'No porn or prostitution': Islamic extremists set up Sharia law controlled zones in British cities

Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Sharia law enforcement zones have been set up. Communities have been bombarded with the posters, which read: ‘You are entering a Sharia-controlled zone – Islamic rules enforced.’

The bright yellow messages daubed on bus stops and street lamps have already been seen across certain boroughs in London and order that in the ‘zone’ there should be ‘no gambling’, ‘no music or concerts’, ‘no porn or prostitution’, ‘no drugs or smoking’ and ‘no alcohol’.

In the past week, dozens of streets in the London boroughs of Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Newham have been targeted, raising fears that local residents may be intimidated or threatened for flouting ‘Islamic rules’.

Choudary, who runs the banned militant group Islam4UK, warned: ‘We now have hundreds if not thousands of people up and down the country willing to go out and patrol the streets for us and a print run of between 10,000 and 50,000 stickers ready for distribution.

‘There are 25 areas around the country which the Government has earmarked as areas where violent extremism is a problem. ‘We are going to go to all these same areas and implement our own Sharia-controlled zones. ‘This is the best way for dealing with drunkenness and loutishness, prostitution and the sort of thug life attitude you get in British cities.’

The former lawyer added: ‘This will mean this is an area where the Muslim community will not tolerate drugs, alcohol, pornography, gambling, usury, free mixing between the sexes – the fruits if you like of Western civilisation. ‘We want to run the area as a Sharia-controlled zone and really to put the seeds down for an Islamic Emirate in the long term.’

Scotland Yard is now working with local councils to remove the posters and identify those responsible for putting them up.

Choudary said he was organising a protest against the Far Right in Waltham Forest this weekend following last Friday’s killing spree in Norway by anti-Islamic gunman Anders Breivik. He said: ‘We are going to put the events in Oslo on the agenda. We are going to be marching and addressing this issue. It is a whole new scenario now. The Muslim community needs to be vigilant. There is an undercurrent against Islam. ‘I do believe a Norway-style attack could happen here.’

The campaign comes just months after stickers proclaiming a ‘gay-free zone’ and appearing to reference the religious Islamic text of the Koran appeared in Tower Hamlets.

Women in parts of East London including Tower Hamlets have been threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists if they did not wear headscarves.

James Brandon, of the anti-extremism think-tank the Quilliam Foundation, which has dubbed the intimidation the work of ‘Talibanesque thugs’, said: ‘This is a small group which is not representative of these communities. ‘It’s great news that the police have decided to investigate this. This has the potential to divide communities and upset people.’

Yesterday the leader of Waltham Forest Council, Chris Robbins, said: ‘As soon as we heard about these posters we worked over the weekend to take them all down. ‘Since then we have been going through our CCTV images and working with the police to try to identify the culprits. Our policy is to use the full extent of our powers to prosecute any offenders.

‘People should not get the wrong idea about our borough because a handful of small-minded idiots, who do not live here, decide to deface our streets with ridiculous posters.’

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How six staff warned in vain about the behaviour of British paedophile who raped toddler

Six workers at a nursery raised concerns about the behaviour of a colleague who went on to rape a toddler, but bosses let him stay in his job.

A judge expressed astonishment yesterday that nursery assistant Paul Wilson was not fired but given a written warning that allowed him to continue working. Mrs Justice Macur said: ‘It is a matter of some incredulity, when reading the reports and complaints that were lodged on your file, that you continued to be employed by that nursery.’

Wilson, who used a mobile phone to film two shocking attacks on the infant, was ordered to serve at least 15 years before he can be considered for parole.

Mrs Macur said the 21-year-old, who worked at the Little Stars Nursery in Nechells, Birmingham, had caused unknown harm to the toddler and more than 20 young girls who he abused online.

Passing sentence at Birmingham Crown Court, Mrs Justice Macur told Wilson that any right-thinking person would regard his crimes as wicked.

Wilson, of Newbold Croft, Nechells, pleaded guilty in June to two charges of rape, 16 counts of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, 25 of making indecent images, and three of distributing images of children.

The counts of rape related to attacks on a toddler committed in a toilet block and a classroom at the Little Stars nursery last year, while the majority of the other offences were committed against girls aged between 12 and 16.

Shockingly, Wilson was training to be a primary school teacher at the time of his arrest.

Condemning Wilson as a predatory paedophile, Mrs Justice Macur told him that the offences had been 'sophisticated and persistent' in their manner. Some of the sexual acts which he had incited children to commit via webcams would be viewed in hindsight by the victims with horror, the judge said. 'You have humiliated and corrupted and defiled,' she told Wilson. 'You are highly deviant, highly manipulative. You are intelligent and the more dangerous for being so.'

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The Green/Left push for media censorship in Australia

By James Allan, Garrick professor of law at the University of Queensland.

LATELY the Gillard government has been clothing itself in GetUp! attire, but last week it flirted with adding some ShutUp accessories.

The problems started when the political agenda of this government started to sound remarkably like the agenda of the far left special interest group GetUp!

It's a world view that allows you to believe democracy is a sufficiently malleable principle that you can barefacedly lie to the voters and not pay a big price. (How many billboards have you seen GetUp!, that self-styled protector of democratic values, pay for condemning Julia Gillard for lying to the voters? That would be zero, right?)

I suspect I'm not revealing any state secret when I say the political policy positions of GetUp! -- reeking of po-faced pieties and "We are the World" platitudes -- are distinctly minority ones. If this becomes your core support group as a government then you are in big, big trouble. Which is when Gillard moved from GetUp! to ShutUp. Apparently the thinking is that we have too much free speech here in Australia. Maybe we ought to pick up on the great democrat Bob Brown's musings and go back a few centuries so we can regulate what the press says.

You really can't be against ensuring that only proper, acceptable views get disseminated, can you? I mean, it works in Cuba and Iran and Venezuela, doesn't it? Or if you decide to display your independence from Brown, to show voters who really is boss, you may just opt to bring in new privacy laws that allow new ways to sue other people.

But putting all the siren song supporters of privacy laws to one side (and we can all await with eager anticipation the next GetUp! billboard in support of this latest thought-bubble policy creation), here is what is at stake.

Any new privacy law regime will make inroads on what people can say. It will take some speech off the table.

There is an inevitable trade-off between free speech concerns and privacy concerns. If you shift the goalposts in favour of more privacy, then by definition you place more limits on free speech.

And I think that's a terrible idea. First off, our laws are already easily sufficient to handle phone hacking situations of the sort engulfing Britain at present. So that's a red herring, plain and simple.

Second, more aggressive privacy laws work not simply by allowing people actually to sue. They work also by creating an atmosphere where people censor themselves because they are afraid of being sued, precisely in the same way that our terrible hate speech laws at present over-reach.

Just look at France, which has strong privacy laws. You had an atmosphere there, no doubt also culturally influenced, where the past exploits of Dominique Strauss-Kahn came as a surprise to most people, save reporters. Do you think those exploits, and I explicitly assume that the New York City charges against him will collapse, but do you think his behaviour might influence whether some people voted for him?

Tony Abbott should have no part in this ShutUp agenda. In any contest between free speech and privacy I think long-term best consequences favour the former much more often. Certainly our present status quo needs no rebalancing in favour of more speech restrictions, and that's true even if it's sold under the banner of some human right to privacy, with a few perfunctory references to international treaties.

Amazingly, however, our present GetUp!/Gillard government seems to think a new ShutUp agenda may help it out with the voters. You have to wonder what planet it inhabits.

We can all only watch this train wreck of incompetence with incredulity. From GetUp to ShutUp, the whole thing has been one giant F . . kUp.

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Norway: it’s not ‘naive’ to defend liberty

After Friday’s murderous attacks Norwegians are right to resist increased surveillance that will compromise citizens’ freedoms.

Before all the gruesome details of Friday’s harrowing attacks in Norway had emerged, speculation was rife as to who was responsible and how Norway should respond. In international television studios and opinion pages, several commentators remarked on Norway’s ‘lack of preparedness’ and false sense of safety. There was outright condemnation of Norway’s ‘absurdly slack security’ and hints that this is a wake-up call for a country that has long imagined itself to be one of the safest places on Earth. Surely, some suggested, Norwegians can’t be so naive as to believe that openness is an appropriate value in this era of global terror?

The proper response to this kind of chastisement came from Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, who was asked at a press conference hours after the attack whether the events would make Norway a less open society. He said: ‘Our answer must be more democracy, more openness, to show that we will not be cowed by this kind of violence.’

Norway and its Scandinavian neighbours are indeed known for their ‘slack security’ and for cherishing openness. Here, politicians still move about relatively freely and among Scandinavians there is still a measure of resistance against efforts to roll out surveillance regimes. For instance, being under the constant, watchful gaze of CCTV cameras, as Brits are, is an alien concept.

It is precisely this sense of security that terrorists like Anders Behring Breivik, the right-wing racist who carried out Friday’s attacks, want to shatter. The aim of terrorism is not just to kill and maim, but also to instill a sense of insecurity and paranoia across society. Instead of giving in to this, the proper response should be a show of resilience, to demonstrate that the democratic values that terrorists - whether of Muslim or Christian persuasion - attack are not so easily done away with.

Unfortunately, in the past decade politicians and lawmakers in Western societies have perpetuated a politics of fear, rather than resilience, in response to terrorist attacks. In the UK and elsewhere, there has been a rollout of heavy-handed security regimes, with increased surveillance, clampdowns on free speech, the extension of police powers to issue stop-and-search orders, and so on - all in the name of ‘counter-terrorism’. As fundamental liberties are trampled on in the name of preventing attacks, our leaders are in fact doing the terrorists’ dirty work for them.

As for Friday’s attacks, the full picture is yet to emerge as to what Anders Behring Breivik’s motives were, whether he acted alone or with the assistance of a wider network, and what precisely he imagined his heinous act would achieve. In statements to his lawyer, he said that he wanted to hurt the ruling Labour Party and its recruitment as much as possible, which is, presumably, why he chose as his targets the government quarters in Oslo and an idyllic, isolated island where the next generation of Social Democrats gather every year for a summer camp.

But this was no precisely-targeted attack. Instead, for Behring Breivik, this was a warning to Norway as a whole. He has said that he wanted to change the political climate in Norway through violence. In other words, he wants to re-shape Norwegian society to fit with his unhinged world outlook, as described in a 1,500-page document that he penned and titled ‘2083 - A European Declaration of Independence’. In this diary-like pamphlet, compiled over nine years, Behring Breivik attacks everyone from Muslims to proponents of multiculturalism and members of the ‘cultural Marxist elite’.

Too often over the past decade, terrorists have indeed been allowed to re-shape society through violence. Not because they have won large swathes of people over to their misanthropic causes but because political rulers have used the spectre of terrorism to justify clampdowns on some fundamental freedoms, infusing Western societies with a climate of illiberalism. Now, instead of chastising Norway for being ‘naive’ for holding on for so long to democratic values, it should be encouraged not to give them up.

Scandinavia is, of course, not immune to illiberal impulses. For instance, since Sweden experienced its first suicide bombing at the end of last year, it has seen an extension of the state’s surveillance powers and some vocal lobbying for clamping down on freedom of expression and association as a way to prevent terrorism.

At the time, some Swedish politicians took the opportunity to defend the fiercely debated ‘FRA law’, which gives the Swedish intelligence bureau the right to snoop on every single email, telephone call, facsimile and SMS message crossing Sweden’s borders. Others said that the Stockholm attack justified the terror-prevention law that was introduced in December 2010. This law criminalises public incitement, recruitment and education ‘for the purpose of terrorism and other serious crimes’. It is designed to meet the requirements of the European Council’s convention on the prevention of terrorism. As similar laws in Britain have shown, these measures tend to blur the boundaries between speech and action, between thought and deed, as anything from championing Hamas to speaking ill of the West or criticising multiculturalism can be categorised as speech that ‘incites terrorism’.

Not only can such laws have severe long-term consequences for citizens’ liberties, while doing little practical to stop terrorism, but they also help instill a ‘better safe than sorry’ attitude that is paralysing and encourages a deep sense of distrust and paranoia.

Norway’s security services may have misjudged the threat from right-wingers, as has been claimed, but it is impossible to predict fully the erratic behaviour of deeply disturbed individuals. It is also undesirable to organise society according to the presumption that a terrorist attack may always be about to happen.

Those now lecturing Norway on being too open, too free and too lax would do well to listen to some of the voices coming from within Norway itself. Rather than rallying for knee-jerk draconian measures, in the past couple of days many Norwegians have spoken up for liberty, stating that more intervention into the private lives of citizens is not a price worth paying. As one commentator put it, ‘We will not have a Norway with new restrictions on movement, more uniforms and therefore also more interventions in the lives of those of us who do not want to comprehend the language of terror. Then the terrorists would win.’

Let’s hope that Norway’s leaders stay true to their promise of retaliating Friday’s attacks ‘with more democracy’ - and that other leaders pay heed to it, too.

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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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