Tuesday, June 17, 2014


British police not interested in catching black monster

Lack of empathy is common among Africans

Lying on the ground in agony after a motorbike accident, former RAF pilot Craig Stevens was understandably relieved when a Good Samaritan stopped by his side.

But to his horror, instead of attending to the blood pouring from his leg, the man began to search through his pockets.

Vulnerable, terrified and in excruciating pain, Mr Stevens pleaded with the stranger to stop – but to no avail.

‘I cannot believe that someone could do that to me, when I was so helpless and in need,’ the 51-year-old said from his hospital bed.

‘I could feel his hands going through all of my pockets, I couldn’t move. I was trapped, in pain and heavily bleeding. I was pleading with him to stop, to help me instead of stealing from me but he carried on. I feel angry. I feel violated.’

Mr Stevens, who served in the Gulf War, was injured as he went to fill his motorbike with petrol ready for a charity ride with the Royal British Legion.

His arm was broken and his leg cut down to the bone – a critical injury due to the blood-thinning medication he takes for leukaemia, which he was diagnosed with three years ago.

Following the accident in Hayes, West London, last week, the former RAF corporal has undergone two major operations and a skin graft on his leg, and remains in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington.

However Mr Stevens, from Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex, said he also feels betrayed by the police, who he says told him they would not investigate the theft.

‘The man who did this is still out there,’ he said. ‘The police said they would only investigate the accident and not the robbery – that is not their choice to make. I am a victim of crime, he might have only taken the £40 I had in cash, but that is not the point. I want the police to do something.’

After his ordeal, an off-duty nurse came to his aid and dialled 999.

Mr Stevens, left, served with the RAF for nine years and is pictured in a glider in 1989. Now he is in hospital recovering from two major operations and a skin graft on his leg

His girlfriend Nita Maisuria, 35, has stayed by his side in hospital. She said: ‘This is the last thing you expect to happen in England.

‘I am appalled that people like this exist and that when Craig needed help, someone acted in such a disgusting way.’

Mr Stevens – who has a 17-year-old daughter from a previous marriage – served with the RAF for nine years before joining Air Canada as an engineer.

Since his cancer diagnosis he has become an active member of the Royal British Legion and now helps to organise fundraising motorcycle rides, which he joins on his beloved Triumph Bonneville.

The accident happened on Uxbridge Road in Hayes at 2:30pm on Saturday, June 7. Mr Stevens describes his attacker as black, around 5ft 6in tall, in his 40s and wearing a trilby hat.

After being contacted by the Daily Mail, police officers visited Mr Stevens in hospital to take a statement regarding the robbery.

SOURCE






Be careful what you wish for: bans and censorship tend to bite the hand that voted for them

Comment from Australia

Freedom is a bit like one of those pesky irregular verbs. I ­deserve liberty; you deserve a balance of rights and responsibilities; that bloke ought to be locked up. I am a rational autonomous adult; you are subject to external influence; that bloke doesn’t know what’s good for him.

When we seek to ban things, this problem arises acutely. I know when I’ve had enough to drink; you should probably slow down; that bloke can’t be served a neat spirit after midnight, drink from glass, have full strength beer at the footy or buy a round for his mates.

When bans are proposed, be they on pornography, swearing, drug use or the characterisation of certain kinds of people based on race, it’s easy to kid ourselves that any rules we make are for that third group of people. These are not people we usually know by name, they are the abstract theoretical people whom we imagine ­really do need to be told how to ­behave. Bans tend to bite the hand that voted for them.

In 1955 the NSW, South Australian and Victorian governments took action to ban comic books, generally blamed for corrupting the morals of the young. Publications were deemed ­obscene if they “unduly emphasised matters of sex, crimes of violence, gross cruelty or horror”.

Edward Massey, a director of the Institute of Political Science, wrote at the time that these conditions would exclude half the works of Shakespeare.

He further noted there was, “as far as I am aware, no evidence that the reading of books has ever led anyone into a life of crime”.

Few books are censored now and the censoring of literature is properly regarded as philistine. But culture more broadly is still censored and there is still a worthy fight to be had defending artists from the gag.

Earlier this year, ArtsHub reported that a line from Jonathan Biggins’ new play had been cut following complaints on opening night. Reports don’t specify the ­offensive content but indicate it was a joke whose punch line was “Campbell Newman”.

Whatever one thinks of Newman, the restriction of Biggins’ imaginary citizen’s freedom to say what he pleased about the Queensland Premier should have been anathema to any political ­descendant of Mill, Locke or Milton.

In the visual arts, leading artists Paul Yore and Bill Henson have been subjected to charges for works depicting children in ways deemed pornographic by police. In both cases, while you might argue for an eternity about the worth of the art, this stretched credulity and in neither case were any children exploited.

The impact of the Henson case was such that in 2011, a work by ­Archibald Prize winner Del Katherine Barton which depicted a shirtless boy was subject to a similar complaint that saw a $200,000 charity auction cancelled.

In the world of television, comedian Dan Ilic’s commercial for Dick Smith, featuring the cheekily laboured innuendo “I like Dick” was refused broadcast. “Apparently” said Smith, “you can’t have lovely old ladies saying ‘dick’. I’m angry. I don’t like this being censored when it’s just good fun.”

Good fun also leads to trouble on radio where the biggest category of complaints is bad language, which has made airplay especially difficult for hip hop, an important cultural outlet for young people. And heaven help the kids who sing along with a rude pop tune: Australian laws against offensive conduct generally stipulate that a person who, “sings an obscene song or ballad” near a school, “shall be guilty of an offence”.

Which also means that kids sharing the songs I learned in the schoolyard about sailors going to see, see, see and that limerick-loving man from Newcastle would all be in breach of the law. A defence can be made that the swearer had a reasonable excuse. Sadly for most school kids, the excuses don’t ­include making your mates laugh.

While a well-placed swear can add sizzle to a pop song, it’s half the steak for many comedians.

Black humour, bad language, and irreverence are stock in trade. Consequently offence is never far away, but if comedians worried too much about it they wouldn’t be very funny. As Ben Pjobe wrote in Meanjin last year: “Everyone has a perfect right to take offence at anything, and I’ll defend that right, but nobody has a God-given right to go through life without being offended.”

I don’t need and certainly don’t demand the freedom to be a racist. But I do want freedom of ­expression for a lot of people who are often deemed offensive. I struggle to see how one kind of free speech isn’t materially affected by the progress or regress of another.

SOURCE






Gov. Perry: ‘I Look at the Homosexual Issue the Same Way’ as the ‘Alcoholic’ Issue

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he views homosexual behavior the same way he views alcoholic behavior, in that a person may be inclined to behave a certain way because of their genetic makeup but they also “have the ability not to do that.”

It is a view he also expressed in his 2008 book on the Boy Scouts, On My Honor,  defending them against the attacks of gay and liberal activists.

“Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that," Perry said on Wednesday at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco.

"I may have the genetic coding that I'm inclined to be an alcoholic," he said, "but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way."

Perry expressed a similar view in his 2008 book, On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For, which examined how liberal groups and gay activists had attacked the Boy Scouts since 1976 to change its policies on membership.

In the book, Perry says, “Though I am no expert on the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate, I can sympathize with those who believe sexual preference is genetic. It may be so, but it remains unproved. Even if it were, this does not mean we are ultimately not responsible for the active choices we make.”

“Even if an alcoholic is powerless over alcohol once it enters his body, he still makes a choice to drink,” said Perry. “And, even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender.”

Perry went on to explain that this does not mean people should condemn those who engage in homosexual behavior, for their lives are just as valuable in the eyes of God as anyone else’s life. But freedom to engage in homosexual behavior does not mean that millions of Americans have to accept, or “normalize” that behavior in society.

“A loving, tolerant view toward those who have a different sexual preference is the ideal position – for both the heterosexual and the homosexual,” said Perry.  “I do not believe in condemning homosexuals that I know personally. I believe in valuing their lives like any others, as our God in Heaven does.”

“Tolerance, however, should not only be asked of the proponents of traditional values,” the governor said. “The radical homosexual movement seeks societal normalization of their sexual activity. I respect their right to engage in the individual behavior of their choosing, but they must respect the rights of millions in society to refuse to normalize their behavior.”

Rick Perry is the 47th governor of Texas. He is a Republican but prior to 1989 he was a Democrat. Perry, as a young man, earned the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America, and the BSA honored him with the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award.

SOURCE






Can we "coexist" with Muslims?

Only when we keep the upper hand

When symbols on the “coexist” bumpersticker come to represent people who would rather you not exist, then it’s time to rethink koexistieren, coesistere, and coexistir. The word, in any tongue, implies live and let live — not live and let murder me.

One can forgive Europeans for growing a bit squeamish about the influx of Muslims. The near hacking off of a soldier’s head with a meat cleaver last year, and the periodic bombings of train-station commuters, tend to shake even the most zealous secularist of a blind faith in tolerance.

The questioning of that rote tolerance, rather than the arrival of intolerant newcomers, shakes Olivier Roy. “The European right is advocating a Christian identity for Europe not because it wants to promote Christianity but because it wants to push back against Islam and the integration of Muslims — or what the National Front calls ‘the Islamization of Europe,’” the political scientist writes at the New York Times. One might reverse the thought to say that the European Left embracing Islam isn’t because it particularly cares for the religion but because it wants to score political points against the Right — and score a new constituency.

The Right’s push back, according to Roy, is an act of bad faith. “Even as the right moves away from the basic values of the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations,” he writes, “it clamors that Europe is fundamentally Christian.”

Surely travelers to Poland or Ireland might think it still; England or the Czech Republic — not so much. While one faith lags, another explodes through immigration and, in some cases, conversion. Muslims now constitute one in ten Frenchmen. Muhammad, in its various spellings, reigns as the most popular name for boys born in Britain.

Immigrating to an Islamic Republic without ever moving, say, from your East London neighborhood has naturally jarred some locals, albeit not in the extreme way that the sight of a cross or a Bible jars denizens of various Middle Eastern nations. Qatar, a “moderate” Arab state readying for an influx of European tourists in the next decade because of the 2022 World Cup, recently made headlines in its “Reflect Your Respect” placards informing visitors of the illicit status of tank tops, shorts, leggings, and knee-high skirts (the sign is silent on assless chaps).

Is the French entreaty for Muslim women to unmask really as pushy as this? 

“Christendom” once worked as a synonym for Europe. The Queen of England calls herself the “Defender of the Faith.” The flags of Europe, almost to a country, betray symbols of the trinity or Christ. The Scandinavian countries, for instance, all bear a cross on their national standards. The British, not to be outdone, boast two Christian symbols, St. George’s cross and St. Andrew’s cross, on their Union Jack.

Rudyard Kipling, whose imperialist faith unintentionally made a colony of London, famously asked: “What should they know of England who only England know?” Now that Englishmen know Pakistanis, Ghanaians, Turks, and much of the world as fellow countrymen, they know enough not to call themselves Englishmen — the more inclusive “Brits” overwhelms in usage. If it’s okay for Qatar to compel visitors to adopt their folkways, why is it racist for Europeans to expect permanent residents to respect the local traditions?

“Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad,” Gibbon imagined had Charles Martel lost at Tours. “From such calamities was Christendom delivered by the genius and fortune of one man.”

Europe knew what it was defending in 732. Nearly thirteen centuries later, Europe’s defenders find themselves deemed offensive by the likes of Olivier Roy. At the very least, the current challenge has Europeans thinking what it means to be a European.

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 POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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1 comment:

TheOldMan said...

Whenever I see one of those "Coexist" bumper stickers, I want to get one that reads "Coexist: It worked well for the Jews in Europe".