Wednesday, July 09, 2008

British children as young as three should be reported for 'racism', Government-funded group claims

Upsetting little children is no problem for these Fascists

Nursery teachers should inform on youngsters such as these if there is a 'racist incident', says a Government-funded advisory group. Toddlers should be taught about racism and singled out for criticism if they have racist attitudes, a Government-funded advisory group said yesterday.

It told nursery teachers, playgroup leaders and childminders to record and report every racist incident involving children as young as three. These could include saying 'Yuk' about unfamiliar food. Even babies should not be ignored in the hunt for racism because they can 'recognise different people in their lives', a new guide for nurseries and child care centres said.

The instructions for staff in charge of pre-school children in day care have been produced by the National Children's Bureau, which receives œ12million a year, mostly through taxpayer-funded organisations. The NCB, which describes itself as 'an umbrella body for the children's sector', has long used its resources to campaign on controversial issues, for example in favour of a legal ban on smacking by parents. It also runs the Sex Education Forum, a campaign for more sex education in schools.

The new 366-page guide, Young Children and Racial Justice, warned that 'racist incidents among children in early years settings-tend to be around name-calling-casual thoughtless comments, and peer group relationships'. It said such incidents could include children using words like 'blackie', 'Pakis', 'those people' or 'they smell'. Children might also 'react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying "yuk".'

Nursery staff are told: 'No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist intent, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action.' If children 'reveal negative attitudes the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes'. Nurseries are encouraged to report as many racist incidents as possible to local councils. 'Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution,' it said. 'In fact, the opposite is the case.' The guidance said that anyone who disagrees is racist themselves.

It also suggests cultivating the home languages of new immigrants - despite Government anxiety to promote the learning of English. It said: 'English is now viewed as the major language of the world but this is not because it has any innate linguistic advantages - it is because English is the language of power in a world dominated by English-speaking peoples.'

Critics of the race programme for pre- school children labelled it 'totalitarian'. Author and researcher on family life Patricia Morgan said: 'Stepping in to stop severe bullying is one thing, but this is interference in the lives of children. It smacks of totalitarianism. 'It is regulation of private speech and thought. They intend nursery staff to step into children's playground squabbles and then report them to the local council as race incidents. Who would ever have thought that the anti-racism crusade would go so far?'

Source

A good comment from Taranto:

The notion that one's taste in food has anything to do with one's attitude toward groups of people is far-fetched to begin with. Scott Bieser, a commenter on the Telegraph's Web site, comments: "This is hilarious. The American Sotuhwest is filled with racist rednecks who love spicy Mexican food but hate Mexicans."

The idea that a 3-year-old child's aversion to unfamiliar food reflects racism is more preposterous still. Furthermore, scolding such a child for "racism" is likely to make him more conscious of race and therefore more prone to prejudice. But maybe that's the idea. After all, the more race-conscious we are, the more "need" there is for outfits like the National Children's Bureau.



400 members of "Rainbow Family" surround, attack federal officers

Forest Service officials stoned by hippie group allowed to displace Boy Scouts' service project

National Forest Service officials, surrounded and attacked yesterday in Wyoming with sticks and stones by 400 members of the Rainbow Family, were given reason to regret their decision to cancel a long-planned national service project by the Boy Scouts of America in favor of the unorganized annual gathering of hippies, anarchists and "free spirits" who commune with nature and each other.

According to a statement released by the Forest Service's Incident Command Team in Rock Springs, Wyo., officers patrolling the main meadow of the seven-day event held near Sandy Springs made contact with a man who fled and was later apprehended. A second Rainbow attendee was detained for interfering in the arrest. As 10 officers began to leave the area with their suspects, they were surrounded by an estimated 400 members of the Rainbow Family. A request for additional officers was made. "The mob began to advance, throwing sticks and rocks at the officers. Crowd-control tactics were used to keep moving through the group of Rainbows," the news release said. When back-up support arrived, officers made five arrests. A government vehicle was damaged and one officer was treated for injuries at a local hospital and released.

"This lawless behavior is unacceptable and we will not tolerate it," said John Twiss, Forest Service director of law enforcement. "The safety of our employees, public and Rainbow participants is our number one priority, and we will continue to protect everyone on the national forest."

As WND reported, the Forest Service canceled a week-long national service project by approximately 1,000 members of the Order of the Arrow, the honor society for the Boy Scouts of America, scheduled since 2004, after the Rainbow Family announced it would hold its annual gathering in the same general location. As WND has reported, the Order of the Arrow has been working for several years to put together this year's public service project called ArrowCorps5.

The plans include about 5,000 top Boy Scouts from across the country donating an estimated 250,000 hours of time to restore, repair, rebuild, reclaim and refurbish miles of trails, acres and glens at five different sites in the nation's forests. In most cases, the scouts pay their own travel and room and board expenses to participate in the biggest service project since World War II.

"ArrowCorps5 is the largest, most complex, most challenging conservation project ever conceived by the Order of the Arrow and Boy Scouts of America," said Brad Haddock, chairman of the National Order of the Arrow Committee. "This project provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for each participant to set an example of leadership in service to those who treasure our national forests."

The decision by the Forest Service to evict the Scouts left local Wyoming leaders infuriated. "It's a matter of intimidation," Sublette, Wyo., County commissioner Joel Bousman told WND. "It appears the Rainbow group has managed to intimidate an entire federal agency."

Mark Rey, the federal undersecretary supervising the U.S. Forest Service, met with Rainbow Family members earlier in Pinedale, and urged them to move their gathering, the Casper Star-Tribune reported. They refused. Rey told WND he thought the decision to move the Scouts to somewhere else and leave the Rainbow Family alone was the best under the circumstances. He said the government allows the Rainbow Family to bypass its regular permit requirements in favor of an "operating plan" but the bottom line was that the government didn't want to be arresting hundreds or thousands of people. "They couldn't be expelled without a fairly significant amount of law enforcement activity," he told WND a week before the gathering began.

"The Boy Scouts have been planning this since 2004," Bousman told WND. "They've been through the planning process and have been working very cooperatively with our Forest Service. They've spent lots of money planning the biggest venture ever for the Boy Scouts. "They did everything legally, they had their permits. But because of the fact Undersecretary Rey, for whatever reason, took it on himself to do what he has referred to as an experimental process by which he does not require the Rainbow Group to have any permit, the conflict developed," Bousman said.

Now, the "significant amount of law enforcement activity" Rey was hoping to avoid by not holding the Rainbow family to the standard permitting process has become unavoidable. Following yesterday's melee, members of the gathering told the Star-Tribune a far different story than that told by the Forest Service. "They were so violent, like dogs," camper Robert Parker said after the incident. "People yelled at them, 'You're shooting children.'" Rainbow members claimed they were Tasered, hit with rubber bullets and pepper spray balls, and had guns pointed at them.

"These people deliberately, for hours, were aggressively working the camp over and working the people over," a Rainbow who gave his name only as Ryan said. "They chose the kiddie village - the one place, the kids, to take their stand and create a riot, and I bought into it. ... They were looking for an excuse to do some damage to us." Ryan's partner, Feather, said she was pepper-sprayed, and saw another Rainbow member with welts all over his body.

Today, the American Civil Liberties Union announced plans to investigate how federal law enforcement treated those attending the gathering. Linda Burt, executive director of the ACLU in Wyoming, said her organization would accept collect calls from Rainbow Family members for the next two weeks to gather information.

Meanwhile, the ArrowCorps5 projects already completed in other states are being credited with making "immediate" changes, Scott Scheffler, a volunteer spokesman for the Scouts, told WND. In Missouri, for example, 100 acres of invasive salt cedar was removed, restoring the area's water table, allowing grasslands to re-grow and restoring the area's beautiful vistas.

Source



Hope Has Not Necessarily Died

This is a time when a foul murderer by the name of Samir Kuntar is being exchanged for the bodies of two Israelis kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is a time when the Iranian leadership regularly promotes genocide by boasting that Israel is about to be wiped off the face of the earth. But it is also a time when an Algerian intellectual by the name of Boualem Sansal can give an interview in the prestigious French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and reveal that hope has not necessarily died.

I had never previously heard of Boualem Sansal. He is described in the interview as a former Algerian civil servant, and author of four earlier novels, and now a fifth with the title of Le Village de l'Allemand, or The Village of the German. He says he took his subject from a real-life discovery that there was a Nazi, a former S.S. man who had more or less colonized a village in Algeria, converted to Islam and was regarded as a hero locally. "The Hitler salute," Sansal says, "has always had its partisans in Algeria."

For a couple of decades now, Algeria has been in the throes of a brutish and murky civil war, costing an estimated 200,000 lives, most of them simple villagers caught and massacred either by Islamists or the military regime. Al-Qaeda in North Africa is presently establishing a base there, trying to colonize the country. The more he researched his novel, Sansal tells us, the more he saw "a substantial similarity between Nazism and the political order that prevails in Algeria." Both are one-party states, with militarization, brainwashing, the falsification of history, the exaltation of the race, the tendency to claim victimhood and to assert that there is a conspiracy against the nation. There is glorification of the leader, an omnipresent police, mass organizations, religious indoctrination. Xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism, he adds, have been elevated to the status of dogmas. We all know, he sums up, that "the line separating Nazism from Islamism is a thin one."

September 11 was "a terrible shock to all of us." Then he understood that Islamism was far more radical than anyone had imagined. Islamism is the matrix of terrorism, and only Muslims and their theologians can engage with it, to recover the Enlightenment that long ago was theirs. His books are banned in Algeria, he thinks of packing his bags, but decides to stay because one day the country will rediscover its way, and he would like to be there to see it happen.

Which is more impressive, the truth and clarity of this man's vision or his courage in expressing it so openly? And who knows what a free spirit like this may achieve?

Source



Leftist puritans rife in the Australian government

From which circle of hell did all these finger-waggers spring? Never have I seen so many preachers so keen to bully others for their own "good". Last week it was Health Minister Nicola Roxon (again) in her Sass and Bide hairshirt, this time warning smokers they may soon need a permit to puff. A licence for cigarettes, Roxon says, is "one of the types of things" her health taskforce may tell her to impose.

Have these people gone mad? Strained a tolerance muscle in their Pilates class? For the first time I feel the temptation to light up a cancer-stick. Indeed, I couldn't think of many nobler causes for which to lay down my wheezing life.

A new breed of puritans is upon us and growing far too puffed up themselves. It's increasingly urgent they be resisted. Consider what plans they've already unveiled to cramp your life and set it to their stern order. Sprinklers on your garden? Banned now for years - to "save" country rivers from the new dams that these concrete greens find hideous, or would if they ever drove out to see one.

Mockery of someone's faith? Also banned, under hate-speech laws - to "save" the too-tender ears of tolerance tut-tutters too intolerant to show tolerance themselves.

Plastic bags to lug home your shopping? To be fined with a 25 cent levy - to "save" the planet from a plastic that smug green baggers find capitalistically crass.

Pre-mixed drinks? Hit with a new alcopop tax - to "save" teenagers from a drink that these pinot preachers find sick-makingly sweet.

Petrol? To be made dearer by an emissions trading scheme - to "save" the planet from a warming that these car-haters and salvation-seekers won't admit halted a decade ago.

Cramp, crimp, crush, ban. Designer sackcloth for everyone. Good heavens, so drunk on bans are these people - drunker than any alcopopper - that a forum of St Kilda residents last week even suggested locals be made to wear ankle bracelets so that visitors could be detected after dark and thrown out. Yes, true, I'm afraid. What next: microchip owners of airconditioners?

Judge the censorious mood from this homely planet-saving advice in last month' edition of the Rural Women's Network Newsletter: "At Easter, we avoid foil-wrapped chocolate eggs by having our kids paint hard-boiled eggs and stones . . . For my daughter's sixth birthday last year we took a tribe of children on a nearby bushwalk and had a rubbish-collecting competitions." Stones for Easter eggs? Rubbish collecting for a little girl's party? This isn't meant to save a planet but to impose someone's joy-killing morality.

It's not just a madness confined to Australia, of course. The Left in every English-speaking land is now indulging its inner totalitarian. How mad is the mood? Here's another measure: America's Democratic Party says its national convention to endorse Barack Obama as its presidential candidate must be the "greenest convention in the history of the planet". So it's not only banned fried food and insisted on organic, but ordered that every meal served to delegates be nutritiously vibrant, including "at least three of the following colours: red, green, yellow, blue-purple, and white". When strangers hover over your plate, demanding you eat not only your greens but your purples, yellows and whites, both of you have a problem.

Actually, everyone does. I mean, if that's the bossing that Democrats inflict on each other, what might they do to everyone else once in power? Good question, and in Australia we already have the scary answer to what our own elite would do to us.

Finger-waggers, as you know, are most commonly found among the "intelligentsia" - famous for producing mega-theories to excuse sticking its nose into other people's business. Think, say, of communism, fascism and now global warming. Ever since the French Revolution we've known that such people are best kept well away from power. But, alas, earlier this year 1000 of the "best and brightest" of this very class, plus a few token conservatives, were instead summoned by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to come to Canberra and tell him how to run the country.

I knew this would end in tears. Read these people's final report, released a month ago, and tremble. Or laugh. It's a Mein Kampf for meddlers - a defence of for-your-own-good bullying that is startling in its contempt for our right to decide for ourselves not just how to live, but even what to eat. What? People deciding for themselves? Buying their own stuff? "We don't realise how insidious this individualism is," chorused our "best and brightest". "Individuality trumps community at every turn" when we really "need to move from individualism to community focus".

Even what people eat should be seen as a decision best made not just by individual diners, but with "the emphasis on collective responsibility". Of course, some party pooper at Rudd's summit must have coughed nervously, because the report goes on: "A view was put forward that this type of approach to policy and program implementation would risk the notion of a 'nanny state' and overrestriction of behaviour . . ." But damn it: "It was felt . . . that health promotion must not succumb to these pressures."

Why not is not explained. It is enough that our "best and brightest" disapprove of what you do. So, having given themselves licence even to dash the chips from your mouth and the slurpee from your hand, off they go, thinking up fresh ways to bully you into living the life of their jackbooted dreams.

Here's just some of the bans and new by-laws their 2020 report urges on Rudd: "A junk-food tax"; "a 2.5 cent increased tax on each cigarette"; "abolishing cigarettes and alcohol brought into the country duty-free"; "more stairs in workplaces to encourage people to avoid using the escalators"; "price foods according to their carbon costs"; and "educating the 'white' population on indigenous culture".

Making people suffer is actually good: "Cities should become car-unfriendly." Making them go without is the whole idea: "Don't just buy green, buy less." And having to force them to obey is no problem: "We need . . . accountability mechanisms to reduce their consumption", plus "levers" such as "taxation, incentives (positive and negative) and regulation". You can hear them drooling over that, no?

Here are bullies who dream of interfering even with your right to buy musical instruments, demanding we "move from buying to hiring", and adding: "Examples are pianos . . ." Pianos, but not didgeridoos, of course.

It's hard to believe our allegedly finest minds could still think like this not two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Somehow, these are people who must have read George Orwell's grim 1984 as not a warning but an inspiration. When Orwell wrote of his poor hero being forced "to join in compulsory exercises following the instructions given by a woman from the telescreen", our intelligentsia must have thought: "Great idea! Let's tell Rudd!" And, sure enough, the report recommends that "half an hour of physical activity (be) built into sedentary jobs". Oh, what a kick, to force millions to run on the spot.

Who unleashed these salon Stalinists? These health fascists? These warming commissars? Who let them loose to flog us sinners into living lives more holy, by their grim creed?

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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