Sunday, September 22, 2013




More multiculturalism in Britain



A predatory rapist who posed as a gay Vogue  photographer to snare wealthy young victims was jailed for life yesterday.

Fabio Moniz, 27, toured exclusive West End venues to charm women with his ‘cut glass’ accent and immaculate manners.

But he poisoned them with the date rape drug GHB before subjecting them to sexual assaults.

He told the court that his life was like that of conman Frank  Abagnale portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Catch Me If You Can.

Yesterday Moniz was jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum of nine years for raping two women.

But detectives suspect he may have claimed many more victims. In 2009 he was cleared of attacking an American tourist. Judge Patricia Lees told Snaresbrook Crown Court that the Portuguese national was a ‘lone predator’ and a ‘very dangerous character’.

Moniz prowled the West End hunting for victims at fashionable nightclubs including Whisky Mist and Mahiki.

His Facebook page is full of  pictures of him posing with women at nightspots in the capital. He pretended to be a photographer, club promoter and even claimed to work for City accountants KPMG and to have partied with celebrities including pop star Rihanna.

In the first of the attacks in September last year, he approached two women outside the Funky Buddha nightclub. Telling them he ‘works in the fashion business with supermodels’ they went to another club where he spiked their drinks.

One of them said: ‘He was smartly dressed in a denim shirt, sweater and jeans and had a cut-glass accent with a slight lisp.’

Moniz took them back to a flat in Bermondsey, south-east London, where one woke up to discover him trying to have sex with her.

Just 20 days later he targeted an American in her early thirties who was dining alone in Claridges. He told her he was gay and had just finished a Vogue photoshoot before taking her to a club. She can remember little more except she woke up naked in her hotel room with Moniz beside her. In both cases he stole personal possessions including credit cards.

Moniz was confronted in court by a second American who accused him of raping her in 2009. The woman, now a successful financial analyst, travelled back to Britain to give evidence against him.

Police do not know how long Moniz has been in Britain. Detective Superintendent Kate Halpin said: ‘Given the nature of his crimes, it is highly likely Moniz  has committed further offences.’

Moniz, of no fixed address, who was convicted of two counts of rape and one of attempted rape at an earlier hearing, was ordered to sign the sex offenders’ register for life.

SOURCE






No one has a human right to hide from justice behind a veil

By Melanie Phillips

Looking back through my cuttings files, I see that my second column after I started writing on this page in December 2001 was on the subject of multiculturalism.

The then Labour Home Secretary, David Blunkett, had declared that British Muslims needed to realise that some of their cultural practices were incompatible with British values.

For his pains, he was accused of helping to promote racism. Plus ca change! Twelve years on, we are having the same argument.

Last week, Birmingham Metropolitan College dropped its ban on female students wearing the Islamic veil that covers the whole face except for the eyes, or even covers the eyes as well with a mesh.

This ban had been in place for eight years, along with a similar edict against hoodies and hats to ensure students were always ‘easily identifiable’.

Eminently sensible and overwhelmingly obvious, you might think. And apparently there had been no protest until recently, when a Left-wing student activist, Aaron Kiely, organised a 9,000-name petition after an anonymous student complained to a local paper that the ban discriminated against her right to wear the full-face veil.

A threatening demonstration was also on the cards. In the face of this pressure, the college shamefully backed down and modified its ruling to allow students to wear ‘specific items of personal clothing to reflect their cultural values’.

Amen to that last sentiment. A liberal society should, indeed, permit cultural or religious minorities to wear distinctive clothing — but only if that doesn’t get in the way of an institution’s ability to enforce basic standards of security, which the full veil most definitely does, since it obscures the identity of the person beneath the covering.

But it does more even than that. It destroys nothing less than the presumption of equality on which human communication is based.

For the full veil radically alters the balance of power between the woman it conceals and those attempting to communicate with her. This is because while they cannot see her face, she can see theirs.

The result is that they are no longer communicating as equals, because she has a basic advantage over them. And no one has the right to bring about that imbalance.

There is nothing remotely ‘racist’ about such concerns. (The term is also illiterate, since Islam is not a race.) Indeed, ‘racism’ is used merely as a smear to intimidate those trying to defend basic values.

For it is a fundamental characteristic of society that faces are visible.

As the Muslim anti-Islamist campaigner Maajid Nawaz has written, it cannot be ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to ask someone to show their face, since only a minority of Muslims believe covering a woman’s face is a religious duty. Some Muslims don’t even believe in covering a woman’s hair.

Nevertheless, non-Muslim society has been thrown into confusion over this issue.

The argument by the woman’s lawyer, that it is a denial of human rights to insist on removing the full veil in court, is as preposterous as it is predictable. There can be no ‘human right’ to interfere with the course of justice nor, indeed, with the universal givens of human communication.

Moreover, the full veil is also a mechanism for denying certain Muslim women their rights. For although some claim they wear it through free choice, others have revealed that, despite initially making such a claim, they have, in fact, been coerced and intimidated into doing so.

More fundamentally, the over-riding rule of a liberal society is that minority customs should be tolerated — but only if they do not interfere with the values of the majority.

That’s why last year another Muslim woman was barred from serving on a jury in an attempted murder trial because she refused to remove her veil.

And it’s why, in a key case in 2007, a High Court judge rejected a bid by a pupil to be allowed to wear the full veil in the classroom.

After that case, the Department for Education issued guidance that enabled head teachers to ban full-face veils on grounds of security, safety or learning.

To his credit, the Prime Minister backed the Birmingham college’s earlier decision to ban such veils, and let it be known that he would back a similar ban at his children’s school.

However, Nick Clegg declared he was uneasy about the ban and believed the bar had to be set ‘very high’ to justify such a prohibition.

For heaven’s sake, how can it be set any higher than a garment that replaces normal human communication by a sinister and intimidating black-out?

Mr Clegg’s lamentable feebleness of mind reflects widespread confusion about multiculturalism. For this doctrine is not, as is so often thought, merely about being tolerant of other cultures.

It holds instead that no culture can uphold its own values over any other.

It means, therefore, that Britain cannot say its core values of openness, equality before the law, women’s rights and so on should take precedence over cultures based on oppression and inequality.

It thus damns basic western values as ‘discrimination’ or ‘racism’, and turns the application of common sense into a prohibited activity.

It is, in short, a mad reversal of truth and justice that ultimately would destroy western society — a fate that risks being brought about not by Leftist rabble-rousers or Islamic fanatics, but by sanctimonious idiots like Nick Clegg.

Multiculturalism is one of the principal confusions of our age, one of many I have been writing about on this page for the past 12 years.

SOURCE

 


Scandinavian Reserve on Immigration Is Breaking Down

The performance of Norway’s conservative/populist/classical-liberal Progress Party in that country’s September 9th election caused much shrieking and swooning on the multicultural left.

One of the most piercing shrieks came from weirdly neckbearded sociologist Alf Gunvald Nilsen at the Guardian blog.  [Norway’s disturbing lurch to the right, September 10, 2013].

Nilsen’s column [sic] led off with a picture of fellow Norwegian Anders Breivik, perpetrator of the appalling July 2011 murders in Oslo and nearby Utøya Island.  The connection here was that Breivik had belonged to the Progress Party in 1999-2007, resigning his membership because he found the party’s line against multiculturalism insufficiently stern.

For an approximate equivalent, you can imagine VDARE.com running a story about Democrats doing well in the 2014 congressional midterm elections, the story prominently decorated with a picture of Washington Navy Yard killer Aaron Alexis, a liberal Democrat.  (We promise not to.)

Mr. Nilsen’s hyperventilating is even stranger in that the Progress Party’s performance in this election was not very good, their representation in Norway’s 169-seat parliament dropping from 41 seats to 29.

What disturbed Mr. Nilsen was rather the overall performance of the rightist parties, which together attained a wafer-thin parliamentary majority of 2 seats over the left-green coalition, which has been ruling since 2009 with a majority of 7.  Some “lurch”!

Indeed, analysts discount the drop in support for Progress by noting that the Conservative Party, which did exceptionally well—from 30 seats to 48—has adopted some of the Progress Party’s ideas, leading Progress supporters to some strategic vote-switching.

The rightist majority will only be a majority if Progress is fully included in government.  Everyone assumes they will be.  Progress helped prop up a center-right coalition in 2001-2005, but the coalition parties did not bring them in to decision-making.  Now, with less of a fjord to be bridged between Conservative and Progress policy positions, there is no longer any reason for the mainstream Right to keep Progress at arm’s length.

Not a strumpetProgress is pretty much what VDARE.com urges our own Republican Party to be:  low-tax, small-government, classical-liberal, culturally conservative, and immigration-restrictionist.  It is led by 44-year-old, agreeably-Scandinavian-looking Siv Jensen (who, although a spinster, is not a strumpet:  the headline “Siv Jensen har stumpet røyken” on that 2011 link translates as “Siv Jensen has quit smoking”).

Even more encouraging to us, Progress went through a schism in the early 1990s over open-borders libertarianism.  The Paulites eventually decamped and formed their own party, which soon withered on the vine.

Other good news from Norway:  two years ago the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO), a mainstream-conservative business lobby, came out against unskilled immigration, noting that (via Google Translate):

"Immigrants threaten the welfare state and [cost] too much. They work for a short time before they end up on welfare and [are] too little productive. [NHO will have fewer immigrants, ABC Nyheter, May 10, 2011.]"

There are some slight qualifications to be made there.  The immigration being spoken of in the NHO report, which it is now quite respectable to oppose, is of Muslims and Africans—“asylum seekers,” in the Euro-jargon of immigration.  Immigration of Swedes, Poles, and Russians into Norway’s small (5.1m) population is quite high and not objected to by anyone much, certainly not by business groups.

And traditional Scandinavian xenophilia remains intense among Norwegian elites.  It was Norwegians, remember, who gave the Nobel Peace Prize to just-elected President Barack Obama for . . .  Well, let’s be blunt:  for being black.  And much harm has already been done to Norway by mass Muslim immigration.

Still, a friend in Norway tells me that the configuration on the political right over there is “somewhat as if we had had intelligent Republican politicians in the U.S.A.”  We can dream.

Across the border in Sweden, meanwhile, the government has announced that it will give permanent resident status to all Syrian refugees who apply for asylum.

Since the United Nations has logged two million Syrians as being in a refugee status, with 4.25 million more displaced within the country, while Sweden’s entire current population is only 9.5 million, this may qualify as the most insane public policy declaration in recent years, anywhere in the world—crazier even than George W. Bush’s 2002 call for the trashing of rational credit standards in home-mortgage lending.

More astonishing yet, the government responsible for this bizarre decision is a center-right alliance dominated by the classic-liberal, low-tax, business-friendly Moderate Party.  Though by no means VDARE.com conservatives, the alliance is well to the right of the Social Democrats who dominated Sweden in the post-WW2 decades and famously excited the disapproval of Dwight Eisenhower (antepenultimate   paragraph here).  

The nearest Swedish equivalent to Norway’s Progress Party is the Sweden Democrats (by no means to be confused with the Social Democrats), who, since first entering the Swedish parliament in 2010, hold 20 of the 349 seats there.

The respectability gap between the Sweden Democrats and the governing center-right alliance is far wider than the Norwegian equivalent, though—more a gulf than a fjord.  All the other parties in parliament have declared policies of non-cooperation with them;

Some of the difference springs from the personalities of the two nations.  Until oil began to gush in the 1980s, Norway was a poor country of isolated, windswept settlements.  Sweden was wealthier and more cosmopolitan—for a while in the modern era, even imperialist.

A rough comparison would be the Scots versus the English.  Through poverty and hardship Norwegians became flintier, more cautious, and more sensible.  Their great burst of prosperity this past 30 years has been well managed.  The oil-rich Gulf Emirates have vending machines to dispense gold bars, and import Pakistanis and Filipinos to do all the work; oil-rich Norway has salted away their oil profits in a national fund for future generations.

The Sweden Democrats, like the British National Party, also had difficulty shaking off actual (as opposed to merely MSM-alleged) Neo-Nazi sympathizers brought along from its precursor parties.  This was far less of an issue in Norway, which, unlike Sweden or Britain, was actually occupied by the Wehrmacht.

We should not, therefore, expect the Sweden Democrats to be a key component of their nation’s government soon, as Norway’s Progress Party has become.  They are there in parliament, though, one more European political party speaking up for patriotic immigration reform.

Someone needs to do it.  The ten days of rioting in immigrant areas of southern Sweden this May showed how far Sweden has gone down the path of national suicide.  The city of Malmö is now a byword for Muslim violence and intolerance.  The city’s small number of Jews are particular targets:

I shall have to leave the Danes, Finns, Icelanders, and Faroese for another time, but there is plainly a great deal to say about the future demographic prospects for Norway and Sweden.  After years of conventional Scandinavian reserve, the peoples of those nations are at last beginning to say it.  

SOURCE





Leftist bigotry against the South

The South has always occupied a special place in the American landscape. As early as the Colonial era, a Southern tradition developed alongside but separate from the rest of the country, handing down a distinctive body of values, customs and stories that has shaped its culture for centuries.

In recent months, several news stories have called attention to the national media’s treatment of the South. Media portrayals of the Paula Deen saga, the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision, and other relevant stories betray a willingness to indulge in misleading and outdated cultural stereotyping.

Following a blitzkrieg from outlets like MSNBC, CNN, Huffington Post and more, jovial Georgian chef Paula Deen was dropped by multiple corporate partners—Food Network, Smithfield, Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Sears and several others. Deen’s crime: she admitted in a court deposition to using the N-word in a decades-old conversation with her husband. The conversation took place immediately after a black man placed a gun to her temple and robbed her. She said in the deposition, “… that’s just not a word that we use as time has gone on” and apologized on several occasions, but to no avail; corporate America, egged on by the media onslaught, snatched away her livelihood.

At the same time Deen was being excoriated for her private use of bigoted language many years prior, two other public figures escaped media scrutiny for hateful public comments they made in the present.

Alec Baldwin, the actor well known for his outspoken liberal activism, took to Twitter with virulently homophobic comments aimed at a reporter who had criticized Baldwin’s wife, writing “[I’d] put my foot up your f---ing a--, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much,” and “I’m gonna find you George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna f--k you…up.” Baldwin later disabled the Twitter account and apologized, but the incident failed to trigger much media attention, and he remains front and center in Capital One commercials.

Meanwhile, Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown University professor and regular MSNBC contributor, said of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on the network’s show “Martin Bashir,” “A symbolic Jew has invited a metaphoric Hitler to commit holocaust and genocide upon his own people.” Far from begetting disciplinary action or even public statements of disapproval from the network or the university where he teaches, Dyson’s remarks earned him a spot on the following Sunday’s “Meet the Press” and appearances on subsequent MSNBC programs.

There certainly appears to be a double standard when it comes to bigoted comments from well-known people. A liberal Yankee can slander reporters for being gay, and a race-mongering professor can compare black Supreme Court justices to Nazi sympathizers—no big deal. But the minute a white woman with a Southern accent admits to wrongdoing, all bets are off—disparate media outlets refuse to let the topic go, and her business is ruined. While no one (including Deen) is defending her use of the N-word, acute regional stereotyping seems to be at play, not a political one—since Deen actually campaigned for Obama in 2008. ...

While conservative political beliefs are sometimes tied to Southern culture, the media’s real foe is Southern culture itself. Time after time, the progressive movement has proven itself incapable of considering people as individuals, but rather as members of a larger group. This is obvious in the media’s coverage of politics, which nearly always centers on “blocs” of voters and interest groups: women, black voters, Hispanic voters, white voters, etc. For the Left, politics is a continual struggle for power among clashing ethnic and cultural groups. This system of analysis is dehumanizing and deterministic— but it’s the way much of the media process human events.

From this perspective, the world is divided largely into two camps: victims and oppressors. In America, victims include women, racial minorities, gays, and more; the oppressors are nearly always whites and Christians. It’s a perversion of the classical “great chain of being.” Groups that can claim some sort of past persecution—the more the better—are highest on the chain, and groups seen as historically oppressive are lowest. If whites and Christians are low on the progressive victimization chain, then Southerners are the lowest of the low, fit for derision and scorn.

Charlton Heston captured this in a speech in the 1990s, saying: “... the God fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle-class Protestant— or even worse, evangelical Christian, Midwestern or Southern, or, even worse, rural, apparently straight, or even worse, admitted heterosexual, gun-owning, or even worse, NRAcard- carrying, average working stiff, or even worst of all, a male working stiff … not only don’t you count, you are a downright obstacle to social progress.”

There are some serious problems with the progressives’ method of historical critique. First, it views existence solely backwards and leaves little room for free will, a hallmark of the human experience. Second, it boxes individuals within categories to which they don’t always neatly fit. To accommodate this failure, progressives must either ignore or attack such individuals (hence media treatments of black conservatives like Clarence Thomas and Tim Scott). Most critically, this worldview leads to intense scapegoating of “historically oppressive” groups.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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