Friday, October 04, 2013



The multiculturalism never stops in Britain



Three pedestrians were struck by a car in a deliberate Grand Theft Auto-style revenge attack, a shocking video revealed today.

The friends - one of them partially blind - were crossing the road after a night out in Manchester city centre when the Vauxhall Corsa was used as a lethal weapon to knock them over ‘like skittles’.

Aqab Hussain, 21 - who was today convicted of four counts of attempted murder - drove straight into the victims, who were hurled through the air, before he sped off and left them for dead.

Eyewitness Corey Gordon, 26, who watched the attack from inside his car, later compared it to a sequence from the violent computer game series in which users play the role of car thieves.

He said: ‘It was like ten pin bowling where you hit the skittles and they go up in the air. I can only describe it as unreal - a computer game like Grand Theft Auto - as he swerved off line to hit the men. It knocked one of the men at least 7ft into the air.’

Hussain even wobbled his vehicle so he could shake off one of the men who was still on the bonnet, Manchester Crown Court was told.

It left Michael Ward, 28, - who was already partially sighted - with skull fractures. He spent 20 days in intensive care after emergency brain surgery and is now paralysed on his right side.

The incident occurred after father-of-three Mr Ward, of Bolton, and his friends had gone to the Silks lap dancing club in Manchester city centre, just after midnight on August 21 last year.

Five minutes after the party arrived at the club, a group of five men, including Hussain, also entered and bought a Grey Goose vodka bottle from the club for £100 to celebrate the Eid festival.

When the club closed at 2.15am there was a fight in which a cap was taken from one of Hussain’s friends during horseplay but was handed back.

A further row erupted outside during which one of the Hussain’s group was heard saying ‘watch, you just watch yourself’.

Minutes later Hussain’s silver Corsa emerged from a side road, turning the wrong way then sped up to 40mph as it mowed down Mr Ward and his three friends as they crossed the road.

One stepped back on to the pavement in time and was uninjured, but the other three men were hit by the car. Martin Harris suffered minor injuries and Paul Hulme had a broken leg which needed surgery to insert a metal rod.

Mr Ward was carried on the bonnet of the Corsa for several feet as the driver swerved to throw him into the road.

He is now unable to use his right hand and she said his cognitive functions including speech had been seriously affected and would leave him dependant on others.

Ian Metcalfe, prosecuting, said: ‘What other intention could the defendant he have had in driving the way he did other than attempting to murder those who he drove into.

‘The Corsa didn’t stop and the occupants made no attempt to stop or assist. Even at the point of impact with the young men, the driver did nothing to apply his brakes to swerve to avoid the collision - nothing at all to avoid the pedestrians crossing.

‘That vehicle only starts to veer from side to side when it has one of the victims is on the bonnet and veers in an attempt to throw him off the bonnet.’

‘The only sensible interpretation of the manner the Corsa was driven is the driver, no doubt inflamed by whatever had gone on a couple of minutes before intended to kill. He was deliberately using that vehicle as a lethal weapon.’

Hussain, of Rusholme, Greater Manchester, was arrested on October 11 as he arrived back in Manchester on a flight from Pakistan.

He denied driving the car and denied all charges. It emerged he had previous convictions for dangerous driving and failing to stop after an accident. He was remanded in custody to face sentence later.

Judge Robert Atherton told him: ‘There will be a substantial prison sentence.’

In a statement issued by police six months after the attack, Mr Ward’s wife Mayrose said: ‘The impact this has had on our lives has been truly devastating and our three children have been left with broken hearts.

‘I go and see Michael every day at the hospital and it is deeply upsetting to remember him how he was before the incident and to see how he is now.

Today Rachael Pavion, District Crown Prosecutor for CPS North West said: ‘Aqab Hussain used his car as a weapon, he sought revenge by driving at speed deliberately at the four men with a clear intention to kill.

‘After he struck his victims, he drove from the scene and showed complete disregard for the harm he had caused.’

SOURCE







How typically hypocritical of the Left, who danced on the grave of Mrs Thatcher, to be upset about debate over Red Ed's Marxist father



Listening to Ed Miliband and his henchmen in the BBC and elsewhere, you would think that this newspaper was guilty of a smear against his late father unprecedented in the annals of human history.

Some hysterical commentators have suggested that the Right in British politics is well-versed in throwing rotten cabbages at its opponents, dead and alive, whereas the virtuous Left never said a nasty thing about anyone.

Of course, in asserting in a headline that the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband ‘hated Britain’, the Mail was merely offering its interpretation of the facts. Others, including some of his friends and Ed Miliband, have a different interpretation.

But I would not have thought it the most damning or surprising suggestion in the world that a Marxist internationalist might regard this country’s institutions with a jaundiced eye. His utterings bear this out.

Compare the Left’s reaction to this supposedly disgraceful smear to its response to the death of Margaret Thatcher in April. The former Prime Minister was put through the mangle in a way Miliband senior certainly has not been.

Her body was barely cold, and her distraught family were mourning her, as various Lefties poured out their bile.

After Lady Thatcher’s death, Ed Miliband was relatively statesmanlike in his remarks in the Commons. Good for him. But a photograph taken nearly two years earlier shows him with his arm around a Labour councillor, Keir Morrison, who is wearing a T-shirt on which these words are emblazoned: ‘A Generation Of Trade Unionists Will Dance On Thatcher’s Grave.’

Mr Miliband must surely have seen this inscription, and yet was happy to put his arm around Mr Morrison. Both men are grinning in the photograph. Perhaps they are amused by the idea of dancing on Lady Thatcher’s grave.

The point is that she was still alive, and, although unwell, capable of being hurt or offended by this photograph had it been shown to her. Ralph Miliband, on the other hand, is beyond being hurt.

And what has been said about him by this newspaper can surely not be compared to the tasteless and cruel suggestion by a Labour councillor, embraced by Mr Miliband, that he and his pals would like to dance on Lady Thatcher’s grave.

The Labour leader is being — shall we be kind? — inconsistent. The same observation can be made of the hordes of Leftists who are dabbing their eyes in memory of Ralph Miliband, having publicly celebrated the death of Margaret Thatcher only a few months ago.

In Glasgow and Brixton, campaigners shouted from loudspeakers: ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie’, as the mob ecstatically replied: ‘Dead, dead, dead.’ Some were carrying banners, with one proclaiming ‘Rejoice. Thatcher is dead’.

The Left-wing MP, and former member of the Labour Party, George Galloway tweeted ‘May she burn in the hell fires’.

Derek Hatton, a former Left-wing Labour councillor from Liverpool, who brought that city to its knees in the early Eighties, tweeted his ‘regret’ that Lady Thatcher had ever been born.

Nice fellows. Perhaps my memory is failing me, but I can’t recall Ed Miliband rebuking them, or expressing any regret over the behaviour of the louts who held parties to mark Margaret Thatcher’s death before her funeral had taken place.

Oh, I shouldn’t forget that the BBC, which has been scandalised by the suggestion that Ralph Miliband was not a paid-up British patriot, gave endless airtime to a long succession of people who wanted to vent their anger and resentment against the just-deceased Margaret Thatcher.

The truth is that Leftists who reach for the smelling salts when the record of one of their own is reasonably questioned require no lessons in the tricks of denigrating or smearing their political adversaries.

We have recent evidence of this phenomenon, even if most of Damian McBride’s victims were in his own party. By his own admission in his memoirs serialised by the Mail, the former Labour spin doctor helped to destroy the careers of two Labour ministers, and briefed mercilessly against others.

Almost every Labour spin doctor of recent times seems to have been skilled at smearing, whereas it is difficult to think of a Tory counterpart so schooled in these dark arts, though it is true that Sir Bernard Ingham, Lady Thatcher’s press spokesman, sometimes hung ‘semi-detached’ Cabinet ministers out to dry.

McBride — like Labour spin doctors Alastair Campbell and Charlie Whelan before him — was an expert in the smearing business. According to the memoirs, Ed Miliband ‘might have problems’ if his exchanges with Derek Draper, another former Labour spin doctor, were revealed.

I strongly suspect that Ed Miliband — a close ally of Gordon Brown, for whom McBride worked — was himself no beginner in this field. The former Blairite minister Tessa Jowell has said she found McBride’s revelations ‘truly shocking’. She evidently believes Ed Miliband must have known what was going on.

And yet this same Ed Miliband presents himself — or more precisely his father — as the innocent victim of an ugly smear. It is an extraordinary piece of legerdemain that has enormously increased my respect for Mr Miliband’s political abilities, if not for his integrity.

What we have seen over the past few days is a show of calculated hysteria on the part of the Labour leader. Of course, no man likes to hear his dead father publicly criticised. But, as I have said, one can think of a thousand more damaging criticisms than the one this paper made against Ralph Miliband.

On one level, Red Ed knew that, as he has bound himself to his father in a series of speeches, he could not afford to let the accusation that Miliband senior had hated Britain go unchallenged.

On another level, Ed Miliband realised that his diatribes against this paper would go down well with the party faithful, and possibly convince the wider electorate that he was stronger and more determined than they had thought.

He may also hope that, by creating such an almighty hullabaloo about his supposedly traduced father 19 months before the general election, he will somehow neutralise a potentially embarrassing issue — the influence of his Marxist father on his own beliefs — and deter the Press from returning to it in the near future.

Let us acknowledge his political guile. But the notion that he is the hapless victim of an overmighty Press is as far-fetched as the suggestion that the Right is more successful in vilifying its enemies than the Left. In recent times, the opposite is much closer to the truth.

Consider that picture of Red Ed with his arm round Councillor Keir Morrison, who wanted to dance on Margaret Thatcher’s grave. He did not give a fig for the sensibilities of an elderly lady and former Tory leader. Without doubt, his late father — who bitterly opposed the Falklands War — would have been very proud.

SOURCE





Marxism...and just how much did Ralph influence Red Ed?

Nothing is more natural than a child’s love for its parents.

Indeed, Ed Miliband struck a chord with many readers by springing to his father’s defence after the Mail’s exposĂ© of the latter’s political philosophy – a philosophy that underpinned incalculable human misery.

But while it is certainly astute PR for the Labour leader to present his complaint against the Daily Mail in purely personal and emotional terms, it is also a mite disingenuous.

For as he is aware, this is not just a personal issue. It is a fundamental question of ideology and enormous public interest.

Indeed, his father cannot be portrayed as an innocent private figure, irrelevantly dragged into the public arena.  On the contrary, he was one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of his generation, an academic and author who devoted his life to preaching one of history’s most poisonous dogmas.

Supporting the Labour leader, Nick Clegg tweeted the platitude: ‘Politics should be about playing the ball, not the man, certainly not the man’s family.’

But what this wilfully ignores is that, in a crucial sense, Professor Ralph Miliband’s ideology is the ball – and not least because his son has made it so.

Indeed, in every major speech Red Ed has made since becoming leader, he has spoken of his refugee parents, their flight from Nazism and the debt he owes them for his convictions and values.

If the man who hopes to be Prime Minister says his father’s outlook helped shape his politics, how can his father’s life and work be declared beyond the pale of legitimate journalistic inquiry?

In his attacks on us, repeated ad nauseam by a gleeful BBC, Mr Miliband has focused on our headline ‘The Man Who Hated Britain’.

Yes, we accept that he can be justly proud of his father’s war record. But consider the following words by the 45-year-old Ralph.

His disdain for Britain included: ‘Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the great Clubs, the Times, the Church, the Army, the respectable Sunday papers...

‘It also means the values of the ruling orders, keep the workers in their place, strengthen the House of Lords, maintain social hierarchies, God save the Queen, equality is bunk, democracy is dangerous etc...

‘Also respectability, good taste, don’t rock the boat, there will always be an England, foreigners, Jews, natives etc  are all right in their place, and their place is outside.’

And these are the words of a man who ‘loved Britain’?  Indeed, he argued for nothing less than workers’ revolution to change this country beyond recognition.

The Marxism he espoused underpinned Stalin and his genocide, graphically described by Michael Burleigh.

Ralph Miliband must have known this horror was happening.  Yet he and his fellow ‘useful idiots’ of the extreme Left continued to teach their warped ideas to the young.

Indeed, it is a measure of their baneful influence that their ideology is still taught in universities, long after similarly vile creeds of the Right have been banished.

What is so disturbing is that Miliband Jnr, with his plans for state seizures of builders’ land and fixing prices by government diktat, appears to have absorbed so many of his father’s ideas.

Now he leads the charge for political control of the Press, calling for a national debate on how newspapers should conduct themselves. Very well.

But the Mail would also welcome a dispassionate and honest debate on the views of his father and their influence on Britain’s would-be Prime Minister.

SOURCE





Feminist Blogger Hanna Rosin Slammed for Being Sane

It sure is hard to be a feminist blogger these days. The agitated masses are always demanding more: more extreme claims, more pseudo-scientific evidence of widespread oppression, and more anecdotes testifying to the unconscionable struggle of women the world over. It is precisely why Hanna Rosin, senior editor at the Atlantic and co-founder of Slate’s DoubleX feminist blog, is so out of place: she is surprisingly conservative.

Wherever Rosin writes becomes a hotbed of controversy. She does not hesitate to use cold, hard facts and intelligent analysis to challenge Barack Obama, Equal Pay Day activists, and other liberals who twist statistics to support a wage gap discrimination narrative. It is easy to see how her posts, including “’The Patriarchy’ is Not to Blame for Your Juice Cleanse” and “The Gender Wage Gap Lie,” receive an enormous amount of backlash from her intended audience. Militant feminist commenters on her posts and across social media platforms retaliated, accusing Rosin of upholding rape and criticizing her marriage.

The blogger’s detractors also include fellow journalists. Rosin’s observation that present-day feminism vitally depends on an “irrational attachment to the concept of unfair” so outraged Kat Stoeffel of The Cut that she wrote a satire blaming “the patriarchy” for everything from juice cleanses to public restrooms. Nora Caplan-Bricker of the New Republic dismissed Rosin’s conclusions as mere “mansplaining,” a bizarre feminist term for men telling women what to think and a baffling expression to use against another woman. Feminists from the Nation to Jezebel to the Huffington Post have added to the onslaught of attacks.

Yet Rosin never fails to deliver a quick-witted response to her extremist progressive critics. On one occasion, when accused of misrepresenting the female population as a “rich white lady,” Rosin replied, “I am a rich white lady. So are the people responding to me. Rich white ladies are generally the ones who bother with feminist showdowns.”

Although Rosin is not a perfect conservative (after all, she is still a feminist blogger), she does a consistently excellent job of summing up sane Americans’ reactions to modern feminism: “again, I’m not sure how blaming the patriarchy will help.” One can only hope the others will eventually catch on.

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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