Friday, September 24, 2010


Six arrested in Britain for 'burning Korans' on YouTube

This arrest is a mockery of the law. Muslims are not a race so how can this be racial hatred? People of all races are Muslims. It's a police State when police can make up the law as they go along. I am thinking of burning a few Korans myself and looking forward to my day in court

BRITISH police have arrested six people on suspicion of inciting racial hatred over a YouTube video apparently showing them setting fire to copies of the Koran. Police in northeastern England said that they had detained two men on September 15 and four more on Wednesday, adding that all of them had been bailed pending further inquiries.

"The arrests followed the burning of what are believed to have been two Korans in Gateshead on September 11," a spokesman for Northumbria Police said. "The incident was recorded and a video placed on the internet."

The YouTube video shows a group of masked men shouting "September 11, International Burn a Koran Day" and "This is for the boys in Afghanistan" before pouring petrol on what they claim are two copies of Islam's holy book. They then cheer and chant slogans as the books burst into flames, before kicking them.

The police force and the local authority issued a joint statement saying that the "kind of behaviour displayed in this video is not at all representative of our community as a whole. "Our community is one of mutual respect and we continue to work together with community leaders, residents and people of all faiths and beliefs to maintain good community relations."

SOURCE






Defeating Militant Islamist Ideology

Al-Qaida has always been a propaganda power. Its dark genius has been to connect the Muslim world's angry, humiliated and isolated young men with a utopian fantasy preaching the virtue of violence. That utopian fantasy seeks to explain and then redress roughly 800 years of Muslim decline.

Al-Qaida's rage predates any offense at Danish cartoons of Muhammad, protests over the ground zero mosque or goofy sectarian grandstanders in Florida threatening to burn the Quran. Al-Qaida's dedication to the destruction of its ideological enemies -- including its Muslim enemies -- lies at the organization's malign spiritual and savage philosophical core.

That malignant ideological core is the target of U.S. Navy Commander Yousef H. Aboul-Enein's extraordinary new book, "Miltant Islamist Ideology" (Naval Institute Press, 2010).

Aboul-Enein is an officer with a stellar professional resume and a compelling personal background. His book is immediately valuable to everyone engaged in the fight against Militant Islamist terrorism -- and Aboul-Enein would insist on militant with a capital M.

When viewed as a treatise on information warfare (which is what the book is, though the author might debate this description), the volume's utility extends well beyond combating Militant Islamists. Aboul-Enein provides an intellectual framework for analyzing and countering the ideology for every transnational terror organization, whether its creed is secular political, tribal, anarchist or religious.

As for the fascinating background: Aboul-Enein is a U.S. Navy Medical Service Corps officer who advises the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community "at the highest levels." He was born in Mississippi and raised in Saudi Arabia, and has a master's degree in strategic intelligence from the National Defense Intelligence College.

Aboul-Enein establishes a goal: He intends to distinguish Islam as a religion from two other groups, Islamists and Militant Islamists. He then seeks to "disaggregate" Militant Islamists from both Islamists and Islam. This, he argues, is key to defeating Militant Islamists, the violent actors who scar Islam, harm Islamists, and murder Muslims and non-Muslims alike. He makes an insistently strong, and often profound, intellectual argument.

"Militant Islamist" Aboul-Enein defines as "a group or individual advocating Islamist ideological goals, principally by violent means." Islamists are a group who advocate "Islam as a political as well as religious system. Chief Islamist objectives include implementing sharia (Islamic) law "as the basis of all statutory issues." Islam is "the religious faith of Muslims, involving ... belief in Allah as the sole deity and in Muhammad as his prophet."

Militant Islamist ideology he condemns as a vicious fraud, for it "is composed of fragmented pieces of Islam ... they are recombined out of context to make up the bulwark of Militant Islamist ideology, which is not the religion of Islam." Militant Islamist ideology "seeks to establish a totalitarian state steeped in the language, symbols and narrowly selective aspects of Islam."

Aboul-Enein says faithful Muslims play a central role in defeating Militant Islamism, arguably the key role. "Unlike communism," he writes, "against which free enterprise and democracy were used as ideological counterweights, Militant Islamist ideology can be opposed among the Muslim masses only by Islamic counter-argumentation. We cannot contain Militant Islamist ideology but only work to marginalize, de-popularize, and erode its influence and mass appeal by identifying it as different from Islam or even from Islamist political groups."

Aboul-Enein does not dismiss the ideological warfare effects of defeating al-Qaida militarily on its home ground, such as Iraq. His chapter titled "Marginalizing al-Qaida" has definite operational implications for exploiting tensions and divisions in a terrorist organization when it is engaged militarily in a decisive theater.

Chapter 20, titled "Mindsets That Hamper America's Capabilities," begins with a quote from Saint Augustine: "When (men) go to war, what they want is to impose on their enemies the victor's will and call it peace." The chapter is a strong riposte to the imposing "Clash of Civilizations" argument Samuel Huntington made in the 1990s.

While Aboul-Enein specifically addresses Militant Islamism, with a tweak of terms and a slight adjustment of the historical dial, his analysis of American information warfare weaknesses applies to World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the great ideological and economic struggle we call the Cold War.

SOURCE





Language Diversity = Divisiveness

The U.S. is an English speaking country, not a bi-lingual or multi-lingual speaking country. Our government conducts all business in English. Our military communicates only in English. Can you envision military commanders giving commands to attack in numerous languages? U.S. businesses typically communicate in English. One of the many strengths of this country is its outstanding communications system.

All roadside signs, instructions, business correspondence, school classes, and general communications should be in English, with no references to any foreign languages.

Immigrants have to learn English and our children have to be proficient in English..

It can be beneficial for people to be fluent in a second language such as Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, etc. Our country needs expertise in foreign languages, but this should be subservient to fluency in English. U.S. citizens who cannot speak and write English as a primary language are probably placing themselves at a disadvantage on the ladder to success in this country.

We should not promote language diversity, because it will lead to divisiveness, the same type of divisiveness we see in numerous foreign countries.

SOURCE




Hands off our testicles

“Two men have been found guilty of ‘providing sperm without a licence.’ But is there a man in Britain who hasn’t done that? … Any talk of ‘sperm’ and ‘licences’ in the same breath should set alarm bells ringing.”

How can it be a crime to ‘provide sperm without a licence or third-party agreement’? That is what two British men have been found guilty of, after it was discovered that they were acting as ‘sperm brokers’, introducing would-be donors of the white stuff to around 800 women who, for various reasons, could not conceive. Yet every man in Britain who has sex with a woman ‘provides sperm without a licence’ (unless he’s wearing a condom); what’s so different when there’s a middle man involved, a broker, who passes the sperm from the man who produces it to the woman who wants it? Any talk of ‘sperm’ and ‘licences’ in the same breath should set alarm bells ringing.

Nigel Woodforth and Ricky Gage, the two businessmen (or ‘fertility conmen’ as they have been branded by the tabloids), made around £250,000 from their ad hoc sperm-donation scheme. The press has gone all out to make the scheme sound as seedy as possible – it was ‘run from a basement’ for the benefit of ‘desperate women’; the two men first got the idea ‘over a drink in the Slug and Lettuce pub in Reading’ – yet presumably it involved men consensually donating sperm and women consenually paying for it and later injecting it. If Gage and Woodforth had been offering cut-price amputations or under-the-radar gall-stone operations, I could understand the outrage. But neither the production nor the ingestion of sperm is a serious medical procedure; men and women do it all the time in the traditional fashion, in beds, on sofas, in alleyways, far from the prying eyes of the would-be fertility police.

And yet at Southwark Crown Court in London last week, Gage and Woodforth were found guilty of providing sperm without a licence. They will receive their sentences this week. The judge has told them to expect to be banged up.

This bizarre case shines a light on the increasingly stiff (no pun intended) regulation of people’s fertility. For many years, only fertility treatments involving frozen sperm required a licence. That’s fair enough: the long-term storing, freezing and unfreezing of sperm requires expertise, and the organisations that do it should adhere to certain agreed standards. But the provision of fresh sperm – that is, unfrozen sperm, the kind that men carry around with them at all times – was traditionally unregulated. Until 2007, that is. Then, the Human Tissue (Quality and Safety for Human Application) Regulations were introduced, and they included the decree that any provider wanting to ‘procure, test, process or distribute’ fresh sperm also had to hold a licence from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). That is why Gage and Woodforth - who organised the provision of fresh sperm - could be found guilty of a crime.

The legal regulation and potential criminalisation of the ‘procurement’ and ‘distribution’ of fresh sperm take us into dangerous territory. This makes something that men and women do all the time into a potential crime. Women ‘procure’ fresh sperm when they sleep with a man with the intention of getting pregnant; is there really a moral difference if they procure that man’s fresh sperm without sleeping with him? Men ‘distribute’ sperm day in, day out – whether into hankies, condoms or into women whom they love, want to make pregnant, or whatever. How can the distribution of fresh sperm be seriously policed? What is the significant difference if the man ‘distributes’ his sperm into a cup first rather than directly to the woman? The tighter regulation of what men and women do with sperm – which is different to blood, for example, in that it can be produced and distributed without risk of injury – is to invite the policing of what for thousands of years was a simple everyday relation between people.

The discussion of the alleged dangers of Woodforth and Gage’s fresh sperm captures what is behind much of the fury over their antics: official fearfulness about the sex act itself. Fertility experts are disgusted that these two men were providing untested sperm. This sperm is not ‘quarantined’ or tested for ‘bacterial and viral infection’, said one scary-sounding report. ‘These fresh sperm delivery services just fill me with horror. There is no way on earth that they can guarantee that [the sperm] is infection-free’, one expert told the Daily Telegraph.

This looks like a proxy debate that is really about the alleged dangers of sex in general – ‘unsafe sex’, that is – where it is also the case that men and women pass fluids that have not been quarantined or tested for infections. Across the country, on a daily basis, unregulated, unpoliced ‘sperm delivery services’ take place – that is, men and women have sex – and the contemporary view of such interactions as potentially dangerous and diseased has definitely informed the discussion of Woodforth and Gage’s horror-inducing fresh-sperm business. Would Those Who Know Better also like us to require a licence before we are allowed to share sperm in the traditional way? Perhaps we shouldn’t give them ideas – their answer to that question would almost certainly be ‘yes’.

What is happening here is that experts are taking a rather Catholic view of sperm. They are treating fresh sperm almost as something sacred, something which cannot possibly be passed from one party to another without the okay of the overlords of the fertility regulation industry. Ironically, it is likely to have been the overregulation and secular sanctification of fresh sperm that gave rise to a business like Gage and Woodforth’s in the first place. In recent years, new rules have been introduced stipulating that any child produced through sperm donation has a right to know who the donor was – and not surprisingly, this bizarre idea caused something of a crisis in the sperm-donation world, as men became less keen to donate their sperm if they thought that 18 years later the product of their masturbation might knock on their front door and say ‘Hello dad’. The tightening of fertility rules, the treatment of sperm donation as a fatherly act – all of this no doubt contributed to the creation of a space for an enterprise like Gage and Woodforth’s.

People’s fertility is already way too regulated. The HFEA may be one of the bodies set to be hurled on to the Lib-Cons’ ‘bonfire of the quangos’, but first its immense powers of fertility-policing will be distributed to other, already exisiting bodies. We need less regulation of our fertile interactions, not more – and a recognition from the powers-that-be that they have no business poking their Victorian snouts into what they call ‘sperm delivery services’, and the rest of us call relationships.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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