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

*************************

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.

***************************

No comments: