Sunday, August 05, 2007

Boy Scouts banned from eating burgers and sausages - because of other people's religious beliefs

It was the glorious dawn of dibdibdobbing. A hundred years ago Lord Baden-Powell set out with 20 lads, his mission to teach them to hunt, light a fire and build shelter in the great outdoors. A century on, it seems the original flame of Boy Scouting is not burning quite so bright. For at a jamboree to mark the centenary of that original trip, there is no singing around the glowing embers of the camp fire - because there is no fire.

And you can't find a singed sausage for love nor money. However, there are veggie burgers aplenty. And a large potted plant, around which the Scouts of 2007 can gather and write down thoughts on how to achieve world peace. The location is Brownsea Island in Dorset, the starting point of Scouting where Lord Baden-Powell led the first expedition. Those young pioneers caught rabbits and then skinned and cooked them on an open fire.

Some 300 modern-day Scouts (the word Boy was dropped in the 1960s) settled down to a meal prepared in a 'kitchen marquee' and consisting entirely of vegetarian food - so as not to offend any religious faiths. Clare Haines, a spokesman for the Scout Association, said: "It was really to do with religion that we were not able to provide sausages and burgers and all that kind of food. "We have been very careful to make sure food is provided to everybody's tastes and beliefs, so no one feels left out. "They enjoyed their vegetarian meals, especially vegetable chilli, fresh salads and jacket potatoes."

She added that campfires had been banned on the National Trust-owned island after a massive woodland blaze 30 years ago.

However, Claire Barnes, a Scout leader from Rochester, Kent, said: "I can't believe anyone would have a problem with sausages or burgers. "I've been involved with the Scouts for 15 years and it's the first time I have ever heard anything like this. "We're proud of teaching our children about building fires - it's these basic survival skills which the movement is based on. "I can understand why they wanted to make everyone feel accepted but I think that's probably taking things a little too far."

The jamboree is one of many events being held to mark the Scouting 2007 Centenary. But for some, the Brownsea experience lacked the outdoors feel of a traditional camping experience. In the middle of the island stands a huge marquee fitted out with industrial ovens and fridges stocked with vegetarian food. Next to it is a large, covered canteen and stage where bands have performed in the evening during the five days of celebrations. There is also an Internet cafe set up with ten lap-top computers to allow home-sick youngsters to keep in touch with their families around the globe.

The Scouts sleep in single-sex tents scattered around the island and have the use of numerous wash tents and portable lavatories. Hundreds of solar powered lights line the walk ways across the island to avoid anyone tripping over tent pegs, and each cluster of tents is illuminated by strings of electric lights powered by generators.

David Massen, a Scout leader from Bradford, said last night: "A lot has changed with the way Scouting works since 1907. "The principles are still the same but society has changed. "For example, Baden-Powell could just take his Scouts out on a boat for a fishing trip, whereas if I want to do the same I have to take a two-hour training session and write a four-page risk assessment statement."

Source



The EU and the Globalist Alliance

A small excerpt from Fjordman below

Here is an interesting comment about Multiculturalism posted at a website in, of all places, Bangladesh: "Multiculturalism is an unnatural and unhealthy condition that can only afflict countries in national decline. (.) Greed and corruption will characterise the government coupled with oppressive measures directed against its citizens. Lies and deceit will be the stock and trade of media, politicians, and educational institutions." Multiculturalism "is used to prevent a national consensus among the electorate. It erodes values, cultures, beliefs, religions, ethnic habits, etc. ensuring a swirling river of discontent upon which the multiculturalists rides. It is a perfect method of ensuring that there can never be accord, unity, or a commonly shared destiny among those ruled."

In other words: Multiculturalism is simply a tool for divide and conquer. Is there then any point in trying to comprehend its logic at all? Maybe it was just a convenient excuse used for disrupting the established order of nation states by flooding them with mass immigration under the cover of "cultural diversity" or historical inevitability. If that is the case, there never was any coherent logic behind it, so we shouldn't waste our time looking for one. Many of those promulgating it never believed a word of it themselves. Multiculturalism is the new Allah: Don't understand, just obey.

This was undertaken by a coalition of different groups with a shared goal of undermining Western nation states. I heard supporters of mass immigration a generation ago state that all this talk about how it would change our societies into the unrecognizable was scare-mongering and racism. Now, the same groups are saying that yes, our societies have been changed forever. It's good, and it's anyway too late to do anything about it, so get used to it! Their propaganda was used to deceive the public and keep it off balance in order to implement potentially irreversible changes with little real debate. They knew they would never get the permission to destroy their own countries, so they simply didn't ask.

By dismantling national borders, the EU has facilitated the largest migration waves in European history. When Poland became a member, many Poles moved to Britain, Germany etc. This left Poland with a labor shortage. They are now considering importing workers from the Ukraine and Russia to compensate for the Poles that left. At the same time, native Brits are fleeing to Spain because they don't feel at home in Britain anymore. By such moves, you unleash a chain migration that will eventually smash nation states that have existed for ages. Yet this intra-European migration pales in comparison to the immigration from developing nations. The end result will - supposedly - be an entire continent of people without any national loyalties who will be divided, disoriented and thus presumably easier to control.

Stalin did the same thing, moving large population groups around to unsettle the state and keep it disunited. The EU has learned a lot from Stalin.

It is indeed highly plausible that some groups used Multiculturalism as a cover for implementing sweeping changes that could not be openly debated, and were frequently the exact opposite of the officially stated goals. Mass immigration was presented as "enriching the local culture." In fact, it diluted it, and that was probably the point



Flushed Korans and Protected Victims

By Robert Spencer

A 23-year-old student at Pace University, Stanislav Shmulevich, was arrested Friday and charged with two felony counts of Criminal Mischief in the Fourth Degree as a Hate Crime. Numerous analysts have been quick to recognize the cruel irony of these charges. Mark Steyn quipped that instead of flushing the Qur'an, "obviously Mr Shmulevich should have submerged it in his own urine, applied for an NEA grant and offered it to the Whitney Biennial. But to that Michelle Malkin responded with the grim truth: "Actually, no. The NEA would have turned Shmulevich in to the police, too. Now, if he had submerged a Bible in urine or coated a Torah in cow dung and submitted it for a federal grant, he'd be sitting pretty-and facing rave New York Times editorials instead of time behind bars."

And that's why, as Christopher Hitchens said, "This has to stop, and it has to stop right now. There can be no concession to sharia in the United States. When will we see someone detained, or even cautioned, for advocating the burning of books in the name of God? If the police are honestly interested in this sort of `hate crime,' I can help them identify those who spent much of last year uttering physical threats against the republication in this country of some Danish cartoons."

Indeed, it has to stop. For all the examples of the double standard that he, Malkin and others have brought forth - from Piss Christ to Chris Ofili's Turner-Prize-winning, elephant-dung and pornography-bedecked Virgin Mary and the rest - emphasize the fact that the real agenda of today's dominant politically correct culture is certainly not tolerance, or even anything-goes moral relativism. Some things most emphatically don't go, as Stanislav Shmulevich's two felony charges indicate. As a cultural movement, political correctness and multiculturalism are emphatically anti-Western and anti-Christian. And they are also suicidal.

But it is not going to stop. As mad as the felony charges against him are, Stanislav Shmulevich most likely is not the end of anything, but rather the beginning. We are unlikely as a society to become a place in which disrespect or even hatred of Christianity comes to be regarded as just as dangerous to the social order as disrespect or hatred of Islam, and we are just as unlikely to return to a saner time when one could not be prosecuted for disliking someone else's beliefs (in which case Shmulevich would have to pay for the books, and for any necessary plumbing work, but that would be all). We have become a society of sacrosanct protected classes whose victim status places them above all criticism. Those individuals and groups who do not enjoy victim status can be shredded with impunity in the public square, and the shredders are hailed as "courageous," "iconoclastic," and "irreverent." But if the protected group is criticized in any way, we are told that the criticism creates a climate of "hostility" and "hate" that can culminate in yet more victimization.

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has worked assiduously for years to claim this protected victim status for Muslims, and its reaction to this incident has allowed them to articulate how they want Muslims in America to be regarded. CAIR-NY Civil Rights Coordinator Aliya Latif said: "We must all be concerned when any actions cross the line from protected free speech to acts designed to intimidate. Just as there is a difference between someone burning a cross in their own backyard and burning that same cross in the yard of an African-American family, there is a difference between desecrating a religious text in a private setting and doing so in a setting that will create a hostile learning environment." Muslims are the new blacks, and CAIR is the new NAACP; this statement is of a piece with CAIR's annual hate crimes report, which attempts, often in quite imaginative ways, to project an image of Muslims as bravely going about their daily lives in an American society that is inveterately hostile, racist, and on the verge of breaking out into open violence against them.

Yet this is nothing more than a myth. A potent one, to be sure, but a myth. Muslims are not being lynched, or persecuted, or discriminated against in America. Time and time again breathless media-amplified fears of "backlash" against Muslims prove unfounded, and Muslims continue to practice their faith here with more freedom than they enjoy in most of the countries from which they came. That's why Stanislav Shmulevich and his flushed Qur'ans are a windfall for American Muslim advocacy groups: he has now validated the victim status they so doggedly claim. And until the American public discourse can dare to break away from the protected-victim model and its subtext of white Christian guilt, these groups will experience many more such windfalls, whenever someone acts obnoxiously or boorishly toward any Muslim or Islamic object. The American public square today simply has no apparatus for dealing with the possibility that the protected victims might be perpetrating evil themselves. The cognitive dissonance regarding Muslims since 9/11 is ultimately what has given birth to 9/11 conspiracy theories, Reichstag fire analogies, and the like. Muslims can't be responsible, because they are non-white, non-Christian, non-Westerners. It must be something we have done.

Most ominous of all is the fact that policymakers at the highest levels assume this. Western leaders routinely assume that money will defeat terrorism: that alleviating poverty in the Islamic world will end the jihad. This assumption rests on a further assumption: that the jihad imperative doesn't arise from anything within the Islamic world that would still be present even if the West somehow began to treat Muslims better. For Muslims are victims, and Westerners are the guilty party.

That is the West's guiding myth. It is why desecration of the Bible will continue to be celebrated as art, and desecration of the Qur'an as a "hate crime." So also is an objective examination of the elements of Islam that jihadists use today to incite to violence, for that violence is all the fault of the guilty post-Christians of Europe and America. If the West is to survive the challenge of the global jihad, this foundational myth must be brought out into the open, repudiated, and decisively rejected.

Source



The Australian far-Left still preoccupied with their old obsessions while blacks suffer

Kevin Rudd's support for the Howard intervention to combat child abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities faces a major challenge from growing opposition within Labor's Left faction. The rumbling in Labor ranks came as Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough said yesterday that the health checks conducted on Aboriginal children in the past month had led to a small number of referrals to child-protection authorities.

Numerous Labor Left MPs told The Weekend Australian yesterday they could not back all elements of the legislative package and would press Mr Rudd for change when parliament resumed next week after the winter break. While Mr Rudd has backed John Howard since he launched the intervention in June, Labor critics raised concerns about two of its tenets: the temporary acquisition of title and the abolition of the permit system controlling entry to indigenous land.

Territory Labor senator Trish Crossin could not vote for the changes to the Land Rights Act. "I may not cross the floor but I won't be in the Senate chamber voting for it," she said. "I could not face my indigenous constituents again if they knew that I had voted for something I knew they were so passionate about." She said nobody was convinced that "taking the title of the land off people and compulsorily removing the permit system will actually stop the child abuse".

A Labor MP, who did not want to be named, urged the ALP to take a stand on title. "We know it's not right and we know it has nothing to do with child abuse. I'll be raising it in caucus and I know others will," he said. Another MP said Mr Rudd's caution on the issue had been initially respected. "We can support the health checks and extra police but the changes to land rights don't stack up," she said.

Their concerns follow those expressed earlier this week by shadow parliamentary secretary Warren Snowdon, who holds the Territory seat of Lingiari. Mr Snowdon had been swamped by concerns about the five-year acquisition of title and the abolition of permit, which he will raise in caucus.

Mr Rudd said on Thursday he was concerned at the time the Government was taking to draft the legislation. With the Government yet to reveal the legislative underpinning of the intervention, Mr Brough offered the Labor leadership a briefing on Monday.

The Weekend Australian understands the intervention will be dealt with in three bills with welfare reform -- the sequestration of payments for food and rent -- being dealt with separately from the land issues.

Opposition indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jenny Macklin said Labor would not declare its hand until it had seen the legislation. Pressure was exerted on Mr Rudd from the other side of the argument by Northern Territory Emergency Response Taskforce chairwoman Sue Gordon, who challenged Labor to commit to the intervention. "The federal Opposition has said they've given bipartisan support but ... here in the Territory Warren Snowdon said he is not overly keen," she said.

In response to Dr Gordon's call, Ms Macklin said federal Labor was absolutely determined to fight rampant child abuse in the communities. "We are in this for the long haul because children deserve an innocent childhood."

Labor vice-president Linda Burney, the first Aboriginal minister in the NSW parliament, was concerned child abuse was being used to "mask" a "land grab". "I personally don't see the connection between the scrapping of the permit system and changes to what is the most iconic piece of land rights legislation in the country. I don't see the connection between that and addressing child sex assault," she said.

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, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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