'Bigotry and Hatred': First UK Chick-fil-A to Close After LGBT Protest

Shortly after the first Chick-fil-A location in Britain opened, LGBT protesters drove it out of business. Oracle Management, the company that rented mall space to the Chick-fil-A, told Reading Pride that the American chicken joint would indeed "Cluck out" of Britain in six months. LGBT activists have made no secret that they intend to prevent Chick-fil-A from doing any business across the pond. Although the management company had already caved to pressure on Friday, LGBT groups still held a protest on Saturday.

"We don’t want you in our country because we don’t agree with the policies and the procedures that you have in place as an organization. You’re not welcome in the U.K.," Stephen Ireland, communications coordinator at UK Pride, declared at the protest.

On Monday, Reading Pride had tweeted a statement condemning Chick-fil-A as antithetical to the values of LGBT activists — and the values of Britain as a country. "The chain's ethos and moral stance goes completely against our values, and that of the UK as we are a progressive country that has legalised same sex marriage for some years, and continues to strive towards equality."

In the statement, Reading Pride charged that the fast food chain's charitable foundation "still supports questionable charities." In particular, the LGBT activist group faulted the WinShape Foundation for donating $1.6 million to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and $150,000 to the Salvation Army in 2017.

Reading Pride quoted the Fellowship of Christian Athletes' statement of faith: "We believe God's design for sexual intimacy is to be expressed only within the context of marriage. God instituted marriage between one man and one woman as the foundation of the family and the basic structure of human society. For this reason, we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one man and one woman. (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:5-6; Mark 10:6-9; Romans 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9)"

Reading Pride also accused Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy of donating "money to a number of anti-gay charities."

Indeed, the WinShape Foundation once supported some conservative Christian organizations that advocated against legalizing same-sex marriage, such as Eagle Forum, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council (FRC). These organizations have been demonized, with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) falsely accusing FRC of being a "hate group" — an accusation that inspired a terrorist to attempt a mass shooting in 2012. Cathy had also made strong remarks critical of same-sex marriage in 2012.

After a nationwide boycott — and a conservative rush to buy at Chick-fil-A called "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day," led by former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-Ark.) — the company apologized for Cathy's comments and the WinShape Foundation stopped funding the more controversial organizations.

Yet LGBT activists and liberal outlets have continued to slam Chick-fil-A, condemning the contributions to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and to the Salvation Army. Both Christian organizations require employees and leaders to live according to traditional Christian sexual morality.

Despite the controversy, Chick-fil-A became the fastest-growing restaurant chain in America last year, and it took third place among all U.S. restaurants in sales. The fast food joint sells delicious chicken at an affordable price and with great service. If LGBT activists succeed at keeping it out of Britain, Brits will seriously miss out.

Chick-fil-A is the furthest thing from hateful. The fast food joint gladly serves all kinds of people, and it provides excellent service and delicious food. It does not deserve this kind of demonization, and the first openly gay presidential candidate for a major party has supported a "peace deal" with the fast food joint. Perhaps the Brits should consider following Pete Buttigieg: Calm down, and eat some Chick-fil-A!

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'Racist Watch' Website Demonizes Trump Supporters, But It Has an Upside

Some weirdos have developed a site called "Racist Watch" that identifies the names and locations of all people who have donated to the Trump campaign. I'm sure they intended this so that far left wackos can ostracize their neighbors who like Trump, and possibly protest outside their homes like crazy people.

However, when I looked up my zip code I realized that this is a great tool to find new friends near you. It's like a dating app for finding friends who aren't crippled by hatred and mental illness. Isn't it always a bummer when you think you've met someone nice and then they ruin it by telling you all their irrational fears about the president putting gay people in concentration camps?

This website can solve that problem. It's my suggestion that everyone needs to look up their address on this site right now and identify people near them who are clearly decent, patriotic Americans and go bring them a basket of muffins or something. Go make a new friend today. Thanks "Racist Watch," you demented loons.

Look how many are even in deep blue New York City! If anything, people with Trump Derangement Syndrome are going to flip out when they search their neighborhood and find themselves surrounded by "racists." I think they're going to need a bigger safe space.

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The myth of rising hate crime

Britain has never been less hateful.

Hate crimes have ‘doubled’ in the past six years, if you believe headlines in the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. The BBC reports a less dramatic but still shocking 10 per cent rise in hate crime compared to last year, from 94,121 to 103,379 offences in England and Wales. Every year, the press presents terrifying figures illustrating an apparent explosion in hate crime. But there is no evidence that hate crime is on the rise.

Every year, the same, small caveat appears in the Home Office’s hate-crime report: ‘The increases seen over the last five years are thought to have been driven by improvements in crime recording by the police… These improvements are thought to be the main drivers for the increases seen.’

Every year, in contrast to the media’s frightful certainty, the Home Office report is full of ‘mights’, ‘mays’ and other bet-hedging. Take hate crime against trans people. Apparently there has been a surge of 37 per cent in these crimes on last year. But the Home Office report is much more guarded: it says that ‘improvements made by the police’ in ‘identification’ and ‘recording’ are the most likely cause of the rise, but ‘genuine increases cannot be ruled out’. In other words, alarming statistics showing a huge rise in transphobic hate crime of 37 per cent may or may not have any relation to actual crimes, according to the people who compiled the statistics.

Rises in hate crime have been blamed on everything from Brexit to Boris’s outburst on the burqa. This year, The Times and the Mail blamed uncivil language on social media for stoking hate. But the real blame for the surge is the release of the College of Policing’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance in 2014, which is still used to this day. This guidance actually demands that the numbers increase. ‘Targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate’, it says. Since then there have also been a number of awareness-raising campaigns around hate crime, particularly in the wake of the EU referendum. In 2017, London mayor Sadiq Khan launched the Metropolitan Police’s ‘Online Hate Crime Hub’. Unsurprisingly, police-recorded hate crime has gone up every year since 2014 without fail. In comparison, over the same period, the crime rate more broadly has remained relatively stable.

In fact, when you look at statistics that are, according to the Home Office, ‘unaffected by changes in recording practice’, you find the complete opposite. The Crime Survey for England and Wales doesn’t provide information on short-term rises and falls but over the long term the trend is clear: over the past decade, it shows a fall in hate crime of 40 per cent. The CPS’s prosecution statistics paint a similar picture. Despite surges in the number of reports made to the police, the number of people actually being prosecuted for hate crimes has also fallen. Hate-crime prosecutions peaked in 2015-16 with 15,442 and have fallen every year since to 11,881 in 2017-18 (the latest year available).

But the problems with police-recorded hate crime don’t end there. Police are obliged to record not only criminal actions but also all non-crime hate incidents. A non-crime hate incident is literally any event that is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility towards a so-called protected characteristic.

‘Perceived’ is the key word here. As the Operational Guidance makes clear: ‘The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incidents.’

In other words, for an incident to appear in the police-recorded hate-crime data, there does not have to be any evidence of any ‘hatred’, nor does the incident even have to be a crime. The only real basis for establishing that a hate crime took place is that somebody reported it to the police. ‘Racist’ non-crime incidents recorded by police as hate crimes over the past five years have included a dog fouling on a neighbour’s lawn, a woman beeping a car, and a speech by Amber Rudd.

Sometimes the ‘hateful’ nature of a crime is later disproven, but that makes no difference to the statistics. Take the manslaughter of Arek Jozwik, a Polish man living in Harlow, which was leapt on by Remain commentators as evidence of a Brexit-motivated racist murder. Police also recorded it as a hate crime. And even though it became apparent in investigations that there was no racial motive, Jozwik’s tragic, accidental killing remains recorded as a hate crime.

Clearly, the police-recorded data tells us very little about prejudice in modern Britain. We should take media reports of rising hatred with a huge serving of salt. And we should be even more wary of those who use this narrative for propaganda purposes.

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Germany’s anti-Semitism problem

The attack in Halle was a reminder of the persistent threat to Germany's Jews.

On Wednesday, a heavily armed 27-year-old man tried to enter a synagogue in the east German city of Halle, while the congregation had gathered to celebrate Yom Kippur. His intention, as he made clear in a recording uploaded online, was to kill Jews.

Unable to force open the heavily secured door of the synagogue, he shot dead a 40-year-old woman who happened to be passing near the synagogue. He then drove off in his car, which was filled with home-made explosives, to a nearby kebab shop, where he killed a 20-year-old man. After several hours, his rampage eventually came to a halt as he crashed his car. He was then overwhelmed by the police. The suspect has since been identified as Stefan B.

These are the facts. But it did not take long for them to be cast aside and for the blame to be attributed to wider forces. Predictably, the first recriminations were directed at the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland. Bavaria’s interior minister Joachim Herrmann said it wasn’t just the perpetrator, but also his ‘supporters in spirit’ in the AfD, who needed to be considered responsible. Matthias Döpfner, head of Axel Springer SE, Germany’s biggest publishing house, spoke of a ‘system failure within Germany’s open society’, and blamed the government for fanning the flames of racism. A commentator in Der Spiegel went so far as to claim that Germany was a country in which hatred of others could effortlessly pass from the election booth to the street. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Left Party said ‘the fact that an act is committed by one person alone does not mean that there is only one perpetrator’.

There is no doubt that Wednesday’s attack was horrific and could have taken many more lives. It is a worrying reminder of the risks faced by Germany’s Jewish community. Anti-Semitism continues to be a sad fact of everyday life. For decades, German-Jewish institutions have been under police special protection. Why there were no police outside the Halle synagogue on such an important day of worship is a question that needs answering. It is one that clearly worried Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who said after the violent rampage that ‘in all synagogues that I know from personal experience, it is normal practice, if unfortunate, that there is police protection during services’.

It would be wrong to downplay this attack and its consequences for German Jews. But it would be equally wrong – and potentially dangerous – to make it look more significant than it was. That would run the risk of giving this warped and vile individual more power than he deserves. Despite what commentators say, Stefan B was the only perpetrator in this crime. Several security experts, the police, his lawyer and even his family have confirmed that he was a socially isolated individual who had planned the attack alone. He produced his weapons using a 3D printer at home, where he lived with his mother.

The one thing this nihilist hoped for was fame. But, as many commentators have pointed out, that hardly makes him special. In the words of security expert Rolf Clemens: ‘These perpetrators seek recognition. They want to make the headlines. Christchurch was an example of how to do that. That’s what [Stefan B] wanted, too.’ Or as Frank Furedi argued recently on spiked, it is likely that such homicidal narcissists spend as much time on their media strategy as on the assault itself.

It is also absurd to excuse him for his actions by blaming others, such as the AfD, the German public or the government. He alone is responsible.

What we do need to take seriously is what Germany’s Jewish community has long warned of – namely, a rise in anti-Semitism. This racism has persisted in postwar Germany, despite the official Holocaust commemorations, the frequent pronouncements of Never Again, and the strict laws forbidding neo-Nazi propaganda. And it has also frequently taken a direct, violent form.

The first major anti-Semitic attack in postwar Germany took place on 9 November 1969. During a ceremony commemorating the 30th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a bomb was left in a synagogue community centre in West Berlin. Due to a fault, it didn’t explode. The attackers – left-wing terrorists – distributed leaflets that said: ‘The Jews expelled by fascism have themselves become fascists who want to wipe out the Palestinian people in collaboration with American capital.’

A year later, in February 1970, an arson attack against a Jewish nursing home killed seven residents, all of them Holocaust survivors. In 1994, and again in 1995, there were arson attacks against a synagogue in Lübeck. And in July 2000, a pipe bomb (similar to the ones used in Halle) killed 10 people, six of them Jewish, in a railway station in Düsseldorf.

Just last month, a 23-year-old Arab man managed to bypass the police and run into a synagogue in Berlin shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and swinging a knife. He was quickly arrested.

The problem of anti-Semitism in Germany manifests itself in other ways, too. There is of course the continued existence of far-right propaganda. But in recent years anti-Semitism has informed crusades against circumcision, calls to ban the kosher slaughtering of animals, and the growth of an increasingly aggressive and one-sided criticism of Israel.

The different forms that anti-Semitism now takes show how difficult it is to attempt to contain this racism through bans and censorship. Not that we should be trying simply to suppress anti-Semitism. Rather, we need to be openly challenging it. Because it is only by engaging in open and honest debate about anti-Semitism that life can become safer again for Jews living in Germany.

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

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