Sunday, March 07, 2010


British Mother branded as abuser for telling daughter of caesarean

Britain's vengeful Leftist bureaucrats again. British officialdom rivals crime as a threat to ordinary decent people

SOCIAL WORKERS have placed the five-year-old daughter of a professional couple on the child protection register for “emotional abuse” after the mother told the girl she was delivered by caesarean. Other allegations against the mother include cuddling her daughter for too long when dropping her off at nursery.

The intervention by Birmingham social services prompted the mother, Shahnaz Malik, to go into hiding with her daughter, Amaani, for two months, fearing the girl would be taken away.

An alert was put out to all British ports, and police conducted raids on a string of properties in the West Midlands. Two weeks ago police battered down the door of the family’s home in an apartment block in an attempt to find Amaani. She had been moved elsewhere by her mother, but her father, Vijay Bansal, 42, an IT consultant, was later arrested and held in a cell overnight for “obstructing” the search.

Officers also seized Malik’s car, took toothbrushes from the bathroom to analyse for DNA and raided the homes of relatives in the middle of the night, looking for the mother and girl. “This whole case is madness as there is no reason for the state to be involved in this little girl’s life in this way,” said John Hemming, a Birmingham MP who campaigns against abuses by the family courts. “The problem is that the system is using massive aggression to deal with the mother’s refusal to respond to a set of frankly silly concerns.”

The council’s actions follow criticism of it by a judge for showing gross lack of judgment in failing to stop seven-year-old Khyra Ishaq starving to death. Care workers did not think she warranted being placed on the at-risk register.

The problems started after Amaani began to attend a private nursery last September. Within weeks, friction developed between Malik and staff, who said the girl bit her nails and had been overheard swearing at a teacher. Malik, who has a masters degree in social policy, said last week: “We never swear at home, so she must have picked up the words at nursery. She told me she did swear at the nursery teacher because she was grabbed very hard by her.”

When Malik withdrew Amaani from the nursery, she was told by a health visitor that their case was being referred to social services. “I went to a solicitor, who said the grabbing of Amaani’s arm was an assault, so I decided to make a complaint to the police,” Malik said. However, she felt the police were uninterested in her complaint and wanted to speak to Amaani alone — which Malik refused to allow.

A few days later her husband was called in by officers. “The police asked me if my wife has mental health problems. I said, ‘Absolutely not’,” Bansal said. “They said, ‘There are allegations coming from the nursery’. They said, ‘Someone overheard your wife saying to your daughter she had her stomach cut open to deliver Amaani’.”

Bansal said the police also told him that his wife cuddled Amaani for 10-15 minutes when dropping her off at the nursery. “I said, ‘No mother wants to leave her child screaming’. “Then they said that when my wife and daughter had been in the police station, Amaani had turned to the officers and said, ‘Hello, pigs.’ But at that point Amaani liked watching Peppa Pig. She calls me ‘Daddy Pig’ and she calls her mother ‘Mummy Pig’.”

Social workers told the family they wanted to hold a child protection conference. Malik said: “We decided not to attend or engage with them since we could see they had made their minds up already.”

In January, Birmingham council notified the family that Amaani was subject to a child protection plan for “emotional abuse”. Although she would be allowed to live at home, social workers would make unannounced visits.

Malik said: “I had only told Amaani about how she was born because I believe in telling the truth and she had thought her daddy gave birth to her. I don’t see how that is evidence of emotional abuse.” She added: “I was getting worried that they would come and take Amaani so I moved out with her and stayed with friends.”

Her husband remained at home but was taken to hospital with a heart condition two weeks ago. The next morning he received a message from the concierge at their block of flats saying the police had entered their two-bedroom apartment. “I had to basically discharge myself from the hospital to come and sort it out,” he said. A few days later he was arrested and placed in a cell while officers looked for Amaani. The girl was finally presented to the authorities last Thursday. She was allowed to return home.

Birmingham council has declined to comment, citing confidentiality.

SOURCE



Don’t mock my lentils: vegans to get discrimination rights in Britain

VEGANS and teetotallers are to be given the same protection against discrimination as religious groups, under legislation championed by Harriet Harman, the equalities minister. Members of cults and “new religions” such as Scientology, whose supporters include the film stars Tom Cruise and John Travolta, would also be offered protection, as would atheists.

A code of practice explaining the legal implications of the equality bill states that religions need not be mainstream or well known for their adherents to gain protection. “A belief need not include faith or worship of a god or gods, but must affect how a person lives their life or perceives the world.”

The code, drawn up by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, singles out vegans, who do not eat any animal products or wear leather, as meriting protection from religious discrimination. It says: “A person who is a vegan chooses not to use or consume animal products of any kind. That person eschews the exploitation of animals for food, clothing, accessories or any other purpose and does so out of an ethical commitment to animal welfare.”

A spokesman from the commission explained: “This is about someone for whom being vegan or vegetarian is central to who they are. This is not something ‘thought up by the commission’. Parliament makes the law, the courts interpret it and the commission offers factual and proportionate guidance to organisations where necessary. We are providing guidance on the implications of the equality bill.”

The legislation also covers “any religious belief or philosophical belief” and even “a lack of belief”. Philosophical beliefs to be protected could include humanism and pacifism, but a spokesman for Harman said scientific or political beliefs such as Marxism and fascism would not be covered. The commission added that the recently founded International Church of Jediism, with 500,000 followers worldwide who base their philosophy on the Star Wars films, would not qualify. Beliefs had to be heartfelt.

The watchdog also warns that advertisements giving preferential treatment to men or women could be illegal. This could mean the end of “ladies’ nights” at clubs, when women receive cut-price drinks or free entrance but men pay full price.

People for whom abstention from alcohol was a way of life would also be protected. Conversely, the bill would make it unlawful for a shopkeeper to refuse to sell cigarettes to a woman because she was pregnant.

SOURCE



The Guaranteed Failure of Catering to Muslim Perception
So long as widespread suspicion exists, and it does exist, amongst the Arab population, that the economic depression … is largely due to excessive Jewish immigration, and so long as some grounds exist upon which this suspicion may be plausibly represented to be well founded, there can be little hope of any improvement in the mutual relations of the two races — 1930 statement by the British government
What does this statement, following an inquiry into the 1929 Muslim attacks upon Jews in Mandatory Palestine, have to do with a recent disinvitation to speak at Britain’s Cambridge University for Israeli historian Benny Morris?

The statement marks the emergence of the Western phenomenon of making decisions on the basis of what Arabs and Muslims perceive, or are said to perceive, at the expense of the facts or the merits of the case. Note the reasons offered by Jake Witzenfeld, president of Cambridge University’s Israel Society, for disinviting Morris:
I decided to cancel for fear of the Israel Society being portrayed as a mouthpiece of Islamophobia. … We understand that whilst Professor Benny Morris’ contribution to history is highly respectable and significant, his personal views are, regrettably, deeply offensive to many.
Morris, once the darling of anti-Israel radicals, is in recent years execrated by them for emphasizing Arab rejection of Jewish statehood as the origin of enduring conflict. Mr.Witzenfeld is clearly overawed by this. Note, in Mr. Witzenfeld’s words, the 1929 leitmotiv: the facts aren’t important — how they could be perceived or portrayed is. This intellectually and morally bankrupt approach can be seen among those who urge an alteration of U.S. policy. Three examples from recent years:

January 2008: Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, urged America to engage Iran over its nuclear weapons program because “most Arabs don’t see Iran as a major threat.”

March 2006: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their neo-Nazi- and Islamist-approved antagonistic paper on Israel and its American supporters, say that Palestinians resorting to suicide bombing “is not surprising … because the Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions.”

April 2004: Egyptian president Husni Mubarak reportedly argued that “many Arabs perceive a sense of ‘injustice’ in the way the United States has offered strong backing for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.”

Were these sorts of representations to be heeded, what would occur? We needn’t guess — Western governments have been listening for years to this sort of talk, with the following results:

Iran has replied contemptuously to Western diplomatic coaxing by turning up the uranium enrichment lever. Sunni Arab powers, far from yawning in their imagined security, are likely to engage in a nuclear arms race with Shia Iran.

Through much of the Oslo process (1993-2000), Israel was deeply attentive to the notion that Palestinian terrorists blow up Israelis because they are frustrated peace-seekers rather than jihadists — a theory still popular among policy analysts who call themselves “realists.” Yet unilateral concessions embolden rather than pacify jihadists — witness the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which produced a dramatic increase in rocket assaults upon southern Israel and turned Gaza into a Hamas emirate clattering with imported arms.

In the past year, the Obama administration made ameliorating Palestinian perceptions of injustice a priority, strong-arming Israel to impose a ban on Jews moving to the West Bank and even parts of Jerusalem. Only the policy hasn’t helped the administration’s plan to reconvene peace talks. Far from it: the U.S. having raised the demand, Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority duly adopted it as a precondition and has refused to negotiate until Israel accedes to it.

The track record of policies designed to appease Arab and Muslim perceptions is provably poor, inasmuch as the irrationality, suspicion, and hatred that they seek to validate are impervious to facts.

Polls show, for example, that neither Egyptians nor Palestinians like America more despite being recipients of ever-rising levels of American largesse. Saudis have scant affection for the U.S. after decades of Washington’s fawning deference. Nor has Muslim opinion been perceptibly altered by the most striking examples of American aid and succor given to Muslims: in Bosnia in 1999, or in Indonesia after the 2005 southeast Asian tsunami.

Even Barack Obama is the partial exception that proves the rule: his popularity among Muslims after a year of strenuous outreach is limited relative to the rest of the world. His approach has not translated into Iranian mellowing or Arab gestures to Israel, two objectives he publicly sought to achieve in return for emollient diplomacy towards Muslims coupled with pressure towards Israelis.

More to the point, such popularity as Obama enjoys in the Muslim world is likely to be deeply conditional. With Obama unable to deliver an Israeli-Palestinian agreement that does not lie in his gift, or to pull out of Afghanistan, or to ignore what occurs in neighboring Pakistan, Arab and Muslim perceptions of Obama can be expected to erode over time. At present, he reportedly has the confidence of just 13% of Pakistanis — hardly a significant improvement over his predecessor’s 9%.

Lying behind the recurrent urge to adopt policies conditioned on what Arabs and Muslims perceive are many things, both general (fear of Muslim groups with a proven track record of violence; political correctness) and particular (rationalizing anti-American or anti-Jewish hatreds). But fear and rationalizing hostility offer no outlet: as in Palestine in 1930, it is a low level of statesmanship that caters to these, one that dooms its practitioners.

SOURCE



What a great steaming nit Malcolm Fraser is!

And that's being much more polite than I really feel inclined to be. For those who are not big on history, Fraser is a former Australian Prime Minister in the conservative cause, whose most notable post Prime-Ministerial activities have principally consisted of losing his trousers one night in Memphis Tennessee and sucking up to African dictators. He is much reviled among Australian conservatives for having done nothing for the conservative cause while he was in office.

His latest profundity is about the assassination of a HAMAS chief in Dubai:
"Mr Fraser said the Jewish state could no longer use the Holocaust as an excuse to justify state-sanctioned murder, and criticism of its policies should not be dismissed as anti-Semitism."
It has apparently escaped the notice of "Trousers" Fraser that Israel has not even acknowledged responsibility for the assassination and so has not blamed it on ANYTHING, let alone the holocaust. And the accusation that Israelis (who are of course predominantly Jews) have committed "state-sanctioned murder" is interesting. He fails to recognize that HAMAS is by its own assertions at war with Israel and that the assassination might reasonably be regarded as legitimate self-defence in that case. Fraser's one-sided slur on Israel DOES then sound like precisely that antisemitism which he denies.

But the man is a proven liar anyway so the only sadness is that his bigoted and probably senile comments were reported at all.

There is an amusing comment here which argues that Fraser's comments are probably in breach of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act of the State in which he resides (Victoria).



Australia: McDonald's rejects push to have more halal-serving outlets

McDONALD'S has rejected a push to have more halal-serving outlets despite pressure on the fast-food giant. A Victorian burger fan, Amin Assafiri, launched the Facebook campaign in frustration at having to drive from driving 8km north to the closest halal McDonald.

Mr Assafiri lives to the north of Melbourne, in Fawkner, with the nearest Hala McDonald's in Roxburgh Park. His "Make Fawkner McDonald's halal!" Facebook page has attracted 341 members -- not enough to sway the burger chain's management.

"We can only accommodate the market so much," McDonald's spokeswoman Kristy Chong said. "It is a considerable cost to go halal. "There are already three halal McDonald's in Melbourne."

Mr Assafiri said at least 1000 Muslims living in Fawkner made special trips to Victoria's halal McDonald's in Roxburgh Park and Brunswick East. The third Victorian halal McDonald's will open in a renovated Preston McDonald's in June.

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 or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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

No comments: