Monday, October 10, 2016



Hate crime probe after leaflets saying those who insult Islam must be killed 'were handed out at London mosque'

Extremist leaflets ordering Muslims to kill those who offend Islam were handed out outside an east London mosque.

Metropolitan police is launching an investigation into hate crime after worshippers were given the booklets during a gathering by the Dar-ul-Uloom Qadria Jilania mosque in Walthamstow.

It has been claimed that Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani was responsible for distributing the literature, because his name appears on the front cover, although he has strongly denied this, reports the Evening Standard.

Mr Jilani is imam at the mosque and owns the place of worship.

It has been reported that the booklet was given out to more than 100 people and focused on fanatic Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer in 2011.

Qadri was serving as Taseer's bodyguard when he shot him 27 times with an AK-47 rifle, in Islamabad.

It is believed that he assassinated the politician because he had dared to speak out against the country's blasphemy laws as part of reform of the country's strict Islamic laws.

The booklet says 'all Muslims' should support Qadri and that being an apostate, someone who does not believe in religion, means you 'deserve to be assassinated'.

One worshipper who received the leaflet told the Standard: 'Two or three people delivered the leaflet. Unfortunately, I am shocked. I think it gives a bad impression.

'Islam teaches when you live here you obey the law and the rule of law, but this is not doing that.'

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: 'We will be assessing the contents of these leaflets to establish whether any criminal offence has taken place.

'We are committed to tackling hate crime in all its forms and have long since recognised the impact of hate crime on communities.'

Mr Jilani said that he had no knowledge of the booklet being distributed.

He also said he did not give permission for his face to be used on the front, that it has been falsely attributed to him and that he does not agree with its content.

Mr Jilani told the Standard: 'I am not aware of if, why or how, the booklet was distributed in Dar-ul-Uloom Qadria Jilania.'

SOURCE





Correctness is devastating Greece

This week’s tear-gassing of pensioners by riot police in Athens exposed rising social tensions in Greece. Twenty-one months after Syriza came to power, alongside the right-wing Independent Greeks, it’s worth taking a step back to examine what has happened in the interim. What we have witnessed is the collapse of two illusions: first, that the radical left has an alternative to austerity; and secondly, that the European Union has any real interest in helping Greece to reform.

Syriza has continued with its policies of increasing taxation and direct cuts to people’s income, including pension cuts. These are the same policies that brought down three governments during the years of Greece’s patronage by the Troika — that is, the EU, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. For most of the self-employed and SME owners — the backbone of the Greek economy — more than 65 per cent of their income now goes on taxes and pensions or insurance payments. The brain drain from Greece now totals more than 400,000 people. Almost 70,000 businesses are in the process of relocating to countries with more welcoming environments, such as Bulgaria and Cyprus. And in the midst of all this, the government boasts about its illiberal clampdown on TV stations, following its introduction of an arbitrary regulation that limits Greece to four TV licences, which means additional TV stations are having to close.

Many view Syriza’s embrace of austerity measures, including its acceptance of a new ‘memorandum’ by the Troika that further devastates rather than reforming the Greek economy, as a U-turn, a political betrayal by prime minister Alexis Tsipras. This is a misreading of what’s happened. Even in the days when the ‘erratic Marxist’ Yanis Varoufakis was finance minister, Syriza’s main plan for the Greek economy was to seek more EU assistance. Tsipras hoped such assistance would come with fewer strings attached, but he soon accepted whatever deal came his way. This touches upon a fundamental deficit in the thinking of the radical left in Greece and across Europe: its utter lack of any economic imagination beyond raising taxes or increased government spending. Decades of growth scepticism on the left, coupled with a distrust in ordinary people’s ability to run their lives for themselves, has made the left almost indistinguishable from the exhausted political centre when it comes to economics.

The other illusion that has been shattered is that the EU is keen to ‘reform’ a supposedly backward Greece. Time and again, the Troika has accepted — with minimal protest by the IMF — that the Greek economy is exhausted. This is clear from its calls for unreasonably high taxation. This shows that what matters most to Brussels is not the restructuring of Greece to improve its economic health, but rather putting Greece on continuous life-support in order to keep it in the Eurozone and avoid further compromising the EU political project. In other parts of the Eurozone, too, it’s come to be accepted that high taxation and low growth are the new norm.

What we have in Greece is political pantomime. The government pretends to negotiate hard while the EU pretends it is reforming and modernising Greece. And who loses out? Hard-working Greeks and pensioners who worked for years and years, who cannot simply leave the country and are now struggling to make ends meet.

SOURCE






Clarence Thomas Is Conspicuously Absent in New Black History Smithsonian

Justice Clarence Thomas, the second black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, is practically absent from the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Anita Hill, the woman who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, however, is given prominent billing in the museum.

The new Smithsonian, which opened in September, gives Hill pride of place in an exhibit on blacks in the 1990s. The exhibit features testimonies trumpeting her courage and the surge of women’s activism that ensued, while making only peripheral reference to the nation’s second black Supreme Court justice.

There is no showcase of Thomas’ own life and career, which ran its own harsh gauntlet of racial discrimination.

“I am not surprised that Justice Thomas’ inspiring life story is not a part of the new museum,” said Mark Paoletta, an assistant White House Counsel in the George H. W. Bush administration who worked on the Thomas confirmation. “Civil rights leaders have tried for decades to malign Justice Thomas because he actually dares to have his own views on race issues. One prominent liberal Supreme Court practitioner has called Justice Thomas ‘our greatest justice,’ but you would never know that listening to the civil rights leadership.”

The exclusion is especially odd given Thomas’ intimate experience with racial discrimination.

Thomas was born in Georgia’s coastal lowlands among impoverished Gullah-speakers. By his own account, he did not master the Queen’s English until his early 20s. He came of age in Jim Crow Savannah, where he was in turn ridiculed by white neighbors and classmates for his unpolished style, one of many indignities typical of his adolescence in the racist South. The startling racial injustices of his youth, by discipline and sheer force of will, gave way to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Yale Law School.

Prior to his appointment to the bench, he served as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency tasked with policing discrimination in the private sector.

The EEOC of 1982 was mired in an administrative tarpit. A Government Accountability Office report issued two months into his tenure criticized years of fiscal malfeasance. The report found the absence of internal accounting controls left bills unpaid, receivables uncollected, and that federally mandated records were largely unreliable.

By all accounts, Thomas was a diligent administrator effectively completing a thankless task, reforming an inert agency for a new era. He oversaw the opening of a new headquarters, introduced new technologies like personal computers, and won one of the largest workplace discrimination settlements in the history of the agency, securing a $42.5 million award from an automaker in 1983.

His litigation methods, however, were deeply unpopular with the civil rights firmament. He abandoned class-action lawsuits and findings of discrimination based on statistics. He saw both mechanisms as tools for bludgeoning the private sector into compliance with a clientelistic agenda, in which corporate entities would agree to timetables and quotas devised by white liberals for hiring minorities, while making sizable donations to black social organizations.

Thomas feared the rot which would attend such practices over time, wherein the worthy cause of racial justice would decay to a base form of racial patronage. He instead favored bringing actions on behalf of individuals, which he saw as corresponding to the dignity of individuals in the way class action suits do not.

“What happened to the people actually discriminated against?” Paoletta said in reference to Thomas’ view. “Where was their remedy?”

He was a presence in the Reagan White House on other matters of controversy. He criticized the administration’s decision to support tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University, a segregationist institution, and openly admonished the U.S. Department of Justice for setting a “negative agenda.”

None of this work, however, let alone more than two decades on the nation’s highest court, earned a mention in the museum.

Another black pioneer of the judiciary has been excluded from the museum. Judge Janice Rogers Brown, the first black woman to serve on the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (generally regarded as the second-highest court in the land), is also not featured. Brown is a George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench and is a committed libertarian jurist.

SOURCE






Black Lives and Sunshine Patriots

Black Lives Matter and their allies, who include the President of the United States, would have us believe that policemen are wantonly murdering black men all across America. Although blacks constitute only 13 percent of the American population, they complain, they constitute a far higher proportion of the victims of police killings.

But in her book, The War on Cops, Heather MacDonald shows that, while this claim is true, when we take into account the number of violent crimes that blacks commit, we find that the number of blacks killed by police is actually disproportionately low.

MacDonald cites a recent study by the U.S. Department of Justice that says in America's 75 most populous counties blacks were charged with 62 percent of the robberies, 57 percent of the murders, and 45 percent of the assaults over a period of time. More violent crimes by blacks means more run-ins with police, and thus higher odds of being shot by the police. And yet, although blacks nationwide commit homicide at eleven times the rate of whites, almost twice as many whites as blacks are killed by the police. So, in fact, it is whites that the police are killing in disproportionately high numbers.

Are blacks stopped and questioned by the police in disproportionately higher numbers than whites? In New York City, according to a MacDonald piece in the Daily News from 2014, blacks commit about 65 percent of all violent crimes, 70 percent of all robberies, and 75 percent of all shootings. Yet through eleven months of 2014, they composed only 54 percent of all "subject stops" by police. Whites, on the other hand, who commit about 5 percent of all violent crimes, composed 12 percent of all subject stops.

Since the Trayvon Martin affair, Black Lives Matter have been searching for a police shooting of a black man that they could turn into a cause célèbre. They thought they had it in shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, but then President Obama's Justice Department exonerated officer Darren Wilson.

But BLM are bound to find their cause sooner or later, if they have not found it already.  Policemen do shoot black men with inadequate justification, just as they do white men. Some policemen fail under pressure, some are incompetent, and some might even be racist. It is important in a free society that the use of deadly force by the police always be subject to the highest degree of scrutiny, and that officers who are not up to the task of wielding their power properly be removed. But Heather MacDonald's statistics give the lie to BLM's charges of systemic police racism. On the other hand, BLM's propensity to rush to judgment before all the evidence has been examined, as they did in the Michael Brown case, suggests an indifference to the truth-or a larger agenda.

In fact, in leveling the charge of racism at the police, Black Lives Matter and their allies are using the police as a stand-in for all of white society. On their website, BLM state, "The enemy is now and always has been the four threats of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism." The police are simply an easy target, since a significant portion of their contact with blacks necessarily occurs under contentious, and often violent, circumstances.

But why would Black Lives Matter, and the President of the United States, want to promulgate the idea that the police, and American whites generally, are racist? Judging by the effect this charge consistently has, their aim appears to be to de-moralize whites, to cause them to abandon their values.

Whites originated, and have been the primary practitioners of, the great principles of classical liberal governance-constitutionally limited government, the rule of law, individual rights, equality before the law, governance by consent, and their economic corollary, capitalism. This is not a racial statement; anyone of any race can practice these values. It is simply a historical fact that it was whites who developed these ideas, put them into practice, and have primarily been responsible for maintaining them in a world that is largely hostile to them. And for groups like Black Lives Matter, who are indeed hostile to these ideas, whites are the enemy. BLM's strategy is to manipulate whites into abandoning these values without firing a shot, thus the tactic of demoralization.

Guilt can be a de-moralizer. Guilt no doubt played a role in the election of Barack Hussein Obama, for whom whites voted in decisive numbers despite his lack of discernible accomplishment and his history of radical leftism (Remember Reverend Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright).

Fear also can be a de-moralizer. In the space of just two generations, the media-Hollywood-academic complex has persuaded Americans that racism ranks among the worst sins man is capable of. Today American whites today are prepared to surrender much of what they hold dear to avoid even the appearance of racism.

Consider the U.S. Congress, who have allowed a black president to engage in an unprecedented series of acts destructive of the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, the separation of powers, governance by consent, and individual rights, all with barely a whimper of protest. Does anyone believe they would have been so solicitous of a white president?

But nothing so vividly illustrates the de-moralizing effect of fear so well as recent actions (or, rather, the absence of action) by the Commissioner of the National Football League, Roger Goodell, and various of the team owners. This season, a handful of players throughout the league have chosen to express support for Black Lives Matter by remaining seated, by kneeling, or by raising the clenched-fist salute of the Black Panthers during the playing of the national anthem before games.

Keep in mind that Black Lives Matter have caused, at least indirectly, the murder of at least seven police officers. They have instigated rioting, property damage, and injury and death to rioters themselves. Their efforts to delegitimize the police are undoubtedly causing more black men to enter into confrontations with the police, and this can only result in more deaths. (95 percent of "failure to comply" charges in New York City are lodged against blacks.) And they have caused police around the country to "back off" in their policing of black neighborhoods, a withdrawal that has caused an increase in the murder rate of blacks in some of these neighborhoods.

Now, I have no doubt that Roger Goodell and the various team owners of the National Football League love America. So it should go without saying that they would not permit their employees prominently and pointedly to express support, on company property and on company time, for so vile a group as Black Lives Matter. BLM occupy the same moral plain as the Ku Klux Klan, and I have no doubt that Mr. Goodell and the owners would never permit their employees to salute the KKK in the way these players are saluting BLM. Ask yourself what would be the NFL's response if some of their players were to stand on a copy of the Koran during the playing of the anthem? Can you believe for one minute that they would permit it to continue? Of course not, but under the absurd rules of political correctness whites are fair game.

So the NFL is allowing the United States itself to be disparaged in their stadiums. This is de-moralization in action. This is the surrender of a value held dear, due to moral paralysis induced by political correctness.

Mr. Goodell has said, "I truly respect our players wanting to speak out and change their community." No doubt, he and the NFL have persuaded themselves they are standing for civil rights. But consider the goals of the newly formed Movement for Black Lives, who operate within the orbit of Black Lives Matter. The Movement for Black Lives has enjoyed recent coverage by the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly. On their website, they list fifteen smaller groups who comprise their movement, and another 35 who have endorsed their efforts.

These neo-Marxists demand "a restructuring of the economy" to abolish private land ownership in favor of collective ownership by black communities. They demand "independent Black political power and Black self-determination in all areas of society"-in effect, a state-within-a-state it seems-perhaps along the lines of American Indian reservations? Are we now to Balkanize the United States according to ethnicity? And they demand money, lots and lots of money, including a "guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people." This agenda represents a repudiation of everything the United States stands for, including genuine civil rights.

In providing Black Lives Matter and their allies access to a nationwide audience, the NFL are selling out the majority of blacks, who are law-abiding and depend on the police to maintain law and order in their neighborhoods.

Since 911, the NFL has been staging moving displays of patriotism at their games. Now we are finding out who the real patriots are, and they are not Roger Goodell and the NFL owners. Mr. Goodell and company are proving unworthy of their audience. They deserve to lose it.

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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