9/2/2010 -
British class war based on a denial of reality
Inequality in Britain isn't down to class but brains
The National Equality Panel, set up by the Government to examine inequality in Britain, published its findings last week. And surprise, surprise: it found that there is a lot of inequality in Britain. People from poorer backgrounds do not usually achieve as much as people from richer ones.
That this is a basic fact of life in the UK is certainly true – although it is not true, as the NEP report claims, that we are significantly more unequal than most other Western countries. The differences are marginal. Even in the places it cites as egalitarian utopias, Sweden and Denmark, it is still the case that who your parents are has a very significant effect on how your life works out.
Indeed, no country anywhere comes close to the egalitarian ideal of ensuring that everyone, irrespective of their background, has exactly the same chance to succeed. And there is a very straightforward reason: people everywhere care more about themselves and their immediate families than they care about everyone else. We all devote our efforts and ingenuity to promoting our own and our families' interests rather than those of "society as a whole"; when the two conflict, we prioritise the former. That's why every attempt to achieve a society in which each person is treated in exactly the same way not only requires state coercion of the most extreme kind, but also always ends in abject failure.
The authors of the NEP report have noticed that our fondness for ourselves and our kin stands in the way of making Britain more equal. They do not want to endorse that tendency, because that might mean endorsing the inequalities that it helps to create. So instead, they imply that inequality in Britain derives less from our concern for our families than from prejudice and snobbery: people at the bottom of the social ladder are being held back because those who are higher up treat them unjustly – and if they were given a fair chance by those who select from applicants for university places or for well-paid jobs, they would do much better.
That belief is certainly widely held. But to what extent is it actually true? The most striking thing about this report is what it leaves out. In common with the other two studies of equality commissioned by the Government in the last 18 months, it does not say a single word about a factor that should at least be considered in any explanation of why some people are more successful than others: their greater intelligence. There is a mass of data which shows that the measurement which best predicts how a child will do in later life is not its parents' income, but its IQ score at the age of 10 or 11. It's not a perfect correlation – but it's a far better guide than any of the variables that the NEP report considered, such as class, gender, ethnic or religious group, or whether you went to a private school rather than the local comprehensive.
Around half of the variation between two people's income and status at work is explained by differences in their IQ. Studies of twins separated at birth and raised in very different families indicate that between 50 and 60 per cent of an individual's IQ score is down to their genes. The remainder can be affected by how you are brought up. It can be boosted if you are also raised by intelligent parents, or diminished if they don't provide an environment which is sufficiently stimulating. So smart children, born to smart parents, have a double advantage – which may be why they do so well.
Recognising the role that intelligence plays in differing levels of achievement does not mean endorsing every inequality in British society. Clearly, many of them are without any justification at all: examples include the income of some bankers and the abysmal condition of some state schools. But identifying ways for the state to tackle inequality requires accurately identifying its causes. This report fails that test, and so can't provide any useful advice on what should be done. Still, don't expect that to stop the Government constructing policies based on its claims.
SOURCE
Former British council chief, 84, arrested for assault for waving walking stick at feral youths
Sick British policing again. They hate middle class Britain
For several months, 84-year-old Graham Powell and his wife have felt frightened and 'under siege' in their own home. The couple say a gang of youths has waged a campaign of harassment against them - vandalising their car, subjecting them to verbal abuse and violence - without censure from the police. So Mr Powell was surprised when he waved his walking stick to remonstrate with one of the teenagers - and was promptly arrested on suspicion of assault.
The former council chief was forced to spend six hours in a police station being questioned by officers after the 15-year-old claimed he had been struck. Now facing a possible court appearance, Mr Powell has written to the chief constable of the force to demand answers over why no action was taken to protect him and his 74-year-old wife from the 'feral' youths.
He said yesterday: 'My wife and myself are under siege from up to ten local youths aged between 11 and 15 and the police are doing nothing about it. 'I have identified the youths but despite my complaints the police do not seem to be taking it seriously. 'It is outrageous that these feral youths believe they are beyond the law. Instead of them being arrested I am now facing standing in the dock.'
Mr and Mrs Powell say they have been virtual prisoners in their flat at Caldicot near Newport, South Wales. A series of incidents which Mr Powell has listed in his letter includes their car rear lights being smashed, and tyres let down. His wife, a former Mayor of Caldicot, has been trapped in her garage twice by youths who have jammed the door shut and on another occasion a teenager tried to drive her car away as she cleaned it.
Mr Powell, a Labour councillor and former leader of Gwent County Council, said yesterday: 'I have lived here peacefully for 31 years until recently. 'We are constantly being verbally abused whenever we step outside, youths peer into our living room and ring our door bell. 'Our kitchen window has been smeared with eggs and drawing pins have been placed upright under our doormat. 'During the recent wintry weather our letter box was filled with ice and our back door barricaded with snow. They have also threatened to cut the brake pipes on my car.'
The former railway guard also spoke of his recollection of the confrontation which led to his arrest. He said: 'I remonstrated with the youth after my wife caught him fiddling with one of the letter boxes. 'He told me to mid my own 'effing' business and punched me on the arm and tried to run up the stairs of the flats. 'I poked my walking stick through the rails to stop him and he forced the stick down with his arm. 'A few seconds later two heavy plant pots were thrown at me narrowly missing my head.'
The grandfather added: 'I was amazed when the police accused me of assault and kept me in the police station for six hours. 'I am on police bail and have to report back at the beginning of next month. My letter to the chief constable is a plea for help.' He said in his open letter to Mick Giannasi, Chief Constable of Gwent Police: 'My wife and I are desperately in need of your help in common with all those who find themselves in a similar situation. 'The problem is feral youths who appear to be beyond the law despite the ample legislation which Parliament has enacted to deal with them. 'We are constantly harassed by a group of youths who seem to be able to do what they like without fear of the law or any form of sanction or punishment.'
Comparing his situation to the experience of Fiona Pilkington, who killed herself and her disabled daughter after they were subjected to a similar catalogue of abuse, he continued: 'The boys seem to get bolder each time they do something and find nothing happens to them. 'We are left constantly wondering what his going to happen next - is it going to be a lighted petrol-soaked rag through a door or window? 'I have dialled 999 several times and officers have visited me but there has been no real action. 'Surely it is not acceptable that elderly people should feel in a state of siege in their own homes and live in fear of that the next day is going to bring.'
A spokesman for Gwent Police said: 'An 84-year-old-man was arrested following an incident on suspicion of assault. 'He was released on police bail pending further enquiries.' She added: 'Any report of crime made to Gwent Police will be fully investigated and the appropriate course of action taken. 'It would be inappropriate for us to comment further about reports made or correspondence received from a particular individual.'
SOURCE
Top Democrat goes to bat for racism
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan is outraged about the dozen staffers who accompanied U.S. Agency for International Development Director Rajiv Shah to a recent meeting on Capitol Hill. You should understand, though, that Conyers was not upset because Shah brought too many staffers along for the meeting with the 42 members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Nor was he upset because any of those staffers displayed a lack of competence. No, Conyers was "alarmed and chagrined" because, as he told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a subsequent letter, "none of the approximately dozen staff he brought with him were African American."
Conyers further informed Clinton that "this is so serious an error in judgment that it warrants his immediate demotion to a subordinate position at AID." That Conyers expects Clinton and her boss in the White House not only to demote Shah, but also to hand out federal jobs on the basis of skin color was made clear in his declaration in the same letter that "it is well known that there has long been an under-representation of minorities in key positions within the State Department. I am confident this administration will immediately begin addressing this problem."
The Michigan Democrat has thus unintentionally cast a glaring light on a key aspect of what is wrong in Washington -- too often, skin color counts more than competence. Conyers is far from alone in demanding that important jobs in the federal government be given to individuals because their skin color fits somebody's idea of the right racial mix of government workers, not because they are most qualified.
Federal officials reflexively claim people are employed in the federal civil service solely on the basis of merit principles, but the reality is government personnel management practices are besotted with multicultural obsessions about recruiting and promoting a work force that "looks like America." There are legions of human resources specialists, personnel directors, and employment lawyers devoted to keeping the bureaucratic wheels of diversity grinding. This is reverse discrimination, pure and simple.
It should be clear to all reasonable people that the vast majority of Americans today reject the racism that denies jobs to individuals because their skin is the "wrong" color or, for that matter, because their gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or economic status is deemed unacceptable by some arbitrary measure. The noble objective of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has been fulfilled in moving America beyond such considerations to a place where the only issue would be whether an individual is the most qualified for a given job. Thanks to the mentality epitomized by Conyers, our government keeps being dragged back into the past.
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Keeping Blacks Poor
How the Democratic party stands between its most loyal constituents and the jobs they need
Never mind the jobless recovery: For a great many black Americans, it’s been a jobless eternity, in good times and in bad. Why?
The first answer many economists will give to that question is: the minimum wage. Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate who spent much of his career showing how government programs reliably end up hurting those they are intended to help, was scathing on the subject, calling the minimum wage “one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.” And he’s not alone: A congressional survey of economic research on the subject, “50 Years of Research on the Minimum Wage,” has a string of conclusion lines that read like an indictment, the first three counts being: “The minimum wage reduces employment. The minimum wage reduces employment more among teenagers than adults. The minimum wage reduces employment most among black teenage males.” Other items on the bill: “The minimum wage hurts small businesses generally. The minimum wage causes employers to cut back on training. The minimum wage has long-term effects on skills and lifetime earnings. The minimum wage hurts the poor generally. The minimum wage helps upper-income families. The minimum wage helps unions.” Helping the affluent and high-wage union workers at the expense of the young, the poor, the unskilled, and small businesses: That amounts to a lot of different kinds of injustice, and it also amounts to a wealth transfer from blacks to whites.
This is a disparity with its roots in history, but the roots don’t go back to Reconstruction or the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. They go back only to the 1960s. In 1954, young black men were in fact more likely to be employed than were their white counterparts, according to the economists Nabeel al-Salam, Aline Quester, and Finis Welch. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the minimum wage, had been passed in 1938, but wartime economic regimentation had postponed its full impact. “Marginal but employed blacks were the first ones to be laid off,” says Prof. Paul D. Moreno of Hillsdale College, a labor historian. Originally modest in its scope, the act was repeatedly revised, both raising the minimum wage and expanding the range of businesses required to pay it. The act originally was restricted to interstate enterprises, but by 1961 the meaning of “interstate commerce” had been so greatly stretched that ordering a box of paper clips from an out-of-state supplier was enough to get a business covered by the minimum wage. As the application of the act grew, so did the disparity in black and white employment rates. Blacks, who had been employed mostly in smaller enterprises, often family-owned, found themselves competing on a straight dollar-per-hour basis with white entry-level workers who were on the whole better educated, better connected — and white. The racial realities of the time meant that the sorts of jobs affected by minimum-wage laws were the ones that were most open to blacks.
And it’s not just that the minimum wage prices some low-productivity workers out of the labor market: It’s that it prevents entry into the labor market in the first place for the most marginal would-be workers. If Will the candy hustler’s real economic output is worth $6.67 an hour, his implied wage on the subway, he’s unemployable with a $7.25 minimum wage. He can sell candy on the subway, but he can’t sell candy for Big Candy Corp., make connections, learn what it’s like to go to an office every day and have a boss, get references, get promoted, and sign up for the tuition-reimbursement program. And that, not the paltry lost income of a minimum-wage job, is the price he pays. Very few American workers actually earn the minimum wage — about 1 percent, in fact — but the minimum-wage job is a gateway into the labor force for many young workers. The value of your first job isn’t the money you earn from it: It’s your second job, and your third. With the right experience and network, a candyman like Will can do well for himself. But without that first job, he has a much higher chance of becoming a statistical blip on the long-term unemployment charts than a middle manager at Hershey or a salesman at Cadbury.
That’s why economists call barriers like the minimum wage “cutting the bottom rung off the ladder.” What’s less often appreciated, though, is the network effect: A guy who’s never gotten on the ladder himself cannot give you a hand up. Job-hunting is almost always an exercise in social networking: A friend of your dad helps you get a summer job, an old colleague recommends you for a position with his new firm. C up in the Bronx does not have a network like that: His friends and family are not in a position to tip him off about a job because they do not have jobs themselves, and, in some cases, never have. He doesn’t have any former coworkers to recommend him for a new and better job. All he has is economically insulated politicians telling him that no job is better than a job that doesn’t meet their political requirements.
The damage done by the minimum wage is real, but it’s not the only impediment to black employment, and maybe not even the most serious one when it comes to the big cities. Black workers in Philadelphia, for example, have long complained about being excluded from the overwhelmingly white building-trades unions, the carpenters’ and electrical-workers’ guilds that are run by a largely Irish-American coterie headed by Pat Gillespie at the Building Trades Council and John J. Dougherty Jr. (“Johnny Doc”) at the IBEW Local 98. Their unions are 80 percent white and 99 percent male, and the numbers are similar in other cities. Irritatingly for the Philadelphia politicians who are beholden to them, 70 percent of the building-trades unions’ members live out in the suburbs rather than in the city. Wilson Goode Jr., a member of the Philadelphia city council, has made black workers’ exclusion from the unions a keynote issue. He’s a deep-dipped liberal, an affirmative-action supporter and a conventional urban Democrat in almost every respect, but he has noticed the strange fact that progressive programs sold as tools to help the city’s largely black working class mostly end up putting money in the pockets of well-off white people in the suburbs. Philadelphia is a city with real black political power, but in a contest between a black city councilman working to secure good jobs for his constituents and the white union chieftains who have been running Philadelphia as a personal fiefdom since time immemorial, Wilson Goode Jr. found out who the boss is, and it’s not him.
When the unions were salivating over the prospect of an expansive new project at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Councilman Goode asked them for information about the racial composition of their work forces, and for a commitment to meet certain diversity goals. They more or less laughed at him — and got the work, anyway. “The issue of lack of diversity within the building trades came up during the convention-center project. There was no plan for opportunity in terms of diversity,” Goode says. “We made a request from the building trades that they submit their demographics to city council, and actually set goals for expanding diversity within their unions. Interesting enough, the carpenters’ union and electrical-workers’ union, which did not comply, went on to work on the project, anyway. The goals that were set within those building-trade unions were not taken seriously.” In fact, Goode says, the only times when black workers have gotten a fair shake on big projects have been those few occasions when the work is not held hostage by the labor mafia — for instance, a couple of open-shop weatherization projects conducted under the authority of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation. Goode pressed to make the convention-center project open-shop, a proposal that was immediately crushed. “Going open-shop did not seem politically feasible,” Goode says, with understatement. “The other option is the creation of new unions that have more people of color, more women, and more Philadelphia residents. And that’s probably even less politically feasible.”
The problem in the labor unions isn’t really old-fashioned racism of the white-sheets and Jim Crow variety: Philadelphia is a city with plenty of poisonous racial politics, but it’s not remarkable for them — worse than Atlanta, probably, but not as bad as Boston. What’s really happening in the unions is a kind of expansive ethnic nepotism. Unions tend to find good positions and lots of work for people who are friends and family of current union members. Indeed, many in the building trades start on the path to union membership early in life. If those unions are dominated by Irish Americans, it’s no surprise that a lot of the plums are going to the Kellys and Murphys, and not the Jacksons and Washingtons or the Garcias and Colóns. As The Economist puts it, “Blacks are also at a disadvantage when it comes to relying on friends and family connections to find jobs; there is not the same network of family businesses that whites and Latinos have. Some studies have found that this factor may explain as much as 70% of the difference in black and white unemployment rates, and may also explain the difference between black and Latino jobless rates. Among young men, for instance, the near-20% Hispanic unemployment rate is much closer to that for whites (17%) than blacks (30%).” The problem, of course, is self-perpetuating: The more blacks are out of work, and the longer they’re out of work, the less of a network black job-seekers are going to have. And they can’t count on the unions to help them out.
“The building trades were the most notorious for their discrimination,” says Professor Moreno of Hillsdale, “along with the railroad brotherhoods, which were in a class by themselves in terms of how exclusive they were. If you look at the data, especially in the building trades, and compare them to the steelworkers or the autoworkers, the worst discrimination is in the building trades. In unions that have a lot of black membership, black workers got into those industries before the unions did. Henry Ford was hiring blacks before the UAW organized them. Steelmakers, same thing. Even in the UAW and the steelworkers, they have the problem of discrimination within the unions when it comes to training for skilled work, promotions, and issues of seniority.” And it’s been that way for generations: In fact, Moreno estimates that if the National Labor Relations Board had properly enforced anti-discrimination rules against the unions starting back in the 1930s — when they were first required to do so — then there would have been no demand for affirmative action later. Instead, the NLRB became a classic captured bureaucracy, seeing its role only as empowering the labor unions while turning a blind eye to the ugly racial discrimination in their ranks.
Democrats will defend everything from partial-birth abortion to distributing gay porn in the classroom, but some subjects are too hot for them to touch: The effect of their minimum-wage enthusiasm on black unemployment is one, and racial discrimination by their organized-labor constituents is another. You’d think that the Democrats would put jobs for blacks at the top of their list — after all, black voters pull the “D” lever about 90 percent of the time. But political calculations are perverse things: Black voters are a cheap date for Democrats, who know that they can sell out the interests of their most loyal constituency with impunity. One of Barack Obama’s first actions in office was to gut a hugely popular school-choice program in Washington, D.C., that benefited black students almost exclusively, and he did so at the behest of the one of the most destructive unions in the country, one that has done more to undermine the future of black Americans than any other and whose members have inflicted more damage on black Americans than Bull Connor and George Wallace ever dreamed of. But the teachers’ unions represent one in ten delegates to the Democratic National Convention, so they have job security — something many, if not most, of the young black men in their classes will never have.
SOURCE
ObamaNet: The Coming Online Censorship
Perhaps the Obama administration and Democratic majority overestimated their ability to sell the American people on proposed radical changes to our political and economic systems, as the federal health care takeover has ground to a near halt, and an increasing number of administration officials are being exposed for far-left statists with a sinister, unconstitutional agenda.
But those in power show no signs of being bothered by something as trivial as the will of the people, and could very well continue down a planned path of disaster, moving on from health care to tackle a vital instrument of free speech. ObamaCare has turned into a nightmarish legislative struggle; will ObamaNet be the next?
Most people have never heard of Cass Sunstein, despite conservative alarm at his 2009 appointment to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The Harvard-educated regulatory czar has, in addition to proposing other ludicrous ideas, called for a hunting ban in the U.S., claimed that exposure to sunlight is unhealthy, and proposed that Americans celebrate April 15 as a sort of tax holiday. As if those aren’t enough, Sunstein is also an advocate of a federally enforced Internet “fairness doctrine.”
Claiming that the uncensored World Wide Web, on which anyone can write or read the content of his or her choice, is a threat to level-headed democratic government, he wants to impose a 24-hour cooling off period for emails (to prevent the sending of angry missives), and create mandatory “electronic sidewalks,” which would display links to opposing views alongside all opinion-based content. Somehow, it seems unlikely that these state-controlled sidewalks would link to tea party or libertarian websites.
In addition, the constitutional law professor has stated that, “under imaginable conditions,” conspiracy theories might be banned, such as those related to the Kennedy assassination, or Obama’s country of birth, and has suggested a tax, “financial or otherwise,” on those who propagate such theories. What sort of tax would fall under “otherwise?” Body parts, perhaps? Fingers for bloggers; tongues for talk radio hosts?
That’s quite a stretch, but in all seriousness, Sunstein believes the federal government should decide which conspiracy theories are appropriate, and then take action to counter those deemed to be nonfactual, marginal, or dangerous. Such an ideology, if legislated into reality, would depend on filtering substantial portions of the Web, as Communist China does with its “Great Firewall,” and would constitute a blatant violation of the First Amendment. The United States could become what is called an Internet black hole, joining the ranks of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran.
Support for such totalitarian tactics should come as no surprise to those who have uncovered similar ideas in the speeches and writings of Obama’s other hand-picked czars, who have significantly more power over policy decisions than any individual member of Congress, but it is still tempting to pinch one’s self. Surely, Internet censorship and suppression of free speech is only the province of foreign regimes, science fiction plots, and bad dreams. Right?
Don’t bet on it. This administration has shown little regard for the Constitution in its push for ObamaCare, and even less for public opinion. The increased power of the Executive Branch might mean that regulatory affairs, relating to the Internet and other forms of communications technology, could be kept out of Congress in the future, and controlled behind the scenes. It will bear a different name, and be kept as far under the radar as possible, but the coming of ObamaNet is imminent. It is up to the defenders of free speech to prevent it.
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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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8/2/2010 -
Where birth control has led
The following was sent to me by a reader. He's probably right but the horse has escaped, I am afraid
FEMALES REQUIRE RELIABLE AND RESPONSIBLE MALES TO PROTECT AND SUSTAIN THEM THROUGH THE YEARS OF BEARING AND RAISING CHILDREN.
FEMALES COMPETE AMONGST EACH OTHER FOR MALES.
IN THE ABSENCE OF ARTIFICIAL BIRTH CONTROL, FEMALES HAVE AN INCENTIVE TO REMAIN CELIBATE UNTIL MARRIAGE, AS IT RAISES THEIR STATUS AMONG THEIR PEERS AS WELL AS AMONG THE MALES THEY SEEK TO OBTAIN.
GIVEN ARTIFICIAL BIRTH CONTROL, FEMALES LOSE THE INCENTIVE TO REMAIN CELIBATE AND INSTEAD ARE INCENTIVIZED TO HAVE SEX AS OTHER FEMALES ARE DOING, AND IN THAT WAY ATTRACT DESIRABLE MALES.
EASY ACCESS TO ABORTION IS A NECESSARY COMPONENT OF THIS NEW SOCIAL PARADIGM AS THE INCREASED PREVALENCE OF CASUAL COUPLING LEADS TO AN INCREASE IN UNINTENDED PREGNANCIES.
MALES ALSO COMPETE AMONGST EACH OTHER FOR FEMALES. THEY INCREASE THIER STATUS THROUGH THE WORK THAT THEY DO AS WELL AS BY BEING ETHICAL AND RELIABLE INDIVIDUALS.
GIVEN ARTIFICIAL BIRTH CONTROL AND EASY ACCESS TO ABORTION, MALES ARE INCENTIVIZED TO HAVE CASUAL SEX WITH MULTIPLE PARTNERS AS OTHER MALES ARE DOING.
AS A RESULT, MALES BECOME DE-INCENTIVIZED TO BECOME ETHICAL AND RELIABLE ADULTS, ESSENTIAL QUALITIES OF MATURITY. ALSO, AS THEY ARE GETTING SEX WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITY DURING THEIR EARLY ADULT YEARS, THERE IS A LOSS OF INCENTIVE TO ACHIEVE THE SELF-RELIANCE AND SUCCESS IN THEIR WORK THAT THEY WOULD OTHERWISE REQUIRE SO AS TO OBTAIN A DESIRED FEMALE OF LIKE STATUS.
ALTHOUGH IT IS DIFFICULT TO DEFINE AND QUANTIFY, HAVING MUTIPLE SEXUAL PARTNERS IS EMOTIONALLY DESTRUCTIVE FOR BOTH MALES AND FEMALES.
ABORTION IS LOSE-LOSE FOR MEN AND FOR WOMEN. IT IS A NECESSARY PART OF A SOCIAL CULTURE THAT PROMOTES UNETHICAL BEHAVIOUR, SEX OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE AND MALE IMMATURITY.
Cautious support for spanking
ALL that firm but gentle persuasion and all those time-outs may have been a waste of time - you really should have been smacking your children. At least, that's a theme of NurtureShock, a US bestseller that will enrage the touchy-feely school of parenting. It's subtitled "Why everything we think about raising our children is wrong" and authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman also note over-praising can demotivate children. To work, praise must be occasional - and sincere. If you want to be a role model for your kids, the authors suggest arguing in front of them.
Most controversially, they cite new research suggesting that smacking not only has a place in child-rearing, but that it can be essential - provided it is delivered in the correct way. Based on a long-term study by Duke University's Dr Kenneth Dodge, they say the way in which parents deliver a smack will result in either an aggressive or a passive child.
With African-American families in the study, the more children were smacked, the less aggressive they became. It was seen as something that every child experienced. In white families, however, smacking was saved for the worst offences - and often when parents were angry.
Ms Merryman admitted she had yet to find a researcher who advocated smacking but said research was focused on the idea that its effect was based on its delivery: that screaming at a child out of anger can be worse than a calm, light smack. "I'm not saying either is good - it's the fact that the parent has lost control that is most upsetting to kids," she said. "Parents are the ones they are supposed to follow. "It's not a parenting manual or advice book. What we really want is to introduce new ways of thinking and new ways to approach child development. "By focusing on the scientists, it's a way . . . to have new conversations about society's approaches to raising kids."
SOURCE
Man makes a mockery of British "ageism" laws
A SERIAL litigant is believed to have earned thousands of pounds by bombarding employers with claims of ageism simply because they used the words “school leaver” or “recent graduate” in job advertisements. John Berry, 54, has initiated actions against at least 60 firms over three years even though he does not apply for the jobs. He uses the government’s tribunal service website to lodge age discrimination claims against recruitment agencies and other businesses.
Lawyers say they have complained to the Ministry of Justice that the online system — which allows numerous actions to be lodged free and with minimal evidence — needs changing. Once the firm becomes aware of the action, Berry emails his targets to warn them they can avoid an employment tribunal only by making him a “settlement” payment of up to £3,500. One small trader said: “I am not prepared to be bullied by this man. I cannot afford to pay him. We’re in a recession and I am struggling to keep the business afloat.”
To encourage companies to settle, Berry usually opts to hold the tribunal far away from where the business is based. He made a similar claim of age discrimination against a woman running a small business in the Midlands last year. He demanded £2,500, but lowered his price by £1,000 after she wrote back saying it would leave her struggling to pay her mortgage or feed her family. He wrote: “I will arrange all legal closing formalities with the tribunal in time for you to have an enjoyable Xmas without this hanging over you.”
Audrey Williams, partner and head of discrimination law at the international law firm Eversheds, said: “Under current UK law a claimant will have to show that they have actually been a victim of discrimination. Simply seeing an advert is not enough.” Berry’s claims are consistently struck out by tribunal chairmen as “misconceived” and “vexatious” but businesses can still be left with legal bills of about £9,000 because Berry ignores orders to pay costs. He has had claims struck out in London, Exeter, Bedford, Ashford, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Watford and Southampton in the past two years.
Gordon Turner, a solicitor at Partners Employment Lawyers, said: “We have found 57 such court decisions with Mr Berry’s name [on them], but that could be just the tip of the iceberg as it does not take account of all those people who chose to settle and not fight.”
Berry, who is married and lives in a semi-detached house in Downend, Bristol, repeatedly declined to answer questions put to him by The Sunday Times at his home and by email last week. Later he replied in an email: “I like many other older job seekers are (sic) suffering age discrimination here in all these issues. You are grossly misinformed about the facts.”
SOURCE
Harperson is on a crazy crusade
Harriet Harman is the deputy leader of Britain's governing Labour party
It does not take much to stir the English into a spasm of anti-Catholicism. Front-page stories declaring that Pope Benedict XVI had called on his flock to oppose the government’s Equality Bill were enough to stir 15,000 people to add their signatures to the National Secular Society’s petition opposing the pontiff’s forthcoming state visit to this country.
Even allowing for the centuries-old suspicion that the “left footers” represent some subversive papal army loyal to Rome rather than to the crown, this has been a wilful misinterpretation, not least on the part of the media. The papal address to the Catholic bishops of England and Wales — the cause of the fury — did not once refer to the Equality Bill (which inter alia sought to tighten the rules governing religious organisations’ exemptions from anti-discrimination law). The relevant passage states: “Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society. Yet as you have rightly pointed out, the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.” And that’s it.
It seems most obviously to have been a reference to laws already passed, notably those that did not exempt Catholic adoption agencies from the “anti-discrimination” requirement to accept applications from homosexual couples — as a result of which many such agencies have closed rather than face prosecution. There is, it is true, a continuous underlying conflict here: that between the demands of faith and those of secular authority, most vividly expressed in Matthew 22.21 (“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”).
While Labour abandoned the idea of the state as all-virtuous in the economic sphere — it privatised businesses that even Margaret Thatcher balked at selling off — some of its leading figures have held firm to the view that it is possible through the enforcement power of the state to improve society’s moral character. What constitutes that “better character” will also be decided by the state, of course, although it is never very clear from what its leaders’ superior moral wisdom derives, other than the very Judeao-Christian tradition whose influence they instinctively wish to relegate.
While Pope Benedict never mentioned the Equality Bill, or even Harriet Harman, it is clear that the deputy leader of the Labour party is one of the few revolutionary idealists left on the government front benches. She still believes, like a St Paul’s girls’ school Robespierre, that the state will set us free from the tyranny of individual choice and the prejudices of faith and family. Her pet project, a bill that attempts to enforce “equality” via a legally binding so-called “socio-economic duty”, is now heading for the statute book.
To read the full text of “The Equality Bill and other action to make equality a reality”, as distributed by something called the Government Equalities Office, is to enter the world according to Harriet. It all seems sweetly reasonable — until you start to think. Its prime example of what “the equality duty could mean” is the following: “In respect of age, a local council putting extra park benches in local parks so older people can enjoy public spaces as well as younger people.” One wonders what possessed those municipal authorities over the centuries to put benches in their parks. Clearly they had not been inspired by Harman’s Equality Bill to think of the needs of their elderly. Was it possible they were able to have such thoughts quite independently of government edicts?
Her document goes on to say that the Equality Bill’s “new positive action measures could mean: the board of a bank that is 100% male ... choosing a woman will help to address the gender imbalance at the top, making the management more representative of its customer base, which is 50% female”. Is it possible that such a bank is aware that its customer base is 50% female and does not need to be informed of that fact by the Government Equalities Office? Is it also possible that such a commercial organisation will do whatever it can not to discriminate against female customers, because it actually does not like to lose business? The condescension of this document is astounding, even by the debased standards of such government screeds.
The next paragraph seeks to reassure us that “positive action is not about banning certain groups” — Etonians? — “from certain jobs. It is about allowing employers to increase diversity if they want their workforce to better reflect the local community or customer base”. Oh, it’s just about allowing us to do what we want, is it? So why legislate?
There is a still more bizarre document put out by the Government Equalities Office: this one is called “The Equality Bill: impact assessment (third version)”. I have in front of me all 233 pages. It tells us that the cost of implementing Harman’s measure, in its first year, will be “between £270.4m and £310.8m”. It admits that part of this vast cost of the Equality Bill might be “additional tribunal/court cases”. No, really?
The document concedes that up to £225m of those additional costs will be borne by “1,174,945 small and medium-sized enterprises”. That’s even before you begin to work out the cost to the taxpayer directly, as all the myriad public bodies created by new Labour get their teeth into the business of enforcing the “socio-economic duty”. The document has an interminable list of the organisations that are ready to do battle against the forces of inequality, not to mention the existing acronymic strategies ready to be inflated still further (“sustainable community strategy (SCS), local area agreements (LAA), local development framework (LDF)”), and so on ad infinitum.
Yet despite all this, the impact assessment insists that the measure will save money. It asserts that the Equality Bill will save the country the sum of “£537,958,543”. How is this enormous and yet precise sum arrived at? Let the Government Equalities Office explain: “This is a benefit to society in general. This concept presumes that a more equitable distribution of resources will raise economic welfare since additional consumption by poor individuals is valued more highly than it is by wealthy individuals.”
So on one side of the balance sheet we have real money — the costs to business and the taxpayer — and on the other side we have psychic money, the financial value that Harman’s advisers have arbitrarily decided to attribute to a more equal distribution of income. No maths teacher used to telling pupils not to add apples and pears would have encountered such a monstrosity.
Besides, what makes the Government Equalities Office believe that this will be the effect of its legislation, however calculated? Last week the government’s own national equality panel (it exists) admitted that despite new Labour’s intense social engineering over the past 13 years, inequalities have increased. It also revealed some fascinating discrepancies in the average wealth of various religious/ ethnic groups. The average Sikh family is richer than the average Christian family (and the average Jewish family is richer than either). Is this the outcome of state support for the Sikh way of life? Is it because Jews have never faced discrimination? Or is because nothing can stop the rise of a social group or family if it has an appetite for hard work?
Alternatively we are asked to believe Harman’s psychic numbers, supposedly the mathematical proof that her legislation, of itself, will make Britain a better society. Whatever you think of the man in the Vatican, he has said nothing as crazy as that.
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Islamic Nazis
No one told the Islamic Nazis that they lost World War II. The former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, recently asserted that Jews in Europe had “always been a problem.” He claimed that “they had to be confined to ghettos and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived…held whole governments to ransom. Even after their massacre by the Nazis…they survived to continue to be a source of even greater problems for the world.”
Mahathir won fame in October 2003 for charging that “Jews rule this world by proxy.” In the same speech, he lamented that “the Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way….For well over half a century we have fought over Palestine. What have we achieved? Nothing. We are worse off than before. If we had paused to think, then we could have devised a plan, a strategy that can win us final victory.”
Final victory? A final solution, perhaps? Might Mahathir believe that Jews are due for one of those periodic massacres about which he spoke so approvingly?
In this Mahathir is not alone: several other Islamic leaders have spoken in similar ways recently. On January 29, Palestinian Authority TV, which is controlled by the ostensibly moderate Fatah faction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, broadcast a Friday mosque sermon containing this reference to the notorious genocidal hadith in which Muhammad said that the end times would not come until Muslims started murdering Jews: “The Prophet says: ‘You shall fight the Jews and kill them, until the tree and the stone will speak and say: “Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah”’ — the tree and the stone will not say, ‘Oh Arab,’ they will say, ‘Oh Muslim.’ And they will not say, ‘Where are the millions?’ and will not say, ‘Where is the Arab nation?’ Rather, they will say, ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah — there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews. Thus, this land will be liberated only by means of Jihad.”
Likewise, on January 12, a top Iranian official, Mohammad Hassan Rahimian, declared on Al-Manar TV: “We have manufactured missiles that allow us, when necessary, to replace Israel in its entirety with a big holocaust.”
On December 29, an Islamic cleric, Muhammad Hussein Yaaqub, said this on Egypt’s Al-Nas TV: “The Jews are our enemies. Allah will annihilate them at our hands. This is something we know for certain. We know this for certain – not because I say so, but because Allah said so. ‘You shall find that the people strongest in enmity to the believers are the Jews and the polytheists.’” That is a quotation from the Qur’an (5:82).
Ahmad Al-Barqawi, professor of philosophy from Damascus University, joined the genocidal chorus on Syria TV on December 15, 2009: “If the enemy reaches a stage in which it feels that it is paying a heavy price for its occupation – both in terms of human lives and in terms of resources – it will give up. Without this, there is no chance of reconciliation with the enemy. Therefore, I believe that the annihilation of Israel is easier than reconciliation with it. Annihilating Israel is easier than reconciling with it, because annihilating Israel through a long-term and consistent effort may bear fruit in a society that feels it is alien to this [Arab] world, and does not want to remain in a world that rejects by force.”
And on January 5, Yousuf Ahmad, head of Gaza’s Al-Faraeen TV bureau, said that Israel was “weaker than a spider web. By Allah, if the Arab nation decided to unite, the state of Israel would automatically collapse.” And if that happened, of course, wholesale massacres of Jews would be inevitable. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal made a similar statement this on Al-Jazeera on December 15: “The resistance on the land of Palestine will be victorious and will drive those Zionists out of our land. We have driven them out of Gaza, even if they continue to besiege it. We will drive them out of the West Bank and all our Palestinian land, Allah willing.”
None of this should come as any surprise. The genocidal hadith quoted on Palestinian TV is just one element of an anti-Semitism that is deeply rooted in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and which runs through Islamic history with a remarkable consistency. What’s more, as Pamela Geller has recently and exhaustively documented at AtlasShrugs.com, the notorious Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was deeply involved in the planning and execution of the Holocaust in Europe. A great admirer and friend of Adolf Hitler, al-Husseini was involved in massacres of Jews in the Holy Land in the 1930s. And in July 1946 at the Nuremberg Trials, Dieter Wisliczeny, the deputy of Nazi genocidal killer Adolf Eichmann, testified that “the Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan… He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”
Al-Husseini was drawn to his role in Hitler’s Final Solution by his loyalty to Islamic texts and teachings that demonize Jews and call for their murder. And as Mahathir and the other Muslims quoted above have shown, Muslims are still reading those texts and taking them seriously. The world yawns at this at its own risk.
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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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7/2/2010 -
You, Britain, are the breeding ground for Muslim terrorists
The Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka says the UK, not Nigeria, should be on the terrorism watch-list. He's got a point. Extremist Muslim preachers are encouraged in their hatred of Western civilization by a similar hatred among Green/Leftists -- and British Leftists are virulent haters, with Israel being a top hate-object for them.
Ever since I told the US website The Daily Beast that Britain was a cesspit and a breeding ground for fundamentalist Muslims, people have been asking me what I meant: “Why do you, a Nobel laureate, say such things? Where’s the evidence?” So let me clarify: I was responding to a question about what I thought about Nigeria, my home country, being placed on a US watch-list of states deemed to be incubators of Islamist terrorism. The listing — which puts Nigeria into a club whose members include Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen — followed the failed attack by the Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young man who boarded a plane with a bomb in his underpants.
I believe it was irrational to point the finger of suspicion at Nigeria because this young man — the so-called Christmas Day bomber — was not radicalised in Nigeria. Everything we know about Abdulmutallab suggests that it happened in London, where he went to university. The same is true of the shoe bomber, Richard Reid. And of the extremists who bombed the London Underground and the buses in July 2005. (A Nigerian was killed in those bombings.) The terrorists who primed a car found outside a London nightclub in 2007 with petrol containers, gas canisters and nails were based in Britain. If Nigeria qualifies for a place on the US list of terrorist countries then, admit it, Britain is overqualified.
The truth is that Britain has created a breeding ground for religious terrorists. I have a number of Muslim friends in Nigeria who have expressed fears that their sons, who are studying at British universities, might be caught up in Islamic fundamentalism. They are worried about the company they are keeping and by changes in their attitudes. Their children are becoming intolerant of other religions, developing a kind of holier-than-thou stance even towards their fellow Muslims. Holier, or purer, than thou — that sums up the mental conditioning. It is the beginning of a religious psychopathy that ends in bombs in underpants. One friend with a son at university in the northeast of England has not — yet — pulled his son out but he is certainly keeping a watchful eye on him. He has reason to be worried.
Where are these students developing these attitudes? Mostly off-campus in local mosques. There are so-called schools of Islamic teaching attached to mosques in certain British cities. These ghetto schools, which are often situated in innocuous places, are a real problem in Britain. You have them in many of your northern cities; you have them in London. They are not mainstream Islamic schools. What their mullahs recruit are impressionable youths who have been extracted from the regular Islamic schools and mosques and taken for special grooming for a narrower, more fundamentalist view of Islam. I do not know how many such schools there are but I have met the products of these schools in Britain. I have heard their pronouncements. I have heard them in the company of my African friends in Britain. I have heard them declare the necessity of destruction of all non-Islamic religions. Their conviction is absolute — and mindless.
On some of the many occasions I have passed through Britain I have encountered religious clerics, some preaching religious hatred. Remember that, interacting with a black man, such preachers tend to be less inhibited in their utterances. They assume — especially if they discern a critical attitude towards western society — that you must be basically sympathetic to their cause.
In 2004 I gave the BBC’s Reith lectures on the theme of a “climate of fear”. My contention was that fear itself posed the greatest danger to our society. At the question-and-answer sessions that followed the lectures, and afterwards, I was assailed by both Jews and Muslims — some genuine and objective disputants, some outright maniacal extremists. One of the most memorable encounters took place at Emory University, Atlanta. I should explain that the Reith lectures that year took an itinerant format, with the lectures delivered before live audiences across a number of cities, including some in the United States.
In Atlanta I was aggressively confronted by members of a Jewish group who remonstrated over what they considered my lack of understanding of the dimensions of the Islamist global threat.
After one of the London lectures, the chauffeur from a private car-hire company who drove me to the airport subjected me to a non-stop fundamentalist defence of 9/11. I actually felt a need to report him to his company for harassment and received an apology.
In my view, Britain has taken far too long to curb such extremes. The harvest of such long neglect is being reaped today by British society. I possess some tracts that have been passed among students by some of these hate clerics and sometimes openly preached. If they were racist in content — as opposed to “religious” — they would long ago have been stopped.
Britain has always prided itself on opening its doors to dissidents, even of the most radical nature. This tradition has its virtues: it enabled revolutionaries such as Karl Marx to study and develop radical theories of history and human society, but it also meant that during the 1970s the terrorist Carlos the Jackal moved freely in and out of Britain.
I am not condemning the idea of the open society, but alongside freedom sits responsibility. When freedom of expression is abused by the preachers of hate — either racial or religious — then the state has a responsibility to act.
I think Britain is finally waking up to this terrorist threat at its heart. But sadly the phenomenon of religious extremism is spreading to Nigeria.
When I was growing up there was harmonious co-existence between the Muslim and Christian parts of its society. That has changed drastically. In Nigeria today there are Christian fundamentalists who go out and destroy traditional African shrines. Sometimes they even join hands with Muslim extremists to destroy places of worship of traditional religions. Roaming hordes of killers in northern Nigeria are breaking into homes, dragging out people of other faiths and hacking them to death.
These things spread. One of my friends, a prominent Nigerian, has a daughter who was married to a young Muslim man in the United States. This young man would not allow any non-Muslim, including his wife’s relatives, into the house. He began by saying her family could come in only on certain days and then it escalated. In the end, of course, they divorced. The father took the daughter home. It is that kind of extreme mental conditioning that fuels religious fundamentalism and threatens world peace.
If a place can be designated — preferably in outer space — for those who believe they are so holy, their religious “truths” so absolute, that they cannot cohabit with other faiths then we should all contribute to the creation of a space armada that would shuttle all such purists to that sanctuary. Failing that, a policy of rigorous educational rehabilitation for these dislocated minds has become mandatory for the very survival of humanity.
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The problem isn’t the Pope, it’s the Vatican of political correctness
By Peter Hitchens
Actually, I am uneasy about the Pope telling us what to do. This is part of being British, or was when I was growing up. I can still recite great chunks of Tennyson’s wonderful Ballad Of The Fleet, all about Sir Richard Grenville and the little ship Revenge, with her valiant Protestant crew, fighting her unequal battle against the great sea-castles of King Philip, ‘the Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain’. I had relatives who viewed the Vatican as Babylon. I was taught at school about Bloody Mary, 400 years later still a loathed figure. Even now, I like to roll over my tongue the defiant 37th of the English Church’s 39 articles: ‘The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.’
The Pope’s warning about growing intolerance of Christianity in the British State should have been issued by the Church of England, and once could have been. But its present leaders are for the most part pretty dim, and almost all liberals – whereas Benedict is a serious thinker, a major intellect and a conservative.
Those who are outraged – or claim to be – about the Pontiff’s warning from Rome are trying to use a force they don’t really sympathise with. My anti-Catholic forebears were Cromwellian Puritans, and would have loathed the sexual revolution even more than they disliked the RC Church. And if these protesters are worried about foreign intervention in British affairs, they are looking in the wrong direction.
Harriet Harman’s ‘Equality’ Bill, a monstrous piece of far-Left fanaticism, flows mainly from the ideas of continental Marxists who knew little of Britain and cared less. And – here’s the really important bit – its planned attempt to force the Churches to hire openly homosexual employees against their will have originated in that Vatican of political correctness, the European Union.
I have the document in front of me, though our leaders have tried to keep it secret and Brussels has never officially released it. It is a ‘Reasoned Opinion’ on ‘infringement No 2006/ 2450’, signed by Commissioner Vladimir Spidla, and it orders the British Government, its subordinate, to amend the law of this country. It declares that the United Kingdom has ‘failed to fulfil its obligation to transpose correctly Articles 2(4), 4 and 9 of Council Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November 2000’. It goes on to ‘invite’ this country to ‘take the necessary measures to comply’. If we don’t, we’ll end up being ordered to act by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
Beside this peremptory stuff, it seems to me that a sermon from the Bishop of Rome is pretty small beer.
It’s not foreign interference the sexual revolutionaries are against. It’s any sort of opposition to their semi-secret elite plan to do away with traditional morality in these islands and everywhere else. So who is really interfering in our way of life?
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No respect for freedom of speech from the SPLC
The article below is from the hatemongering SPLC. They admit to "inspiring" the student brownshirts concerned
Students at Cal State Long Beach are launching a campaign against a faculty member known for his anti-Semitic writings and, most recently, for his leadership of a white supremacist political party.
Aiming to force Kevin MacDonald’s departure from the university, student activists this week began urging their peers to boycott classes taught by the longtime psychology professor. “We feel that Professor MacDonald brings a very racist ideology into his teaching,” said Marylou Cabral, a senior art education major at Cal State Long Beach who’s helping spearhead the anti-MacDonald efforts. “We believe that his personal biases are going to affect his teaching no matter what he’s teaching, and we believe that he brings a political force to our campus that we need to counter. … He’s not just an individual with hateful beliefs. He’s someone who’s making an effort to organize and promote those beliefs, and we feel that’s dangerous.”
The impetus for mobilizing students was MacDonald’s new position as director of American Third Position (ATP), whose stated mission is “to represent the political interests of White Americans.” According to in-depth reporting by O.C. Weekly, ATP is partnering with Freedom 14, a local neo-Nazi group, to establish itself as a party dedicated to the deportation of non-whites. ATP’s chairman is hard-line racist William D. Johnson, a Los Angeles-based lawyer who once proposed repealing the 14th and 15th Amendments, which made freed slaves U.S. citizens, granted equal protection under the law, and prohibited race-based denial of voting rights. Instead, Johnson proposed the Pace Amendment, which would essentially allow only non-Hispanic whites to become U.S. citizens. The group is planning to run political candidates nationwide, and the Southern California branch has handed out hundreds of anti-immigrant fliers and other materials, according to ATP’s blog.
Until ATP’s founding last October, MacDonald’s bigotry found expression mainly through academia rather than activism. His widely discredited research purportedly shows that Jews are driven by a genetically programmed group evolutionary strategy to undermine and harm Western civilization. In his academic works, MacDonald has suggested taxing Jews or restricting their access to universities as ways of protecting white society.
The student-led campaign against MacDonald began on Tuesday, the first day of his spring semester classes. Student activists affiliated with the groups Students Fight Back and the Party for Socialism and Liberation attempted to get those who’d signed up for MacDonald’s upper-level psychology courses — child & adolescent development, developmental psychopathology and social personality development — to drop them and join the boycott. The activists entered MacDonald’s three classes before the professor had arrived and distributed fliers detailing MacDonald’s bogus research and far-right political affiliations, along with a supplemental sheet listing alternative courses students could take. When MacDonald got to class, the activists confronted him about his white supremacist views, which he tried to deny, according to Douglas Kauffman, a senior English literature major who’s involved in the effort. But MacDonald did not disavow his association with ATP. “He was completely silent and tried to evade the topic each time by claiming he only wanted to talk about school issues,” Kauffman said.
MacDonald did not address his views or far-right advocacy in a brief E-mail to Hatewatch. “Students have disrupted my classes and encouraged students to drop my courses,” he wrote. “I suppose these are exactly the sorts of thuggish behavior advocated by the SPLC. Disrupting classes is illegal and it is unfair to students who are simply trying to get an education in difficult times.”
Department chairman Kenneth Green also took issue with the students’ tactics. “Those students were not registered for his class, and they had no legal right to be there,” he said. “There are more appropriate ways to protest.”
But the students defended their methods. “That was the most direct, efficient way to reach those students who are encountering him twice, three times a week,” Cabral said. And most students were receptive to their message, Kauffman said; despite a budget crisis that has limited their enrollment options, about half a dozen students immediately walked out in the three classes combined.
Provoked in part by an SPLC investigation, controversy has dogged MacDonald since at least 2006, when faculty members began expressing serious concerns about his research methods and the use of his writings by extremists to justify a racist agenda. In April 2008, the psychology department approved a statement disassociating itself from MacDonald’s work. “We respect and defend his right to express his views,” it stated in part, “but we affirm that they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach.” Other academic departments have issued similar statements. While defending his academic freedom, the Cal State Long Beach Academic Senate also voted in October 2008 to disassociate itself from MacDonald’s writings.
University Assistant Vice President Toni Beron said she hadn’t heard about the student campaign against MacDonald and didn’t immediately have any comment.
The students will circulate a petition next week calling for MacDonald’s removal from the faculty and for students to stop taking his classes, Kauffman said. (They plan to present a copy, along with a letter explaining why students want him dismissed, to a psychology department committee conducting senior faculty reviews.) They’re also planning a campus meeting to discuss MacDonald and their efforts to get him ousted. They hope to work with faculty members who have pressured MacDonald in the past and would like to get the unions on campus to join their cause, including the California Faculty Association.
“Our campus is one of the most diverse in the country, and that really flies in the face of having a Nazi as a professor,” Kauffman said.
SOURCE
PETA Behaving Badly
PETA's real interest seems to be in naked women. Below is the latest example in a long line of such
Another organization has caved to PETA pressure because of a mistaken belief that the radical group really cares about animals. The Neumann University Alumni Association says it will stop distributing discounted tickets to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in response to PETA’s latest protest. The alumni association was offering discounted admission to the February 27 show in Philadelphia.
In a February 1 letter, PETA said Neumann University (a Franciscan-affiliated school) would betray its Catholic values by continuing to support the event. (We wonder where PETA’s concern for values is when it mixes naked women and religious imagery.) As happens all too often, university officials cried “uncle” without looking carefully at PETA’s credibility. And the truth is out there: For puppies and kittens, PETA is the proverbial Grim Reaper.
This so-called animal “rights” group killed 95 percent of the pets in its care in 2008, according to records PETA itself filed with the Virginia state government. Out of the 2,216 animals PETA took during 2008, it managed to find homes for a mere seven animals – despite an annual budget of $32 million.
What’s the reason for PETA’s hypocrisy? Money. It’s easier and cheaper to run media campaigns berating circuses than to actually roll up a sleeve or two and save cats and dogs. The last thing PETA wants to do is actually take care of animals. That’s expensive. (But it’s also “ethical.”)
PETA will, however, use advertising dollars to shamelessly exploit human tragedy. In Great Britain, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) just banned PETA from displaying an ad with a photograph of a baby killer. PETA was trying to link animal abuse with infanticide.
Thankfully, more and more people are catching on to PETA’s hypocrisy and rejecting its message. Just look at these 14-year-girls in Punxsutawney on Tuesday. For all the effort PETA spends targeting kids, it may be all for naught.
SOURCE
Sea terrorists obstructing Japanese whalers again
For the sake of Australia's farmers, one must fervently hope that the Australian government keeps right out of this. It has taken decades to open up the Japanese market to some Australian farm products but if the Japanese consumer gets the idea that Australia is backing these hostile and dangerous publicity-seekers, that market would come to an abrupt dead end. Most countries have "country of origin" labelling laws for goods in their shops and the Japanese government would just have to step that up a bit for Japanese consumers to get all the signal they need
ANTI-WHALING activists have described how Japanese whaling ships circled their protest vessel "like sharks" before ramming it off Antarctica. Sea Shepherd founder, Captain Paul Watson, said the Japanese harpoon ship rammed the conservationists' ship the Bob Barker and tore a 90cm gash in the hull above the water line. The incident happened about 300 kilometres off Cape Darnley, in the Australian Antarctic Territory, about 3pm (AEDT) yesterday. No-one was injured in the incident.
Capt Watson said the collision was "entirely intentional" on the part of the Japanese. "Four Japanese ships circled the Bob Barker like sharks," he said. "Then one of them, the Yushin Maru 3, did a quick turn and rammed a three-foot gash in the hull. "Luckily, the waters are calm at the moment and we have a welding crew working to fix it."
The anti-whaling vessel was blocking the slipway of the Nisshin Maru, the Japanese whaling fleet's factory ship, when the collision occurred.
Japan's Fisheries Agency said however, the activist boat caused the collision by suddenly approaching the harpoon vessel to throw bottles containing butyric acid in an attempted attack on the Japanese ship. The Japanese agency accused Sea Shepherd of "committing an act of sabotage" on the Japanese expedition, noting that it is allowed under world whaling restrictions as a scientific expedition. "We will not tolerate the dangerous activity that threatens Japanese whaling ships and endangers the lives of their crew members," it said in a statement late yesterday.
Capt Watson called on the Australian government take action on illegal whaling. "The Japanese are violating Australian laws on whaling and nothing is being done to stop them," he said.
This is the second major clash between Japanese whalers and anti-whaling activists this year, after the Ady Gil sank following a collision with a Japanese whaling ship in the Southern Ocean on January 6.
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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6/2/2010 -
Australia: abused black kids taken away by authorities and then sent to other abusive black homes
Because of the Leftist "stolen generation" myth they cannot be sent to white homes -- which is of course blatantly racist. The fact that the lives, health and welfare of black kids are being stolen right now matters not at all to the race-obsessed and hate-filled Left
ABORIGINAL children in care are routinely being placed with relatives in remote communities where they are exposed to sexual abuse and alcohol-fuelled violence, a wide-ranging report on child protection - kept hidden by the Northern Territory government - has revealed.
The Bath report - compiled after an audit of scores of cases of children deemed at high risk who were in the care of the state - exposes the near-total breakdown of child protection systems in the Territory, where background checks on carers are rarely carried out, ministers regularly fail to review the progress of cases, and social services for troubled families are in critically short supply.
Howard Bath, who was appointed Children's Commissioner in the Territory after compiling the extensive report, documents case after case where children were failed by the system that was supposed to protect them. The report - suppressed for more than two years by the NT government - found Aboriginal children were at particular risk, often consigned to carers who lived in violent or abusive homes in remote communities where standard case reviews rarely happened.
Barely any Aboriginal carers underwent a registration process, and the government's bureaucrats warned it that a "sense of complacency" governed the assessment, review and management of cases of children placed in the care of a relative.
Dr Bath found the Aboriginal child placement principle - which states that Aboriginal children should be placed with a relative or other Aboriginal carers if possible - sometimes took precedence over child safety, and that the standards applied to foster carers were followed with much greater rigour than with relative carers. "'The present data suggests, as do some of the decisions in the case studies, that in some cases this principle appears to be given primacy over basic child protection considerations," he says. "It was never the intent of the principle that children should be placed in unsafe situations."
The NT Government, which is under enormous pressure over its handling of child protection after recent damning coronial findings, has kept the full extent of the crisis racking the department of Families and Community Services hidden from the public for more than two years despite mounting evidence of a system on the brink.
Two years after his extensive report was suppressed, Dr Bath warned that child protection had "slipped off the radar" in the NT, as the devastating findings of the Little Children are Sacred report faded from public consciousness. In late 2007, the Labor Government released the Bath report's executive summary and recommendations, but refused to release the damning detail contained in the close to 200 pages of the full report.
The Government is so sensitive about the contents of Dr Bath's report that it has even refused to release it to NT Ombudsman Carolyn Richards, who is investigating 35 complaints against child protection services. The Weekend Australian understands Ms Richards will be forced to issue a summons on Dr Bath to obtain the report.
SOURCE
Politicized British police ignore emergency calls
A chief constable is in hot water for saying police cannot attend every 999 call - and most people do not expect them to. Cambridgeshire's Julie Spence made the claim after a judge criticised her force for its 'indifferent' response to a man who reported an attacker hiding behind his house who was 'coming for a fight'. No officers were sent in response to the emergency call and the man was badly beaten.
Mrs Spence, who yesterday also came under fire for 'wasting money' on an internet blog supposedly written by a police dog, said 'a note of realism' was required. She added: 'The fact is the bestfunded, biggest force in the world would not be able to attend every 999 call. 'Nor do I believe that is the expectation of most of our callers. 'Most know and appreciate and understand that their need may sometimes be less pressing than another's.'
Politicians and campaign groups responded with dismay. A spokesman for Alan Johnson said: 'The Home Secretary expects the police to respond promptly and effectively to every emergency.'
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: 'We have to get more of our police out from behind their desks filling in forms and on to the streets where they are needed. 'We cannot go on with a situation where bureaucracy takes precedence over policing.'
Mark Wallace, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'It is not good enough for any chief constable to simply shrug their shoulders and wash their hands of a case like this. 'The police have a serious responsibility to protect the public from crime, and too often people are being let down. 'If you phone 999 about a serious crime or threat, then it is not unreasonable to expect the police to respond promptly.'
The force was savaged by Judge Sean Enright for not sending an officer out immediately after a 999 caller rang to say he was about to be attacked at his home. Despite telling the operator a man was hiding behind his house and 'coming for a fight', Sadegh Ghanbara, from Peterborough, was told to call back if he returned. The operator graded the incident as B, which does not warrant an immediate call-out.
Minutes later, Sherwan Rasul, 18, launched a savage assault with a baseball bat, leaving Mr Ghanbara unconscious with a broken nose. He called 999 again half an hour later, saying Rasul had returned and had started hitting him and pleaded for an officer to be sent. Police arrived eight minutes later.
Judge Enright said the initial response 'smacked of indifference'. He added: 'It was plain Mr Ghanbara feared he would be assaulted and the assault was imminent. 'The inescapable fact is that had the police responded to the 999 call, it is highly likely that an assault wouldn't have taken place.'
SOURCE
Tzipi Livni to test UK law with visit
Britain is braced for a diplomatic row after a senior Israeli politician warned that she was preparing to travel to the UK, where she faces an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes. Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli Foreign Minister and now the leader of the Opposition, said that she wanted to test promises by David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, that he would change the law to ensure that she was not arrested for her role in last year’s Gaza offensive.
In December, a London court agreed to a request by pro-Palestinian groups to issue a warrant over alleged war crimes during the military operation, which took place when she was Foreign Minister. The court rescinded the warrant when it became clear that she was not on British soil.
At the time, Gordon Brown and Mr Miliband pledged to prevent this happening again and the Government has since been considering various ways of changing the law. One plan would see a ban on arrest warrants for alleged war crimes, while another could give immunity to former ministers.
Ms Livni has set a deadline of February 23, after which she told The Jewish Chronicle that she planned to visit “within weeks”. Any change to the law would be made in the Crime and Security Bill going through Parliament, which is in the committee stage until that date.
Ms Livni said: “I will do this not for me, not for provocation, but for the right of every Israeli to travel freely. I am not going to be restricted by extremists because I fought terror.” The British system was, she said, “being abused by extremists for political reasons. Belgium and Spain have changed their laws, and the British know that they have to do so”.
Despite a Tory pledge to support the change, a motion against a new law preventing her arrest has gathered 108 backbench signatories. [It's unstated but most of them will be from the Labour party. The British Left hates Israel. See here and here and here, for example]
SOURCE
Corporate America is to Blame Not Haitian Government?
Apparently, corporate America is to blame for the widespread suffering and acute poverty in Haiti that has only intensified in the aftermath of a major earthquake. This is the central message of The New York Times hit piece on the Rawlings Sporting Goods company that left the island about 20 years ago; external factors unrelated to Haiti’s government are the culprit here, according to the article.
Baseballs are very specialized products that require a highly trained work force. If Rawlings had its druthers, it would have preferred to keep an already well-trained trained workforce in place, equipped to handle a unique product. Yet, the company felt compelled to uproot itself thanks to government corruption, mismanagement and poor public policy decisions.
The Haitian government imposed severe regulations and restrictions that made for an untenable business climate, but this story is untold.
Rawlings now has a moral obligation to re-invest in Haiti because the company was profitable there at one time, even though it has no ownership over any of the policy decisions made in the past two decades. This argument is made by a book author quoted in the story who has studied assistance programs to Haiti.
“Do they have an obligation?” Josh DeWind, a co-author of “Aiding Migration: The Impact of International Development Assistance on Haiti,” said Tuesday in a telephone interview, referring to Rawlings. “I suppose they did quite well in Haiti, so, yes, in a humanitarian sense, it would be morally right to go back and help out, given that they benefited from Haiti.”
There’s no talk about The New York Times re-locating any of its facilities down to Haiti.... The message should be “Haiti Heal Thyself,” but it’s just easier to bash corporate America.
Rawlings has been operating in Costa Rica since about 1988 in response the political unrest that accelerated throughout Haiti in the late 1980s and accelerated into the 1990s. This write-up is reflective of the long-standing antipathy The New York Times has toward business owners who are understandably reticent to operate in a climate where the rule of law is not observed.
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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5/2/2010 -
Anger as British judge spares devout Muslim from jail
Cherie Blair is to be investigated by the organisation that deals with complaints against judges after she gave a more lenient sentence to a Muslim offender because he was “religious”.
The Judicial Complaints Office is to look into a complaint by the National Secular Society that Mrs Blair, who practises law under her maiden name of Booth, suspended a six-month jail sentence passed on Shamso Miah on the ground that he was devout.
Miah was convicted at the Inner London Crown Court last month of assault after he broke a stranger’s jaw. Terry Sanderson, president of the society, said: “We think this is discriminatory and unjust. and we wish to make a formal complaint about it. It’s wrong that someone so high-profile as Mrs Blair — and she is very high-profile as a Catholic — should make such remarks in court.”
The court was told that in August last year Miah, 25, from Redbridge, northeast London, went from prayers at a mosque to a bank, where he got into an argument with Mohammed Furcan over who was first in the queue. He punched Mr Furcan in the face and ran out. Mr Furcan followed him but was knocked to the pavement, breaking his jaw.
Miah told police that he had been acting in self-defence, but CCTV footage showed that he was the aggressor, the jury heard. Miah pleaded guilty. Mrs Blair said that violence on the streets had to be taken seriously but added: “I am going to suspend this sentence for the period of two years based on the fact you are a religious person and have not been in trouble before. You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.”
He was ordered to complete 200 hours of community service and pay £200 in costs.
SOURCE
Once again Britain's Marxist-trained social workers ignore appalling working class abuses
But middle class people get targeted on mere suspicion
A judge today criticised scandal-hit Doncaster social services for failing to protect two young girls subjected to a shocking catalogue of cruelty over a four-year period. The sisters, now aged eight and ten, were repeatedly beaten with a slipper and belt, had food taken from their plates to give to pet dogs and were sent to school crawling with lice and in a filthy condition.
The girls were put on the child protection register because of the family's history of neglect, but were removed six months later. This decision by social workers left the children at the mercy of their mother's brutal boyfriend.
The shocking case emerged just weeks after the same social services department was criticised for its handling of the 'torture boys' case in which two young boys left close to death after being tortured by two sadistic brothers. The victims were strangled, hit with bricks, made to eat nettles, stripped and forced to sexually abuse each other. Doncaster's social services were heavily criticised in a serious case review which cited 'multi-agency' failings and an inability to connect the boys' worsening behaviour to their neglectful family background.
Doncaster's social services was taken over by a Government hit squad last year and emergency measures implemented because of a series of failures and concerns over the high number of child deaths.
Judge Jacqueline Davies today said the case was a 'horrid process of intimidation towards two defenceless little girls' and jailed their 31-year-old mother for 21 months and her ex-boyfriend, 26, for three years and three months at Doncaster Crown Court. And the judge slammed Doncaster social services again after hearing the children were removed from the child protection register six months after they were deemed to be at risk.
Details of the sisters' appalling treatment and neglect were revealed in court. The elder girl told police they had both been hit with a slipper on the hands, back and bottom. She had been struck 50 times with a belt buckle and had her face squeezed by the boyfriend and her head banged against a wall. She had also been punched in the stomach by the boyfriend, who is not her father, so hard she had to crawl across the floor because she was in so much pain. The girls told their mother to 'tell him to stop' but she failed to intervene.
When the mother bought things for the children her partner said 'they don't deserve anything.' One witness said he took food from them to give to the dogs.
Prosecutor Richard Sheldon said the violence usually happened when the mother worked the night shift at a bakery and her lover was left in charge. She knew about the assaults but did nothing. The alarm was raised when the girls' grandmother, who refused to enter the filthy house, alerted social services and the police.
Teachers at their school described the girls as 'ill-kempt, in ill-fitting clothes and stinking or urine with insect bites to their body and lice on their head'. Mr Sheldon said: 'The school said the mother had a similar appearance as if she didn't have a penny to her name and skinny but she always said the marks on her children were accidental.'
The girls' welfare declined when the mother began working nights and in January, 2008 it was noted the girls went to school in freezing weather wearing summer dresses and smelling of urine.
When interviewed by police the boyfriend said the girls were 'little bastards' who didn't know how to look after themselves and they would not be told off so he did not believe his behaviour was unreasonable.
The mother said she didn't want him to hit the kids but admitted doing nothing to protect them because she had nowhere else to go and he would not leave the house.
Mr Sheldon said the partner often referred to the girls as 'tarts' and 'scruffy idiots'. The boyfriend admitted wilful assault and ill treatment of the children. Their mother admitted wilful neglect. They also admitted causing unnecessary suffering or injury by failing to provide adequate accommodation and care.
Kath Goddard, for the mother, said she was a 'damaged and vulnerable' woman who needed help. But she had begin to turn her life around and the jail term would prevent her from having contact with her new baby son, over which court proceedings are taking place.
Michael Caine-Soothill, for the boyfriend, said he had been on the 'at risk' register himself as a child and his behaviour was motivated by a lack of parenting skills rather than a 'wilful want to hurt children'. It led to the mother and her partner being arrested for cruelty offences dating from 2004-2008.
Doncaster council tonight declined to comment on the case.
SOURCE
Curious Defenses of the Goldstone Report
by Alan M. Dershowitz
Even before the Goldstone Report was released, Richard Goldstone was arguing for its credibility by invoking his Jewishness, his Zionism, his daughter’s residence in Israel and his connection to Hebrew University. It was the mirror image of the classic fallacy known as the argument ad hominem, which is defined as follows: A substantive argument should not be rejected solely because of who has offered it.
It follows of course from this fallacy that an argument should also not be accepted because of who offered it.
A close relative of the ad hominem fallacy is what I have called “the argument by ethnic identity,” which I have defined as follows: An anti-Israel argument is made stronger if offered by a Jew. (“See, even a Jews agrees that…)
These are precisely the fallacious arguments being offered in defense of the Goldstone report by Richard Goldstone and his supporters. Goldstone has even elicited his daughter’s help. This is what she has said: “Had Richard Goldstone not served as the head of the UN inquiry into the Gaza War, the accusations against Israel would have been harsher.” She continued. “My father took on the job, for peace, for everyone and also for Israel.” She told the Jerusalem Post, “My dad loves Israel and it wasn’t easy for him to see and hear what happened. I think he heard and saw things he didn’t expect to see and hear….”
The problem is not what Goldstone saw and heard. It’s what he willfully and deliberately refused to see and hear. He refused to watch videotapes, easily accessible on the internet, that show conclusively that Hamas terrorists routinely fired rockets from behind human shields. He refused to credit eye witness reports published by refutable newspapers and even admissions by Hamas leaders. He willfully refused to listen to the testimony of one of the world’s leading experts on how democratic militaries fight asymmetrical warfare against terrorists who hide behind civilians, who said:
“I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”
Instead of defending the report against the many substantive arguments offered against it, Goldstone has repeatedly cited his Jewishness as both a shield against the criticism and a sword with which to continue to attack Israeli actions.
Had Goldstone not been the author of the United Nations Human Rights Council report on Israel, it would be tossed in the trash barrel along with other one-sided and biased reports by this prejudice group which targets only Israel for human rights violations. But those seeking to defend this indefensible report point to Goldstone’s authorship as proof that it must have credibility because a Jew wrote it (“See, even a Jew….)
In a criminal trial, it is impermissible to attack the character of the defendant unless he has placed his character at issue. That is precisely what Goldstone has done in his campaign to lend credibility to his mendacious report by constantly invoking his Jewishness. The appropriate response to an ad hominem positive argument is an ad hominem negative argument. That is why, in addition to providing a 49 page substantive response to the arguments and methodology of the Goldstone report, I have raised questions about Goldstone’s motivations in accepting leadership of the mission and signing his name to a report which is so demonstrably false and one-sided.
In light of the hard evidence, that is easily accessible online and in the media, Goldstone cannot possibly believe that Hamas did not intentionally use human shields, have their fighters deliberately dress in civilian clothing and use mosques and hospitals to store rockets and other weapons. Videotapes conclusively prove these charges, and Hamas acknowledges—indeed boasts of—them. He cannot possibly believe that Israel used the thousands of rockets that Hamas directed against its children as an excuse, or a cover, for its real goal, namely to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible. Nor could he possibly believe that the Israeli government made a policy decision, at the highest levels, to deliberately target Palestinian babies, young children, women and the elderly for murder. All the evidence points away from these wild charges. Yet he signed a report asserting that those demonstrably false conclusions were true. Shame on him. And even more shame on him for exploiting his Jewishness to get others to believe these defamations against the Jewish state.
The Goldstone report should be rejected on its demerits. The added fact that it was authored by a Jew—selected precisely because he is a Jew with aspirations to be honored by the international community—should diminish, rather than increase, its credibility.
I have challenged Goldstone to debate the substantive points in his report. I promise not make any ad hominem arguments against the report if he stops making ad hominem arguments in its favor. Or as Adlai Stevenson once promised a political opponent: “If you stop lying about me, I will stop telling the truth about you.”
SOURCE
Sadly for the Left, the attacks on Indians in Australia are NOT the work of "racist" whites
I have been saying this for years now but Andrew Bolt's comments below might get more attention -- JR
IT'S because so many people want to believe Australians are racist that Jaspreet Singh became the latest fake example of our evil. Singh, a 29-year-old Indian "student", turned up last month burned to a crisp, with a tale of having been attacked in Essendon by four racists with a can of petrol. The story smelled from the start, and not just of premium unleaded. Police even warned it sounded suss, starting with this notion that gangs roam Essendon late at night with cans of petrol, looking for Indians to burn.
But what followed is a golden example of a phenomenon that's made this country seem like a madhouse lately. If people really want to believe something they will, and facts barely matter. Indeed, facts are then evil.
That's why so many millions believe in the "stolen generations", for instance, especially when no one can name even 10 children stolen just for being Aboriginal. That's why millions more are sure man is heating the world dangerously, even when the planet has cooled for more than eight years.
And that's why so many of our preacher-teacher class, from academics to ABC broadcasters, have so eagerly insisted that every Australian (except themselves, funnily) is a racist redneck - a smugly self-regarding lie they're now shocked to see is believed of them, too, by an Indian media only too happy to pander to its own chip-on-the-shoulder xenophobes.
It's the wanting to believe that counts. So here's what we read last month about the bizarre barbecueing of Jaspreet Singh from Indian journalists and Australian cause-pushers.
Sindh Today, January 9: "Days after India asked Australia to take urgent action against those behind the murder of an Indian student a week ago, a 29-year-old Indian was set ablaze Saturday by four unidentified attackers in Melbourne, putting bilateral ties under strain."
The New Indian Express, January 11: "Victoria Police say ... there is no reason at this stage to consider this (attack) racially motivated. If the statement had been calculated to enrage, it could hardly have been more provocatively phrased. Perhaps, in Australia, opportunist crimes also involve setting the victim ablaze. In any other country, this would prima facie be considered a hate crime, in this case racist."
The Communist Party of India, January 12: "In the past two weeks, racist attacks on Indians in Australia have claimed two lives (Ranjodh Singh and Nitin Garg) while 29-year-old Jaspreet Singh is now recovering from burns ... "
The Sydney Morning Herald, January 15: "Aboriginal leader Tom Calma believes the recent attacks on Indian students in Australia could be racially motivated."
AND more. Even former Defence Force chief General Peter Cosgrove, too ready to bend with the fashionable wind, just days later gave an Australia Day speech claiming attacks on Indians had "erupted over the last several weeks to become a major problem", and "it is easy to conclude that they are racially targeted".
Just as well he didn't mention the now singed Jaspreet by name, because here's what we read this week of our latest martyr to Australian racism: "Singh, 29, of Grice Crescent, Essendon, in the city's north, faced an out-of-sessions hearing early this morning ... charged with making a false report to police and criminal damage with a view to gaining a financial advantage."
Of course, Singh could be completely innocent. Let the court decide whether he really just blew himself up while trying to torch his car - but do let the Indian Government now apologise for jumping to its own inflammatory conclusion about our wickedness.
But this is not the first time an example of Australian racism has gone up in smoke like Singh's shirt. Let me quote from a statement sent to Indian newspapers just last week by Australia's man in New Delhi: "The Australian High Commissioner, Mr Peter Varghese, today welcomed advice that the NSW police had arrested three persons in connection with the murder of Ranjodh Singh, a 25-year-old Indian man, whose burnt body was found in the NSW town of Griffith on December, 29, 2009. Gurpreet Singh, 23, and his 20-year-old wife Harpreet Bhullar faced the court on January 29. A third man was arrested on the same day and will also be charged with Mr Singh's murder. Mr Varghese said ... the identity of those arrested (all three are Indian nationals), as well as the conclusions reached by the investigation, clearly showed that racism had not been a factor.
Mr Varghese said that this case had been widely reported in the Indian media as a racist attack and he hoped that those, which carried such reports, would now set the record straight. Yeah, dream on, Peter. Why would we expect Indian journalists to stop jumping on every attack as proof of old-fashioned white Australian racism, when our own are just as likely to do the same - or to be so scared of seeming racist that they refuse to tell us all the forgiving truth?
THAT'S been the case ever since our media first paid serious attention to attacks on Indians - in 2008, when Sukhraj Singh was almost bashed to death in a Sunshine shop. The racial identity of those thieving attackers, officer? Can't say, couldn't see. The ethnicity of the boys who bashed Singh, Mr Reporter? Didn't notice, won't write. In fact, and said by almost no one, Singh had been belted by an ethnic gang of whom the only one since publicly identified in court is Zakarie Hussein, a 21-year-old from Somalia. But, you see, our police command and journalists would rather all Australians seemed racist than risk being called racist themselves for giving the facts.
And on this circus rolled. Take the notorious bashing on the Werribee train last year of Sourabh Sharma, which led The Times of India to declare that a "tribe of extreme nationalists who champion an exclusivist, white Aussie identity seems to be increasing in Australia". Check the CCTV vision and you could see what the police and journalists would not say - that the attackers seemed to include youths who weren't "white", and at least one who looked very Indian.
Indians and Pakistanis here actually know this "white racism" bogey is a myth, of course. Macquarie University student Mukul Khanna, called back home by his worried parents, told a local paper that a lot of his Pakistani friends had been bashed and robbed, but "interestingly, the attackers are mostly not locals and are themselves people of foreign origin".
Most of the reported robberies on Indian taxi drivers in the inner west in one six-month period were likewise by African gangs - but which police chief would dare say such a thing? Gosh, no; former chief commissioner Christine Nixon not only banned the term "gang", but falsely claimed at the last federal election that the Howard government was wrong - Sudanese immigrants did not have a crime rate higher than the average. She still hasn't apologised for deceiving you. Facts! Who needs them? Indeed, who's a racist boy for even pointing them out?
The joke is, of course, that this country is actually so short of real racists that it drives our manners police mad. In 2001, for instance, Equal Opportunity Commission Victoria's then chairman moaned: "I am not aware of any conclusive evidence that suggests that discrimination is increasing."
Solution? Instead of closing up shop, saying its job was done, the EOCV pushed the Labor Government to pass draconian new laws against racial "vilification" to help create more racists for it to go catch.
Our federal race commissioners have had the same problem, and lusted for the same solution. One, Zita Antonias, admitted a decade ago that complaints of racism had fallen by more than a third, but insisted we couldn't be that nice: "The figures are incongruent with anecdotal evidence."
Tom Calma, who succeeded her and now claims that the attacks on Indians may well be racist, was just as peeved to find so little real proof of these legendary (white) Australian racists. He blamed our stupid laws for having "made it difficult to prove there had been discrimination", and demanded the Rudd Government fix this disgraceful lack of racists by changing the laws to reverse the burden of proof. And since Indian papers say we're all racist, bingo, we must be, too, unless someone can prove we're not.
SO whether Jaspreet Singh got toasted by racists or soon will be by judges hardly matters. We're racist until proven innocent -but to prove we're not we must say who's behind much of this mayhem. And to do that would be, er, racist. Caught each way.
So our police and politicians, glowing with self-righteousness, meekly argue instead that we're not racist because - drum roll, please - the rest of us are just as likely to be bashed, robbed and raped as any Indian on our streets. Oh, goody. I can't tell you what a relief that news will be to anyone catching a late-night train to Sunshine.
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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4/2/2010 -
Kerry: Repeal the First Amendment!
When President Obama says "jump," John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking former junior senator from Massachusetts who by the way served in Vietnam, says, "I have the hat." Obama called on Congress to deliver a "forceful response" to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and Kerry now says he favors the repeal of the First Amendment:
"The sovereign right of the people to govern being essential to a free democracy, Congress and the States may regulate the expenditure of funds for political speech by any corporation, limited liability company, or other corporate entity," the amendment says. "Nothing contained in this Article shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press.''
The Hill reports that Kerry and Sen. Arlen Specter (R2D2, Pa.) are the only two senators so far to back the idea of repeal. Blogress Ann Althouse notes that a video was also released in which Hitler expressed his disagreement with the ruling, but it apparently has disappeared from the Web.
In a Politico op-ed, David Bossie, head of Citizens United, notes that Obama has accepted money directly from corporations, which remains illegal for candidates for federal office:
Many states, including Illinois and Maryland, allow corporate contributions to state candidates. As an Illinois state senator, Obama accepted direct contributions from the corporate treasuries of Citigroup and London-based pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, among others. As a Maryland state legislator, Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen, one of the more hysterical critics of the decision, accepted from business entities about 10 percent of his campaign funds during the four years leading up to his election to Congress.
If, as these detractors and their allies would have us believe, corporate money is by definition corrupting, why did they accept these funds when doing so benefited them?
Hmm, probably because it benefited them. We laugh at the Kerry-Specter initiative to repeal the First Amendment, because it has zero chance of winning the support of 67 senators and 290 representatives, the threshold for even proposing a constitutional amendment. We are, however, even more appalled with Kerry and Specter than we were before, if you can believe it.
SOURCE
Carer slaps an autistic child who cannot speak to stop an attack on another child -- So the carer gets fired in Batty Britain!
A woman in charge of looking after children on a school bus run was sacked after she 'tapped' a boy on the back of his hand, an employment tribunal heard. Margaret Parsons, 72, was dismissed by Flintshire County Council for gross misconduct after the alleged incident in October 2007. She is claiming unfair dismissal.
The school escort had tried to stop the severely autistic child from fighting with another child on a minibus, the tribunal heard. She was dismissed following a second incident the following month, when she allegedly hit the same child with a shoe. Miss Parsons, now 72, of Mold, North Wales, had worked as a school escort for 14 years, accompanying special needs children to and from school in a taxi or minibus.
She was suspended from her job following a complaint from the child's mother after the alleged incident on November 26, 2007. Head of regeneration at Flintshire County Council, David Heggarty, told the tribunal at Abergele the special needs youngster, referred to as 'Child C' during the hearing, was 'severely autistic'. "On November 26, 2007 there was a complaint from the mother of a special needs child who complained that Miss Parsons had been hitting the child on the foot with a shoe," he said.
Miss Parsons was suspended pending an investigation, during which, the other incident in October was looked into. Mr Heggarty read a statement from a disciplinary meeting with Miss Parsons in January 2008. During the meeting Miss Parsons spoke about the October incident and said Child C was kicking the other boy's legs. She said that boy was banging his own legs and that she 'tapped' the back of Child C's hand. On the same day Miss Parsons told the mother of the child that she had 'tapped' the little boy on the hand for being naughty.
The hearing was told that on the day she 'tapped' the child she told a friend, the boy''s mother and her line manager about what she had done. The mother did not mind her doing that, Mr Heggarty said. Mr Heggarty said: 'The morning after the shift she told a friend things had got on top of her and "I smacked him." 'She said "I don't make a habit of it" and said she had never smacked him.'
Her solicitor, Tudor Williams, in making a claim for unfair dismissal, asked Mr Heggarty whether his decision to dismiss Miss Parsons was "over the top".
Mr Heggarty replied: 'The child has severe autism and is unable to speak. I believe the behaviour of Miss Parsons was completely inappropriate.' He added: 'Miss Parsons was employed to react to situations of that nature. 'We would expect that the children were protected from themselves and others.'
Mr Williams said Miss Parsons had "no alternative but to prevent one child being assaulted by another'. He said: 'She was seatbelted and had to intervene to stop the attack continuing.' Miss Parsons was paid 12 weeks notice of termination.
Mr Heggarty added: 'There were some mitigating factors. There was a belief on behalf of Miss Parsons that she had been given permission to slap. She also reported it to a line manager but it hadn't been followed up.'
SOURCE
Russia returning to its old form?
The Jewish Agency for Israel has canceled plans to hold its upcoming board meetings in St. Petersburg over concerns that the Russian government would not allow the gathering to take place.
The agency had announced in the fall that it would be holding the meetings there with the intent of showcasing to its 120-member board the projects that the organization operates in Russia. But despite several months of planning, the Russian government recently cooled to the idea, according to a letter the agency sent Tuesday to its board of governors.
"Two weeks ago we were advised for the first time about some outstanding issues regarding the legal status for the Jewish Agency in Russia," the letter said. "We immediately submitted all the required documentation and have since been waiting for an official response. In the interim we have received numerous unofficial messages but no clear answer. Today we heard via the office of the Israeli Ambassador in Moscow that the Russian Foreign Ministry still maintains that our legal status in Russia is not adequate for convening a meeting of the Board of Governors."
The meetings will now take place Feb. 21-23 in Jerusalem.
The decision to change locations comes at a critical time for the agency's operations in the former Soviet Union after having had to slash its programming in the region because of recession-induced budget cuts. The agency's new chairman, former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, has made it a top priority to resuscitate funding for projects in the region.
The Russian government, according to a Jewish Agency source, has been focusing on the fact that the Jewish Agency is registered in Russia as a local NGO, but the board of governors meeting is an international convention.
An agency insider dismissed this line of argument. "It is not as if they didn't know who we were three months ago," the source said. "They put up last-minute, ostensibly bureaucratic, hurdles." "Apparently they didn't want it to happen," the source said. "The Jewish Agency is Israel's largest nonprofit with diplomatic links to Russia. In an ironic way, this justifies our need to be there."
It is unclear how much the change in venue will cost -- or save -- the agency. The organization had chartered a plane to fly many of the 200 registered participants from Jerusalem to St. Petersburg.
SOURCE
Conspiracy Theories: Is Rebutting Them Governments Job?
Conspiracy theories abound in the U.S. about everything from who killed JFK to America’s alleged involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Most of us, while we may not agree with them, tolerate them nonetheless. That’s what freedom of speech is all about.
Unless, of course, you are Obama Administration Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein.
In a recently written “Preliminary Draft” of a research paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” he and his co-author Adrian Vermeule claim that, “government might do well to maintain a more vigorous counter misinformation establishment than it would otherwise do, one that identifies and rebuts many more conspiracy theories [than] would otherwise be rebutted.”
What reasons do they give for justifying such an intrusion by government into freedom of expression? And even more important, do their suggestions have any place in a free and open society?
Well, you have to understand that the government to which they wish to hand such unfettered, intrusive power has only the best of intentions — that it is “a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories … if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so.” They then add, rather cryptically, that they will not give us a clearer idea of what they mean by “social welfare.” We’re to look at this expression as a hole into which the “right account” of social welfare is to be plugged later.
Were they merely discussing some abstract philosophical concepts with little practical import, most of us would likely be willing to cut them some slack as starry-eyed academics typically out of touch with the real world. But they are arguing that the Federal government actually adopt a widespread program of infiltration and attempted overthrow of groups allegedly harboring “conspiracy” theories on a scale never before envisioned in the history of the Republic. And, of course, the government is to conduct this witch-hunt at significant taxpayer expense.
Now most readers may believe that the vast majority of conspiracy theories are harmless, inconsequential and best ignored by government. Not surprisingly, Sunstein and his co-author try to disabuse us of this notion. They want them all investigated – especially if, in any way, they depart from current government dogma.
They make a legitimate point that, while many conspiracy theories—like the Roswell UFO cover-up—seem to require no action from believers, some others may foment violent action, like the beliefs about the malevolence of the Federal Government resulting in the isolated actions of the Oklahoma City bomber. So some beliefs might result in significant harm if acted upon by “only a small fraction of adherents.” With this, most would agree, theoretically, at any rate.
But that hardly justifies where Sunstein goes from here. For even though he recognizes that not all conspiracy theories foment violence, he still maintains that many of them, in fact, the most common cases, “can still have pernicious effects from the government’s point of view.” You see, he posits somewhat hysterically, they “induce widespread public skepticism about the government’s assertions.” Or, worse yet, they motivate people not to participate in “government-led efforts.” in some area.
Here he opens the door to declaring a whole host of such theories “pernicious.” By the guidelines he lays down, practically any theory that contains beliefs that dissent from the government’s official line in almost any area or subject now qualifies as “pernicious”—not as legitimate free speech. He recommends against ignoring these theories as their proponents may “draw ominous inferences from the government’s silence.”
So, Sunstein’s recommendation is to go after all so-called “conspirators” tooth and nail. He wants to unleash a whole host of government operatives on them, infiltrating their meetings, bugging their phones, monitoring their credit card transactions, tailing their cars, and likely even hiding under their beds if the Obama Administration so desires.
It all sounds like some bizarre scenario culled from the “Coming Attractions” of a science fiction epic. But, unfortunately, in this case, it’s not science fiction at all. And, it’s not “coming;” it’s here.
Cass Sunstein, as mentioned above, is the Obama Administration’s Regulations Czar. As such, he is responsible for deciding what government agencies are allowed to do. And that means when he says it’s time for government enforcers to start spying on “conspirators” who express “skepticism about government’s assertions,” it’s time for you to start looking over your shoulder.
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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3/2/2010 -
French citizenship denied to Muslim fanatic
A FOREIGN national who forced his French wife to wear the full Islamic veil will be denied French citizenship, the immigration minister said today. Eric Besson said he had signed a decree rejecting the man's citizenship application after it emerged that he had ordered his wife to cover herself with the head-to-toe veil.
"It emerged during the inquiry and the interview process that this person forced his wife to wear the full veil, deprived her of freedom of movement with her face exposed and rejected the principles of secularism and equality between men and women," said Mr Besson. The man's name and nationality were not made public.
The decision came after a parliament report last week called for a ban on the full Islamic veil in all schools, hospitals, government offices and public transport. The French government is seeking legal advice before drafting legislation that would outlaw the burqa or niqab in as many areas as possible, Prime Minister Francois Fillon has said.
President Nicolas Sarkozy has proclaimed the burqa "not welcome" in secular France and come out in favour of legislation to outlaw the veil, but has warned against stigmatising Muslims.
Home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority, France has been debating whether to ban the burqa that is worn by a small group of women - about 1900, according to the interior ministry.
Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said last month that Muslim men who force their wives to wear the full veil should not be granted French citizenship. A French court denied citizenship to a veiled Moroccan woman on the grounds that her "radical" practice of Islam was incompatible with French values.
SOURCE
British attack on religious freedom dropped after Papal intervention
So now Leftists hate the Pope -- but they did anyway
Harriet Harman has backed away from a confrontation with religious leaders over who they can employ, making clear that she will not force contentious amendments to the Equality Bill through Parliament. Ministers were astonished on Monday when the Pope said that the Bill violated "natural justice" and urged bishops to fight it. But that attack, along with the strength of opposition in the Lords and the limited time left to get Bills passed before the election, has sapped the Government's enthusiasm to continue the fight.
Ms Harman, the Equalities Minister, has been engaged in a long dispute with churches and religious organisations over their exemption from anti-discrimination employment law, and how it affects "non-religious" posts. The dispute led to a government defeat on a key amendment to the Bill last week in the Lords, but it was expected that Ms Harman would reintroduce the measure, or one similar.
The amendment clarified rather than changed existing law, stating that churches were exempt from discrimination legislation when appointing priests and other "religious" posts, but that they must comply with its terms for "non-religious" jobs, such as youth workers or accountants. Although that was enshrined in law in 2003, it has been ignored by many organisations, which have interpreted the exemption to cover all posts. Ms Harman felt that religious groups should be reminded they were breaking the law, and tabled an amendment making it clear that there was a distinction between religious and lay jobs. But she said last night that she would not bring back the amendment when the Bill returned to the Commons.
"We have never insisted on nondiscrimination legislation applying to religious jobs, such as being a vicar, a bishop, an imam or a rabbi," she said. "Religious organisations can decide themselves how to do that. However, when it comes to non-religious jobs, those organisations must comply with the law. We thought that it would be helpful for everyone involved to clarify the law, and that is what the amendment ... aimed to do. That amendment was rejected, so the law remains as it was."
Although Ms Harman made no mention of the Pope's visit to Britain this year, it is understood that the Government did not want the dispute to overshadow preparations.
Sources close to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster indicated that problems remained, saying that the Pope's criticism went beyond the Equality Bill, and was a broader attack on all recent legislation, which he believes has affected religious freedoms. During an ad limina - a five-yearly visit to Rome - the 35 Catholic bishops from England and Wales told the Pope of their concern that Catholic adoption agencies had had to close or sever their links with the Church because of rules forcing agencies not to discriminate against gay couples.
The Pope's position has received support in the Church of England and other faith groups. Writing in The Times today, Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, says: "There are times when human rights become human wrongs ... a political ideology, relentlessly trampling down everything in their path. This is happening increasingly in Britain, and it is why the Pope's protest against the Equality Bill ... should be taken seriously."
But Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, a gay rights group, warned churches that it would support discrimination claims if gay people were prevented from taking up lay posts. "If any church dismisses someone from a non-liturgical role, such as a youth worker or a press officer, we will support their case."
SOURCE
BBC managers attacked for attempting to update their programmes
A WOMAN who was dropped from presenting a rural affairs program made by Britain's public broadcaster has become the first presenter to sue them for sex and age discrimination. The Times of London reported today Miriam O’Reilly and three other women in their 40s and 50s were told in November 2008 they were being removed from presenting duties on the BBC One network's Countryfile program as part of a revamp.
O’Reilly, 52, an award-winning journalist who spent 25 years at Britain's public broadcaster, the BBC, lodged papers at London Central employment tribunal last week, claiming the corporation discriminated against her on grounds of sex and age.
The case was embarrassing for Mark Thompson, the corporation's Director General, who said recently that the BBC had "taken on board" that viewers wanted "much more than just youth on screen". It followed outrage over the removal of West End choreographer Arlene Phillips, 66, from prime time program Strictly Come Dancing, in favour of singer Alesha Dixon, 30.
O’Reilly told The Times of London, "I think ageism is endemic at the BBC, and women have been reluctant to speak out, because they have their careers to think about and it is a big risk."
As part of the revamp, O’Reilly left along with fellow reporters Juliet Morris, Charlotte Smith and Michaela Strachan, who were all in their 40s and 50s. The male hosts, Ben Fogle and Tom Heap, were also removed, but Fogle was given a new countryside show, and Heap returned later.
The BBC recently fought back against accusations of ageism after the exit of older women such as news presenters Moira Stuart, 60, and Anna Ford, 66. A BBC spokesman said, "Any suggestion the presenters of Countryfile were replaced on the grounds of age is absolute nonsense."
SOURCE
British Taxi drivers accused of racism for displaying sign saying they are 'English speaking'
I personally find it difficult to deal with many people who do not have a native command of English so I would certainly choose a cab that was unlikely to give me such difficulties. Why should I not? It is not a question of race. There are people of all races who speak good English.
A racism row has broken out after a city's taxi drivers started displaying stickers in their cars saying they are 'English speaking'. Up to a dozen drivers have been showing off the notices bearing the St George's Cross on the back windows of their cars in Southampton, Hampshire. The small red and white sticker declares the cab is being driven by an 'English speaking driver.'
But the flags have been branded 'racist' by trade representatives, councillors and racism campaigners who have demanded they are removed. Taxi drivers have hit back, claiming the stickers are simply a protest to force the council to make sure new drivers can speak good English. The stickers were placed in the cars after drivers received complaints about the standard of spoken English among them. There have also been complaints from passengers about drivers using sat navs and over-charging.
Perry McMillan, chairman of the Southampton cab section of trade union Unite, said the group's ethnic minority members had been upset by the stickers. He said: 'Surely all drivers speak English. If they don't, then what's going on? 'We hope that licensing officers can investigate this and satisfy the trade that this isn't the case.'
Campaign group Show Racism the Red Card demanded the stickers be taken down from the cab windows. Chief Executive Ged Grebby said: 'I don't have a problem with displaying the cross of St George because this is a symbol we have managed to reclaim from the far right. 'But the "English speaking driver" part is where it crosses the line into racism. 'Cab drivers have to have a command of English [But only a bare minimum in some cases] and there are strong racist undertones in this message. 'I think the drivers should take the flags down immediately and if they don't, they should be told to by the council who licences them.'
But taxi drivers have hit back at the allegations of racism. Clive Johnson, chairman of taxi firm Radio Taxis and the Southampton Trade Association, said: 'These signs are not racial. 'They are a protest to the council saying please make sure all new drivers have command of the English language. 'There are a few drivers out there who cannot speak English and just bluff their way along. 'It doesn't matter if they are Polish, Russian, French or Spanish, if they can't communicate with passengers then it's a problem.'
Taxi driver Peter Ford, 48, said: 'It's just about letting customers know that the driver will actually be able to speak English, which isn't always the case.' Fellow driver Chris Head, 49, added: 'I have no problem with the stickers. 'Lots of customers will wait at ranks until an English driver comes along because they want someone they can talk to.'
Ian Hall, chairman of the Southampton Hackney Association, said half of the group's 126 members are from an Asian background. He added: 'I don't think any drivers should have these stickers in the back of their car because it's racist. 'If drivers have got these stickers in their back windows then they need to take them down.' Mr Hall said night trade in Southampton would 'collapse' without ethnic minority drivers, who buy the majority of taxi plates.
The sticker issue was raised at a meeting between cab firms and Southampton City Council. It is believed that the council would order them to be removed if it received complaints from passengers. Chairman of the council's licensing committee Councillor Brian Parnell said the stickers were 'offensive'. He said: 'It's certainly not the image we want for Southampton. 'It is offensive to drivers from ethnic minorities who form a large part of the city's drivers and without whom Southampton's taxi service would suffer. 'We want to promote harmony in the city.
'But it is important that taxi drivers meet a certain set of standards and one of those is the ability to speak English. 'It is normal good practice for anyone working in another country to be able to speak the language of that country. 'I think the problem might be that many drivers do speak English but with a heavy accent that can be difficult to understand.'
Cllr Don Thomas, who sits on the licensing committee, added: 'Taxis and taxi drivers can form the first impression that visitors have of Southampton. 'I think this is completely the wrong sort of message to be sending out in what is proudly a cosmopolitan city.'
A council spokesman said: 'People should contact the council and let us know if they see signs and stickers being used in taxis, particularly if they find them offensive.'
Currently, anyone who wants to drive a taxi must hold a British driving licence, pass a medical, undergo a criminal record check and complete a 'knowledge' test of Southampton. Last year council chiefs added a driving assessment and a test in basic reading, writing and communication skills. Within six months of taking to the road, drivers must also pass a BTec qualification in Road Transport Passenger Driving.
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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2/2/2010 -
Pope attacks British "equality" laws
The Pope has made an unprecedented attack on the Government, accusing it of pursuing “unjust” equality laws. Benedict XVI claimed that legislation introduced by Labour to end discrimination “actually violates natural law” because it stopped worshippers remaining true to their beliefs. Rather than making society more equal, the Government’s new rules limited religious freedom, he said.
His strongly worded intervention in British politics comes after leaders of both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England clashed with Labour over its Equality Bill, which they fear will make them admit homosexuals to the priesthood or face prosecution for discriminating against them.
In an address delivered yesterday to 35 Catholic bishops from England and Wales, the Pope attacked Labour’s equality proposals. He said: “Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society. Yet ... the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.
“In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.” Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill, currently going through Parliament, contains a new, narrow definition of religious workers. It means clergy will not be allowed to opt out of the rules and so will either have to go against their teachings by employing homosexuals, or face prosecution.
It is also believed the law, intended to outlaw discrimination against any group in the “provision of services” from health care to shopping, would restrict the right of a church school to employ a head teacher who shared their faith, and would open the job up to members of any religion or atheists.
Since coming to power, Labour’s drive for equality has led to a series of high-profile disputes with the 4.1million Catholics in England and Wales. Ministers wanted to force popular and successful faith schools to take a quarter of their pupils from other religious backgrounds but backed down following a Catholic campaign. Many Catholic adoption agencies have either closed down or cut their links with the Church over the past year after they were refused exemptions from anti-discrimination rules that forced them to consider homosexual couples as potential parents.
As he confirmed that he would make a historic state visit to the country later this year, the Pontiff also urged Catholics in Britain to speak “with a united voice” in a secular and multi-cultural society. He said staying true to the Gospel “in no way restricts the freedom of others” but rather “serves their freedom by offering them the truth”. He told the bishops that they must continue to assert the Catholic point of view in national debates.
The Pope is seen as more conservative than his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, and has been unafraid to assert the Church’s traditional teachings on subjects such as contraception and sexuality, despite criticism in the liberal West.
At a press conference in Rome, the Most Rev Peter Smith, Archbishop of Cardiff, said: “The Church of course upholds absolutely the equal dignity of every person, irrespective of their faith, age and ability. But I think there is a misunderstanding, because sometimes in government legislation equality seems to be that we are all absolutely equal, which we are not. We are equal in dignity, beyond that each one of us is unique.”
The Pope’s comments come at a critical time, just months ahead of the general election. English and Welsh bishops are expected to publish their own guide to issues that voters should consider when choosing a party, such as family life, abortion and assisted suicide.
SOURCE
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2/2/2010 -
Violent antisemitism in Sweden
Your calendar may say 2010, but in the Swedish town of Malmo, it is 5 minutes to Kristalnacht 1938. Jews are fleeing the city in droves, while thuggish mayor Ilmar Reepalu cynically uses immigrant Muslim brutes as lumpen Brown Shirts to terrorize the few who remain:
Violent anti-Semitism has become increasingly commonplace in Sweden’s southern city of Malmö, leading many Jewish residents to leave out of fear for their safety. “Threats against Jews have increased steadily in Malmö in recent years and many young Jewish families are choosing to leave the city,” said Fredrik Sieradzki of the Jewish Community of Malmö.
Last year, 79 crimes against Jewish residents were reported to the Malmö police, roughly double the number reported in 2008. In addition, Jewish cemeteries and synagogues have been repeatedly defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, and a chapel at another Jewish burial site in Malmö was firebombed last January during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Many Jewish residents of Malmö feel that local anti-Jewish sentiment is linked with negative attitudes towards Israel...
Sieradzki says that the attitudes of Malmö politicians, especially Social Democrat city council chair Ilmar Reepalu, have allowed anti-Semitism to fester. “He’s demonstrated extreme ignorance when it comes to our problems,” Sieradzki explained. “It’s shameful and regrettable that such a powerful politician could be so ignorant about the threats we face. Consider that just in the past year:
1) While the IDF was striking Hamas in Gaza, bombs, rockets, bottles and rocks and explosives were hurled at Jews in Malmo by Muslim mobs--Reepalu did nothing.
2) Israel's tennis team was forced to play their March 2009 Davis Cup matches in an empty stadium in Malmo, since Mayor Reepalu couldn't "guarantee the safety" of the filthy Zionists if his faithful jihadi servants were allowed to buy tickets. Of course, the Muslim thugs did the next best thing by rioting outside the stadium, and roaring out the all-time favorite jihadi chant, "The army of Muhammed will kill the Jews." (note the pacifist polizei response, don't want to make Muslim rioters upset, do we? )
3) Now Reepalu has gone out to openly condone these outrages in modern Europe: When gently questioned by a reporter from Skansen.se about the flight of the Jooooos from Malmo, he blames...the people fleeing: "I wish that the Jewish community had distanced itself from Israel's violations of the civilian population in Gaza. Instead, they chose to hold a demonstration of support in the town square, which may have sent the wrong signals." (H/T Tundra Tabloids!)
Just like those damned Czechs used to lord it over the Chermans in the Sudetenland...Of course those Arab lads had to fire-bomb the demo! Yes, folks, step right up and meet the New Europe...same as the Old Europe.
SOURCE
Leftist class war continues in Britain
Children of better-off parents left in tears after they are banned by the local council from attending school trips at half-term. British local councils are often very Leftist
They had been looking forward to their half-term excursions for weeks. But dozens of children have been barred from school trips to a safari park, football ground and indoor ski centre because their parents are too well-off. Families said their children had been left in tears, unable to understand why they were banned from going on trips with their friends.
Last night council officials were accused of penalising working parents as only 'economically disadvantaged' pupils can take part in the excursions. A Government-funded scheme, being trialled across Trafford Council in Greater Manchester, is open only to children who receive free school meals because their parents are on benefits.
Families not on state support are not eligible for the trips to Knowsley Safari Park, football sessions with the Manchester United Foundation and a day at the Chill Factore indoor snow centre, even if the parents are willing to pay. Sarah Rumney, whose five-year-old son attends Partington Primary School, said he had been upset when told he could not go on the outings. 'I'm really angry,' she said. 'I'm being penalised for working and wanting to do better for myself and my children.'
The 29-year-old self-employed cleaner was willing to pay for her son to take part but was told places were restricted. She said: 'It's a nightmare. What sort of incentive does it give to these kids to want to go out and work if all their friends are allowed to go on fantastic trips but they aren't? I'm quite annoyed about it.'
Margaret Woodhouse, from Trafford Council's children and young people's service, confirmed 22 schools in the area had been included in the pilot scheme. She said: 'It was a government requirement the money be used to support children from "economically disadvantaged" families within the area. Trafford Council chose to follow the guidance from the Training and Development Agency - responsible for allocating funding on the government's behalf - and use free school meals as its criteria. 'This ensures the funding goes to support children from lower-income families.'
But yesterday the Government said the council appeared to have missed the point of the scheme. Officials said the aim was to ensure all children were able to enjoy out-of-school activities - regardless of their parents' income. A spokesman at the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: 'Our guidance is crystal clear that no child should be left out. 'Activities should be available to all children - with those who can afford it being able to pay and take part.'
Officials pointed to guidance saying the scheme should 'encourage those who can afford to pay to do so, while using the subsidy to make particular efforts to encourage the participation of those who are unable to pay'. The spokesman added there was no stipulation the money be ring-fenced for those on free school meals. 'It is down to schools to use their professional judgments in deciding who is or is not eligible for a subsidy,' he said. 'We're clear that many groups can be covered, including children in care, young carers and those with special educational needs - not necessarily limiting subsidies to pupils on free school meals.'
Last night Trafford Council officials said activities had been restricted to children on free school meals only in the Partington area. This was because of higher than average levels of children with families on state support. In other areas of Trafford running the scheme, paying parents had been able to send their children on the activities.
A Training and Development Agency spokesman said: ‘The extended services disadvantage subsidy is provided to schools specifically, and quite rightly, to help those children whose parents are less well-off and who have fewer opportunities, and a greater need than others. ‘Our guidance to schools clearly states that any new activities – from breakfast clubs to summer camps – should be open to all pupils and should be financially sustainable, including charging for activities where appropriate.’
SOURCE
Sharia’s Dominion: Two books argue that repression, cruelty, and fear are central to Islam
Book Review by Leslie S. Lebl of: "A God Who Hates: The Courageous Woman Who Inflamed the Muslim World Speaks Out Against the Evils of Islam", by Wafa Sultan; and "Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law", by Nonie Darwish
As American citizens and officials engage in a muddled public debate about how to deal with indicted Fort Hood murderer Malik Hasan and his ilk, they would do well to consult these two books, which examine the Islamic system in practice. A God Who Hates explores the nature of Islam, viewed through Wafa Sultan’s personal experiences growing up in Syria, working there as a doctor, and then immigrating to the United States, where she became a psychiatrist. Cruel and Usual Punishment, published early last year, is the second book by Nonie Darwish, the daughter of an Egyptian officer killed by the Israelis in the 1950s. Her first, Now They Call Me Infidel, offered extensive autobiographical detail; the more recent book is an in-depth probe of what she sees as key problematic aspects of Islam.
Both Sultan and Darwish document how traditional Islamic law, or sharia, underpins Islamic life. Darwish argues that under Islam’s golden period of conquest and imperial rule, sharia’s most important aspect was “total control of the large and diverse Muslim empire—everyone’s behavior, loyalty, mind and even soul.” The system was all-encompassing and punishments were strict, but the caliphs, or rulers, were exempt from penalty for theft, adultery, killing, or drinking; in addition, they alone could have an unlimited number of wives. Their subjects were not allowed to revolt against them unless the caliphs acted in an “un-Islamic” way. Indeed, the fate of the learned imams who had written the sharia law demonstrated the extent of the caliphs’ immunity: they all wound up imprisoned, punished, exiled, or poisoned.
This system, Darwish writes, continues today in the tyrannical—and broadly accepted—behavior of most Muslim rulers. And the behavior cascades downward through Islamic society: those in positions of authority, whether in business or government, often act in repressive ways toward subordinates or the public at large. For many Islamic men, the home is the only place where they can assert their authority; yet even there, Darwish suggests, that authority is less than it seems. She analyzes the corrosive impact of polygamy, practiced or merely hypothetical, on all family members. She also notes its contribution to societal tension: since women do not greatly outnumber men, richer, older men acquire numerous wives at the expense of poorer young men. Caught between exclusion from a normal family life and brutal behavior in the public sphere, the best outlet for many young men is jihad: “The bottled-up sexual rage of the Muslim male,” Darwish argues, “must explode in the faces of the foreign infidel.” Jihad is thus essential for the maintenance of sharia law.
For her part, Sultan emphasizes the fear inherent in Islam, where the Koran’s 99 attributes of God include “The Harmer,” “The Compeller,” “The Imperious,” “The Humiliator,” and “The Bringer of Death.” She traces this to the dangerous environment of the Arabian desert, in which life was fragile and unpredictable, heightening people’s fear of the unknown. She also emphasizes the traditional Bedouin practice of raiding; Bedouins feared raids, yet relied on them for their own survival. Muslims today, too, are governed by the philosophy of raiding, she suggests. She describes an incident soon after she arrived in the United States, in which an Arab neighbor took her to the supermarket: We went into a Vons market and, once there, she began to open every packet she could, then she began to make holes in the lids of cartons of milk, Jell-O, and cream. Then she made holes in a number of bags of potato chips, packets of paper handkerchiefs, and packets of spaghetti.
I shouted at her disapprovingly: “Dina, what are you doing?”
“May God curse them. They stole our land!”
“And are you doing this to try to get it back?”
“I’m trying to hurt them! You’re still new here. Don’t you know the owner’s Jewish?” This hatred of Jews is not peripheral or dependent on Israel or Israeli behavior. Rather, it is deeply rooted in Islam, which divides the world into two parts, Muslim and non-Muslim. As Sultan recalls from her own childhood: “Jew must be one of the words Muslim children hear most frequently before the age of ten. It is also one of the hardest words they hear, as in their imagination it conjures up visions of killing, depravity, lies, and corruption. When one person wishes to express his disdain for another, he will call him a Jew.”
With some humor, Sultan describes how, early on, she bolted out of a shoe shop in Hollywood, one foot bare, upon discovering that the shop assistant was an Israeli Jew. ”We imbibed with our mother’s milk hatred for the Jews,” she writes, “and for anyone who supported their cause. We justified this hatred by devising a conspiracy theory, and we called anyone who disagreed with us a Zionist agent. This conspiracy theory helped keep Muslims inside the straitjacket in which Islam had imprisoned their minds.”
Darwish agrees. She quotes the Koranic verse, “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them.” She thinks Westerners who dismiss the influence of such passages on Islamic attitudes are deluding themselves: “Don’t even think for a second that the above verse does not cause a major divide between Muslims and non-Muslims. Those apologists who claim it has little effect on Muslim society are in denial and are unable to see Muslim society objectively.”
These various elements of control, fear, and separation dominate the role of women, particularly, in traditional Islam. Sultan recounts horrifying tales of rape, incest, and abuse that she uncovered while working as a doctor in Syria. Most searing are those of women convinced that, as they have been told all their lives, they are dirt. Such conviction, Sultan points out, comes straight out of Koranic verses and prophetic traditions, which stress that women are defective.
Darwish lays out the options available to Muslim women. They can reject sharia, whether secretly or openly; they can join in, becoming militant supporters of it; or they can live in denial. She herself spent many years in the third category, as she describes: “Women who follow the maze Islam has created for them will not be noticed and will be safe. On the other hand, if anyone deviates and is noticed, she will get no mercy from anyone. Other women in society—mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins—were among those who reinforced such attitudes.” Most Muslim women succumb to what Darwish terms a “worldwide Stockholm syndrome,” championing sharia for their own survival.
If the fundamental elements of traditional Islam are inimical to Western values of equality, freedom, and tolerance, what can be done to protect these values from Muslim immigrants who seek, like Malik Hasan, to destroy them?
For Sultan and Darwish, the basic problem is not the Hasans of this world, but the ideology that motivates them—an ideology fundamental to “traditional” or “moderate” Islam as much as to its “radical” variant, they believe. Darwish cites repeated examples of Islam’s reliance on vigilantism: Muslims who kill unbelievers, infidels, or non-Muslims are regularly absolved of their crimes, and the use of civilian enforcers is a constant feature of Islam. She argues that Muslim immigrants to the West need to understand that attacks on freedom of religion will not be tolerated, and that their goal should be assimilation into democratic society. She would have sharia declared an illegal, dangerous totalitarian ideology, in much the same way that the United States did decades ago with Communism. These steps would not stop the entry of Muslims intent on subverting the Western system, but they would put them on notice. Sultan, a Muslim who has become an atheist, states the problem even more baldly: No one can be a true Muslim and a true American simultaneously. Islam is both a religion and a state, and to be a true Muslim you must believe in Islam as both religion and state. A true Muslim does not acknowledge the U.S. Constitution, and his willingness to live under that constitution is, as far as he is concerned, nothing more than an unavoidable step on the way to the constitution’s replacement by Islamic Sharia law. These two books will no doubt prove highly unpalatable, if not unacceptable, for many Americans. Nevertheless, they should demand serious attention. Both authors are intelligent, courageous observers who know what they’re talking about, and who speak out at their own personal risk. The United States is, and will remain, a welcoming land for immigrants, and any Muslim like Wafa Sultan or Nonie Darwish who wishes to live here and share our values should be made welcome. Those who seek to bring down our system, however, should not. The hard part, of course, is figuring out how to distinguish between the two categories. But we won’t be able to solve that problem until we address it honestly.
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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1/2/2010 -
'Burglars give up any human rights': British Conservative leader gets tough on right to defend home
David Cameron backed the rights of homeowners to protect themselves yesterday by warning that burglars surrender their ‘human rights’ the moment they break in. He raised the election stakes on crime by saying a Tory government would change the law to protect householders who exercise their ‘legitimate’ right to self defence. The Tory leader’s comments follow public outrage at sentences handed out in cases like that of Munir Hussain, who chased and beat a man who had held his family at knifepoint in their home.
Mr Cameron said he wanted to see fewer people arrested for defending their family and property. He told the BBC1 Politics Show: ‘It’s to make sure that fewer cases, frankly, are taken to court, that fewer people are arrested for doing what I think is perfectly legitimate, which is to defend yourself in your own home. ‘The moment a burglar steps over your threshold and invades your property, with all the threat that gives to you, your family and your livelihood, I think they leave their human rights outside.’
Under existing laws, homeowners are allowed to use only ‘reasonable’ force to tackle a burglar. The Tory proposals would strengthen the law so they would face prosecution only for using ‘grossly disproportionate’ force. It was unclear how Mr Cameron’s controversial proposals would work, but the Tories have pledged to abolish the Human Rights Act and replace it with a Bill of Rights if they win power. Mr Cameron has insisted that a Bill of Rights would ‘better tailor, but also strengthen, the protection of our core rights.’
The Tory leader’s tough stance put him on a collision course with the legal establishment and civil rights campaigners. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said he was speaking ‘nonsense’ and accused him of electioneering. She said: ‘Both main parties have become old hands at using law and order as a political football and inflated language is the tool of their trade. But as neither Mr Cameron nor the Government believe in the summary execution of burglars, the idea that anyone “leaves their human rights” at the door, as opposed to jeopardising their freedom, is nonsense.’
Business Secretary Lord Mandelson told the Politics Show: ‘It’s a wonderful soundbite but that’s all it is. ‘You know it’s not a practical policy. What sort of country is he trying to create? ‘Of course it will receive short-term public applause from those who want to get tough on burglars, as we do in our Government, but where’s the practical common sense policy thinking?’
Leading barrister Paul Mendelle, QC, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, has warned that the Tory proposals would encourage vigilantism and allow householders to kill burglars without being prosecuted. He said: ‘Burglars, knowing that they could be killed, might be more likely to carry weapons and/or use extreme violence. So it would be wholly counterproductive. The law on self-defence works well and has done for years.’ [i.e. It's very lucrative for lawyers]
But Dr David Green, from the thinktank Civitas, said Mr Cameron’s policy was ‘common sense’. He said: ‘If someone is faced with a threat in their own home they should be able to use anything at hand to protect themselves – even if it is in hot pursuit. ‘There are a lot of people out there who are afraid that they could find themselves in the dock if they defend themselves.’
Businessman Mr Hussain was jailed for two and a half years in December after chasing career criminal Waled Salem and attacking him with a cricket bat. Last month, the Lord Chief Justice freed Mr Hussain, saying the case demanded mercy in the face of a national outcry.
SOURCE
Why you SHOULD let your children play with danger (despite warnings from the health and safety brigade)
With suggested activities for children such as boiling water in a paper cup and cooking CDs in a microwave, it's unlikely to be a hit with the health and safety brigade. But a book detailing ways to expose youngsters to danger as part of their development has become surprisingly popular among parents.
Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) urges parents to help youngsters learn to judge risk and gain responsibility through experiments. They include playing with fire, driving under adult supervision and licking a nine-volt battery.
Co-author, Californian Gever Tulley, said the book was a response to the trend of fear-based parenting, where parents stop their offspring from trying new things for fear they may get hurt. He argues it is better to try something and fail, and so aid a child's 'creative development' than to not try at all.
The book was rejected by at least 16 publishers who feared lawsuits from parents whose children injured themselves following the book's advice, but it took off after the authors started selling it on a 'print-on-demand' basis. It is now the top title on Amazon's Kids' Active Books.
Mr Tulley insists there is a serious point to the activities, which also include making a bomb in a bag and climbing trees. He said: 'Of course, we must protect children from danger . . . but when that becomes over-protection, we fail as a society, because children don't learn how to judge risk for themselves. 'Let children practise climbing trees, and they will learn to do it safely. If you never let them climb a tree, they will eventually do it anyway, possibly in the most unsafe manner possible.'
Peter Cornall of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents agreed some accidents could benefit children. He said: 'Children are losing any sense of where real danger lies.'
SOURCE
The roots of Muslim rage
In one of his letters Thomas Jefferson remarked that in matters of religion "the maxim of civil government" should be reversed and we should rather say, "Divided we stand, united, we fall." In this remark Jefferson was setting forth with classic terseness an idea that has come to be regarded as essentially American: the separation of Church and State. This idea was not entirely new; it had some precedents in the writings of Spinoza, Locke, and the philosophers of the European Enlightenment. It was in the United States, however, that the principle was first given the force of law and gradually, in the course of two centuries, became a reality.
If the idea that religion and politics should be separated is relatively new, dating back a mere three hundred years, the idea that they are distinct dates back almost to the beginnings of Christianity. Christians are enjoined in their Scriptures to "render ... unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's." While opinions have differed as to the real meaning of this phrase, it has generally been interpreted as legitimizing a situation in which two institutions exist side by side, each with its own laws and chain of authority-one concerned with religion, called the Church, the other concerned with politics, called the State. And since they are two, they may be joined or separated, subordinate or independent, and conflicts may arise between them over questions of demarcation and jurisdiction.
This formulation of the problems posed by the relations between religion and politics, and the possible solutions to those problems, arise from Christian, not universal, principles and experience. There are other religious traditions in which religion and politics are differently perceived, and in which, therefore, the problems and the possible solutions are radically different from those we know in the West. Most of these traditions, despite their often very high level of sophistication and achievement, remained or became local-limited to one region or one culture or one people. There is one, however, that in its worldwide distribution, its continuing vitality, its universalist aspirations, can be compared to Christianity, and that is Islam.
Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.
We should not exaggerate the dimensions of the problem. The Muslim world is far from unanimous in its rejection of the West, nor have the Muslim regions of the Third World been the most passionate and the most extreme in their hostility. There are still significant numbers, in some quarters perhaps a majority, of Muslims with whom we share certain basic cultural and moral, social and political, beliefs and aspirations; there is still an imposing Western presence-cultural, economic, diplomatic-in Muslim lands, some of which are Western allies. Certainly nowhere in the Muslim world, in the Middle East or elsewhere, has American policy suffered disasters or encountered problems comparable to those in Southeast Asia or Central America. There is no Cuba, no Vietnam, in the Muslim world, and no place where American forces are involved as combatants or even as "advisers." But there is a Libya, an Iran, and a Lebanon, and a surge of hatred that distresses, alarms, and above all baffles Americans.
At times this hatred goes beyond hostility to specific interests or actions or policies or even countries and becomes a rejection of Western civilization as such, not only what it does but what it is, and the principles and values that it practices and professes. These are indeed seen as innately evil, and those who promote or accept them as the "enemies of God."
This phrase, which recurs so frequently in the language of the Iranian leadership, in both their judicial proceedings and their political pronouncements, must seem very strange to the modern outsider, whether religious or secular. The idea that God has enemies, and needs human help in order to identify and dispose of them, is a little difficult to assimilate. It is not, however, all that alien. The concept of the enemies of God is familiar in preclassical and classical antiquity, and in both the Old and New Testaments, as well as in the Koran. A particularly relevant version of the idea occurs in the dualist religions of ancient Iran, whose cosmogony assumed not one but two supreme powers. The Zoroastrian devil, unlike the Christian or Muslim or Jewish devil, is not one of God's creatures performing some of God's more mysterious tasks but an independent power, a supreme force of evil engaged in a cosmic struggle against God. This belief influenced a number of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sects, through Manichaeism and other routes. The almost forgotten religion of the Manichees has given its name to the perception of problems as a stark and simple conflict between matching forces of pure good and pure evil.
The Koran is of course strictly monotheistic, and recognizes one God, one universal power only. There is a struggle in human hearts between good and evil, between God's commandments and the tempter, but this is seen as a struggle ordained by God, with its outcome preordained by God, serving as a test of mankind, and not, as in some of the old dualist religions, a struggle in which mankind has a crucial part to play in bringing about the victory of good over evil. Despite this monotheism, Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, was at various stages influenced, especially in Iran, by the dualist idea of a cosmic clash of good and evil, light and darkness, order and chaos, truth and falsehood, God and the Adversary, variously known as devil, Iblis, Satan, and by other names.
The Rise of the House of Unbelief
In Islam the struggle of good and evil very soon acquired political and even military dimensions. Muhammad, it will be recalled, was not only a prophet and a teacher, like the founders of other religions; he was also the head of a polity and of a community, a ruler and a soldier. Hence his struggle involved a state and its armed forces. If the fighters in the war for Islam, the holy war "in the path of God," are fighting for God, it follows that their opponents are fighting against God. And since God is in principle the sovereign, the supreme head of the Islamic state-and the Prophet and, after the Prophet, the caliphs are his vicegerents-then God as sovereign commands the army. The army is God's army and the enemy is God's enemy. The duty of God's soldiers is to dispatch God's enemies as quickly as possible to the place where God will chastise them-that is to say, the afterlife.
Clearly related to this is the basic division of mankind as perceived in Islam. Most, probably all, human societies have a way of distinguishing between themselves and others: insider and outsider, in-group and out-group, kinsman or neighbor and foreigner. These definitions not only define the outsider but also, and perhaps more particularly, help to define and illustrate our perception of ourselves.
In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam. But the greater part of the world is still outside Islam, and even inside the Islamic lands, according to the view of the Muslim radicals, the faith of Islam has been undermined and the law of Islam has been abrogated. The obligation of holy war therefore begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.
Much more HERE
Push for a Human Rights Act fading in Australia
A lucky escape for Australia, considering the British example
The first big Australian political story of the year has raised surprisingly little attention. This is likely to change when the civil liberties lobby realises that the Rudd Government appears to have junked the human rights agenda.
Last Wednesday, The Australian Financial Review reported an interview with the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland. There was considerable media focus on his comment that the Rudd Government, if re-elected, would consider a referendum on the republic, the recognition of indigenous Australians, local government and co-operative federalism.
The interest faded when the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said Kevin Rudd had made it clear "there are no present plans to have a referendum" on the republic.
Gillard said the Government was focused on immediate challenges and mentioned lifting educational standards. Fair enough. But if the republic is a lower-order issue to education, then education reform should take precedence over a human rights act.
This was the part of the McClelland interview that was essentially overlooked. He said it was the Government's philosophy that "the enhancement of human rights should be done in a way that as far as possible unites a community rather than causes further division".
If this is the case then a human rights act seems doomed. Writing in the Herald last February, the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC, maintained that at the 2020 Summit "a thousand articulate members of the community came down in favour of … a charter of rights". Not so. This issue was only discussed in any detail at the summit's constitution, rights and responsibilities sub-stream, which was chaired by the legal academic Helen Irving.
There was majority support among sub-stream delegates for a charter of rights but also strong minority opposition. Following the summit, McClelland established the National Human Rights Consultation, chaired by the lawyer Father Frank Brennan, with three other members. He erred in not including someone who opposed a charter of rights. Irving would have been an ideal appointment.
The group released a report in September. Its most controversial recommendations turn on the proposal that Australia should adopt a human rights act and that the High Court should be empowered to declare a Commonwealth law to be incompatible with it. The Brennan report says that this recommendation may prove impractical. Brennan told The Weekend Australian in September: "My own view is that I think this provision is not going to be workable."
Little wonder McClelland is wary. In its foreword, the Brennan report concedes the Coalition is opposed to a human rights act and the Labor Party is divided on the issue. Two of the most articulate opponents are the former NSW premier Bob Carr, and the NSW Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos.
Then there is the new Liberal Party leader, Tony Abbott. As McClelland well knows, Abbott is capable of running a very effective campaign against a charter presented as giving more power to unelected judges and bureaucrats at the expense of the elected representatives of the people. Abbott's case would be strengthened by the fact that, on this issue, his views are close to those of Carr and Hatzistergos.
The Brennan report revealed that a majority of Australians believe human rights are adequately protected now. Outside such advocacy groups as GetUp! and Amnesty, there is little call for a charter. The majority of submissions came from these organisations while most of those opposing came from the Australian Christian Lobby.
In the lead-up to this year's federal election, Rudd and his colleagues do not need an argument with Christian groups - including the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, who has expressed concern that the human rights lobby is intent on constraining religious freedom. As McClelland has indicated, the Rudd Government does not want to preside over a divisive debate on this issue.
Nor is there reason to. Irving is correct in arguing that the Australian rights record is no worse, and in many cases is better, than in countries which have a bill of rights. Such recognition is missing from the Brennan report. The tone of Australia Day suggests that most Australians are happy with their lot. It seems that McClelland has come to a similar conclusion.
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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31/1/2010 -
Book Review: "The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures"
Review by Bruce Bower
Several recent best sellers in the natural and social sciences have portrayed religious belief as irrational and even downright harmful. In his new book, Wade gives faith a reprieve. He argues that religion served crucial purposes in ancient societies and, via evolution, became ingrained in the human brain.
Wade offers a respectful outlook on humanity’s faith in gods and supernatural powers, while not shying away from the darker side of religious convictions, including wars and inquisitions. But his notion that natural selection equipped human brains with an innate system for learning religion is speculative.
Beginning at least 50,000 years ago, bands of hunter-gatherers acted according to religious rules and rituals, Wade proposes. Religion fostered moral standards that held groups together. The societies that benefited most from the unifying power of shared beliefs outcompeted rivals and thus left more survivors, Wade writes, and so genes underlying a brain-based “faith instinct” proliferated.
Wade, a science journalist, grounds his ideas on two controversial assumptions: that natural selection acts on groups, not just individuals, and that genes can provide the basis for faith.
Wade’s thesis will generate at least as much dispute as has the notion of a language instinct, which he also embraces. Beliefs in higher powers may get built from basic forms of interpersonal and social learning, not from a preset brain circuit, some social scientists argue. Heaven knows, some fascinating research lies ahead.
SOURCE
Ethnic minority staff paid 10% less than white workers at British "equality" watchdog
The Government’s controversial equality watchdog was last night accused of ‘rank hypocrisy’ for flouting its own policies on fair pay. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has angered business leaders by ordering a crackdown on hard-pressed companies that fail to pay the same rates to employees doing similar work.
But official figures show that more than two years after it was set up to stamp out discrimination, the commission is paying its own ethnic minority workers almost ten per cent less than white staff – an embarrassment for its black chairman Trevor Phillips. And disabled workers at the quango, which employs more than 500 staff, have slipped behind their able-bodied colleagues by nearly nine per cent.
Moreover, the figures show the pay gap for both minority groups has worsened over the past year, and female staff also face pay discrimination compared to male counterparts.
Tory MP Philip Davies, who elicited the pay-gap figures in questions to Women and Equalities Minister Angela Eagle, said: ‘This is rank hypocrisy. They should be ashamed of themselves.
‘We have the ludicrous situation where the taxpayer-funded body that goes around lecturing everyone else about fair pay is one of the worst offenders themselves.’
The details have emerged after a period of turbulence at the commission, which last summer saw the resignation of six commissioners, criticism of the management style of Mr Phillips and calls for his resignation.
In 2008, The Mail on Sunday revealed that the £112,000-a-year equality chief was paid by Channel 4 to give it advice on the fallout of the Big Brother racism row involving Indian actress Shilpa Shetty, provoking accusations of a conflict of interest.
The EHRC – which received more than £61million from the Government last year – encourages companies to carry out equal-pay audits to compare the earnings of staff doing the same job or similar work that requires equivalent skills, effort and decision-making. A commission spokesman said: ‘We recognise we should have published these gaps,’ adding that it was now planning to do so within the next few months.
The latest available figures up to the end of October show that the quango is paying 9.66 per cent more to white staff than to ethnic minority staff, 8.9 per cent more to able-bodied than to disabled employees and 3.04 per cent more to men than women. The commission spokesman said that its salary inequalities were far lower than national averages, while they employed higher than average numbers of women and minority groups. Referring to the new pay-gap figures, the spokesman said: ‘These gaps are largely due to the process of creating the commission by bringing together three different legacy commissions, each with their own pay and conditions. ‘We are determined to address the issue and we are carrying out a review of our pay and reward systems.’
SOURCE
Terror suspects exploit the British system to stay anonymous
Terror suspects are wrongly exploiting the British legal system to try to "hide behind a cloak of anonymity", the country's most senior judges warned yesterday. The identities of some suspects have been kept secret by the courts without "the slightest justification", the Supreme Court ruled.
In a significant ruling which lawyers said had implications for other high profile criminal cases the judges appeared to criticise courts for granting anonymity too freely without sufficient consideration of whether it is truly in the public interest. The practice is now so commonplace that it is "ingrained" among court officials, the judges said.
Lord Rodgers warned concealing the identities of suspects "casts a shadow over entire communities" and said the public had a "legitimate interest in not being kept in the dark". The comments came as Lord Rodgers ruled the identity of four terror suspects who appealed against assets-freezing orders made by the Treasury could be made public. A fifth suspect had already been named. He launched a thinly veiled attack on the fact lawyers for some of the individuals had issued a press notice attacking the assets order using "highly charged language" against the Government but then, at the same time, demanded anonymity.
In a separate ruling, the Supreme Court said the Treasury had acted unlawfully in freezing the assets.
But in a far-reaching ruling on whether the men could be identified, Lord Rodgers described an "efflorescence of anonymity orders" in recent years and they had become an "ingrained habit". He highlighted that in 2007 eight out of 58 appeals in House of Lords involved at least one party had anonymity, while 15 of 74 cases did in 2008.
In a decision hailed as a victory for press freedom, he signalled they were only justified in an "extreme case", such as when a party or witness in proceedings or their family might be in peril of their lives or safety as a result of being identified. But none of the terror suspects could show that identifying them would put anyone at risk of physical violence, the Supreme Court said.
The Justice said his concerns over anonymity could also apply to suspects on control orders, who are all granted anonymity, but stressed other factors could be involved in such cases.
One leading lawyer suggested the ruling could even have implications for anonymity surrounding criminal cases such as the recent Edlington torture case where the two culprits have been kept secret because they are children.
As a result of the ruling, the men were identified as brothers Michael Marteen, formerly known as Mohammed Tunveer Ahmed, Mohammed Jabar Ahmed and Mohammed Azmir Khan, who the Treasury alleged they had reasonable grounds for suspecting they were or might be, facilitating the commission of acts of terrorism. The fourth is Hani El Sayed Sabaei Youssef also known as Hani al-Seba’i an Egyptian lawyer who arrived in Britain in 1994 claiming that he had been tortured by the police because he represented Islamist clients.
A fifth man was already identified as Mohammed al-Ghabra, after having been identified through a Bank of England press release. He is alleged by the US authorities to have “backed al-Qaeda and other violent jihadist groups, facilitating travel for recruits seeking to meet with al-Qaeda leaders and take part in terrorist training.”
In the case of Youssef, Lord Rodgers said the public would be "astonished" to learn that the courts, up until now, had prevented them from knowing he had successfully sued the Home Office for wrongful imprisonment in an openly reported case. He also expressed concern that courts were being misled, saying that Youssef was named in a Bank of England press release in 2005 and had featured in press articles.
Lawyers for Youssef and Marteen had argued they should remain anonymous because identifying them would have a serious effect on their private lives and their families, and expose them to suspicion to which they would be unable to respond.
Lord Rodgers said there "never was the slightest justification" for anonymity orders, and pointed out that "the courts below appeared to have granted anonymity orders without any very prolonged consideration and without explaining their thinking". In the case of Marteen, he added that "what he really objects to is being identified as a person who the Treasury suspects, on what it regards as reasonable grounds, facilitates or may facilitate terrorism".
He also highlighted the fact that the three brothers, along with al-Ghabra, had "sought to enter the debate about the merits of freezing orders.
Solicitors for Marteen had issued a press release which attacked the Government for sacrificing "fundamental rights and liberties" and had "dishonoured their pledge of accountability".
Lord Rodgers said: "It is unusual, to say the least, for individuals to enter a debate, using highly charged language and accusing the Government of dishonouring a pledge, but at the same time to insist that they should have the right to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. It is also unusual for someone to assert the need for the press to respect his private and family life by not reporting his identity while simultaneously inviting them to report his version of the impact of the freezing orders on himself and members of his family."
He said while allowing the media to identify the men could lead to "outrageously hostile" coverage about them, that was "not sufficient reason for curtailing that freedom" for all members of the press.
As a result of the separate ruling on the unlawfulness of freezing orders, the Treasury has promised fast-track legislation. The court had ruled in favour of the five men who have had their assets frozen under an order brought in by the government without a vote in Parliament. A Treasury spokesman said: "The Government is committed to maintaining an effective, proportionate and fair terrorist asset freezing regime that meets our UN obligations, protects national security by disrupting flows of terrorist finance, and safeguards human rights. "It's important to be clear that this ruling does not challenge the UK's obligations under the UN Charter to freeze the assets of suspected terrorists, which we will continue to meet. "We will introduce fast-track legislation to ensure there is no disruption to our terrorist asset freezing powers."
SOURCE
Bureaucratic attempts to restructure the welfare-devastated lives of Australian blacks are going nowhere
Australian Aborigines are a completely different race from Africans but welfare has been as destructive among Australian blacks as it is among American blacks and native Americans
THIS should be a time of progress and optimism in the remote Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory. Vast reform efforts are under way, huge resources have been committed to transforming the social map, hundreds of new houses are being built or at least are on some official drawingboard, the commonwealth's emergency response is entering a much-advertised sustainable development phase.
Even the town camps of Alice Springs are being cleaned up as part of a $130 million transformation plan. New local government shires are in place across the bush to streamline public services and oversee the creation of 20 "growth towns". There is a remote service delivery headquarters in Darwin and a fresh philosophy of consultation is in the air.
"Grassroots inputs will help the tree to flourish," declares the commonwealth's co-ordinator-general for services to remote communities, Brian Gleeson, in his first report. His Territory-appointed counterpart, development expert Bob Beadman, speaks eagerly of government agencies and indigenous people keen for change, "all poised for the communities to develop a sense of wellbeing and place in society, and taking the opportunity to move forward with the options modern life has to offer".
Why, then, are fights and feuds still the chief markers of time's passage in the Aboriginal societies of the centre? Why is there a pandemic of marijuana use among the young, to go with the mass alcoholism seen in the itinerant camps of Alice Springs? Why are funerals and hospital visits the key events of the social calendar?
In a bid to take the true pulse of the central Australian bush and gauge the effect of the latest reform program, 2 1/2 years since the initial intervention on John Howard's watch, Inquirer this month made a 3000km journey through the far reaches of the Western Desert, visiting communities and outstations.
Despite the rhetoric being pumped out in Canberra and Darwin, it is plain that another policy failure is unfolding across the inland: money is being poured into the region, nourishing support staff and project managers but failing to benefit the indigenous citizens it is intended to help. Indeed, under the present dispensation little has changed and little can change: power over local affairs has been withdrawn from the communities while the welfare and training systems in place constitute a perfectly structured trap.
The consequences are widely felt. A dreadful disconnect between the administered and the administrators is palpable. What does one register in a typical desert community in this new progressive era? Depression, lassitude, a deep lack of purpose or involvement in the economic patterns of the wider world.
There are routine paid tasks to be done by locals: cleaning, rubbish collection and the like. They are overseen by managerial outsiders and helpers, tellingly referred to as staff and accommodated in little white mini-suburbs set apart from Aboriginal living areas.
But the incentives for community members to remain in the workforce or develop skills are minimal: it takes 20 hours of work a week before a remote community labourer has earned as much as he or she receives in standard welfare payments.
Beadman is one of few senior officials prepared to comment publicly on this dilemma. He says "it will take time, persistence and hard-headedness to move people out of dependency", and he cautions that he is hearing reports that remote community locals are refusing jobs at shires and stores. He even canvasses "breaching" welfare recipients who decline to work. But the flow goes both ways. Inquirer saw locals in one community approaching shire officials and pleading for work, to be told none was available.
Inquirer heard testimony that a senior local shire worker on approved leave for ceremonies was terminated because of his absence. The trap of joblessness, however reached, is profound: it is the key feature shaping the communities.
Hence, remote life's unhurried rhythms: dogs gather in their packs, card games wear on, queues form at the shop, police cars drift by on patrol. For many residents, the critical issue at any given time is the next trip into Alice Springs, where drink, drugs and casino gambling are on offer.
At least Canberra is well-informed these days about the surface conditions in the remote Territory. A network of 50 government business managers is in place, observing the 70-odd prescribed communities targeted by the initial intervention. Some of these managers are engaged, some ineffectual; some benign, some unpopular. All of them file detailed intelligence reports to Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, the Canberra department charged with running the emergency response's next phase, when the word intervention will be retired, and "normalisation" put in its place.
These reports which, somewhat creepily, are not shared with the target communities, are transmitted to the remote service delivery board of management in Darwin and they serve as the basis for fine-tuning policy. But since their writers speak no desert language and must rely on paid local "engagement officers", such documents catch little of the mood of discontent and cynicism that has spread through the communities.
The immediate weight of administration is now shouldered by the new shires, Territory local government bodies set up two years ago and virtually insolvent due to their funding arrangements and bizarrely ruinous IT costs. On paper, these organisations had strong potential as vehicles for the democratic control of regional priorities, for in the centre the remote shires cover exclusively indigenous populations and have indigenous councillors.
But as soon as the local shire councillors began trying to influence events on the ground, the bureaucrats hit back. Long lectures on separation of powers now consume shire meetings; Aboriginal councillors and mayors have come to realise the public service has once again clawed back control over their lives. One desert shire has 42 highly paid administrators where seven were needed in the old days when community councils operated; its human resources department alone employs three people.
Much of the tone of community life stems from the ground conditions. Overcrowding is still the key factor in the Aboriginal bush, the chief source of conflict, tension, ill-health and poor education outcomes: hence the critical importance of the $672m Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure program for public housing which, after two years has yet to have any effect in the centre. Take Kintore, the celebrated home of the modern desert painting movement, with its population of about 500. Here prominent artist Yuyuya Nampitjinpa lives in a block house with 27 residents while next door, shire councillor Irene Nangala has 29 people living in her home.
Yet no new houses will be built in Kintore. The repairs and renovations that have been scheduled will be carried out without the involvement of the local training and housing contractor. Six houses in the community stand derelict and a further two, formerly used for Aboriginal housing, have been taken over for health and social service use.
Take little Haasts Bluff, where three home renovations "to city standard" will be carried out when 18 houses need urgent repairs. Even the scope of the renovation works has been scaled back in recent months. Consider the prospective "growth town" of Papunya, where broken houses dot the landscape and many of the population of 300 live 15 to a dwelling: the renovations budget has been cut from $3.2m to $1.9m as SIHIP's program costs have blown out. Nineteen houses in the community will be worked on, at $100,000 each, maybe after Easter this year. Again, no new houses will be built in such places. Thus the largest Aboriginal housing project ever mounted in the Territory will not have the slightest effect on the overcrowding crisis in these communities.
A telling example of today's "whole of government" approach to housing is provided by recent initiatives at Imanpa, a small, functional settlement just off the Lasseter Highway leading to Yulara. Imanpa has 18 houses for its 200 people. Many houses are very full: one holds 17 family members from four generations. There are several modern houses reserved for the handful of outside staff; there is also a new police station.
Now the Territory police want to build a larger police station alongside the community to patrol the highway and three big new houses for its officers as well. Imanpa, understandably, feels over-policed: its leaders are up in arms and say they will not approve the new station unless their own people also get some new housing. Imanpa's promised repairs and renovations budget under SIHIP has already been cut from $1.1m to $700,000, or about $75,000 for each house due to be repaired: enough, on a rough estimate, for a new kitchen and laundry once the outside work crew fees have been factored in.
These are the kinds of new figures that have been quietly provided in recent weeks to the desert communities; they are, understandably, not being widely advertised by the responsible commonwealth and Territory government departments.
In theory, it should be simple to kick-start economic activity in such a landscape when so much needs to be done. Workforce training should be the first growth area. In practice, training leads nowhere: many young remote community men have already been trained as builders under the last housing program, and will now be trained again under SIHIP.
Training is outsourced by government and specialist companies are installed in larger centres. They offer skills judged useful in the brave new world of the centre. Basic courses for the mining industry are the main fare. Tourism, the obvious main chance, is a little exploited opportunity. Mutitjulu community lies next to Uluru and next to a giant tourism complex with 1000 workers, built on Aboriginal land; yet no Mutitjulu local holds a job at the Yulara resort.
There is, of course, another model for Aboriginal social development in the bush beside the vision of growth towns filled with Western businesses. For the past three decades, the dream of a contained life on outstations has held seductive sway in policy circles and, as a result, scores of small, far-flung huddles of houses and facilities dot the desert landscape.
Millions of dollars worth of infrastructure has been concentrated in these places. But many of the outstations now stand empty for much of the year as their occupants congregate in Alice Springs.
During a swing through the Kings Canyon outstation, Inquirer saw deserted facilities, damaged equipment and broken work buildings. At one large, vacant outstation, the houses had been vandalised by the abandoned pet camels. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage had been sustained, the septic tanks were full to overflowing, maggot casings lay thick in stagnant pools on the lounge-room floors.
From such cameos of wilful neglect, it is easy to concoct a bleak view of outstation life and the slim prospects for its successful prolongation in the centre. But there are counter-examples. Consider tiny Wanmarra and the details of its circumstances. Wanmarra outstation has 11 residents, six of them diligent market-garden workers on a community development employment program, the work subsidy scheme now being phased out by the commonwealth. There are three neat, solid family houses, all in perfect condition. Two of them were built by the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission two decades ago. Wanmarra has a cool room for the food crops it grows: tomatoes and watermelons trucked off regularly for sale in Alice Springs.
Peter Abbott, the young Community Development Employment Projects co-ordinator for the area, spells out the dilemma. It lies in the core economics of the outstation. A full crop of fruit, once sent out, may earn $3000; the program wages available for him and his fellow workers are $200 a week. "The only good thing," he says, "is we're sitting on our country and we're not somewhere in town. It makes us happy."
Wanmarra illustrates several features of the outstation model: how hard it is to make a living in the desert and to profit from the exiguous market opportunities of the centre; how much, too, depends on personal commitment. But it also shows that the welfare life is not an inevitable temptation; nor must bush houses decay within 10 years of their construction. There is a sharp, implicit lesson. It is precisely the policies of the commonweath and Territory governments, and the signals they still send, that favour the outcomes we see across most of Aboriginal central Australia.
How to recraft the model? The first step is to grasp the tone of the emotional landscape in the communities. Despite the new vogue in Canberra for constant consultations, senior bush men and women feel they have been marginalised and ignored. A mood of gloom and resignation has taken hold now that the emergency response has been smothered by a new tide of bureaucratic initiatives. Never have there been so many outsiders living on communities, and living off them, as locals well know. What limited autonomy once existed at the level of the remote community councils has been prised away and new tiers of administration imposed.
Welfare persists, though in more tightly constrained fashion. Some public housing is being provided, though at the cost of enforced leases over Aboriginal land. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Aboriginal people in the centre's remotest settlements are now being policed and watched more than they are being helped. The intensity of the outside attention tends to backfire: it infantilises and erodes capacity, rather than builds it up. Money flows in, but it is being spent on the outside contractors and providers of services rather than on bush jobs.
A complex new architecture of governance has been put in place but it is, once more, an architecture that blithely ignores the traditional patterns of Aboriginal social authority and contributes to the breakdown of old ways. Such is the map as the freshly badged policies of sustainable development begin to bite.
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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30/1/2010 -
British local authority snoopers question five-year-olds on home life
Children as young as five are being told to fill in Big Brother-style forms which let councils snoop on intimate details about their home lives. The questions - which have been attacked as exploitative - ask about junk food, television habits, family time and even whether the youngsters 'like themselves'. Results are stored on a database, allowing families deemed to be 'at risk' to be referred to social services or doctors.
Children are asked to colour in answers to questions such as how much fruit they eat each day compared to crisps and fizzy drinks. Hundreds of the 'lifestyle' quizzes, which are backed by the Department of Health, have been handed out in an attempt to build a picture of the health and wellbeing of individual households.
But privacy campaigners last night condemned the forms. Alex Deane, of Big Brother Watch, described it as 'an unbelievable intrusion into private life'. He said: 'The state doesn't bring up children, parents do. There is an important distinction between teaching and nannying - or even bullying - and this steps way over the mark.'
The lifestyle quizzes were piloted in Erewash, Derbyshire, where children filled in the forms at 'healthy living' after-school clubs, to which parents are invited. Although the survey was not compulsory, pupils were strongly encouraged to fill it in. The forms will now be sent out to 200 schools across the county and other councils are monitoring the scheme closely.
Daniella Yeo, of Erewash council, said the after-school clubs were very popular and that the questions followed guidelines set by NICE, the NHS's regulatory body. She added: 'They will help us target families at risk of obesity. We can then encourage parents to attend sessions with social services or GPs.'
Other questions for five-year-olds include whether they eat breakfast, how much water they drink and how they get to school. They are also asked 'how much to do like yourself?' - and told to tick a thumbs-up or thumbs- down sign that matches how they feel.
Seven-year-olds are being given an even more detailed quiz in which they say exactly how many hours they spend with their family, watching television and playing computer games. Civil liberties campaigner Josie Appleton, of the Manifesto Club, said: 'Councils and schools should concentrate on providing everyone with a good education. 'But they should keep their noses out of children's lunchboxes and away from the family dinner table.'
SOURCE
A Savage attack on free speech in Britain
The UK government’s border ban on an American shock jock reveals its utter disdain for freedom of speech and its fear of a volatile public
Imagine this: a man is banned from entering the UK. Not because he intends to hurt someone, or because he is fleeing a crime committed some place else. No, he is prevented from ever putting a foot on British soil because of the things he says. That’s it. No other reason.
This is the situation in which the American ‘shock jock’ Michael Savage currently finds himself. More shocking, however, is that barely anyone in Britain has batted an eyelid on his behalf. That freedom of speech can be so flagrantly disregarded and merit barely a murmur of comment in response reveals just how normal we consider restrictions on free speech today.
Perhaps the indifference to Savage’s plight owes more than a bit to the nature of the protagonist, a rent-a-chauvinist dj with a not-so-nice line in liberal-baiting. Here’s a sample: ‘Only a devastating military blow against the hearts of Islamic terror coupled with an outright ban on Muslim immigration, laws making the dissemination of enemy propaganda illegal, and the uncoupling of the liberal ACLU can save the United States. I would also make the construction of mosques illegal in America and the speaking of English only in the streets of the United States the law.’
When Savage is not labelling the Koran a ‘book of hate’, he’s having a pop at the ‘gay and lesbian mafia’ for wanting to ‘homosexualise the whole country’ – an unprecedented feat of seduction by any standards. Savage by name, a bit ridiculous by nature. Abortion, Mexican immigrants, Barack Obama: there are few things the potty-mouthed dj hasn’t built a politically incorrect tirade around. No liberal causes, sentiments, or, as Savage portrays them, sacred cows, are out of bounds.
It’s probably fair to say that he’s not exactly the most progressive of guys. In fact, a lot of the stuff he spouts is undoubtedly offensive. But then again, as his ‘shock jock’ appellation suggests, he’s meant to be offensive. One thing he probably never meant to be, however, was a threat to UK national security. Yet, as the latest attempt to overturn his ban from entering the UK was defeated in the House of Lords, this, it seems, is exactly how the Home Office views him: a man who, with a few illiberal rants, might shock the British public into a gay- or Muslim-bashing frenzy.
The Savage case first came to light in May last year, when the then-home secretary Jacqui Smith announced that this polar opposite of Simon Mayo was banned from entering the UK. ‘He is someone’, she said, ‘who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence if that person were allowed into the country’. Savage isn’t alone. Since 2005, 21 other people have also been barred from the UK on the grounds of inciting hatred and violence, including a motley crew of neo-Nazis like Erich Gliebe and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen Donald Black, a few ‘hate preachers’ such as Amir Siddique, and a couple of Russian skinheads convicted of 20 racially motivated murders. Given the last two are currently serving 20-year prison sentences, one suspects that their freedom of movement might already be limited.
Last week, following the failed attempt of UK Independence Party leader Lord Pearson to have Savage’s ban overturned, security minister Lord West reiterated Jacqui Smith’s original position: ‘Mr Savage was banned for… unacceptable behaviour and making clear comments that might lead to civil violence [and] community violence.’ In other words, he was banned because he says things - really, really rude things. In fact, the things he says are so rude, and yet so magically persuasive, that Lord West wasn’t prepared to give any examples. Presumably in case the Lords and Ladies of the UK’s upper house were spurred to ‘civil and community violence’.
One of the absurdities of this, the UK’s list of banned people, is that quite a few of those on the list, including Savage himself, had neither tried, nor intended, to enter the UK. This was because the list, compiled by Whitehall types using Google and a little help from the intelligence services, was never really a practical measure. It was, as Smith herself said at the time, a way to showcase ‘the sorts of values and sorts of standards that we have here’. ‘It’s a privilege to come to this country’, she continued: ‘There are certain behaviours that mean you forfeit that privilege.’
And, in a way, Smith was right. This list of people exemplifying ‘unacceptable behaviours’, whether a shocking dj or a maverick cleric, did represent something about contemporary Britain: it showed just how low is the esteem in which the government holds its citizens. All it takes, apparently, is for someone to say something, in this case an invective-filled rant by Savage, and hundreds of people will automatically, unthinkingly act upon it. If that is all that is necessary for a race riot or a spate of homophobic violence, then far from showing ‘the sorts of values and sorts of standards’ we hold in the UK, it reveals their absence. We are barbarians in the making, a powder keg of bigotry just waiting for the shock jock’s spark. If we’re not racist homophobes, then we’re potential victims of racist or homophobic words, wallflowers in need of the state’s protection. Either way, as censor or protector, the state cannot trust the people.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. A ban on unacceptable behaviour, on offensive speakers, is never a testament to the strength of a society’s norms and values. It is always its opposite, a sign of weakness. Indeed, how weak must the British establishment be that it fears that a few utterances from a really rude dj might cause ‘inter-community tension or even violence’. If the government really believes in the strength of the values and standards it would like Britain to hold dear, why are a few people with dissenting, sometimes offensive views deemed such a problem?
It is precisely when speech is offensive that its freedom needs to be defended. This is not to give the okay to violent attacks on Muslims, homosexuals, or any other constituency the Home Office deems is at risk. And that’s because actions – actions which, in the case of killing or beating people up, have long been illegal – are not the same as words and thought. The fact that the government and its cronies in the House of Lords are happy to elide this distinction reveals the disdain with which they view the reasoning abilities of the British public. And that, not the un-PC shtick of Savage, is really shocking.
SOURCE
None Dare Call It Socialism
In toney, left-wing circles it's considered rude, as well as prima-facie evidence of yahooism or worse, to suggest that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the rest of the merry majority in Washington today are socialists. Conversations with liberals either end or get testy when this word comes up. The charge of socialism, they huff, is too outrageous to even consider.
A primo example of this came on one of the yak-yak shows Sunday morning where uber-liberal Bob Woodward of the "Washington Pest" pronounced that calling Obama a socialist is "not even in the ballpark" (Bob apparently being unaware that Obama's ball park only has a left field).
Closer to home I have a dear friend who's a trial lawyer in Tampa where I live and who voted for our rookie president (in accordance with a strict work rule of the trial lawyers' union). He tells me he quits reading commentary on the current scene when he encounters the world socialism. My guess is he would put his fingers in his ears if I brought the word up in conversation, though he is, taken all around, a most gracious fellow.
Some of the more acute on the left realize the socialist label is apt enough and only ham it up in this wise because they know most Americans -- saving a large fraction of those in academe, most of the media, Hollywood, the mainline clergy, most foundations, the education industry, environmentalists, and the literati -- don't fancy socialism, or politicians who promote it.
Of course most of this lefty behavior is based on attitude rather than analysis. It's more a matter of etiquette than polemics. The folks tuning out references to socialism are treating the word as a mere insult and don't bother to parse whether this is or isn't an accurate designation for what the current post-everything administration is all about.
So, is it? In trying to sort out this thorny problem of political definition I look for guidance to -- as I often do in dealing with life's more perplexing questions -- one of John Wayne's movies. The Duke doesn't let me down.
In 1959's Rio Bravo, the Duke is the sheriff and Dean Martin plays his deputy, a guy who's quick and slick with a gun when he's sober. In one scene, Martin's character asks the sheriff if he thought he, the Martin character, was as good and as fast as another gunman. The Duke takes a thoughtful beat, as he was so good at doing, and replies, "Well, I'd hate to have to make a living on the difference."
Well now there you are. Thanks again, Duke. What Obama and his legions are doing may not exactly be socialism, which is usually defined as government ownership of the means of production. But when you try to contrast socialism with what Obama and his crowd have put through and what they're whooping up, if you seek to isolate real differences between socialism and Obamaism, it would be awfully hard, as the Duke phrased it, to make a living on the difference.
Consider. The Obama administration and its congressional courtiers have put the federal government into the domestic car business in a big way. They've gotten "health care" legislation through both federal houses that goes a long way toward nationalizing the one-sixth of the economy, they put the national debt on steroids, and they're going for the homerun in cap and trade legislation, which would take decisions on how much and what kind of energy can be used in the economy from the private sector where they belong and turn them over to politicians and bureaucrats.
Cap and trade, if enacted, would effectively Sovietize the United States. America under cap and trade would have a command and control economy run (into the ground) out of Washington. As for America's long run of affluence and liberty, it would be time for Dandy Don to sing, "Turn out the light, the party's over." Cap and trade America would be grotesquely different than what America is and ever has been.
Likely what's happened is that modern socialists have gotten smarter, or at least cagier. Contemporary socialists, in contrast to those boring old Mustache Pete socialists of decades ago who wanted to run factories and mines and mills and stuff, have figured out that actually owning the means of production is a lot of trouble, and takes away valuable time that could be more (excuse the expression) profitably spent dominating the culture. Far easier to allow some poor sod to have his name on a title somewhere and think he owns the factory (or restaurant, or car dealership, or contracting business, or, or, or…) and just make all the important decisions for him. Call this soft-socialism, smart-socialism, or perhaps just lazy-socialism.
Plus there's the matter that people who own businesses often face losses. Better to take the profits in taxes and let the "owner" absorb the losses.
As we've seen, this goes well beyond economics. Government making all the decisions -- economic, political, cultural, sexual, religious, personal -- is what socialism is all about. Under socialism everything is political.
The depressing tendency toward over-regulation, a fact of life at least since the New Deal, has gone into warp-speed with the new Washington crowd. This bunch recognizes no limits in telling business "owners" what they can produce, how much of it and when, with what kind of and how much energy, who they must hire, what they must pay employees and what conditions of employment they must provide.
As we watch Obama and his merry band annex more and more of our personal and economic freedoms by putting more and more under the federal thumb, how much comfort can be taken by saying, "Well, at least it's not exactly socialism?" Socialism vs. Obamaism may not be a distinction without a difference. But it's certainly a distinction with such a trifling difference that there's not nearly enough there to make a living on.
Could any of this be why Obama's approval rating is now well below 50 percent and his disapproval rating is higher than any Gallup has ever measured at the beginning of a president's second year? Could it also be why Republican Scott Brown is looking like a possible winner tomorrow in Massachusetts (where you could get all the state's Republicans on a single school bus and have room left over to seat the New England Patriots, in uniform)?
SOURCE
The "Stolen Generations" myth is just another Leftist fraud -- entirely at variance with the facts
"Racist" Australian governments of the pre-WWII era "stole" thousands of black children, according to Leftist historians. A rebuttal below by Keith Windschuttle, Australia's most painstaking historian. He looks at ALL the evidence
In his 2008 parliamentary apology, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd endorsed the estimate by Peter Read, the university historian who first advanced the concept of the Stolen Generations, that 50,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed in the 20th century. Read had written that governments removed children as young as possible and reared them in institutions isolated from any contact with Aboriginal culture. "Welfare officers, removing children solely because they were Aboriginal," he said, "intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home."
The majority were allegedly babies and infants. The SBS television series First Australians claimed most of the 50,000 were aged under five. Henry Reynolds explained the rationale: "The younger the child the better, before habits were formed, attachments made, language learned, traditions absorbed."
It is not difficult to prove these assertions are untrue. When you look at the surviving individual case records in NSW, as I did for the period 1907 to 1932, they reveal that 66 per cent of the 800 children then removed were teenagers aged 13 to 19 years. Some 23 per cent were aged six to 12, and only 10 per cent were babies to five-year-olds. Most of them came from Aboriginal welfare stations and reserves. Two-thirds of the teenagers went not to institutions but into the workforce as apprentices.
For white children in welfare institutions, apprenticeship was then the standard destination too. At the time, for both white and black children, apprenticeship meant leaving home for four years and living with an employer. The principal occupations targeted by these job placement schemes, agriculture for boys and domestic service for girls, were the same for both black and white apprentices.
In Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory in the first half of the 20th century, laws and policies forbade the removal of full-blood children. The policy for segregated reserves across all of central and northern Australia, where full-blood populations still predominated, had been defined in Queensland in 1897. One of its principal aims was to preserve the ethnic integrity of the full-blood population by prohibiting sexual relations with Europeans and Asians. For J. W. Bleakley, the Queensland chief protector who also wrote the commonwealth policy that prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s, this was a matter of great principle. "We have no right to attempt to destroy their national life. Like ourselves, they are entitled to retain their racial entity and racial pride."
Only half-caste children could be removed. However, in WA, half-castes could not be removed under the age of six. In the post-war Northern Territory, 80 per cent of children in the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin and almost all those at the St Mary's hostel in Alice Springs (the Territory's sole institutions for part-Aboriginal children) were of school age, between five and 15. This was not surprising since the main reason for these homes' existence was to provide board for children sent by their parents to go to school.
The idea that most children were removed permanently is also untrue. In NSW, 80 per cent of those sent to one of the three Aboriginal child welfare institutions stayed there less than five years. Those aged 12 to 15 typically remained for months rather than years. Long-term residents were limited to those who had no parents willing or able to care for them. Rather than attempting to destroy Aboriginal culture, institutions for these children performed a temporary care function for disadvantaged and dysfunctional families, the same as welfare institutions for white children.
Those made apprentices were away from home for four years but could return for annual holidays. Their case files show that once their apprenticeships were complete, a majority returned home.
Another falsehood is that parents were not allowed to visit children in institutions. In NSW, the Aborigines Protection Board not only permitted this but from 1919 onwards it gave parents the money for the rail fare plus "a sustenance allowance" to do so. There is plenty of evidence of Aboriginal parents visiting their institutionalised children in NSW, SA and WA. As one inmate of the Cootamundra Girls' Home said, "my father, he always used to come over on pension day, and me birthday". At the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin, up to one quarter of those accommodated were working women, several of them single mothers with their children.
The notorious Moore River Settlement in WA was an institution for destitute Aborigines of all ages. Indeed, most children went there with their parents. Only a minority of children at Moore River, a total of 252 from 1915 to 1940, or 10 a year, were removed from their families. This was out of a state population of 29,000 Aboriginal people.
What support there was for the Stolen Generations thesis came from quotations taken out of context by politically motivated historians. Read claimed the files of individuals removed by the Aborigines Protection Board revealed the motives of those in charge. "The racial intention was obvious enough for all prepared to see, and some managers cut a long story short when they came to that part of the committal notice, `reason for board taking control of the child'. They simply wrote `for being Aboriginal'."
My examination of the 800 files in the same archive found only one official ever wrote a phrase like that. His actual words were "being an Aboriginal". But even this sole example did not confirm Read's thesis. The girl concerned was not a baby but 15 years old. Nor was she sent to an institution. She was placed in employment as a domestic servant in Moree, the closest town to the Euraba Aboriginal Station she came from. Three years later, in 1929, she married an Aboriginal man in Moree. In short, she was not removed as young as possible, she was not removed permanently, and she retained enough contact with the local Aboriginal community to marry into it. The idea that she was the victim of some vast conspiracy to destroy Aboriginality is fanciful.
Rather than acting for racist or genocidal reasons, government officers and missionaries wanted to rescue children and teenagers from welfare settlements and makeshift camps riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence and sexual abuse. In NSW, WA and the Territory, public servants, doctors, teachers and missionaries were appalled to find Aboriginal girls between five and eight years of age suffering from sexual abuse and venereal disease. On the Kimberley coast from the 1900s to the 1920s they were dismayed to find girls of nine and 10 years old hired out by their own parents as prostitutes to Asian pearling crews. That was why the great majority of children removed by authorities were female.
The fringe camps where this occurred were early versions of today's remote communities of central and northern Australia. Indeed, there is a direct line of descent from one to the other: the culture of these camps has been reproducing itself across rural Australia for more than 100 years.
Government officials had a duty to rescue children from such settings, as much then as they do now. Indeed, the major problem was that state treasuries would not give the relevant departments and boards sufficient funds to accommodate all the neglected and abused Aboriginal children who should have been removed.
The other great myth about the Stolen Generations is that children were removed to "breed out the colour". It is certainly true that two public servants responsible for Aborigines in the 1930s -- Cecil Cook in the Northern Territory and A.O. Neville in WA -- subscribed to a proposal for radical assimilation. Cook said in 1933 that he was endeavouring "to breed out the colour by elevating female half-castes to white standard with a view to their absorption into the white population". Neville said in 1937 that if such a scheme were put into practice we could "eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia".
There are two problems with this case. For a start, the proposal was, as its name said, about "breeding", not the removal of children. It was a plan to oversee the marriage of half-caste women to white men. In practice, it was a failure. Part-Aboriginal women preferred men of their own background and few wanted to marry white men. By 1937, Cook confessed he had overseen fewer than 50 such marriages in his time in office.
Second, those who proposed it were never given the legal authority by their ministers or parliaments to institute such a scheme. Nor were they given enough funding to do so. Neville constantly complained about the tiny budget he received, half that of NSW for an Aboriginal population three times as great. He was never funded to undertake a program of inter-marriage and assimilation. Indeed, the Native Administration Act of 1936, now demonised by historians, inhibited his ability to breed out the colour by defining half-caste people as "natives" and forbidding their marriage to white people or those of lesser descent.
An earlier generation of historians support my interpretation. In his 1972 book Not Slaves, Not Citizens, Peter Biskup declared Neville's program "an unequivocal failure" that was "quietly dropped". Biskup said of the 1936 act: "Instead of being bred out, colour was being bred in." In Shades of Darkness, his history of Aboriginal affairs from 1925 to 1965, Paul Hasluck said the proposal was too unpopular with white voters and their elected representatives to ever have been implemented.
Yet recent historians and commentators have persisted in describing this proposal as "a massive exercise of social engineering" and an instrument of genocide. Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, described it as commonwealth policy: "The officials in Canberra and the minister, J. A. Perkins, gave support to Cook's proposal for an extension of the Territory policy to Australia as a whole."
This is false. The truth is that Perkins, minister for the interior in the Joseph Lyons government, in a carefully worded statement to the House of Representatives on August 2, 1934, denounced the proposal. He said: "It can be stated definitely, that it is and always has been, contrary to policy to force half-caste women to marry anyone. The half-caste must be a perfectly free agent in the matter."
From 1932 to 1934, Cook had tried several times to get approval for his proposal from the Lyons cabinet. None of the letters and reports that circulated between Darwin and Canberra on this issue ever mentioned that it had anything to do with removing children. The whole discussion was about arranged marriages.
Once Lyons and his ministers learned about Cook's plan, and especially after being subjected to the embarrassing publicity it generated in both the Australian and English press, they wanted nothing to do with it. On September 19, 1933, cabinet sent the proposal back to the department unapproved. Bleakley's alternative recommendation for segregated reserves that retained the Aborigines' "racial entity and racial pride" remained commonwealth policy for the duration of both Cook's and Neville's tenures in office.
None of the historians of the Stolen Generations have ever reproduced Perkins's statement. Nor have they reported any of the other critical reactions made by Lyons to the press. On June 23, 1933, the Darwin newspaper, the Northern Standard, quoted Lyons government sources saying: "It is all a lot of rot." But you won't find that quoted in any of the academic literature on this topic.
Manne is not the only offender here but, as a professor of politics, he had the greater public duty to tell the full story. However, he stopped short of revealing that the events concluded with cabinet throwing out the proposal and the minister denouncing it in parliament. To have told it all would have publicly disproved his case about the Stolen Generations and the allegedly racist and genocidal objectives of government policies in the 1930s.
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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29/1/2010 -
British prosecutors grab the first excuse to drop a prosecution for REAL hatred
But just deny the holocaust and you can spend years in jail. Witnesses in court cases often become very upset for one reason or another but that normally leads only to an adjournment. The judge certainly thought that the prosecutors were off-beam. What merits the most severe punishment in Britain is being middle class. The underclass can virtually do no wrong
A teenager who branded Francecca Hardwick, the disabled girl found dead with her mother in a burnt-out car, a “freak” who “deserved what she got”, walked free from court yesterday. The 16-year-old boy grinned and punched the air after prosecutors decided to halt the trial when the main witness collapsed while giving her testimony.
In dramatic scenes at Hinckley Youth Court, the trial of one of the teenagers accused of waging a local hate campaign against the neighbours of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca was abandoned “in the public interest”.
It was alleged the youth, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had been harassing Hazel Smith, 48, a friend of Ms Pilkington, who also worked as a lollipop lady and parish councillor, because he believed she had reported him to the authorities. Mrs Smith told the court the boy had branded Francecca, who had a mental age of 4, “Frankenstein”, and said she and her mother both “deserved what they got”.
No one has been prosecuted over the deaths of Ms Pilkington, 38, who killed herself and her 18-year-old daughter after suffering years of abuse from local gangs at their home in Barwell, Leicestershire. Their bodies were found in a burnt-out car in October 2007. A coroner severely criticised police and council officials for failing to protect the vulnerable pair from the abuse, after an inquest last October.
Mrs Smith told the court that he had confronted her on two occasions, after she caught him shooting at her pet guinea-pigs with an air gun. “He said that I was a neighbourhood watch bitch, a copper’s nark and that I get people into trouble. “He said he was going to smash my windows at the house and he hated me. I didn’t reply to him and he then swore at me and stuck his two fingers up and started to ride off. “That made me feel terrible, like I was a troublemaker causing problems for everyone around Barwell. I was frightened in case I should say something I shouldn’t.”
Moments later she collapsed. She appeared to be having a fit, and paramedics were called. Mark Williams, for the prosecution, said that it was in the “public interest” to end the trial.
District Judge David Meredith said he was unhappy about the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) decision: “I am backed into a corner from which I have no escape. There are particular aspects of this case that have caused me grave concern by the alleged response to Fiona Pilkington and her daughter’s death. The alleged comment that Fiona Pilkington deserved what she got is a matter I would view as significant. I view the [CPS] decision not to proceed as a little hasty.”
The judge ordered that not guilty verdicts be entered to the charge of harassment and a separate charge involving a public order offence. Addressing the youth, he said: “For reasons better known to them than to me, the prosecution has come to the conclusion it is not in the public interest to pursue these matters against you.”
Earlier at the same court two youths, aged 16 and 17, were convicted of harassing another neighbour of Mrs Pilkington. The judge took 30 minutes to convict the teenagers of conducting a campaign of intimidation against Carol Sainsbury, 46, a disabled grandmother, who lived on Bardon Road, between August 1 and October 7 last year. A third teenager Billie-Joe Kenney, 19, was cleared of the charge.
SOURCE
For Bigots, Israel Can Do No Right
As most objective observers throughout the world marvel at Israel ’s efficiency and generosity in leading the medical aid efforts in Haiti , some bigots insist on using these efforts as an occasion to continue their attack on the Jewish state. Both the neo-Nazi hard right and the neo-Stalinist hard left cannot help but to demonize Israel, regardless of what Israel does.
The neo-Nazi website ReportersNotebook.com features a blog entitled The Zionization of Disaster Relief. It accuses Israel of “exploiting the suffering of poor, defenseless Haitians on behalf of Israeli Triumphalism.” It complains that Israel is rendering medical aid to Haiti only to deflect attention from its crimes against the Palestinians.
The hard left, even in a Israel, complains that Israel should not be sending medical assistance to such a faraway place. Instead it should be sending it to nearby Gaza.
Even the New York Times, in an otherwise thoughtful analysis of the controversiality of the aid among some Israelis, failed to note the difference between Israel sending its limited resources to faraway Haiti and to nearby Gaza. Haiti is not at war with Israel . Haiti has not pledged itself to Israel ’s destruction. Haiti has not fired 8,000 rockets at Israeli civilians. Gaza , on the other hand, has a popularly elected government that has done and continues to do all of the above. Moreover, there is no comparison between the tens of thousands of Haitians who have died from a natural disaster, and the people of Gaza who suffer far less from what is, essentially, a self-inflicted wound.
Nor do the perennial enemies of Israel emphasize the comparison between tiny and resource-poor Israel , on the one hand, and the enormous and resource-rich Arab and Muslim nations, on the other hand. While Israel digs deeply into its treasury and manpower to send medical assistance a quarter of the way around the world, Arab and Muslim nations are generally missing in action when it comes to relief efforts. This is true not only in Haiti , which is a Catholic nation, but it was equally true when tsunamis and other natural disasters have devastated Muslim nations.
For those who argue that Israel is sending this aid to Haiti for its own selfish reasons, there are two answers. First the realpolitik answer: All nations have interests; and all act, at least in part, out of self interest. When the United States government is asked by Americans to justify its multibillion dollar foreign aid grants, it generally responds by arguing that these grants are serving the interests of the United States . When it comes to Israel , however, a double standard is always applied. Israel must act only out of altruistic motives, while all other countries are entitled to leven altruism with self interest. The second answer is that Israel is doing far more in Haiti than would be required to satisfy its self interests. It is sending more aid per capita than any country in the world. It is doing it with extraordinary efficiency and real impact. Isn’t it at least possible that the millennia-long Jewish tradition of tzadakah—that is charity based on justice—is at least part of the explanation for Israel ’s generosity?
The fact that so many Israelis are advocating medical and other assistance to Gaza , certainly supports this latter theory. Has any other country in the history of the world ever provided medical and other assistance to a people with whom it is at war—to people who continue to support rocket attacks and other forms of terrorism against its own civilians? Again, a double standard. The reality is that Israel will be extremely generous to the people of Gaza if and when they stop supporting attacks on Israeli civilians, stop making martyrs of their suicide murders, and stop encouraging their children to don suicide vests. Contrast Gaza with the West Bank , which today has an improving economy, better travel conditions and among the best health care available in any Arab or Muslim country in the area. The peace dividend the Palestinian people will reap from making peace with Israel is incalculable.
So continue to criticize Israel when it fails to live up to generally applicable international standards, but praise it when it exceeds those standards in rendering aid that has saved and will continue to save many lives. Israel will continue to send disaster relief regardless of how the world reacts to it because Israelis understand how it feels to be subject to disasters. But fairness requires that Israel not be condemned for its humanitarian efforts, and that its rendering of aid to Haiti not be used as yet another occasion for applying a double standard to its actions.
SOURCE
Why are birthrates in the USA higher than in other economically advanced countries?
Seeking solutions, a few policy experts have begun looking more closely at the United States. After a big drop in the mid-1970s, America's fertility rate bounced back and has remained relatively stable, near replacement level--a 30-year-plus pattern that astounds European observers. For a time, demographers explained the difference between the U.S. and other industrialized countries by observing that America's population was more diverse, with more recent immigrants who had more children. But fertility levels among native-born white Americans also remain higher than among native-born Europeans, and the U.S.'s overall fertility outpaces that of other countries with a high percentage of foreign-born residents.
Demographers have also speculated that the higher fertility rate is a function of America's being a more religious country, reasoning that those who engage in organized religious activity favor larger families. One survey found 46 percent of Americans attending religious services regularly, compared with just 4 percent of Japanese, 7 percent of Swedes, and 16 percent of Germans. Yet fertility rates have remained stable in the U.S. even as they have plummeted in religious fundamentalist countries like Iran and Jordan, as well as in developing countries like Mexico, where rates of religious attendance remain higher than in America.
Faced with these contradictions, some scholars are now positing the distinctive nature of the U.S. economy and its labor market as a principal reason why Americans are having so many kids. "In general, women (and couples) are deterred from having children when the economic cost--in the form of lower lifetime wages--is too high," wrote economists Francesco Billari, Jose Antonio Ortega, and Hans-Peter Kohler in a 2006 study. "Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then reenter the labor force."
In Japan and many European countries with low fertility rates, government policies and cultural pressures on businesses make it difficult and expensive to lay off workers, instead promoting virtual guarantees of lifetime employment and early retirement. That, in turn, makes it harder to rehire those who have taken a break from work. Women are left with a difficult choice: either work full-time continuously and remain childless, or take time off to raise children and derail future employment opportunities. In Japan, 70 percent of women who leave the workforce to have a child never return. In low-fertility countries like Italy, Spain, and Greece, 40 to 50 percent of women are no longer working by 50. Over 70 percent of American women are still in the workforce at that age. In America, employers and workers have also proved far more innovative in designing work schemes that afford parents better reentry into the job market, including flex-time arrangements. One study found t! hat in over 30 percent of families in America in which both parents work, one parent is not working the traditional nine-to-five schedule.
Some countries have tried to compensate for rigid labor markets by enforcing parental-leave policies that require companies to rehire mothers (and occasionally fathers) who've taken time off to have a child and by providing parents with state-subsidized child care when their leave expires. But while such policies do encourage women to work, they're enormously expensive and hurt economic growth. Norway spends an astonishing 2.7 percent of its gross domestic product on subsidized day care. Partly as a result, Norway and other Northern European countries with aggressive natalist policies are among the most heavily taxed in the developed world. Levies on the average worker amount to 44 percent of earnings in Norway and 48 percent in Sweden, compared with 29 percent in America. And high taxes put downward pressure on fertility by diminishing the disposable earnings that couples might choose to spend on child rearing. One study of Europe's plush pension systems, which require p! ayroll taxes of up to 20 percent of earnings in some countries, found that the most expensive plans have probably diminished fertility rates by up to 1.6 children per couple.
The result of these disparities is a dramatically different demographic and economic future for the U.S. than for the rest of the industrialized world. While other developed countries shrink and age, America's population will grow by one-third through 2050, projections say. The working-age population in America will expand by some 45 million people even as it contracts by 100 million people in Europe and by 10 million in Japan. The economic boon to the U.S. could be significant: population growth has accounted for one-half to two-thirds of annual GDP growth in the industrialized world since World War II, according to Hewitt. By contrast, a shrinking population will cut Japanese and European economic growth by an average of nearly 1 percent annually by 2020, economists estimate. Shifting demographic patterns could also sharpen the American edge in innovation and entrepreneurship, as the pools of highly educated workers shrink in Europe and Japan and population growth shift! s to areas of the world where education levels don't match America's.
There are a few worrying trends. The massive debt that the U.S. has piled up during the current economic crisis and the lavish new entitlement programs that Washington is considering could drive taxes much higher, depressing economic growth and potentially sending fertility rates tumbling. And a disturbing fact embedded in our high birthrate is that 35 percent of all American children are now born to single mothers--and the percentage is growing. Extensive research shows that children raised in single-parent households don't do as well in a range of areas, from school to work, and any sizable decrease in academic achievement or work-participation rates would erode the advantages of a growing working-age population.
Nevertheless, the United States faces a far less challenging task in maintaining its demographic balance in coming decades than most countries do. And the likely benefits of that stability will far outweigh many of the short-term economic concerns currently dominating headlines.
Much more HERE
Australia: How I became a racist
This poor woman can't get over her delusion that all cultures are equal
I’m sitting in my lounge room looking at the swag of contemporary political philosophy books I own, simmering with resentment at the noise the uneducated wogs downstairs are making.
My family moved to Balmain when I was a teenager and until recently I’ve mainly lived in the Inner West of Sydney. I tried the Eastern Suburbs for a while but decided it was too cashed up and pretentious for my left-wing sensibilities. So I stayed close to Glebe and Newtown, went on the right marches, studied the right subjects at uni, and voted for the right political party.
But a couple of years ago my boyfriend and I found ourselves priced out of the inner city rental market - a direct consequence, I told myself, of my lack of materialism and desire to pursue a modest creative life.
We moved to south-western Sydney - to a suburb I had never even visited - where our newly renovated two bedroom apartment with large balcony and lock-up garage sets us back a mere $330 a week.
I now live in an epicentre of multiculturalism where Anglos are almost non-existent, and so at 41 I find myself a minority for the first time in my life. And I don’t like it. The median strips resemble the streets of Bombay - continually littered with household rubbish. We’ve renamed the corner fruit and vege shop The Rotting Fruit Emporium where the over-ripe produce is certainly cheap but has the molecular structure of cask wine.
The butchers which specialises in halal meat, particularly goat, is as hygienic as the average outdoor dunny, and the Bongo Mart, the local equivalent of a convenience store, has never stocked anything by Kraft, Arnotts or Cadbury’s.
Of course, the trouble with being immersed in difference is not that I can’t get organic truffle oil pasta or a babycino but that I’m confronted with the fact that what I thought were my values - reflected in those books with their bleeding heart titles like On Toleration, The Ethos of Pluralisation, and Multicultural Citizenship - seem to be so easily eroded by minor council violations committed by anyone I consider ‘other’.
Indeed, my self-righteousness received a boost from said council when they recently launched a ‘Quit the Spit’ campaign, designed to deter ‘foreigners’ ignorant of ‘our ways’ from gobbing all over the street. I’ve even begun to yell the slogan at people who violate it.
I’m stumped as to how the culturally specific conventions by which I live my life have come to be immutable, universal laws of nature in my mind? What’s happened to me? I’ve become the type of person I was always most intolerant of: an intolerant person. It’s positively unAustralian
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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28/1/2010 -
British Leftist logic
Employer told not to post advert for 'reliable' workers because it discriminates against 'unreliable' applicants. Publicity brings the usual backpedalling, however
When it comes to hiring staff, there are plenty of legal pitfalls employers need to watch out for these days. So recruitment agency boss Nicole Mamo was especially careful to ensure her advert for hospital workers did not offend on grounds of race, age or sexual orientation. However, she hadn't reckoned on discriminating against a wholly different section of the community - the completely useless. When she ran the ad past a job centre, she was told she couldn't ask for 'reliable' and 'hard-working' applicants because it could be offensive to unreliable people.
'In my 15 years in recruitment I haven't heard anything so ridiculous,' Mrs Mamo said yesterday. 'If the matter wasn't so serious I would be laughing out loud.
'Unfortunately it's extremely alarming. I need people who are hardworking and reliable - and I am pleased to discriminate in that way. If they're not then I really can't use them. The reputation of my business is on the line. 'Even the woman at the jobcentre agreed it was ridiculous but explained it was policy because they could get sued for being dicriminatory against unreliable people. 'She told me they'd had lots of problems with people taking them to court for adverts stating something like "would suit school leaver".'
Mrs Mamo, 48, of Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, runs Devonwood Recruitment, which supplies hundreds of cleaners, caterers and porters to hospitals across the country. She filed the advert for a £5.80-an-hour domestic cleaner at a hospital in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, through the Jobcentre Plus online service last Thursday.
However, when she rang the nearest branch in Thetford, Norfolk, to make sure details would be available to jobseekers who turned up in person, she was transferred to a woman who said the wording was unacceptable. Mrs Mamo, a divorced mother of two, added: 'I had to battle to have "must speak English", which they also said was discriminatory. 'In the end, I had to write "must speak English due to health and safety reasons" because they're dealing with hazardous materials.'
The diktat was widely criticised yesterday. A spokesman for the Campaign Against Political Correctness said: 'This is absolutely ridiculous. 'Of course people want reliable workers and employers should be able to ask for them. If they can't advertise for what they want then the system is broken.'
The Equality and Human Rights Commission added: 'This is in no way in breach of any discrimination law. 'Mrs Mamo should consider very unreliable any advice that she may have received implying that this aspect of her advert was discriminatory.'
Yesterday the Department for Work and Pensions said it could not comment on the conversation Mrs Mamo had with the member of staff at Thetford. However, a spokesman insisted her original advert had run on the Jobcentre Plus website and on computer terminals in branches. She added: 'Reliability is important to employers and we welcome ads seeking reliable applicants.' [Apparently The 'offensive' advert was eventually allowed on the website but not on the instore display]
SOURCE
Britain's Gestapo-style bureaucracy reined in by High Court
No punishment until you are found guilty of an offence would seem basic to justice but it's not so in modern Britain. You may not even be told why you are being punished or allowed to speak in your defence. And the government now aims to entrench that
Ministers will rush anti-terrorist legislation through Parliament after the Supreme Court yesterday quashed measures introduced by Gordon Brown to freeze the assets of al-Qaeda suspects. In a landmark decision seven Supreme Court justices ruled that ministers acted unlawfully in imposing financial restrictions on individuals without a vote in Parliament. They allowed a challenge by five men who had their assets frozen.
The orders were Britain’s response to UN Security Council resolutions calling for action to halt the financing of international terrorism. The justices ruled, however, that if the Government “considers that such far-reaching measures are necessary or expedient for combating terrorism or honouring the United Kingdom’s international obligations it must obtain approval for them from Parliament”.
The Treasury said that it was seeking cross-party support to pass emergency legislation before the election.
The justices condemned the Terrorism (United Nations Measures) Order 2006 and the Al-Qaida and Taliban (United Measures) Order 2006 as oppressive and paralysing. Lord Hope of Craighead, the deputy president of the court, said that those affected were in effect “prisoners of the state”. He added: “This is a clear example of an attempt to adversely affect the basic rights of the citizen without the clear authority of Parliament.”
The justices said that those affected by the orders had not had the opportunity to challenge the grounds on which they were suspected, but not charged, of financing terrorism. The court will rule today on when the quashing of the orders should take effect. It may delay the move to allow Parliament to pass legislation denying the men access to their funds.
In a second ruling the court lifted the anonymity orders granted to the men after a challenge by media organisations, including The Times. Lord Rodger of Earlsferry said that there was “never the slightest justification” for the orders and called for the growing phenomenon of giving anonymity to litigants to stop. One of the men was named in an earlier decision as Mohammed al-Ghabra. The others are: Mohammed Jabar Ahmed, Mohammed Azmir Khan and Michael Marteen, known previously as Mohammed Tunveer Ahmed. The fifth was Hani El Sayed Sabaei Youssef, who was granted anonymity to protect his family in Egypt. The court heard he gave interviews regularly.
Mr Justice Collins, in the High Court, originally outlawed the Treasury’s powers to freeze assets as unfair and a breach of fundamental rights. That was overruled by the Court of Appeal and the case became the first to be heard in the Supreme Court.
The justices said that the issue was whether Parliament intended to give the Treasury power to make orders that “interfere so profoundly with individuals’ fundamental rights without parliamentary scrutiny”. Parliament “did not so intend” and in making the orders the Treasury exceeded its powers, they said.
Terrorist financing orders were supposed to give effect in British law to UN Security Council resolutions requiring member states to freeze the assets of Osama bin Laden, the Taleban and their associates.
Eric Metcalfe, of Justice, the law reform and human rights group, said: “It is right that the Government takes action to prevent the financing of terrorism. But it was wrong for the Treasury to do so by side-stepping Parliament and violating basic rights.”
SOURCE
It's not the middle classes but social engineering zealots like Ms Harman who are to blame for Britain's inequality gap
The comments below amount to an extended version of what I said on DISSECTING LEFTISM yesterday
After 62 years of the welfare state and 13 of New Labour, Britain is becoming a less equal society. The Government's National Equality Panel reported this week that the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970. Deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman immediately took to Radio 4 to assert that 'persistent inequality of social class perpetuates disadvantage'.
The Government proposes to attack this by placing a new legal burden upon public bodies 'to address socio-economic equality'. It is fascinating to speculate about her meaning. Will travellers be represented on the board of Railtrack? Should sink estate dwellers have a statutory voice on the BBC Trust? Ms Harman is a boundlessly foolish woman, so it would be rash to rule out any extravagance.
Class, not patriotism, is the last resort of political scoundrels. Labour, on the ropes electorally, is playing the card for all it believes it to be worth. Between now and polling day, we shall hear much more about alleged social discrimination, the shocking advantages the rich somehow steal from the poor. The tragedy is that Harman and her kind are pursuing cheap tactical advantage amid one of the horror stories of our time.
The National Equality Panel is a silly name for a meretricious quango. We do not need its report to show that the bottom section of British society, the underclass, lead miserable lives from which their children have pathetically little chance of escape. It is heartbreaking to see mid-teen mothers in supermarkets, clusters of idle kids on city street corners, knowing they are probably doomed to join Britain's one-in-six workless households and the dependency culture.
But Ms Harman's resentment focuses upon the haves; the people who earn large incomes, rear their children in comfort and, above all, educate them privately. Harmanism has launched Labour stalwart Dame Suzi Leather, chairman of the Charities Commission, on her war against independent schools. Harmanism is reflected in a thousand Government initiatives to fight alleged unfair disadvantage - one of them revealed this week by the Norfolk Jobcentre, which rejected an advertisement specifying that applicants should be 'reliable' workers. This, asserted the Jobcentre, discriminated against unreliable workers. The recruitment agency placing the ad had to fight to be allowed to request an English speaker, lest this disadvantage non-English speakers.
Harmanism seeks to attack every cause of unemployability save the most obvious: the catastrophic failure of the state education system. Professor John Hills, a member of the National Equality Panel, said yesterday: 'The challenge our report puts down to all political parties is: how do you create a level playing field when there are such large differences between the resources that different people have available to them?' Just so. But a host of social surveys show that 40 years ago more of the children of the poor escaped from their environment, through the grammar school system and a far more rigorous teaching and exam culture, than do their successors today.
Shirley Williams and Anthony Crosland, education ministers under Harold Wilson and Harriet Harman's spiritual forebears, deliberately destroyed the grammar schools. It has taken half a century for the damage inflicted on social mobility by their 'level playing-field' policies to be fully understood.
A new pamphlet for the Civitas think-tank by former university teacher David Conway analyses the decline in Britain of 'liberal education'. The Victorians proudly called it 'liberal' because its purpose, through subjectbased teaching, was to liberate children from ignorance. They promoted the classics, science and literature not merely to cram facts but to broaden horizons, teach children to think and to reach conclusions on the basis of evidence.
In 1919, the Oxford historian H.A.L. Fisher declared: 'The business of a university is not to equip students for professional posts, but to train them in disinterested intellectual habits, to give them a vision of what real learning is, to refine taste, to form judgment, to enlarge curiosity and to substitute for a low and material outlook on life a lofty view of its resources and demands.' How many universities today still cherish such noble objectives?
Even at Oxbridge, thanks to the Harmanites' insistence on admitting quotas of state school pupils heedless of attainment, most students now spend their first year being taught to write essays. First-class honours are distributed like popcorn, to one in five graduates.
I occasionally talk to Eton sixth-formers. It is painful to perceive the contrast between their literacy, curiosity and capacity for self-expression and the limp, passive, inarticulate students one often meets at universities. The Etonians are supremely privileged young men.
But the old grammar schools also possessed some great teachers who produced remarkable pupils, to which Alan Bennett's enchanting play and film The History Boys bear witness. Today, and admittedly in part because of the Tories' 1988 Education Act, we have a schools system which denies the brightest their chance to excel, and merely teaches millions the minimum necessary to pass innumerable tests.
Where are the vaulting ideals of Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian educationist, who asserted in 1873 that the true purpose of schooling was 'to provide children with knowledge of human capability and achievement and the workings of nature'?
If the Tories gain power later this year, one of their biggest problems will be to overcome the Harmanism of the mighty educational establishment. One of its standard-bearers, John White, of London's Institute of Education, argued in a 2007 lecture: 'The academic, subject-based curriculum is a middle-class creation - whose effect, if not intention, has been to make it difficult for many children not from a middle-class background to adjust to a highly academic school culture.'
Likewise, Martin Johnson, head of education policy for the Association Of Teachers And Lecturers, said: 'Most people are not intellectuals and do not live their lives predominantly in the abstract.' He attacks conventional teaching 'because mass education systems developed in the 20th century copied the curriculum considered necessary for social elites: leisured classes who could afford and valued such attitudes'.
Though Messrs White and Johnson would never admit it, their view is rooted in fantastic condescension: teach the underclass what little it is capable of learning, and leave higher things like science to the rich b******s whose parents pay fees.
Civitas's David Conway argues: 'Unless the provision of liberal education is once again made the central purpose of state schools, it will increasingly become the exclusive preserve of the few privileged enough to attend independent schools. That is not the way of social progress.'
It would be naive not to recognise the near-unteachability of the most disadvantaged of our children. But there are many, many more who have the brains and energy and supportive parents to propel themselves upwards in society - if only their schools give them the chance. We need fewer bog-standard tests and more exams that mean something; teachers committed to competition and enabling clever children of all classes to fulfil their potential.
Yet Harmanism is about levelling down, stuffing the middle classes. Oh yes, and with the dollop of hypocrisy that allowed the minister (herself educated at the famously elitist St Paul's Girls' School) to choose a grammar school outside her constituency for her children.
It is no longer a class divide which disadvantages Britain's poor. Nobody is denied a job or promotion because they don't speak proper or hold a knife and fork right. The educational chasm is the one that matters, and Labour's social engineers bear an overriding responsibility for it.
Until state schools revive the cult of excellence, until teachers are obliged to teach and pupils to learn, the underclass will indeed remain tragic victims - of Harmanism, not social discrimination.
SOURCE
Socialism is Great! (And Other Chinese Fables)
In a time when a White House Communications Director lists Red Chinese dictator Mao as a major influence in her life, it’s worth taking a look at the society that Mao established through mass murder and terror. Two very different new memoirs by Chinese authors do just that. Anita Dunn, then President Obama’s director of communications, last fall held up Mao as an example of individualism. In reality, under Mao’s regime, the communist government was so intent on wiping out individuality that it even demanded ideological allegiance from those it had branded enemies of the state — as it was killing them.
Even in the time of “reform” after Mao’s death, during the great “liberalization” of the 1980s, Chinese female workers were required to report their menstrual cycles and sex lives to factory apparatchiks in charge of population control. Evidently, this is Anita Dunn’s idea of how the individual can make a difference in society.
In In Search of My Homeland, his eloquent and tragic memoir, artist Er Tai Goa records that as the Chinese government worked its prisoners to death, those in Mao’s gulags were continuously tested for ideological rigor. In fact, the inmates, much like the rest of the country, monitored each other through “mutual supervision,” complete with the infamous group criticism sessions and punishments. As Goa recounts, the prisoners were required to endure all this with a state-enforced smile on their faces, a strenuous effort that added another torment to their daily agony.
While prisoners were dropping like flies in the camps, life could still be made worse by the commandant. Even whole-heartedly embracing the process of personal “reforming through labor” and taking a vocal lead in ideological discussions — and “mutual supervision” — did not spare one from arbitrary punishment.
If this seems unbelievably Orwellian, consider this: During China’s Cultural Revolution in the ’60s, most of the people sent to their deaths in labor camps weren’t dissidents at all. In fact, most were as devoted to Mao as the people who denounced them and sent them away.
Er Tai Gao, however, did commit an ideological crime in the eyes of the regime, even though he had no political motive. As a young, naïve art teacher, Gao published an essay, “On Beauty,” in which he argued that beauty was subjective and dependent on context. Essentially, he wrote, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To Western readers, the premise of Goa’s essay, which is included as an appendix, seems self-evident. But Lenin had held that beauty was objective and materialistic. So, in Mao’s eyes, Gao’s position was a crime against the Chinese State.
Gao published his essay in 1957, the time of “openness,” when Mao suckered his country’s intellectuals into expressing heresy openly so he could purge them in the Cultural Revolution. Gao was sent to the Jiabiangou “Farm” in the Gobi Desert, where the prisoners dug and filled in ditches through every kinds of brutal weather until they collapsed and died.
Goa, who survived more than two years in Jiabiangou, was released to a restrictive work environment, only to be denounced again and publically beaten; and was sent to another camp until he was released in 1962. He found a job after his release in China’s famed Mogoa Caves, a treasure trove of archeology and art, where he was able to lose himself in his work despite constant deprivation and threat.
In Search of My Homeland is a spare and beautifully written book. But it’s not necessarily a hopeful one. Gao says his survival was not due to any great inner strength of his own, or the kindness of strangers, but was entirely “capricious.”
He may give himself too little credit. This book is the result of a secret diary he kept hidden on his person as he kept himself sane by writing. The discovery of the document would probably have led to his death. However foolish the risk was, readers are the beneficiaries of his foolhardy courage in providing us this extraordinary document.
“Socialism is Great!”
While not a political dissident in any sense we would recognize, Gao at least was an intellectual of some consequence who expressed an opinion that clashed with state orthodoxy. But as Lijia Zhang recounts in her extremely engaging memoir, “Socialism is Great!,” her parents were basically anonymous workers, cogs in the machine of China’s vast labor force, who endured persecution during the Cultural Revolution.
For Zhang, however, neither Cultural Revolution nor Mao himself is the primary focus. Her story begins when her mother ends the school career of young Lijia and bequeaths the budding 16-year-old scholar a mind-numbing job in a Nanjing rocket factory — presumably a life sentence.
Lijia discovers an environment where the “workers” are anything but dedicated laborers and find innumerable ways to get through the day without effort. Production is secondary to ideological purity in the late 1970s, and the plant’s political instructor gathers them daily for what amounted to Communist chapel sermons:
“Wang loved to talk up the latest political movement: today, a campaign against burgeois liberalism symbolized by bell-bottoms, called ‘trumpet trousers’ in Chinese.
“‘Unable to distinguish between flagrant flowers and poisonous weeds, these young people pick up capitalist trash like “trumpet trousers and rotten music,’;’ Wang spat through a southern accent. ”‘We must resolutely defend the “four cardinal principles” of socialism and firmly oppose bourgeois liberalism!’”
But Lijia was a free spirit to a fault — and ambitious to boot. She first exercised rebellion by soaking up as much Western culture and literature as possible, such as secretly reading Jane Eyre and Great Expectations, and eventually through forbidden meetings with lovers (recounted in such frank detail that one hopes at least some were given pseudonyms).
While many in the West have heard of China’s one-child policy, which led to millions of cases of infanticide and forced abortions, it is rarely recounted just how thoroughly the Communist Party regulated the love life of average citizens.
China in the 1980s was a nation where married women could be forced to have an abortion at the same time a single woman could not legally obtain one. In a society nearly as sexually regulated as one under Islamic Sharia Law, an unmarried pregnant woman suffered not just social stigma but also civil sanctions—but so-called “pro-choice” and “feminist” groups on the American Left still lauded communist China’s “family planning” regime as a model for the Third World.
The limiting of offspring was not the only way in which married couples’ lives were regulated by the State. Lijia’s mother, for instance, lived as a virtual widow for most of her adult life for daring to marry a man from another city who was never given permission to permanently join her in Nanjing, giving them less than two weeks a year to be together.
In the rocket plant Lijia, and the other women are forced to submit to examinations by “the period police” in the factory hygiene office, a humiliation she recounts in chilling detail.
The book’s title comes from a hilariously stilted song the party gave the workers to boost morale. “Socialism is Great!” is filled with wry observations and a delicious sense of the ridiculous. While the totalitarian weight of the Chinese state is ever-present, Zhang tells her story with a sense of humor that is unique in dystopian memoirs.
The book ends on a serious note, however. Lijia, who organizes China’s largest pro-freedom rally outside of Tienanmen Square, is arrested for questioning even while her personal life takes a potentially disastrous and poignant turn.
In Search of My Homeland and “Socialism is Great” could not be more different books that examine the same society. Gao’s book may be more of a literary masterpiece, but Zhang’s effort fills the more needed gap in our understanding by covering a much more neglected period of Chinese political history.
Despite all the talk of progress, the more things changed, the more the underlying totalitarian nature of the Chinese Communist state has stayed the same.
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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27/1/2010 -
Britain to get even softer on crime
With a few exceptions, the only people much threatened by the law in Britain these days are people who defend themselves. You can get more time in jail for defending yourself than you would for rape. Rapists often walk free
Tens of thousands of criminals will spend less time in prison under Government plans to limit the ability of judges to set jail sentences, an official document has disclosed. It suggests that officials are alarmed that judges are giving criminals longer sentences than proposed by ministers, which they refer to as “upward sentencing drift”. From April, a new Sentencing Council will effectively force judges to follow sentencing guidelines drawn up in Westminster.
An official assessment of the impact of the move concludes that if judges follow guidelines set down by the council it will avoid the need for more than 1,000 future prison places. This represents tens of thousands of criminals being spared jail time over the next few years. However, one think-tank claimed that the document meant that the Government would need 8,000 fewer places than currently projected and accused ministers of trying to cut the prison population by the back door.
The Sentencing Council will become the body providing sentencing guides for judges and magistrates when it replaces the Sentencing Guidelines Council and Sentencing Advisory Panel. It has greater powers because legislation says courts “must follow” guidelines and have a “duty” to impose sentences within an identified range. Under the previous bodies, courts needed only to “have regard” to any guidelines.
An “impact assessment” for the new council drawn up by the Ministry of Justice said a “closer adherence to sentencing ranges could arrest historical trends in upward sentencing drift”. “Arresting sentencing drift could potentially mean avoiding the need to build some 1,000 additional prison places,” it said.
The document was unearthed by Max Chambers, a research fellow at Policy Exchange’s Crime and Justice Unit. “The Government repeatedly claimed that these changes were not an attempt to reduce the prison population by the back door,” he said. “The reality is that because of a failure to provide adequate capacity in the first place, the Government is going to try to manage down the prison population by up to 8,000 places over the four years. “The right way to cut the prison population is to rehabilitate prisoners properly and cut reoffending rates, not to undermine the long-standing principle of judicial discretion.”
Simon Reed, the vice-chairman of the Police Federation, had concerns that sentencing was being determined by ministers rather than magistrates and judges. “Any sentence imposed is already affected by remission for guilty pleas and half-point release,” he said. “I’m sure that there will also be pressure applied for any sentence to be set at the lower end of the band rather than the upper limit.”
Dominic Grieve, the shadow justice secretary, said it was important that sentences were not “driven by the Government’s failure to provide enough prison places”.
Although the Government has pledged to provide 96,000 prison places by 2014, an increase of about 10,000, the Commons justice select committee has suggested that the number of inmates be cut by a third, with courts using jail as a last resort.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: “The Sentencing Council will develop sentencing guidelines, monitor their use and play a key role in influencing a wide range of decisions relating to sentencing. “The council will also be required to assess the impact of sentencing practice and promote awareness of sentencing matters.”
SOURCE
Feminists totally out of touch with normality -- as usual
One of my best single friends is witty, clever, rich, successful and bears more than a passing resemblance to Pamela Anderson. Men tend to wilt in her presence or behave with inappropriate rashness. The world is her oyster - and yet what she wants more than anything is a baby. Currently, she is trying to conceive with donor sperm. When I went to see her recently, she introduced me to her friend, Alana, who - as a single woman - was thinking of going down the same route, but dithering. Alana knew I'd had a baby late in life and, since she was hitting 40, was eager to meet me.
When she found out I was living with my baby's father, she looked miserable for a minute before saying, with admirable honesty: 'Oh, so you're OK then. I'm not sure if I can bear to do it alone. 'Ever since I was little I've dreamed of a happy marriage and a family. Facing up to having a child alone kills that dream, and I think I'm still mourning it.'
I thought of Alana when I read the vituperative, enraged reactions to Lori Gottlieb's new book, Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr Good Enough, which is published in Britain next week. Gottlieb - a writer and columnist - would say Alana could fulfil her dream, so long as she 'settled' for the next man that came along .. . even if he had halitosis or was rude to waiters.
The thesis of Gottlieb's book is that by holding out for the romantic ideal, broadly known as Mr Right, after the age of 30, many of us girls are throwing away the opportunity of a secure and fulfilling family life - a life-affirming structure that will keep us happy, regardless of our husband's failings.
In her book, Gottlieb - a single mother who admits she wishes she had settled for any of the 'perfectly acceptable but uninspiring' men she rejected during her futile hunt for perfection - describes sitting in the park with a friend and their six-month-old babies, both conceived via donor sperm: 'Ah, this is the dream,' I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing.
'In some ways, I meant it: we'd both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. 'The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married,and live happily ever after. 'Of course, we'd be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won't tell you it's a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. 'Most likely, she'll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).'
Phew. No wonder Gottlieb has whipped up such a storm. Across the pond, the internet is buzzing - and most of the women giving their views aren't happy with the author's 'tell it like it is' approach. 'There's no way in hell you would get me to settle for less than the perfect man - not even at gunpoint', wrote one outraged woman. 'She needs a psychiatrist, pronto,' said another. You get the picture.
Social scientist Bella DePaulo, author of Singled Out and The Living Single blog on the internet, was incandescent with indignation. She called Gottlieb's 'husband-fixation' 'tragic' and described the comments the author made as 'nakedly and proudly regressive'.
So does Gottlieb know what she's talking about? She's based her book on her own experience and research conducted among 30-year- olds. Underlying the entire premise is her conviction that they all long for conventional family life. She concludes: 'Oh, I know there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will say that the women I know aren't widely representative, that I've been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I'm talking about. 'All I can say is that if you say you're not worried about finding the right man, either you're in denial or you're lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you're not worried, because you'll see how silly your face looks when you're being disingenuous.'
My initial instinct was to laugh and wholeheartedly agree with Gottlieb's vociferous detractors. Decades of feminism have surely convinced us that we can do without conventional, male-dominated social structures? It seems ludicrous that women should be exhorted to put up with, say, as Gottlieb suggests, a widower with nightmare children still grieving for his dead wife, just for the sake of simply being able to call yourself 'Mrs' and not 'Miss'. Yet thinking about my generation, 20 years on from Gottlieb's anxious 30-year-olds, I wonder, to my consternation, if she has a point.
Before I am labelled as regressive, too, I'm not talking about my friends who are perfectly content, having chosen to live single, child-free lives. I am talking about those who so desperately wanted marriage and children - but missed out. Last year I went to a big 50th birthday party. Our host, happily married for more than two decades with a brood of children almost grown, made a speech in which he praised his wife's virtues and revelled (somewhat smugly) in his happiness and good fortune.
As he talked, I happened to glance over at his ex-girlfriend. A beautiful, talented woman with a lust for travel, she had broken off her relationship with our host years ago to pursue other excitements. Decades on, she is still unmarried without children - and not by choice.
Her smile was fixed as she listened. So should she have 'settled' all those years ago for a man who could have provided her with all those things she didn't even know she wanted then? Is it even possible for today's women, so used to controlling their lives, to 'sell their soul' to someone who really doesn't do it for them? Can we really do as Gottlieb urges? Well, dare I say it: 'Yes we can!' Before you shriek in horrified protest, let's first dissect this idea of 'settling'.
During an interview about her new book describing her love affair with Harold Pinter, Lady Antonia Fraser coyly confided that he had sent her reams of love poems. I defy any woman who was listening not to have had a momentary pang of extreme envy. I certainly did. Who wouldn't fantasise about being loved by a hugely talented genius who filled their house with flowers - just as Harold did for Antonia? Yet, when I delve into my memory I recall that a painter bordering on being a genius once did just that for me. I came home to my entire living room floor strewn with scarlet flowers. He was sitting among them, awaiting my arrival. Did I marry him on the spot?
No, instead of recognising, as Lady Antonia did, that this was an exquisite gesture that could change my life, I focused instead on all the reasons why I had to resist the man. He lived abroad, had a receding jawline and a somewhat alarming dress sense. Surely these were the tiniest of minor obstacles if I had only had my eye on the bigger picture?
Whether my generation has watched too many slushy movies with happy endings or just read too many self-help books and had a lot of therapy to boost their sense of self-worth, many of us have failed to recognise a potential partner because we were too busy waiting for some Richard Gere lookalike to turn up and re-enact the final scene of An Officer And A Gentleman.
When I was in my early 40s, my partner of seven years left me because he didn't want babies, and I faced a bleak, childless future. Then, at 45, I became pregnant by a man I had known for less than a year. It was such an unexpected shock that I initially mistook the symptoms for an early menopause.
I was not in a permanent or committed relationship with the baby's father, but I made a decision. I hate to use the word 'settle' because it suggests the child's father was lacking in some way, and he was not. I prefer to say that I managed my expectations of the man I would share my life with. I finally let go of my fantasy that a millionaire poet who looked like George Clooney was going to come along and fall passionately in love with me. After all, even if an impossibly handsome, wealthy poet existed, why on earth would he plump for an ageing hack like me? What on earth was I thinking? By waiting for some ludicrously gorgeous and perfect fantasy to materialise I had, for years, probably ignored numbers of highly desirable men who were right under my nose.
Sometimes, I've felt a pang of regret as a man I had insouciantly dismissed as being not quite good enough for me reappeared later as a model husband and father, a beaming wife at his side. I began thinking about how often my friends and I have said, insisting it was in jest: 'Oh, I should have married him!'
So is marriage really what we wanted? One outraged blogger responding to Gottlieb wrote: 'Much of what she says is simply about wanting to fit into traditional society and has little to nothing to do with love.' Fair enough. So, perhaps the reason this book has caused such uproar is because she's really raising that universal question we're all grappling with: does marriage make us happy?
Young people, without experience of it yet, may think it does. Older people may answer this question more circumspectly. Some of my married friends still seem happy. A few have soldiered on in unhappy marriages for the sake of their children. Others have persevered after initial disappointments and found, to their surprise, that they have discovered a friend, if not a passionate lover, with whom they can happily share their life. Several have fled.
Having never married, I cannot tell whether I'd have been happier inside the institution, but what I do know for sure is that facing a childless future was utterly miserable - and before I had a child I often thought back to past boyfriends to indulge in wistful 'what might have been' thoughts.
Let's calm down about what this new book is saying. I think Gottlieb's fault is to use the term 'settling' when she talks about the man we choose because it has stirred up a hornets' nest of reaction. I think, like thousands of wise matchmakers and probably our grandparents before us, she's just saying that if children and a conventional stable home are something you want, stop day-dreaming about being fought over by Colin Firth and Hugh Grant and start dealing with the real men in front of you. Or it could be too late. It's just common sense, really.
If Jane Austen or the Brontes were alive today, Jane Eyre might have failed to see beyond Rochester's crusty exterior and Elizabeth Bennet could have overlooked cold, arrogant Darcy altogether, in the misguided hope that the perfect man was just around the corner. The last line of Charlotte Bronte's great novel might have read, 'Reader, I should have married him.' If it's a conventional happy ending you want, as opposed to the prospect of a life alone, then I urge you to take heed of what Lori Gottlieb has to say.
SOURCE
The Islam Tax
Look at your next airline ticket and you will find a "Security Fee". What is the Security Fee that was passed after September 11, 2001? It is an Islam tax. It is more money out of an American's pocket to pay for the privilege of living with Muslims amongst us.
It turns out that we pay an enormous amount of money for our life with Islam. Let's look at a list of expenses that we bear because of Islamic ideology. If there were no Islam we would not have the Transportation Security Administration, Homeland Security, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, all that so-called terrorist work by the FBI, rebuilding the World Trade Center and who knows what else. The Iraq war has cost about $700 billion, the Afghan war has cost about $250 billion and all of the government agencies cost in the neighborhood of tens of billions per year. We are up to at least a TRILLION dollars of our Islam tax. That little $10 Security Fee may seem small, but that is for every round trip ticket sold in the US. What will the trial in NYC for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed cost? Millions of dollars. And the hits just keep coming.
Another part of the Islam tax is the jizyah (the dhimmi tax) that we call foreign aide. We pay various Islamic governments, including Egypt, Pakistan, the so-called Palestinians and others. Why do we pay the jizyah? We want to be friends (Never mind the 12 verses in the Koran that say that Muslims are never the friends of kafirs, unbelievers).
We are bringing Muslim refugees into America where they receive more benefits than American citizens, another Islam tax.
Why did Islam attack the World Trade Towers? Because they were the World TRADE Towers, an economic target. What was the purpose? To destroy the economy of America.
The Islam tax is a trillion dollars and counting. If we did not have this tax, it would certainly ease the economic crunch we have today.
This economic squeeze is 1400 years old. Mohammed created jihad, civilizational war. His concept of war was very sophisticated and included all forms of force against kafirs. He used threats, spies, secret agents, slavery, sex, propaganda, assassinations, deception, religious attacks, and the destruction of kafir economies.
As soon as Mohammed started his jihad, he warred against the economy of the kafirs. He kept up a running attack on the trade caravans of Mecca. When he attacked one tribe of Jews in Medina, he destroyed their economic base—their date palm plantations. This act was against the Arab customs of war, but Allah said it was a good thing. When he attacked Taif, he destroyed their plantations as well. Economic war.
One of his last acts was to attack the Christians north of Medina. Once he had crushed them, he made them pay the jizyah tax (the dhimmi tax). He did the same to the Jews of Khaybar. The jizyah tax was 50% of their income.
All Islam has to do is to keep up the attack. It does not matter whether they win or lose a particular battle. The more Islam practices jihad, the more we deny it and create some governmental nightmare that avoids the ideological war with Islam, but costs a fortune. Our self-deception is bankrupting us.
Islam produces poverty. Without oil, the income to all of the Arabic nations is less than that of Spain. This is not an accident. Mohammed was a businessman, but after he became a prophet, all of the money he made came from the loot from his victims, not a great business model. Mohammed knew how to bleed his enemies dry. We are bleeding today as a result of the Islamic war against the kafirs.
But Islam does not just tax kafirs for money. Kafirs have to submit to Sharia law and this means the loss of freedoms. Only Muslims are allowed to dictate what is taught about Islam in our schools. Islam gains the benefits of a deceitful history lesson, and we lose our freedom of speech. This is a tax on our Constitutional freedoms.
Everyday we submit a little more to Sharia law when we allow Muslims to take time off to pray at work and school. Article 6 of our Constitution says that our Constitution is the law of the land, but we are submitting to the demands of Sharia law when we declare that the sports facilities must be divided in use so that Muslim women can obey Sharia laws about mixing sexes. Our sovereignty decreases and Sharia law gains. This is a tax against our laws.
So now in America, kafirs are poorer and Muslims are richer because of Islam.
SOURCE
Australia has just had another day of national celebration, but forget about a republic or new flag
Some realism from a rather disgruntled Leftist below. Australia is a monarchy, not a republic and its flag has the British flag quartered -- all of which is anathema to Leftist ideologues. I also had a few comments on the subject yesterday on Australian Politics -- JR
AUSTRALIA should become a republic. But it won't for a very long time, if ever. There's a better than even chance that the change won't come during the lifetime of any Australian alive today.
The political system, and Australians' deteriorating attitudes to politics and politicians, will see to that. The republican question is now what used to be called in the newspaper game a "hardy annual": a predictable, intrinsically inconsequential story that can be trotted out at the same time every year to little lasting effect.
This Australia Day weekend the hardy annual sprouted a little extra foliage with Ray Martin's revival of the suggestion that the nation should change its flag and ditch the Union Jack. That idea used to get around with the republican argument back in the 1990s, until republicans, excited by the prospect of a referendum aimed at ditching the monarchy, judged it to be too toxic and dumped it.
All these years later, the change-the-flag idea retains the same noxious qualities, unloved by politicians and the talkback radio crowd, and met with gold-plated indifference by the wider public. Republicans ignore these responses at their peril.
In a rational world, a nation such as Australia - incredibly fortunate and fabulously wealthy compared with most of the globe - should not be so resistant to changing its status and its flag. But it is. And that resistance will grow.
Australia is becoming an increasingly nationalistic and jingoistic country, a nation of flag-wavers, as evidenced by the motorists who affixed Chinese-made plastic flags on their cars and the young people - males mostly - who wandered the streets, and sports and entertainment venues, wearing outsize flags as capes in the past few days.
This is bad news for republicans because that nationalistic impulse and the growing adherence to the flag as a national symbol - and the aggression with which the flag is sometimes brandished - are affirmations of Australia as it is. Their statement is simple: the country is great, it does not need improvement, so tamper with it at your peril.
Flag-wavers do not question their country, they exalt it, and with every year their numbers grow, as do the nationalistic and patriotic atmospherics that accompany each successive Australia Day. As prime minister, John Howard used to take care at election times to declare Australia "the greatest country in the world". The line was always well received. One of his enduring legacies is the rise of an inherently more conservative attitude by greater numbers of Australians towards their country.
This makes it harder to sell the republican argument, which at its heart says something is wrong with Australia's national arrangements that must be fixed. There is no consensus within the society that this is the case.
It is probably the case that a majority of Australian voters favour the idea of a republican Australia, as the polls suggest. But the numbers are not overwhelming. And there is often a big gap between what people tell pollsters and what they do. They say they want governments to provide greater services but they bitch about every extra tax dollar, for example. And Australians have not liked voting "yes' at referendums since Federation.
The truth is that there is absolutely no urgency attached to the change and it's hard to see the circumstances in which there ever will be, unless Britain decides to declare war on Australia. Would it make us richer or make our streets safer? No.
The move to a republic would merely offer an improvement on an already functioning set of arrangements, a very hard sell in the heat of a hard-fought referendum campaign.
In any case, what sort of republic are we talking about? There is no single view: the republican position is in a pre-adolescent state. There are minimalists and there are direct-electionists, with few real signs of an accord.
Since the 1999 referendum, when the minimalist proposal attracted 45 per cent of the vote and failed to carry one state, the direct-electionists have argued that every non-monarchist is obliged to fall in behind the idea of an elected ceremonial head of state. Speaking for myself, they are dreaming. The last thing this country needs is more elections and more politics, which is what this model would bring, no matter what they say. Certainly some minimalist republicans will shift but I would never back it.
As for the political obstacles to a republic, they seem less surmountable by the day. Labor is uniformly republican but the Liberals will always be split on the republic, with the bulk of the party membership - understandably for a fundamentally conservative party - arguing vigorously for the status quo.
That alone would probably be enough to sink any referendum, especially in a wired world where email avalanches, viral campaigning and the hit-and-run style of the blogosphere get results. Witness Malcolm Turnbull's recent defenestration as leader. Anyway, we can have another talk about this. How about, say, late January next year?
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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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26/1/2010 -
The House of Lords is once again the last defender of freedom in Britain
Lords defeat for British government over forcing churches to hire homosexuals
Church leaders claimed a victory for religious freedom last night after defeating the Government's attempts to force them to hire homosexuals or transsexuals. The House of Lords voted down the plans after arguing that the move would go against the tenets of their faith.
The result is a humiliating blow for Harriet Harman's controversial Equality Bill, which is going through Parliament. It would have required churches and religious groups to take on candidates who do not fit in with their religious doctrine when recruiting key staff such as faith school headteachers or youth workers.
Organised religions have a special status that lets them turn down applicants whose lifestyles conflict with the churches' beliefs, even if they are otherwise well qualified for the job. Churches and mosques can reject candidates for jobs as ministers or priests if they are actively homosexual, if they have changed their sex or are women. It also extends to key staff who promote the religion, such as faith school heads.
A powerful coalition of bishops and Conservative peers last night voted to maintain the 'status quo' by 216 to 178.
Ministers insisted that the Equality Bill merely clarified existing laws, but a string of influential peers last night argued that churches could find themselves vulnerable to legal challenges in the future. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, warned peers that forcing religious leaders to choose between the law and their beliefs was the 'road to ruin'. He said: 'You may feel that many churches and other religious organisations are wrong on matters of sexual ethics. 'But, if religious freedom means anything it must mean that those are matters for the churches and other religious organisations to determine for themselves in accordance with their own convictions. Where are the examples of actual abuses that have caused difficulties? 'Where are the court rulings that have shown that the law is defective? If it ain't broke, why fix it?'
Baroness O'Cathain, who tabled the successful amendment, said: ' Organisations should be free to choose their staff on whether they share those beliefs. 'How would a rape crisis centre operate if it was forced to employ male counsellors? This is the state trying to tell people who they can and can't employ.'
But Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said: 'This amendment gives churches the absolute right to legally discriminate against gay administrative workers. 'We are very disappointed that the law has not been clarified. 'Religious agitation in the House of Lords has forced the Government into a humiliating defeat and on to a collision course with the European Commission.'
SOURCE
Politically correct McDonald's
Three recent headlines convinced me that the Happy Meal has been replaced with the Politically-Correct Meal at your neighborhood McDonald’s.
Recently, I came across the story of Lauren McClucky, a big-hearted 19-year-old who lives in the Chicago area and has been using “McFest” as the name for her charitable concerts that raise $30,000 for Special Olympics® in 2007 and 2008. It was only when she decided to trademark the effort in 2009 that the Oak Brook, Ill.-based restaurant chain “lawyered up” against her. As a result, she’s had to spend some $5,000 — about half of the proceeds from the 2009 concert — on legal fees.
“It has nothing to do with food, arches or their colors,” she told one publication recently, and “our M’s are pointy, not curved.”
The plight of this do-good girl might not have been deemed blogworthy had it not been for some of the restaurant’s other efforts which had recently shown up on my “radar” and found a place on what I call my “watch list” of future story topics.
A couple of weeks ago, I came across the restaurant chain’s effort to cater to the African-American community via its 365Black® campaign which touts the message, “we believe that African-American culture and achievement should be celebrated 365 days a year — not just during Black History Month.” In response, I say, what other cultures and achievements are you celebrating?
Today, I learned that the 31,000-restaurant chain had ticked off its Chinese customers while trying to not offend Muslims and ended up apologizing to them. Below is how it was explained in an article in Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper:
McDonald’s this month started selling cartoon character miniatures depicting the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac calendar, but the pig was replaced by love god Cupid as McDonald’s said it did not want to offend Muslims.
Can you see why I’m a little peeved? If Miss McClusky was a black Muslim from China, I seriously doubt that the restaurant chain would have released its hounds (a.k.a., “lawyers”) to attack her and her charity over a petty trademark issue. Not in today’s politically-correct environment!
SOURCE
Filip Dewinter and Vlaams Belang
Vlaams Belang is a Belgian political party that is critical of Islam. It is headed by Filip Dewinter
How many times have you heard that “Vlaams Belang is a fascist party”? How many times have you read that “Filip Dewinter is a neo-Nazi”? It’s a persistent and pernicious meme. It has no basis either in history or current events, but it became the “dominant narrative” back when Vlaams Belang was still Vlaams Blok, and it is a lie that simply will not die.
Time for a reality check. Take a look at this photo one more time:
De Winter is the man on the ground
Tell me, who are the fascists in this picture? Who wears the jackboots? ...
Any association with Filip Dewinter is actually an honor, for the man is a hero. He belongs in the same class as Geert Wilders or Pia Kjærsgaard. To imply an equivalence with even Hillary Clinton is an insult to the man. There is nothing that Filip Dewinter has said that I would “deplore”, and the fact that he keeps a Celtic Cross on his bookshelf bothers me not in the slightest.
If the world were a fair place, Vlaams Belang would be held in the same esteem as the Partij Voor de Vrijheid, and Filip Dewinter would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Geert Wilders. But, unlike the PVV, Vlaams Belang grew out of Vlaams Blok, which gives it a pedigree that can be traced far enough back that the Left can cry, “Ha! Gotcha, you Nazi!”
The equivalent in American terms would be the Democratic Party, which has its roots in Reconstruction and Jim Crow and racial segregation. The Democrats have a pedigree that can be traced far enough back — say, to 1960 — that we can cry, “Ha! Gotcha, you RACIST!”
However, I subscribe to the principle of “By their fruits ye shall know them.” And Vlaams Belang is the only political party in Belgium that has strongly and officially and consistently supported the state of Israel.
Filip Dewinter was the only national Belgian political leader to speak out publicly in Parliament on behalf of Belgian Jews this time last year, when the Left marched with Hamas supporters on the streets of Antwerp chanting “Jews to the gas”.
Vlaams Belang is the only political party in Belgium that takes a libertarian stance and supports a free market economy. To refer to them as “fascist” or “neo-Nazi” is not just inaccurate, it is a travesty of the truth.
The uncomfortable fact of the matter is that anti-Semitism is indeed alive and well in Belgium, but 99.5% of it is confined to the hallowed halls of the Socialist Left. To assert otherwise is to ignore the plain truth that can be easily discerned by reading the copious public record.
It’s time to stop ducking for cover every time the topic of Vlaams Belang comes up. Just because thousands of others believe the same lie doesn’t mean that we have to support their statements or give them cover when they promote falsehoods. It’s better to be a lone dissenter speaking the truth than to join a crowd of people who are screaming lies.
More HERE
Italy: Appeal against crucifix ban 'ready'
Italy is preparing to appeal against a recent European court ban on crucifixes in schools, according to a top aide to prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The crucifix ban has sparked a strong reaction in the overwhelmingly Catholic country.
"It is the right of parents to educate their children according to their personal convictions and in keeping with the religion of students," said Gianni Letta, late on Thursday. "We are confident that the Court of Human Rights will repair what we consider a big violation against culture, rights and religious sentiment," Letta added. He was speaking during a conference at the Italian embassy to the Holy See in Rome.
The European Court of Human Rights in November ruled in favour of an Italian mother who filed a complaint that the display of crucifixes in classrooms prevents her children from getting a secular education. The Strasbourg court found that: "The compulsory display of a symbol of a given confession in premises used by the public authorities... restricted the right of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions."
The Vatican called the ruling "wrong and myopic" while members of the conservative government said crucifixes are part of Italy's national identity. The head of the Conference of Italian bishops, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco said the appeal is "an initiative to appreciate...because the sentence goes against the reality in Europe where history was born with the Gospel" .
A law requiring crucifixes to be hung in schools dates back to the 1920s in accordance with an agreement that Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini struck with the Vatican. Although a revised accord between the Vatican and the Italian government ruled that Catholicism was no longer the state religion in 1984, the crucifix law has never been repealed.
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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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25/1/2010 -
British police provoke violence at patriotic demonstration
They deliberately did the opposite of good police practice -- which is to keep rival groups as far apart as possible
Police will study CCTV footage today of violent scenes involving far-right protesters after clashes broke out at an anti-Islamic protest.
The violence flared after members of the English Defence League (EDL) descended on Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire for the latest in a series of demonstrations. Seventeen arrests were made at the rally on Saturday and six police officers were hurt.
Demonstrators battled with officers as they tried to push their way past cordons separating them from anti-fascist protesters. One member of the public was injured and five police vehicles were damaged.
Supporters congregated at the Reginald Mitchell pub before heading on to the streets. The protesters, many in balaclavas, carried placards that read “Patriotism is not racism” and “Terrorists off our streets”. They sang Rule Britannia and the national anthem, waved St George flags and shouted chants abusing Muslims.
“Our officers will now be reviewing CCTV, video and other evidence,” said Superintendent Dave Mellor.
A YouTube video of the rally showed EDL supporters breaking into a police van and stealing riot shields. The EDL criticised police for positioning anti-fascist protesters opposite the main demonstration.
Ian Dalziel, 53, a joiner from Stoke, was not part of the march but showed his support for the EDL at the protest. “These demonstrations are helpful because at some stage the Government has got to turn around and listen,” he said.
Staffordshire Police said that those arrested were aged between 17 and 49 and linked to the EDL protest. Five men, from Cheshire and Yorkshire, have been charged with racial and public order offences. Seven have been bailed pending further inquiries. Four men were in custody yesterday.
SOURCE
The Left Continues to Try to "Understand" History's Greatest Monsters
A special piece called The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die airs tonight on Glenn Beck's program on Fox News, exploring the history of communism and totalitarianism as well as the modern Leftists who idolize those responsible.
Almost on cue, Leftist Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone has announced that he wishes to make a movie about Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin to... "put them in their proper context."
Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it’s been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect... I’ve been able to walk in Stalin’s shoes and Hitler’s shoes to understand their point of view. We’re going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them.
Townhall's been on this beat for awhile, and you would do well to check out our Townhall Magazine feature piece exposing Che Guevara as the mass-murderer he is.
Ignorance, of course, accounts for much Che idolatry. But so does mendacity and wishful thinking, all of it boosted by reflexive anti-Americanism. The most popular version of the Che T-shirt, for instance, sports the slogan “fight oppression” under his famous countenance. This is the face of the second in command, chief executioner and chief KGB liaison for a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and executed more people in its first three years in power than Hitler’s executed in its first six.
SOURCE
Fiorina Puts Gender Above Merit
by: Meredith Jessup
As a traditional conservative, I've never been a fan of affirmative action. Personally, I like to know that when I'm hired into a job, my recruitment was based on my merits and abilities as an individual, not solely because the company decided it needed more estrogen represented on the payroll.
I don't believe in meeting quotas when it comes to hiring minorities; I believe in choosing the most-qualified, most promising candidate. So when I hear supposed "conservative" Carly Fiorina, candidate for the U.S. Senate, say the following during a campaign stop recently, I got pretty ticked off:
In a room full of women, Fiorina stated that it's more important for half or more of the elected officials in government to be women than to elect the most qualified candidate. I would challenge Fiorina on this asinine point: If women need women to represent them, does this mean Fiorina is admitting she's incapable of representing the men of California?
I'm pretty disheartened to hear that a candidate running for office in a country founded on the worth of the individual would advocate this kind of ridiculous idea.
SOURCE
Netanyahu stakes claim to West Bank settlement
Israel's prime minister declared on Sunday that his country would retain parts of the West Bank forever - a statement sure to provoke Palestinians and complicate the year-old peace mission of a visiting U.S. envoy.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid claim to the disputed territory just hours after meeting with George Mitchell, the Obama administration's Middle East envoy. Mitchell has been shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian leaders since late last week in hopes of breaking a deadlock over Israeli settlement construction. "Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here, this place will be an inseparable part of the state of Israel for eternity," Netanyahu proclaimed at a tree-planting ceremony celebrating the Jewish arbor day at a settlement just south of Jerusalem.
Netanyahu's participation Sunday in tree-planting ceremonies in two West Bank settlements were an apparent attempt to soothe Jewish settlers who vehemently oppose his decision - taken under intense U.S. pressure - to slow West Bank construction. Both settlements lie within areas Israel wants to keep in any final agreement with the Palestinians.
On the eve of Mitchell's arrival last week, Netanyahu said Israel would want to retain a presence in the West Bank even if a peace deal is reached with the Palestinians in order to protect Israel's heartland from missile attacks by militants.
The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, for a future independent state and say settlements undermine this goal. They have refused to resume peacemaking until all settlement construction stops, something Netanyahu has refused to do.
Following his meeting with Mitchell, Netanyahu told his Cabinet he had heard "a few interesting ideas" on renewing peace talks. The U.S. official later left Jerusalem for another meeting later in the day with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in neighboring Jordan.
Abbas' aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh said Netanyahu's tree-planting Sunday undermined peace prospects. "This is an unacceptable act that destroys all the efforts being exerted by senator Mitchell in order to bring the parties back to the negotiating table," he said. Contacts with the Americans would continue, he said, but a return to negotiations with Israel appeared unlikely anytime soon.
In a meeting with Mitchell Friday, Abbas stood firm by his demand for a total settlement freeze. Netanyahu has imposed some restrictions on construction in the West Bank, but has not ended it. And he hasn't put any limits on building in east Jerusalem, home to sacred Jewish, Muslim and Christian sites and claimed by the Palestinians as their future capital.
Israel annexed east Jerusalem shortly after capturing it along with the West Bank from Jordan in 1967. Today, nearly 200,000 Israelis live in Jewish neighborhoods built in east Jerusalem. The international community does not recognize the annexation and views the neighborhoods to be settlements.
Last year, President Barack Obama took office with the ambitious aim of putting Mideast peacemaking on a fast track. Instead, the peace mission has stalled over Israel's settlements on occupied lands and the refusal by the Palestinians to return to peace talks. Obama acknowledged last week that he underestimated the domestic political forces at play in the region and overreached in expecting a quick breakthrough.
Netanyahu heads a coalition largely opposed to the sweeping territorial concessions that would be necessary to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians. He himself had long refused to endorse the concept of Palestinian statehood, doing so only in June under intense U.S. pressure. But he has given no indication about what concessions he's prepared to make.
The Palestinians fear that Washington's inability to get Israel to even temporarily freeze settlement construction forecasts doom for Israeli concessions on tougher issues like partitioning Jerusalem. Abbas is also worried his already battered standing among the Palestinian people would suffer further if he resumes talks without a settlement freeze. The Palestinian leader is locked in a fierce rivalry with Islamic Hamas militants who overran the Gaza Strip in 2007 and believe only violence, not negotiations, will pressure Israel to yield war-won land.
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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24/1/2010 -
'The freedom to think for ourselves'
By Jeff Jacoby
THE SUPREME COURT'S RULING last week in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was a triumph for the First Amendment. In clear and cogent language, five justices swept away the caste system under which some groups of citizens have been free to engage in vigorous and unfettered political speech while other groups face criminal penalties for doing the same thing. Overturning two of its precedents and much of the 2002 McCain-Feingold act, the court called their sweeping restrictions on corporate spending during election campaigns by the name they merit: censorship. When the government dictates "where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, "it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves."
Not surprisingly, some of the formerly privileged groups are reacting angrily to the court's blow for free speech. The New York Times, for example, promptly excoriated what it termed a "disastrous" decision, declaring that it that will "thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century" by freeing corporations to deploy "their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding."
In truth, the decision simply extends to all corporations the same First Amendment freedoms that media corporations -- such as The New York Times Co. -- take for granted. For-profit corporations that happen to be in the business of publishing or broadcasting are free to spend money supporting or opposing political candidates. Why shouldn't corporations in every other industry be equally free?
On the front page of Friday's Times, an article analyzing the impact of the court's decision was headlined, "Lobbies' New Power: Cross Us, And Our Cash Will Bury You." Sounds menacing. Yet newspapers, magazines, and TV networks deploy that power all the time, "burying" public officials (and countless other subjects) with hard-hitting journalism and commentary of every kind -- news stories, photographs, documentaries, exposés, endorsements. They may not always use their power wisely or fairly, but on the whole the marketplace of ideas is richer for their participation. If media corporations have a robust First Amendment right to be heard during political campaigns, every other kind of corporation does too.
Some of the attacks on the high court's ruling have been hysterical -- in both senses of the word. "SUPREME COURT UNDOES DEMOCRACY," wailed Public Citizen in bright-red, Armageddon-sized capital letters on its web site. Florida congressman Alan Grayson denounced Citizens United as "the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case."
Such unhinged reactions to a ruling that extends free speech rights to all is a sad reminder of how far the left has moved from the First Amendment tradition of the 20th century's great liberals. Kennedy's opinion quotes from a 1957 dissent by three of those liberals -- Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Black, and Chief Justice Earl Warren:
"Under our Constitution it is We The People who are sovereign," they avowed. "The people determine through their votes the destiny of the nation. It is therefore important -- vitally important -- that all channels of communication be open to them during every election, that no point of view be restrained or barred, and that the people have access to the views of every group in the community."
McCain-Feingold was an egregious affront to that principle of open communication. It made it a crime for any corporation -- big or little, for-profit or nonprofit -- to broadcast "electioneering communications" in the weeks leading up to an election, or to advocate the election or defeat of any candidate for federal office at any time. That meant, as the court pointed out, that under McCain-Feingold it would have constituted a felony for the Sierra Club to run an ad a month before Election Day exhorting viewers to disapprove of a congressman who favors logging in national forests. Or for the National Rifle Association to publish a book urging citizens to vote against an incumbent US senator because he endorsed a handgun ban. Or for the American Civil Liberties Union to put up a website telling the public to vote for a presidential candidate because he is a champion of civil liberties.
"These prohibitions are classic examples of censorship," wrote Justice Kennedy. Of course they are. Why did it take the court so long to say so? And why wasn't the opinion unanimous?
SOURCE
Ban on burqas receives strong public support in France
A report drawn up by French MPs will this week call for a ban on Afghan-style burqas and other garments that cover a woman’s face. The proposal has strong public support. According to an opinion poll by Ipsos for the magazine Le Point, 57% of voters favour a ban while 37% are opposed.
The recommendations of a parliamentary commission, to be published on Tuesday, are expected to include a bar on wearing full veils on public transport and in schools, hospitals and public-sector offices including post offices. The commission is thought likely to call for a total ban after further consultation.
President Nicolas Sarkozy launched a debate on veils last June, telling a special sitting of both houses of parliament that they were “not welcome” in France. He said last week the full veil was “contrary to our values and to the ideals we have of women’s dignity”. He is reportedly reluctant to impose a total ban, saying he would prefer a national consensus on the issue. His centre-right party, the UMP, is divided.
Spearheading the call for a complete ban is Jean-François Copé, head of the UMP faction in the lower house, who claims to have the backing of 200 MPs. Supporters of a total ban, who include François Fillon, the prime minister, argue that it would protect public safety and women’s rights. Copé has drafted a proposal stating that “nobody, in places open to the public or in the street, may wear an outfit or an accessory whose effect is to hide the face”. A few exceptions would be made, he said, such as for carnivals. Copé suggested a fine of £750, but some conservative politicians have proposed that veiled women be denied child support payments and refused citizenship. France is home to about 5m Muslims.
André Gerin, the Communist MP who heads the commission, predicted the ban would be “absolute”. He has denounced what he called “French-style Talibans”. “The veil is only the visible part of the iceberg,” he said.
Hassen Chalghoumi, a Tunisian-born imam in northern Paris, backed the proposed ban last week, saying full-face veils had no basis in Islam and “belong to a tiny minority tradition reflecting an ideology that scuttles the Muslim religion”. “The burqa is a prison for women, a tool of sexist domination,” he said.
Opponents of a ban argue it would stigmatise Muslims. “France would be the only country in the world that sends its policemen ... to stop in the street young women who are victims more than they are guilty,” wrote Laurent Joffrin, editor of the left-wing newspaper Libération. Police officers in some areas with large Muslim communities have warned that stopping women wearing veils would provoke riots.
SOURCE
British judges see through parental alienation syndrome
Mothers often set their children against their estranged husbands but this time the judges were having none of that
A boy of 11 has been ordered to leave his mother and move more than 100 miles to live with the father he hates. Appeal Court judges accepted last week that the boy was thriving with his mother, enjoying a life full of activities. Yet they still ruled that he should live with his father, whom he has not seen for nearly four years.
Experts said the judgment reflected the emphasis the courts were now putting on the role of fathers and on the need for children to have contact with both parents. The boy’s parents split up before he was born and the father has been striving to win access for years. He works in the City of London, lives in a £1million Stockbroker Belt house, has remarried and has two more children, who are educated privately. He said he would also send the boy to private school. The mother, a professional woman, had said she was happy for the boy to have contact with his father – when he was ready to do so.
But the Appeal Court upheld an earlier ruling at Coventry Crown Court, where Judge Clifford Bellamy said he was unconvinced that the mother really wanted contact to resume. The appeal judges called the boy’s feelings of hate for his father ‘irrational’ and said he would suffer long-term emotional and behavioural problems if they were not reunited. Judge Bellamy said ‘no stone had been left unturned’ to re-establish contact between father and son, but even indirect attempts through gifts and Christmas cards had failed utterly.
Despite the father being ‘devoted’ to his son, the boy was stubbornly resistant to ever seeing his father again. The judge added that the mother’s arrangements for the boy to have extra-curricular activities every day of the week left no space for his father, adding: ‘All of this strongly suggests that, in truth, the mother has no real wish to see contact restart.’ Judge Bellamy said she had ‘significant influence and power’ over the boy.
He added that the animosity felt by the boy would quickly disappear once he was living under his father’s roof.
The boy’s guardian, an expert appointed to provide an independent view of his best interests, told the court: ‘I feel pretty ferocious in protecting him. Never have I come across such a strong sense of fighting for a child.’ But the judge said she had become too emotionally involved in the case and lost her sense of objectivity.
At the appeal, Lord Justice Thorpe said it was the third time recently that the court had upheld properly reasoned decisions in favour of fathers. Miranda Fisher, of London solicitors Charles Russell, said later that the activities of groups such as Fathers 4 Justice had tipped the balance – and courts were taking a tougher line on parents who denied contact between their children and their ex-partners. She explained: ‘Twenty or 30 years ago it was not the normal expectation that fathers should be involved in looking after the children. Now more mothers have full-time careers and fathers are increasingly wanting to share in caring.’
SOURCE
Australia: Bad behaviour by African "sportsmen"
They don't seem to get the idea of sport. So we have the inevitable attempt to play the race card, of course. If they had simply said that they were unfamiliar with local customs and then apologized for offending people they would no doubt have got a much better outcome. That is the sort of thing that Western whites are always expected to do when they offend some minority
A TEAM of African refugees has been blocked from playing after accusing basketball officials of racism. The Hoop Dreamz team has lodged a complaint with the Anti-Discrimination Commission Queensland, alleging victimisation by Brisbane Basketball and its parent organisation Basketball Queensland.
Mediation has begun but Basketball Queensland says the players will only be allowed to compete in the new season, beginning next month, if they split up and join different teams. Basketball Queensland says that it is necessary because referees have felt threatened by Hoop Dreamz players and spectators and the sporting body has a duty of care.
But team coach David Yohan claims they have been subjected to "institutionalised racism" and the move is a huge blow which has devastated the youngsters. "They can't believe what's happened," he said. "They thought Australia was a place of opportunity. If they could do something with their lives, this would be the place to do it."
Ethiopian-born Mr Yohan formed Hoop Dreamz, initially playing in a public park in Yeronga, to help keep fellow refugees off the streets and out of trouble. The 24-year-old's success has brought tributes and awards. In November he received a young leader medal in News Ltd's Pride of Australia awards and last Thursday, Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman presented him with a Young Citizen of the Year Award. Hoop Dreamz entered two teams in the Brisbane Basketball tournament last season and, in a dream debut, both made their grand finals last September, the under-18s taking the title.
But their joy quickly soured. Complaints about on-court behaviour during the under-20 grand final resulted in three Hoop Dreamz players being suspended. But Basketball Queensland then went further and commissioned an independent report by lawyer Simon Harrison into allegations by officials about the behaviour of some of the team's supporters. Mr Harrison said that, during the final moments of the final, with Hoop Dreamz likely to lose, a minority of supporters "became agitated and that agitation spilled over into what has to be regarded as inappropriate and, in some circumstances, aggressive behaviours".
The report says that Brisbane Basketball general manager Tracey Wroe, who was officiating at the game, feared for her safety after being surrounded by a group of 30 to 40 supporters after rebuking them for bursting balloons and that she was later assaulted by two girls who threw coins, which hit her in the face. A number of supporters and independent witnesses made statements denying there was threatening behaviour and alleging racist comments by officials. Mr Harrison said he found no evidence of "racist behaviour or attitude".
Officials rang police, reporting a brawl involving 50-plus people outside the stadium after the game but a police report says the group was moved on without incident. Mr Harrison recommended that Basketball Queensland's code of conduct be read to the Hoop Dreamz team before their next game.
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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23/1/2010 -
SCOTUS Ruling Clears Way for Corporate, Union Campaign Contributions
A victory for free speech -- to the fury of the Left. The Left grumble about "corporate" funding for political advertising but they are the ones who get most corporate support so the grumbles just show their kneejerk hatred of freedom
In a dramatic upheaval that sharply divided the U.S. Supreme Court, a 5-4 majority ruled yesterday that under the First Amendment Congress may not bar corporations and unions from using their own money to make independent expenditures to support or oppose political candidates. The Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 08-205, ruled that the ban on direct corporate expenditures before elections, with criminal penalties, is a powerful chill on legitimate political speech.
"Its purpose and effect are to silence entities whose voices the government deems to be suspect," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
By a separate 8-1 vote, however, the Court upheld disclosure requirements imposed on corporations to give the public information about the sources of the spending.
The ruling drew charges of judicial activism for overturning two major high court precedents on campaign reform: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U. S. 652 (1990), and a section of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, 540 U. S. 93 (2003), which had upheld the corporate ban contained in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law of 2002. The ruling is a substantial blow to that law. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who launched the legal challenge to McCain-Feingold in 2002, was in the Court chamber when the ruling was announced.
Critics of the decision immediately predicted it would alter elections this year and beyond by unleashing a new flood of corporate and union money into a system already awash with special-interest funds. "We are moving to an age where we won't have the senator from Arkansas or the congressman from North Carolina, but the senator from Wal-Mart and the congressman from Bank of America," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, D.C.
President Barack Obama attacked the ruling, asserting in a statement that "the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans." Mr. Obama pledged to work with Congress to come up with a legislative response, though he did not detail what the response might be.
Supporters of the decision applauded the Court for embracing core First Amendment protections for political speech when it matters most—before elections. "The Court has finally struck down blatant censorship that masquerades as campaign finance reform," said Steve Simpson of the libertarian Institute for Justice....
Citizens United first challenged the ban in 2008 out of concern that its documentary "Hillary: The Movie" criticizing then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would be viewed as a campaign communication that violated the law because of its corporate funding.
Yesterday's ruling, announced at a special sitting of the Court after months of now-apparent internal debate and delay, was sharply criticized by four dissenting justices from the Court's liberal wing, led by Justice John Paul Stevens....
Professor Nathaniel Persily of Columbia Law School noted that since Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito Jr. joined the Court it has consistently narrowed or struck down campaign regulations. The newest member, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined Justice Stevens' dissent, along with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
More here
Britain's lazy political police again
Police under fire over ignored murder call
BRITISH police faced criticism for failing to respond to an emergency call made by a woman who was subsequently stabbed to death in front of her young daughter, Sky News has reported. Rabina Bibi, 35, called the police at 7.36 pm (local time) on September 3, 2008, to report that her ex-partner, Zakarya Rezaie, was banging on the door of her home in Coventry, England.
Five minutes later, she called to say he had left and she no longer required police assistance. The court was told that in fact Rezaie was already in the house then and had forced her to call police and say he had gone.
Less than 30 minutes after that, the emergency services received a call from Bibi's terrified seven-year-old daughter, Ayesha. A jury heard that Ayesha asked for the police and said, "He's my mummy's friend and he's trying to kill her with a knife ... She's bleeding everywhere."
Police officers then went to the house and found Bibi with multiple stab wounds. Despite calling for an ambulance, she died at the scene.
The UK's Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said the West Midlands Police "failed" Bibi by not sending out an officer when she made the first call. Police should have arrived within half an hour. IPCC commissioner Len Jackson, said: "She was entitled to a police response within 30 minutes based on the information she provided, and it failed to happen. "It will never be known whether she would still be alive today had police officers been dispatched to her in accordance with force policy."
The IPCC said Bibi's second call was treated correctly in not cancelling a police response to what was logged as a domestic incident, despite the caller's request. "The grading of Ms Bibi's first 999 (911) call as an 'early response incident,' classified as there being genuine concern for a person's safety, was appropriate on the information she provided," the commission said. "It meant that police officers should have attended her within 30 minutes. However, no such police resource was deployed to the first call logged."
The IPCC investigation was unable to establish with certainty whether the cause was due to "an IT failure or human error." West Midlands Police said it agreed to review its IT systems and staff training to avoid a repeat of the failings. Rezaie, 29, was last year sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder.
SOURCE
But they swung into action over 3 dead goldfish!
And bungled that, too, of course
As any rookie detective knows, if you're going to get a result you need a watertight case. The Norwich goldfish killings looked straightforward enough: Three dead, the stench of bleach and an obvious prime suspect. It should have been open and shut - but sadly it wasn't. When the case reached court, an exasperated magistrate was alerted to a glaring omission in the prosecution's evidence and threw the matter out.
It seemed the long arm of the law hadn't extended to testing the fish tank water for bleach. Police had decided not to because the analysis would have cost too much.
Last night as all concerned were counting the cost of the case - likely to be thousands of pounds - a legal source said: 'It begs the question why on earth it got to court in the first place if the evidence was not sorted out.'
Chantelle Amies, 19, had been accused of poisoning the pet fish, which belonged to a neighbour's four-year- old son, by pouring bleach into their water following a dispute. The shocked teenager, who denied killing the £7 pets last September, was arrested and charged with criminal damage. Susanna Chowdhury, prosecuting, said Miss Amies's fingerprints had been found on a bottle of bleach in the house and on the fish tank. The prosecution had three witnesses saying they had smelled bleach in the fish tank. But the court was told that although the fish water had been taken by police they had not sent it away for testing.
It is believed the decision was taken after the Crown Prosecution Service suggested the evidence of witnesses who smelt bleach was strong enough to secure a conviction. But Philip Farr, defending, said they could not prove there had been bleach in the tank or whether the fish had been killed by bleach. As a result, chairman of the bench, Mary-Anne Massey, decided there was no case to answer.
The average magistrates' trial is estimated to cost at least £2,000. But this was the third time the case had been listed in court requiring parties to be present, meaning the final bill could be much higher.
Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, criticised the CPS for bringing the matter to court. He said: 'Regardless of the type of offence being alleged, it is wasteful and unjust to bring a case all the way to court without sufficient evidence. Given that there are plenty of stronger cases that never get fully pursued, the CPS need to work harder at securing good value.'
The CPS refused to say how much the saga had cost. A spokesman said: 'We obviously felt we had enough evidence for a conviction and that it was in the public interest to bring the case to court.'
SOURCE
Equal evil, unequal outrage
By Jonah Goldberg
Communism is, to be fair, a dirty word. But not that dirty. You can wear a Mao hat to your local organic coffee shop. You can hang a campy poster of Lenin in your dorm room right next to the Bob Marley cheesecloth. A hemp-fabric Che Guevara t-shirt? Man, you’re cool.
In other words, it’s taboo, but fashionably taboo. No politician with ambitions for a career outside of the fever swamps of college town gasbaggery would ever cop to the C-word. But few politicians – Democratic politicians at least -- would pay a price later in life for dabbling in “radical politics” in their youth. Meanwhile, if you complain about some kid wearing Karl Marx on his t-shirt you’re just letting the world know how un-hip and hung-up you are.
You can’t say the same thing about fascism or, more specifically, Nazism (there’s a difference between the two, but there’s no point in getting into that here). A Hammer and Sickle tattoo is edgy, trendy and clever. A Swatiska tattoo is disgusting and evil.
Now, let me be clear: That is exactly how it should be. I do not object to the strictness of the taboo against Nazism and its icons. My complaint is over the failure of society to treat Communism even a fraction as harshly.
Communists, marching under the banner of “socialism” killed more people than the Nazis did by a wide margin. They imprisoned more, enslaved more, oppressed more, by any metric. Conservative estimates put the death toll at nearly 100 million. The Chinese alone killed some 65 million of their own citizens. And, of course, this leaves out the fact that the Nazis considered themselves “socialists” as well.
This raises a vital point. We are taught that Nazism was evil – and it was! – but that Communism was merely “misguided.” “The Communists’ hearts were in the right place, they just went too far,” seems to be prevailing attitude of so many intellectuals and journalists. To hate Communism or to even have an “inordinate fear” of Communism – to borrow a phrase from Jimmy Carter – is a sign you’re a paranoid kook. To hate Nazism is a sign of enlightenment, even when you imagine it to be in all sorts of places it isn’t (like, say, the Republican Party).
One reason for this double-standard is that we’ve also been taught that Communism and Nazism were opposites. Since Nazism was evil, it’s opposite can’t be. But this is nonsense on stilts. Communism and Nazism were kindred phenomena, two closely related movements vying to win the battle for dominance of the 20th century. The Harvard intellectual historian said it well, Bolshevism and fascism aren’t opposites, they’re both heresies of socialism.
Nazi ranks swelled with former German Red shirts. The Communist battalions had loads of converted Brown Shirts. There were self-described “national Bolshevik” working for Hitler and their were self-described “Red fascists” working for Stalin. The Communists in the Reichstag voted in lockstep with the Nazis on the grounds that a Nazi takeover would be a short pit-stop on the way to Communist rule. They’re slogan: “First Brown, then Red.”
But wasn’t Nazism nationalist and Communism internationalist? Yes, that was the main difference between the two brands of socialism, but that once serious distinction quickly became a marketing slogan, and soon not even that. Stalin embraced “socialism in one country” and fought the “great patriotic war for Mother Russia.” Mao embraced socialism with “Chinese characteristics.” Pol Pot was a nationalist and socialist. So is Kim Jong Il. There has never been a real “internationalist” socialist regime. They’re all nationalist-socialist regimes, just like the German National Socialists – aka the Nazis.
It’s true that the Nazis were anti-Semites and racists to a much greater degree than the Soviets (which is not the same as saying the Soviets weren’t anti-Semites and racists). But why should that exonerate the Soviets from killing at least 20 million of their own people?
To get a sense of how deep the double standard goes, consider the fact that according to the UN and international law, Communists never commit genocide.
The United Nations defines genocide as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Left out of this definition are "modern" political labels for people: the poor, the religious, the middle class, etc.
The oversight was deliberate. The word "genocide" was coined by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who was responding to Winston Churchill’s 1941 lament that “we are in the presence of a crime without a name." Lemkin, a champion of human rights who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust, gave it a name a few years later: “Genocide.”
But to get the UN to recognize genocide as a specific crime, he made compromises. Pressured by the Soviets, Lemkin agreed that "political" groups shouldn’t be included in the UN's 1948 resolution on genocide. Hence when the Soviets killed millions of Ukranians in the name “modernization” and “collectivization” it wasn’t “genocide.” After all, Stalin insisted he didn’t want those farmers dead because they were Ukranians he wanted those Ukranians dead because they were farmers.
Under the more narrow official definition, it's genocide to try to wipe out Roma (formerly known as Gypsies), but it's not necessarily genocide to liquidate, say, people without permanent addresses. You can't slaughter "Catholics," but you can wipe out "religious people" and dodge the genocide charge. Even today, the Russians and Chinese block any attempt to fiddle with the definition of genocide.
I passionately believe we should continue to condemn Nazism for the titanic evil that it was. I can even understand and agree with the feeling that for hard-to-define reasons, Nazism ranks as the greatest moral horror of the 20th century. But surely it’s fair to say that Communism comes close. And surely decent people should be able to muster some disgust and outrage for both without being mocked, particularly by some kid who looks like he’s auditioning for the role of Shaggy in a live-action Scooby-Doo remake and can’t even explain why it’s clever he’s wearing Mao’s mug on his t-shirt.
SOURCE
Australian Leftist feels uncomfortable with Australian patriotism
He is quite horrified that we celebrate our national day (Jan 26th) with some enthusiasm. See below. He wants us to make the day "silly". The old leftist propaganda about internationalism and multiculturalism is beginning to wear off. Australia has got a lot to celebrate but a miserable Leftist sees only faults. How odd that the whine appears on the site of Australia's "national" broadcaster
Long before it came to symbolise some sort of football, meat pies, kangaroos and Sam Kekovich view of aggressively asserted Australianism, January 26 traditionally marked nothing more than the sunny end of the silly season: that moment when working Australia shook the sand out of its togs and dragged its bronzed and rested form back to work. After Australia Day, the Year Proper could begin.
That was a concept of the national day we could all agree with, a simple, innocuous, seasonal marker. It would be impossible this time next week, for example, for the Victorian premier to announce that he has just appointed a Minister for The Respect Agenda. If he does it this week we know he's just being silly. If he did it next week we'd seriously have to fear for his sanity. But between silly seasons, some time back, something happened to Australia Day.
It was at about the same time that inane and tuneless chants of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie" began to ring beerily from the sporting terraces; about the same time that the Australian flag began to take on a subtly shifting significance beyond a merely formal drape of bright bunting. About the same time that Anzac Day, once a quietly reverential and nostalgic gathering of old soldiers, was appropriated to the greater cause of Nation Building and Aussie Pride. About the time people started tattooing the Southern Cross on their shoulder blades, chests and ankles.
Every year of late we've had a similar discussion round Australia Day, wondering whether it was an occasion that was truly inclusive. It is, obviously, a particularly sensitive spot on the calendar for indigenous Australians. It marks -- and I offer this information for the young people reading who have been betrayed by an education system that long ago consigned even the rudiments of history to, ah, history - Australia Day marks the moment the first governor of NSW pulled up in a jolly boat somewhere near the end of the third runway at Sydney airport, raised a flag and began the random discharge of firearms. Sheep, binge drinking and urban sprawl would follow.
Black Australians trace a certain amount of dispossession and misery to this moment, and that is where the "is this a day for all Australians?" conversation has traditionally settled. That point still holds, of course, Australia Day for Aboriginal Australians is a day of invasion, the beginning of a slow, cruel conquest.
These days though, Australia Day is leaving a lot of the rest of us, black white and brindle, behind as well. For most of my life expressions of national pride were seen as gauche and unfortunate embarrassments. We used to look at the rampant flag waving of Americans and raise a sardonic eyebrow. We'd happily admit to our Australianism but in a quietly understated way.
That's no longer the fashion for many in our community, no longer the fashion in particular among that vocal, demanding common denominator who seem to be the trend setting cohort in our culture, the populist mass whose fickle political preferences and aggressive self assertion make them the target market in much of the national discussion.
It has to be said that they are leaving a lot of us cold, and behind. The politicians pander, through self interest, to the flag wavers and star tattooers leaving a big chunk of the rest of us to wonder what happened to this place that it is suddenly so sure of itself, suddenly so chest thrusting, flag draped and proud.
For a lot of Australians the country's meek sense of quiet confidence has long been its greatest charm. For a lot of us national pride is the most empty sort of boast. A lot of us resent the subtle pressure to join the collective heave of Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. A lot of us would like to see Australia Day slip back into something quieter and gently daggy. Stop taking it seriously. Make it silly again.
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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22/1/2010 -
Black Conservatives Condemn Grayson Remarks Comparing Protection of Free Speech to Racist Dred Scott Decision
Amazing. Support for free speech = support for slavery??? It takes a Leftist ....
Members of the Project 21 black leadership group are condemning remarks today by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) comparing today's Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to the Dred Scott case.
The decision in Citizens United eases certain restrictions on the free speech of businesses, associations, organized labor and certain advocacy groups with regard to their participation in political campaigns. In response, Grayson said: "This is the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case."
In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court ruled that black Americans who were either slaves or the descendants of slaves could not be, and never had been, U.S. citizens. The decision, formally known as Scott v. Sandford, also invalidated the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in portions of U.S. territories in the west.
Project 21 members said:
Bishop Council Nedd II: "In Dred Scott, the Court equated people with property. The Court's decision today was about giving people a voice. There is no correlation between the two. Congressman Grayson needs to apologize. His flippant and unenlightened statement offends me personally, and it disrespects generations of black people who suffered from slavery." (Council Nedd II is the bishop of the Chesapeake and the Northeast for the Episcopal Missionary Church.)
Horace Cooper: "Where has Representative Alan Grayson been? He compares today's landmark decision - in which free speech trumps FEC restrictions - to the awful ruling that black people are nothing more than property. He's off base yet again. It's more than a little ironic that Democrats praised Dred Scott when it was handed down over a hundred years ago, yet now stand opposed to fundamental freedoms such as free speech today." (Horace Cooper is a former visiting assistant professor at the George Mason University School of Law.)
Ellis Washington: "As a black man, I am outraged that Representative Grayson would equate the bondage of slavery with today's Court ruling extending freedom of speech to businesses and corporations in the political process, and having the courage to bring modern jurisprudence in line with the guarantees of the Constitution. In other words, the Court held that money equals speech and radio shows, media entities and corporations equal people. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech for everyone!" (Ellis Washington is a former editor of the Michigan Law Review.)
In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: "Our nation's speech dynamic is changing, and informative voices should not have to circumvent onerous restrictions to exercise their First Amendment rights. The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach."
SOURCE
Dutch politician in court over anti-Islam speech
Dutch far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders on Wednesday appeared in an Amsterdam court for the first time in connection with charges of inciting racial hatred against Muslims.
Wilders, who has compared the Koran to Hitler's Mein Kampf, "has always made his statements in his capacity as a public representative," his lawyer Bram Moszkowicz argued at the start of the hearing, held amid heavy security.
The 46-year-old MP, creator of the controversial anti-Islam film Fitna, was greeted outside the Amsterdam district court by about 200 supporters, some of whom came from Belgium and Germany to attend the proceedings. Wednesday's hearing was to work out the modalities for Wilders' trial, for which no date has been set and which he claims is a "political process."
Moszkowicz argued that this court had no jurisdiction to hear the case, arguing the Supreme Court was the competent authority for allegations involving misconduct by an MP. But prosecutor Birgit van Roessel said that "expressing his opinion in the media or through other channels is not part of an MP's duties." Lawmakers only enjoy immunity for their utterances when these are made in the confines of parliament.
Wilders faces five charges of religious insult and anti-Muslim incitement after a court last week dismissed his final challenge against the pending prosecution. He stands accused of insulting Muslims by describing Islam as a fascist religion and calling for the banning of the Koran. He is also charged with inciting hatred and discrimination for stating that Moroccan youths were violent, calling for Dutch borders to be closed to all "non-western immigrants", and advocating an end to what he terms "the Islamic invasion."
Wilders faces up to one year in jail if convicted.
His 17-minute film, Fitna, was called "offensively anti-Islamic" by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon after its screening in the Netherlands in 2008 prompted protests in much of the Muslim world.
The prosecution service had initially declined to charge Wilders, dismissing dozens of complaints from around the country in the context of freedom of speech. But an appeals court last January ordered prosecutors to put the MP on trial, saying politicians should not be permitted to make "statements which create hate and grief."
Wilders' Party for Freedom has nine seats out of 150 in the Dutch parliament.
The politician, under 24-hour surveillance following death threats, said on his website that he has done nothing wrong. "I am convinced that this trial can only result in my acquittal." The prosecuting authority, meanwhile, said it had not yet decided on its end strategy. Not having wanted to prosecute Wilders in the first place, "it is possible that we may ask for an acquittal at the end of the trial," spokesman Otto van der Bijl told AFP outside the court.
SOURCE
The British Labour Party has been dreaming up 33 new crimes a month
Labour has created 4,300 new crimes since taking power - including a ban on swimming in the wreck of the Titanic and on the sale of game birds shot on a Sunday. Gordon Brown has been the worst offender in this unprecedented 'legislative splurge', with his Government creating new offences at the rate of 33 a month. Under Tony Blair, Labour invented 27 new ways of criminalising the public every month.
The 'crimes' range from swimming in the hull of the Titanic without the permission of a Cabinet Minister to 'disturbing a pack of eggs' when instructed not to by an authorised officer. In total, between 1997 and 2009, 4,289 new criminal offences were created - approximately one for every day ministers have been in office. It is twice the rate at which new crimes were created under the last Tory administration.
They include offences - such as carrying out a nuclear explosion - which could easily be covered by existing laws. Others are simply bewildering, such as the ban on the sale of game birds shot on a Sunday-or Christmas Day. This stems from the fact it is illegal, for ancient religious reasons, to shoot the birds on a Sunday - so the Government felt the need to also make it illegal to sell birds shot on a Sunday, to reinforce the point.
Liberal Democrat home office spokesman Chris Huhne, who uncovered the figures, will attack the Government's law-making frenzy in a speech tonight. He will say: 'Over the past 12 years, this Labour Government has been suffering from the most acute and prolonged bout of legislative diarrhoea. 'We have had 69 Home Affairs Bills in 12 years, an average of almost six per year. This is a staggering-volume to have added to the statute books in such a short time, and this is just the two departments of the Home Office and the Justice Department. 'The "bill teams" in departments are possibly among the most productive parts of the public sector. Unfortunately, the product is in too many cases virtually worthless.'
Many of the new laws are backed by powers to enter people's home without a warrant to check they are not being breached.
Mr Huhne wrote to Justice Secretary Jack Straw urging him to repeal some of the laws. But, in reference to the crime of 'disturbing a pack of eggs', Mr Straw said: 'Egg marketing inspectors must be able to ensure that eggs suspected of being marketed in contravention of EU regulations are not tampered with.' He added: 'I am sorry that you regard these offences as unnecessary. In their different ways they are important pieces of legislation.'
SOURCE
British swimming pool users banned from showering naked 'in case children are offended'
Swimmers have been banned from showering naked at their local pool - in case they offend children. Bathers have been told to keep their swimming costumes on while using the showers following complaints from local schools that pupils were offended by 'open nudity' and needed 'a certain amount of privacy.'
Swimmers who regularly use the Torridge Pool in Northam, Devon, described the rule as 'health and safety gone mad.' Local councillor Hugh Bone said the decision was 'ridiculous' and vowed to fight the ban by continuining to showering in the nude. Grandfather-of-four Hugh said: 'This surely is ridiculous. People should not believe that we are all perverts. 'Boys and men as well as girls and women have always changed in front of each other and this is part of the growing up experience.'
One mother-of-two added: 'We all want our children to be safe but this a step too far. I don't think we should teach them that nudity is something to be ashamed of. 'We are all born naked and have our imperfections. This strikes me as health and safety gone mad.'
The lido is used by 13 primary and junior schools in the area who have exclusive use of the pool at certain times of the week. But members of the public can still use the changing rooms at the same time as the pupils, either from a previous swimming session or after the gym.
But some of the schools say they want Parkwood Leisure, which runs the facility, to allow them exclusive use of the changing rooms. Torridge Pool's general manager Bob Demott said asking members to wear a swimsuit during school visiting times was a reasonable compromise. He said there had never been any incidents at the leisure centre and the measure was a safeguard for both the children and adults.
Mr Demott said: 'We do have a private room in both the male and female changing rooms that the public can request the key for should they wish to shower naked when the pupils are there.'
Local councillor Gaye Tabor added: 'Children need to learn to swim for their own safety, they also have a right to a certain amount of privacy.'
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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