada is a nation of stoners. It is also a nation of gangs. Every ethnic group has its gangs - the joy and fruit of multiculturalism. How can we lock up or shoot back when it threatens our supply of High? When we would be locking up or shooting our neighbors? I've got a bad case of the warm fuzzies. I need a vegan granola bar and a Perrier.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Morality. If you have it you know what you have to do. If you don't have it then whatever happens is just a cost of doing business in your nihilistic world. But don't worry - there are government programs for you. And grief counselors. You can have my share - I don't need them. And when you're ready to play in the real world get your ass over to the nearest Fish & Game club. There are millions of us in Canada who have both a sense of morality and guns. We can help.

Source



Australia's self-inflicted African problem

POLICE are advising the Immigration Department for the first time about how and where to settle troubled African refugees. Senior Victorian police have urged the department to settle Sudanese families in country towns such as Mildura and Sale, away from suburban Melbourne where young African men are being caught up in street crime. The Australian understands that police first appealed to immigration officials last year following a spike in criminal activity among young Sudanese men, while Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon was attempting to play down the problem. Sudanese gang violence escalated last September, with the fatal bashing of 19-year-old Liep Gony near Noble Park railway station, in Melbourne's east.

Police advised against settling Sudanese in "dysfunctional areas" such as housing commission flats in Melbourne's north and east, and a growing number of the 15,000-member state community are now living in Mildura, Sale and Wonthaggi. African Think Tank chairman Berhan Ahmed yesterday praised the rural settlement, saying it would help the Sudanese integrate, find work and avoid drugs, alcohol and street crime. "The influence of drugs and alcohol will not be there [You're kidding!], and it will be much easier for kids and refugee families to adjust in rural areas," he said.

Dr Ahmed - a Melbourne University senior research fellow studying refugees living in rural Victoria and their city counterparts - said young Africans living in the country were more likely to perform better at school and get work. While it was difficult to resettle refugees who were already living in Melbourne, he said the Brumby Government could offer them better housing and jobs to encourage them to move. "You entice them by giving them opportunities," he said.

Victoria Police's multicultural liaison officer, Joseph Herrech said helping Sudanese refugees to settle in Melbourne was a challenge for immigration officials and police. He said grouping the Sudanese together at times led to crime-related problems, and separating them often exacerbated their emotional hardship. "We've recommended to Immigration that they be spread out slightly more," he said.

Other police recommendations to the immigration department include developing better pre-departure programs for humanitarian refugees to educate them more about Australian culture, the judicial process and the law-enforcement agencies. Police sources have told The Australian that gangs involving Sudanese men, including African Power and the Bloods and Crips - inspired by the Los Angeles-based crime groups - have grown in numbers and become more of a concern in the suburbs of Collingwood and Carlton.

Former immigration minister Kevin Andrews decided to cut back the African refugee intake last year amid fears they were not "settling and adjusting" into Australian life.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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