24/3/2010 - Announce to all Blognow.com.au users
Hello to all users.
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Last but not least, all sponsor user blog will be promoted on the homepage of Blognow.com.au for their support.
Thanks for all the support. :)
Blognow.com.au Team.
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12/3/2010 -
REDIRECT
Response times on this blog have become so slow as to render the blog almost useless. I am therefore moving the blog back to its original home HERE. There will be no more posts here in the foreseeable future -- not that very much is foreseeable.
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11/3/2010 -
British police told to tackle crime that destroys communities
At the moment, they are too busy enforcing political correctness to tackle real crime. Photographers are at greater risk from the police than are youth gangs
Police forces are failing to protect the most vulnerable people in society from antisocial behaviour, the police inspectorate has said. Chief constables were told that they must understand the toll that harassment, criminal damage and verbal abuse is taking on communities.
Denis O’Connor, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, said more than half of the 44 forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland could not identify repeat victims, leaving officers ignorant of the plight of vulnerable victims. This was evident in the case of Fiona Pilkington, who killed herself and her severely disabled daughter in 2007. She had called Leicestershire police for help more than 30 times while being subjected to constant abuse.
Mr O’Connor said: “The police database of information about antisocial behaviour incidents is inadequate and should be improved as a matter of urgency. An awful lot of police forces have real problems. “There is a lot of antisocial (ASB) behaviour, a lot of it is under-reported and there is a problem with nailing the intelligence around it. “It is like going back to the doctor’s surgery but you see a different doctor every time. We want everybody to take this issue seriously. It undermines confidence in the police. We are a long way from a police officer on his way to a report of ASB being told that it was the eighth time police had been called.”
Mr O’Connor was talking at the launch of a new website, MyPolice.org.uk, designed to give people more information about crime and the performance of local police forces. The website, which Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary hopes will be live in the next few days, shows that only four forces recorded a mark of “excellent” across the board, with Nottinghamshire rated as the worst in the country.
Of all the ASB cases the inspectorate looked at, the police failed to attend 23 per cent of them. There were 3.6 million reports of ASB in 2008-09 but senior officials said this figure could be doubled because of under-reporting.
SOURCE
Useless British police again -- baby left outside in the cold for 80 minutes: Dies
All they are good for is harassing decent people
A baby abandoned on the steps of a mosque was left outside in the cold for 80 minutes by police officers who thought he was dead. The boy was eventually spotted breathing as forensic officers investigated the scene where he was left in a carrier bag at the weekend. He was taken to hospital where he died within the hour.
Witnesses told how the area was cordoned off and a white tent put up around the infant after police arrived at 10.30am on Saturday. Shouts for an ambulance were heard around midday before the child was taken away in a police car. By then, Staffordshire police had released a statement saying that a 'body' had been discovered at the Makki Masjid mosque in Shelton, Stoke-on-Trent.
Minutes after it was discovered the baby was still alive, an updated statement was issued to say a 'small baby' had been found and taken to hospital.
The baby died at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire at 12.30pm. Staffordshire police have referred the incident to the Independent Police Complaints Commission which was yesterday investigating how officers could have failed to spot the child breathing. It is understood a note found with the child read 'Please bury him' and contained two £10 notes.
The child was found abandoned in temperatures of 5c (41f) by a teacher at the mosque's Saturday school. Detective Chief Inspector Phil Bladen, of Staffordshire police, said the baby's death was being treated as unexplained. [Really???] The force refused to comment on its initial response to the baby's discovery.
SOURCE
British social workers get it badly wrong again -- despite many warnings
Their usual indifference to the deeds of the underclass allowed a British Fritzl to get his daughters pregnant 18 times
A MAN raped his two daughters and fathered nine babies with them during 35 years of physical and sexual abuse. And he escaped detection because care professionals missed numerous chances to intervene. Agencies involved with the family repeatedly failed to take action even though the father was accused of incest on seven separate occasions, with a further 12 reported incidents of violence. Today authorities issued an unreserved apology to the abused women.
The 57-year-old man, from Sheffield, England, was jailed for life in November 2008 after one of his daughters accused him of incest. The man, who cannot be named, admitted 25 rapes and four indecent assaults, with the attacks beginning in 1980. If his daughters refused his advances, they would be punched, kicked and sometimes held in the flames of a gas fire.
The case echoes of that of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who imprisoned and raped his daughter.
Between 1975 and 2008 the family came into contact with 28 different agencies and more than 100 professionals. A review of the case made 128 recommendations for improving understanding, practice, procedures and training into intra-familial abuse. However, no staff were sacked or disciplined as the case was seen to be a "collective failure".
Chris Cook, the independent chairman of the Lincolnshire and Sheffield safeguarding children board, said: "We are genuinely sorry. We should have protected you. "This is a tragic and complicated case. The man responsible, who intimidated and frightened his family, was convicted of multiple counts of rape and is serving a life sentence."
The case review showed that the family moved home 67 times over a 35-year period so that the father could avoid detection.
The women's brother voiced anger that his sisters had not been protected, saying: "I blame a lot of people," he said. "I blame people that were meant to be looking after children because we were all meant to be under child protection at five, so I blame the people that should have been doing their jobs looking after us," he said.
SOURCE
Swedish media publish Mohammed cartoon to support threatened cartoonist
I didn't think the Swedes had it in them
Three leading Swedish newspapers and the national broadcaster carried a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed with a dog's body after an alleged plot to murder the artist who drew it was unveiled in Ireland.
The threat to Lars Vilks was a threat against all Swedes, the country's biggest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, proclaimed, adding that the new year axe attack on a Danish cartoonist for drawing the Prophet meant that Scandinavian values of openness were being assaulted.
The drawing by Mr Vilks was published overnight in the Stockholm-based Dagens Nyheter and Expressen newspapers and the Malmo daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet, in defence of one of the cornerstones of Sweden's constitution. This states that Swedes have the right to freedom of speech and cannot be retrained from the lawful expression of their views.
The newspapers stopped short, however, of running the cartoon on their websites because of their wider accessibility around the world. Islam forbids representations being made of the Prophet.
"In September 2007, al-Qa'ida leaders set a price on Swedish artist Lars Vilks's head," said Dagens Nyheter in an editorial comment. His "alleged crime" was to draw a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed as a "roundabout dog"; a type of street installation popular in Sweden where sculptures are often placed in the middle of roundabouts.
"The threats are attacks on one of the most fundamental rights - the freedom of speech - and should be viewed as a wider treat against an open and free society," the editorial stated.
Gunilla Herlitz, the Dagens Nyheter editor-in-chief, defended the reprinting of the cartoon as a legitimate part of the story of the day. "I believe that, in this case, the cartoon is a part of the news and therefore we would like to show the readers what this is all about. But the cartoon is published in a context and is not the leading picture on the page."
SOURCE
The Goddess That Failed
By Phyllis Chesler
For years now, newly arrived refugees have been contacting me. They write to tell me that they’ve lost nearly everybody they once knew. Their whole world is gone now. Some whisper over the phone. Others write long letters. They ask me how I’ve managed.
I am talking about ideological refugees from feminism, leftism, gay liberation, socialism, and progressivism.
Yesterday, I received a letter from someone in Berkeley. She tells me that, earlier this week, she was “overjoyed to see the feisty Tikvah students on the steps of Sproul Plaza giving out Israeli flags and t-shirts and dancing in circles,” and how afterwards, some “went to confront the theatre of the absurd, enacting the checkpoints.” Referring to the feminist movement in Berkeley, she asks: “Could you ever have believed it? From anti-patriarchy to pro-Hamas in a few decades?” Her letter continues: "That you exist and are doing this work means a great deal to me. So far, I have found ONE new friend who comes from the same Jewish lesbian feminist cultural lineage of the 1970s. Neither of us has many friends from the old days we can comfortably talk to anymore, although I still try. I thought I had the smartest bunch of women assembled for a lifetime but I was wrong."
Last night a friend of forty years came to visit me. She is especially dear to me because she is among a handful of people from that era with whom I can still talk. At best, the rest are frozen in amber, as they perpetually relive their own, long-ago moment in the sun. They have not evolved in history, they are relics; or, they have kept doing the same thing over and over again, thinking the same thoughts, focusing on the same issues. At worse, they have become Stalinized and “Palestinianized.” In either case, no honest conversation between us is possible. In 2005, five years ago (!), I wrote about this in The Death of Feminism; I doubt that many feminists read it.
Please understand: I am a sentimental and sociable woman and for such reasons, I might have continued to talk to the useful idiots who routinely demonize Israel and America, romanticize jihad and the Islamic Veil, and slander freedom fighters as “fascist Islamophobes.” Luckily, they condemned me. After years of kissing up, they shunned me, attacked my work, sullied my reputation —or they simply “disappeared” that work from their collective memories. They did not invite me to speak at conferences or at memorial services for feminists whom I’d once loved and with whom I’d worked for years. These conferences and funerals were all being filmed for the archives — and my fine feminist comrades needed to create a “revisionist” history, one in which no Zionists, no American patriots, no defenders of Western civilization could appear.
It was an excellent education. I am grateful to them for it. But now, there is no going back. I understand that we were never “friends,” only “fellow travelers.” When I departed from and dared to criticize the Party Line, I no longer existed.
Am I ready to write my own personal Darkness at Noon? (By the great Arthur Koestler) Or The God That Failed? (By Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, Louis Fischer, Stephen Spender, and Koestler). Perhaps — but not quite. I have not stopped being the kind of feminist I’ve always been. Many others who call themselves feminists interpret that word far differently than I do.
But, there are major feminist exceptions and they include all those feminists who work for womens’ health and against pornography, prostitution, and trafficking, and who “staff” all the violence against women areas. Even here though, the fate of Western civilization is far from their minds. They are in the trenches, drowning in female blood, and they do not look up to see the jihadists coming, nor can they desert their posts long enough to survey the distant trenches that overflow with Muslim female blood, Muslim gay blood, infidel blood. They are also connected, for reasons of sentimentality and funding, to the less saintly, more “mean girl” kind of feminists.
A friend wants to give me a seventieth birthday party later this year. First, I said “I won’t come.” She persisted and asked me for a guest list which spanned the last fifty years. I remained poignantly silent. Said she: “If you don’t give me a guest list I’ll start inviting…” and she named twenty people, none of whom I wish to see in an intimate, social setting ever again in this lifetime.
This sobered me right up. This is not me. Indeed, I’ve changed. Hallelujah!
I now understand that when political intimates betray their own ideals in a way that endangers real people, destroys real lives — this cannot be glossed over. There is no going back. There is only a war to fight. Totalitarianism either stands or it falls. Barbarism is defeated or it overcomes civilization. Either Western values (which include human rights, women’s rights, religious tolerance, freedom of speech, etc.) prevail or they are lost.
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 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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9/3/2010 -
The British Labour Party's cult of secrecy is an insult to all Britons
Just weeks before a general election, the prime minister provides a photo-opportunity of himself, posing with our brave boys in Afghanistan. A few hours later, it is announced that no reporters will be permitted to visit the front line during that election campaign, lest what they see and hear should influence the outcome.
Justice minister Jack Straw tells parliament he will not disclose the reason why Jamie Bulger's killer Jon Venables has been returned to prison, lest this prejudice possible future criminal proceedings.
And on Sunday, the BBC's Panorama reported that more than 60 per cent of NHS hospital trusts provide the public with inaccurate information about their performance.
Here, within the space of a few days, is an extraordinary range of examples of the manner in which official secrecy routinely operates in Britain, all year round. The alleged right of the Government and institutions to withhold information - even on issues of the utmost importance to the public interest - is exercised again and again, at the convenience of ministers and civil servants.
In 21st century Britain, a chasm now exists: between the feast of information the sovereign and corporate states possess about us and the crumbs they disclose about themselves. Each of us knows that records of our phone calls, finances, household circumstances, shopping transactions and even physical movements are monitored by thousands of computers and tens of thousands of CCTV cameras.
Perhaps you, like me, have become increasingly reluctant to conduct online shopping transactions that demand, say, 20 lines of personal details. We are aware that such information is likely to be broadcast and sold to scores of other organisations, regardless of whether or not we tick the box for non-disclosure. Making such tiny gestures to protect our privacy is futile amid the floodtide of data that is already jamming networks.
The Government, in contrast, discloses information about its own workings and those of public bodies like a miser paying his bills in 10p coins on the last day of the month. It knows almost everything about us - but we are told vastly less about them than we rightfully should be. The Afghan example above is grotesque. British forces are engaged in a serious war on the far side of the world. The Government has handled it badly - recklessly, even - above all, by under-resourcing. Many soldiers are understandably bitter, as almost every day they experience the consequences of trying to do too much with too little. This is embarrassing for our Government and should be a source of personal shame to the prime minister, if he was capable of such a sentiment.
But it is extraordinary that the Ministry of Defence should deem it acceptable to deny frontline access to the media ahead of polling day, lest reporters discover things that further damage New Labour.
Such behaviour, however, is institutionalised. Take another example: in recent months, evidence has emerged that the huge increase in immigration to Britain since 1997 was endorsed by the Blair regime in pursuit of its own political ends. Some of its principals favoured immigration as a social engineering tool. Blair believed a large influx of immigrants would irreversibly alter the character of Britain towards becoming a multicultural and more left-leaning society. Not only was any hint of such motives concealed at the time, but documentation on this supremely sensitive issue remains to this day locked in Whitehall files.
It is striking to contrast the manner in which this country conducts its official business with that of the United States. Across the Atlantic, there is an overwhelming presumption in favour of disclosure. Congressional committees constantly demand - and receive - information about the inner workings of government departments that in Britain would never be revealed to their parliamentary counterparts.
In the U.S. the Freedom of Information Act really means what it claims - an ordinary individual can exercise a right to be shown material, not least about themselves, which would be denied over here.
In Britain, the demands of security are routinely cited to conceal blunders. Remember the 2008 Gulf fiasco? British sailors and Royal Marines were captured by the Iranians in an incident that became a national humiliation. Some months later, the then defence secretary, the egregious Des Browne, told the Commons that an internal inquiry had been held. But he announced that its entire report was being classified, on security grounds. The Tories limply - and quite wrongly - acquiesced in this.
There were genuine security issues in some parts of the report, which it would have been right to blank out. But concealment of the whole document was designed simply to spare the blushes of the Royal Navy's top brass. Secrecy was abused for convenience, not security. The MoD should never have been allowed to get away with hiding its dirty linen.
More recently, of course, there was last year's Commons expenses scandal. From beginning to end, MPs fought tooth and nail to prevent the disclosure of their abuse of public funds. Their rearguard action was led by the then Speaker, the appalling Michael Martin, today a peer, if you please. Day after day in the courts, at taxpayers' expense, Martin struggled to conceal first the details of his own excesses and then those of hundreds of MPs. In the end, thank goodness, he lost and we won. Every window-box and lavatory seat was exposed. But how can MPs be surprised by the public's abiding suspicion and, indeed, contempt for the system? They strove to defend the indefensible to save their skins.
Most of us find it easy to define the criteria for protecting or revealing official secrets. There is a real public interest in concealing some processes of government, especially diplomacy, for a period of time. There is, however, no public interest in protecting ministers and officials who have blundered from embarrassment.
How many people suppose the details of Jon Venables's reimprisonment are being concealed merely to serve justice? How many, instead, think the justice department's overriding concern is to shield those who released him in the first place?
No U.S. government would dare to exclude the media from the Afghan combat zone when the congressional mid-term elections loom. But our government casually imposes a ban - because it is accustomed to getting away with such abuses.
Britain in 2010 is a more open society than it was in, say, 1960, but that is not saying much. The culture of official secrecy, the belief in the Government's right not to tell us things, remains deep-rooted in every inch of Westminster and Whitehall soil. We must dig and hack at it at every turn, insisting that when ministers and officials deny us information, they are challenged.
If legal super-injunctions to protect celebrities from the exposure of their follies represent an abuse of justice, official secrecy again and again proves an abuse of democracy. Politicians will always lie. That is part of their trade, as the panel of the Iraq Inquiry can testify. But the rightful business of a democracy's media and citizens is to ensure that they cannot manipulate the machinery of government to get away with it.
SOURCE
An evil pro-abortionist ignored by the media
Who is Harlan Drake, you say? You may well have forgotten him since the national media uttered barely a peep about his transgressions. After all, while Scott Roeder murdered an abortion doctor, Drake merely murdered a pro-life protester. In the American psyche, the former is a national outrage; the latter offers little worth lamenting. The murder of an abortion doctor will get you expansive amounts of shrill media coverage, an immediate statement from the White House, and a swift Department of Justice promise to step up security and enforcement at abortion clinics around the country. Killing a pro-life protester will not even get you ignominy. It will merely get you, well, ...oblivion.
Not even Harlan Drake disputes that he murdered Jim Pouillon. The only point of debate at the trial is whether Drake was insane at the time. The only point of debate in this writer's mind is whether anyone notices or cares that he did it at all.
Harlan Drake was every bit as meticulous in his assassination of Pouillon in Owosso as Roeder was in his own killing of George Tiller in Wichita. Drake dropped off his nieces at school that morning. He then edged his pickup into the vicinity of pro-life protester, Jim Pouillon. Pouillon, 63, was standing in one of his regular protesting locations on the street corner in front of the high school. Harlan Drake rested his left arm on the car window to steady his right hand as he shot the elderly man. He then pulled the truck still closer to fire again. In all, Drake landed four bullets in the defenseless man's body. Jim Pouillon fell down, then forward, and died right there in the grass. Drake drove away and moved on to murder a former employer, Mike Fuoss, and to search for a third victim, whom he fortunately never located.
What does “Mama” have to do with it? A former Owosso city councilman, Michael Cline, has testified that Harlan Drake's mother, Kimberly Staples, had phoned several days in a row leading up to the murder and asked the councilman to “do something” about the town's 'problem' protester, Jim Pouillon. She told Cline she would “send her boys over to go see Jim.” After the shooting, Cline reported that Staples called him and said “I have solved the city’s problem.” In other words, the defense was very simple: Pouillon needed killing. Mama said so.
Jim Pouillon's tactics in protesting abortion were controversial to be sure. He carried signs with a picture of a healthy baby on one side and a photograph of a dismembered, aborted fetus on the other. He aimed to show passers-by the horrors of abortion. Pouillon's personal history was spotty with a series of family disputes and strained relationships. As a result, Jim Pouillon had few admirers in Owosso, Michigan.
In fact, the local paper, The Argus-Press, said in an editorial five days after the killings, "His sign, often accompanied by his shouting at passers-by, gave his cause, indeed his town of Owosso as well, a bad name." Nothing like blaming the victim for dressing too provocatively.
No evidence of such reputation editorializing emerges from Wichita after the murder of famed abortionist Dr. George Tiller. Evidently, in the public mind, vocally showing people pictures of aborted fetuses is one thing while being the one who actually, but very politely and quietly, does that dismembering is another thing altogether. The former is heinous and disgusting; the latter merely falls into the category of health care, or reproductive “rights.”
Again, Pouillon had few defenders for his pro-life protesting. Many residents found his protestations to be not only repugnant but evil. The trial is underway and should continue for two more weeks, but it will do so without the participation of Owossohites like Judy Jackson, 64, who told one reporter, "I don't agree with someone taking someone's life. But I don't miss the man on the corner or his foul mouth. He would chase you, call you names. He was evil. His pictures were so gross." In other words, to locals like Ms. Jackson, he had it coming. After all, Pouillon was “evil.” He performed the dastardly deed of displaying before human eyes the atrocities of abortion. Tiller? Well, at least he did his deeds in private.
In America, what offends is not so much what you do as it is how you do it. Suction babies out from their mothers' wombs, or stick scissors into their heads if you must, but please we just ask that you not show us the pictures. Actions are actions, but showing pictures is “evil.” Our eyes and our sensibilities are delicate. Our souls clearly are not.
Two men were murdered. One of them performed unspeakable acts of violence against the defenseless. The other showed us the pictures. America does not like pictures. And therein lies the difference between the cause celebre that is Scott Roeder and the quickly forgotten mama's boy, Harlan Drake
SOURCE
The feminist silence about Bill Clinton
By Carrie Sheffield
This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will headline soirees for today's (March 8, the original publication date) International Women's Day, a time set aside to honor brave women from around the world. Aside from the fact that the affair has Soviet roots and migrated to the United States via the Socialist Party of America, it's laudable to acknowledge women struggling for progress in all corners of the globe. Former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice celebrated the occasion as well.
As Mrs. Clinton distributes laurels to brave women from places such as Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka, she may reflect on perhaps the biggest barrier that obstructed her own career: her misogynist husband.
As reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin write in their newly released book, "Game Change," party leaders worried about Bill Clinton's ongoing sexual misconduct helping sink Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign.
According to Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann, party donors and senior leaders such as Sen. Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, saw the perennially aroused Mr. Clinton as a heavy albatross around his wife's neck, and so they looked elsewhere for their candidate. Their worries went far past Monicagate to a lifestyle Mr. Clinton embraced in Chappaqua and beyond.
Since leaving the presidency, Mr. Clinton has trotted the globe doing some valuable work through his Clinton Foundation, including attempts to empower impoverished women. But the sad irony is that he has an ongoing track record of abusing his powerful position to lure women into sexual submission, and his wife's career has suffered for it.
While I'm no big fan of Mrs. Clinton, anytime I see a woman held back because of her man's inability to keep his pants on, my inner feminist starts screaming. Yet there is profound silence from the largely Democratic, establishment feminist movement around Mr. Clinton's double-faced life and the extreme disrespect he shows for his wife.
Perhaps the Clintons have made some private, kinky truce under which each partner is allowed to boink whomever he or she likes. But if that's the case, why the facade of family solidarity and public wifey-boosting from Bill? Why not become like our European friends across the pond who adamantly and openly separate a public official's private life from his or her personal life? The answer is that here in the United States, we expect more from our leaders.
What bothers me most about Mr. Clinton's post-office career is that he doesn't acknowledge the damaging effect his brazen hanky-panky has on women who are trying to free themselves from chauvinistic societies plagued by Neanderthalic ideals of female subjugation. Reputation is a powerful thing. Why should men in the developing world respect their wives and quit abusing powerful positions to satisfy their bodily proclivities when a leader of the Free World continues to hamper women's progress?
It happens here, too. Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write that now-Sen. Claire McCaskill admitted that she kiboshed a run for governor of Missouri because she was worried that Mrs. Clinton might top the 2008 party ticket, testosterone-high hubbie in tow. "I had a lot of problems with some of his personal issues," Mrs. McCaskill told Tim Russert in 2006. "I said at the time, 'I think he's been a great leader, but I don't want my daughter near him.' "
Of course, Mrs. McCaskill seems to have rebounded; a Senate seat is hardly subjugation. However, she is the exception rather than the rule. Just ask would-be President Hillary Clinton, who saw her dream unraveled thanks to Mr. Clinton's imprudence. Why won't she just leave him? The answer, of course, is complicated.
Mrs. Clinton, whose policy positions I find less than appealing, is trapped in a marriage of convenience that is full of symbiotic benefits from Mr. Clinton. She likely couldn't have risen so high without him, and vice versa. But her fate is tied to his adolescent cravings, and she, like so many women around the world, has hit a glass ceiling held in place by a man's libido.
Today we'll see if Mrs. Clinton has the courage to break free from the machismo order and set an example for women around the world trapped in repressive societies. We'll see if Mr. Clinton renounces his juvenile traipsing and apologizes for turning back the clock on women's progress. That would be miraculous, indeed.
SOURCE
Australia: Rights bill is still a threat
By James Allan, Garrick professor of law at the University of Queensland
NEXT Wednesday, Frank Brennan is due to speak to the Labor Party caucus. Brennan chaired the Attorney-General's committee that came out in favour of a statutory bill of rights.
Brennan was described, when that committee was set up, as a fence-sitter, a disinterested person. Of course that label was nonsense. Before being appointed, Brennan had been on the record more than once as being in favour of Australia enacting a statutory bill of rights. In fact Attorney-General Robert McClelland didn't appoint a single known bill-of-rights opponent or sceptic.
Still, public opposition to this statutory bill of rights proposal, including among a big chunk of the Attorney-General's Labor Party colleagues, has been such that we learned a fortnight ago that cabinet was not treating a statutory bill of rights as a high priority. That's a polite way of saying nothing will happen before the next election.
Enter Brennan and the invitation offered to him by Labor Party proponents of a bill to speak to caucus. Presumably the hope is that Brennan will stiffen the spine of the government and get it to think again. Let's hope not. I'm a long-time opponent of these anti-democratic instruments and the Rudd government was brave to stand up to the chardonnay-sipping lawyers' wing of the party over this.
But what will Brennan say to caucus this Wednesday? Here's my bet. He will tell them that unless Australia enacts a statutory bill, our jurisprudence and judges' decisions will no longer be referred to by top judges in Canada, New Zealand, Britain and Europe. (Americans rarely refer to foreign precedents.)
He'll paint the spectre of isolation and urge caucus to think again. Here's why they should ignore Brennan.
To start, the claim about being isolated jurisprudentially on rights issues if you lack a bill of rights is largely false. When you buy a bill of rights, all you're really getting is the views of unelected judges rather than of elected legislators. But there's no reason judicial views should be more morally attuned or rights-respecting than those of elected legislators.
Take free speech. People in Australia have more freedom to say what they want than do Canadians. Look at hate speech or campaign finance rules or defamation regimes. Canada, which for 28 years has had one of the strongest bills of rights, has noticeably more restrictions on speech than we do here.
In fact, last year Canada's Supreme Court referred specifically to our High Court's views in changing their defamation law. The case was called Torstar. It hardly showed Australia being isolated on issues of free speech.
But if, for the sake of argument, the cost of not having such a bill of rights is that Australian top judges feel a tad isolated when next they jet off to international conferences, that's frankly a cost that is worth bearing. After all, we're talking about transferring power to unelected judges. We're talking about inroads into democratic decision-making.
That's true no matter how often proponents prevaricate and pretend that a statutory version won't make any difference, leaving us to wonder why they would expend so much effort.
The sensible wing of the Labor Party here looks as though it has killed off any explicit enacting of a statutory bill of rights. But the Brennan committee foreshadowed a back-up strategy that the lawyers' wing of the Labor Party just might try.
The ploy here will be to insert one of the key provisions of a statutory bill of rights, known as a reading-down provision, into another statute, probably the Acts Interpretation Act. This transplanted provision will do the same work of authorising judges to interpret all other statutes in a new-age way as it would in a real bill of rights. It will allow them to read other statutes in a way they, the judges, happen to think is more rights-respecting.
A similar provision in Britain has resulted in the judges saying they can ignore the clear meaning of other statutes and the clear intentions of parliament. Put one of these in some other statute and you get a bill of rights in all but name. Watch to see if this secondary ploy is being foisted on the sensible wing of Labor.
SOURCE
Germaine Greer rubbished
You may also have read this week that the playwright Louis Nowra has written an essay in The Monthly magazine, published yesterday, to mark the 40th anniversary of The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer's 1970 treatise. Nowra flays Greer and rubbishes her book.
She just didn't get women, Nowra reckons. Women, he says, still want romance and marriage and children and all the "fripperies" - frocks and make-up and cosmetic surgery - that Greer urged them to give up. (Many surely do.) They "love shopping more than ever". (My daughters certainly do.) Botox injections, says Nowra, have become "virtually a woman's rite of passage". (Mmmm? Maybe around Kings Cross, where he lives. He should get out more.)
Nowra says of Greer: "Her notion that women would use power differently from men was hopelessly idealistic." Perhaps, but so is this from Nowra: "One is immediately struck by how much the Western world has changed for women, who now run corporations and are heads of government bureaucracies, as well as being business leaders, film directors and soldiers. Few occupations are denied women … When Greer wrote her seminal book only 4 per cent of American wives earned more than their husbands; now this figure is verging on 20 per cent."
Wow! In Australia, we read this week, less than 2 per cent of ASX200 companies have a woman at the helm. One in 12 directors is a woman. Women earn 82.5 per cent of men's pay - worse than in 1985. Combat roles for female soldiers are severely restricted. Woman's Day, meanwhile, strikes a blow for the sisterhood by publishing a photo of a teenage Lara Bingle in the shower, taken in 2006 by her then lover, the footballer Brendan Fevola, and the mag reasons it was going to come out anyway. And Bingle was a "home-wrecker". Ding-dong, the witch is fair game. And happy International Women's Day for Monday.
All that said, Nowra's essay is a great read, a brutal but thoughtful and sometimes fair critique of The Female Eunuch and of Greer: the daughter embittered by her narcissistic mother's emotional abuse; the powerful polemicist who inspired women to leave their husbands but who wrote off gays as "faggots"; the fantasist who reckoned mothers could live in farmhouses in Italy where a revolving door of friends, relatives and local peasants would care for their children; the acid-tongued mauler of other prominent women; the woman who imagined herself as the wife of the Bard ("I'd f--- Shakespeare except that he especially asked that his bones not be disturbed"); the author of "dull and graceless" and "increasingly daft" prose; the attention seeker on Celebrity Big Brother; and, ultimately, the "irrelevant noise of a shock jock few people listen to any more".
Perhaps Nowra's cheapest shot is likening Greer, a "befuddled and exhausted old woman", to "my demented grandmother". If the dead could sue, his granny surely would.
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 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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8/3/2010 -
Swiss voters reject giving abused animals a lawyer
Swiss voters have soundly rejected a plan to appoint special lawyers for animals that are abused by humans, dealing a blow to advocates who say Switzerland's elaborate animal rights laws aren't being enforced. Official results showed that 70.5 per cent of voters cast their ballot against the proposal to extend nationwide a system that has been in place in Zurich since 1992. About 29.5 per cent of voters backed the proposal, with officials putting the turnout at just over 45 per cent.
"The Swiss people have clearly said our animal protection laws are so good we don't need animal lawyers," Jakob Buechler, a lawmaker for the centrist Christian People's Party, told Swiss television SF1. Switzerland tightened its animal protection laws two years ago and now has among the strictest rules anywhere when it comes to caring for pets and farm animals. Pigs, budgies, goldfish and other social animals cannot be kept alone. Horses and cows must have regular exercise outside their stalls, and dog owners have to take a training course to learn how to look after their pets properly.
Tiana Angelina Moser, a lawmaker for the Green Liberal Party, said animal rights advocates would now be looking for other ways to make sure laws against animal abuse were properly applied and those who hurt animals receive appropriate punishment.
The country's only animal lawyer, Antoine Goetschel, said that public prosecutors were often unsure about animal rights and shy away from pursuing cases even if there is clear evidence of abuse. Goetschel said he represents about 150 to 200 animals annually in Zurich, while in other cantons (states), only a handful of cases go to court each year.
Most of his clients are dogs, cows and cats, Goetschel told AP in a recent interview. But in one high-profile case last month, Goetschel represented a dead pike after an animal protection group accused the angler who caught it of cruelty for taking 10 minutes to haul the fish in. The angler was found not guilty.
Opponents of the latest proposal, including farmers' groups and the government, had argued that existing laws are sufficient and appointing lawyers for animals would incur unnecessary costs for taxpayers.
SOURCE
Photography under threat: The shooting party’s over in Britain
Did you hear the one about the mother banned from taking a snapshot of her baby in the pool? Or the student prevented from photographing Tower Bridge at sunset? Be warned. The authorities now have the power to confiscate your camera — or even arrest you — for daring to take a picture in public
In the eyes of many, the camera has become an offensive weapon, as Peter Dunwell discovered when he travelled from Grimsby to London in January. Coming down by train with a work colleague, Dunwell planned to make a photo-journal of their trip. At King’s Cross he took out his Sony Handycam and started to photograph the arrivals board and station. Two police community-support officers approached and told him to stop. Sure, PCSOs are agents of the state whose job it is to stand by while others drown (as happened in the case of a 10-year-old boy) but intervene in anything none too dangerous. And yes, King’s Cross is sensitive to the threat of terrorism because the London bombers arrived there before going their separate ways on the Tube to murder 52 people in 2005. But Dunwell, a middle-aged man of middle build with middling-brown hair, doesn’t look much of a terrorist. He looks more like the manager of a Jessops camera shop, which is what he is. Though his colleague has dyed blonde hair and pierced ears, there’s no law against that, yet.
In fact, the PCSOs did not suspect him at all of plotting to blow King’s Cross to smithereens. They told him to put his camera away simply “because people don’t want you taking their photographs”. Kamera verboten.
Nobody had complained or objected. Authority had taken its own decision that the British public did not wish to appear in Dunwell’s photograph, even if only in the background. Dunwell was shocked and embarrassed. “It made me feel like I was a paedophile,” he says. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong or illegal. It says something about our attitudes, our freedoms and restrictions on life that you can’t even take a photograph.”
In the most spied-on country in the world, with an estimated 4.2m CCTV cameras tracking our moves, people are now suspicious if Joe Nikon presses his shutter button. In one way Dunwell’s incident was so bittersweet it was almost comical. He had come to London to attend a demonstration in Trafalgar Square about precisely this: the rising tide of restrictions on public photography. That day hundreds of photographers gathered in the square — where you can now only take a commercial photograph if you pay for a special permit — to protest that they are not terrorists, paedophiles or paparazzi invaders of privacy. They’re just enthusiasts pursuing life through a single-lens reflex.
The protestors came in all shapes and sizes: tall, short, fish-eyed and wide-angled. Some were as tatty as their cameras, bandaged together with tape, others were in cashmere and corduroys with the latest kit. Among them was Jane Hobson, a photography student. Shortly before Christmas, Hobson was on a student exercise taking pictures in central London. Outside City Hall, security guards ordered her to stop. “They just said it wasn’t allowed, even though I was on a public highway. Another time I was stopped while taking pictures of Tower Bridge at twilight.”
Many photographers believe more is at stake than a few lost shots of iconic buildings. Eyeing up the fading light, they see darkness falling on personal freedoms and a whole strand of social history. “Look at the Victorians and Edwardians,” says Hobson. “Photographs tell us so much of what it was like then. We’re in danger of losing that.” And Simon Moran, a photographer who hosts the UK Photographers’ Rights Guide on his website, says: “Some of the greatest pieces of photographic art we have — reportage and street photography and cityscapes — wouldn’t be possible if people didn’t have the freedom to go around and take pictures without being stopped.”
One of the most beguiling properties of photographs is their ability to expand over time. When you capture an image, often spontaneously, it is a single moment framed in stillness. A child’s innocent smile, perhaps, a lover’s glance, a silhouette etherised against a sundown sky. Look again in 5, 10 or 50 years and that image will have grown far beyond a 7x5in print into a lost world all of its own: a life that might have been; a culture vanished; a childhood of happy, crazy days. Did we really wear those fashions? And look at that hair!
From animals daubed on cave walls to Martin Parr painting modern life with a camera, man has always recorded the world around him. It’s personal memory and public history, and, say photographers, it’s under threat.
If such claims seem alarmist, consider a famous image by Jimmy Sime from 1936. It shows a group of five boys standing by the road in Eton and brilliantly portrays the social divide of the time. Three are local boys in open-neck shirts and scruffy trousers or shorts, looking agog at the other two, who are Eton pupils immaculate in top hats, ties and waistcoats, walking canes in hand. The facial expressions still speak across the years. To capture such an image now, you would need the permission of all the boys, via their parents or the school. Without it, the pixel police step in, either in person or in the form of self-censorship. When a recent BBC programme filmed Eton pupils walking along the road outside the college, it blurred the faces of every one.
Photographing adults, even our most taxpayer-funded figureheads, is also becoming off limits. In December some of Her Majesty’s loyal peasants tried to snap the Queen and members of the royal family as they were going to church near Sandringham. A heinous crime obviously — so the police moved in and confiscated their cameras. Kate Middleton, a royal-in-waiting as Prince William’s on-off girlfriend, threatened legal action after being snapped at Christmas on a tennis court close to a public footpath. Her lawyers sought damages for invasion of privacy. At the time of writing the case was unresolved, but was expected to be settled in Middleton’s favour
Many photographers blame changes in the law for the antipathy that has developed towards them. One European court ruling, involving Princess Caroline of Monaco, judged that taking photographs of her was an invasion of her privacy even when she was in a public place. Yet other celebrities court such pictures. Some photographers complain they are now uncertain where the boundaries lie.
In photography journals and blogs, professionals and keen amateurs also take aim at the Terrorism Act of 2000. Section 44 of the act gave police more power to stop and search people in specified areas. That might sound reasonable — until you learn that large tracts of London, every big rail station in the UK and many other sites have been quietly designated specified areas. To make matters more confusing, details of which areas have been designated are often not disclosed in case it might help terrorists. It’s 1984 meets Catch-22. Previously the police had at least to cite reasonable grounds for suspicion in order to stop and search you; now they don’t. If you’re wearing a loud shirt, walking on the pavement cracks, or carrying a camera, you’re fair game.
The law also allows officers to view images in your phone or camera. Officers are not allowed to delete them — but they can seize and retain any item that an officer “reasonably suspects is intended for use in connection with terrorism”.
At the same time terrorism shares a powerful characteristic with paedophilia: they both fuel a climate of fear that spreads far beyond their immediate or likely victims. In the aftermath of the child murders of Sarah Payne in 2000 and Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham in 2002, local officials went to Defcon 2 on paedo-alert throughout the country. Pre-emptive bans and jobsworth enforcement have become the norm, as Kevin Yuill, a university lecturer, discovered when he picked up his daughter from a ballet class at a Durham leisure centre.
“She was 10, and for her to apply for the Royal Ballet School she had to have some pictures of certain poses,” recalled Yuill. “I’d arranged with her ballet teacher, a middle-aged woman, to help me with the poses while I took pictures. I was stopped by the manager of the centre and told I needed permission to take pictures. I said, ‘From who? Who exactly do I need permission from? I’m her father.’ She said I’d need to get central permission, from the council, to take pictures in a leisure centre of my own child.” Despite his protestations, the manager insisted Yuill took no photos. “It’s outrageous,” he says. “I’m not allowed to take pictures of my own child. And her ballet teacher, a 60-year-old woman, was there. She was outraged too. It’s not about protecting children, it’s about something else. I dislike the idea of government being the only people allowed to take pictures, which is what this appears to be.”
Age, gender and location make little difference. In Fareham, Hampshire, an older couple were stopped from taking pictures of their grandchildren in a shopping centre because photography was banned. They were ordered to leave. In a park in Oldham, a young couple were stopped from taking pictures of their 11-month-old baby when a warden told them it was “illegal”. In recent months a man was questioned by police for taking pictures of the Christmas lights in Brighton; and in Kent a man was arrested after he took pictures of Mick’s Plaice, a fish-and-chip shop. Haddock fundamentalism has yet to emerge as a major threat, but you never know.
The legal position remains badly focused. Case law on privacy is developing. Certain laws relating to private property can encompass photography — you might be pursued for trespass if you took a photograph on private property without permission. And taking photographs against a subject’s will could be held to be harassment.
The lack of any specific law banning photography in public places is little comfort. The uncertainty itself is insidious, says Hadaway. “There is this huge space for people to impose rules. The government and the police say that no, there’s no law that prevents you from taking photographs. But petty authority pushes for greater control.”
More HERE
Is atheism promoting intolerance?
Comment from Australia
It wasn’t so long ago that most atheists kept their non-belief of a God or other deities largely to themselves. They lived in a world where most people believed - and continue to believe – there is a God or some other spiritual being that is at the controls of everything around us - even if some people can’t put their finger on who or what this Force is.
But now a new strand of atheist is emerging. Independent thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are prepared to speak out publicly and condemn established religious beliefs, accusing the "God followers" of having a dangerous influence on society.
Is this new atheism at risk of causing a new battlefront of conflict and division in society? Monash University Professor and Anglican priest Dr Gary Bouma seems to think so. He told the Studies of Religion in Focus conference in Sydney today that atheists or people without a specific faith are fuelling sectarian conflict and creating problems for interfaith tolerance in Australia.
According to ABC News, he aimed his criticism at groups that vilify or deny the right to build mosques and those who say that religious voices should be driven out of the public policy area or that religion shouldn’t be in schools, etc.
The battlelines between atheism and religion appear already to have been drawn in New Zealand at least. Last month, atheists who wanted to run an advertising campaign on buses across the Tasman proclaiming "There is probably no god, now stop worrying and enjoy your life" were blocked from doing so by one major company.
While Christianity remains the most dominant religious faith in Australia, there are also signs that this country is becoming a more diverse society. At the same time, the 2006 Census identified 18.7 per cent of Australians claiming they had "No Religion", a percentage that has been steadily increasing.
As many of the newly-arrived and long-established faiths seek to co-operate in creating a more tolerant nation, the strand of atheism that expresses hostility towards all religious belief and seeks to convert the world to one of non-belief threatens to destabilise that process.
Contrary to what some atheists believe, the world would not be a better place without religion.
SOURCE
There never has been a Palestinian state
Richard Cohen’s excellent article in the Washington Post on Wednesday March 2nd, offers several compelling reasons why Israel doesn’t deserve to be compared to South Africa under Apartheid, but I believe that it will be hard for many on the left who think of the State of Israel in that manner to ever understand this, unless they know the truth, that Israel isn’t and never has occupied any Palestinian Arab owned land.
In her excellent article “Palestine – The Big Lie”, Sharon Nader Sloan lays out the true history of Israel, going all the way back to ancient Israel, all of which clearly proves that:
1: There’s never existed a “Palestinian State”
2: Jerusalem was never the capital of any nation other than Israel.
In fact there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian. They’re just Arabs, like all the rest. They hate Jews because their religion tells them to, and because in a matter of a few short years after modern day Israel was created, the Jews took that barren and desolate land and turned it into a bountiful and beautiful Garden of Eden growing oranges the size of basketballs. Of course by doing this, right under the Arabs’ noses, and for all the world to see, they showed the Arabs up for what they are, a culture of backwards, bigoted and racist barbarians, whose only contribution to human civilization was the invention of Algebra.
Then, to add further insult to injury, when shortly after her founding, all of Israel’s close neighbors got together and attacked her, all of those brave and manly warriors were made to look like “girly-men” by the Israeli military, and it’s easy to imagine how that made them feel.
As Ms. Sloan points out, Palestine is a region, not a nation, in the same way that the Sahara is a region. Most of the Arabs who owned land there SOLD it to the Israelis. The Israelis paid what to them were enormous sums for their land, and they were happy to take it. Not one square inch was stolen from anyone.
And if the need for a “Palestinian State” were so great, why didn’t we hear anyone demanding a “Palestinian State” during the 19 years that Jordan occupied Jerusalem and the entire West Bank? Why did they ever reject the UN compromise of splitting the land controlled by the British up into a Jewish state and what would have been a Palestinian State” in the first place? Instead they decided to go to war to destroy Israel, after which that land legally became Israel’s by right of conquest!
So why should there be a Palestinian State”? The Arabs are free to live there, there are even Arab members of the Knesset. Are they saying that they’re entitled to their own state because they live there? If so, how would we feel if the huge number of Hispanics in California demanded their own state as well? And while we’re at it, how would the non-Hispanic Californians feel about the Hispanics, if they were constantly throwing rocks at them, and harassing them 24/7?
The idea that the Jews in Israel are occupying Arab lands is taken for granted by almost everyone, and like Global Warming, it’s just another BIG LIE!
SOURCE (See the original for links)
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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 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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7/3/2010 -
British Mother branded as abuser for telling daughter of caesarean
Britain's vengeful Leftist bureaucrats again. British officialdom rivals crime as a threat to ordinary decent people
SOCIAL WORKERS have placed the five-year-old daughter of a professional couple on the child protection register for “emotional abuse” after the mother told the girl she was delivered by caesarean. Other allegations against the mother include cuddling her daughter for too long when dropping her off at nursery.
The intervention by Birmingham social services prompted the mother, Shahnaz Malik, to go into hiding with her daughter, Amaani, for two months, fearing the girl would be taken away.
An alert was put out to all British ports, and police conducted raids on a string of properties in the West Midlands. Two weeks ago police battered down the door of the family’s home in an apartment block in an attempt to find Amaani. She had been moved elsewhere by her mother, but her father, Vijay Bansal, 42, an IT consultant, was later arrested and held in a cell overnight for “obstructing” the search.
Officers also seized Malik’s car, took toothbrushes from the bathroom to analyse for DNA and raided the homes of relatives in the middle of the night, looking for the mother and girl. “This whole case is madness as there is no reason for the state to be involved in this little girl’s life in this way,” said John Hemming, a Birmingham MP who campaigns against abuses by the family courts. “The problem is that the system is using massive aggression to deal with the mother’s refusal to respond to a set of frankly silly concerns.”
The council’s actions follow criticism of it by a judge for showing gross lack of judgment in failing to stop seven-year-old Khyra Ishaq starving to death. Care workers did not think she warranted being placed on the at-risk register.
The problems started after Amaani began to attend a private nursery last September. Within weeks, friction developed between Malik and staff, who said the girl bit her nails and had been overheard swearing at a teacher. Malik, who has a masters degree in social policy, said last week: “We never swear at home, so she must have picked up the words at nursery. She told me she did swear at the nursery teacher because she was grabbed very hard by her.”
When Malik withdrew Amaani from the nursery, she was told by a health visitor that their case was being referred to social services. “I went to a solicitor, who said the grabbing of Amaani’s arm was an assault, so I decided to make a complaint to the police,” Malik said. However, she felt the police were uninterested in her complaint and wanted to speak to Amaani alone — which Malik refused to allow.
A few days later her husband was called in by officers. “The police asked me if my wife has mental health problems. I said, ‘Absolutely not’,” Bansal said. “They said, ‘There are allegations coming from the nursery’. They said, ‘Someone overheard your wife saying to your daughter she had her stomach cut open to deliver Amaani’.”
Bansal said the police also told him that his wife cuddled Amaani for 10-15 minutes when dropping her off at the nursery. “I said, ‘No mother wants to leave her child screaming’. “Then they said that when my wife and daughter had been in the police station, Amaani had turned to the officers and said, ‘Hello, pigs.’ But at that point Amaani liked watching Peppa Pig. She calls me ‘Daddy Pig’ and she calls her mother ‘Mummy Pig’.”
Social workers told the family they wanted to hold a child protection conference. Malik said: “We decided not to attend or engage with them since we could see they had made their minds up already.”
In January, Birmingham council notified the family that Amaani was subject to a child protection plan for “emotional abuse”. Although she would be allowed to live at home, social workers would make unannounced visits.
Malik said: “I had only told Amaani about how she was born because I believe in telling the truth and she had thought her daddy gave birth to her. I don’t see how that is evidence of emotional abuse.” She added: “I was getting worried that they would come and take Amaani so I moved out with her and stayed with friends.”
Her husband remained at home but was taken to hospital with a heart condition two weeks ago. The next morning he received a message from the concierge at their block of flats saying the police had entered their two-bedroom apartment. “I had to basically discharge myself from the hospital to come and sort it out,” he said. A few days later he was arrested and placed in a cell while officers looked for Amaani. The girl was finally presented to the authorities last Thursday. She was allowed to return home.
Birmingham council has declined to comment, citing confidentiality.
SOURCE
Don’t mock my lentils: vegans to get discrimination rights in Britain
VEGANS and teetotallers are to be given the same protection against discrimination as religious groups, under legislation championed by Harriet Harman, the equalities minister. Members of cults and “new religions” such as Scientology, whose supporters include the film stars Tom Cruise and John Travolta, would also be offered protection, as would atheists.
A code of practice explaining the legal implications of the equality bill states that religions need not be mainstream or well known for their adherents to gain protection. “A belief need not include faith or worship of a god or gods, but must affect how a person lives their life or perceives the world.”
The code, drawn up by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, singles out vegans, who do not eat any animal products or wear leather, as meriting protection from religious discrimination. It says: “A person who is a vegan chooses not to use or consume animal products of any kind. That person eschews the exploitation of animals for food, clothing, accessories or any other purpose and does so out of an ethical commitment to animal welfare.”
A spokesman from the commission explained: “This is about someone for whom being vegan or vegetarian is central to who they are. This is not something ‘thought up by the commission’. Parliament makes the law, the courts interpret it and the commission offers factual and proportionate guidance to organisations where necessary. We are providing guidance on the implications of the equality bill.”
The legislation also covers “any religious belief or philosophical belief” and even “a lack of belief”. Philosophical beliefs to be protected could include humanism and pacifism, but a spokesman for Harman said scientific or political beliefs such as Marxism and fascism would not be covered. The commission added that the recently founded International Church of Jediism, with 500,000 followers worldwide who base their philosophy on the Star Wars films, would not qualify. Beliefs had to be heartfelt.
The watchdog also warns that advertisements giving preferential treatment to men or women could be illegal. This could mean the end of “ladies’ nights” at clubs, when women receive cut-price drinks or free entrance but men pay full price.
People for whom abstention from alcohol was a way of life would also be protected. Conversely, the bill would make it unlawful for a shopkeeper to refuse to sell cigarettes to a woman because she was pregnant.
SOURCE
The Guaranteed Failure of Catering to Muslim Perception So long as widespread suspicion exists, and it does exist, amongst the Arab population, that the economic depression … is largely due to excessive Jewish immigration, and so long as some grounds exist upon which this suspicion may be plausibly represented to be well founded, there can be little hope of any improvement in the mutual relations of the two races — 1930 statement by the British government What does this statement, following an inquiry into the 1929 Muslim attacks upon Jews in Mandatory Palestine, have to do with a recent disinvitation to speak at Britain’s Cambridge University for Israeli historian Benny Morris?
The statement marks the emergence of the Western phenomenon of making decisions on the basis of what Arabs and Muslims perceive, or are said to perceive, at the expense of the facts or the merits of the case. Note the reasons offered by Jake Witzenfeld, president of Cambridge University’s Israel Society, for disinviting Morris: I decided to cancel for fear of the Israel Society being portrayed as a mouthpiece of Islamophobia. … We understand that whilst Professor Benny Morris’ contribution to history is highly respectable and significant, his personal views are, regrettably, deeply offensive to many. Morris, once the darling of anti-Israel radicals, is in recent years execrated by them for emphasizing Arab rejection of Jewish statehood as the origin of enduring conflict. Mr.Witzenfeld is clearly overawed by this. Note, in Mr. Witzenfeld’s words, the 1929 leitmotiv: the facts aren’t important — how they could be perceived or portrayed is. This intellectually and morally bankrupt approach can be seen among those who urge an alteration of U.S. policy. Three examples from recent years:
January 2008: Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, urged America to engage Iran over its nuclear weapons program because “most Arabs don’t see Iran as a major threat.”
March 2006: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their neo-Nazi- and Islamist-approved antagonistic paper on Israel and its American supporters, say that Palestinians resorting to suicide bombing “is not surprising … because the Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions.”
April 2004: Egyptian president Husni Mubarak reportedly argued that “many Arabs perceive a sense of ‘injustice’ in the way the United States has offered strong backing for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.”
Were these sorts of representations to be heeded, what would occur? We needn’t guess — Western governments have been listening for years to this sort of talk, with the following results:
Iran has replied contemptuously to Western diplomatic coaxing by turning up the uranium enrichment lever. Sunni Arab powers, far from yawning in their imagined security, are likely to engage in a nuclear arms race with Shia Iran.
Through much of the Oslo process (1993-2000), Israel was deeply attentive to the notion that Palestinian terrorists blow up Israelis because they are frustrated peace-seekers rather than jihadists — a theory still popular among policy analysts who call themselves “realists.” Yet unilateral concessions embolden rather than pacify jihadists — witness the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which produced a dramatic increase in rocket assaults upon southern Israel and turned Gaza into a Hamas emirate clattering with imported arms.
In the past year, the Obama administration made ameliorating Palestinian perceptions of injustice a priority, strong-arming Israel to impose a ban on Jews moving to the West Bank and even parts of Jerusalem. Only the policy hasn’t helped the administration’s plan to reconvene peace talks. Far from it: the U.S. having raised the demand, Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority duly adopted it as a precondition and has refused to negotiate until Israel accedes to it.
The track record of policies designed to appease Arab and Muslim perceptions is provably poor, inasmuch as the irrationality, suspicion, and hatred that they seek to validate are impervious to facts.
Polls show, for example, that neither Egyptians nor Palestinians like America more despite being recipients of ever-rising levels of American largesse. Saudis have scant affection for the U.S. after decades of Washington’s fawning deference. Nor has Muslim opinion been perceptibly altered by the most striking examples of American aid and succor given to Muslims: in Bosnia in 1999, or in Indonesia after the 2005 southeast Asian tsunami.
Even Barack Obama is the partial exception that proves the rule: his popularity among Muslims after a year of strenuous outreach is limited relative to the rest of the world. His approach has not translated into Iranian mellowing or Arab gestures to Israel, two objectives he publicly sought to achieve in return for emollient diplomacy towards Muslims coupled with pressure towards Israelis.
More to the point, such popularity as Obama enjoys in the Muslim world is likely to be deeply conditional. With Obama unable to deliver an Israeli-Palestinian agreement that does not lie in his gift, or to pull out of Afghanistan, or to ignore what occurs in neighboring Pakistan, Arab and Muslim perceptions of Obama can be expected to erode over time. At present, he reportedly has the confidence of just 13% of Pakistanis — hardly a significant improvement over his predecessor’s 9%.
Lying behind the recurrent urge to adopt policies conditioned on what Arabs and Muslims perceive are many things, both general (fear of Muslim groups with a proven track record of violence; political correctness) and particular (rationalizing anti-American or anti-Jewish hatreds). But fear and rationalizing hostility offer no outlet: as in Palestine in 1930, it is a low level of statesmanship that caters to these, one that dooms its practitioners.
SOURCE
What a great steaming nit Malcolm Fraser is!
And that's being much more polite than I really feel inclined to be. For those who are not big on history, Fraser is a former Australian Prime Minister in the conservative cause, whose most notable post Prime-Ministerial activities have principally consisted of losing his trousers one night in Memphis Tennessee and sucking up to African dictators. He is much reviled among Australian conservatives for having done nothing for the conservative cause while he was in office.
His latest profundity is about the assassination of a HAMAS chief in Dubai: "Mr Fraser said the Jewish state could no longer use the Holocaust as an excuse to justify state-sanctioned murder, and criticism of its policies should not be dismissed as anti-Semitism." It has apparently escaped the notice of "Trousers" Fraser that Israel has not even acknowledged responsibility for the assassination and so has not blamed it on ANYTHING, let alone the holocaust. And the accusation that Israelis (who are of course predominantly Jews) have committed "state-sanctioned murder" is interesting. He fails to recognize that HAMAS is by its own assertions at war with Israel and that the assassination might reasonably be regarded as legitimate self-defence in that case. Fraser's one-sided slur on Israel DOES then sound like precisely that antisemitism which he denies.
But the man is a proven liar anyway so the only sadness is that his bigoted and probably senile comments were reported at all.
There is an amusing comment here which argues that Fraser's comments are probably in breach of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act of the State in which he resides (Victoria).
Australia: McDonald's rejects push to have more halal-serving outlets
McDONALD'S has rejected a push to have more halal-serving outlets despite pressure on the fast-food giant. A Victorian burger fan, Amin Assafiri, launched the Facebook campaign in frustration at having to drive from driving 8km north to the closest halal McDonald.
Mr Assafiri lives to the north of Melbourne, in Fawkner, with the nearest Hala McDonald's in Roxburgh Park. His "Make Fawkner McDonald's halal!" Facebook page has attracted 341 members -- not enough to sway the burger chain's management.
"We can only accommodate the market so much," McDonald's spokeswoman Kristy Chong said. "It is a considerable cost to go halal. "There are already three halal McDonald's in Melbourne."
Mr Assafiri said at least 1000 Muslims living in Fawkner made special trips to Victoria's halal McDonald's in Roxburgh Park and Brunswick East. The third Victorian halal McDonald's will open in a renovated Preston McDonald's in June.
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 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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6/3/2010 -
Geert Wilders on course to be next Dutch prime minister
The anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders is poised to become the next Dutch prime minister after making major gains in regional elections
Municipal results announced on Thursday put his party in first place in Almere, a region near Amsterdam and second in The Hague, one the country's largest cities and the seat of the Dutch government. If repeated in national elections on June 9, the Freedom Party could win 27 out of 150 seats, becoming the largest single party and putting him in line to become prime minister and form a new government.
Mr Wilders has called Islam a backward religion, wants a ban on headscarves in public life and has compared the Koran to Hitler's Mein Kampf. "We are going to conquer the entire country we are going to be the biggest party in the country," he said after the vote. "The leftist elite still believes in multiculturalism, coddling criminals, a European superstate and high taxes. But the rest of the Netherlands thinks differently. That silent majority now has a voice."
The Freedom Party currently has nine of the 150 seats in the Dutch parliament, and five of the country's 25 European parliament seats. But some polls suggest it is now the most popular party in Holland, traditionally seen as a bastion of tolerance.
The Dutch political mainstream yesterday made clear its outrage at the election results. NRC Handelsblad, the Dutch newspaper of record, observing: "The Dutch political system, based on consensus and co-operation, is coming apart at the seams."
Muslims in Almere, where one third of the 190,000 population is of immigrant origin, reacted with shock and anger to his party's success, fearing his victory would fan animosity. "It is terrible," said computer sciences student Kadriye Kacar, 35, who was born in Holland but is of Turkish descent. "People are looking at us in a new way today as if they are thinking – 'We won and you are leaving'. "I don't wear a headscarf normally but I have decided to start doing so now out of protest. Other people in my community are planning to do the same. We will protest until Wilders is gone."
Mr Wilders popularity has grown since he was banned from entering Britain last year. He was arrested and deported after being declared a threat to public safety. The bar has now been lifted and he is due in London on Friday to show his anti-Muslim film, Fitna, in the House of Lords, at the invitation of invitation of Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the Ukip leader and Baroness Cox, a cross bench peer. "I do not agree with Geert Wilders that the Koran should be banned – even in Holland where Mein Kampf is banned. I don't want it banned but discussed and specifically as to whether it may promote or justify – or has promoted or justified – violence. I am therefore promoting freedom of speech," said Lord Pearson.
Mr Wilders is facing prosecution in Holland for "inciting hatred" with the controversial film which depicts the Koran burning and focuses on the links between Islam and terrorism.
SOURCE
A Year of Anti-Religious Bigotry
It's quite striking to see the degree to which traditional Islam has come under ferocious attack from the anti-religious impulse in Hollywood and New York and other bohemian centers in America. It is clearly anti-Islamic religious bigotry. Take a look at just some examples over the past year alone.
January: The Source Weekly, a weekly arts publication in Bend, Ore., featured on its cover an image of Mohammad holding a child with President Obama's head crudely posted on its body. Muslim protests were greeted with this dismissive response: "What is printed is printed, and we will not apologize."
Feb. 12: The NBC sitcom "30 Rock" poked fun at Muslims when Alec Baldwin's character attempted to ingratiate himself with his beautiful Muslim girlfriend by fraudulently going through the motions at her mosque.
Feb. 16: The Fox drama series "House" concentrated a plot on an imam who had privately lost his faith in Islam, while publicly being suspected of having AIDS. In other words, he was a religious hypocrite, a heavy drinker who was accused of being a pedophile and who declared he "hate(d) his job." Ultimately, the doctors would find he was free of AIDS and he would rediscover his faith, but not until after all the negative stereotypes had gleefully marched through the episode.
April 4: On The Washington Post blog site "On Faith," atheist Susan Jacoby insisted Muslim leaders should burn in hell for adhering to their Islamic views on abortion: "Religious 'authorities' ought to burn in hell, if there were a hell, for hypocritical apologies composed of words rather than deeds. There could surely be no better place for leaders who believe in forcing a nine-year-old to bear the children of her rapist."
April 13: In the weekly gay Hotspots magazine, an ad appeared promoting a gay club in West Palm Beach, Fla. The ad was clearly, unequivocally designed to insult Muslims. The ad depicted a DJ dressed as Mohammad ascending to Heaven -- with an erection under his robe. Beneath him were several followers making crude comments about his anatomy on the order of "I've seen bigger."
Oct. 18: The annual Halloween special on "The Simpsons" inflamed the Islamic community with a zombie plot. When most of Springfield turned into zombies after eating tainted red meat, Bart Simpson spit out tainted hamburger before he could be transformed, and was hailed as "Mohammad the Prophet."
Oct. 23: The film "Eulogy for a Vampire" opened in New York. The New York Times described the movie's mix of religious imagery, whippings and animal blood surrounding a plot of an all-male Sufi Muslim order "whose members seem to spend no time in spiritual reflection but quite a lot of time groping one another."
Oct. 25: On HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," actor and show creator Larry David used a bathroom in a Muslim home to upset his friends by not only urinating while standing, which Muslims find religiously impure, but also urinating all over the walls, including a picture of Mohammad. David compounded the offense by talking incessantly while using the bathroom, which is also offensive. David seemed to take glee in offending Islamic audiences.
Nov. 12: While discussing Islam on the primetime "Jay Leno Show," Leno ridiculed Muslims for their faith. He said, "Apparently, they ran out of places to send suicide bombers, so they are looking to outer space."
Dec. 7: In a profanity-laced bit on his HBO special "Weapons of Self Destruction," Robin Williams referred to Mohammad as a "Nazi."
On and on it goes, and by now, perhaps you've already surmised: None of the foregoing was true. Hollywood would never dare ridicule Islam this way. The same holds true for every other appendage of the cultural left. In each case, scratch the Muslim reference and replace it (with a few modifications) with the Catholic Church, with its priests and monks, with Pope Benedict XVI, and with Jesus and Mary. All of these incidents were cited in the Catholic League's "2009 Report on Anti-Catholicism," but they only scratch the surface. There are 68 grisly pages of examples.
Catholicism is the single largest religious denomination in America. In our news and entertainment media today, anti-Catholicism remains "the last acceptable prejudice." It is not that the cultural left is out of touch. It is out to destroy.
SOURCE
A Spy Scandal About Nothing
The complaints leveled against Israel by European countries and Australia, regarding the alleged misuse of passports by the Mossad in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, ring hollow and smack of blatant hypocrisy. Whoever did kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh—whether it was the Israeli Mossad or someone else—clearly did have their agents use stolen or forged passports. Big deal.
Every good intelligence agency uses stolen and forged passports. The British have been especially adept at this means of spycraft. No country that uses fake passports in their intelligence operations has the moral authority to complain about the alleged misuse of passports in this case. The only ones that have a legitimate grievance are those individuals whose passports may have been misused without their knowledge.
I guess it’s the job of foreign ministries to complain publicly when other nations do what they themselves do secretly. Hypocrisy is, after all, the homage that vice pays to virtue. I’m reminded of the famous scene in Casablanca, when officer Renault declares, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” A croupier then approaches Renault, and hands him a roll of currency: “Your winnings, sir.”
The hypocrisy in this case seems even more blatant than usual. Is it because Israel is the alleged offender, and the world has gotten accustomed to singling out Israel for double standard condemnation?
Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Bali, which killed a large number of Australian tourists, I had the opportunity to meet with the Australian Prime Minister. I was writing a book at the time on preemption, and I asked him whether he would have authorized a preemptive attack on the terrorist who killed Australian citizens, if such an attack would have saved their lives. His response was that Australia would have done anything it could, to prevent these terrorist attacks. Anything, I guess, except misusing passports! Is there anybody who believes that Australia would not have used forged or stolen passports to prevent the Bali massacres? If Great Britain could have stopped the London subway attack by misusing passports, would M6 have allowed the terrorism to go forward in the name of preserving passport integrity? Of course not. The same is true of Spain with regard to the Madrid bombing and to every other country in the world that seeks to prevent terrorism. Well, if the Mossad did in fact kill al-Mabhouh, they too did it to prevent the killing of their innocent civilians.
The Israelis are always accused by their enemies, and sometimes even by their friends, of taking “disproportionate” action to stop terrorists. But what could be more proportionate than a carefully planned and specifically targeted attack on an admitted terrorist who boasted of being an active combatant? Whoops! I guess I forgot about those darn passports. That must be the disproportionate action complained about. Saving innocent lives, on the one hand—misusing passports on the other. I guess the right moral resolution, according to some foreign ministries, is to let innocent victims die—at least as long as its only Israeli victims.
It’s interesting, and disturbing, that more criticism is being directed against Israel for allegedly using stolen passports than for allegedly killing a terrorist. That’s because no western country wants to appear to be sympathetic to a terrorist. The “victims” of passport fraud are innocent civilians, but the injury they have suffered pales in comparison to the injuries—deaths—prevented by the well-deserved death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
If the deaths of a small number of innocent civilians is deemed “proportional” to the killing of a terrorist combatant, than surely the discomfort of a small number of innocent victims of passport fraud is proportional.
The high dudgeon expressed by foreign ministries over stolen passports is worse than hypocritical. It undercuts the war against terrorism.
There ought to be concern, among western democracies, about how easy it is to use forged or stolen passports. Dubai should be conducting an investigation, but the focus should be on how simple it was for those carrying these phony passports to get into their country. The misuse of passports is, after all, a primary tool used by terrorists to smuggle themselves into western countries, from which they can engage in worldwide terrorism. There are thousands of forged and fraudulent British passports circulating around the world today. Many are in the hands of terrorists. That should be the focus of any investigation, not the occasional and controlled misuse of passports by western intelligence agencies to combat terrorism.
Whoever snuck into Dubai using fake passports may have done that country a service in warning them to tighten up their passport procedures. Next time it may be a terrorist who tries to enter the country. Wait! Isn’t that exactly what happened when al-Mabhouh walked through security using a real passport with his real name? I guess in Dubai you don’t have to use a fake passport if you’re a terrorist, but you do if you’re trying to stop terrorists —at least if the terrorism is directed only against Israel. I guess Dubai is less concerned about letting terrorists into their country with real passports than in letting those who would stop terrorism into their country with fake passports. It’s a topsy-turvy world out there.
SOURCE
Sorry, but some have to suffer for their art
By Barry Cohen, who was arts minister in Australia's Hawke Labor Party government
DAVID Throsby, economics professor at Macquarie University, has brought down his latest report entitled, "Don't Give Up Your Day Job", pointing out that the lot of artists is not a very happy one, financially speaking. The report states that "census figures show artists' income fell from the median level of $30,000 in 2001 to about $26,000 in 2006 while salaries for most professional groups rose." It adds: "It has been a decade since the Australia Council released the report on the financial status of artists and found that a third lived below the poverty line. "Half earned less than $7300 for their art and only 12 per cent were working full-time."
Well there's a surprise! Most artists can't make a living out of their chosen art. Who would believe it? My mind returned to my early days as federal arts minister when I appeared on a public platform with the federal secretary of Actors Equity. He concluded his address fulminating that "of the 4000 members of my union only 400 are working". The players collective loved it but then didn't hear his sotto voce comments as he sat down. "And that's all that deserve to be working."
Periodically, we hear the nonsense parrotted by the arts community claiming that artists of Australia are treated much the same as chimney-sweeps were in Dickens' day. Comparisons are often made with salaries earned by the average worker up to and including the head honchos of our top companies. Those who struggle along on $8 million a year.
Throsby and the Australia Council are absolutely right about the low earnings for the great majority of artists but it has always been thus and will remain so. And the reason? Most occupations, be they clerks, sales assistants, miners, shearers, boilermakers, doctors, dentists or school teachers, have a limited number of positions available which, once filled, guarantees that those seeking employment in that area will look further afield. It's called the free market and it works. There aren't thousands of aspiring boilermakers lining up for jobs that don't exist. They find work that puts a roof over their heads, food on the table and financial security.
Artists, and I use the word loosely, are an entirely different kettle of fish. We must remember that there are millions of them in Australia out of a population of 22 million. Precisely how many I have no idea, but picture for a moment all those you know who fancy themselves as artists: painters, sculptors, singers, musicians, dancers, actors, composers and the millions of handicraft artists that indulge in embroidery, tatting, quilting and the like.
My First Lady, the beauteous Rae, is a dab hand at any craft she puts her mind to. Her days are full making magnificent quilts. Recently, together with a local quilting group she delivered 73 quilts to fire victims in Victoria. Does she earn anything from her art? Not a cent. Does she expect to? No and nor do her fellow quilters. They do it because they love doing it. It is an art but it is also their hobby.
I've been a little luckier over the past 20 years as a columnist with eight books, seven of which made the best-seller list. It's been a nice little earner, but thank God it wasn't my only source of income. Like Rae, I write because I love writing. Would I continue if there was no longer a market? Almost certainly, because of the pleasure it brings and not because of the financial reward.
A few artists are extremely well paid, earning in the millions, while a substantial number make a good living. However, in the arts, unlike most other trades and professions, there are 10 times more practitioners than there are opportunities for fame and fortune.
And who decides who is an artist? More importantly, who decides who is a good artist? In an occupation where there is no shortage of egos it's easy to declare oneself to be an artist and expect the world, or the government, to provide you with a living. It's nonsense and the sooner the arts community stops whining about how their talents are not being rewarded the better. The arts community should be honest with aspiring artists and warn them that their worth will be determined by the market, by who buys their records, books, paintings or pays to see them perform.
Some expect governments to provide. And they do. The federal government picks up the tab for a vast number of artistic activities. Indeed the spending on everything from the National Gallery through to the Film and Television School comes to $696 million. And then there's the ABC, SBS and extensive state and local government programs. Governments are continually expanding their arts programs, creating opportunities for artists while stimulating tourism and ensuring the arts are more widely enjoyed.
We are indebted to David Throsby for his latest report on the plight of our artists. It's the 11th in a similar vein over the past 30 years. What is needed is some solutions. Let's hope we don't go the way as some European countries where those who are declared to be artists are guaranteed a salary for life. Denmark is one such country and so is Holland. Such a system guarantees there are any number of artists beavering away filling up warehouses with paintings no one will ever see.
There is a vital role for governments to play in developing talented artists, but please spare us from the nonsense that everyone who declares themselves an artist should be guaranteed an income.
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 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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5/3/2010 -
"The Guardian" says that Rupert Murdoch is the reason why Conservatives don't like the BBC
The fact that the BBC is for the most part a Leftist propaganda outfit is not mentioned. Conservatives don't need Rupert to make them hostile to the Beeb. The Beeb is its own worst enemy. If it had stuck to its charter it would be beyond criticism
Like a man who fears he's about to get knifed in the heart, so plunges the blade into his own leg instead, the BBC has decided. its best strategy for self-preservation is to suffer a little pain now to avoid a lot of pain later. The strategy review unveiled this week offered up a couple of radio networks and half its web pages by way of a sacrifice.
The latter sounds like a smart decision. The core business of the BBC is broadcasting - it's there in the name - and if it has to choose between radio, television and an uncountable number of web pages, then radio and TV should always come first. The review should have held firm on the principle that underpins the universal licence: that everybody in Britain should get something from the BBC.
So why has BBC director-general Mark Thompson proposed closing the Asian Network, the teen cross-media brands BBC Switch and Blast!, as well as halving the size of the BBC website? Because he feared that if he didn't jump from the second-storey window, an incoming British Conservative government would push him off the roof. He is right to be anxious.
The Tories have indeed signalled a hostility to the BBC that is rare, if not unprecedented, in an opposition. Why might that be? Two words: Rupert Murdoch. People often speak of the unique influence of the media magnate, with his combination of economic and political muscle, but ''influence'' doesn't quite capture it. Instead, Tory leader David Cameron has simply allowed News Corporation to write the Conservative Party's media policy.
Start with the BBC. Murdoch, with son James, can't stand it - regarding it, a senior figure in broadcasting tells me, as ''like the ebola virus: they can't destroy it, so they try to contain it''. They dress up their opposition in pseudo-intellectual free-market blather, but the reality is much earthier: the BBC is a rival, and therefore an obstacle to News' commercial ambitions. The smaller and weaker the BBC becomes, the more money News Corp can make.
So the Murdochs constantly demand a cut in Britain's licence fee. Last year Cameron nodded dutifully and called for an immediate freeze in the fee. That would have marked an unprecedented break in the multi-year financial settlement that is so integral to the BBC's independence - preventing it from constantly having to make nice to the politicians to keep the money coming in.
More HERE. Also here
The Intolerance and Bigotry of Openly Gay Military Service
In early February, I published a column and a blog post at the American Spectator, urging retention of the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. I argued that giving lesbians and homosexuals a specially protected legal status would inevitably lead to infringing upon the First Amendment rights of religious believers and cultural traditionalists. This is true, I noted, for several reasons. First, the gay lobby demands not just tolerance of lesbians and homosexuals, but explicit affirmation of the same. Consequently, the gay lobby will litigate against religious believers and cultural traditionalists who do not acquiesce to its agenda. This, in fact, already has happened — and is happening — in the civilian world.
Moreover, the litigious nature of American society almost will require that these issues be fought out in the courts, where cultural traditionalists and religious believers have very few allies. Finally, as a practical matter, the hierarchical nature of the military tends to suppress free thought and intellectual dissent.
In fact, intellectual uniformity and compliance tend to be enforced within the military and sometimes in a rather heavy-handed manner. (The Marine Corps is the notable exception to this rule. The Corps actively encourages intellectual exploration and dissent; however, the Marines are a unique and special breed.)
All of which argues, I wrote, for maintaining the current policy: because the current policy allows gay men and women to serve discreetly and without conflict, and to do so without making a legal issue of their sexual status and sexual orientation. The American Spectator’s Philip Klein then wrote a thoughtful blog post in which he took exception to my case. Philip said my concerns were exaggerated and overblown. “To me, it’s hard to see what the fuss is about,” he wrote.
Well, it should be less hard now in light of recent Air Force censorship. The censorship occurred last week and involves the president of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins. Mr. Perkins had been invited (last October) to speak at a prayer luncheon at Andrews Air Force Base. But two days after the State of the Union Address, in which President Obama called for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Air Force rescinded Perkins’ invitation. The reason: Perkins had spoken out in support of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; and this, he was told by the Air Force, made his views “incompatible [for] military members who serve our elected officials and our Commander-in-Chief.”
Perkins is a veteran of the Marine Corps and an ordained minister. He expressed his dismay at being censored in two separate documents, a policy update and a press release, both published last week by the Family Research Council:
As one who took the oath to defend and protect our freedoms, I am disappointed that I’ve been denied the opportunity to speak to members of the military, in a non-political way, solely because I exercised my free speech rights in a different forum.
It’s ironic that this blacklisting should occur because I called for the retention and enforcement of a valid federal statute…
Unfortunately, this is just a precursor of things to come in a post-“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military. This legislation would more than open the armed forces to homosexuals; it would lead to a zero-tolerance policy toward anyone who disapproves of homosexuality…
Military chaplains would bear the heaviest burden. Would their sermons be censored to prevent them from preaching on biblical passages which describe homosexual conduct as a sin?
Moreover, according to CNSNews, which, together with the Washington Times, broke the story:
“The [Air Force] Chaplain’s Office retracted Mr. Perkins’ invitation after his recent public comments made many who planned to attend the event uncomfortable,” the Andrews base public affairs office said in a statement issued late Thursday, [February 25].
Censoring military veterans, ordained ministers, religious believers, cultural traditionalists, and civic-minded leaders like Tony Perkins is dismaying; however, it is, sadly, not surprising. It is, in fact, the inevitable end result of a series of statements made by key political and military leaders to the effect that being gay is on a par with being black or Asian. Never mind that being gay is, as Colin Powell pointed out back in 1993, a behavioral characteristic, whereas being black or Asian absolutely is not a behavioral characteristic.
Nonetheless, say key political and military leaders, gays must be accorded a specially protected legal status; and all those who don’t agree better shut up, resign or retire, and get out of the way. Twenty-year Navy veteran J.E. Dyer explained why this must be so at Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog.
Gays can already serve in the U.S. military; repealing DADT [Don't Ask, Don't Tell] isn’t about allowing them to [serve]. It’s about endorsing their sexual orientation in military operations and culture.
The course of hands-off neutrality is not an option in these realms; their unique character is to require affirmative policy. Civilians should start by understanding this.
The quiescent tolerance they think of in relation to their own lives must translate, in the military, into endorsement and administration of an explicit position.
Philip Klein discounts Dyer’s concerns as far-fetched hyperbole. I wish Philip were right; but alas, he is mistaken.
Straight firefighters in San Diego, for instance, were forced (in 2007) to march in a gay pride parade. The firefighters later sued and won a lawsuit for this infringement of their First Amendment rights; but most military personnel are neither inclined nor able to sue their military supervisors.
Most military personnel, in fact, quietly suffer whatever injustices they are forced to suffer at the hands of their superiors. Indeed, as Dyer observed:
There is no “neutral zone” in the military as there is in civilian life. The military operates on affirmative policy. It will administer open gay service on the basis that homosexuality must be acceptable to everyone in the service.
There is no basis for trusting in any quiescent barriers to the full implications of that, as the current plethora of legal issues arising from gay advocacy lawsuits makes clear.
Why, then, is the military considering a policy that purports to solve a problem which doesn’t exist (because lesbians and homosexuals can and do serve now, albeit discreetly), will infringe upon the First Amendment rights of military members, and likely will drive valuable personnel out of military service altogether?
These are good but politically inconvenient questions, which is why they escape the lips of the Big Media.
SOURCE
History's oldest hatred
by Jeff Jacoby
ANTI-SEMITISM is an ancient derangement, the oldest of hatreds, so it is strange that it lacks a more meaningful name. The misnomer "anti-Semitism" -- a term coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, who wanted a scientific-sounding euphemism for Judenhass, or Jew-hatred -- is particularly inane, since hostility to Jews has never had anything to do with Semites or being Semitic. (That is why those who protest that Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic since "Arabs are Semites too" speak either from ignorance or disingenuousness.)
Perhaps there is no good name for a virus as mutable and unyielding as anti-Semitism. "The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan, religious, and secular societies," write Joseph Telushkin and Dennis Prager in Why the Jews?, their classic study of anti-Semitism. "Fascists have accused them of being Communists, and Communists have branded them capitalists. Jews who live in non-Jewish societies have been accused of having dual loyalties, while Jews who live in the Jewish state have been condemned as 'racists.' Poor Jews are bullied, and rich Jews are resented. Jews have been branded as both rootless cosmopolitans and ethnic chauvinists. Jews who assimilate have been called a 'fifth column,' while those who stay together spark hatred for remaining separate."
So hardy is anti-Semitism, it can flourish without Jews. Shakespeare's poisonous depiction of the Jewish moneylender Shylock was written for audiences that had never seen a Jew, all Jews having been expelled from England more than 300 years earlier. Anti-Semitic bigotry infests Saudi Arabia, where Jews have not dwelt in at least five centuries; its malignance is suggested by the government daily Al-Riyadh, which published an essay claiming that Jews have a taste for "pastries mixed with human blood."
There was Jew-hatred before there was Christianity or Islam, before Nazism or Communism, before Zionism or the Middle East conflict. This week Jews celebrate the festival of Purim, gathering in synagogues to read the biblical book of Esther. Set in ancient Persia, it tells of Haman, a powerful royal adviser who is insulted when the Jewish sage Mordechai refuses to bow down to him. Haman resolves to wipe out the empire's Jews and makes the case for genocide in an appeal to the king:
"There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among ... all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws are different from those of other peoples, and the king's laws they do not keep, so it is of no benefit for the king to tolerate them. If it please the king, let it be written that they be destroyed." After winning royal assent, Haman makes plans "to annihilate, to kill and destroy all the Jews, the young and the elderly, children and women, in one day . . . and to take their property for plunder."
What drives such bloodlust? Haman's indictment accuses the Jews of lacking national loyalty, of insinuating themselves throughout the empire, of flouting the king's law. But the Jews of Persia had done nothing to justify Haman's murderous anti-Semitism -- just as Jews in later ages did nothing that justified their persecution under the Church or Islam, or their expulsion from so many lands in Europe and the Middle East, or their repression at the hands of Russian czars and Soviet commissars, or their slaughter by Nazi Germany. When the president of Iran today calls for the extirpation of the Jewish state, when a leader of Hamas vows to kill Jewish children around the world, when firebombs are hurled at synagogues in London and Paris and Chicago, it is not because Jews deserve to be victimized.
Some Jews are no saints, but the paranoid frenzy that is anti-Semitism is not explained by what Jews do, but by what they are. The Jewish people are the object of anti-Semitism, not its cause. That is why the haters' rationales can be so wildly inconsistent and their agendas so contradictory. What, after all, do those who vilify Jews as greedy bankers have in common with those who revile them as seditious Bolsheviks? Nothing, save an irrational obsession with Jews.
At one point in the book of Esther, Haman lets the mask slip. He boasts to his friends and family of "the glory of his riches, and the great number of his sons, and everything in which the king had promoted him and elevated him." Still, he seethes with rage and frustration: "Yet all this is worthless to me so long as I see Mordechai the Jew sitting at the king's gate." That is the unforgivable offense: "Mordechai the Jew" refuses to blend in, to abandon his values, to be just like everyone else. He goes on sitting there -- undigested, unassimilated, and for that reason unbearable.
Of course Haman had his ostensible reasons for targeting Jews. So did Hitler and Arafat; so does Ahmadinejad. Sometimes the anti-Semite focuses on the Jew's religion, sometimes on his laws and lifestyle, sometimes on his national identity or his professional achievements. Ultimately, however, it is the Jew's Jewishness, and the call to higher standards that it represents, that the anti-Semite cannot abide.
With all their flaws and failings, the Jewish people endure, their role in history not yet finished. So the world's oldest hatred endures too, as obsessive and indestructible -- and deadly -- as ever.
SOURCE
A jaundiced Leftist view of the world's most politically incorrect politician
Silvio is very Italian -- with the disrespect for rules that is characteristic of Italians. He just does and says what he thinks. Comment from Australia below
On and on through the centuries Italian culture, design, art, style, food and wine have uplifted our lives. Surely we can forgive them one or two excesses, such as Silvio Berlusconi, the grinning former cruise ship crooner, who amassed a media fortune and wound up as Prime Minister.
YouTube has plenty of Silvio's excesses on display. One piece of footage has him about to enter his official limousine when he sees a female parking officer bent over the bonnet of a car writing a ticket. He does the unthinkable, stepping right behind the auto della polizia femminile to make some pelvic-thrusting gestures. Hilarious stuff - well at least Silvio thought so. One shudders to think of the consequences if ever Kevin Rudd thought this might be a fun thing to try.
Most Italians seem immune to their Prime Minister's bizarre behaviour. That is not to say everyone is happy. Silvia Greco, a freelance journalist living in Sydney, visited her homeland only to find apathy and docility about Berlusconi.
She wrote about her experiences for The Australian Financial Review last November under the headline ''Via Dolorosa, Italia''. Greco was amazed so few people protested about Berlusconi's affairs with prostitutes, his system of patronage for the most eye-catching of women and the allegations of corruption which see him ducking and weaving through the courts and denouncing the judiciary. She wrote: ''Undoubtedly Berlusconi used his television channels to bewilder the country, crushing opposing voices and creating a grotesquely vulgar society full of naked girls and arrogant politicians.''
Her relatively short article was accompanied by an illustration from the artist Michael Fitzjames. It was a map of Italy, renamed Berlusconia, with the main towns and cities also renamed into places such as as ''Necappi'' and ''Ponzi''.
This was not greeted in a docile fashion by sections of the Italian community in Australia and the Italian government. The AFR has received hundreds of letters protesting at this ''national vilification''. There is now an online petition for Silvia Greco to be stripped of her Italian citizenship. Inviolable values have been transgressed.
Last month La Fiamma, one of the large Italian-language newspapers published in Australia, reported that the Italian Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, Stefania Craxi, had replied to a question from the Melbourne-based Italian senator Nino Randazzo. The senator wanted to know what action has been taken by the government over the ''insulting article and cartoon''? La Fiamma said the ''offensive episode [is] unprecedented in the annals of Italo-Australian relations''.
Importantly, La Fiamma revealed a bustle of diplomatic activity over the crisis. Craxi said ''the Italian Embassy in Canberra reacted immediately''. There was a meeting in Canberra with the man at the Europe desk in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Richard Maude. Craxi added the embassy ''set in motion a campaign promoted by the Italian-language newspapers Il Globo and La Fiamma, for the collection of signatures and letters of protest''. According to this report, the Italian government precipitated the protests.
It didn't end there. In Rome, gaskets were being blown at the Farnesina, home of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The director-general for Asia and Oceania met the Australian ambassador Amanda Vanstone. Craxi reported Vanstone ''briefly recalled the excellent state of bilateral relations'', nonetheless was ''sorry for what had happened … then emphasised that the contents of the article in no way reflects the sentiments of the Australian government and people''.
The Human Rights Commission has received 145 complaints. They have asked that the newspaper publish each month an article extolling the beauty of Italy, apologise and pay compensation of $2000 each for the time, grievance and expense this trauma has caused.
Last October The Guardian reported that Berlusconi plans to establish a taskforce to fight bad international press about his sexual and corruption woes. ''An emergency taskforce is to be established within a month to monitor airwaves and newsstands the world over for coverage of Italy and bombard foreign newsrooms with good news about the country.'' The plan was announced by Italy's tourism minister, Michela Vittoria Brambilla, a former TV journalist with Berlusconi's Mediaset group. Well, it seems to be up and operating at full tilt. Berlusconi seeks to extend his control of the media to the far nooks of the globe.
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 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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4/3/2010 -
Pupils aged five on hate register: Teachers must log playground taunts for British Government database
It's the government that hates normal kids
Heads will be forced to list children as young as five on school 'hate registers' over everyday playground insults. Even minor incidents must be recorded as examples of serious bullying and details kept on a database until the pupil leaves secondary school. Teachers are to be told that even if a primary school child uses homophobic or racist words without knowing their meaning, simply teaching them such words are hurtful and inappropriate is not enough.
Instead the incident has to be recorded and his or her behaviour monitored for future signs of 'hate' bullying. The accusations will also be recorded in databases held by councils and made available to Whitehall and ministers to help them devise future anti-bullying campaigns.
The scale of the effort to stop children using homophobic or racist language was revealed after the parents of a ten-year-old primary school pupil in Somerset, Peter Drury, were told that his name would be put on a register and his behaviour monitored while he remained at school. The boy was reported after he called a friend 'gay boy'. His parents fear the record of homophobic bullying will count against him throughout his school career and even into adulthood.
In another incident last year a six-year-old girl, Sharona Gower, was reported for 'racist bullying' at her school near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Sharona was chased by two 11-year-old girls, one of whom taunted her that she had chocolate on her face. The six-year-old responded to one of the girls, who was black: 'Well, you've got chocolate on yours.'
Many schools nationwide have already followed advice that they should record incidents of alleged racist, homophobic or anti-disability bullying. One report last year by the Manifesto Club civil liberties think-tank said that 40,000 children each year are having racist charges added to their school records.
But ministers aim to make reporting of supposed 'hate taunting' a legal requirement for every school, primary as well as secondary, and every local authority across the country from the beginning of the new school year in September. Incidents considered serious will have to be reported to local authorities. Children's Secretary Ed Balls is set to introduce rules that, officials said, 'will mean that schools will have to record and report serious or recurring incidents of bullying to their local authority. 'This will include incidents of bullying and racism between pupils and abuse or bullying of school staff. The Government is clear that schools must take seriously any complaints made of abuse or bullying by pupils.'
Head teachers were first advised to keep records of racist incidents eight years ago. Then, in 2007, heads were told to include disability-related and homophobic bullying in their tallies. Rules for heads say that using language such as 'gay' - which has had near-universal usage among British schoolchildren in recent years to denote something as inferior - counts as homophobic bullying, even if pupils do not have any homophobic intention in mind when using the word. Primary school pupils must be taught 'the nature and consequences of homophobic bullying', according to the rules.
Schools Minister Vernon Coaker said: 'The majority of schools already record incidents of bullying. 'However, we want to make sure that all schools have measures in place to prevent and tackle bullying and show they are taking it seriously.'
But concerns have been raised that the system turns everyday banter among children into incidents of racism or homophobia when none was meant. Margaret Morrissey, founder of campaign group Parents Outloud, said: 'This is totally appalling. The use of such language is part of the learning process. Children need to learn where the boundaries lie. And I very much doubt they understand what they are saying. 'This does not mean that the behaviour shouldn't be challenged. It must be explained that it is wrong. But to keep a register that will haunt them for years to come is going far too far and is against all rights.'
Michele Elliott of the charity Kidscape said: 'Children are being criminalised and singled out here from a very early age when they don't know what they're doing.'
Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said: 'Abuse in the playground has always happened and always will. 'Children have to learn to take this as part of growing up and you can't punish children for doing something they don't understand while they are very young.'
Penny Drury was furious when her ten-year-old son Peter was put on the local education authority's 'hate list' after he called a friend a 'gay boy' outside school. Mrs Drury, 43, was called into her son's primary school to be told by the headmaster that another mother had heard Peter using homophobic language. She was told that the incident would be registered and his file monitored while he was at Ashcombe Primary School in Westonsuper-Mare, Somerset.
'He doesn't even understand about the birds and the bees, so how can he be homophobic?' said Mrs Drury, pictured with Peter. 'Peter is a very naive boy who didn't know what he was doing and is now very upset as he is now in trouble. It doesn't mean he is going to turn into a homophobic attacker when he is older. 'He must have picked up the word from somewhere and thought it to mean stupid. 'If I heard it I would have been the first to correct him and tell him not to use it, but putting him on a register seems way over the top.'
Mrs Drury and her husband Brian, a manufacturing manager, asked for Peter to be removed from the register but to no avail. Mrs Drury added: 'I'm now worried if this is going to affect him applying for universities in the future. I just think the whole thing would be better sorted out by the teacher or parent explaining to them that their language is wrong and not to do it again.'
SOURCE
When rhetoric rules the roost
There is something pathetic about what passes as European foreign policy these days. Quite simply, more often than not, the concerted positions of the EU member nations have nothing to do with any of their national interests.
Take the EU’s initial response to the killing of Hamas terror-master Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on January 19. A senior terrorist engaging in the illegal purchase of illicit arms from Iran for Hamas-controlled Gaza is killed in his hotel room. The same Dubai authorities who had no problem with hosting a wanted international terrorist worked themselves into a frenzy condemning his killing. And of course, despite the fact that any number of governments, (Egypt and Jordan come to mind), and rival terrorist organizations, (Fatah, anyone?) had ample reason to wish to see Mabhouh dead, Dubai’s police chief Lt.-Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim blamed Israel.
Not only did he blame Israel, to substantiate his claims, Tamim released what he said was video footage of alleged Mossad operatives who entered Dubai with European and Australian passports.
Relying only on Tamim’s allegations, EU leaders went into high dudgeon. Ignoring the nature of the operation, the basic lack of credibility of the source of information, and the interests of Europe in defeating jihadist terrorism in the Middle East and worldwide, the chanceries of Europe squawked indignantly and threatened to cut off intelligence cooperation with Israel.
In Britain for instance, Foreign Office sources told the Daily Telegraph, “If the Israelis were responsible for the assassination in Dubai, they are seriously jeopardizing the important intelligence-sharing arrangement that currently exists between Britain and Israel.”
It reportedly took the intervention of the highest echelons of Europe’s intelligence agencies to get their hysterical politicians and diplomats to stop blaming and threatening Israel. After being dressed down, on Monday, the chastened EU foreign ministers abstained from mentioning Israel by name in their joint condemnation of the alleged use of European passports by the alleged operatives who allegedly killed the terrorist Mabhouh.
And lucky they held their tongues. Because on Tuesday, Tamim claimed that after the hit, at least two of the alleged members of the alleged assassination team departed Dubai for Iran. It’s hard to imagine Mossad officers feeling safer in Iran than in Dubai at any time and certainly it is hard to see why they would flee to Iran after killing an Iranian-sponsored terrorist.
What the initial European reaction to Tamim’s allegations shows is that blaming Israel has become Europe’s default foreign policy. It apparently never occurred to the Europeans that Israel might not be responsible for the hit. And it certainly never occurred to them that cutting off intelligence ties with Israel will harm them more than Israel. They didn’t think of the latter, of course, because Europe has no idea of what its interests are. All it knows is how to sound off authoritatively.
THIS HAS not always been the case. It was after all Europe that brought the world the art of rational statecraft. Once upon a time, Europe’s leaders understood that a nation’s foreign policy was supposed to be based on its national interests. To advance their nation’s interests, governments would adopt certain policies. And to facilitate the success of those policies they developed rhetorical arguments to explain and defend them.
Contemporary European statecraft stands this traditional foreign policy model on its head. Today, rhetoric rules the roost. If actions are taken at all, they are adopted in the service of rhetoric. As for national interests, well, the Lisbon Treaty that effectively bars EU member states from adopting independent foreign policies took care of those.
With national interests subordinated to the whims of bureaucrats in Brussels, Europe does little of value in the international arena. As for its rhetoric, as the EU’s rush to threaten Israel for allegedly killing a terrorist shows, it is cowardly, ineffectual and self-defeating. If the Mossad did in fact kill Mabhouh, then the operation was an instance in which Israel distinguished itself from its European detractors by acting, rather than preening.
Unfortunately, such instances are increasingly the exception rather than the rule. Over the past 16 years or so, Israel largely descended into the European statecraft abyss. Rather than use rhetoric to explain policies adopted to advance its national interests, successive Israeli governments have adopted policies geared toward strengthening their rhetoric that itself stands in opposition to Israel’s national interests.
Take Israel’s positions on Iran and the Palestinians, for instance. Regarding the Iranians, Israel’s national interest is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Today, the only way to secure this interest is to use force to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. Given Iran’s leaders’ absolute commitment to developing nuclear weapons, no sanctions – regardless of how “crippling” they are supposed to be – will convince them to curtail their efforts to build and deploy their nuclear arsenal. Beyond that, and far less important, the Russians and the Chinese will refuse to implement “crippling sanctions,” against Iran.
IN LIGHT of these facts, it is distressing that Israel’s leaders have made building an international coalition in support of “crippling” sanctions against Iran their chief aim. And this is not merely a rhetorical flourish. Over the past several weeks and months, Israel’s top leaders have devoted themselves to lobbying foreign governments to support sanctions against Iran. Last week Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu went to Moscow to gin up support for sanctions from the Russian government. This week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak traveled to the UN and the State Department and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon flew off to Beijing just to lobby senior officials to support sanctions.
It isn’t simply that this behavior doesn’t contribute anything to Israel’s ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. It harms Israel’s ability to do so, if only by diverting our leaders’ focus from where it should be: preparing the IDF to strike and preparing the country to withstand whatever the after-effects of such a strike would be. Moreover, by calling for sanctions, Israel contributes to the delusion that sanctions are sufficient to block Iran’s race to the nuclear finish line.....
To avoid Europe’s encroaching fate, Israel must abandon its current course. The purpose of rhetoric is to support policies adopted in the pursuit of a nation’s interests. And Israel has interests in need of urgent advancement.
More here
Geert Wilders to visit Britain
The article below from "The Times" is a bit biased but is informative nonetheless. Rather infantile to make his hair an issue. If that's the best the British establishment can do, it doesn't say much for their argument
Boyish, topped with a bouffant mane of bleached blond hair, cheerful and cherubic, Geert Wilders is the unlikely new face of the far Right in Europe. But appearances are deceptive. The leader of the Dutch anti-immigration Freedom Party has emerged as one of the most divisive politicians in Europe, the purveyor of a virulent brand of anti-Islamic rhetoric that calls for a tax on Islamic headscarves and a ban on the Koran, which he likens to Mein Kampf.
Mr Wilders is facing trial in a Dutch court for “inciting hatred”. Last year he was banned from Britain and turned away at Heathrow when he arrived here planning to show his short film, an incendiary anti-Islamic diatribe that the Dutch Prime Minister described as serving “no purpose other than to offend”.
On Friday, after successfully appealing against the Home Office ban, Mr Wilders will return to Britain at the invitation of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to show his controversial film to an invited audience at the House of Lords. The English Defence League is expected to demonstrate in his support and Muslim groups are all but certain to mount protests.
To his enemies, the 46-year-old Dutchman is an old-fashioned racist demagogue in a new suit; a bottle-blond bigot. To his growing ranks of supporters he is a champion of free speech, a bulwark against what he calls “the Islamic invasion of Holland”. He may be dismissed by some as a crank but he is an increasingly powerful and popular one. On February 20 the Dutch centrist coalition Government collapsed, deeply divided over keeping troops in Afghanistan, paving the way for a general election in June in which the Freedom Party is expected to do extremely well. Polls suggest that the party will triple its tally of seats, becoming at least the second-biggest parliamentary party and quite possibly the overall winner. Mr Wilders is likely to be a key player in any coalition, with a profound impact on the political agenda.
Nicknamed “Mozart” on account of a platinum hairdo that looks strikingly like an 18th-century wig, Mr Wilders has played on the dischords in Dutch society with virtuoso skill. As in Britain, many Dutch voters are alarmed by the scale of immigration, battered by the global economic crisis, culturally anxious and increasingly receptive to his grim warnings about a “tsunami of Islamification”.
The political heir to Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch populist politician who called for a halt to Muslim immigration and who was murdered in the 2002 election campaign, Mr Wilders has portrayed himself as the only politician in his country brave enough to stand up to militant Islam, a threat that he has compared to Nazism. “A century ago there were approximately 50 Muslims in the Netherlands. Today there are about one million. Where will it end? We are heading for the end of European civilisation,” he predicts. Promising strict limits on immigration, he has also called for a “head-rag tax” of €1,000 (£922) a year on Muslim women wearing headscarves.
In 2008 he released a 15-minute film entitled Fitna (the Arabic word for “strife”) which provoked outrage across the Muslim world: it opens with an image of the Koran, followed by footage of terrorist attacks and a litany of stonings, beheadings, honour killings, homophobia and child marriages. It ends, predictably, with the Danish cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked fury in 2006. Al-Qaeda is believed to have ordered the killing of Mr Wilders after the film was released. Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, has described the Dutch politician as “offensively anti-Islamic”. His most incendiary remarks are aimed at the Koran, which he calls a fascist book. “The Koran incites to hatred and calls for murder and mayhem,” Mr Wilders told the Dutch Parliament. “It is an absolute necessity that the Koran be banned for the defence and reinforcement of our civilisation and our constitutional state.”
In January a Dutch court ordered the public prosecutor to try Mr Wilders on charges of fomenting hatred and discrimination. Mr Wilders indicated that he would call witnesses in order to prove Koran-inspired violence, including Mohammed Bouyeri, the man convicted of murdering the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh in 2004.
Although he faces 16 months in prison if convicted, the trial represents a political goldmine for Mr Wilders and helps to explain his recent rise in opinion polls. If he is convicted he will paint himself as martyr to political correctness; if he is acquitted he will claim vindication. The trial has been suspended until after the election.
Inadvertently, Britain also did much to boost his standing in February last year by banning him from entering the country as an “undesirable person”, citing EU laws enabling member states to exclude someone whose presence could threaten public security. Mr Wilders loudly condemned Gordon Brown as “the biggest coward in Europe” and some 84 per cent of Dutch voters objected to the way that Mr Wilders had been ejected by Britain.
The ban was later overturned by an asylum and immigration tribunal. On Friday, at the invitation of the UKIP leader Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Baroness Cox of Queensbury, he will show Fitna to MPs, peers and guests before giving a press conference at Westminster.
“The issue of militant Islam is the greatest issue facing our Judeo-Christian culture,” Lord Pearson said. “I don’t agree that the Koran should be banned but we want it discussed ... mild Muslims should stand up and debate their militant co-religionists.”
Mr Wilders has sought to distance himself and his party from the traditional standard-bearers of the extreme Right in Europe, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front in France and the late Jörg Haider of the Freedom Party in Austria. He has made no contact with the BNP. “My allies are not Le Pen and Haider,” he says. “I’m very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.” His prime political role models are said to be Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill.
The son of a printer, Mr Wilders was raised Roman Catholic but is now an atheist. He worked in a Dutch social insurance agency before becoming a speechwriter and then MP for the liberal People’s Party, which he left in 2004 to form his own party.
As a prime terrorist target he lives under 24-hour police guard, changing his location nightly. He is seldom seen in public and gives few interviews. Even contact with his wife, a Dutch-Hungarian former diplomat, is limited by security concerns, This way of life, under constant threat, is “a situation I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy”, he once remarked.
“They are trying to shoot him all the time,” says Lord Pearson, noting that Mr Wilders will be coming to Britain with five state-hired Dutch bodyguards. “He has a really, really tough existence.”
Mr Wilders opposes expansion of the EU, most particularly Turkish membership, and Dutch military deployment in Afghanistan, but the core of his message lies in an appeal to defend traditional Dutch culture against perceived encroachment by Islam. “Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe,” he told the Dutch Parliament. “Stop all immigration from Muslim countries, ban all building of new mosques, close all Islamic schools, ban burkas and the Koran ... Stop Islamification. Enough is enough!”
Some polls suggest that after the June elections Mr Wilders may lead the biggest single parliamentary party, raising the prospect that a former fringe provincial politician with extreme views and peculiar hair could end up leading the country. “At some point it’s going to happen and then it will be a big honour to fulfil the post of prime minister,” he says. If that comes to pass it will mark both the triumph of a new, more subtle brand of right-wing politics in Europe, and the final demise of the stereotyped image of the Netherlands as a nation of bland liberal views and easygoing tolerance.
SOURCE
The penalties of being a fussy middle-class woman
"I chose to have a baby without a father and it's brought me huge joy - but also chaos, exhaustion and despair"
A couple of nights ago, I tiptoed out of my two-year-old daughter's bedroom, having tucked her up with her beloved Doggy - a revolting scrap of balding fur with a torn nose and one eye - pressed up against her cheek. Millie had warm milk in her tummy and there were endless verses of The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round spinning in the air. I was stopped short in the doorway by a chirpy call of: 'Goodnight, Mama!'
Granted, it wasn't a quotation from Hamlet, but when it's your first child wishing you goodnight for the first time in her 24-month existence, having heard you whisper it to her with your every goodnight kiss, it generates an exquisite flutter of delight and the mad desire to run and share it with someone special.
In my case, that was my mum. And then my best friend Christine. And then my other best friend Adam. They were all out, so they heard my news by voicemail several hours later. Not for the first time, as I sat on the sofa, hugging my knees to my chest, bursting with pride and dripping with tears of joy, I wished my daughter's father could be by my side, to gasp and coo with me at yet another tiny, but momentous, development in our daughter's life.
But that's never going to happen, because my daughter hasn't got a father. She's the donor- conceived child of a single mother, the result of an agonising decision I made some years ago, complete with its intricately complex and agonising repercussions.
So, when I read Zoe Lewis's poignant and admirably honest description in Saturday's Daily Mail of her fears and doubts about her decision to go it alone as a single mother, I understood her turmoil better than most people. And it made me want to give her a hug and tell her that everything is going to be fine. Tiring, but fine. Because I've been there, felt that, doubted that, feared that and lived to tell the tale with ceaseless delight and a lot of pride, however difficult I've found it at times.
For all the joy a new life brings, it's going to be a tough road ahead for Zoe, whether it's the practical hardships you think you can prepare for or those emotional bombshells that explode when you least expect them.
Two years and two months ago, I gave birth to my beautiful baby girl, conceived after five gruelling cycles of IVF using donor sperm. It was, and remains, the most spectacular experience of my life, the achievement of which I am most proud, the moment when I felt I truly became who I was destined to be. But it so very nearly did not happen. Unlike my core group of friends, I had remained single throughout my 30s - my biological clock shrieking, my options diminishing, anxiety and depression clouding my days.
Getting married and having children, that most common of experiences, seemed to be slipping out of my grasp. With great reluctance, I was forced to confront a terrifyingly stark choice: live the rest of my life childless; just hope Mr Right-ish would turn up at some point; or seize control of my future and try for a baby on my own.
Like Zoe, being a single mother wasn't what I wanted, or hoped for, or dreamt of. But not being a mother was unendurable. I steeled myself for tough times ahead, and I certainly got them. Four years of fertility treatment, five cycles of IVF, three failed pregnancies and a bill for £42,000.
The cost to my emotional, psychological and physical well-being was inestimable. But so was the joy of my daughter's arrival. There aren't sufficient words in the English language to express its magnitude. Euphoria doesn't even come close. And it's a feeling that's remained with me ever since.
For while I am ecstatic, awestruck, privileged and humbled on a daily basis, I am also semi-comatose with exhaustion and permanently worried about money and my ability to earn enough of it.
I am frustrated at being stuck in a small flat without a garden and a teensy bit tired of borrowing other people's husbands to put up shelves, assemble furniture and untangle my computer malfunctions. Single motherhood, I have found, for all its walks in the park, is not a walk in the park....
I made a decision to deny my child a father, and we live with the - at times unbearable - consequences of that decision every day. One morning last week, we arrived a little late at nursery. My daughter's class was in the middle of a play session and the teacher was holding up a series of pictures of activities - a man raking leaves, a woman baking a cake - and asking the children to identify them.
As I took off my daughter's coat and started changing her shoes, the teacher held up a picture of a man shaving and asked: 'Whose daddy shaves in the morning?' The entire class shouted back 'My daddy does! My daddy does!', while my little girl looked on bewildered.
Blinking back my tears, I gave her a massive cuddle, praying she hadn't fully understood the question, and whispered into her neck 'I love you', as I picked up my coat to leave. 'I ruff oo!' she called back cheerfully, as I reached the door, beaming for all her worth.
I dissolved into tears in the car and sobbed for most of the day. I've put us into this delicate and complex situation, it's my responsibility to deal with it, but it's the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
No single woman I know who has followed the same path as me has done so lightly or without a considerable battle with her conscience. My feeling is that we didn't actively choose to become 'single mothers'; we actively chose not to be childless. And I believe there's a profound and easily ignored difference. I would never advocate single motherhood as a lifestyle option; it's tougher than you could ever imagine, stressful, exhausting, expensive and fraught with complications, both obvious and subtle.
More here
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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 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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3/3/2010 -
Bureaucratized British firefighters left woman in mine shaft for six hours due to 'health and safety concerns'
They were obviously not concerned with HER health and safety
An injured woman lay for six hours at the foot of a disused mine shaft because safety rules banned firefighters from rescuing her, an inquiry heard yesterday. As Alison Hume was brought to the surface by mountain rescuers she died of a heart attack.
A senior fire officer at the scene admitted that crews could only listen to her cries for help, after she fell down the 60ft shaft, because regulations said their lifting equipment could not be used on the public. A memo had been circulated in Strathclyde Fire and Rescue stations months previously stating that it was for use by firefighters only.
Christopher Rooney, the first senior fire officer at the scene in Galston, Ayrshire, in 2008, told the fatal accident inquiry at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court that it would have been possible to pull Ms Hume up had it not been for the memo. A paramedic volunteered to treat her but was prevented from being lowered. A mountain rescue team that was summoned freed Ms Hume, 44, a solicitor who had two children, but she died just as she was brought to the surface.
Mr Rooney, 51, who has retired from the fire service, was asked by Gregor Forbes, for Ms Hume’s family: “On the basis of the manpower and equipment available, is it your view it would have been possible for the firefighters to have brought the person to the surface before the mountain rescue team?” he replied: “Yes, I believe so.” Ms Hume had strayed off a path in a field and fallen into the former Goatfoot mine.
Mr Rooney said he had arrived at 2.30am but mist reduced visibility. Ms Hume’s family led him to the hole, which was partially concealed by vegetation. “We heard Alison making distressed noises,” Mr Rooney said.
A firefighter, Alexander Dunn, was lowered with oxygen and first-aid equipment. He was with Ms Hume for four hours until the mountain team arrived. He told the inquiry that the time taken to rescue her was “excessive”. Mr Dunn, 51, who is retired, was critical of the subsequent fire service debriefing, saying it failed to address key points.
SOURCE
Another example of how the perverted British police and prosecutors loathe self-defence
This brave guy should never have been charged
A homeowner who killed an armed intruder and seriously injured another man after they broke into his flat [apartmebt] has been cleared of murder today. Samuel Quamina, 49, was confronted by three men brandishing a pistol and a metal steering lock as he read the Bible in his home. He armed himself with two kitchen knives and slashed at the burglars as they attempted to grab his gold necklace and rings.
Perry Nelson Jr, 24, of Norbury, south London, suffered a fatal stab wound and died at King's College Hospital after running from the bungled raid. His 41-year-old alleged accomplice was also injured and a third man, aged 38, escaped unharmed.
Mr Quamina was today cleared at Croydon Crown Court of three charges including murder, manslaughter and actual bodily harm.
His police statement told how the 30-second violent ordeal took place in his flat in Peckham, south-east London, at about 8pm on September 10, last year. During the trial, Mr Quamina had contended he was a religious man who had acted in self-defence. He said on the day of the attack he had been reading the bible while smoking a ‘spliff’ when a friend came around to borrow a CD. The three men burst into the second-storey flat as the friend left.
He told investigators two music speakers fell from a wall in the brawl, smashing down on his attackers and disarming them. Mr Quamina said he was ‘terrified’ and thought the three men wanted to rob and kill him, so he took two knives from the kitchen and slashed the attackers as they attempted to steal the jewellery he was wearing.
The case is the latest to highlight to what extent self defence can legally be used when protecting against burglars. Last month Tory leader David Cameron fuelled the debate by saying intruders leave their human rights at the door when they break in to a property. He said only those who use ‘grossly disproportionate force’ should be put in the dock and that his party will review the law.
Prosecutors have insisted that householders are able to use ‘reasonable force’ to defend themselves and protect their property. [So this guy was being unreasonable???]
SOURCE
Free speech destroyed by political correctness
Jake Witzenfeld, president of Cambridge University’s Israel Society cancelled a talk by Benny Morris, a distinguished Israeli historian, for fear the Israel Society would be portrayed as a mouthpiece for Islamophobia.
The trial of Geert Wilders, in Holland, has received almost no attention from the media panjandrums in the West for fear the issue might lead to Muslim incitement, particularly in cities like Rotterdam where the Islamic population is near a majority.
Yale University Press refused to publish cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed in a book about the cartoons and the aftermath of the original publication, for fear of a possible violent response from Islamic adherents.
Yes, these craven responses all appear with the word “fear” since that word has trampled the meaning of freedom in nations that have fought for its defense over centuries. In one moment, intimidation has trumped free speech and cowardice has subordinated any display of courage.
I find it astonishing that a heralded center of learning, a major university press and a nation that once fought against totalitarian impulses could so easily justify their actions. Whatever happened to a belief in freedom of speech and a faith in the power of debate to reveal the truth that counters censorship?
It is instructive that the fear someone might claim you are racist or Islamophic – even if you know you aren’t and if you know the speaker isn’t – may justify a refusal to hear someone’s point of view. Following this precedent, any serious discussion of Middle East politics, or Muslim inspired terrorism of religion itself should be banned since there are invariably those who will portray opinions they don’t like as hateful and, yes, racist.
What these three illustrations demonstrate is that slander can be converted into an effective weapon to stifle expression. When Muslims are concerned about opinions that don’t fit with their worldview, they can raise the specter of retaliation and attack a speaker with epithets, such as Islamophia, and mirabile dictu speech is silenced.
It is hard to know exactly when this form of preemptive capitulation began. However, when the United Kingdom refused to admit Geert Wilders for a public presentation fearing his speech might be a source of incitement, this nation that carried the banner of free speech from the Magna Carta to the defense of liberty in World War II seems to have lost its way. Apparently the most basic right, the one generations had taken for granted, is now in jeopardy in the very venues liberty once found a congenial home.
From Voltaire to Jefferson, warnings about the way free speech can be imperiled filled the pages of various broadsides. It is remarkable that the canon on free speech can be so easily overturned by the masters of political correctness. Alas, if free speech can be denied to Geert Wilders or leading intellectuals, it can be denied to anyone. Would I be permitted to speak at Cambridge University if I did not comply with the prevailing intellectual orthodoxy? Could I publish a book that points to the imperial goals in Islam? Would it be possible to invite an Israeli scholar who defends his nation’s policies to a forum at a Middle East Studies program anywhere in the West?
After all, a few sentences twisted into an incendiary comment by a concerned listener can result in violent repercussions. Or, claims about the speaker – true or not – may result in the withdrawal of an invitation. Universities are so skittish at the moment that even the appearance of potential controversy is conspicuously avoided.
Tolstoy once noted that “The opinion of a revered writer or thinker can have a deep influence on society; it can also be a big obstacle to understanding the truth.” Indeed that is the case with many venerated thinkers. But it is also true that the biggest obstacle in pursuit of the truth, is the systematic interference of free speech, an interference that becomes particularly lamentable when it is done voluntarily, when the invocation of fear is sufficient to drown out expression.
SOURCE
Is That Your Hand In My Pocket?
The playwright Jonathan Holmes indulges in some special pleading for the arts, and for people much like himself. All three parties find themselves scrambling for a coherent arts policy, with the Tories currently making the running by suggesting a combination of a revamped lottery contribution plus a peculiar beast they are calling “philanthrocapitalism.” What they seem to mean by this is that businesses and wealthy individuals will make up the shortfall left behind when Jeremy Hunt and co have finished taking the Arts Council to pieces – in other words, a spectacular piece of wishful thinking. Now might be a good time to ask whose thinking is most wishful here. If the art world’s theoretical customers don’t regard what’s on offer as of sufficient value to hand over their cash directly, voluntarily, then isn’t that telling us something? Isn’t it a tad grandiose to expect one’s commercially unviable art to be subsidised by the taxpayer - irrespective of whether those taxpayers would choose to fork over their cash, which they most likely had to earn by doing something of more obvious market value? Sadly, Mr Holmes doesn’t quite get to grips with such basics or their moral implications. He teases us, though, with this: Lurking underneath all this there is, of course, a much bigger issue. Why should the arts receive any subsidy at all? The first argument is that almost everyone else is subsidised too, so why not the arts? Despite the regularity with which it’s aired, this is a not the strongest argument to advance. The fact that six people already have their hands in my back pocket isn’t the most persuasive reason for inviting in a seventh, eighth and ninth. There is, after all, only so much pocket. Mr Holmes then changes tack. The arts in this country are a major financial success story. The income from creative industries generates revenues of around £112.5bn, and they employ more than 1.3 million people, which is 5% of the total employed workforce in the UK. Note the sly use of the term “creative industries,” which includes advertising, commercial television, recording studios, graphic designers, computer games developers... i.e., businesses run as businesses and which generate profit because what they produce is of value to their customers, as determined by their customers and not by some imperious committee. Finally, the big guns are wheeled out to thunder. A mature democracy should have the courage and the understanding to see the debt it owes its artists, What? You didn’t expect modesty, did you? and to continue to support them, because what it gets in return – economically, socially, aesthetically, philosophically – is almost immeasurably greater than that which it dispenses. Oh, don’t look shocked. It’s hard to recall a Guardian arts funding piece that didn’t invoke both selfless heroism and cruel persecution. The benefits of the arts are such a no-brainer, so obvious, that the sole genuine reason for cuts is censorship of some form. In the 20th century, the only governments to systematically attack the arts have been the ones that also attacked democracy. Note how the prospect of reducing coercive taxpayer subsidy is framed rather grandly as “censorship” of artists - and by implication an attack on democracy itself. No other genuine motive could possibly exist. Those who would rather keep a little more of their own earnings and choose for themselves which art forms they indulge are clearly monsters. We’ve heard this pompous guff before of course, as when Hanif Kureishi and the Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington conjured a world in which artistic “dissent” was being “suppressed” by suggestions that artists might actually consider earning a living. Yet the most profound argument for art runs much deeper than any of this. Art, very simply, is how we comment on our world, how we speak truth to power. Blimey. Sceptical readers may wonder if Mr Holmes thinks a little too highly of his vocation and its political, sociological - indeed, cosmic - importance. And one has to wonder who has more power in the current funding formulation. The taxpayer, who is forced to bankroll projects regardless of personal interest or objection, or those who take the taxpayer’s money and expect to go on doing so?
SOURCE
Why Do Arabs Hate Google?
The “suggest” feature on Google often causes controversy, because Google suggests what Google users often search for, and Google users — like most inhabitants of the planet Earth — are notoriously politically incorrect. The most frequently searched topics can be quite offensive, and when offense is being taken, who do you think is standing at the head of the queue, ready to claim their share?
You guessed right! So it’s no surprise to find an article in Arab News with the headline “Google slammed for suggesting ‘smelly Arabs’”:
The ‘Google Suggest’ feature, a labor saving device designed to predict queries will automatically suggest completing your query with ‘why do Arabs stink?’ or ‘why do Arabs have big noses?’
This sounded like a real hoot, so I opened Google and tried it out. Here’s a screen cap of the result (which was still allowed by Google as of this morning):
After I stopped laughing and wiped the tears from my eyes, I continued reading the article:It is not hard to understand why Arab interest groups such as the London-based Arab Media Watch (AMW) have started to remonstrate against the suggestions.
“What’s worrying is that these (suggestions) are based on the overall popularity of searches, so if you may not have been looking for that, many other people have,” Guy Gabriel, advisor to AMW told The Media Line. “We’re in a day and age where the Internet is a tool by which we break down barriers and learn more about different communities across the world so it’s alarming to notice on Google that this isn’t the case as it stands.”
This assertion doesn’t make sense. If we “learn more about different communities across the world”, we discover that — statistically speaking — Arabs tend to do some things more than other groups do, and those things include driving taxis, wearing turbans, owning gas stations, and wearing black. Yes, they really do write from right to left. And, not to put too fine a point on it, they also tend to throw rocks, fight with Jews, and lose wars.
Smelling bad is a matter of personal opinion, and everyone can determine that one for himself. As for “big noses”: if you took a pair of calipers to the schnozzes of a thousand Arabs and compared the result with a thousand toffee-nosed Brits or Yanks, what do you think you would find?
So what’s the big deal?
Well… Anything that offends Arabs is a big deal, so Google will probably have to “fix” this feature eventually. The AMW aims to make sure of it:
The organization advocating fair and objective coverage of Arab issues in the British media says Google is “failing in its aim to avoid offending a large audience of users,” and said the feature not only perpetuates stereotypes but also highlights a worrying trend among Google users.
“I’m not suggesting that Google are aware of this and they are refusing to do anything about it,” Gabriel said. “Now that it has been flagged, they are in a position to do something about it.”
In other words: Google, you have been warned.
AMW claimed that while searches regarding other ethnic groups produced a similar range of pejorative or stereotypical suggestions, queries about Arabs yielded more offensive results than other groups, and a search using Jews produced noticeably far less.
Yes, I can well imagine that this is the case. Familiarity breeds contempt, and over the last decade or so the English-speaking world has become very familiar with Arabs, perhaps much more familiar than it would like.
However, if the Arabs have ended up the losers in an ethnic popularity contest, the only possible explanation is our inherent racism and Islamophobia. What Arabs themselves say and do has no bearing on the matter — our “prejudice” is the only possible explanation.
What if those insulting suggestions concerned — to pick another ethnic group at random — the Danes? How would those proud Vikings react if such aspersions were cast upon them?
All the Danes I know would laugh themselves silly.
So I tried “Why do Danes” in the Google search box, and… Nothing! Google users don’t even care enough about Danes to ask insulting questions, and that’s the most insulting thing of all!
So I had to make up my own suggestion list for “Why do Danes”:
- wear helmets with horns sticking out
- drink beer
- eat smelly fish
- have blond hair
- eat licorice
- light candles
- listen to Lady Gaga
- etc., etc.
Are we offended yet?
I tried a lot of other ethnic groups, religions, and nationalities, and found Google to be a treasure trove of user preoccupations concerning Eskimos, Hindus, the Irish, Africans, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Canadians, Australians, Britons, and Americans.
But my favorite “Why do” list was for the Turks. It contained only two items: “deny the genocide” and “smell bad”. Now, that’s succinct.
Google, despite its lofty PC intentions, has inadvertently created a massive database of ethnic stereotypes. If you want to find out all the insulting things that people think about, say, the French, just google “Why do French” and wait for the suggestions to pop up. Hint: the olfactory sense is involved here, too.
As a matter of fact, most people outside the Anglosphere seem to “smell bad”. Considering that this is an Anglophone list, I suppose that’s not surprising. A French person who googles a question about “les Anglais” might well turn up something uncomplimentary about all those malodorous goddams across the Sleeve.
But back to the Arabs. For some reason the Google suggestions left out the most relevant question of all:
Why do Arabs have such thin skins?
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 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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2/3/2010 -
Royal Marine told to cover up regimental tattoo at Heathrow because it was 'offensive' to other passengers
A former Royal Marine was told to cover-up a tattoo of his regimental badge by security staff at Heathrow Airport, because it was 'offensive' to other passengers. Paul Fairclough, a former medic with the 539 Assault Squadron, was furious after he was challenged over the famous Marine dagger insignia as he arrived for a transfer flight. The 29-year-old, who served in Kosovo and Iraq, had just arrived at Terminal 5 from Toronto and was transferring for a Manchester flight when he was stopped by a female security operator as he passed through a metal detector.
After he put his bag on to an x-ray machine he was told to take his jacket off - revealing the 12-inch tattoo on his right arm. The female operator spotted the tattoo and said: 'That tattoo is offensive. You will have to cover it up.' The father-of-one, who joined the Army at 19 and now works as a safety officer on oil rigs, refused to cover the design and walked past the guard.
Mr Fairclough said: 'I tried to explain that she was mistaken and that it was the insignia of my old regiment, the Royal Marines. 'She said she knew exactly what it was but that it made no difference. They had a policy that tattoos showing offensive weapons of any kind must not be on show. 'I was half annoyed and told her that there was no way I was covering it up and I walked on as she glared at me. 'I half expected to feel a tap on my shoulder but I just walked through the arch and went on my way.'
Mr Fairclough, who lives with wife Nicky and 1-year-old son Matthew in Tranmere, Wirral, then attempted to make a complaint after passing through security. 'I demanded to see a supervisor to ask for an explanation. 'He said they had a policy that offensive tattoos connected with gangs and weapons must be covered-up in the airport. 'But he said there was no ban on military insignia tattoos and tried to explain it away by saying that the operator concerned must have made a mistake. 'When I said that she had insisted that she knew exactly that it was a Royal Marines' badge he tried to say she must not have been trained properly. 'He didn't apologise and I was left feeling insulted, angry and incensed. I served my country and lost mates who were blown-up in Iraq. 'I am proud of my service with the Royal Marines and this left a bitter taste in my mouth.'
The Commando dagger is the formation flash of the Royal Marine Commando regiment and reflects its ability to adapt to combat situations. It does not appear on their uniform, but does appear on the Royal Marines Commando insignia.
A spokesman for British Airports Authority at Heathrow said: 'This should not have happened. We have no policy against tattoos. 'We do sometimes ask passengers to cover-up things like slogans that would be offensive to other travellers, but that is clearly not case on this occasion. 'BAA would like to offer our sincere apologies to the passenger concerned.'
SOURCE
Lord Carey of Clifton: ‘Christianity is victim of bullying campaign’
Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has warned that Christianity is being marginalised by a “strident and bullying campaign” against the faith. Lord Carey, speaking at a symposium on Christian persecution in the House of Lords, said: “Christianity, which has given so much to our country, is now being sidelined as never before as though it is a stranger to our nation.”
Warning that Britain’s Christian heritage was in danger of being abandoned, he continued: “We have reached a point where politicians are mocked for merely expressing their faith. I cannot imagine any politician expressing concern that Britain should remain a Christian country. That reticence is a scandal and a disgrace to our history.”
He urged Christians to become more assertive about their faith: “If we behave like doormats, don't be surprised if we are treated as though we are. It is time to return to the public square.”
Recently, a number of Christians have been sacked or suspended for speaking about their faith. Olive Jones, a teacher who lost her job for asking permission to pray for a sick pupil, told the meeting: “Twenty years of teaching dismissed for sharing the goodness of God in this Christian nation. I felt I had been treated as a criminal.” Caroline Petrie, a nurse, was suspended for offering to pray for a patient, said: “I was told if I continued what I was doing I would be struck off the nurses’ register.” She was reinstated after seeking legal assistance.
SOURCE
British police do deal with Islamic radical
Sir Ian Blair signed a formal agreement with an Islamic extremist to treat him as the Metropolitan Police’s "principal" representative of the Muslim community, it can be disclosed. The activist, Azad Ali, was accepted by the Met as a trusted interlocutor. The force also agreed to give him information on forthcoming anti-terror raids. – Mr Ali has previously justified the killing of British troops in Iraq, believes al Qaeda is a "myth," and has praised a key mentor of Osama bin Laden.
Mr Ali signed the deal, a copy of which has been seen by the Daily Telegraph, in his capacity as the then chairman of the Muslim Safety Forum – a body closely linked to the fundamentalist Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE).
In yesterday's Sunday Telegraph a Labour minister, Jim Fitzpatrick, accused the IFE of infiltrating the Labour Party and British politics along the lines of the far-Left Militant Tendency in the 1980s. The IFE believes in jihad, sharia law and the transformation of Britain into an Islamic state. It will be the subject of a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary tonight.
The Muslim Safety Forum was set up, in its own words, to challenge the "unfair focus on the Muslim community when it came to policing activities and enforcement of anti- terror policing legislation." It was accepted by the police as a legitimate body. The agreement, dated December 2006 and personally signed by Mr Ali and Sir Ian, who was Commissioner of the Mat at the time, states: "The Commissioner will recognise the MSF as the principal body in relation to Muslim community safety and security."
Sir Ian or his deputy committed to meet Mr Ali and the MSF at least twice a year and to hold monthly meetings with the MSF at "New Scotland Yard or other suitable premises." Met chiefs, including counter-terrorist commanders, also committed to attending the MSF's own meetings "whenever possible”. Both the current head of the antiterrorist command, Commander Shaun Sawyer, and his predecessor, Commander Bob Quick, who the MSF described as a "close partner”, have had regular meetings.
The agreement says that the Met and MSF will "use the MSF as a consultation body to help formulate policy or practice." and "progress an annual plan of work through agreed priority workstreams," jointly led by Met and MSF representatives. The workstreams included counter-terrorism and "Islamophobia." Mr Ali was the MSF lead on counter-terrorism.
In the wake of the controversy about the abortive terror arrests in Forest Gate in summer 2006, the Met also agreed to set up a four-strong panel with the MSF to offer the Muslim community a chance to comment on whether the information police had on a suspect was too flimsy and the consequences of a raid for community relations. Mr Ali, one of the panel members, said at the time: "This will allow independent scrutiny of intelligence."
Mr Ali was also described by the Metropolitan Police Authority as a "key member" of the Met's ‘Communities Together Strategic Group’, chaired by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Rose Fitzpatrick, which met fortnightly to "oversee and review community reassurance and engagement measures." He was a member of the Kratos Review Group, to examine the Met's response to suicide bombings.
However, Mr Ali, who is also a senior official of the IFE, has a strong track record of extremism. Last year, by which time he had become the MSF's treasurer, he was suspended from his job as a civil servant after praising Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden's key mentor. Writing on his blog on the IFE website, he described Azzam as one of the "few Muslims who promote the understanding of the term jihad in its comprehensive glory" as both a doctrine of "self-purification" and of "warfare." He then quoted Azzam's son, approvingly, as saying: "If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier's uniform inside Iraq, I would kill him because that is my obligation ... I respect this as the main instruction in my religion for jihad."
In January Mr Ali lost a libel action against a newspaper which reported his comments. Ruling against him, the judge, Mr Justice Eady, said that Mr Ali "was indeed ... taking the position that the killing of American and British troops in Iraq would be justified."
Following the controversy over his remarks Mr Ali left the post of MSF treasurer, but he remained a trustee and director of the group. The group also preserves its close links with the IFE, whose headquarters it shares and several of whose trustees and activists also sit on the MSF.
A Met spokesman said the 2006 agreement between Sir Ian and Mr Ali, which was subject to annual renewal, was not renewed after it expired in December 2007, although links between the Met and the MSF continued. The spokesman said: “We are currently working with the Muslim Safety Forum to review how it can best represent London’s diverse Muslim Communities so that we can better understand and then act on their concerns about safety and security.”
SOURCE
Australian businesses to be compelled to employ more females
So capable women will be unable to prove themselves. People will think they owe their position to quotas, not ability
BUSINESSES will be forced to employ minimum numbers of females in the workplace under new laws being considered by the Federal Government. Bosses employing 15 or more people will be required to report on the gender balance in the workplace under proposals in a new government commissioned report. The KPMG report was commissioned last year to review the role of the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency.
Among the suggestions was a push for workplaces to have a voluntary 40 per cent female representation at all levels within three to five years. If this failed, mandatory quotas enforced by sanctions and penalties would be introduced.
But industry groups have rejected the quota concept. In its submission, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said it supported "the attainment of equal opportunities based on merit, rather than the filling of quotas".
But Australian Institute of Management state chief executive officer Carolyn Barker said she supported quotas. "There is evidence that when governments particularly put in quotas . . . the number of women in executive positions and on boards increase," she said. "And I have to say, is that such a bad thing?"
The Brisbane Institute CEO Karyn Brinkley said quotas were not the long-term solution for women's careers. "I don't know that I see a lot of point in quotas," she said. "I think it detracts from the argument that you appoint them because they have amazing sets of skills, and attributes that are very complementary."
A further suggestion was for the publication of league tables, listing the best and worst businesses that met gender targets.
The report showed only 54 per cent of the female labour force was in a full-time occupation, compared with 84 per cent of males. At the same time, males received 17 per cent more in their paypackets than women.
A spokesman for Minister for the Status of Women Tanya Plibersek said the department was considering the report and would release its findings in coming months.
SOURCE
Bureaucracy is irredeemably stupid
Sara Husdon comments below on attempts by Australian governments to "help" indigenous blacks
Despite extensive consultation with communities in the Northern Territory about what type of new houses they would like as part of the government’s Indigenous housing program, it appears that the government is still following the same old tired designs for the construction of houses.
Two years ago, federal Indigenous Affairs Minister, Jenny Macklin, promised ‘a makeover with a difference’ as part of the government’s $672 million ‘strategic’ Indigenous housing program (SIHIP).
NT Housing Minister Rob Knight said that design teams would look at the territory’s outdoor lifestyle and climate when designing houses.
But as Nigel Scullion, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs, pointed out in a recent media release, the new houses built under SIHIP look surprisingly similar to the old ones.
In the past, houses in remote NT communities were regularly criticised as being designed by white bureaucrats with no understanding of the way in which Aborigines live and no consideration for the 40 plus degree temperatures. ‘They are sweat boxes ... you wouldn’t put your dog in there during the heat of the day,’ said one government official in The Age.
Yet, it seems the two new houses built in Wadeye have not been built according to local residents’ wishes. During the extensive consultation process, residents repeatedly said that they wanted large verandas; outdoor living areas; and toilet access from outside, but these three design features have not been included.
Pictures of one of the new houses taken by Nigel Scullion as part of his press release show an ugly grey rectangular box, with a bright yellow metal awning. These houses look almost identical to the ones they were meant to replace.
Residents of existing homes have also been ignored by the government, with recent refurbishments in Ali Curang falling far short of their expectations. Houses remain filthy and incomplete. New stainless steel benches have been installed but not much else, prompting concerns that the houses would fail to meet the standards of the Residential Tenancies Act.
Macklin has come out in defence of these refurbishments, saying that they were only meant to include new kitchens and bathrooms – in contrast to her promise two years ago for a ‘makeover with a difference.’
It seems Aboriginal people have been duped again.
Rather than continuing to look to the government to meet their housing needs, residents of remote Indigenous communities would be better off copying the residents of the Ilpeye Ilpeye town camp near Alice Springs. There, traditional owners have allowed the Australian government to acquire their land and change the community lease to freehold title. This change will enable residents to become home owners and perhaps finally kiss the government and their broken promises goodbye.
The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated February 26. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590.
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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 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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1/3/2010 -
Utah Democrats Oppose Racial Equality
A joint resolution (HJR24) seeking to amend the Utah constitution to prohibit racial and ethnic preferences, modeled on California’s Proposition 209 and similar measures in Washington and Michigan, is working its way through the state legislature. Democrats, of course and as usual, oppose the measure.
While proponents say HJR24 is about fairness and upholding the intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, opponents are asking why the measure needs to be engraved in the state’s highest law.
Minority Leader David Litvack said that House Democrats have united against the measure. And, speaking for himself, he questions the need and the rush. “They have no proof that reverse discrimination even exists,” said the Salt Lake City Democrat. “Yet we’re going to ask citizens to amend the state Constitution.”
“That’s a sacred document,” Litvack added. “It should not be amended based on myth and misperception.”
I wonder if Leader Litvack and the Democrats have any objection to the identical value being “engraved” in the nation’s highest law via the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Why do they react so strongly to a constitutional provision that would prohibit behavior they claim to oppose and assert does not even occur?
Someone should ask Leader Litvack if he and his fellow Democrats oppose all the affirmative action policies and programs supported by Democrats in the federal government and other states. If they support those policies, they should be honest enough to admit that they oppose HJR24 in Utah not because it is unnecessary but because they oppose its substance, prohibiting preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity.
SOURCE
Abysmal Coverage Of Race In The New York Times
I've been writing about how the mainstream media covers race issues for so long, and so much of that coverage is so bad, that I thought I was long past being shocked by the thoughtless (or worse, premeditated) dumbness that so often appears in publications widely if mistakenly thought to be reliable.
But I was wrong. This article, by Randal C. Archibold in yesterday's New York Times on race-based strife at the University of California, San Diego, proves that I can still be shocked by mindless comment in the mainstream press, at least when it contains "analysis" like this:
... more than a decade after a state ballot proposition barred the use of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, the University of California continues to struggle to diversify its campuses. Black and Latino undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted and, although gains have been made in the numbers of minority students since then, the proportion of white (30.5 percent) and Asian (39.8 percent) students enrolled last year far exceeded that of blacks (3.8 percent) and Latinos (20.4 percent).
Just a few years ago, the Los Angeles campus, one of the system's most prestigious, was shaken with the news that only 103 black freshmen had enrolled, 2.2 percent of the class in a county that is 9.4 percent black. (The numbers have since ticked up to about 4.5 percent of the class.)
Where to begin ... where to begin? How about with the assumption — actually, here it's more overt argument than implicit assumption — that selective universities are at fault, whether they're overtly discriminating or not, if their student bodies are not a demographic mirror of ... of ... what? UCLA presumably should mirror its "county," but UCSD, described as "set on a bluff along the Pacific Ocean," is in a county that in 2008 was only 5.5% black. Should that be the target? Moreover, if the standard is demographic mirroring of, well, of something — city, county, state, whatever — why does the article demonstrate no concern, why does it apparently not even notice, that the proportion of whites in the University of California system (30.5%) is dramatically far below the proportion of whites in the state of California (42.3% in 2008)?
I suppose it could be argued that even authors of articles that purport to be news in the New York Times are entitled to reveal their own peculiar assumptions (selective universities should be demographic mirrors of some jurisdiction), but they are not entitled to their own facts, and it is simply not true that after the passage of Prop. 209, prohibiting racial preferences, "Black and Latino undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted," a drastic decline that even now has been characterized only by "gains" that are implied to be small, still leaving them woefully underrepresented.
Here are some facts that go unmentioned in the NYT article:
- The sharpest decline of any group in the year after passage of Prop. 209 was experienced by whites, who fell from 40% of system admits to 34%, where they remained through 2005.
- By 2002 the proportion of underrepresented minorities admitted to the university system, 19.1%, exceeded the proportion admitted in 1997, 18.8%, the last year in which preferences were in effect.
- The proportion of admitted URMs rose to 19.8% in 2003 and to 20% in 2004.
- A revealing graph of freshman enrollment by ethnicity, 1997–2005, can be found here, which also provides the numbers for the unmentioned (as though it does not exist) California State University system.
- The more recent numbers are even more dramatic. The proportion underrepresented minority admits was 22.9% in 2007, 25.1% in 2008, and 26.9% in 2009.
Ending preferential treatment of minorities did decrease their proportion at Berkeley and UCLA, the most selective campuses in the university system, but that is not the same as the Times's assertion that minority enrollment plummeted "systemwide." Ending preferential treatment did not end minority representation; it redistributed it to other campuses in the university system and to the state college system.
Perhaps the (former?) "newspaper of record" can no longer expect its writers to perform research, but you'd think that there would be fact checkers or, heaven forbid, editors to catch errors like declaring that minority "undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted" when it did not.
ADDENDUM
As if to prove my point about the New York Times often stumbling, or worse, in its coverage of race issues, another article that appeared yesterday, "To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case," commits a doozy that makes my case better than my mere assertion.
Read this paragraph, then re-read it:
In 2008, Lila Rose, a college student at U.C.L.A. and the founder of an anti-abortion group called Live Action, released four audio recordings of a man trying to make donations to Planned Parenthood clinics to pay for black women's abortions. In one, the caller, played by James O'Keefe III, the provocateur recently arrested on charges that he tried to tamper with the telephones of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said, "You know, we just think, the less black kids out there, the better," to which the Planned Parenthood employee replies, "Understandable, understandable."
First, the "fact" that's here but wrong: what O'Keefe was arrested for was "entering federal property under false pretenses," but even that charge is now up in the air. As the New Orleans Times Picayune reported several days ago,
The U.S. attorney's office in New Orleans has another month to decide what, if any, charges to bring against the four men arrested at the end of January in Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office, including conservative activist James O'Keefe.
Louis Moore, the magistrate judge for the federal district court in New Orleans, agreed Wednesday to motions on behalf of the four to extend the time by which the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District must seek a felony indictment, press misdemeanor charges or drop the case.
Moore said the extension, which was unopposed by prosecutors, would offer the parties "additional time to conduct informal discussions and discovery and avoid or lessen additional proceedings," suggesting the possibility of a plea deal that would likely spare the four from facing felony charges.
But mere factual error and incompleteness is not the most egregious journalistic offense here. Can you imagine discussing James O'Keefe, describing him (accurately enough, I think) as a recently arrested "provacateur," and not even mentioning his role in single-handedly destroying ACORN?
But why imagine it when you can read it (or in this case, not read it) in the New York Times?
SOURCE
British flag banned in Britain over health and safety
A council has banned the Union flag from its building because a health and safety assessment concluded that scaffolding would have to be erected to raise and lower it
The flagpole atop Colchester borough council's Rowan House office block has remained bare since the building was purchased from Anglian Water two years ago. A frustrated Conservative politician was so concerned that he presented a Union flag to the council's Liberal Democrat leadership and offered to climb the roof himself to make sure it was flown.
A council spokeswoman said the absence of a flag was a "logistical operational matter" and insisted the building, Rowan House, had an unusual roof which made it difficult to access the flagpole.
Will Quince, the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Colchester, said: "I cannot believe that a flagpole was put on top of this building that is inaccessible. This seems to be absolute health and safety nonsense. "I'm happy to go up there and put it up myself. "I'm incredibly proud to be British and it pleases me greatly when I walk around the town to see many people who proudly display our Union flag. I think it's really sad we can't fly it for health and safety reasons."
Anne Turrell, the Liberal Democrat council leader who received Mr Quince's 6ft by 4ft flag, said: "Health and safety won't allow us to do it, unless we scaffold the building. "That costs thousands of pounds and I'm sure the taxpayers of Colchester wouldn't want us to spend that to put a flag up." A council spokeswoman said: "It is a very strange shaped building with triangular roofs, and there are no access points. "It is a logistical operational matter and advice has been taken from the health and safety adviser. We regularly have flags on the town hall, which is a very prominent building just half a mile away from Rowan House."
She was unable to confirm whether the council had looked into using alternative methods to hoist the Union flag, such as deploying a cherry picker or steeplejack.
In 2004, councillors in Trowbridge were told that a Cross of Saint George could not be flown on the town hall because scaffolding would be too expensive and leaning out of a first-floor window was too dangerous.
In May last year officials at South Kesteven district council initially claimed that similar health and safety risks meant a Union flag could not fly on the town hall at Bourne, Lincolnshire, for Armed Forces Day. They relented when a spiked fence below the flagpole, which was the cause of the safety concerns, was boxed in to avoid any danger to life or limb.
SOURCE
If more Muslims are truly a problem…
Comment from Australia by Andrew Bolt
WE didn’t need the Rudd Government to tell us this week that, ahem, our own Muslim community is now a growing terrorist threat. What we needed was to hear what the Government planned to do about it.
And the answers in its new White Paper on counter-terrorism? Virtually zilch. Not even a word on whether it would be wise to cut immigration from Muslim nations, now running at about 28,000 a year. Nor was there anything about ending the mad multiculturalism that rewards most those who integrate least.
Rather the reverse. The Government promised more of the stuff that’s clearly not doing the job - more of that “multiculturalism and respect for cultural diversity to maintain a society that is resilient to the hate-based and divisive narratives that fuel terrorism”.
Hey, guys. If multiculturalism has made us so “resilient to the hate-based and divisive narratives” of jihadism, why does your White Paper admit that “numerous terrorist attacks” have had to be “thwarted” in Australia since 2001, and that we now have 20 people jailed on terrorism charges, 38 people charged after anti-terrorism operations (presumably all, or mostly, Muslims, too) and 40 more denied passports? That’s sure a lot of strife from just 340,000 Australian Muslims, as measured by the last census. We’ve actually got more Buddhists here, but when did you last hear of any plotting to blow us up?
Like I said, the threat from our own home-grown or imported jihadists was already perfectly clear. We could figure that out just from this month’s news that another five Muslims in Sydney had been jailed for plotting terrorism and gathering 12 firearms, 28,000 rounds of ammunition and four boxes of material for high explosives. But even more of a wake-up were the comments from so many leaders of our Muslim community. Uthman Badar, from the Australian arm of the extremist Hizb ut-Tahrir, cried persecution, and claimed poor Muslims were being prosecuted merely for their ideas: “The anti-terror laws were designed to silence Muslims through fear and intimidation.”
Samir Dandan, from the Lebanese Muslim Association, also fed the poor-us-against-them division, saying Muslims believed they were punished harder than the rest of us, while Keysar Trad, of them Islamic Friendship Association, blamed the “anger” of Muslims on our own alleged violence against Islamic countries. Even more worryingly, 10 imams and 20 Muslim “community leaders” met in Lakemba, at Australia’s biggest mosque, to sign a statement demanding police show them proof that the five jailed men had criminal intentions.
Never mind that the police evidence had been enough to convince an Australian jury: “Until we see the real evidence, we believe that the reason for the arrests and convictions is that these young men expressed or hold opinions that contradict Australia’s foreign policy towards majority Muslim countries." Meanwhile, outside the mosque, The Australian reported, “a group of young men pumped their fists in the air and accused ASIO of being dogs”.
This is the scenario, repeated so often over the past decade, that every Australian could see for themselves - of Muslims planning or waging jihad, only to be defended or excused by “community leaders”. And this is the reality that the Government’s White Paper now concedes in the frankest language I’ve heard in public.
“A ... shift apparent since 2004 has been the increase in the terrorist threat from people born or raised in Australia, who have become influenced by the violent jihadist message,” it warns. “A number of Australians are known to subscribe to this message, some of whom might be prepared to engage in violence. Many of these individuals were born in Australia and they come from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds.” And then this warning, so pregnant with implications: “The scale of the problem will continue to depend on factors such as the size and make-up of local Muslim populations, including their ethnic and/or migrant origins, their geographical distribution and the success or otherwise of their integration into their host society.”
Let me decode that. The Government admits the size of this growing terrorism threat depends on the size of our Muslim population. Isn’t that then the debate we must have? Yes, I know most Muslims here, my friends included, are peace-loving Australians, and I do not mean to offend them or expose them to unmerited suspicion. I also admire those Muslims I know who have stood against the extremists. But I do mean to have a frank conversation.
After all, this report also points out terrorism isn’t necessarily related to poverty, and that our wanna-be terrorists are often not the Muslims we accepted as immigrants, but their born-here children. What’s more, they come from a “wide range of ethnic groups”. That means we can’t keep out tomorrow’s terrorists just by bringing in only nice, hard-working Muslims from countries we trust. What of their later children, newly radicalised in mosques, universities or prisons?
Surely one way to minimise the danger, then, is to cut Muslim immigration, or at least freeze it until the jihadist wind blows out. Should we really be bringing in more than 28,000 people a year from Muslim lands such as Pakistan, the Middle East, North Africa, Bangladesh, Somalia, Afghanistan and Indonesia?
But on this issue the Government says nothing. Nor will it discuss dismantling multiculturalism, which at one stage had taxpayers funding the pro-bin Laden Islamic Youth Movement of Australia. But why is multiculturalism sacred, when even this White Paper says one “pathway to violent extremism” is through “identity politics”? After all, multiculturalism subsidises identity politics with your money while making Australia seem too weak or even shameful to deserve the first loyalty of a confused young man.
So what did the Government, badly needing a distraction from its insulation debacle, propose instead? Only easy, uncontroversial tinkering with controls at our borders, rather than anything to deal with the people who’ve got through already. There will be better border checks, for instance, and our spy agencies will help try to stop the flood of boat people unleashed by the Government’s rash softening of our laws.
I don’t mean to single this Government out as unusually weak on the threat within. In some ways the Howard government was even worse. Example? The White Paper warns that a “small number” of Muslims here support foreign terrorist groups that might use Australia as “a suitable or convenient location for an attack on their enemies”. It adds: “This includes groups with a long history of engaging in terrorist acts and a current capability to commit them, such as Lebanese Hizballah’s External Security Organisation.”
So Hezbollah (our spelling) has an active terrorist wing and could strike here? Then why did John Howard as prime minister pick for his Muslim Community Reference Group at least five Muslim leaders who defended Hezbollah, including Sheik Taj el-Din al-Hilali, then the Mufti of Australia, and Sheik Fehmi Naji el-Imam, who succeeded him?
I am not saying these men would ever support Hezbollah terrorist attacks here, but how many of their followers could be trusted to draw the line? Answer: no one knows, but our experts fear. So until we get more reassurance, we’ll need more action than this paper proposes.
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 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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28/2/2010 -
The race card is upsetting the scales of justice in Britain
Positive discrimination is saddling Britain with woefully bad lawyers, particularly prosecutors
Last week a report commissioned by the government concluded that a “lack of diversity” among judges was limiting judicial perspectives and was affecting the experience of people who used the courts. The report came up with more than 50 recommendations on how to tackle the problem, including schemes in which judges would encourage students from ethnic-minority backgrounds to pursue judicial careers.
The legal world should think very carefully about this. It is right that the judiciary should reflect the society it serves, of course, but positive discrimination and politically correct initiatives are already, to my mind, having a detrimental effect on the law. Any more could be disastrous.
I was called to the bar in 2006 and, as a British woman of Indian descent, I can hardly be accused of racism. So I perhaps feel freer to speak than some of my colleagues. But what we all see is the same thing: the race card being played in recruitment to legal firms and to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
The frustration and resentment this generates is aired in private. In the pubs near chambers you often hear tales of friends finding themselves up against lawyers who can barely speak English and are unable to grasp complex points of law. A judge told me that he and his colleagues were scared to criticise for fear of being told “you have commented on my sub-standard English because I’m not English”. So the issue is boxed away in a corner and it is a shame because the whole system is suffering.
The new report has the laudable aim of changing the make-up of the judiciary. But wouldn’t it be more sensible to let it happen organically, over time, rather than try to shoehorn in people who might not be suitable?
It is not so much at the bar but at the CPS, though, where there is a real problem. The bar is at least independent but the CPS is much more directly connected with the government and has to be seen to be a fair employer. Some of the CPS propaganda material is hilarious. It has gone so overboard in an attempt to be fair that you have to search hard to try to spot the white person in its illustrations. In London, at least, the organisation seems to be stuffed with people from ethnic minorities.
It is worrying when you ring someone up about a case, often a serious one, and you have trouble understanding what they are saying. Or you get skeleton arguments or documents drafted that simply make no sense and are written in pidgin English. In a system responsible for the administration of justice that is alarming ... and when it comes to analysing law and statute, well, you wonder how that can possibly be being done properly.
In a drugs case I was defending last year I lodged a complaint of abuse of process and the skeleton argument presented in response was laughable. It was really quite shocking but nobody commented on it. We all knew, but it just seemed to be accepted.
One of the problems is that CPS lawyers, who appear as higher court advocates, get appointed to cases beyond their capability. At the bar we have a grading system for prosecution. You apply and are graded 1-4, with grades allocated according to experience and grade 4s taking the most serious cases.
The CPS has no such system. CPS lawyers are allotted more serious cases according to time spent in various departments. CPS advocates cover early case hearings where the management of the case is decided. These hearings often result in the case being turned over to the independent bar. But this frequently happens at the last minute, so the barrister who takes it on is left to prosecute underprepared and therefore prosecutions suffer.
I was defending an extremely serious robbery case last year and the prosecution advocate was clearly less senior than I was and didn’t know how to deal with complicated pieces of law, but he was an in-house advocate so had been able to have “first dibs” on the brief rather than it going out to the independent bar. He obviously didn’t have the experience to deal with the case. His presentation was absolutely appalling and that wasn’t so unusual: you see people failing to grasp basic principles and you see their clients suffering and you wonder how on earth they made it to where they are.
This is racism in reverse: and the biggest irony is that the people who suffer from racism now — middle-class white men — are ticked off or called racist if they complain. Sometimes I even have to ask myself, am I racist? But I’m not, I’m really not. Although I do worry that people will think I have got where I am without quite deserving to — so the culture of “diversity” damages people who have worked hard as well as those who have lost out.
SOURCE
Leftist love of regulations never stops in Britain
Now the Government wants competence tests before you can be a dog owner
Every dog owner will have to take a costly ‘competence test’ to prove they can handle their pets, under new Government proposals designed to curb dangerous dogs. Owners of all breeds would also have to buy third-party insurance in case their pet attacked someone, and pay for the insertion of a microchip in their animal recording their name and address.
The proposals are among a range of measures to overhaul dog laws in England and Wales being considered by senior Ministers, who are expected to announce a public consultation within weeks. But critics said responsible dog owners would be penalised by yet more red tape and higher bills – one expert estimated the extra costs at £60 or more – while irresponsible owners of dangerous dogs would just ignore the measures. They added that genuine dog lovers could end up paying for efforts to control a small number of ‘devil dogs’ that terrorised socially deprived areas.
The RSPCA said last night it would welcome a review of legislation which has failed to curb the numbers of dangerous dogs that can attack, and sometimes kill, children and adults. But a spokesman for the charity added: ‘We would not support anything that would hit sensible owners while failing to police those who are a danger.’
A government source said the proposals, contained in a confidential document headed Consultation On Dangerous Dogs, have been drawn up by the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra). They follow mounting public concern about the spate of serious injuries and deaths inflicted by dogs. Police figures show an increase in the number of ‘status’ dogs used to intimidate or threaten others. According to the last available figures, there were 703 convictions for dangerously out of control dogs in 2007 – up from 547 in 2004.
Under the proposals, would-be owners would have to show they had a basic understanding of their dogs before being allowed to keep one. The document says: ‘There have been suggestions for a competency test for all or some dog owners, akin to the driving theory test.’
But the document admits the cost of setting up such a scheme to cover Britain’s six million dog owners ‘is likely to be prohibitive’, and would have to be met by either charging for the test or by imposing a dog licence fee. Moreover, the officials concede that there were disagreements over what would constitute competence in looking after and controlling a dog.
Third-party insurance would be less contentious, as owners of certain breeds of dogs are already required to take out such cover. It is also included in the pet insurance taken out by owners to cover unforeseen vets’ bills and it can be bought for a little as £5, though it will be more expensive for larger and more powerful breeds. In addition, many owners have had microchips implanted in the necks of their dogs – a process that costs about £30.
Other proposals due to be floated by the Government include giving the police and local authorities the power to impose Asbos on the owners of unruly dogs, and extending the law to cover attacks everywhere. At the moment, dogs which attack people on private property where they are allowed to be are exempt from the law, despite the complaints from injured postmen. There are also plans to boost the enforcement powers of police, the courts and local authorities.
As part of the proposed overhaul, all dog laws, including the Dangerous Dog Act 1991, often cited as an example of poorly drawn-up ‘knee jerk’ legislation, could be incorporated into a single law.
An RSPCA spokesman said: ‘We welcome a review but the problem is that while responsible owners will abide by the rules, inevitably you are going to get a fraternity that does not. There are always people who will buy a dog from their mate in a pub and won’t tell the authorities. ‘So the danger is that sensible owners will be out of pocket while irresponsible dog owners will ignore any new rules unless the policing of them is rigorous.’ He said, for example, that while the RSPCA encouraged the use of microchips, the system relied on owners keeping the information up to date. ‘It is no good finding an aggressive dog roaming the streets, perhaps having attacked someone, and going to the address on the microchip to find that the owner hasn’t lived there for years,’ he said.
The Kennel Club said that it was in favour of measures to promote responsible dog ownership, but that the competence tests sounded impractical. A spokesman for Defra said: ‘We do not comment on leaked documents.’
SOURCE
The British government claims to be concerned about the high rate of teenage pregnancies
But they are a major cause of it
Sex education has failed. So the Establishment decrees that we must have more of it, and in fact that there shall be no escape from it.
What I don’t grasp is why the people of this country put up with so many separate insults to their intelligence in any given week. And why this particular blatantly obvious sequence comes round year by year and nobody even laughs, let alone draws the correct conclusion.
Despite the casual massacre of unborn babies in the abortion mills, and the free handouts of morning-after pills (originally developed for pedigree dogs which had been consorting improperly with mongrels), and the ready issue of condoms to anyone who asks, and the prescription of contraceptive devices to young girls behind the backs of their parents by smiling advice workers, and the invasion of school classrooms by supposedly educational smut, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy has failed, is failing and will continue to fail.
In the week that figures clearly showed that the Government’s supposed target for cutting teen pregnancy by half is never going to be reached, compulsory smut education – a key part of this ‘strategy’ – was forced on all English schools by law for the first time. There will be no opt-outs. The new liberal gospel of ‘do what thou wilt – but wear a condom while thou doest it’ will be taught by order of the State.
Some years ago, I wrote a short history of sex education in this country. I didn’t then know about its first invention, during the Hungarian Soviet revolution of 1919, when Education Commissar George Lukacs ordered teachers to instruct children about sex in a deliberate effort to debauch Christian morality.
But what I found was this. That the people who want it are always militant Leftists who loathe conventional family life; that the pretext for it has always been the same – a supposed effort to reduce teen pregnancy and sexual disease; and that it has always been followed by the exact opposite.
It was introduced into schools against much parental resistance during the early Fifties. And, yes, the more of it there was, the more under-age and extramarital sex there seemed to be.
By 1963, in Norwich, parents were told that their young were to be instructed in sexual matters because the illegitimacy rate in that fine city had reached an alarming 7.7 per cent (compared with a national rate of 5.9 per cent). The national rate is now 46 per cent and climbing, so that was obviously a success, wasn’t it? Well, yes it was, because the people who force these peculiar classes on our young are lying about their aims. You can see why.
Most of us, in any other circumstance, would be highly suspicious of adults who wanted to talk about sex to other people’s children. But by this sleight of hand – that they are somehow being protected from disease and unwanted pregnancy – we are tricked into permitting it.
And our civilised society goes swirling down the plughole of moral chaos.
SOURCE
British photography phobia again
Father stopped from taking picture of his son, 4, on children's train ride 'in case he was a paedophile'. But publicity brings the usual backdown
A father was stopped from taking a photo of his son on a children's train ride after an over-zealous security guard accused him of being a paedophile. Kevin Geraghty-Shewan, 48, was approached by the guard after he took the picture of his four-year-old son Ben on the toy engine outside a shop. He was then threatened with arrest after refusing to hand his mobile phone containing the picture after a row with a policeman.
Mr Geraghty-Shewan said: 'Ben saw a children's ride which had a train on it and wanted to have a go because he's obsessed with trains.' Moments later, he was apprehended by the security guard. The father-of-one, who was in the North East visiting family, said: 'He said "you can't take pictures in here". I asked why and he told me it was because for all he knew I could be a paedophile. 'I told him Ben Was my son. But he said I couldn't prove it. 'I couldn't believe it. I walked away and then I thought about making a complaint.'
A few minutes later a police officer arrived at the Bridges Shopping Centre in Sunderland and threatened to delete the photograph. 'They said I matched the description of a man who had been taking pictures,' Mr Geraghty-Shewan said. 'They took my details and said they had the right to remove the picture from my phone. 'I got annoyed and things got heated, then he threatened me with arrest for breach of the peace.
'Ben thought I was in trouble because he had sat on the ride and we didn't put the money in.'
Mr Geraghty-Shewan was so annoyed by the incident he posted a picture of the security guard on his blog.
A spokesman for the Bridges Shopping Centre said: 'We take the safety at all our shopping centres very seriously. 'We do ask our security guards across the estate to be diligent in implementing our security measures, which includes monitoring photography in our centres. 'Unfortunately on this occasion what should have been a simple polite conversation led to a misunderstanding and we apologise for any offence caused. 'It is always our aim to implement our security procedures with the minimum of fuss and disruption to our shoppers.'
A spokesman for Northumbria Police said: 'We received reports of a disagreement over a photo taken on the premises of a shopping centre. No offence took place.'
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 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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27/2/2010 -
Another crass failure by British social workers
They attack harmless middle class families and leave children of feral families to die. Contrast the story below with the one immediately following it. Once again we see that Leftism is motivated by a desire to tear down the successful rather than any desire to help the poor. Only hate can explain their priorities
A seven-year-old girl was starved to death by her mother despite a plentiful supply of food in the home and visits from social workers in the weeks before she died. Khyra Ishaq was denied meals and was hidden away in a squalid room at the top of an otherwise clean and tidy house by her mother and stepfather, who operated a draconian punishment regime. Her agonising death occurred despite four visits to the family home by five different officials charged with taking care of vulnerable children in Birmingham, including social workers, police and local authority home-schooling officials.
Last night a High Court judge condemned social workers involved in the case, saying that Khyra would be alive if they had done their job properly. The judge’s comments came after Angela Gordon, Khyra’s mother, was cleared of murder after prosecutors at Birmingham Crown Court accepted her plea of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. She also admitted five counts of child cruelty against the other children in her care. Her partner, Junaid Abuhamza, a schizophrenic, had a manslaughter plea accepted earlier in the trial after a report on his mental health. The pair will be sentenced next Friday.
Children’s services at Birmingham City Council were last year described as “unfit for purpose” after it emerged that 16 children known to social workers, including Khyra, had died of abuse or neglect in five years. The department mounted a vigorous defence of its role in the child’s death, saying that it lacked sufficient powers to intervene, especially once Khyra was removed from school to be “home-educated”. But the statement from a High Court judge who presided over related care proceedings last year cast doubt on the department’s version of events.
Mrs Justice King said that “in all probability” Khyra would be alive today if there had been “an adequate initial assessment and proper adherence by the educational welfare services to its guidance”. She said: “It is beyond belief that, in 2008, in a bustling, energetic and modern city like Birmingham, a child of 7 was withdrawn from school and thereafter kept in squalid conditions for a period of five months before finally dying of starvation.”
No one from the department has lost their job or been disciplined over these failings.
Yesterday’s verdicts brought to an end a harrowing trial in which jurors heard that the severely emaciated girl resembled a famine victim at the time of her death in Handsworth, Birmingham, in May 2008. The case reduced hardened police officers to tears during the investigation. Khyra was beaten and locked in a garden shed if she broke house rules. Five other children in the house were also starved, and two of them were close to death when Khyra succumbed to an infection and died. Jurors were shown pictures of the well-stocked kitchen and a fridge full of milk, fruit juice and other groceries.
Gordon withdrew Khyra from school in December 2007, five months before she died, saying that she was being bullied and would be taught at home. She then barred visiting social workers and even the police from entering her house, though they were allowed to see some of the children, including Khyra, on the doorstep. They concluded that the children were not in any danger, and closed the case.
Home education officers who visited judged that the home was suitable for home education after seeing a room laid out like a classroom. Their judgment turned out to be seriously flawed.
Given the record of children’s services, Khalid Mahmood, MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said that it was time for an independent inquiry into the failing department. He has written to Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, urging him to initiate one. Mr Balls called Khyra’s death “preventable” but said that he would await the findings of the serious case review to see whether further action was needed, although he criticised the professionals involved.
“There are clearly serious questions to be answered about what local services and professionals were doing in the months before this tragedy took place. As the trial has shown, it is now clear that concerns about these children were not acted upon effectively, and it is right that a serious case review has been carried out,” Mr Balls said.
Yesterday both the local authority and the local independent children’s safeguarding board blamed in part the current liberal regime around home education for “hampering” child protection work. Although 20,000 home-educated children are known to local authorities, the true number could be as high as 80,000. Under current law no one is responsible for monitoring home education or has powers to see children who have been taken out of school. The Government is currently passing a law to establish a new and tougher system.
SOURCE
British women fleeing to Spain to stop their babies being taken from them by rogue social workers
A pregnant British woman has fled to Spain with her parents to prevent her unborn baby being taken into care by social services, despite an offer by the child’s grandparents to foster her. Megan Coote, 21, is one of two British women who have escaped to Spain after threats by Suffolk social services to remove their babies. The infants were born last week two days apart and are now neighbours.
Their cases reflect what John Hemming, a Lib Dem MP and chairman of Justice for Families, believes is a growing phenomenon. “It is clear that nothing is being done to sort the family courts out and so more people are thinking of simply emigrating,” he said.
The second British woman, Carissa Smith, 32, arrived in Spain over Christmas with her husband, Jim, £300, three cats and their baby on the way. Mr Smith reckons he has spoken to dozens of couples who have made a similar decision. “There’s so many people who want to go back but are frightened,” he said. “It is a horrible way to live. Nobody wants to leave their country, family and friends, but you have to.” Their name has been changed for legal reasons.
The birth of the Smiths’ son brings back painful memories of the daughter they no longer see. Carissa had a psychologist’s diagnosis of factitious illness, which used to be known as Münchausen’s syndrome by proxy, in 2008. The same psychologist later changed the diagnosis to narcissistic personality disorder, but their daughter was already in care. Although experts said there was no immediate risk to the child, social services said she could face emotional abuse in future. When Carissa became pregnant again, the Smiths decided to move abroad.
Tim Yeo, the couple’s MP, suggested in Parliament that Suffolk social workers acted in the Smith case in a manner “sometimes tantamount to child kidnapping”. That the Coote family fled the same authority “rather bears out the theory I had that the department intervenes not with the aim of helping couples become good parents but of separating vulnerable couples from their baby”, Mr Yeo told The Times.
In the case of Ms Coote, who has mild learning difficulties, her parents offered to foster their grandchild. When she became pregnant, her midwife went to social services with concerns about her emotional maturity. A psychological assessment suggested that she would not be capable of looking after the baby. Her parents disagreed, but volunteered as guardians. The baby was due but social services told them that the process would take 12 weeks and could not promise that the baby would not be put forward for adoption beforehand.
When Jim Smith learnt that the Cootes were moving away, he rang to offer them space in his new house.
Suffolk social services would not comment on individual cases. However, Simon White, director of Children and Young People’s Services, said: “Children’s services work hard to support parents and families so that children can remain in their own families. No decisions can be made before assessments which determine whether the child in question can be adequately cared for by the natural parents or within the extended family.”
Some warn that children who have been noted by social services as at risk may face further dangers abroad. Barbara Hopkin, of the Association of Lawyers for Children, was involved in a case in which a mother fled to Spain, fearing that her unborn child would be removed. The baby died, smothered when her drunken boyfriend rolled on it. “Other countries are much less interventionist and our system is generally much better,” Ms Hopkin said.
But Mr Yeo believed that more support for families at home was necessary. “It’s a tragedy that loving couples should have to flee Britain to feel safe to bring up their own baby. It’s a terrible situation for any family and rather a serious indictment of the way the system of support is operating.”
The Cootes feel that they have been let down by social services. “I employ people. I pay my taxes. I abide by the law,” Mr Coote said. “I didn’t think that my country was going to kick me in the teeth.” He is now battling to find a way to reunite his family in the United Kingdom where he still runs a business and his son is in school.
For the Smiths, Spain is home. But their plan to celebrate their baby’s return from hospital yesterday was marred by a visit from Spanish authorities. They had been alerted by Suffolk social services. “They are being really nice but we’ve got a weekend of worry ahead,” said Mr Smith.
SOURCE
The threat to banish school skirts is just one part of an insane and authoritarian attempt to remake Britain into some far-Leftist fantasyland
Back in the Eighties, a string of Labour-run town halls were notorious for their extremism, mismanagement and financial extravagance. Justly known as the 'Loony Left,' these authorities were epitomised by Ken Livingstone's spendthrift and dogmatic regime at the Greater London Council. Their excesses were supposed to have ended with the rise of New Labour.
But, as Gerry Adams once famously said of the IRA, the ideological extremists 'never went away'. They merely transferred their activities from the urban municipalities to the heart of government. Thanks to the 13 years of Labour rule, lunatic Leftism now has more influence than ever. Its politically correct zealotry flourishes throughout the public sector and the quangos. Its fixations with race and gender are written into law. Its obsession with social engineering is transforming the fabric of Britain, destroying traditional, unifying bonds such as family life and nationhood.
The fanaticism of the Left was recently exposed in guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission for public bodies on how to treat transgender people, including transvestites and those undergoing a change of sex. In one startling passage in this 68-page document, the Commission warned it may be illegal for any school to require girls to wear skirts as part of their uniform, since this could discriminate against transsexual pupils.
Such an edict would be laughable were it not so indicative of the disturbing mindset of the equality bureaucrats who wield such control over our lives. The threat to take legal action against schools because some uniforms can be deemed 'gender specific' is beyond satire. The number of transsexual adults in Britain is tiny, perhaps as few as 5,000, yet the Commission wants all public services to be altered for the sake of this minuscule group. Furthermore, it is absurd to start putting these highly emotive, questionable labels on young people before they have barely passed puberty.
Such action highlights three of the most dangerous traits of the Left-wing doctrinaires. One is their remorseless focus on categorising individuals by race, gender, sexual orientation or class - and then placing them within hierarchies of victimhood according to the perceived disadvantage they have suffered. Another is the sexualisation of children, in which the innocence of youth is destroyed by the aggressive promotion of the so-called 'sexual rights' agenda. The third is the eagerness to obliterate all traditional morality by presenting support for normal, married family life as outmoded and discriminatory.
While warning that requiring girls to wear skirts is 'potentially unlawful', the Equality Commission document highlights, as an example of 'good practice', the real-life case of 'a young transperson born female attending a mixed-sex primary school'. On the advice of a 'gender identity clinic' in London and the local 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth service', the school transformed its procedures to accommodate this one young child who had been 'identified as transgender' by a psychologist. The changes including a 'gender neutral uniform' - whatever that might be - and 'a new system of lining up for class by mixed-sex group labelled using basic shapes (such as Triangles, Circles and Rectangles) rather than by gender.'
Teachers were also encouraged to use the changes as a way of 'exploring gender stereotypes'. Most parents would prefer that primary schools just teach their pupils to read and write properly rather than embarking on journeys of sexual exploration.
The Equality Commission guidance is riddled with this kind of bizarre nonsense. Public facilities are urged to install unisex toilets which are 'more welcoming' for transgender people.
Following the example of New Forest District Council in Hampshire, leisure centres are encouraged to hold sessions where transgender people have 'sole use of the swimming pool, gym, sauna and badminton courts for an evening'. Prisons are warned against stopping hormone therapy for transgender convicts. When speaking to transgender people, public officials are instructed 'to use the pronoun that is consistent with the person's appearance and gender expression. For example, if the person wears a dress and uses the name Susan, feminine pronouns are appropriate'. Public bodies are further urged to 'designate a trans-equality and human rights champion among its staff' and to provide all staff 'with training on trans-equality'.
As always, the fashionable obsession with ethnicity appears. 'Young black trans men might face different issues and have very different needs compared with older white trans women,' reads one extract. There is also a deluge of ultra-feminist drivel. 'Gender identity is subjective,' proclaims the document, contradicting almost a million years of biology.
How outrageous that we have to pay for this through our taxes. No one voted for this radical agenda or for the bureaucrats pushing through the change. In its ruthless campaign to impose the creed of the hard Left on Britain, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, headed by Labour schmoozer Trevor Phillips, swallows £70million a year and employs 525 staff.
The quango was established in 2006 through a merger of three previous bodies: the Commission for Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission. As usual in the elitist public sector culture, where much of taxpayers' money is treated with contempt, the annual expenditure of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is almost 50 per cent higher than the total budget of all three predecessor bodies combined.
Reflecting the Commission's climate of self-indulgence, salaries have risen by 25 per cent over the past two years - this at a time of deepening recession across the country. No fewer than 28 of the employees earn more than £50,000-a-year and three receive over £100,000.
Profligacy is endemic. The Commission squanders £ 5.5million a year on public relations and, in its first three years, spent more than £3.5million on consultants, despite a large complement of its own pen-pushers.
Ken Livingstone's GLC was infamous for the way it doled out grants to certain politically favoured groups, and the EHRC is exactly the same. The sums doled out to recent recipients from its £10million Strategic Funding Programme are eye-watering. The Derbyshire Friend Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Special Support and Advocacy Services organisation was awarded £393,000. The Lesbian And Gay Foundation was awarded £264,000. Women In Prison was given a grant of £280,300. Ethnic Alcohol Counselling in Hounslow received £120,000.
Travellers' groups have also done well - £114,000 has gone to the Cardiff Gypsy and Traveller Project; £150,000 to the Leeds Gypsy and Traveller Exchange; and £40,000 to the Friends, Families and Travellers in West Sussex to give them 'the confidence to participate actively in the life of the community'.
One of the largest recent grants was the £258,300 dished out to a body called The British Institute of Human Rights, which is headed by barrister Katie Ghose, who used to work for the Labour MP Greville Janner. In her eagerness for judicial activism in support of a radical agenda, Ms Ghose is all too typical of metropolitan elite that loathes traditional Britain. A trustee of the gay pressure group Stonewall, she has also been a leading figure in the outfit called Bail for Immigration Detainees, which campaigns against the detention of asylum seekers and migrants.
As usual with the politically correct brigade, Ghose's definition of human rights does not encompass the rights of taxpayers. In August 2007 she wrote an incredibly patronising article in the Guardian about the decision, on human rights grounds, not to deport from Britain Learco Chindamo, the killer of the headmaster Philip Lawrence. Ghose dismissed the public outcry over the decision as nothing more than 'hysteria' and then, turning to Lawrence's widow Frances, who had expressed her outrage, wrote: 'A more fitting legacy to her husband would be to engender a real understanding of what human rights are about.'
Interestingly, Ghose was employed as a member of the Government's task force which advised on the creation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission - the very Commission that turned out to be so generous towards her own organisation.
The Commission enjoys not just lavish funding, but also tremendous powers under a raft of legislation such as the 2000 Race Relations Amendment Act, which gives all public bodies a statutory duty to promote racial equality. The role of the EHRC will be even more influential when Harriet Harman's Equality Bill becomes law. The EHRC is the chosen instrument for implementing this change, as its commissars will be able to go into any workplace and carry out equality inspections and gender audits. 'We will adopt a targeted approach to private sector organisations,' warns the Commission.
There are two particularly odious aspects to the Equality Bill. One is the introduction, for the first time in British law, of positive discrimination, whereby employers in recruitment will be required to favour ethnic minorities and women, making a nonsense of the very term equality. Second, no business will be allowed to bid for the supply of goods and services in the public sector unless it has demonstrated its commitment to multi-cultural diversity. Given that the state sector's market is estimated to be worth more than £175billion, this rule again gives enormous power to the bureaucrats of the Commission who will check for compliance.
The overtly Left-wing nature of the Commission is reflected in its membership. Almost all the 15 Commissioners are from the politically correct nexus of public bureaucracy, trade unionism and progressive politics. Indeed, more than half are active members of the Labour party. One especially notable Commissioner is Kay Carberry, who has been intimately involved with the Labour movement for over 20 years as a key trade unionist, particularly with the TUC. She is also close to Peter Mandelson, who is godfather to her son. There is one Liberal Democrat on the Commission - but not a single Conservative.
Apart from the naked political bias, what is sickening about the Commission is that it hectors the rest of society while performing so dismally itself. Again, like the erstwhile GLC, the EHRC has become a byword for waste and incompetence. In July 2009, the independent watchdog the National Audit Office severely censured the organisation for wasting almost £1million, when it re-employed seven managers who had received generous early retirement packages from the now defunct Commission for Racial Equality. The seven were given pay-offs worth £629,300 in 2007 and then were taken back days later as consultants on fees totalling £323,700, an arrangement that the Audit Office said was 'novel and contentious', failed 'to follow proper processes' and 'did not represent value for money'.
A scathing report from independent consultants DeLoitte, who had been appointed to examine the disastrous chaos at the EHRC, agreed. In language that was deliberately toned down, the report found that the board 'does not operate against clear, consistently understood rules and a common purpose'. DeLoitte further condemned the bias of the Commission. 'There is currently a lack of representation from the private sector and a need for representation from a broader political spectrum.'
But despite all the turmoil, Trevor Phillips remains in post. With the backing of new legislation, his quango will soon be more powerful than ever, the leading apparatchik of Harriet Harman's sinister new social order. Schools who have the audacity to make their pupils wear skirts should be very afraid indeed.
SOURCE
How to Stifle Speech
The fact is very few Muslim-majority countries are free countries. A Muslim who wants to speak his mind without fear, practice his religion as he chooses, and vote for or against politicians in fair elections is better off living in the West than in any of the more than four dozen nations that hold membership in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).
But even in the West, freedom is an endowment, not an entitlement. Generation after generation must have the courage to defend what we used to call, without embarrassment, “the blessings of liberty.”
That means recognizing that a war is being waged against what we used to call, also without embarrassment, the Free World. This war is being waged by an enemy many are reluctant to name: Islamists. They are fighting not only with AK-47s and I.E.D.s in such places as Afghanistan and Somalia. They also are fighting with actions, ideas, and laws in such places as Europe and America. They are fighting a pitched battle against freedom of speech — the right without which other rights cannot be protected.
And, at this moment, the West is putting up a feeble defense. We are accepting government prohibitions on the thoughts we may express, we are allowing extremists to shout us down and shut us up, and we are self-censoring out of fear or faux-sensitivity. A few examples?
Start with the Dutch government’s prosecution of Geert Wilders, a member of parliament who has expressed unfavorable opinions of the Islamic faith and the Koran. Such views may cause offense. But they cannot be criminalized in any country that values freedom.
Would anyone consider prosecuting a Muslim or an atheist for making hostile comments about Christianity or Jesus or the Bible? In 1987, Andres Serrano offended many people with “Piss Christ,” his photograph of a crucifix submerged in a container of urine. Not only was he not prosecuted, he was awarded a prize in a contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (which speaks volumes not only about American freedom but also about the tastes of the “arts community”).
And when Louis Farrakhan, after a visit to Libya, called Judaism a “gutter religion,” was there anyone — no matter how outraged — who proposed sending the Nation of Islam leader to prison?
Those who defend the prosecution of Wilders contend that his statements amount to “hate speech.” And that, they assert, is dangerous and therefore must be outlawed. They point to the existence of “hate crimes” in the United States and say it’s more or less the same thing.
But it’s not. The idea behind “hate crimes” is that the law should differentiate between someone who hits you on the head because he wants your wallet and someone who hits you on the head because you’re black, Jewish, Muslim, or homosexual. The latter, it is argued, is worse than the former and so merits additional punishment. I have always been doubtful about that proposition. But more to the point: There has been from the start the concern that hate crimes would lead where they have led in the Netherlands and elsewhere: to justifying the criminalization of thought and expression — even in the absence of any act of violence.
Meanwhile, as Mark Steyn notes, a film titled The Assassination of Geert Wilders has been produced and promoted — by a Dutch government-funded radio station. No one is being prosecuted for hate speech as a result of that.
Another battle against free speech was called to my attention by Ali H. Alyami, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia. He sent me a video of Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., at the University of California, Irvine. Alyami suggested I watch it because, he said, it represents a “threat to our freedom of expression.”
It shows a lecture hall in which Oren is to give a talk. Several students, many but not all foreign and Muslim, have taken seats around the hall. Every few seconds one rises and begins to shout at Oren. Guards lead that individual out. Oren begins again — and another individual stands up, shouts, and is led out. The goal is to prevent Oren from completing a single thought — and to prevent the audience from hearing what he has to say.
University officials insist such behavior is intolerable — but do you think they’ll actually take the tough measures necessary to prevent such brown-shirt tactics in the future? And what do such episodes say about the values the students are learning from their professors? Is there any reason to believe they — the students or their professors — understand anything about the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
One more battle to consider before I let you go: Last year, Yale University Press published The Cartoons that Shook the World, a book about the controversy over the twelve drawings ridiculing Islamist terrorism which were published in a Danish newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten, in 2005.
Soon after, the OIC demanded that the United Nations impose international sanctions on Denmark, and it circulated a dossier that contained not just the cartoons but examples of other European insults — most of which were fabricated. Especially memorable was a picture of a man wearing a pig mask, captioned: “Here is the real image of Mohammed.” It was eventually revealed that this was a photo of a Frenchman at a pig-squealing contest; nothing to do with Mohammed. Nevertheless, coupled with the cartoons, it enraged Muslims in many countries, some of whom took to the streets, rioting, setting fires, and assaulting anyone who looked European. More than 100 people were killed.
With this as backdrop, Yale decided to exclude the cartoons from the book on the cartoons, and to omit, as well, any images of Mohammed, including those by the 19th-century French artist Paul Gustave Doré and the 20th-century Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. Was that because Yale’s executives feared violence? Or, as Roger Kimball has suggested, was it out of deference to Saudi Arabian donors? Either way, it’s hard not to view Yale’s decision as an act of preemptive surrender.
The OIC, in its 1990 “Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,” declares that “Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely” — but then adds: “in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Sharia,” which is to say Islamic law as interpreted by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and other despotic members of this international religious/political alliance.
Theirs is not a different view of freedom of speech: It is a death sentence for freedom of speech. And it is what they intend not only for the lands they now rule but globally. What does it tell us that they are finding so many people in the West willing — indeed, eager — to assist them?
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 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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26/2/2010 -
Israel’s Right To Self-Defense
The headlines and video images allegedly showing Israeli spies in Dubai are titillating, but they mask the serious issues involved in the death of Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Along with predictable European hand-wringing over forged passports, this case is the latest example of the failure of the international legal system and the United Nations to provide a remedy to mass terror.
Al-Mabhouh was a cold-blooded murderer—in an interview just last year on Al Jazeera he boasted about kidnapping and then killing two Israeli soldiers. He was also a major figure in arranging arms shipments from Iran to Gaza. Al-Mabhouh shared responsibility for the thousands of rocket attacks fired at civilians in Sderot and other Israeli towns, which resulted in last year's war in Gaza. In his travels, the Hamas terrorist was probably making arrangements for the next round of attacks.
But international law provides no means for stopping terrorists like Al-Mabhouh, or for his Hezbollah counterpart, Imad Moughniyeh, whose life ended with an explosion in Damascus in 2008. (In addition to numerous attacks against Israelis, Moughniyeh has been blamed for the 1983 Beirut bombings that killed hundreds of American and French peacekeepers and the murder of Lebanese President Rafik Hariri.) Cases involving Muslim terrorists, supported by Iran, would never be pursued by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, or raised in the framework of the United Nations. Al-Mabhouh violated the human rights of untold Israeli civilians, but the U.N.'s Human Rights Council—which is dominated by such moral stalwarts as Libya, Algeria, and Iran—has no interest in Israeli complaints.
It is equally hard to imagine Interpol issuing arrest warrants in response to Israeli requests. And if warrants were issued, history shows that German, French, Belgian, and other European governments would not risk the consequences of acting on them. Little effort was ever made to apprehend the perpetrators of the Munich Olympic massacre, or of the deadly bombing attacks against synagogues in Istanbul and Athens. It's a widely known secret that European governments had ungentlemanly agreements with the PLO that allowed the Palestinians to operate from their territories, provided the terror attacks occurred elsewhere. Not until 2003 did the EU even put Hamas on its terror list. Hezbollah is currently free to operate in Europe.
The bitter reality is that for Israel, international legal frameworks provide no protection and no hope of justice. Instead, these frameworks are used to exploit the rhetoric of human rights and morality to attack Israel. In European courts, universal jurisdiction statutes, initially created to apprehend and try dictators and genocidal leaders, are now exploited as weapons in the service of the Palestinian cause. In this way, Israeli defense officials are branded as "war criminals."
Similarly, Richard Goldstone's predetermined "fact finding inquiry" into the Gaza war makes no mention of Al-Mabhouh or Iran, which supplied Hamas with over 10,000 rockets for attacks against Israelis. Mr. Goldstone and his team have remained silent about what would be the "legal" way to bring jihadi murderers to justice. In their efforts to demonize Israel, Palestinian terror actually doesn't really exist. The Goldstone team simply refused to accept conclusive Israeli video evidence of Hamas war crimes.
The same legal distortions are found among the organizations that claim to be the world's moral guardians, such as Human Rights Watch. HRW's systematic bias is reflected in a Middle East division that sees no problem in holding fund-raising dinners in Saudi Arabia—one of the world's worst human rights violators and a country officially still at war with Israel—to help finance their campaigns against the Jewish state.
In the absence of any legal remedies or Western solidarity, Israel's only option to protect its citizens from terror has always been to act independently and with force. When in 1976 a group of Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Israel-bound Air France plane to Uganda and separated the Jewish passengers, Israel decided to act. In a daring mission, it rescued all but three passengers while killing all terrorists and several Ugandan soldiers who had been protecting the terrorists. Back then, Israel's detractors also fretted about the "violation of Ugandan sovereignty" even though dictator Idi Amin was in cahoots with the terrorists. Entebbe, though, quickly became the gold standard for successful counter-terror operations. Only a year later, Israeli-trained German special forces freed in Mogadishu, Somalia a Lufthansa plane hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. Similarly, when after years of horrific suicide bombings Israel pioneered the targeted killings of Hamas terrorists—often with the help of unmanned drones—Israel's Western adversaries complained about "extrajudicial assassinations." Today, though, U.S. forces have copied Israel's technique with their own drone killings of jihadi terrorists in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.
Unlike those Predator strikes, though, which hardly raise an eyebrow in the West these days, there was no "collateral damage" in the mysterious Dubai hit. No innocent civilians were hurt, no buildings were damaged. Justice was done, and al-Mabhouh's preparations for the next war ended quietly.
All this is lost on those diplomats, "legal experts," and pundits who blame Israel for Dubai, and angrily denounce the passport infractions. In the absence of viable alternatives, and a refusal to share any of the risks, they are in no position to condemn actions aimed at preventing more terror.
SOURCE
Offensive legal niceties in Britain
Relatives of 7/7 victims offended by ‘apparent bombers’ remark
Relatives of some of the 52 victims of the July 7 London bombings protested in the High Court about a reference to their killers as the “apparent bombers”. One father addressed the court after Hugo Keith, QC, counsel to the 7/7 inquest, made his remark when referring to the four men who detonated suicide bombs on three Tube trains and a bus in July 2005.
“For more than 4½ years, the whole world has known that four sick and evil men killed 52 lovely, innocent people,” said Ernest Adams, 72, whose son James, 32, died in the explosion beneath King’s Cross.
Addressing a pre-inquest hearing, Mr Adams told the Coroner, Lady Justice Hallett: “Your inquest is not going to be about 52 apparent deaths, it will be about 52 real deaths caused by four real bombers. I find it very upsetting and insulting to use the word ‘apparent’.”
Other families echoed his concern and Mr Keith apologised for upsetting the families. The coroner added that her team would try to come up with another phrase that would not cause distress.
SOURCE
UN: Australia's Aboriginal program violates human rights
It probably does but just about everything else has been tried and there is nothing that a knowall Hispanic lawyer like the Mr Anaya can say that will help. Maybe Mr Anaya should concentrate on Mexico. He might know something about that and there are certainly plenty of human rights abuses there. Anaya has bloviated on this before. See this reply to him. Mr Anaya seems curiously unconcerned about the rights of the abused Aboriginal children. State and Federal governments of all stripes have been trying for decades to solve the problems of Aborigines, using all sorts of "solutions", and this prick thinks he is wiser than all of them after just a two-week visit. Being a Hispanic-American lawyer must give you special wisdom, I guess -- more likely a chip on your shoulder. He works for the same U.N. that constantly maligns Israel while ignoring huge Arab abuses.
I personally think that the latest initiatives will fail like all others before them. Leave Aborigines to their own devices but provide a high level of policing to protect the women and children is what I would recommend. But I have known Aborigines for years, unlike Mr Anaya -- JR
An Australian government program imposing radical restrictions on Aborigines in a crackdown on child abuse is inherently racist, breaches international human rights obligations and must be changed immediately, a U.N. official said Wednesday.
In an advance copy of a report to be released next week, the United Nations special rapporteur on indigenous human rights, James Anaya, expressed serious concerns over the controversial initiative known as "the intervention." The program forced a series of tough rules on Aborigines in the Northern Territory _ including bans on alcohol and hard-core pornography _ in response to an investigation that found rampant child sex abuse in remote indigenous communities.
"The measures specifically target indigenous people and impair certain rights and freedoms," Anaya, a University of Arizona human rights law professor, told The Associated Press. "It does impair self-determination of Aboriginal communities, their ability to make certain choices about how their communities are run."
In August, Anaya traveled to several Aboriginal communities to hear residents' concerns. His conclusions and recommendations released Wednesday are part of a larger report Anaya wrote on Aboriginal issues that will be released next week.
Aborigines make up about 2 percent of Australia's population of 22 million and are the country's poorest, unhealthiest and most disadvantaged minority. Governments have spent billions of dollars on community programs, housing and education reforms over the past few decades, but living conditions for the nation's original inhabitants remain abysmal.
In 2007, a government-commissioned inquiry concluded that child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities had grown to catastrophic levels, though it didn't provide actual numbers. The government quickly suspended its own anti-discrimination law _ the Racial Discrimination Act _ so it could ban alcohol and hard-core pornography in Aboriginal communities and restrict how Aborigines spend their welfare checks. The restrictions do not apply to Australians of other races.
The measures are "incompatible" with Australia's international human rights obligations, including the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Anaya said. Further, he said, there is no proof any of the measures have actually improved the lives of Aborigines. "Have the alcohol restrictions actually reduced consumption? There's no evidence for it," he said.
Anaya will present his report to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva in September. Australia would be given the opportunity to formally respond then.
Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin's spokeswoman Jessica Walker said in a statement that the government plans to roll out new rules for income management in July that will not discriminate based on race. She also said the government has introduced legislation that would reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act.
In August, Macklin defended the intervention after Anaya criticized the program in an address to reporters. "The most important human right that I feel as a minister I have to confront is the need to protect the rights of the most vulnerable, particularly children, and for them to have a safe and happy life," Macklin said at the time. "These are the rights that I think need to be balanced against other human rights."
Anaya believes there's a way to do both _ by giving Aborigines a say in how they can best be helped.
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Australia: Criminals get it too easy, Victoria's Justice Philip Cummins says
One of the nation's most experienced judges has attacked courts claiming they are being too soft on violent criminals. Victorian Supreme Court Justice Philip Cummins said yesterday the courts had "fallen short on sentence" in cases involving sex offences, violence, and especially domestic violence.
His sentiments were echoed by a veteran magistrate, who this week jailed a seven-time drink driver after lashing out at the leniency shown to him in previous court appearances.
Justice Cummins, 70, in his Supreme Court retirement speech to a packed courtroom of judges and lawyers, said: "I think that sentences imposed should better reflect parliamentary provision and community values." He said he had no doubt every judge respected and was concerned for victims. "(But) with sexual offences, violence, and especially domestic violence, I think courts have fallen short on sentence," he said. "Courts need to give significantly more attribution to personal responsibility and to the consequences of that responsibility," Justice Cummins said. "The even hand of justice requires that victims properly be acknowledged and properly be respected."
Courts had failed to translate respect and concern to action, leaving it to the media, Parliament, and commentators. "It was not the common law or the courts that rid us of the blight of provocation, behind which much domestic and other violence escaped its true consequence," he said.
Justice Cummins has been widely regarded as a champion of victims' rights. Last year, he made a landmark judgment that sex offenders on extended supervision orders should be identified. Yesterday he again called for open justice, saying: "Judges should not sit behind closed doors, hear parties in the absence of each other, or engage in undue pressure."
At Dandenong Magistrates' Court on Tuesday, Rodney Crisp, a magistrate for nearly 25 years, told Michael Sich the public was fed up with drink-drivers being freed on suspended sentences. He jailed Sich, 39, who has six prior drink-driving convictions but has twice been freed on suspended sentences for a year and disqualified him from driving for 10 years. "The community won't tolerate a seven-time drink driver being released. (It) could never stomach it. It would rightly lose all confidence in the system of sentencing," he said. Sich appealed but was denied bail and remanded until his appeal hearing on June 17.
SOURCE
Australia: The Leftist love of censorship again
Communications Minister's website removes references to filter
THE minister in charge of the Government's web censorship plan has been caught out censoring his own website. The front page of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's official website displays a list of topics connected to his portfolio, along with links to more information about each one. All the usual topics are there – cyber safety, the national broadband network, broadcasters ABC and SBS, digital television and so on.
All except one. It was revealed today a script within the minister's homepage deliberately removes references to internet filtering from the list. In the function that creates the list, or "tag cloud", there is a condition that if the words "ISP filtering" appear they should be skipped and not displayed. The discovery is unlikely to do any favours for Senator Conroy's web filtering policy, which has been criticised for its secrecy.
According to Google's cache records, the exception has been included on the minister's homepage since at least February 14. A message on the page says it was last updated in October last year.
Melbourne web developer David Johnson told news.com.au the code was intended to remove references to internet filtering. "The code is a quick fix," said Mr Johnson of creative agency Lemonade. "If the developers of the minister’s site had wanted to do it properly they would have placed the 'ISP filtering' keyword exclusion on the server side where it is inaccessible to the public, instead of the front-end code which can be seen by anyone and understood by people with even a basic knowledge of scripting."
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 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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25/2/2010 -
Negligent British bureaucrats arrested for once: Amazing
The sky must be falling
Three Fire Service bosses were arrested yesterday in connection with a warehouse blaze that killed four firefighters. The fire at a vegetable packing plant in Warwickshire caused one of the biggest losses of life in the history of the Fire Service. Ian Reid, 44, Darren Yates-Badley, 24, Ashley Stephens, 20, and John Averis, 27, died tackling the blaze at Atherstone on Stour in 2007.
While police refused to reveal the ranks of the three men being questioned in custody, it is understood that they are managers who played a commanding and organisational role in tackling the fire. A 43-year-old man from Nuneaton, a 49-year-old man from Leamington and a 48-year-old man from Warwick attended Warwickshire police station yesterday morning. They were questioned on suspicion of gross negligence, manslaughter and offences under the Health and Safety at Work Act.
The fire, caused by a suspected arson attack and described as “the worst night for the Fire Service in decades”, started on November 2 at the warehouse near Stratford-upon-Avon. Sixteen fire engines and eighty firefighters tackled the blaze which lasted more than five hours, with flames spiralling hundreds of feet into the air. Mr Stephens, Mr Averis, and Mr Yates-Badley were reported missing and found dead in the smouldering remains of the building after an extensive search. Mr Reid died in hospital after the plant’s roof collapsed while he was inside. It was the biggest loss of life for the service since seven were killed in a fire in Glasgow in 1972.
Last May four Poles, who had worked at the warehouse, were arrested and questioned by Warwickshire Police in connection with the tragedy.
Earlier the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) had revealed that detectives were planning to arrest three managers who were involved in the incident command process. Matt Wrack, the FBU general secretary, said at the time: “We are concerned at the move to arrest these individuals at this stage when all other key players have not even been interviewed. “Evidence from our own investigation suggests there may be systemic failings.”
The incident has been the subject of a joint investigation by the police and the Health and Safety Executive. A Warwickshire Police official said: “A 43-year-old man from Nuneaton, a 49-year-old from Leamington Spa and a 48-year-old man from the Warwick area presented themselves at a Warwickshire police station, where they will be questioned on suspicion of gross negligence, manslaughter and offences under the Heath and Safety at Work Act.”
SOURCE
Amnesty International: Not Much of a Reputation To Lose
Amnesty International has been a handmaiden of the left for as long as I can remember. Founded in 1961 to support prisoners of conscience, it has managed since then to ignore the most brutal regimes and to aim its fire at the West and particularly at the United States. This week, Amnesty has come in for some (much overdue) criticism -- but not nearly so much as it deserves.
During the Cold War, AI joined leftist international groups like the World Council of Churches to denounce America's policy in Central America. Yet human rights in Cuba were described this way in a 1976 report: "the persistence of fear, real or imaginary, was primarily responsible for the early excesses in the treatment of political prisoners." Those priests, human rights advocates, and homosexuals in Castro's prisons were suffering from imaginary evils. And the "excesses" were early -- not a continuing feature of the regime.
In 2005, William Schulz, the head of AI's American division, described the U.S. as a "leading purveyor and practitioner" of torture and recommended that President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking American officials face trial in other countries for their crimes. "The apparent high-level architects of torture," he added, "should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998." Schulz's comments were echoed by AI's Secretary General, Irene Khan, who denounced Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our times."
When officials from Amnesty International demonstrated last month in front of Number 10 Downing Street demanding the closure of Guantanamo, Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo detainee who runs a group called Cageprisoners, joined them. Begg is a British citizen who, by his own admission, was trained in at least three al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, was "armed and prepared to fight alongside the Taliban and al-Qaida against the United States and others," and served as a "communications link" between radical Muslims living in Great Britain and those abroad.
As for Cageprisoners, well, let's just say it isn't choosy about those it represents. Supposedly dedicated to helping those unjustly "held as part of the War on Terror," it has lavished unmitigated sympathy on the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, confessed mastermind of 9/11; Abu Hamza, the one-handed cleric convicted of 11 charges including soliciting murder; and Abu Qatada, described as Osama bin Laden's "European ambassador." Another favorite was Anwar Al-Awlaki, the spiritual guide to Nidal Hasan (the mass murderer at Fort Hood) and underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Anne Fitzgerald, AI's policy director, explained that the human rights group allied with Begg because he was a "compelling speaker" on detention and acknowledged that AI had paid his expenses for joint appearances. Asked by the Times of London if she regarded him as a human rights advocate, she said, "It's something you'd have to speak to him about. I don't have the information to answer that." One might think that would be a pretty basic thing about which to have information.
This level of collaboration didn't go down well with everyone at Amnesty. Gita Sahgal, the head of Amnesty's gender unit, went public with her dismay after internal protests were ignored. "I believe the campaign (with Begg's organization, Cageprisoners) fundamentally damages Amnesty International's integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights," she wrote to her superiors. "To be appearing on platforms with Britain's most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment. ... Amnesty has created the impression that Begg is not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights." For this, Miss Sahgal was suspended.
There have been a couple of voices raised on her behalf on the left. Christopher Hitchens (if we can still locate him on the left) condemned Amnesty for its "disgraceful" treatment of a whistle-blower and suggested that AI's 2 million subscribers withhold funding until AI severs its ties with Begg and reinstates Sahgal. Salman Rushdie went further: "Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty's leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong."
Rushdie is right. His only error is in believing that Amnesty's loss of innocence is recent.
SOURCE
Coast to Coast, Sidewalks Are Being Closed to Christian Evangelists
They are the heirs to John the Baptist, Paul the Apostle, and two thousand years of Christian tradition: believers who step out on city streets and openly share their faith in Jesus Christ.
Their freedom to share the Gospel on public property is a right that America's founders made sure was protected by the Constitution, but it’s a freedom under growing assault, coast to coast, from a culture that doesn’t want to be confronted, however gracefully, with the Truth.
In just one week, lawyers for the Alliance Defense Fund and our allied attorneys have risen in defense of a number of these street evangelists. In Los Angeles, we’re defending Anthony Miano, who was confronted by law enforcement officers and told he couldn’t stand on a public sidewalk in front of the San Fernando Courthouse. They ordered him to another, near vacant sidewalk across the street – even though Miano was clearly more than 100 feet from the main door of the building (as required by law) before he was approached.
“Christians shouldn’t be prohibited from expressing their beliefs in a clearly public area,” says ADF Senior Counsel Nate Kellum, who, along with local allied attorney, John Stewart, is defending Miano. “Our courts should understand this more than anyone else. This man was doing nothing other than exercising his rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to peacefully share his faith with people willing to interact with him or accept his religious literature. That is a protected free speech activity that cannot be outlawed on a public sidewalk, whether it is near a courthouse or anywhere else.”
ADF attorneys have sent a letter to the presiding judge of the Courthouse, affirming Miano’s rights.
Across the country, in Richmond, Virginia, a similar case requires a lawsuit to reclaim the same protected free speech rights for other preachers.
For two years, Rob Baird, James Lee Craft, Nathan P. Magnusen, Matthew Ray, and Ryan Walker have been politely sharing their faith around the city, on public sidewalks and at public events. Threatened with arrest under noise ordinances and trespassing laws, they’ve been urged repeatedly by police to move to more remote areas and stop “disturbing” and “offending” people.?
“Denying Christians free speech rights is a practice that the city of Richmond should put to an end,” said ADF-allied attorney Steve Taylor, of Chesapeake, who has filed suit against the city of Richmond on behalf of the men. “Americans have the right to peacefully share their faith in public areas. The Constitution does not allow anyone to be silenced simply because other people don’t like the content of the message being spoken.”
SOURCE
Defining "Victory" and "Peace": How the U.S. and Israel Reject General Sherman's Solution and Get Blamed Anyway
"War," said General William Tecumseh Sherman, "is Hell." He knew what he was talking about. Sherman's march through Georgia and into South Carolina at the end of the Civil War helped end the Civil War while destroying a lot of civilian homes, farms, and towns. His strategy was to inflict such terrible punishment on the South that it would surrender faster, thus saving lives. His men did things shocking to Americans even after such a bloody conflict, burning plantations and destroying everything in their wake. Ironically, though, even Sherman's deeds have been exaggerated.
But Sherman was no mere brute. He was so depressed by the prospect of the Civil War-being among the few who understood how long and bloody it would be-that he had a nervous breakdown at its onset and tried to escape the responsibility of service that he ultimately knew would be impossible for him to avoid. Like other Western generals of his time, and almost up to the present day--but no longer--he simply believed, in his words, "I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early [that is, complete and quick] success."
After the war, Sherman became commander of the U.S. army and said about 1870, regarding the Franco-Prussian War but it applies generally:
How are wars won? The preferred way is for one side to see that its own victory is impossible and that it will face much heavier costs by continuing than by surrendering or making peace. By making a deal sooner, the side that's losing often reasons that it can get better terms.
What do you do, though, if the other side isn't going to give up? Here's what Sherman said about the French-German conflict but which also applies to America's Civil War and many other conflicts as well:
"The proper strategy consists in inflicting as telling blows as possible on the enemy's army, and then in using the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force the government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war."
That's pretty terrible. Remember, though, that Sherman did say war was Hell. When it became clear that Japan was not going to surrender in World War Two, requiring a full-scale U.S. invasion of that country's homeland that would have left millions dead, President Harry Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. He was right to do so. The results were horrendous, heart-breaking. Yet if Truman had not taken that tough decision far more Japanese and Americans would be dead. The damage to Japan would have been so great that the country would not have recovered, if at all, until many decades passed.
Consider Sherman's analysis in a contemporary context. Western democracies, including the United States and Israel, have no desire to pursue such a strategy. If the governments did, the democratic institutions and public opinion would never stand for it. This creates a paradox: if the other side doesn't surrender, victory is impossible because that other side will not be crushed or so credibly threatened with destruction that its leaders will give in.
This is one side-the other is the nature and ideology of the enemies themselves-of asymmetric warfare. By refusing to surrender, by offering up their own civilians as casualties, by courting massive destruction, by keeping the battle going and inflicting casualties on the democratic combatants, the weaker side hopes to win. True, the radicals believe that their ideology and determination makes them stronger but there's one more factor: they count on the squeamishness of their would-be victims as being too soft, in effect too democratic.
The radicals using asymmetric warfare are wrong in thinking they can win but they are right in thinking they can't lose. The battle goes on as long as they choose, even if the democratic side doesn't give up. And sometimes it does, or at least they can still hope that it will and use that hope to inspire more sacrifice from its own people.
Consider Israel in this context. The above explains why Israel can never "win" the conflict with the Palestinians or with the neighboring Arabs or Muslims for that matter. "Win" here means to gain such a triumph that the conflict will come to an end. But Israel can "win" by reducing the cost of the conflict to itself, going on with its national life, and reducing conflict to a minimum in terms of disruptions and casualties.
Equally, the radicals can gain international sympathy and criticisms of Israel but that will never bring them actual victory, only allow them to extend the conflict indefinitely. And so, there is no peace but Israel remains the closest thing to a winner, as long as it is willing to pay a certain price, while trying to reduce that price to the lowest possible level.
I am not advocating a Sherman-like policy. No one in any position of power in Israel is doing so or has ever really done so. Aside from the moral issue, the effect on Israel's own society, and the impact on its international standing, such a step simply isn't necessary.
Compare the Israeli view to that of the creator and commander of the German army, not in World War Two under the Nazis, not even in World War One, but in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. The Germans had won but the French were waging war for a time through guerrilla forces. General Moltke ordered all French guerrillas to be shot and anyone helping them be severely punished. "Experience has established that the most effective way of dealing with this situation is to destroy the premises concerned-or, where participation has been more general, the entire village...."
A German officer wrote in 1870: "We are learning to hate them more every day....Atrocious attacks are avenged by atrocities which remind one of the Thirty Years War."
Does this have anything to do with Israeli tactics on the West Bank or Gaza Strip? Of course not, though nothing would be easier for Israel to do in terms of capability. After 50 years of conflict, Israeli soldiers don't respond the way those Germans did after five months. That's why not a single real atrocity or massacre can be found by Israel's enemies despite massive and desperate attempts to do so over many years; even despite the fact that there have been many completely documented and deliberately planned massacres of Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorists.
And this remains true despite the fact that the "atrocious attacks" Israel faces, in terms of anti-civilian terrorism, is far beyond what that German officer in 1870 could ever have dreamed possible. Remember, too, by the way that under British rule in mandatory Palestine the mere possession of a gun was punishable by death. The British executed more Jews in two years during the 1940s than Israel has hung Palestinians who killed civilians in 50 years. In fact, Israel has not executed a single Palestinian during its existence.
Fortunately, back in 1871, the French government, realizing the hopelessness of the situation, made a deal, giving up one and a half provinces and paying reparations in order to end the war. Even this did not terminate the friction between the two countries which later resulted in two world wars, though that particular peace agreement held for almost 45 years.
Still, the Franco-Prussian war example shows that even a "total victory" might be less satisfactory ultimately than what for Israel is largely a victory for all practical purposes, including at least formal peace with two of its neighbors and a de facto peace-though not necessarily a permanent one of course, with the Palestinian Authority.
Two points to conclude. First, there is nothing harder than to explain the above to a Western audience. They identify a good outcome only with a full and formal peace ending the conflict. This is, of course, preferable. But if it is impossible-and it is in an asymmetric conflict when international sympathy for the aggressive "underdog" allows it to go on getting its people killed and territory damaged for decades-than a practical "victory" is the next best thing.
Second, it is rather ridiculous to slander Israel as a "war criminal" or bully or aggressor or the factor blocking peace when the opposite is true. If the weaker side insists on being the attacker and rejecting a reasonable peaceful solution, then that supposed "David" becomes in fact the actual "Goliath."
Moreover, compared to the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there have been no massacres, summary executions, wholesale destruction of cities, large-scale looting, or anything comparable to such things.
In the attempt to smear Israel, we are now down to debating whether it was right for Israeli soldiers to shoot back at enemy combatants trying to kill them who were firing from a specific building or which ammunition should have been used in doing so. And this in a situation where the other side is subject to no limits whatsoever, indeed can be expected to target civilians on purpose and execute prisoners.
Definitely, there has been a great deal of success for groups with a long history of deliberate terrorism in lying about Israeli actions and spreading the general impression that some kind of war crimes were committed. Yet the fabrications and irresponsibility of Western institutions in doing so are far more shocking than anything that actually happened.
And finally, Israel has rejected the Sherman strategy. It is the Palestinian side, along with Iran, Syria, Hizballah, and others that have embraced it. They just lack the competence to pull it off.
In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the United States is facing parallel issues, and this will happen even more in the future. It is understandable that democratic countries have generally abandoned the Sherman approach but there is a price to be paid for doing so. What is completely unacceptable is to pay the price for restraint and then be falsely accused of acting otherwise.
At the end of the Civil War, Sherman wrote, speaking words that all democratic societies truly feel: "I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting -its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers.... It is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation."
Yet Sherman did not live to see the age of ideological warfare, no matter what the cost to their own people the radicals and Islamists do indeed call for "more blood, more vengeance, more desolution." They do so in the hope that their enemies are "sick and tired of fighting," will do anything to avoid casualties and the "anguish and lamentations," from citizens, and that fools in the enemies' camp blame the continued warfare and suffering on their own side.
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 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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24/2/2010 -
At last we know the truth: The Labour party despises anyone who loves Britain, its values and its history
Of all the issues of concern to the public, immigration is possibly the most explosive - and the one about which the most lies are continuing to be told. During the period that Labour has been in office, mass immigration has simply changed the face of Britain. The total number of immigrants since 1997 is pushing three million.
Ministers claim that immigration policy has been driven principally to help the economy. They have always denied that they actually set out deliberately to change the ethnic composition of the country. Well, now we know for a certainty that this is not true. The Government embarked on a policy of mass immigration to change Britain into a multicultural society - and they kept this momentous aim secret from the people whose votes they sought. Worse still, they did this knowing that it ran directly counter to the wishes of those voters, whose concerns about immigration they dismissed as racist; and they further concealed official warnings that large-scale immigration would bring about significant increases in crime.
The truth about this scandal was first blurted out last October by Andrew Neather, a former Labour Party speechwriter. He wrote that until the new points-based system limiting foreign workers was introduced in 2008 - in response to increasing public uproar - government policy for the previous eight years had been aimed at promoting mass immigration. The 'driving political purpose' of this policy, wrote Neather, was 'to make the UK truly multicultural' - and one subsidiary motivation was 'to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date'.
Ministers, however, went to great lengths to keep their real intentions secret from the public - with, said Neather, a ' paranoia' that these would reach the media - since they knew their core white working-class voters would react very badly. Accordingly, a report about immigration by a government advisory unit, which formed the core of a landmark speech in 2000 announcing the loosening of border controls, went through several drafts before it was finally published - and the Government's true intentions about changing Britain into a multicultural society were removed from the final version.
After revealing all this, Neather subsequently tried to backtrack, saying that his views had been twisted out of all recognition by the media. They hadn't been. Nevertheless, Jack Straw, who was Home Secretary at the time the immigration policy was changed, said he had read press reports of Neather's remarks with incredulity since they were 'the reverse of the truth'.
Now we know, however, that they were indeed the truth. We know this only because details of the advisory unit's report which were excised from the final published version - just as Neather said - have been emerging into the public domain through Freedom of Information requests. The pressure group MigrationWatch obtained an early draft which revealed that the Government's intention was to encourage mass immigration for 'social objectives' - in other words, to produce a more ethnically diverse society - but that on no fewer than six occasions this phrase was excised from the final version, published some three months later.
Now we further discover, from what was removed from seemingly another early draft, that the aim was not just to implement this policy of mass immigration without the knowledge or consent of the British people. It was done in the full knowledge that the people actually wanted immigration reduced. And we also discover that those who expressed such concerns were dismissed with utter contempt as racists - and it was further suggested that ministers should manipulate public opinion in an attempt to change people's attitudes.
Well, they have certainly tried to do that by hanging the disgusting label of 'racism' round the neck of anyone who dares voice such concerns. Thus the eminent and decent Labour MP Frank Field found himself smeared as a racist for daring to suggest that the rate of immigration should be reduced. What bullying arrogance. The real prejudice is surely to believe that opposition to mass migration can never be based on any reasonable objection.
The implications of this covert policy are quite staggering. Ministers deliberately set out to change the cultural and ethnic identity of this country in secret. They did this mainly because they hated what Britain was, a largely homogeneous society rooted in 1,000 years of history. They therefore set out to replace it by a totally new kind of multicultural society - and one in which the vast majority of newcomers could be expected to vote Labour.
They set out to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions. They set out to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another 'multicultural' identity in its place. And they then had the gall to declare that to have love for or pride in that authentic British identity, and to want to protect and uphold it, was racist.
So the very deepest feelings of people for their country were damned as bigotry, for which crime they were to have their noses rubbed in mass immigration until they changed their attitudes.
What an appalling abuse of power. Yet even now they are denying that this is what they did. Yesterday, the Immigration Minister Phil Woolas blustered that the advisory unit report had not been accepted by ministers at the time. But the fact is that mass immigration actually happened. The only thing ministers hadn't accepted was that the truth about their intentions should be revealed to the public.
Surreally, Mr Woolas further claims that the Government has brought immigration down. But the reductions he is talking about have taken place on the separate issue of asylum. The impact of the Government's new points scheme upon the record rate of immigration growth has been negligible.
The truth is that these early drafts of the advisory unit's report have blown open one of the greatest political scandals of the Labour years. At no stage did Labour's election manifestos make any reference to a policy of mass immigration nor the party's aim of creating a multicultural society. What we have been subjected to is a deliberate deception of the voters and a gross abuse of democracy.
There could scarcely be a more profound abuse of the democratic process than to set out to destroy a nation's demographic and cultural identity through a conscious deception of the people of that nation. It is an act of collective national treachery.
Now we face imminently another General Election. And now we know that in their hearts, Labour politicians hold the great mass of the public, many of them their own voters, in total contempt as racist bigots - all for wanting to live in a country whose identity they share.
There could hardly be a more worthy issue for the Conservative Party to leap upon. Yet their response is muted through their own visceral terror of appearing racist. The resulting despair over the refusal of the mainstream parties to address this issue threatens to drive many into the arms of the truly racist British National Party. If that happens, the fault will lie not just with Labour's ideological malice and mendacity, but with the spinelessness of an entire political class.
SOURCE
Why can't Britain follow Israel’s lead?
EXCUSE me for not sending flowers to the funeral of the terrorist the Israelis bumped off in Dubai. Unlike the bleeding hearts in the liberal media I’m not shedding any tears. As military chief of terrorist group Hamas, Mahmoud al Mabhouh had the blood of many Israeli soldiers and civilians on his hands. He was in charge of smuggling rockets and grenades into the Gaza Strip so his murderous gangs could lob them into Israel. He could hardly complain when a hit squad from Mossad, the Israeli security service, brought his life to a swift end. To say he had it coming is an understatement.
So why such a fuss about his execution? Why has the Foreign office twisted the arm of the Israeli ambassador? And possibly the most crucial question of all: whose side are we on, the terrorists or those with the courage to stand up to them? The Israelis don’t mess about, they don’t sit back and take it. You kill one of them and they will kill you. And afterwards they won’t explain, they won’t apologise, they won’t even deny it.
WORLD opinion means nothing – what ever London, Washington or Damascus may say the Israelis are convinced that they are right. An eye for an eye is the most basic concept of natural justice, dating back 4,000 years to Babylonian times and is promoted three times in the old Testament. Even in the New Testament Jesus says: Those who take up the sword shall die by the sword.
Did Mahmoud al-Mabhouh reflect on that as he checked in to room 230 at his posh hotel in Dubai? He was the man behind the kidnapping and killing of two Israel soldiers 21 years ago; he had been smuggling arms into the Gaza Strip; he was believed to be in Dubai to buy more weapons from an Iranian dealer. If Mossad agents came to call they were hardly there to inquire after his health.
Unlike Britain, Israel doesn’t tolerate an enemy within. It doesn’t give those who hate them free housing and welfare handouts. It doesn’t let the right of free speech enable them to preach murder on its streets.
Retribution is a vital part of Israel’s psyche. After the Second World War the Israelis spent half a century tracking down evil Nazis. When Israeli athletes were murdered at the 1972 olympics their Palestinian killers were hunted around the world and eliminated: one by a bomb in his bed, another by a booby-trapped phone.
Who can forget the electrifying raid on Entebbe in 1976 when Israeli special forces stormed a hijacked airliner, killed the terrorists and freed all but three of the hostages? It was a salutary lesson to the world.
You’d think that Britain of all countries would understand the need to pull no punches with those who have sworn to be your enemies. That’s what the SAS did in Northern Ireland for more than 30 years, taking out IRA members before they could perpetrate further outrages. It is what our special forces did in Iraq and are doubtless doing in Afghanistan.
It is what the SAS should be doing today in Somalia, where British yacht couple Paul and Rachel Chandler are being held by pirates. Can you imagine the Israelis allowing two of their people to suffer so long in some fly-blown African hellhole?
Israel has no reason to be ashamed of its actions. As Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman points out: “our security activity is conducted according to the very clear, very cautious and responsible rules of the game.” rule No 1 of course in any security activity is kill or be killed.
Where Britain has a right to be upset, however, is the way the Israelis have carried out ID theft on the passports of six of our citizens. It’s not the first time they’ve done it and last time they promised they wouldn’t do it again.
One Foreign office source says Britain could cut ties with Mossad if the Israelis have been “found to be acting against British interests”. You might think executing the would terrorist might be precisely in our interests but the career diplomats take a loftier view.
Gordon Brown says Israel has questions to answer about nicking our passports but the implication is that Britain wouldn’t be in the least bit put out if the Israeli hit squad had used fake documents from Libya, Japan, Peru – in fact anywhere other than Britain. BROWN even has the cheek to spout that “a British passport is an important part of being British”. This from a Prime Minister whose policy was to welcome millions of immigrants so he could socially engineer the country to be less British and more likely to vote Labour.
We should take no lessons either from the BBC, which for too long refused to call Hamas suicide bombers “terrorists” and hid behind weasel words like “radicals” and “militants”. Its anti-Israel bias is clear today when BBC News pontificates that Israel “may have scored a costly own goal” by using British identities for what it calls “nefarious activities”.
Make no mistake, I think a British passport is the most valuable document in the world and I don’t like it being used to gain illegal entry to another country. But my top priority will always be security and the world is undoubtedly more secure now Hamas has lost another murderer from its ranks.
SOURCE
See no Islam
Attack in Little Rock 'like other killings we have'?
Remember last June when President Obama traveled to Saudi Arabia because, as he put it, "It was very important to come to the place where Islam began and seek his majesty's counsel"? I argued at the time, gagging, that rather than visiting "the place where Islam began," the president of the United States should have gone to the place where Islam had just ended the life of a U.S. soldier. I refer to the U.S. Army-Navy recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark., where on June 1, Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad fatally shot Pvt. William Long, 23, and wounded Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, 18. The two soldiers had been standing outside having a smoke.
As usual, the president didn't take my advice, or even my further suggestion that he turn the attack into an opportunity to declare in a major address the 21st-century era of jihad over. Instead, he journeyed to lands where jihad is a sacred institution, and in Cairo, Egypt, made another speech entirely, boosting and even preaching on behalf of Islam. His only comment was to call the attack, belatedly, "a senseless act of violence." Senseless? This was an act of jihad, and both soldiers, along with the fallen and wounded at Fort Hood, should receive the Purple Hearts they deserve.
Muhammad himself has made his jihadist intentions against the U.S. military clear, beginning first with his statement to police and later in collect phone calls to the Associated Press from the Pulaski County jail. On June 9, the AP quoted Muhammad calling the attack "an act, for the sake of God, for the sake of Allah, the Lord of all the world, and also a retaliation on U.S. military."
He wasn't guilty of murder, he said, "because murder is when a person kills another person without justified reason." Such a definition jibes with Islamic law, which, for example, permits the killing of "non-Muslims at war with Muslims." Muhammad also told the AP he wanted revenge against the U.S. military for its perceived offenses against Muslims and the Koran.
We haven't heard much about the case since Pulaski County prosecutor Larry Jegley asked for a gag order on the gabby jihadi -- a step a prosecutor will take, former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy tells me, to prevent the jury pool from being "poisoned" and to ward off potential defense claims that a fair trial was not possible.
But lead prosecutor Jegley has now entered bizarro territory, telling the New York Times this week that his team, as the paper put it, "considers [the attack] a straightforward murder case and that they intend to try it without delving into Mr. Muhammad's religious conversion, political beliefs or possible ties to terrorists. 'When you strip away what he says, self-serving or not, it's just an awful killing,' said Larry Jegley... 'It's like a lot of other killings we have.'"
It is? Do "a lot" of middle-class murder defendants in Pulaski County convert to Islam in 2004 and worship at an Ohio mosque frequented by convicted terrorists in 2005 and 2006? Do "a lot" of them travel to Yemen in 2007 where, ABC News reported, "it is believed that Muhammad attended the Damaj Institute, an Islamic institute attended by a number of radicalized U.S. converts [including] John Walker Lindh? Do "a lot" get themselves arrested for overstaying their visa in Yemen and possessing a fake Somali passport? Do "a lot" finally get deported back to the States in 2008? (Bio highlights courtesy the Nefa Foundation.) Do "a lot" fire on U.S. soldiers at a military recruiting center?
I'm not the only one confounded by the prosecutor's inexplicable and highly disturbing decision to follow a see-no-Islam strategy. Muhammad himself recently wrote to the judge claiming he was encountering legal obstacles to changing his plea to guilty. Avowing affiliation with al Qaeda as a member of "Abu Basir's Army," Muhammad further emphasized the fact that the incident was a "a Jihadi Attack ... justified according to Islamic Laws and the Islamic Religious Jihad To fight Those who wage war on Islam and Muslims."
This was an act of war against the U.S. and should be treated as such. Especially for the sake of the fallen, this is no time for the prosecutor to run off the battlefield.
SOURCE
Jews leave Swedish city after sharp rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes
Sweden's reputation as a tolerant, liberal nation is being threatened by a steep rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes in the city of Malmo. Because the offenders are Muslims, the Leftist Swedish authorities turn a blind eye
When she first arrived in Sweden after her rescue from a Nazi concentration camp, Judith Popinski was treated with great kindness. She raised a family in the city of Malmo, and for the next six decades lived happily in her adopted homeland - until last year. In 2009, a chapel serving the city's 700-strong Jewish community was set ablaze. Jewish cemeteries were repeatedly desecrated, worshippers were abused on their way home from prayer, and "Hitler" was mockingly chanted in the streets by masked men. "I never thought I would see this hatred again in my lifetime, not in Sweden anyway," Mrs Popinski told The Sunday Telegraph. "This new hatred comes from Muslim immigrants. The Jewish people are afraid now."
Malmo's Jews, however, do not just point the finger at bigoted Muslims and their fellow racists in the country's Neo-Nazi fringe. They also accuse Ilmar Reepalu, the Left-wing mayor who has been in power for 15 years, of failing to protect them. Mr Reepalu, who is blamed for lax policing, is at the centre of a growing controversy for saying that what the Jews perceive as naked anti-Semitism is in fact just a sad, but understandable consequence of Israeli policy in the Middle East.
While his views are far from unusual on the European liberal-left, which is often accused of a pro-Palestinian bias, his Jewish critics say they encourage young Muslim hotheads to abuse and harass them. The future looks so bleak that by one estimate, around 30 Jewish families have already left for Stockholm, England or Israel, and more are preparing to go.
With its young people planning new lives elsewhere, the remaining Jewish households, many of whom are made up of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, fear they will soon be gone altogether. Mrs Popinski, an 86-year-old widow, said she has even encountered hostility when invited to talk about the Holocaust in schools. "Muslim schoolchildren often ignore me now when I talk about my experiences in the camps," she said. "It is because of what their parents tell them about Jews. The hatreds of the Middle East have come to Malmo. Schools in Muslim areas of the city simply won't invite Holocaust survivors to speak any more."
Hate crimes, mainly directed against Jews, doubled last year with Malmo's police recording 79 incidents and admitting that far more probably went unreported. As of yet, no direct attacks on people have been recorded but many Jews believe it is only a matter of time in the current climate. The city's synagogue has guards and rocket-proof glass in the windows, while the Jewish kindergarten can only be reached through thick steel security doors.
It is a far cry from the city Mrs Popinski arrived in 65 years ago, half-dead from starvation and typhus. At Auschwitz she had been separated from her Polish family, all of whom were murdered. She escaped the gas chambers after being sent as a slave labourer. Then she was moved to a womens' concentration camp, Ravensbrück, from where she was then evacuated in a release deal negotiated between the Swedish Red Cross and senior Nazis, who were by then trying to save their own lives.
After the war, just as liberal Sweden took in Jews who survived the Holocaust as a humanitarian act, it also took in new waves of refugees from tyranny and conflicts in the Middle East. Muslims are now estimated to make up about a fifth of Malmo's population of nearly 300,000.
"This new hatred from a group 40,000-strong is focused on a small group of Jews," Mrs Popinski said, speaking in a sitting room filled with paintings and Persian carpets. "Some Swedish politicians are letting them do it, including the mayor. Of course the Muslims have more votes than the Jews."
The worst incident was last year during Israel's brief war in Gaza, when a small demonstration in favour of Israel was attacked by a screaming mob of Arabs and Swedish leftists, who threw bottles and firecrackers as the police looked on. "I haven't seen hatred like that for decades," Mrs Popinski said. "It reminded me of what I saw in my youth. Jews feel vulnerable here now."
The problem is becoming an embarrassment for the Social Democrats, the mayor's party. Their national leader Mona Sahlin - the woman who is likely to become the next prime minister after an election later this year - last week travelled to Malmo to meet Jewish leaders, which they took to be a sign that at last politicians are waking to their plight. After the meeting, the mayor, Mr Reepalu, also promised to meet them. A former architect, he has been credited with revitalising Malmo from a half-derelict shipbuilding centre into a vibrant, prosperous city with successful IT and biotech sectors. His city was - until recently at least - a shining multicultural success story, and has taken in proportionally more refugees than anywhere else in Sweden, a record of which it is proud.
Sweden has had a long record of offering a safe haven to Jews, the first of whom arrived from the east in the mid-nineteenth century. Today the Jewish population is about 18,000 nationally, with around 3000 in southern Sweden.
The mayor insisted to The Sunday Telegraph that he was opposed to anti-Semitism, but added: "I believe these are anti-Israel attacks, connected to the war in Gaza. "We want Malmo to be cosmopolitan and safe for everybody and we have taken action. I have started a dialogue forum. There haven't been any attacks on Jewish people, and if Jews from the city want to move to Israel that is not a matter for Malmo."
One who has had enough is Marcus Eilenberg, a 32-year-old Malmo-born lawyer, who is moving to Israel in April with his young family. "Malmo has really changed in the past year," he said. "I am optimistic by nature, but I have no faith in a future here for my children. There is definitely a threat. "It started during the Gaza war when Jewish demonstrators were attacked. It was a horrible feeling, being attacked in your own city. Just as bad was the realisation that we were not being protected by our own leaders."
Mr Eilenberg said he and his wife considered moving to Stockholm where Jews feel safer than in Malmo. "But we decided not to because in five years time I think it will be just as bad there," he said. "This is happening all over Europe. I have cousins who are leaving their homes in Amsterdam and France for the same reason as me."
Malmo's Jews are not the only ones to suffer hate crimes. At the city's Islamic Centre, the director Bejzat Becirov pointed out a bullet hole in the window behind the main reception desk. Mr Becirov, who arrived in 1962 from the former Yugoslavia, said that windows were regularly smashed, pig's heads had been left outside the mosque, and outbuildings burnt down - probably the acts of Neo-Nazis who have also baited Jews in the past.
He said that the harassment of Jews by some young Muslims was "embarrassing" to his community. Many of them are unemployed and confined to life on bleak estates where the Scandinavian dream of prosperity and equality seemed far away.
For many of Malmo's white Swedish population, meanwhile, the racial problems are bewildering after years of liberal immigration policies. "I first encountered race hatred when I was an au pair in England and I was shocked," said Mrs Popinski's friend Ulla-Lena Cavling, 72, a retired teacher. "I thought 'this couldn't happen in Sweden'. Now I know otherwise."
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 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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23/2/2010 -
Sick Britain again
Sex attacker freed from jail to kill mother as his human rights deemed 'more important than safety of others'
A woman was murdered by a violent sex attacker who had been released from prison just nine months earlier, an inquest heard today. Anthony Rice was on licence at the Elderfield probation hostel in Winchester, Hampshire, when he killed Naomi Bryant after they met in the city, the inquest was told. A report by the chief inspector of probation released in 2006 said probation and other officials were sidetracked by considering Rice's human rights above their duty to the public.
The hearing into the death of multiple sclerosis sufferer and mother-of-one Ms Bryant, 40, takes place almost five years after she was strangled and stabbed to death in her home by Anthony Rice. Central Hampshire Coroner Grahame Short told the jury that the cause of Ms Bryant's death had been murder but the inquest, which is expected to last up to three weeks, would look into the issues surrounding the killing.
He explained that the hearing at Winchester Crown Court would take evidence from police, probation and prison service representatives looking at Rice's release from prison and management in the community. He said: 'We will be looking at what the various authorities did or did not do to protect the public and in particular Naomi Bryant.' He added: 'This inquest is not straightforward but it is emotive. Naomi Bryant left a daughter aged 14 without a mother and her own mother lost a child. 'They will have been devastated by her death and you will feel great sympathy for them. 'You may feel revulsion at some of the evidence, you will hear evidence of a violent and sexual nature, however your duty is to find the facts and reach a conclusion.'
The inquest was told that a post mortem examination showed that Ms Bryant had been stabbed 15 times to the chest and once to the neck and had been strangled with a ligature. The cause of death was given as pressure to the neck and multiple stab wounds.
A critical report by chief inspector of probation Andrew Bridges released in 2006 found that there were 'substantial deficiencies' in supervision by probation and other officials in Hampshire. He concluded that officials were sidetracked by considering Rice's human rights above their duty to the public. Two parole requests were refused before he was released in November 2004, having served nearly 16 years. The Parole Board concluded he presented only a 'minimal risk'. The report said the 2001 decision by the board to move him to an open prison created a 'momentum towards release'.
When the decision to free him was made the board 'gave insufficient weight to the underlying nature of his risk of harm to others'. Rice was then put under the supervision of the Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements, designed to manage violent offenders in England and Wales.
Detective Inspector David Crouch, of Hampshire Police's major crime department, told the hearing that Ms Bryant suffered from multiple sclerosis and was also an alcoholic who was well known in Winchester. He said: 'She had been a regular drinker for most of her adult life, she was what is commonly known as an alcoholic. 'She had a distinctive style of dress, a local character, and a very nice lady by all accounts.'
He described how Ms Bryant met Rice in a pub on August 13, 2005, a few days before he killed her. They met again in passing on August 17 when Ms Bryant called her daughter on Rice's mobile phone to tell her that she was going out drinking, Mr Crouch said. He added that at 7pm that evening Ms Bryant and Rice were seen walking together towards her home, where her body was found the next morning by her ex-partner and her daughter.
He said that when police arrived, they found 'a lot of blood' between the bedroom and bathroom. He added that Ms Bryant's body was found hidden under a mattress between two sections of the bed which had been pulled apart. She had been stabbed with a knife taken from the kitchen of the house. The force of the blows had caused the tip of the knife to break off, the inquest heard.
He said that Rice was arrested the following day in London where he had bought a ticket to return to Scotland, where he had grown up. Mr Crouch said that Rice confessed during police interview to the killing and told officers that there had not been a sexual motive to the crime. Rice told police that he decided he was going to kill her simply because he had a 'deep set anger inside him', the inquest heard. He also said in interview that if it had not been Ms Bryant he would have killed someone else and he had chosen her because she was 'vulnerable' and an 'easy target'. The hearing was told that Rice had said that he knew that he would be caught and go back to prison, but said that he did not care.
Mr Crouch told the inquest that Rice also confessed to attacking a woman with a brick in Southampton in April 2005. He said that Rice had told police that he had gone to visit a prostitute but had become angry when she had 'ripped him off'. Rice said that he had vented his anger by hitting the woman with a brick as she walked to work and also attacked another prostitute and a vagrant. Rice was given a life sentence at Winchester Crown Court for the murder of Ms Bryant, in October 2005, with a minimum term of 25 years imposed.
The inquest was told that Rice had 22 previous convictions prior to the murder dating back to 1972 when he was aged 15. The first offences were six charges of indecent assault and were dealt with at a Dundee youth court and involved him slapping the faces of passers by and indecently assaulting some of them. In 1989 Rice was convicted of attempted rape. Mr Crouch said that as part of his conditions for release from prison, Rice was given a residential place at the Elderfield hostel where he was subject to a curfew.
He said that Rice was allowed to leave the hostel during the day and he worked at a launderette for a period and was also trying to get on to a computer training course.
SOURCE
Muslim murderers protected from execution?
Remember the case in which Faleh al-Maleki, an Iraqi-American father brutally ran over his daughter, Noor, in Arizona, then attempted to escape but was apprehended in Britain and returned to face justice?
Guess what’s just happened? The Arizona prosecutors have been scared off seeking the death penalty. Public defender Billy Little raised the specter of “How will it look for Christians to execute a Muslim?”
I kid you not. Billy Little asked the judge to “take special precautions to ensure the County Attorney’s Office wouldn’t wrongly seek the death penalty because Almaleki is a Muslim.” Little called for an “open process (to) provide some level of assurance that there is no appearance that a Christian is seeking to execute a Muslim for racial, political, religious or cultural beliefs,” referring to County Attorney Andrew Thomas’ Christian faith.
Whoa! Words fail me here. Are Christian lawyers, by definition, hopelessly biased against Muslims? This is a fact not in evidence. Is the public defender Christian? Why should this matter in America? What if the judge is Christian? Does Billy Little understand that Muslim judges do not usually prosecute men who honor murder their wives, sisters, or daughters?
But prithee pause. Allow me to take another approach. If Billy Little is that concerned with not shedding Muslim blood: Faleh al-Maleki is a Muslim who also killed a Muslim; he rode right over his daughter with a two-ton jeep. Is her female Muslim blood cheaper than his male Muslim blood? And, let’s not forget: Al-Maleki attempted to murder another Muslim woman who was sheltering his daughter.
Little also rattled his sword about the importance of keeping “religion” out of the proceeding…while simultaneously using the defendant’s religion to insist that his life be spared! In any event, even most Islamists insist that Islam has nothing to do with honor killings, that it is a tribal custom, one that existed long before Islam arose. (And, I must add, a custom which all-mighty Islam has been unable or unwilling to abolish).
Fine. Keep religion out of it if you must. Call it a dirty tribal custom. But let’s be honest. You just don’t see many Buddhists, Jews, or Christians killing their daughters because they refuse to remain in arranged marriages or because they want to lead independent lives. This was precisely why al-Maleki killed his daughter.
According to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, Al Maleki is still being charged with first degree murder, aggravated assault, and two counts of leaving the scene of a serious accident.
So: Why have the prosecutors backed down? Has the same politically correct culture that has so fatally infected the American military (Fort Hood, etc.) infected the prosecutor’s office as well? Are Arizonians unconsciously guilty about living on indigenous Apache and Navajo land and see al-Maleki as a symbol of indigenous cultures?
I am not a huge fan of the death penalty; it is applied in racially biased ways and innocent people have been executed. And yet: Do the prosecutors really believe that being sentenced to life in prison (as an “honorable” man) will deter the next dishonorable honor killer in our midst, to whom his miserable, misogynist concept of “honor” is more important than life? Certainly, far more important than female life.
SOURCE
A black man who does not play the victim game
In December 2001, the Toyota Motor Corporation held a public meeting at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with racial activist Jesse Jackson. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss Toyota's "Twenty-First Century Diversity Strategy," a ten-year program worth some $7.8 billion in contracts for minority-owned businesses. At even a casual glance, the program seemed a capitulation to Jackson, who had threatened to call for a black boycott of the carmaker over some ads that he deemed racist. Toyota's denials that it had given in to racial extortion rang unconvincing.
Also in attendance that day was another black minister named Jesse--the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson. Peterson is the staunchly conservative head of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, or BOND, which is dedicated to "rebuilding the family by rebuilding the man"--educating males, mostly black males, about personal strength and responsibility. Peterson is also Jackson's sworn nemesis and calls him, among other things, a "racist demagogue" and a "problem profiteer." For two years prior to the Toyota meeting, he'd been holding rallies declaring Martin Luther King, Jr. Day a "National Day of Repudiation of Jesse Jackson." So when it came time for the Q&A, Peterson asked Toyota's reps if BOND could apply for its grants without joining Jackson's Trade Bureau at an entry fee of up to $2,500.
"All hell broke loose in the room," Peterson writes in his book Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America. "Several blacks got up and started screaming obscenities at me." Jesse Jackson denounced "some parasites who want to pick up apples from trees they didn't shake." When Peterson tried to leave the meeting, he claims that Jesse's son Jonathan confronted him and shoved him in the chest, while others surrounded him, shouting obscenities.
Peterson sued, claiming that Jesse Jackson threatened him and that Jonathan assaulted him. The jury split 6-6 on the assault charge, and it was settled out of court. A lengthy 6-6 split on the other charges ended when, according to the Los Angeles Times, three jurors, still professing to believe Peterson, surrendered to the argument that he hadn't proved his claims. Though Jesse Jackson had to admit under oath that his Trade Bureau played a role in distributing the Toyota grants--and though he acknowledged the "parasites" remark--he and his son walked away largely unscathed.
I couldn't help but think of Jesse Jackson when I visited Peterson at BOND recently. I couldn't help but think of Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, with its monumental marble headquarters in Chicago and branches in major cities around the country. BOND's offices, by contrast, are in a shabby storefront sitting amid furniture stores, gas stations, and billboards in a flat and dispiriting stretch of L.A.'s Mid-City West section. Whereas Rainbow/PUSH reportedly receives double-digit millions in corporate grants and sponsorships, BOND gets by on about half a million dollars a year in mostly private donations (though some money comes in from Toyota since the 2001 brouhaha). Its Home for Boys, a gabled house in a pleasantly leafy residential neighborhood nearby, can hold eight residents at a time, with some sharing rooms. That, along with BOND's After-School Character Building Program, which takes on ten to 12 kids for six to nine weeks, represents an effort no larger than, say! , a church Sunday school: about 70 boys have graduated from both programs so far. BOND chapters begun in Flint and Lansing, Michigan, have had to close down for lack of funds.
But if BOND is austere, it nonetheless provides Peterson with a platform from which to speak his indomitable piece. The building includes a rudimentary chapel--a cross, a podium, maybe 30 office chairs--where he preaches to a small congregation every Sunday (the sermons are later posted on his website and YouTube). There's also an admirably equipped studio from which he puts on a radio and Internet call-in show five mornings a week. As BOND's president and CEO, he makes regular TV appearances with Fox News stalwarts Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity (who serves on BOND's advisory board). He also writes a no-holds-barred column on the popular conservative Christian website WorldNetDaily, and he makes occasionally raucous speaking appearances, including a recent debate at Yale University in which he denounced affirmative action, to predictable hisses from the Yale Political Union.
Still, the contrast between Jesse Jackson's wealth and fame and Jesse Lee Peterson's relatively modest circumstances seems an object lesson in the fate of competing narratives and identities. The great social thinker Shelby Steele has written that to "be black" in America requires the wearing of a mask. Either you are a "challenger," like Jackson, who essentially tells whites: "I judge you racist until you do something--such as giving me money--to prove otherwise." Or you are a "bargainer," like Barack Obama, who says, "I will not use racism against you, if you will not use race against me."
But Jesse Lee Peterson will not "be black" in that sense at all. "The 'Black Experience' is a myth used to control people," he has written. His approach to the problems facing America's entrenched black underclass is profoundly personal. And his comparatively marginal place in the culture raises the possibility that, for a public black in America, to be a man only is to be a man alone.
Most black Americans are suffering not because of racism but the lack of moral character," Peterson tells me. We are sitting in his office in BOND's cramped second story. It's a threadbare space: cheap desk, cheap chairs, some books on cheap shelves, some photos of friends and BOND graduates hanging on the off-white walls or propped against them. "About 50 years ago, the government came in under Lyndon B. Johnson, and it said to black people, 'We're gonna take care of you. You can't make it because of racism. But you can't have a father in the home, you can't have a man in your home.' " He's alluding to welfare systems that subsidized single mothers and thus discouraged marriage. "And many black people decided to go with that, and they took the fathers out, and the government became the daddy of the family. And the so-called civil rights leaders became the head of the people . . . and they have managed to brainwash, dumb down, and demoralize the people for their own perso! nal gain."
Like many outspoken conservatives, Peterson is only noticed by the mainstream media when he makes statements that are, I suspect, purposely calibrated to shock and annoy them: "Thank God for slavery" (because it brought blacks out of Africa to America) and "Barack Obama hates white people." Like many black conservatives, he is subject to continual name-calling and racial slurs. One man even pulled a gun on him when he recognized him in a restaurant, Peterson says, and others have threatened violence against the radio stations that run his show. But in appearance and behavior, at least, he doesn't fit the firebrand mold. He's a slender man of average height with a relaxed, quiet aspect. A cleft palate, not repaired until he was in his teens, left him with a slight speech impediment, and he has developed a careful manner of speaking, not ferocious at all, not even in the pulpit. He is self-effacing and humorous and notes his own lapses in grammar and eloquence by telling me! simply and without apology, "I didn't get a great education." He is scrupulously direct and thorough when answering questions, and his worldview is strikingly coherent and precise.
Like Steele--who provides both a blurb and a frontispiece quotation for Peterson's autobiography, From Rage to Responsibility--Peterson decries the transformation of the civil rights movement from a principled appeal to the American creed to a politicized shakedown of guilt-ridden whites. He condemns the government subsidies of single motherhood that have helped set loose a plague of black illegitimacy and its attendant plagues of generational poverty and crime.
SOURCE
Australia: Token jail sentence for a violent black
Sounds like "multicultural" bulldust to me. I wonder what the victim thinks of it? Apparently unlawful carnal knowledge ("Statutory rape") is OK if you are black too
A VIOLENT man convicted of a series of horrific assaults on a 15-year-old girl he held prisoner has been freed from jail because he is an Aborigine. The Herald Sun reports the Court of Appeal ruled that participating in a Koori Court, where offenders discuss their crimes with a judge and Aboriginal elders in a room that has been traditionally "smoked", can lead to a lighter sentence.
Court president Justice Chris Maxwell and Justice Peter Buchanan said the 18-month minimum term imposed on Steelie Morgan, 26, was manifestly excessive because he took part in a "sentencing conversation" about his crimes. "His active participation in the process was a factor that mitigated punishment," the court said. "The sentencing conversation is designed to further the reformation of an Aboriginal offender through a unique blending of Aboriginal customary law and the English common law." Morgan has served seven months of the term but the appeal judges said the rest of the sentence should be wholly suspended.
During a 10-week reign of terror Morgan, of Moama, subjected the girl, who was his under-age sexual partner, to a series of attacks, where she was bashed, stabbed, humiliated and held captive. He threatened to kill her, smashed a full plastic water bottle over her head, threw a knife at her, which struck her on the neck, and bit her nose. Morgan made a weapon of a water hose and repeatedly struck her on the legs, threw a heavy tool, cutting her head, and forced her to stay in a bedroom for nearly a month.
Morgan pleaded guilty at La Trobe Koori Court to eight counts of causing injury intentionally, two of assault, one of making a threat to kill and one of false imprisonment.
The offences occurred between December 2007 and March 2008 and each count of intentionally causing injury carries a 10-year maximum term. After he was caught Morgan "sought reconciliation with his indigenous heritage", the court said. Justices Maxwell and Buchanan said Morgan was shamed by admitting his crimes before Aboriginal elders.
SOURCE
Australian "aid" to Pacific Island countries is a disaster
An army of well-paid advisers keep the Pacific poor
Taxpayers should be extremely concerned that egregiously high salaries are paid to aid-funded advisers, not because they are earning more than the Prime Minister but because the aid is being wasted. Capacity building has not merely failed to get Pacific islands to grow, but is responsible for their lack of development.
Some of these advisers do a reasonable enough job, though many do too little to earn any salaries. Many of the useful ones, for example, in finance departments, are not advisers at all. They manage budgets and expenditures. The islands have thus avoided the inflation and excessive borrowing of previous decades. But countries cannot develop unless their own nationals learn by doing. Nationals may initially make more mistakes than advisers, but only by actually doing a job without someone looking over their shoulder can a cadre of public servants be created. Yet 30 years after independence, key public service posts throughout the islands are held by expatriates. Solomon Islanders welcomed the pacifying functions of the Regional Mission to the Solomons, but they now seethe with resentment because they have no role in their own country. There is also almost no indigenous private sector in the Pacific. Australian expatriates dominate large business and the professions and Chinatowns handle the luxury trade that caters for them. In Fiji, which relied least on expatriates, they are flocking back. They are now Chinese rather than Australians.
Most of the Pacific graduates trained in Australia do not seem to be working in the Pacific. They resent advisers in positions they could fill that are being paid salaries they can earn only by working abroad. They find jobs in international organisations or the Middle East. In Papua New Guinea particularly, stratospheric expatriate salaries are justified by the personal danger arising from the violent crime that has grown steadily despite 30 years of advice.
Progress is inverse to the number of advisers. There are relatively few advisers in Samoa, which pulled itself together in the 1990s to achieve a decade of low but steady growth. Advisers are most numerous in the Solomon Islands and PNG where standards of living for more than 80 per cent of the population remain at bare subsistence level. Women work in the gardens struggling to get some cash crops to the market. Boys and men hang around smoking ganja and drinking beer. There are no jobs. There is no running water or electricity. Women give birth in the bush. Literacy is estimated to be 25 per cent, principally in urban areas. The more enterprising lads drift to towns where there are also no jobs. Crime is the realistic alternative. In Port Moresby and Lae, expatriate triads run gangs of Raskol that manage the breaking-and-entering, gambling, prostitution and illegal immigration. They probably earn more than the Prime Minister of China.
Capacity building runs in tandem with the UN Millennium Development Goals that have been adopted by AusAID. Capitalist development pursued by Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, up to a point even Indonesia, China and India - where there is not an expatriate in sight - has been abandoned. The Millennium Development Goals reject rigorous education, hard work, savings and investment that lead to improvements in living standards, for the socialist objectives of abolishing hunger (which the Pacific has never experienced), postmodern education that has empowered Pacific children but not taught them to read, write or count and minimal health targets that are clearly not going to be achieved. Tragically, a demographic transition to lower population growth is being achieved in PNG by the high death rates of the HIV-AIDS epidemic.
As Peter Bauer saw in the 1950s in Africa, aid supports elites who live comfortable lives while most of their peoples remain in poverty. The Pacific elites send their children to international schools or to boarding schools in Australia. Expatriates support golf and tennis clubs, cafes and restaurants. Locals are encouraged to steal to keep up with these Joneses.
Pacific islands have rich agricultural land and forests, marine resources and minerals. Their beauty is legendary so they are ideal for tourism. The Pacific has received more aid per capita than any other region in the world.
Barnaby Joyce may not be across the development literature but he can smell a rat. Australian aid to the Pacific indeed has been an example of transferring funds from low-income earners in Australia to high-income Pacific elites.
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 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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22/2/2010 -
Innocent Brits could have lives wrecked by Big Brother vetting "checks"
It's reminiscent of the "trials by accusation" that prevailed in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia: No checking for truth so very open to abuse by nasty people. It's a totally non-judicial system that can nonetheless hand out very damaging punishments. British justice is obviously long dead
Innocent teachers and nurses could be banned from working with children because of their attitudes or lifestyles. Workers judged to be lonely and to have a chaotic home life could be barred from working with vulnerable people, even though there is no evidence that they pose a risk, according to guidelines from the Government's new vetting agency. Decisions about staff will be taken by officials who have never met them, based on details passed on by their employers.
Experts claimed that the "Big Brother" approach meant innocent people could have their careers wrecked on the basis of cruel rumours or ill-informed moral judgements.
The row is the latest controversy to hit the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), which was set up to vet millions of people working with vulnerable people. The Government announced a watering down of the scheme in December in the wake of a public outcry over plans to force adults who give other children lifts to clubs and sports events to undergo criminal records checks and register with the ISA.
Since October, employers have been under a legal duty to refer staff to ISA for assessment if children or vulnerable adults who they work with are considered to have been harmed or put in danger. Controversially, managers have also been told to pass on names of staff they have prevented from working with vulnerable people for fear they could "pose a future risk" - even though no incident has occurred.
Guidance seen by The Sunday Telegraph, which has been given to more than 100 case workers at the ISA reveals that those referred could be permanently blocked from work if aspects of their home life or attitudes are judged to be unsatisfactory. It says case workers should be "minded to bar" cases referred to them if they feel "definite concerns" about at least two aspects of their life, which are specified in the document. It means, for example, that if a teaching assistant was believed to be "unable to sustain emotionally intimate relationships" and also had a "chaotic, unstable lifestyle" they could be barred from ever working with children. If a nurse was judged to suffer from "severe emotional loneliness" and believed to have "poor coping skills" their career could also be ended.
ISA's case workers, who have no minimum qualification or experience, make their decision about whether someone should be barred from working with children or vulnerable adults without ever seeing the person. They are expected to establish the person's relationship history and emotional state based on the file passed on by their employer.
Psychologists, professional regulators and health and teaching unions last night expressed horror over the guidance. Harry Cayton, chief executive of the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, which oversees Britain's nine health regulators, said: "My concern is that judgements are being made not on the basis of facts but on opinion and third party perceptions."
Dr Mike Berry, a leading forensic psychologist, described the system as "incredibly dangerous" and open to error. The expert in criminal profiling said: "These tests are so subjective; plenty of people are lonely, while others have what some might call a chaotic lifestyle. It depends who is judging." Dr Berry, a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University added: "This tool is based on a stereotype of paedophilia, based on social inadequacy, but there are plenty of people who are quite self-contained, a bit of a computer nerd, and perhaps a bit isolated who present no danger to society. Meanwhile Rose West would pass this test with flying colours."
He said the dangers in the scheme were compounded by the fact case workers had no direct contact with the person they assessed. "I think it is a major problem that the person making this decision is so distant from the case, and to the consequences of what they are doing. "They are essentially sitting in a call centre, following an automated system, and dependent on information from third parties. That in itself is very worrying," said Dr Berry.
Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: "This Government is creating a society where everyone is treated as guilty unless they are proved to be innocent. "These changes contravene any principles of natural justice and will destroy the lives of decent innocent people. Gordon Brown is creating Government by "thought police"."
Gail Adams, head of nursing at Unison, said: "We are concerned that it is a paper process, that it is subjective. "Of course we want to protect children and vulnerable adults, but you have got to get the balance right. This is more like Big Brother." Amanda Brown from the National Union of Teachers said the union was "extremely worried" about the operation of the system.
Adrian McAllister chief executive of ISA said no one would be barred purely on the basis of their lifestyle or attitude, given that all referrals had to identify either harm done, or a "future risk of harm". He said: "One of the understandable concerns we have heard from people is that they could be barred for private interests like pornography, or liking a drink. That isn't the case. "We only look at these risk factors if relevant conduct [actual harm] or a risk of harm has been identified."
Mr McAllister said he expected the "vast majority" of its cases to involve incidents where actual risk or harm has occurred, based on evidence such as a police caution, "rather than cases based on a feeling or suspicion". The organisation was unable to explain the reasoning behind its instruction to staff that definite concerns in two areas should be sufficient to be "minded to bar" staff. It would only say that the protocol follows advice from a forensic psychologist.
SOURCE
Antiwhite bigotry from CBS
Elderly white man walks away from a dispute with a young black man. Black man follows and hits white man. White man hits back. So it's the white guy's fault!
A CBS report that cites an elderly white man's "shoe-shining" remark as the trigger for a "racially tinged" transit bus altercation in Oakland, Calif., is being blasted on the network's website forum page by participants who say the black man involved "got what he deserved."
A videotape taken by a passenger on the bus reveals how an elderly white man, who at one point walked away from the argument, responded violently after being struck – apparently in the chest or neck area – by a black attacker. The black man's nose was broken and both men were checked at a hospital, authorities later confirmed.
CBS said the woman who shot the video claimed the fight was started by the white man's statement about "shining shoes." CBS quoted Ivanna Washington, who shot the video, as saying, "The white guy was asking the black guy for a shoeshine. And I guess the black guy took it as a racist comment, like, 'Why's a black guy have to spit shine your shoes?'" Her explanation was that after the white man walked away and moved to the front of the bus, the black man followed, then, "I guess he hit him across the face once. And then the white guy stands up and lets loose."
The network report cited a statement from transit spokesman Clarence Thomas that the senior man was "off his medication" but doesn't elaborate. Authorities said neither man was pressing charges.
But comments on the CBS website forum page were largely one-sided, accusing the network, which did not respond to a WND request for comment, of portraying the senior citizen as a racist. "You idiots at CBS for even making this older man look like a racist! Unbelievable! Did you even watch the video???" wrote one. Said another, "They thought that he was easy pickins they thought wrong. CBS is opening a can of worms with their anti-white biased reporting. If CBS thinks we're just going to take it they are wrong."
Other comments:
* "Did the reporters not even watch the video! What a joke! The girl recording this is just as involved in the whole fight. Screaming "pinky" let alone her behaviour throughout the whole video egging the younger guy on."
* "The bearded white man clearly acted in self defense. Shame on CBS for portraying it any other way."
* "The bothersome thing to me is how the article was written. The opening paragraph chose the wording carefully and deceptivly. (sic) The 'college student' screamed two racist slurs that somehow wern't (sic) mentioned at all while being clearly heard and helping progress the altercation. Instead the writer only mentioned her as a college student not an instigater (sic) who screamed racist comments twice…"
* "So if the transit spokesman is to believed, the elderly man certainly did an admirable job of trying to defuse the situation despite being 'off his medication'. Did this spokesman happen to mention what type of medication this was? Blood pressure medication? Prescription antacid? Viagra? What was it? It's rather disingenuous to include the item in the story without further explanation considering what that most people will automatically assume it to imply that the man suffers a psychiatric disorder even though his behavior and attempt to de-escalate the situation prior to the physical altercation suggests otherwise."
* "Race is irrelevant to this. A young person acting foolishly learned a lesson. It's actually refreshing to see a situation like this where race is irrelevant. It's just a young guy with a little too much testosterone…"
* "How about some actual thought or journalism?"
* "The black guy can't leave it alone and even after the old guy walks off still follows him up the front of the bus. The guy got what he deserved."
* "CBS, you should be ashamed and embarrassed for publishing this story with the 'skew' you portray. Tempers of both men were high, but you cannot in ANY way blame the 67 year old man for what happened."
* CBS, you are losing credibility in droves and have angered and insulted many people. This is spreading like wildfire on many message boards on the internet, and I hope it continues to do so."
The video, indeed, went viral, according to a report in the Examiner. It already has reached both the U.K. Sun as well as the Daily Mail. At the popular Armstrong and Getty radio show in California, hosts said the majority of their e-mails, including some from African-Americans, favored the older man.
SOURCE (See the original for video)
The Only Problem With Affirmative Action? Its Name!
Post below recycled from "Discriminations"
A remarkable essay by Raina Kelley, “Don’t Call It Affirmative Action,” appeared online in Newsweek yesterday. She must be some sort of columnist there, but I can’t say for sure because when I clicked on the sidebar item for the author’s biography the screen that appeared was blank.
My first thought is that I,and other readers, would have learned more if the article were blank and the biography filled in. “But I gotta tell you,” as Ms. Kelley would say, that’s not right. The article does reveal what Newsweek editors think is worth saying about affirmative action.
“As a child,” Ms. Kelley begins, I was always fascinated by the tortures inflicted in Greek mythology — Sisyphus forced to roll a boulder up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down every evening. Prometheus enduring the eating of his liver by an eagle every day. They’re just so exquisitely punitive. But I gotta tell you, writing a defense of affirmative action would have been a perfect addition to Hades’ arsenal. And “I gotta tell you” that reading her defense qualifies as an even more perfect addition.
Let’s look in some detail at Ms. Kelley’s Hades Defense of Affirmative Action.
• “One of the problems, I think, is branding.”
“Sadly,” she writes, “the phrase ‘affirmative action’ has become code for choosing unqualified minority candidates instead of qualified white people.”
This may well be true for some people, but it is not for me, and it is not for the most trenchant criticism of affirmative action. The point is not that most beneficiaries of affirmative action are not qualified; it is that that because of their race or ethnicity they are admitted or hired or promoted even though they are less qualified than one or more of their rejected competitors who received no preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity.
Nor is it true that those most disadvantaged by affirmative action are “white people.” If Ms. Kelley were aware of the data from post-Prop. 209 California and from a number of recent studies, she would know, as I pointed out here discussing some of those studies, that
Asians benefit much more than whites when racial preference policies are eliminated. In fact, the proportion of whites admitted often decreases when race preferences are curtailed. • She claims to believe that universities have a right to discriminate.
“Stanford,” she writes, has every right to compose a student body based on the qualifications it thinks will maintain its status as an elite university. If one of those qualifications is a diversity of background, so be it. Really? So, if Elite U., believing that “diversity” — especially engineered, race-based “diversity” requiring preferential treatment based on race and ethnicity — produces distracting conflicts and resentments, decided “to compose a student body” emphasizing high grades and test scores and cultural homogeneity (based loosely on the Japanese model), Ms. Kelley would simply respond by saying “so be it”? “I gotta tell you,” I don’t think so.
• She believes affirmative action “works on behalf of all people.”
Literally. That is, not that the entire society benefits from giving racial and ethnic preferences to members of certain preferred groups, but that members of all groups individually benefit from preferential treatment. A survey done last year by Quinnipiac University found that more than 70 percent of voters think diversity is not a good enough reason to give minorities preferential treatment. And that’s despite the fact that the number of people who fall under the protection of such programs has continued to grow — women, Hispanics, gay men and lesbians, the disabled, even white men have all been the beneficiaries of more inclusive hiring practices. • She does not believe that affirmative action involves giving preferential treatment to minorities. As long as people remain convinced that affirmative action is about giving minorities preferential treatment, they will also remain ignorant of the fact that affirmative action works on behalf of all people. • She doesn’t understand that affirmative became “controversial” when, and because, it abandoned colorblindness for racial preferences. Affirmative action wasn’t supposed to be controversial. In 1961 when President Kennedy issued an executive order mandating that beneficiaries of federal monies “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin,” it was a bold call to arms for the American government to walk the walk of desegregation
As long as affirmative action meant taking steps to ensure that everyone was treated “without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin,” it wasn’t controversial. It became controversial — and worse, positively offensive to many — when it abandoned the principle of colorblindness in favor of color conscious racial preferences.
• She, like many others, misunderstands President Johnson’s Howard University speech. It wasn’t until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that Lyndon Johnson expanded the mission of affirmative action: “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: ‘now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair…This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”
Back then, with the paint over the “Whites Only” signs still fresh, it made sense that a simple law, no matter how historic, would not be enough to end Jim Crow.... The fact that Kelley’s error in linking LBJ’s speech to support for racial preference is quite common does not make it less an error. As I argued here: Today we are accustomed to dealing with two very different standards to evaluate discrimination: an “intent” test, which requires finding a discriminatory intent in order to determine that a particular policy is discriminatory, and a “results” test, which does not require a finding of intent to determine that some “disparity” or “underrepresentation” is discriminatory. But that distinction had not emerged in 1965 when Johnson made his speech, and when he called for “equality as a fact and equality as a result” he did not mean proportional representation or an absolute equality of goods, money, assets, jobs, whatever that people mean today by “equality of results.”
What Johnson meant by “equality,” it is quite clear, is non-discriminatory equality of opportunity. The evidence? For starters, the very next sentence in Johnson’s speech, after the oft-quoted passage quoted above, states: For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities — physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness. [Emphasis added] True, Johnson then says in the next sentence that “equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough,” but in the remainder of the speech he does not really specify what more is needed, other than various forms of assistance there is no reason to assume would be conditioned on skin color as opposed to need.
Next, three months after his Howard speech, Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 which required “affirmative action” of government contractors. But note how “affirmative action” was defined:
The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. [Emphasis added] • She describes affirmative action as pro-active prevention of, or perhaps restitution for, discrimination that might occur in the future. Affirmative action is not about giving African-Americans now the 40 acres and a mule their enslaved ancestors never got. It is about creating opportunities for the minority that the majority might be tempted to keep for itself. It might; it might not. Whatever. And it provides premature restitution to individuals who have not yet suffered any injury, paid for by other individuals who have not been found to have done them any wrong.
• She believes racial discrimination (in the form of racial preference) must continue because racial discrimination still exists.
And while there has been a vast improvement in race relations since 1964, I don't think anyone believes all our problems surrounding discrimination and bias have been solved. Hundreds of people have climbed to the top of Mt. Everest, but that doesn't make it accessible. • She believes that “diversity” begets “accessibility.”
Your guess about what this means is as good as mine, but here is what Kelley says: Accessibility in the workplace, in schools, and everywhere else comes out of diversity. Having a diverse workforce or student body does have benefits. Maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t. But it clearly has costs, which Kelley does not mention.
• She is convinced that “diversity” (which “is just a syonym for melting pot”) will dispel prejudicial stereotypes. It’s hard to think black people are inferior if they’re sitting next to you in freshman English or in a conference room. Again, maybe; maybe not. If Princeton Prof. Thomas Espenshade (who favors affirmative action) is right in his finding that [c]ompared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis[,] then after sitting next to minority students in a freshman English class white and Asian students might come out of that class with prejudices they lacked when entering, or if they entered with those prejudices they might well find them confirmed and not dispelled.
• She believes that opposition to affirmative action can be reduced or eliminated by changing its name. But rather than patiently explaining that the aim of affirmative action is not to toss white men out on the street or proving that I deserve all the opportunities I’ve been given, I propose changing the name to “employment equity,” the phrase they use in Canada. Or at least some kind of wording that says: “This isn’t about demonizing white men, stealing their jobs, and giving them to knuckleheads. This is about fairness.”
If I were polite, I would refrain from saying that the level of argument in this essay does little to suggest that Ms. Kelley deserves the opportunity she’s been given to write essays in Newsweek.
Kelley and others can attempt to dress up racial preference with fancy clothes like “equity” and “fairness” all they want to, but “I gotta tell you”: racial preference by any other name is still racial preference.
UPDATE
In a comment on Ms. Kelley’s article (Page 3 of the comments, 19 Feb. at 8:29 AM), Roger Clegg makes similar criticisms, except both better and more succinct).
The arrogance and folly of unchecked good intentions
Writing from Australia, David Burchell says good intentions are not enough -- in a meditation inspired by a pipsqueak Green/Left politician who has done a lot of harm -- killing four people and endangering many others
PERHAPS the most beautiful and disturbing meditation ever voiced on the tragic character of modern politics, Politics as a Vocation, was delivered almost a century ago in another world from ours, among the bare whitewashed walls, wide-eyed Byzantine icons, slender Moorish windows and dusty sunbeams of the University of Munich, then consumed in the death-throes of World War I. Pressing on the great sociologist Max Weber's heart as he spoke was an agonised awareness of the great catastrophe already unfolding in Germany: the great tragic ballet in which the far Left and the far Right, locked in their fatal dance of mutual hatred, dragged the entire civilisation of Europe down into the flames.
Attempting to understand why so many people were willing to draw Europe into the abyss for the sake of imagined utopias they didn't seriously believe in, Weber was moved to compare the visionaries of his day to the early followers of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount or Moses' tablets, believers in an absolute ethic that brooks no compromise and focuses only on ultimate ends. To the followers of this creed, "if an action of good intent leads to bad results", the responsibility must lie with the world, or with the stupidity of others.
By contrast, Weber suggested, mature political leaders have to be content with an ethic of responsibility, one that takes into account the "average deficiencies of people" and holds itself responsible for its mistakes.
At our best we may manage to combine both ethics, so that the grand cause and the steps along its way are equally visible to us. Most often, though, the final goal is shrouded in life's moral mist.
Watching Environment Minister Peter Garrett's other-worldly television performances last week amid the dying fall of the government's home insulation program, I found Weber leaping to my mind. Here, after all, is the minister who best lays claim to our contemporary Sermon on the Mount: the preservation of the planet, seen as the overarching political good. Here is a man who incarnates the notion that a good conscience can overcome all political ills; the conviction that "from good only comes good, but from evil only evil follows", in Weber's words.
And yet here, at the same moment, is a man who seems constitutionally incapable of accepting any personal responsibility for one of the great public policy follies of the past decade and who seems, to all appearances, strangely emotionally detached from its human consequences. If there was ever an example of how an unquestioned good heart and political irresponsibility of the most abject kind can travel hand in hand - like two heedless child-lovers out of a Medieval chivalry romance - surely this is it.
It is humbug to suggest - as Garrett continues to suggest - that his scheme has been laid low by the machination of shonky operators or the negligence of half-trained operatives. Patently, there would have been no fly-by-night insulation firms and no army of semi-trained labourers in the first place but for a decision to throw billions of dollars of public money, holus-bolus, towards the creation of a new and for all practical purposes unregulated industry without any apparent concern for the consequences.
Nor is it credible to blame the existing safety standards of state governments when their creators could hardly have imagined the industry would grow 30-fold within a few months.
Curiously, in his interviews Garrett neglected to mention that the proposed replacement scheme will be subject to a rigorous independent assessment. But then, signalling a belated return to good governance might amount to a confession of error. And for our granite-faced modern Moses, that would never do.
By the normal measures of prudent governance it ought to have been obvious that the business of combining our largest ever stimulus package with a vast wish-list of public infrastructure programs and improvised environmental remedies was laden with peril.
As a stimulus package it is probably too large and too lengthy, because of the competing policy demands generated by it and because of the impossibility of cutting off the fiscal tap once so many undertakings have been given. At the same time, as a public infrastructure program it is too improvised, too spontaneous and too nakedly political. To save the planet, fill up schoolyards with new buildings, prime the pump and lock in the electoral support of Ute-Man all at once is a virtuous circle of vertiginous complexity. In the end, it is an invitation to irresponsibility.
Of all the grand literary creations of Old Labor - the romantic, quixotic Labor of the 1970s, with its endless litany of self-justifying mythologies - none is more elegiac or more eye-opening than Graham Freudenberg's classic biography of Gough Whitlam, A Certain Grandeur. Penned in the mordant, sententious tones of Roman imperial historians, it relates the fall of Whitlam as a kind of grand tragedy, replete with heroic but flawed characters and the inscrutable hand of fate.
Writing about the notorious loans affair that finally brought Labor to the abyss, Freudenberg conveys the impression that the disaster had only two causes: the grand but sadly flawed personality of Labor's minerals and energy minister Rex Connor and the diabolical malignity of Labor's enemies. On the question of whether a federal minister ought to secure a personal budget line by borrowing billions on the security of the Reserve Bank through a dubious business intermediary, in the ignorance of most of his colleagues and against the furious opposition of Treasury, Freudenberg is elegantly silent. Indeed, he does not even trouble to tell the reader what the Middle Eastern loans were supposed to be for, let alone whether they were necessary. All that matters was Connor's goal of building a great nation. This is the Sermon on the Mount reduced to a farce.
From this seemingly forgotten low-water mark of Australian public policy, I'd suggest we can infer the following moral. When you abandon the ethic of responsibility for a troubling and unstable combination of high moral rectitude and low political cunning, you expose yourself to the dizzying prospect of the abyss. And once you begin to fall, there are no handholds.
At present - in parts of its infrastructure planning, several of its environmental programs, much of its pseudo-support for hybrid automobiles and more or less the entirety of the National Broadband Network - contemporary federal Labor is tiptoeing close to the edge. It's time to step back again on to economic terra firma.
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 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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21/2/2010 -
British social workers only care about hurting ordinary people. They don't care about real child abuse
It's the Marxist inversion of values: The bourgeoisie are the problem, not the underclass. Contrast the story below with the specious reasons given by social workers for removal of a child that headed up yesterday's posts on this blog. A child that is at no demonstrable risk is removed but a child in dire peril is left where it is. The social class background makes the difference. Believe me now about the Marxist values taught in social work schools?
Haringey Council allowed a second "Baby Peter" case to occur more than a year after the first, then "buried" it, it can be revealed. A second young boy, only a few months older than the murdered Baby Peter Connolly, suffered serious injuries while supposedly under the protection of Haringey social services in mid-August 2008. His mother was subsequently arrested for assault.
Although the boy - known as "Child Y" - survived, he spent weeks in hospital. Despite promises of improvements after Baby Peter's 2007 death, a serious case review into Child Y found many of the same failings that allowed Peter to be killed. The damning review, by social work consultant Sally Trench, has been quietly published on an obscure website without any form of public announcement. It was accessed by The Sunday Telegraph after a tip-off from a senior source involved in child protection in Haringey.
The review catalogued dozens of contacts Child Y had with official agencies before his injury. It said it was "perplexing" that "practitioners, managers and professional networks apparently make the same mistakes over and over again". It added: "This serious case review has several key issues in common with those of recent Haringey serious case reviews."
After Baby Peter's mother and her boyfriend were convicted of causing his death, in November 2008, Haringey's then director of social services, Sharon Shoesmith, was dismissed. She is currently fighting a High Court action for unfair dismissal, claiming her sacking was unjustified, but the further evidence of her department's failings is unlikely to help her case.
Child Y was born in March 2006 to Ms Y, who was only 15 years old at the time, and an 18-year-old father, Mr T, described as a "serious and prolific offender" who had already served three custodial sentences for violent crimes while still a minor. Ms Y had accompanied Mr T on some of his crimes and had received three criminal supervision orders, the first when she was 13. Haringey considered the case, but decided to allow the couple to keep the baby.
In the months after Child Y's birth, the review says, Mr T "severely attacked" Ms Y on at least five occasions. As with Baby Peter, the police, GPs and probation service were closely involved with the family but Haringey had by this stage stopped contact and "Y was not seen by a social worker or health visitor for many months."
After Mr T attempted to rape Ms Y in the presence of the child, leading to further police intervention, Haringey finally drew up a child protection plan, but the review says that, as with Baby Peter, "several parts of the plan were not implemented and in fact the details of who was looking after [Child Y] were often unclear."
In August 2008, when Child Y was just over two years old, Ms Y was arrested after bringing him in to North Middlesex Hospital with a badly fractured thigh. Doctors found that the boy's injuries were "not consistent" with the explanation given by Ms Y, that he had fallen while jumping on a bed, and were "likely to be a non-accidental injury". After he was released from hospital, several weeks later, Child Y was taken into care. It is not clear whether his mother has yet been charged or tried for causing the injury amid doubts about the strength of the medical evidence.
The review said that until the injury, Haringey social services took the "mistaken view" that the risk to the child was "low level". In fact, it said, the risk was "significant" and "considerable" and this should have been obvious to the council. It also said that information about the family was not properly shared between agencies such as GPs, social services and police, a key failing also identified in the Baby Peter case. "Agencies generally worked in 'silos', making it difficult to achieve a full picture of the risks," the review said.
The review said Haringey social services' response to Y's birth was "insufficient" and its assessment of the danger of keeping him with his parents was "inadequate" and "tended to underplay areas of risk". The social workers handling the case changed frequently, it says, and there was inadequate supervision, in a further echo of the Baby Peter case.
Baby Peter was found dead on 3 August 2007 at the age of 17 months. A post-mortem found that he had eight broken ribs, lacerations and bruising. It later emerged that he had had at least 60 contacts with official agencies. The serious case review into his death identified a series of failings and the council promised improvements. However, the Child Y case suggests that even a year after the Baby Peter tragedy the improvements had not been delivered.
The review into the Y case did not even begin for several months after Y's injury and did not conclude until autumn 2009. Some time between then and last week it was placed on the publications page of the Haringey Local Children Safeguarding Board website, but the case has received no publicity until now.
Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, said: "I have never heard of this case until you told me about it. "It is really shocking that something that bears all the hallmarks of what happened in Baby P can go wrong again in Haringey. "Haringey, of all boroughs, needs to be upfront about these problems. The whole problem with Haringey is its tendency to close ranks and bury embarrassing information. "Every time they promise things have changed and they haven't changed. If this happened in 2008, it's a disgrace that it's only come to light now."
Cllr Lorna Reith, cabinet member for children and young people, said: "We have accepted all the recommendations of the review and are addressing the issues identified by the local children's safeguarding board. "These improvements form part of our wider programme of work that is well under way to bring the standards of our children's service up to the level of the best, to ensure families and children in Haringey get the support they need."
SOURCE
The hypocritical British Leftist elite
Conservatives don't believe in equality but Leftists claim to
Class is an illness from which this country seems unable to recover. No sooner had new Labour soothed us into feeling better, murmuring that we were all middle class now, than old Labour spread the old infection of class resentment: listen to Gordon Brown’s jibes about the playing fields of Eton and his threats of class-war electioneering. And just as David Cameron tries to persuade us that we are all in this together, an old Tory nincompoop reminds us that we aren’t. We are still in two different compartments.
Sir Nicholas Winterton, the Conservative MP, made an astonishing protest against proposals that MPs should no longer travel first class on trains. His explanations were beyond parody: he said he felt it was quite wrong for MPs to have to travel with the rest of us as it would make it impossible for him to work, and it would put chaps such as him “below” local councillors and local government officials and even, for heaven’s sake, below army majors.
Besides, the rest of us in standard class are “a totally different type of people”. That at least is a relief to my feelings — I wouldn’t want to be at all like Winterton — but his explanations could not fail to irritate. “I didn’t say they weren’t as good, but they are in a different walk of life. They are doing different things. Very often they are there with children.” ...
However, although it took a silly, superannuated Conservative to remind us of all this, what is truly despicable is that Labour is no better. Since 1997 new Labour ducks have taken easily to the waters of state-subsidised privilege, as of right; they are just as keen on paddling round designer duck houses and rabble-excluding moats as any Tory booby. “The many, not the few” — that’s what they claim to stand for.
In fact they’re quite content to let the many do the standing while they themselves sit without a hint of self-reproach in the quiet comfort of first class, both literally and metaphorically. They are not even embarrassed by the phrase.
We have a government — and, more widely than that, a centre-left establishment in the public services — that gives every impression of being obsessed with inequality. We are lectured constantly by new Labour about the evils of social exclusion, the lasting damage done by real inequality, the social malaise that follows social injustice, and the central importance of imposing equality by law — complete with an ambitious Equality Bill. The Conservatives do not disassociate themselves from this rhetoric — quite the reverse.
Yet, over 13 years in office, this same political class has left in place, on the country’s state-subsidised, public-service trains, the astonishing notion of first class — a notion that is an offence against the idea of equality. And (with some honourable exceptions) it is happy to travel first class at the expense of the low-paid and the poor.
Admittedly, there are some people who do need special treatment, for reasons of security or perhaps of sanity — pop stars, the Queen, a few secret agents and the prime minister. Then there are those who just want special treatment and can pay for it out of their own money. But if there is little or no need for special treatment, and if — as with train tickets — the cost-benefit ratio is daft, then there can be no possible reason the taxpayers should bear the expense of it. Equality is, or ought to be, good enough for most people.
I never travel first class (apart from buying an occasional £5 weekend upgrade in the past). But I have often walked through first-class compartments on my way to steerage, wondering what sort of people could afford to sit in them, and I can confirm Winterton’s point that they are stuffed full of public servants who are not paying for their own seats. Local authority workers, BBC apparatchiks, politicians, civil servants and armies of quangocrats are there, squandering vast sums on the tiny advantages that a first-class seat has over a standard quiet seat.
What is so remarkable is the unthinking sense of entitlement. You might have expected it from some of the worst grandees of the past but not, surely, from present-day public servants. Altogether, this is an odd way to carry on for those whose working lives are spent in the aggressive pursuit of equality in every form — through statutory equality agendas, new equality legislation and the mind-numbing equality rhetoric adopted so aggressively by all political parties. First-class rail tickets for dedicated egalitarians are a comic example of cognitive dissonance.
What’s really going on, I think, is that the nature of class war has changed. The old virus has mutated. The old social and political divisions have given way to two new classes — rather as on the trains. Those in economy are most of us, paying for the comforts of those in first class. And those in first class are the new political class — all those who owe their advancement and their security and their pensions and their privileges not to their backgrounds or their talents, or even necessarily their political parties, but to the state and our taxes.
Member of the first class are various, from the Tony Blairs to the Wintertons, but whatever they say about equality, they are in fact united in defence of their right to their privileges and to having their own undemocratic way.
And in his strange cry of complaint Winterton was speaking not just for the old order, but also for the new first class. It is this class that is the new cross-party adversary of the good society, but, just like the old class virus, it will be hard to fight.
SOURCE
Narcissism and Your Family
Deeply embedded in today's culture, narcissism has crept into our children's mentality like a thief in the night, actually robbing them (and everyone around them) of much dignity and happiness.
Young people spend hours every day updating their Facebook pages, post and e-mail countless pictures of themselves, and plug their ears with music to create a self-indulgent existence shut-off from everyone around them. I recently went online and viewed the page of a friend-of a-friend-of a-friend-of my daughter's on Facebook and discovered literally hundreds of pictures of the girl posing like a super model.
Where are our children learning to be so obsessed with self? From adults, of course. In 2006, Time Magazine voted "You" as the "Person of the Year". And why not? Peruse the popular magazine covers and they are all about indulging in your own desires and fantasies. Just watch television for a couple of hours and you'll walk away feeling as if you owe it to yourself to have an affair, spend lavishly on yourself, and be your "own man" at the expense of everyone else.
And then there's the American obsession with pornography - the ultimate objectification and degradation of other human beings. Men, women girls and boys are all there for your personal pleasure in millions of websites, advertisements, shows and publications.
Just look at the economic mess we are in. Too many spent way beyond their means on trinkets and toys and demanded the best when their budgets could afford what was "only" good enough. They bought homes and cars and gadgets a plenty, with the swipe of an interest-only loan or a "special low introductory rate" credit card. America is largely an entitlement society where we demand that the government provide us with health-care, retirement, and a comfortable life, with no concern of who will pay for Utopia.
And then there is the phenomenon of abortion on demand, without apology, through the ninth month of pregnancy. Have all the sex you want, with whomever you want, and if you get pregnant, just "terminate" it regardless of how the father may feel. And the baby? What baby? It's just tissue - remember? How convenient. Our kids see our selfish, irresponsible ways and learn the lesson, 'It's all about me."
When our culture is all about "My body, my career, my choice, my, my, my, what is a parent to do? Thankfully, we've known the answer all along: Practice the Golden Rule. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
The wisdom in this biblical admonishment is so self-evident that it is universally admired - but tragically, rarely followed. It is the basic tenant for successful human relationships, the economy, personal finances, you name it. Imagine the good that could accomplished, the human suffering that would be replaced with human achievement, if we treated others with the dignity and thoughtfulness we ourseleves crave.
The two greatest gifts we can give our children are to teach them to love God with all that is within them, and to love their neighbors as they love themselves. Here are five easy ways to start:
- Invest time in your kids, rather than being obsessed with your own career, hobbies or whims.If your kids see that you are not concerned about them enough to sacrifice your own desires and pour into their lives, how will they ever learn to pour into others?
- Be a role model. Considerate, well-mannered, thoughtful children come from parents who exude those behaviors themselves.
- Share stories of kindness. Start seeking media that teach what is highest and best, that glorify human decency instead of depravity.
- Be generous. You may not be rich, but everyone can be generous with their time and talents. There's nothing more selfless than giving to someone who can't possibly ever repay you.
- Practice 'Random Acts of Kindness". Think of something nice to do for someone else - and then do it. Consistently.
Narcissism eventually leads from self-love to self-loathing. But living the Golden Rule is a powerful way to spread joy, improve the human condition, and develop true self-respect.
SOURCE
Tea Party Movement vs. Elites
The most recent media attacks on the Tea Party movement have some of their populist defenders nervous. Bill O’Reilly on his February 16 broadcast, following the publication of a New York Times article, asked Sarah Palin this question:
"Do you think the birther people should have a place at the Tea Party table…do you see the danger if that becomes the headline…?"
The danger of the “birther” question is irrelevant because the elitist Times will always find something that they can use to try and discredit anyone who isn’t liberal. And if there is a crowd of a thousand tea party protesters the media will canvas all of them until they find one willing to say something objectionable. The Times has even done that unfairly to O’Reilly in the past. The reality is that when the Times or the rest of the elite media attacks regular Americans, Tea Party or otherwise, it doesn’t discredit the people - it further marginalizes the liberal media.
The Times article in question was almost a parody itself. It was thick with drama about angry people being drawn into conspiracy theories that the Times believes were long ago discredited: “Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists... In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites” says the Times.
Of course that nutty conspiracy theory has been discredited repeatedly by George Soros, former directors of Goldman Sachs and Italian automaker Fiat.
Among the other conspiracy theories the Times says were long ago dismissed was the belief that if liberals were allowed to they would elect a president with links to Marxist terror groups such as the Weather Underground and its founder Williams Ayers or an admitted Communist such as Van Jones or a disciple of Saul Alinsky. What a kooky notion.
The Times also warns that the Tea Party participants could prove potentially violent. The Times quoted leftist “civil rights activist” Tony Stewart saying: “When people start wearing guns to rallies, what’s the next thing that happens?”
While we are still waiting for the first victim of a violent tea partier, a Harvard graduate, liberal elitist and enthusiastic Obama supporter Amy Bishop allegedly shot and killed three of her unarmed colleagues at the University of Alabama last week. And wasn’t Unabomber Ted Kaczynski one of theirs too? Perhaps the liberal media should be investigating the dangerous left-wing militias, or as they like to call themselves, “community organizers” “labor unions” and “environmentalists.”
The Times sees a potential takeover of the Republican Party: “tense struggles have erupted over whether the Republican apparatus will co-opt these new coalitions or vice versa.”
The “tense struggles” for the Democratic Party were won by sixties radicals, but to point that out makes you a conspiracy theorists according to the Times and other mainstream media outlets.
Which is why these loose coalitions of Americans meet to try and figure out what has happened to their country; they saw the media drive the election of Barack Obama with nary a scintilla of investigation into his background, experience or who shaped the way he thinks or how he might govern. The very same media that spent years investigating George W. Bush’s early 1970’s military record. And when these so-called journalists could find nothing damaging, they simply used faked documents at a critical time before the 2004 election.
I spent years as an investigative journalist and I have no conspiracy theories about the media, but I do have an explanation for why so many distrust the media. By ignoring Obama’s past and the radical things he has done as president, from his appointments to the massive spending and “redistribution” schemes, the Times and the rest of the liberal so-called mainstream media have provoked the very conspiracy theories that they now mock. So now we are left with a broken government and an angry, cynical people, and the very elites who broke it are mocking the people for no longer trusting them.
SOURCE
Salman Rushdie: Amnesty International is morally bankrupt
THE Booker prize-winning author Salman Rushdie has accused Amnesty International of “moral bankruptcy” for working with a former terror suspect from Britain. Rushdie, whose plight was championed by Amnesty when he was placed under a fatwa by the Iranian regime for his novel The Satanic Verses, said the charity had done “incalculable damage” to its reputation by collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former inmate of Guantanamo Bay, and his organisation Cageprisoners.
His accusation follows the suspension this month of Gita Sahgal, a senior Amnesty official, who raised concerns about the organisation’s links to Begg and Islamists. “It looks very much as if Amnesty’s leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong,” said Rushdie.
Kate Allen, director of Amnesty UK, said it took criticism “seriously” but would continue to press for “universal respect” for human rights. [But some rights are more equal than others, apparently]
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 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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Examining political correctness around the world and its stifling of liberty and sense. Chronicling a slowly developing dictatorship
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Gender is a property of words, not of people. Using it otherwise is just another politically correct distortion -- though not as pernicious as calling racial discrimination "Affirmative action"
Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!
Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.
Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."
The Supreme Court of the United States is now and always has been a judicial abomination. Its guiding principles have always been political rather than judicial. It is not as political as Stalin's courts but its respect for the constitution is little better. Some recent abuses: The "equal treatment" provision of the 14th amendment was specifically written to outlaw racial discrimination yet the court has allowed various forms of "affirmative action" for decades -- when all such policies should have been completely stuck down immediately. The 2nd. amendment says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed yet gun control laws infringe it in every State in the union. The 1st amedment provides that speech shall be freely exercised yet the court has upheld various restrictions on the financing and display of political advertising. The court has found a right to abortion in the constitution when the word abortion is not even mentioned there. The court invents rights that do not exist and denies rights that do.
Consider two "jokes" below:
Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?
A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"
Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:
Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?
A. They are both religious fundamentalists"
The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".
One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.
It is widely agreed (with mainly Lesbians dissenting) that boys need their fathers. What needs much wider recognition is that girls need their fathers too. The relationship between a "Daddy's girl" and her father is perhaps the most beautiful human relationship there is. It can help give the girl concerned inner strength for the rest of her life.
The love of bureaucracy is very Leftist and hence "correct". Who said this? "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything". It was V.I. Lenin
On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.
I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.
I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!
Germaine Greer is a stupid old Harpy who is notable only for the depth and extent of her hatreds
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