UK government told anti-Islam film incites terrorism

There is a clear threat of violence below.  I wonder how that comports with British hate-speech law?

Britain’s Counter-terrorism Command Unit and Specialist Internet Bureau have taken notice of a representation made by an influential Muslim organisation which is asking the government to ban the blasphemous film “Innocence of Muslims” for posing danger to UK’s national security.

The Jamaat-e-Ahle Sunnat UK, which claims to represent the majority of Muslims in Britain, has approached the home secretary and police forces around the country requesting that the movie be removed from YouTube on the grounds that it incites racial and religious hate crimes and openly encourages violence in the name of faith.

The group didn’t request that the film, which caused outrage among Muslims across the world, be banned for being offensive, nor that it will incite hatred against the Muslims but rather that it would encourage violence by Muslims to non-believers.

Raja Zahid Nawaz confirmed to The News that his organisation had been contacted by the security officials with assurance that the contents of the letter were being studied and all the activity around the film online and otherwise was being monitored.

Ghulam Rabanni, Secretary General of the organisation, told The News that the blasphemous film is not about the “freedom of speech”. “This film is aimed at inciting religious and racial hatred. It incites extremism and terrorism and will lead to the radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK. It encourages physical and violent attacks on non-Muslim communities around the world. It encourages child abuse. It will damage the fabric of a multi racial and multi faith society and it will lead to tensions and disturbances within the UK and in particular in inner city areas. We have asked the government to ban the film on YouTube.”

SOURCE





Outrage at BBC scandal conceals the fact that British culture encourages paedophilia. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about

By James Rhodes

Yet another bloody article about Jimmy Savile. We read more and more about the horrors that went on and the now incontestable fact that others knew it was happening, and we get all shouty and indignant. It reveals the irksome, irritating side of Twitter, the tabloid press, self-published blogs and the loud, chatty guy in the pub. The moral high ground. The furious bleating and self-righteousness of the whiter-than-white populace.

The outcry will not do any good at all. How many times since "Never again" has it happened again? Using words like "molest" and "abuse" runs utterly counter to the horror of child rape. As do the prison sentences handed down upon conviction. You can serve longer in prison for saying "I'm going to kill you" (maximum sentence 10 years) than you can for having sex with your three-year-old daughter (maximum sentence seven years). Newspapers happily show pictures of 14-year-old girls sunbathing and use sexual language to describe them while at the same time appearing indignant and appalled at the crimes of Savile, Glitter et al.

The culture of celebrity has the same shroud of secrecy, power and authority as the Church. Why on earth should we be surprised at sexual abuse going on in those circles? The only thing that surprises me is that people actually seem surprised. In any environment where there is power, there will be an abuse of that power.

When I was at school I was sexually abused. Let me clarify: I was serially raped when I was a child, between the ages of five and 10. At least one other teacher knew it was happening and even after voicing their concerns to the relevant authorities within the school, nothing was done and the horrors continued. (Over two decades later, and only after a statement from both me and another teacher, did the police arrest and charge the rapist with 10 counts of buggery – at the time of arrest he was a part-time boxing coach for boys under 10.)

We read about things like this and we think "how awful" and then get on with eating our cornflakes, but no one really wants to look beneath the surface. The physical act of rape is just the beginning – each time it happened I seemed to leave a little bit of myself behind with him until it felt like there was pretty much nothing left of me that was real. And those bits do not seem to come back over time. What goes too often unreported and unexamined and unacknowledged is the legacy that is left with the victim.

Self-harm. Depression. Drug and alcohol abuse. Reparative surgery. OCD. Dissociation. Inability to maintain functional relationships. Marital breakdowns. Being forcefully institutionalised. Hallucinations (auditory and visual). Hypervigilance. PTSD. Sexual shame and confusion. Anorexia and other eating disorders. These are just a few of my symptoms (for want of a better word) of chronic sexual abuse. They have all been a part of my life in the very recent past and the abuse I went through was 30 years ago. I am not saying that these things are the inevitable result of my experience; I imagine that some people can go through similar experiences and emerge largely unscathed. What I am saying is that if living life is the equivalent of running a marathon, then sexual abuse in childhood has the net effect of removing one of your legs and adding a backpack of bricks on the starting line.

I don't want to be writing about things like this. I don't want to deal with the inevitable feelings of shame and exposure that will come from it. And I don't want to deal with the accusations of using my back story to flog albums, being full of self-pity, attention-seeking or whatever other madness will no doubt end up in the comments below. But neither do I want to have to keep quiet, or even worse, feel as if I should keep quiet, when there is so much about our culture (which is in many ways so incredibly evolved) that allows, endorses, encourages and revels in the sexual abuse of children. Paedophilia has acquired a grim, vaguely titillating, car-crash fascination that the press have jumped all over.

We simply cannot on the one hand have sexualised images of children on billboards and magazines, underwear for six-year-olds with pictures of cherries on them, "school disco" themed nights at bars and community service sentences for downloading "indecent" images (indecent? Saying "shit" in church is indecent – this is abominable), and on the other hand regard the Savile story with abject horror. It just does not equate. This is not about censoring what the press can write (typical example from one tabloid: "She’s still only 15, but Chloë Moretz … The strawberry blonde stepped out with a male friend in a cute Fifties-style powder blue sleeveless collared shirt which she tied at her waist – revealing just a hint of her midriff"). or what pictures they can publish. It is about protecting minors who do not have a voice, who are not capable of understanding certain matters and who cannot protect themselves.

This has all been said before. And nothing has really changed. We forget (who would want to remember this stuff?), we think shouting loudly will absolve our collective guilt and change things for the better, we point fingers and form lynch mobs. We paint "paedo scum" on convicted (or suspected) paedophiles' homes. And yet what we need to do is open our eyes fully and simply not tolerate this, rather like we've done and continue to do so effectively with homophobia and racism. We need to look at providing more visible therapy for both victims, perpetrators and those who have urges that threaten to make them perpetrators. We need to overhaul sentencing guidelines and start tackling the issues with more clarity and integrity. Whatever it takes for as long as it takes needs to be the guiding principle here, because otherwise we will, to use a well-worn but apposite phrase, simply continue the cycle of abuse.

SOURCE






London Police 'could be sued over plan to give top jobs to black people and women'

Britain’s biggest police force is to become the first public body to adopt a policy that gives priority for top jobs to black people and women.

The Metropolitan Police will  recruit senior officers and promote civilian staff from minority groups  in ‘tie-break’ situations where they are just as qualified as white or  male candidates.

Scotland Yard’s diversity board has warned that the ‘positive action’ policy, made legal by equality laws last year, will be controversial.

The move could trigger lawsuits by job applicants who lose out and is likely to raise concerns that successful candidates were chosen to fill  quotas rather than on merit. But a meeting chaired by Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe took the decision to use positive action after it was given Government advice.

Minutes of the policy forum meeting on July 11 state: ‘The Forum were supportive of using a legal provision that could potentially deliver a more diverse workforce.

‘It accepted the Diversity Board’s caution but were confident that Legal Services could guide on the few occasions this provision would be used.’

Recent figures show that although one in ten of the Met’s 32,000 officers come from ethnic minorities, there are just two black and Asian men in the highest rank.

In March this year the Met had 7,829 female officers – but only seven in the chief officer tier. Since then three high-profile women have retired.

As part of efforts to make its workforce more representative of London’s population, the Met considered if it should use the new equality law that allows positive action.

The legislation, introduced in April last year, lets employers recruit or promote candidates if they have a  ‘protected characteristic’, such as race, that is under-represented.

But Scotland Yard’s Diversity Executive Board warned in an internal paper: ‘This is legislation, ambiguously written, with no case law existing to support legal advice. No public or private sector organisations contacted have plans to use it.’

But Ilana Swimer, an employment expert at law firm Halebury, said: ‘Even if the Met decide to support this provision, it is unlikely to have a significant impact on diversity.

‘Indeed, any employer who recruits a candidate having relied on this provision could open themselves up to challenge by other candidates who feel they have been treated unfairly.’

Charles Crichlow, president of the National Black Police Association, denied it would lead to tokenism.

‘You would be getting your job on merit because it’s only open to equally qualified candidates,’ he said.

SOURCE 






A police state created by "anti-fascists"

In their enthusiasm to clamp down on ‘hate speech’, anti-fascists have become an unofficial arm of the state

Given that the key thing about twentieth-century fascism was its extreme authoritarianism, you might reasonably expect those who describe themselves as ‘anti-fascist’ to be anti-authoritarian. You might imagine that these campaigners, more than most, would know the dangers of giving the state too much power and trusting it to determine who may speak and who may not, who is a ‘decent’ person and who is not.

But you would be wrong – certainly if the events in the north-east London district of Walthamstow this weekend were anything to go by. There, anti-fascists campaigning against a protest planned for Saturday by the right-wing, allegedly fascistic English Defence League (EDL) demonstrated that they are uncritically pro-state, and unabashedly pro-authoritarian, trusting the powers-that-be to police public protest and political discourse more broadly.

The modern anti-fascist left has provided plenty of justification for increased state control over political to and fro in modern Britain. It has strengthened the use of public-order laws over political freedom, and it has empowered the state to govern all forms of political speech. That control extends not just to the statements and actions of ‘fascist’ groups, but also to the statements and actions of left-wing groups and anti-fascists, too.

So for the next 30 days, any group - regardless of its grievance - is banned from marching in Walthamstow and the rest of the borough of Waltham Forest and in the nearby boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham and Islington. This blanket ban is directly down to the campaigning efforts of left-wing anti-fascist protesters, who have spent the past month taking to the streets to get people to join local Labour MP Stella Creasy in signing a petition to ban the EDL from entering Walthamstow. The successful campaign for a ban was celebrated by Creasy who, ironically, claimed it meant ‘our community can get back to its normal, peaceful and tolerant state’.

In truth, Walthamstow on Saturday resembled a police state. Hundreds of police officers monitored public transport, roads and thoroughfares, looking suspiciously at anyone who walked past. Random searches of people and cars were carried out, which led to three arrests of individuals, not because they were EDL members, but for things like drug possession and driving while disqualified. Many more officers waited in the wings as mobile surveillance-cameras checked the town for anyone who dared take to the streets to express their political views.

While the UK Home Office cannot ban ‘static demonstrations’, the Metropolitan Police used section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to ban any EDL event from taking place in London, with the exception of a one-hour rally outside the Houses of Parliament. The anti-fascist protesters were permitted to have a demonstration in Walthamstow, however, and they duly decided to hold a ‘victory rally’ celebrating the fact that they had successfully kept the EDL from marching. Censorious Creasy was cheered by the anti-fascists when she took to the stage.

In what bizarre world is this a victory? In lobbying for the state to ban the EDL, anti-fascist protesters managed to have their own freedom to protest restricted as well. The fact that their own civil liberties would also be affected must have come as no surprise to many of these anti-fascist protesters, given that they were banned from marching in Tower Hamlets last year, too. Some socialist groups, however, did see it as ‘scandalous’ that they were banned from marching. They began chanting ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’, complaining that their human rights were being breached.

So it’s fine to ban the EDL from marching, but not the EDL’s left-wing opponents? Apparently, human rights should not extend to those with the Wrong Views - or perhaps anti-fascists think EDL members aren’t human. It was as if these naive protesters were complaining that the home secretary, Theresa May, couldn’t see who the good guys were.

Given the extent of collaboration between the anti-fascist left and the police, you can see why they might have been miffed. On Saturday, anti-fascist groups such as Hope Not Hate monitored the borough on behalf of the police to ensure no one that even looked like an EDL supporter was allowed into the borough. Searchlight magazine reported seeing ‘six to eight thuggish EDL types wandering around’, who were told they were not welcome. Others took to Twitter to encourage their followers to report to the police any EDL members seen entering the borough. As one anti-fascist Twitterer put it: ‘So glad the #EDL are denied access to #Walthamstow today. We are on EDL watch, [so if EDL members are] seen today anywhere in “Stow”, please let the police know.’

That anti-fascists now take it upon themselves to ensure the law is being enforced, shows the extent to which the left have become an unofficial arm of the state. They have become squealers, the state’s eyes and ears, cheering on the state to intervene.

Surely anyone with an anti-authoritarian bone in their body would be chilled by the state’s clampdown on free expression in huge swathes of London over the next month. These so-called ‘anti-fascists’ are so untroubled by it, they are holding ‘victory rallies’ instead. What’s anti-fascist about that?

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,  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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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