Enza Ferreri

Jihadist Beheading of Woolwich Soldier in London, Shouting "Allahu Akbar"

2013-05-23T03:56:00.002+01:00

After the beheading, one of the jihadists, with blood in his hands, holding a knife and a machete, talking to the camera, says: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth", and swears by Allah: "We will never stop fighting you".

In the fuller version of the video at Jihad Watch, at the beginning he mentions Surat at-Tawba, the ninth sura (chapter) of the Qur'an, which contains exhortations to kill infidels.

I've summarized here the events as they developed and became known, from the BBC feed:

A witness claims two men in a car ran over another man walking along the street, then got out of the car and carried out an axe attack on him, killing him, the BBC's Matt Prodger reports.

It is claimed the victim was wearing a Help for Heroes charity T-shirt. He was a soldier, a young army cadet serving in the Woolwich Barracks, South-East London.

The police responded and then shot the two attackers in front of the public.

The two injured men were taken away from the scene, and London Ambulance Service says one is in a "serious" condition.

Police have removed a "substantial number of weapons" from the scene, including knives and at least one firearm.

One witness, identified only as James, said two men attacked another man, aged about 20, who was wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt.

"These two guys were crazed. They were just animals. They dragged him from the pavement and dumped his body in the middle of the road and left his body there," he told LBC radio.

Another eyewitness wishing to remain anonymous said:

"I was walking my dog and heard some shouting about 50 yards from me. A man was running down the road and being chased by a car. The car then screeched to a halt and two men got out one had some kind of sword. They literally swung at the other guy's head. The armed police turned up and there were some shots. We were told to go home and now they won't let us out. We're in lockdown. There actually now seems more activity than there was before. I can hear helicopters and there are police officers with guns."

Witness Graham Wilders told the BBC he arrived on the scene to find a car crashed into a wall and a man on the ground.

"Two people were lying over him and I thought they were trying to resuscitate him," he said.

But Mr Wilders said he drove on to park his car, and when he returned another witness told him the two men were stabbing the man on the ground.

Senior Whitehall sources have told the BBC that the Woolwich attackers are thought to have tried to film their attack whilst shouting "Allahu Akbar" - God is Great, says political editor Nick Robinson.

The men were said to have been of Muslim appearance (surprise, surprise!).

The government is now treating this as a suspected terrorist attack, Mr Robinson says.

The Christian Genocide by Ottoman Muslims that Was Praised by Hitler

2013-05-22T19:50:00.000+01:00

Interesting article on the website of Middle East and Islam scholar Raymond Ibrahim, written by Ralph H. Sidway, Orthodox Christian researcher and writer, author of the book Facing Islam: What the Ancient Church has to say about the Religion of Muhammad.

The piece is important because it examines, among other things, the Orthodox Church clergy's little-discussed role in the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule, and because it may help to reduce the gap among the different Christian Churches and denominations that can be an obstacle to a unified Christian response to persecution and common enemies.

The article, alliteratively entitled Assassination Plot Points to Perilous Position of Patriarch, explores the history of the Christians of what is Turkey today under Muslim Ottoman rule and their dhimmi (subjugated) status, adding: "One aspect of the dhimma which is most terrifying is the concept of “collective punishment.” If one Christian violates the dhimma contract, Muslims may attack any or all Christians. The real world applications of this practice during the Ottoman era were severe indeed" (Emphasis mine).

This situation worsened over the ages since the Fall of Constantinople to the Muslim armies in 1453 through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The birth of nationalist and liberal (not in the current, politically-correct sense, mind you, but in the opposite, freedom-loving, classical-liberalism sense) movements throughout Europe in the 19th century resulted in the 1821 uprising against the Ottoman Empire by Greeks in Turkey and Constantinople, who suffered terrible slaughter.

Sidway, quoting from historical sources, focuses on the position of the Orthodox Church during the Ottoman rule, "a terrible one, and it is impossible to describe all the suffering, humiliation, and outright persecution the Church was obliged to undergo in this age, which was dark indeed... many [patriarchs] were put to torture… Churches were defiled, relics cut to pieces, and the Holy Gifts profaned. Christian pogroms became more and more frequent".

Ecumenical Patriarchs, other clergy and even monastics were killed under the Muslim Turks, suffering martyric deaths, and "paved the way towards freedom for the Greek people". Links are in the original article:

Recently a man was arrested in Turkey in connection with a plot to assassinate Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople. The alleged plot was set up to slay the Patriarch on the 560th anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople on May 29. You can read a couple of articles covering different aspects of the story at Huffington Post and at Today’s Zaman (a Turkish news website).

What I would like to draw attention to, so as to provide some context for this story, is the very real threat to Ecumenical Patriarchate (and indeed to all Christian clergy) over the past several hundred years...

But the amazing contribution of the “higher clergy,” the bishops, is very important. Again we turn to John Sanidopoulos, who translates an historical summary by political scientist Konstandinos Holevas:

Blood-Stained Cassocks and 1821

Without the Orthodox clergy the great national campaign of 1821 would not have succeeded. Some propagandists of outdated ideologies deny the role of the Bishops and speak only of the “lower clergy”. They are wrong both in terms of terminology and in their historical perspective.

In the Orthodox Church the higher clergy are the Bishops, the Presbyters (priests) and the Deacons. To the lower clergy belong the Subdeacon and the Reader, who are laymen. The French Consul François Pouqueville writes that 100 Patriarchs and Bishops were killed during the Turkish Occupation and the Struggle [of 1821]. Before 1821 there were 80 movements made by Greeks, and most were led by Bishops. Remember that from 1680 to 1700 Eastern Central Greece was free after two Bishops revolted, Hierotheos of Thebes and Philotheos of Salona.

1821 is stained with the blood of Patriarch Gregory V and Patriarch Cyril VI, from Andrionople. Besides Bishop Germanos of Patras, who blessed the banner at Holy Lavra Monastery and in Patras, Isaiah of Salona declared Revolution in Fokida and was sacrificed in Alamana. The Patmian Patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilos Pagkostas, went to Patmos and raised the banner of revolution. From then he never returned to his throne.

Most Bishops of Peloponnesos were imprisoned by the Pasha of Tripoli from the beginning of March 1821, and only two were found alive when the Greeks entered after 6.5 months. Let us not forget this sacrifice of the shepherds.

In Cyprus, Archbishop Kyprianos had joined the Filiki Etairia (Society of Friends). The Turks were informed and on 9 July 1821 there was a great slaughter in Nicosia. Kyprianos together with all the Bishops and Archimandrites were killed together with the elders.

Many other Bishops played a significant role in the Struggle, such as Anthimos of Elos, Theodoritos of Vresthena, Joseph of Androusa, and Neophytos of Talantio (Livadeia). And in the Grand Exodus of Messolonghi, Bishop Joseph of Rogon, aid to Metropolitan Porphyrios of Arta, was sacrificed while blowing the windmill.

All who lived at that time were confessors: Bishops, priests, simple monastics, all proclaimed their “presence”. Our [Greek] Freedom is owed primarily to the Blood-stained Cassocks.

Eventually, the Serbs and Bulgarians threw off the Muslim yoke as well.[3] It was this series of humiliating defeats during the nineteenth century, and losses in the Balkan Wars of the early twentieth century, which enraged the Turkish Muslims, who turned on the weakest elements of their Christian population, precipitating their infamous genocide against the Christians of Armenia, Greece, Pontus, and Syria, massacring over 3.6 million men women and children (some dying from starvation, disease and the forced deportations) from 1894 to 1922. Sporadic persecutions against remaining Christians extended well into the 1950s, perhaps the worst example being the Istanbul Pogroms of 1955, which dealt a crushing blow to the Orthodox Christian community in Turkey. The Greek population of Turkey had already been reduced to about 120,000 in 1927 (following the main period of the Orthodox Christian Genocide); by 1978 it had collapsed to only 7,000. According to the Human Rights Watch, by 2006 there were only 2500 Greeks in Turkey.

Thus we see, from the very beginning of Muslim occupation of former Byzantine Christian lands, persecution of not merely lay Christians, but of all the clergy, including the Patriarchs, was standard practice for the Muslim Turks. Brutal and prolonged persecution, pressure and institutionalized discrimination has almost exterminated the Orthodox Christian population from what was once a flourishing Christian civilization. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Muslim Turks mercilessly targeted the weakest of the weak, setting an example that Hitler extolled in his plans for his Third Reich.

When it comes to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Turks do not by any stretch of the imagination have a “rabble rouser” on their hands. Recently, yes, His All Holiness has taken a vocal stand against converting the great Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque.[4] He has also been persistent in asking for the Turkish government to return the Halki Seminary to the Patriarchate and allow it to reopen. The seminary, closed by the Turks in 1971, was the only indigenous Orthodox seminary in Turkey. Orthodox clergy since then must pursue theological studies overseas, yet bishops must meet ridiculously stringent requirements of Turkish citizenship in order to serve at the Phanar, the seat of the Patriarchate. +Bartholomew has also stood valiantly against suggestions by the Turks that the title “Ecumenical” be removed from his office.

And that’s not all. The ancient thread of crude and dangerous persecution from the Ottoman days is strong as ever in modern, moderate Turkey. As journalist Nicholas Gage pointedly observed back in 2008:

The Ecumenical Patriarchate, which was established in the fourth century and once possessed holdings as vast as those of the Vatican, has been reduced to a small, besieged enclave in a decaying corner of Istanbul called the Phanar, or Lighthouse. Almost all of its property has been seized by successive Turkish governments, its schools have been closed and its prelates are taunted by extremists who demonstrate almost daily outside the Patriarchate, calling for its ouster from Turkey.

The ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew I, is often jeered and threatened when he ventures outside his walled enclave. He is periodically burned in effigy by Turkish chauvinists and Muslim fanatics. Government bureaucrats take pleasure in harassing him, summoning him to their offices to question and berate him about irrelevant issues, blocking his efforts to make repairs in the few buildings still under his control, and issuing veiled threats about what he says and does when he travels abroad.
In my book, Facing Islam, I express my concerns over some of His Holiness’ statements, notably in his book, Encountering the Mystery, where he writes of a “dialogue of loving truth” with Islam, and of Orthodoxy having for centuries “coexisted peacefully” with Islam, and where he also projects the chimera of an “interfaith commitment… still felt and lived by Greeks [and] Turks”[5] as an example for all to follow.

Elsewhere in his book, he goes even further, calling for the tearing down of “the wall of separation between East and West, between Muslims and Christians, between all religions of the world,” and writing warmly, “One who achieves the state of inner peace in relation to God is a true Muslim.”[6]

Such unfortunate effusions obscure the Truth of Christianity, giving the impression that +Bartholomew leans towards some sort of syncretic, relativistic creed, embracing the equal validity of all religions and especially of Islam and Christianity.

Yet we must understand such assurances in context, as being carefully crafted to pacify both the hostile government under whose thumb His All Holiness struggles to lead his flock, as well as the sea of easily agitated Muslims who surround the tiny island of Orthodoxy in Istanbul. No doubt +Bartholomew’s concern is to avert Muslim aggression not so much against himself, but against the dwindling Christian population of Turkey, which has endured nearly six centuries of relentless persecution and pressure from their Islamic masters. Sounding a falsely irenic tone is too often a sad necessity for those oppressed under Islamic rule.

While we may be heartened by the brave resolve and serene faith of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in the face of such overwhelming odds, if Muslim history is any indication, he may yet earn his heavenly crown in a far more abrupt fashion than his longsuffering, patient endurance of trials. May it not be so, and may God grant His All Holiness many years! And may we even see the conversion of Hagia Sophia back into a Christian church! [All emphases added]

Ordinary Greeks Turn to Golden Dawn

2013-05-21T00:36:00.000+01:00

The media blame Golden Dawn for being racist, but they don't say that the situation in Greece is beyond tolerability.

90% of illegal immigrants to Europe go through Greece, the gateway to our continent. One million immigrants are reported to be in Greece, half of whom illegal.

Ordinary, non-racist Greeks, whose lives have become unbearable due to the very high level of immigrants' crime which makes them scared of going out at night, vote for Golden Dawn because the party is the only one that tackles the problem and helps.

A Golden Dawn voter is the florist in the video, who says she ended up living in a ghetto.

H/t to Vlad Tepes

Sri Lanka Canteens Boycott Halal Foods

2013-05-20T23:24:00.000+01:00

It's working in Sri Lanka, a predominantly Buddhist country where people refuse to submit to Islamic law and eat ritually-slaughtered halal meat from animals killed while still conscious.

It will work in the UK and everywhere else.

It's sheer consumers' pressure.

Consumers in Sri Lanka refuse to buy halal food from school and other canteens, and the All Ceylon Canteen Owners Association, representing the canteen owners facing financial losses because they purchase halal products that they cannot sell, now boycott halal food products:

Canteen owners in Sri Lanka have decided to boycott halal products from April, the All Ceylon Canteen Owners Association told the ‘Colombo Gazette’newspaper.

President of the association, Asela Sampath, said that the decision was reached as most consumers refuse to purchase halal products.

Sampath said that repeated requests to the authorities to address the issue fell on deaf ears and the canteen owners were facing a loss by purchasing halal products and being unable to sell them.

As a result he said canteens operating on rent in schools and at other public places will stop purchasing and selling halal products from next month.

The move to boycott halal products comes days after the Bodu Bala Sena called for a complete ban on halal products instead of just removing the logo from products sold locally.

The Bodu Bala Sena had said that Sinhalese Buddhists must completely boycott halal products.

The All Ceylon Jamiyyathul Ulama (ACJU) had this week said it had decided to withdraw the halal logo from local food products as a result of the tensions which arose in the country recently.

Addressing a joint media briefing in Colombo between the ACJU, Ceylon Chamber of Commerce and a group of senior Buddhist monks, the ACJU said that the halal logo will not be issued in future for products sold locally.

However the logo will be made available as an option for products to be exported to some countries, the ACJU said.

ACJU President Rizvi Mufthi said that the halal certification was issued as a service to the Muslims and was not compulsory.

The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce said it did not expect the withdrawing of the logo for products sold locally to have an impact on businesses.

Susantha Ratnayake, chairman of the chamber, had said that the halal logo will be imprinted on products sent to some countries like in the Middle East and the Maldives where it is compulsory for the logo to be on food products.

The Bodu Bala Sena had meanwhile said that the sales of halal products at Muslim enterprises had dropped by 50 percent as a result of the debate on the issue created by the monks.

Halal Meat Is the First Giant Step of Our Islamization

2013-05-18T02:50:00.000+01:00

A few days ago I got up determined to keep Islam and politics out of my mind - I tend to think about such subjects a lot these days - at least until I would turn my computer on and start working.

I went to the front door to check my mail and among the letters there was a leaflet with the menu of a local takeaway. I inspected it and found the dreaded word: "Halal".

There is no way you can keep Islam out of your life, even out of your thoughts for long, in today's Britain, even more so in today's London. The saying "If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain" seems particularly appropriate under the circumstances. I did not want to figuratively go to Islam, but Islam came to me.

I threw in the dustbin the takeaway leaflet, but not before having phoned the place to let the people running it know that I was about to keep their leaflet, since the takeaway is convenient and close to us, but that when I saw they were selling halal meat I got rid of it - which is exactly the truth. I added that there are many other people like me in our area who don't want to eat halal meat and that the takeaway is going to lose business because of this issue.

The only thing I did not mention is that I am a vegetarian, which is the best, surest way not to be affected by halal if you live in Londonistan, although I was vegetarian long before the birth of this problem in the West: I recommend it to everybody, regardless of the halal question. Let's not delude ourselves: even in the best conditions, slaughter is always atrocious for the animals, it is in fact murder. But although a vegetarian, I would not buy anything from a halal-meat-peddling outlet.

People who haven't seen the light sometimes say to me during a discussion that the Islamization of Britain is never going to happen, a view, alas, shared by many.

The fact is that we do not even need to talk about the future, because it is already happening.

A clear case of Islamization already present is that of halal meat.

This subject is one of those that most antagonizes British and other European natives against Islam for two reasons.

The first is that lots of people care about animals and they do not want to see them unnecessarily suffer to satisfy the ritual requirements of a doctrine, Islam, which is alien to us and seems to disprove its ethical and therefore religious status exactly with precepts like these that instruct its believers to increase, rather than diminish, the suffering in the world.

It looks paradoxical that the improvements that our civilized society has introduced to at least alleviate, if not eliminate, the terrible agony of slaughter should be reversed on the whim of a group of people with a way of thinking stuck in the 7th century AD and who came to our countries with their hands stretched out asking to be helped to get out of the poverty and backwardnedss that Islam forces on them, only to practically replicate those conditions here.

The second reason why halal meat is so unpopular is that here we can see in practice, perhaps for the first time on a large scale, what Islamization is.

What many people strongly object to is that they have been compelled to live according to Sharia law against their will, and that is the very essence of Islam and its supremacism.

Many UK schools, hospitals, canteens, hundreds of restaurants and pubs have been routinely serving halal meat to non-Muslims who did not know that they were eating meat from ritually slaughtered animals. Famously, even sporting venues such as Wembley Stadium and Ascot, supermarkets including Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Somerfield and the Co-op, fast-food chains like McDonald’s, Subway and KFC, and pizza chains like Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut and Nando’s have been selling halal meat without letting their customers know.

Part of the reason for this is that not all meat produced from animals killed by halal methods of slaughter is suitable for Muslim consumption because it may still not meet other Islamic dietary requirements, and therefore may end up being sold to non-Muslims. Something similar happens with kosher meat for Jewish consumption, which may find its way to the wider community.

Even Easter eggs and cat food have been found to be halal in Australia, as denounced by the Aussie website Halal Choices, which is so popular that it has received more than 250,000 visits since the Christian activist Kirralie Smith created it two years ago.

And this is the good news. The movement against halal is global, developed in all Western countries with a Muslim population. Facebook alone pullulates with anti-halal pages, sometimes dedicated to the closure or the prevention of a local abattoir.

Only a couple of months ago a row erupted over a North-East London school's decision to start serving only halal meat to its pupils. Parents objected to these plans of the management at Larkswood Primary School in Chingford. These are people whom we should support. It was also discovered that halal is the only meat served in three-quarters of council-supported schools and academies (46 in total) in Waltham Forest Council.

The Daily Mail reporter who wrote the article about UK institutions and commercial outlets serving halal linked to above has managed to have access to a halal abattoir undercover. Here is what he witnessed:

They [Animals] are fully conscious as their throats are slit by a slaughterman as he utters prayers to Allah to ‘bless’ the animal. The creature then bleeds to death in a process that can take more than 30 seconds…

Though the deep incision to the neck cuts through the animal’s windpipe and main arteries, the creatures are still able to cry out.

During my two-hour visit, I watch as lamb after lamb has its throat sliced open while fully conscious. They make pitiful bleating and gurgling sounds as they choke on their own blood. It’s a chilling sound that, once heard, stays with you for days afterwards.

And then there’s the fact that the animals can witness each other being killed as they travel along the conveyor belt. Their hooves twitch wildly as they try to break fee.

One lamb cries out for more than 20 seconds before it flops off the end of the conveyor belt and on to a rotating table. From there, it is shackled by its hind legs and hauled up to the ceiling on a hook, where it is left with a dozen others to ‘bleed out’ — another important part of the halal process.

Of course, no slaughter of an animal is easy to watch. But it is hard to remain dispassionate as I watch dozens of still-conscious animals bleeding to death, the floor covered by an inch of warm, frothy blood.

The British law, which requires animals to be stunned and rendered unconscious before slaughter, should be changed so that it no longer makes exceptions for both halal and kosher, as Liberty GB says in its manifesto. Sweden and Norway banned ritual slaughter in the 1930s. Switzerland, one of the most ancient countries to be based on popular consent and direct democracy, banned it as early as 1893.

It's worth explaining that, if we implement that, nobody will have to go against his or her religious beliefs or commandments.

Islam specifically exempts its faithful from the obligation to eat halal food if none is available:

He hath only forbidden you dead meat, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and that on which any other name hath been invoked besides that of Allah. But if one is forced by necessity, without wilful disobedience, nor transgressing due limits,- then is he guiltless. For Allah is Oft-forgiving Most Merciful. Quran (002:173)

Neither Islam nor Judaism prescribes meat consumption. If a follower of either faith does not want to eat non-permitted meat, he can be a vegetarian, thus also doing a favour to his heart and decreasing his risk of cancer.

Interestingly, it's a major secular Jewish philosopher, Peter Singer, who has this recommendation for Muslims and his fellow Jews in his book Animal Liberation (Amazon UK) (Amazon USA) (page 155, The New York Review of Books, second edition):

Meanwhile, those who do not wish to eat meat slaughtered contrary to the current teachings of their religion have a simple alternative: not to eat meat at all. In making this suggestion, I am not asking more of religious believers than I ask of myself; it is only that the reasons for them to do it are stronger because of the additional suffering involved in producing the meat they eat.

Jewish writer and Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, also a vegetarian, said: "I am not a vegetarian for my own health, but for the health of the chickens" and "every day is Treblinka for the animals". He wrote a very poignant short story, The Slaughterer, in which a compassionate man, Yoineh Meir, is appointed the town's ritual slaughterer in the old country, and obediently performs his duties but his life is turned into a living hell of nightmares and obsessions of blood and slaughter, until madness and drowning himself in the river become his final escape:

The killing of every beast, great or small, caused him as much pain as though he were cutting his own throat. Of all the punishments that could have been visited upon him, slaughtering was the worst.

While we are waiting for the law to be changed to prohibit ritual slaughter, at the very least halal meat should not reach the non-Muslim market (and kosher the non-Jewish), and all meat from animals who were slaughtered when conscious should be clearly labelled as such. There is certainly a vast number of people who want clear labelling, knowledge and choice.

Islamic Forced Conversions - Past and Present

2013-05-17T00:15:00.000+01:00

Raymond Ibrahim, a scholar of Islam and Islamic history who has a particular focus on Muslim persecution of Christians, has on his website - for which I also write - a new article, Islamic Forced Conversions — Past and Present, highlighting the astonishing similarities of past atrocities, which many people in the West believe to have been consigned to distant history (belief largely due to the mainstream media's "carpet non-coverage" and total neglect of these everyday slaughters, massacres, beheadings, torture and discrimination), to current ones.

His piece was inspired by last Sunday’s canonization by Pope Francis I of the 813 Martyrs of Otranto, Christians from the South-Eastern Italian town of Otranto killed by Muslim Ottomans for refusing to convert to Islam in 1480. Their elevation had been decided by Francis' predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, in one of his last acts before resigning.

This canonization concerned the largest number of people to be elevated to sainthood at once in the history of the Catholic Church.

Muslims, and their tireless allies and apologists in the liberal media, cannot leave the Holy Father alone even when he is just doing his job, like canonizing new saints. And something as small as a symbolic hint and an indirect reference to current persecution of Christians, without any mention of specific countries or even Islam, can be enough for a Muslim website to say: "He did not mention any countries, but the Vatican has expressed deep concern recently about the fate of Christians in parts of the Middle East, including Coptic Christians in Egypt. The pope’s canonization is expected to raise anger among Muslims over linking Islam to violence."

And the NBCNews website faithfully echoed: "The choice of some of the new saints was also striking, touching on the already-fragile relationship between Christianity and Islam... So why risk creating yet another inter-faith row with a celebration which some in the Muslim world may be seen [sic] as a provocation?".

These comments are a reminder, if necessary, that things have not changed in Muslim intolerance towards Christianity, as Raymond Ibrahim explains in his new article:

The lost history of Christians forced to convert to Islam—or die—is reemerging, figuratively and literally. According to the BBC: “Pope Francis has proclaimed the first saints of his pontificate in a ceremony [last Sunday] at the Vatican—a list which includes 800 victims of an atrocity carried out by Ottoman soldiers in 1480.They were beheaded in the southern Italian town of Otranto after refusing to convert to Islam.”

The BBC adds in a sidebar: “The ‘Martyrs of Otranto’ were 813 Italians beheaded for defying demands by Turkish invaders to renounce Christianity. The Turks had been sent by Mohammed II, who had already captured the ‘second Rome’ of Constantinople.”

Historical texts throughout the centuries are filled with similar anecdotes, including the “60 Martyrs of Gaza,” Christian soldiers who were executed for refusing Islam during the 7th century Islamic invasion of Jerusalem. Seven centuries later, during the Islamic invasion of Georgia, Christians refusing to convert were forced into their church and set on fire. Witnesses for Christ [Amazon USA] , [Amazon UK] , lists 200 anecdotes of Christians killed—including some burned at the stake, thrown on iron spikes, dismembered, stoned, stabbed, shot at, drowned, pummeled to death, impaled and crucified—for refusing to embrace Islam.

If history is shocking, the fact is, today, Christians—men, women, and children—are still being forced to convert to Islam. Pope Francis alluded to their sufferings during the same ceremony: “As we venerate the martyrs of Otranto, let us ask God to sustain those many Christians who, in these times and in many parts of the world, right now, still suffer violence, and give them the courage and fidelity to respond to evil with good.”

Consider some recent anecdotes:

In Pakistan, a “devoted Christian” was butchered by Muslim men “with multiple axe blows [24 per autopsy] for refusing to convert to Islam.” Another two Christian men returning from church were accosted by six Muslims who tried to force them to convert to Islam, but “the two refused to renounce Christianity.” Accordingly, the Muslims severely beat them, yelling they must either convert “or be prepared to die. . . . the two Christians fell unconscious, and the young Muslim men left assuming they had killed them.”

In Bangladesh some 300 Christian children were abducted in 2012 and sold to Islamic schools, where “imams force them to abjure Christianity.” The children are then instructed in Islam and beaten. After full indoctrination they are asked if they are “ready to give their lives for Islam,” presumably by becoming jihadi suicide-bombers. (Even here the historic patterns are undeniable: for centuries, Christian children were forcibly taken, converted to and indoctrinated in Islam, trained to be jihadis extraordinaire, and then unleashed on their former Christian families. Such were the Janissaries and Mamelukes.)

In Palestine in 2012, Christians in Gaza protested over the “kidnappings and forced conversions of some former believers to Islam.” The ever-dwindling Christian community banged on a church bell while chanting, “With our spirit, with our blood we will sacrifice ourselves for you, Jesus.”

Just as happened throughout history, Muslims today regularly “invite” Christians to Islam, often presenting it as the only cure to their sufferings—sufferings caused by Muslims in the first place.

In Pakistan, a Christian couple was arrested on a false charge and severely beaten by police. The pregnant wife was “punched, kicked and beat” as her interrogators threatened to kill her unborn baby. A policeman offered to drop the theft charge if the husband would only “renounce Christianity and convert to Islam,” but the man refused.

In Uzbekistan, a 26-year-old Christian woman, partially paralyzed from youth, and her elderly mother were violently attacked by invaders who ransacked their home, confiscating “icons, Bibles, religious calendars, and prayer books.” At the police department, the paralyzed woman was “offered to convert to Islam.” She refused, and the judge “decided that the women had resisted police and had stored the banned religious literature at home and conducted missionary activities. He fined them 20 minimum monthly wages each.”

In Sudan, Muslims kidnapped a 15-year-old Christian girl; they raped, beat and ordered her to convert to Islam. When her mother went to police to open a case, the Muslim officer of the so-called “Family and Child Protection Unit,” told her: “You must convert to Islam if you want your daughter back.”

Indeed, because Christian females are the most vulnerable segments of Islamic societies, they are especially targeted for forced conversions. In 2012, U.S. Congress heard testimony about the “escalating abduction, coerced conversion and forced marriage of Coptic Christian women and girls [550 cases in the last five years alone].Those women are being terrorized and, consequently, marginalized, in the formation of the new Egypt.”

As my new book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians [Amazon USA] , [Amazon UK] , documents, wherever there are large numbers of Muslims—whether in the Arab World, Africa, Asia, or even in the West—Christians are being persecuted. Forced conversions are the tip of the iceberg, and certainly not anomalies of history.

The Himalayas Are Melting. Or Maybe Not

2013-05-14T23:20:00.000+01:00

Mount Everest's Ice Is Melting, Live Science headlines an article that begins with "Earth's global thaw has reached Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak", pointing to the fateful global warming syndrome.

But if you then carry on reading the report you'll find:

The researchers suspect that the glacial melting in the Everest region is due to global warming, but they have not yet established a firm connection between the mountains' changes and climate change, Thakuri said in the statement.

While Everest isn't the only Himalayan region seeing the effects of climate change, not all of the region's glaciers are melting. The Karakoram Mountains, on the China-India-Pakistan border, are holding steady and may even be growing. But shrinking glaciers in the rest of the Himalayas have drawn significant global attention, because the glaciers provide water and power for roughly 1.5 billion people.

Shrinking glaciers always draw more attention, because they fit in with the anthropogenic global warming theory, whereas new glaciers being formed or growing, which are just as numerous, contradict it.

See You on 15 May at London Event on Marriage

2013-05-13T19:01:00.003+01:00

The Coalition for Marriage in the UK has planned a very interesting free event (or rather two events with the same presentation, one in central London on 15 May and one in Chessington on 14 May - details below), with a very interesting guest, Ryan Anderson, whom they call "the man who gave Piers Morgan a run for his money" because of the way he outsmarted the British Leftist journalist on a USA TV debate on marriage.

Another speaker at the events will be Adrian Smith, the Manchester housing manager who was demoted and lost 40 per cent of his salary just for having said on his personal Facebook page that "gay" weddings in churches would be "an equality too far".

I'll be at the London event, so if you attend too we could meet:

We would like to remind you that Ryan Anderson, who brilliantly stood his ground defending marriage against a sneering Piers Morgan on American TV, will be visiting the UK next [now this] week.

Mr Anderson is a bright, young, articulate academic and author from Washington DC and he knows the arguments for marriage inside-out. We have organised two special events so that our supporters can hear what he has to say.

Also speaking at the events will be Adrian Smith, the housing manager from Manchester who was demoted and lost 40 per cent of his salary just for saying on his personal Facebook page that gay weddings in churches would be "an equality too far".

Please join us at one of the two events:

Chessington, Tuesday 14 May, 8pm - 9.30pm
The King's Centre, Coppard Gardens,
Chessington, Surrey, KT9 2GZ
Click above for a map

London, Wednesday 15 May, 6pm - 7.30pm
The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple,
Crown Office Row, London, EC4Y 7HL
Click above for a map

The same presentation will be given at both meetings. The meetings are free of charge and there’s no need to book.

The West Has an Irrevocable Duty to Help the Christians of the World

2013-05-12T23:09:00.001+01:00

Raymond Ibrahim’s fundamental new book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK ), has been widely reported, covered and praised and does not require an introduction, but it prompts a reflection.

The problem of Christian discrimination and persecution by Muslims is in fact two problems. Like unpunished crimes’ victims who suffer twice, for the crime and for the injustice of the criminal’s going scot-free, while the atrocities committed against Christians are unbearable enough on their own, the total indifference of the rest of the world adds to the pain.

Floods, earthquakes, natural calamities and man-induced ones like the recent collapse of a factory in Bangladesh attract lots of media coverage and offers of foreign aid, but this does not happen with what Raymond Ibrahim has rightly called “arguably the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis” and Andrew McCarthy “the great unspoken civil rights issue.. [and] scandal of our day”.

How much Western governments care about the plight of the Christians living in Muslim-majority countries can be seen by how indifferent they were to the systematic discrimination of which Pakistani Christians, during that country’s 2010 devastating floods, were victims in the distribution of aid – essential to survival – ironically donated by those very same historically Christian Western countries.

The Vatican, to its credit, was one of the few to highlight that injustice. I have never heard of a Western government – or any other, for that matter – giving aid to Pakistan on that occasion only on condition that a fair and equal distribution was guaranteed.

In Islam “charity” has a different meaning from the Christian one, being a duty extended only to other Muslims. This semantic difference reflects that pseudo-religion’s division of humanity into the Muslim Ummah and the infidels, groups with very unequal status, whereas Christianity proclaims the equality of all human beings:

Allah has bestowed His gifts of sustenance more freely on some of you than on others: those more favoured are not going to throw back their gifts to those whom their right hands possess, so as to be equal in that respect. Will they then deny the favours of Allah? Quran (16:71)

There are theories that aspire to be scientific and are not – like many alternative medicine disciplines for example – and paintings or sculptures whose authors consider art but nobody else does. Similarly, Islam claims to be a religion but it fails the crucial tests for being one: making its faithful better persons and embracing reciprocity, one of the most fundamental, indeed basic, rules of ethics. Hence my choice of the appellative “pseudo-religion”, pretending to be a religion but not being one.

Foreign aid could in fact be used as a tool for Western governments and charities to demand equal treatment of Christians and other minorities in Muslim countries as a pre-condition for receiving that aid.

I have once provocatively advanced the proposal to give Pakistan, which is one of the world’s worst offenders in the persecution of Christians, “the South-African treatment”, isolating and repudiating it from the international community, which in the case of South Africa put pressure on Pretoria and played a big role in ending the apartheid. The British Commonwealth, of which that country was part, turned out to be particularly important in this process. Pakistan is also a member of the British Commonwealth, from which it should be banned until it abolishes its blasphemy laws.
South Africa’s bans from sporting events were also used as effective means of pressure, and so could be banning Pakistan from Commonwealth Games, Cricket World Cup, and similar.

The obstacle is, obviously, the lack of political will.

The British Pakistani Christian Association’s petition calling for an end to British foreign aid to Pakistan until human rights improve has been rejected because ”stopping UK aid to Pakistan will not accelerate progress on human rights and will only make conditions worse for the millions of poor and marginalized across the country, including the Christian community”, although the organization is still collecting signatures for the petition:

We the undersigned petitioners believe that any aid given by Britain to Pakistan should have approriate [sic] accountability and traceability. We urge the Government of the UK to ensure that a significant proportion of the £225m given in aid last year for improvents [sic] to the educational provision in Pakistan, is used to level the diasparity [sic] of opportunity between minority faith groups and the Muslim majority. We call for this disproportionality to be set as a priority before and above overall holistic educational reform. Only 7% of minority people in Pakistan attain an adequate level of literacy and 86%of minority people work as janitors, sewarage [sic] workers or domestic servants.
We also call for the UK to use the commitment to provide aid to challenge the Government of Pakistan to take tangible steps towards a better human rights record (currently 125th out of 160 countries on UN Development index).

Another measure that the West could implement is that of giving preference to Christian asylum seekers and immigrants over others.

In April Dutch Members of Parliament “offered to consider special status for Christian asylum seekers and refugees fleeing extremism in Pakistan, after hearing a report from Wilson Chowdhry of the British Pakistani Christian Association”.

This was also the idea of Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna, one of the few Catholic high-ranking clergy members with a realistic, non-appeasing approach to Islam. He wrote in September 2000 that, not for religious reasons but purely to favour the peaceful integration of immigrant communities into Italy, we should favour Christian immigration.

To his motivation we can add the great Christian humanitarian crisis. For two reasons we should be particularly concerned about it: first, the numbers, one Christian estimated to be killed every 5 minutes just for his/her faith, give it priority; second, our particular relationship with the Christian world.

The West owes its existence to Christianity – along with Greco-Roman civilization – and in fact I consider the two terms synonymous. Christians the world over are culturally, if not geographically, part of the West: but then the West is a cultural, more than geographic, concept.

So, although we should be concerned about all, not just Christian, oppressed peoples of the world, I think that we Westerners owe a particular debt of gratitude to these brothers and sisters who are discriminated, persecuted and victims of violence just for being Christian, and despite that they keep their faith alive, the same faith that we take so much for granted that we have lost it.

They are martyrs in the true etymological sense of bearing witness to the value of the Christian faith.

Tanzania: Muslim Bomb Outside Catholic Church Kills 3 and Injures over 60

2013-05-11T01:17:00.001+01:00

In Tanzania, as in many other African countries, Muslims discriminate against, persecute and attack Christians, with the complicity of the authorities.

For years officials have been colluding with Muslims to stop churches from being built and to erect mosques, Christians have been arrested for "illegal preaching", churches have been destroyed and torched, Christian university students have been prohibited from worshipping, Christian leaders have been jailed, Muslims have seized Christian burial sites, and especially in the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, where Muslims represent 97 per cent of the inhabitants, Christians live in fear of being killed.

A young man who converted to Christianity fled the island to escape death threats from his Muslim family, after the beating he had received from them left him with head, hand and torso injuries, a serious mouth wound and substantial loss of blood; another Christian who accidentally burned pages of the Quran chose jail by entering a guilty plea rather than face certain death from a violent mob.

The apparent paradox is that most Tanzanians are Christian. Christians are 60 per cent of the population and Muslims are 36 per cent. But Muslims do not need to be a majority. The supremacism and aggression that are part of Islamic doctrine ensure that even a minority of Muslims can terrorize non-Muslim majorities.

After all, the dhimmis (the subjected people) that inhabited the lands of the Middle East and North Africa conquerered by Islamic hordes after the death of Muhammad were often still majorities in their countries.

The most recent horror occurred last Sunday, a bomb explosion outside a new Catholic church, considered "one of worst ‘terrorist’ incidents in years" in which 3 people were killed and more than 60 injured:

Last Sunday’s blast outside St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Arusha, a town popular with tourists visiting the Serengeti national park and Mount Kilimanjaro, was just the latest example.

The newly built church, in the Olasti district on the outskirts of Arusha, was celebrating its first ever mass at the time of the attack, which left three dead and more than 60 injured...

In Zanzibar, which is 97 per cent Muslim, arsonists burned the Evangelical Church of Siloam on February 19, two days after gunmen killed a Catholic priest, Father Evaristus Mushi, in the Motni area of the island.

Earlier that month, an Assemblies of God minister, Pastor Mathayo Kachili, was hacked to death in the Geita region of Lake Victoria..

Christian Solidarity Worldwide reports that church leaders began to receive text messages from a group calling itself ‘Muslim Renewal’ which claimed responsibility for these murders, adding the killers were ‘trained in Somalia’ and which promised ‘disaster’ during the Easter season.

Is Homosexuality as Harmless and Healthy as Political Correctness Dictates?

2013-05-09T18:09:00.000+01:00

In psychology and psychiatry, a condition is considered pathological when it results in behaviours or states of mind which are harmful to oneself and/or others.

Sometimes it is a question of degree. All of us, for example, have little insignificant rituals, or irrational beliefs, or acts of superstition that serve no purpose but are harmless enough. When these come to dominate somebody's life and seriously interfere with normal everyday functioning, they are deemed a disorder, specifically Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

We all generally keep objects that only occupy space without any use or function, but it is only when the house becomes a suffocating repository of towering piles of junk and old newspapers that this behaviour is called "hoarding" and treated as a disease.

So, it is the consequences that signal pathology.

Paedophilia is considered an illness because it is believed that children and young people under the age of consent will be harmed by sexual relationships, especially with adults.

Incidentally, the very fact that the age of consent, even in the Western world alone, varies considerably and can be as low as 13 in Spain and as high as 18 in the USA shows how unclear and uncertain many of our notions about sex ethics are.

Therefore, so the current consensus goes, paedophilia is an abnormality and homosexuality, for example, is not purely because of the consequences, harmful in the former and innocuous in the latter.

This is the received wisdom, the present-day orthodoxy and dogma which, interestingly enough, is very different from that of not just 100, or 50, but even a few years ago, when same-sex marriage, for instance, was still generally regarded as, well, queer.

So, if we think that our ideas were so terribly wrong then, they might as well be wrong now, and maybe in a decade or two from today they will have changed all over again, in the same or in the opposite direction.

"Homosexuality" can refer to two things: homosexual tendency and homosexual behaviour. As in many other cases in psychology and psychiatry, it is the acting on the tendency, namely the behaviour, that can more appropriately be considered pathological or not.

If we look at homosexual behaviour in men, we see persons who are prepared to take extraordinary, lethal health risks in order to satisfy their tendency.

Male homosexuals are at very high risk of contracting the AIDS virus and other sexually transmitted diseases, disproportionately high in comparison to the heterosexual population:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published in 2010 a study conducted in 21 American cities, showing that one in five MSM (men who have sex with men) had HIV...

A coincidence, you say? No, the way HIV, the AIDS virus, spreads has a lot to do with homosexual behaviour.

Before looking into the evidence of brain, genes or hormones we need to recognise that the male body is not designed to be penetrated during sexual intercourse. The lining of the anus is much thinner than the vagina and tears very easily. The lining of the anus, compared to the lining of the vagina, is also designed for nutrients to pass through it - where a healthy vagina will stop sperm entering any part of the body except the reproductive system the anus will allow semen (and any disease it carries) into the blood stream. Also the anal sphincter muscle is designed to expel not accept objects which can lead to problems in later life...

So biologically the male and female bodies are compatible with each other not bodies of the same gender.
This is from the website of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a federal government agency:

The Surgeon General (C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General 1982-1989) has said, "Condoms provide some protection, but anal intercourse is simply too dangerous to practice".

Condoms may be more likely to break during anal intercourse than during other types of sex because of the greater amount of friction and other stresses involved.

Even if the condom doesn't break, anal intercourse is very risky because it can cause tissue in the rectum to tear and bleed. These tears allow disease germs to pass more easily from one partner to the other.

The often-repeated wishful thinking "panacea" of the use of condom is just that, a wishful thinking myth.

Male homosexual behaviour may reduce life expectancy up to 3 times more than smoking. This is what "Modelling the impact of HIV disease on mortality in gay and bisexual men", a peer-reviewed study published in the Oxford Journal of Epidemiology, says:

In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men [for smokers is 7 years less]. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years will not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.

Are men engaging in sex with other men only harming themselves, although that in itself would be sufficient to recognize this behaviour as psychologically pathological?

Actually no, the risk spreads to society at large. Tuberculosis is increasing in the world, "and 'the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history' largely, as the authoritative medical journal The Lancet explains, thanks to the spread of HIV: 'Due to the devastating effect of HIV on susceptibility to tuberculosis'."

All this shows that male homosexual behaviour has consequences that, if political correctness and fears of being ostracized as a "homophobe" - things that have nothing to do with medical or psychological considerations - did not stand in the way, would rightly make it classified as pathological.

Number of Tuberculosis Cases Rises in the UK Due to Immigration

2013-05-07T17:45:00.002+01:00

"The increase in the rate of TB in the UK, which contrasts with most other European countries, may, at least in part, be due to the fact that a high proportion of UK cases occur in the foreign-born, coupled with a comparatively large number of foreign nationals from countries with a very high incidence of TB."

Who wrote that? One of the far-right "nazi grouplets", as the Marxist site Searchlight would call them? A racist, a xenophobe?

No, it is the conclusion of a scientific study published in the world's most authoritative database of peer-reviewed medical research, the US National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.

The study in question is called "The impact of immigration on tuberculosis rates in the United Kingdom compared with other European countries", and these are its results:

TB notification rates increased in only three of the 21 countries [under investigation]: the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden. In all three countries, approximately three quarters of cases were foreign-born. The UK had the third highest number of foreign nationals overall, but the highest number from a country with a TB incidence > or =250 cases/100000 (219000, 13%). European countries with declining TB rates had varying patterns of migration, but did not generally receive migrants from very high-incidence countries and/or had a smaller proportion of their total TB cases in their migrant population.

This was published in May 2009, but the trend, far from stopping or decreasing, has continued.

Another highly prestigious, historical medical publication, The Lancet, in 2010 printed a paper entitled "The white plague returns to London—with a vengeance" calling London "the tuberculosis capital of Europe", a claim repeated last week in another paper in the same major medical journal, titled "The ongoing problem of tuberculosis in the UK":

London has the highest overall rate of tuberculosis of any capital city in western Europe. Rates of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis have doubled in the UK over the past decade, and, although most developed countries have achieved sustained reductions in the number of cases, rates in the UK continue to rise.

The paper is a comment on a new report from the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis, Drug-resistant tuberculosis: old disease—new threat, published 15 April. Among other things, the report says:

TB is the leading killer of people living with HIV/AIDS, accounting for one in four AIDS related deaths...

In the UK, TB is a particular problem among people born abroad and hard to reach groups... [In the UK] The majority of the 81 new cases in 2011 (95%) were born in South Asia, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, with an additional six of these being the most extreme form of the disease (XDR).

There are almost 9,000 new cases of this deadly disease each year in the UK.

Tuberculosis, especially drug-resistant, cases are on the rise in the world, and "the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history" largely thanks to the spread of HIV: "Due to the devastating effect of HIV on susceptibility to tuberculosis".

This explains why, for example, South Africa has both the world's highest burden of HIV and the third highest burden of TB. Another country which has among the highest rates in the world of both TB and HIV and has a high rate of TB/HIV co-infection is Nigeria.

The resurgence of tuberculosis, which was once one of the world’s biggest killers, has led the World Health Organisation to declare it a global health emergency in 1993.

Two of the great idol totems of our time, unrestricted mass immigration from Third World countries to Europe and normalization of homosexuality, untouchable dogmas of progressivism and liberal rectitude, are thus taking us back to the 19th century.

UK Local Election: Triumph of Real Conservatism and Sea Change in British Politics

2013-05-04T00:09:00.000+01:00

Anti-immigration, anti-European-Union, against wind farms and other absurd climate change policies, pro-family and anti-homosexual-marriage UK Independence Party, or UKIP, (there is much more to be against than to be for at the moment in Britain) has today changed British politics, very likely forever.

This far-right, real conservative party which not long ago had a support of barely 5% of the population has experienced a surge in popularity and is the triumphant winner of yesterday's local election in England and Wales, getting a quarter of the vote nationally.

UKIP is not the winner in the sense of getting most votes, but is certainly the party that got by far most gains.

These are the 2013 local election results as share of the total national vote:

Labour - 29%
Conservatives - 25%
UKIP - 23%
Liberal Democrats - 14%
Other - 9%.

The previous local election gave these results for the top 4 parties:

Conservatives - 44%
Liberal Democrats - 25%
Labour - 13%,
UKIP - 5%

UKIP has pushed all parties below 30%, Labour as well as Tories. There are now few points dividing UKIP from either of them, and all three are between 20% and 30%, while the Lib Dems are on their way to be consigned to history, so eventually there will be two of the three main parties on the Right and only one on the Left.

If we look at the number of seats, we can see that even the way the number of seats gained by UKIP, 139 (an astounding rise from 8 to 147!), closely mirrors the number of seats lost by the Lib Dems, 124, shows in purely and clearly arithmetic terms how the former party is replacing the latter.

A by-election to replace a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons was also held at the same time in South Shields, near Newcastle upon Tyne. Labour easily won this, a safe seat for them, but UKIP came an astonishing second pushing the Lib Dems into seventh place with a result so bad that they lost their deposit.

UKIP was the big story of this election. Every other sentence in all the commentaries on the vote contained the word "UKIP".

Prime Minister and leader of the Tories David Cameron, who had in the past called UKIP supporters "closet racists, loonies, nutters and fruitcakes", is so scared of them now that today he expressed respect for them and their choices, saying that it's no good insulting them and they must be listened to and treated with respect.

The most interesting aspect of the election results is that UKIP has not just taken votes from the Conservatives, the only right-wing party among the major three, but also - albeit to a lesser extent - from Labour and the Liberal Democrats, parties of the Left.

This disproves the predictions of those who before the elections were warning of the danger that voting UKIP, dividing the Right, would help Labour, with which I disagreed.

In the traditionally Conservative South of England, the Labour Party has been pushed into fourth place in many localities.

As Conservative minister Michael Gove said, this was not a protest vote against the government - which is a coalition of Tories and Lib Dems - but a protest against Labour, therefore against all the three main parties.

But the most important thing is that the UKIP victory means a reshaping of the face of British politics, what UKIP leader Nigel Farage calls a "game changer".

It is no longer a three-party-system now, but a four-party-system.

Previously the three main parties were one on the Right and two on the Left, now it's two on each side.

Not only that. The other major story of this election is the defeat of that pathetic party, the Liberal Democrats, whose policies are best described as being to the left of Tony Blair's New Labour, which was forever and with some success chasing that elusive centre ground, also known as Middle England, and to the right of good Old Labour, which is what we have now.

The Lib Dems, this insignificant former third party of Britain, the point of whose existence many acute minds have in vain tried to discern, seems destined to a well-deserved extinction.

There is a lesson here for U.S. politics as well. This extraordinary rise of a small, fringe, truly conservative party with more ideas than resources and more principles than media coverage has shown that people want more really conservative, right-wing, sane, commonsensical policies and unambiguos, unapologetic clarity on them than we credit them for.

Someone during the British media commentary on the election made a comparison between UKIP and the Tea Party.

I don' t know how much that comparison is appropriate, but I do know that the Republicans, like their British counterparts, the Tories, at the moment are not true to their conservative principles.

Doing the Romney thing, selecting a left-leaning Republican presidential candidate who has "evolving" views on same-sex marriage - when we know that we must win the culture war in order to win the political war, as the Left has demonstrated to us by its successful example of the last 50-60 years - is the best way to lose the race for the White House, because it sends mixed messages.

Rather than going after the centre, or middle ground, in the hope that this will bring more votes by widening the spectrum of consensus, the UKIP example has shown that it is better to choose policies we truly want implemented and try to bring the people on our side, thus moving that middle ground in the direction that we desire.

Tories' Dirty Tricks Do Not Stop UKIP Rise

2013-05-02T02:18:00.000+01:00

Who is right? Ann Widdecombe (whom I admire but not necessarily agree with on this point)? She says that, despite having found herself questioning her own loyalty "since Cameron forced through gay marriage against the wishes of his own party":

At the General Election a vote for Ukip [right-wing UK Independence Party] will be a vote for Miliband and all that Britain has gone through in the interests of putting the economy right will be brought to nought. I make no apology for repeating what I have said before: the note from Liam Byrne, the outgoing Labour treasury minister, summed it up: “There is nothing left.” There never is after Labour governments.

In tomorrow’s [local] elections much the same warning applies; a vote for anything other than Conservative is a vote for Labour and thus for high tax and high spend at county halls.

Don’t do it. Vote instead for the party that has imposed a benefits cap, promises an in-out referendum, is sorting out educational standards and is slowly restoring financial sanity. No other party that can win offers all that.

So vote Conservative even if through gritted teeth.

Or UKIP's leader Nigel Farage, who says: "A young Margaret Thatcher would join Ukip instead of today's Conservatives"?

He added that Ukip would stand down candidates to help the Tories if they pledged to take Britain out of the European Union.

He considers the prospects of a deal with David Cameron to be just about zero, but thinks that other Tories exist with whom his part could do a deal, "there are some very good-thinking people there, like Michael Gove, who doesn't just dismiss somebody else's point of view, he listens to it and engages with it."

Mr Farage believes that Ukip has "every prospect" of taking first place in next year's European elections.

He said: "It seems to me that we get to the point where if Ukip does become strong enough as a result of this year's local elections and the European elections next year, that is the moment at which we can have a serious conversation about realigning British politics.

"We are not there yet, by a long chalk, but don't think it can't happen.

"I think Ukip could be the catalyst over the next two years for a really fundamental realignment of the way politics is structured in Britain."

Tories are so desperate that they have resorted to any means, including the ones which are commonly employed but are usually the Left's prerogative, i.e. calling people (in this case UKIP candidates at the UK local election of 2 May) names, e.g. "homophobic", "racist", "neo-Nazi" and the like. Together with Labour, the Conservatives have also produced fake leaflets to discredit the UK Independence Party, leaflets that look like they have come from UKIP and carry messages like "An apology, we got it wrong" as well as attacking candidates for that party. A similar strategy (the use of the striking yellow and purple colours of UKIP for the Tory leaflets) had already been employed and failed in the recent Eastleigh by-election where the UKIP triumphed.

Despite all these attempts, Britain's bookmakers are betting on UKIP making major gains in Thursday's local elections.

The bookies know what they are doing. The most recent opinion poll by ComRes gives these results:

Conservatives 31%
Labour on 24%
UKIP 22%
Lib Dems 12%

According to recent evidence, therefore, it looks like UKIP may be going to take votes from the left-wing parties as well, i.e. the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. A 2-point difference between Labour and UKIP is particularly noteworthy, considering that UKIP was until not long ago a fringe party and now is on the brink of overtaking the historical party of the British left, workers and unions.

It appears to me as if those politicians and media commentators who use these tactics to scare off prospective UKIP voters have understood neither the reason for the party's electoral success nor indeed the people of this country, who increasingly support it. Otherwise they would realize that accusing UKIP's candidates or members of "racism" and "homophobia" is exactly what will make its popularity grow: the public opinion has started recognizing these terms, to which we can add "Islamophobia", for what they are: an attempt by people without either arguments or principles to frighten the population into silence and force them to cower into submission.

These insults, the modern version of accusations of heresy, say much more about the persons who use them than about the persons they are used against.

Western Socialist Governments Destroy Economy with Taxes and Inflation

2013-04-30T03:11:00.000+01:00

Both inflation and taxes are the worst enemies of productive work and earning.

Taxes, especially high ones, act as a discouragement, if not a deterrent, from working hard to acquire money that you will see taken away in front of your very own eyes.

Inflation will see to it that what you are allowed to keep will be in reality much less than what appears to be.

In my personal experience I have to say that, when I was earning reasonable money from my internet commercial activity, realizing that a big chunk of it was not mine at all thanks to the Inland Revenue did cool my passion and dampen my enthusiasm a bit, not much but a little. So, when I became more involved in political writing - nothing to do with taxes but for entirely different motivations -, I was not so keen to devote more time to my commercial websites as I might have been without the lurking presence of high taxation and high inflation.

I am interested in economics, and I was very pleased to find in what I consider one of the best blogs around, that of Alexander Boot, such clear, simple and, more importantly, well-founded explanations of how Western current financial woes originate in the political sphere.

Inflation may have economical causes too, but what we have now is astronomical:

Behold: £100 pounds in 1850 became £110 pounds in 1900 -- a negligible inflation of 10% over 50 years. That meant that a baby born at the time with a silver spoon in his mouth, which utensil equalled, say, a solid middle-class income of £500 a year, could live his whole life in reasonable comfort even if he never made a penny of his own. Conversely, £100 in 1950 became £2000 in 2000 -- a wealth-busting, soul-destroying inflation of 2,000%.

Today's skyrocketing inflation derives from heavily indebted governments' habit of printing too much money to repay their debt with it.

Economic value, despite the appearances, is not in the money, it is in the goods - products and services - that people need and are willing to pay for. So, if inflation depends on the proportion between the goods produced and the currency in circulation or, as Milton Friedman put it, is "too many dollars chasing after too few goods", it is evident that, coeteris paribus, the more money is printed the higher the rate of inflation.

The government is responsible in two ways: first by overspending and getting into debt ("Excess government spending causes inflation", wrote American economist Alan Greenspan, who served as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, in his book The Time of Turbulence (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK)), and then by trying to get out of it by "quantitative easing", i.e. printing money.

High inflation does all the wrong things for the economy: not only, along with high taxes, deters people from working hard, but also it deters them from saving and encourages them to spend and even take debts. After all, the money you borrow now has more value than when you have to repay it in the future.

If there are not enough savers, there will not be sufficient funds for businesses to borrow, which will slow down enterprise and productivity and therefore reduce employment. It is a domino effect, or rather a geometric progression, multiplying instead of summing the terms. A wrong choice, a bad move causes a concatenation of cascading calamities.

This is what socialism invariably and solely does: destroy. It destroys many other things, but here we are talking economics so we concentrate on the fact that it destroys wealth and the ability to produce it.

And Western governments become bigger and bigger and spend as if there is no tomorrow (literally as well as metaphorically) because they run on socialist principles like redistribution of wealth and, as Marx described the second element of communism, they give "to each according to his needs", a perfect definition of the welfare state (the first element of communism is "From each according to his abilities").

As for high taxation:

The highest rate of income tax peaked in the Second World War at 99.25%.It was slightly reduced after the war and was around 90% through the 1950s and 60s.

Tax revenues as a percentage of GDP for the UK in comparison to the OECD and the EU 15. In 1971 the top-rate of income tax on earned income was cut to 75%. A surcharge of 15% on investment income kept the top rate on that income at 90%. In 1974 this cut was partly reversed, and the top rate on earned income raised to 83%. With the investment income surcharge this raised the top rate on investment income to 98%, the highest permanent rate since the war.

That was true madness, before Thatcher restored sanity and reduced the tax burden.

The reason why the 50% tax top rate on incomes higher than £150,000 introduced in 2010 by Labour was lowered to 45% in the 2012 budget is because it was costing the Exchequer an estimated over £1 billion a year in loss of tax revenue.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research correctly predicted:

There is good evidence that an increase in high-rate Income Taxes beyond 40% will lead to a loss of revenue to the Exchequer over the coming years.
Calculating the taxable income elasticity
Higher rates of Value Added Tax and National Insurance Contributions mean that the revenue maximising rate of Income Tax for the very rich has fallen over the past year. Combined with increased labour and capital mobility, this means the revenue maximising top rate of Income Tax is likely to be less than 40%.

Mosques Are the Battleground of the War between Islam and the West

2013-04-29T18:44:00.000+01:00

"We don't debate unprofessional councillors, unprincipled journalists, and self-righteous community organizers; we turn the tables on them": this is how British planning lawyer Gavin Boby, also known as the "mosque buster", describes the activity of his organization, the Law And Freedom Foundation. He uses the law to stop the building of mosques in the UK by demonstrating to local councils that the building of a mosque or an Islamic centre is actually in violation of British law. And he succeeds: the count so far is 16 victories out of 17 cases.

Gavin Boby is a 48-year-old planning lawyer from Bristol, South-West England. He deals with planning permissions or zoning permissions.

Like many other people in Britain, for almost 10 years Boby had witnessed the progressive penetration of Islam in his country, but like many other people he watched idly not knowing what to do about it.

It was the same feeling of impotence that most of us shared. But then, a couple of years ago, he had this idea. Many mosques disrupt neighbourhoods and drive out long-time residents. Non-Muslim women in particular are made to feel uncomfortable in those areas. Why not use his legal skills to help local communities resist planning applications for mosques?

The BBC video above the article exposes how corrupt the process of granting mosque planning applications can be, showcasing a session in the Rochdale Council's planning committee in the North of England, during which councillor Begum does not allow discussion before the vote is taken and rushes the other members to vote.

This is very topical in light of the recent revelations that the Boston bombers' mosque "has been associated with other terrorism suspects, has invited radical speakers to a sister mosque in Boston and is affiliated with a Muslim group that critics say nurses grievances that can lead to extremism", has classic jihadi texts in its library, and gave money to two terrorist charities which have been shut down by the U.S. government. But then again, when is something about the violent nature of Islam not topical these days?

Still, this is a good way to introduce the mosque buster's work. What are mosques? As we know, mosques are not like churches or synagogues, they are far more than houses of worship and contemplation, many of them are centres of jihadist activity that indoctrinate to commit and support violence against infidels. In America, as many as 4 different studies have independently come to the same conclusion that 80 per cent of US mosques "were teaching jihad, Islamic supremacism, and hatred and contempt for Jews and Christians".

The Law And Freedom Foundation website declares: "A mosque is not merely a place of worship. Islamic doctrine requires the application of Islamic law within its geographical reach."

We can see the truth of that in London. It is no coincidence that sharia-law areas or self-declared Muslim areas with Muslim patrols acting like vigilantes in cities like London are near mosques. We are increasingly seeing Muslim patrols in the proximity of mosques saying to passers-by that they can't walk a dog, wear a skirt, drink alcohol.

In an interview Gavin Boby explains that mosques are being used as the bridgehead, the forefront of the advance of Islam in a territory. What happens in neighbourhoods - usually working class districts which are not used to dealing with officialdom - where a mosque is built is that the area changes forever for its residents, who no longer recognize it and eventually have to move out, due to things like the parking jihad, general harassment, vandalism.

"The parking jihad is" he describes, "soon after the construction of a mosque, people will find no parking space there, their driveway is being blocked or even a car is parked in the driveway inside your property and if you ask them to move their car they'll say it's only for an hour." The parking tends to be used as a way to establish possession and control over the area, of saying: "This is a mosque area, we are the owners now and there's nothing you can do about it", and then after that it gets worse until the point when people move out.

"The Koran" the Bristol lawyer continues, "calls 14 times for the enslavement of non-Muslims, and 3 times for killing the unbelievers wherever they are found. This is obviously against English law. You don't need to be a good lawyer to fight it but you need to be a very good lawyer to get around it."

Partly, the mosque buster's approach is that of finding the contradictions and incompatibilities between Islam and Western fundamental principles (that's the easy part), and making mosque building and planning regulations become the battleground of these ideological conflicts.

In the same way as Islam is not just a religion but also a political doctrine of supremacy and power, so the mosque is not simply a building of worship but also a political one.

Gavin elaborates:

This is the Islamic doctrine, every mosque is instructed to be based upon the original mosque in Medina, where Muhammad originally in the 7th century set up his religious-political doctrine of social control, and the mosque is a place of government, it is a place where treaties are made, death sentences are passed, armies are blessed and dispatched, it is primarily about political control and it is very much used as a tool of advance. Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey talked about that, the Muslim Brotherhood compared their mosques to battalions and to beehives, where Muslims will gather and then advance, and there's nothing new about this, it goes back to the 7th century.

So, this is the why of the Law And Freedom Foundation's operation. Now let's see the how.

Gavin works pro bono as a planning lawyer for anyone wishing to fight the erection of a mosque. He says:

The method is very simple. A planning application gets submitted for a mosque in an area, and it will never be called a "mosque". It will be called a community centre; an inter-faith centre; a public community, harmony-building outreach centre, and then the neighbours contact us, and it's usually people who have never been involved in politics before, are shy of politics and officialdom and ask us to help them to resist it. And that's what we do, we help them to simply use established methods of consultation to tell the local authorities: "We object to this proposal because of the effect it will have on the neighbourhood, the effect on parking, the effect on noise, the effect on disturbance, the architectural effect, the effect of concentrations of people generally, the amenity for residents". And also we give them advocacy in front of the council meeting, we'll advocate on their behalf.

Therefore the approach is twofold. The most commonly employed is to use the effects on and the desires of the local communities as tools in the consultation process which is local authorities' standard procedure before a planning or change of use permission is granted.

As an example, the last two refusals to mosque building from local authorities were motivated by: loss of the retail floorspace; harm to the character, function, vitality and viability of the neighbourhood centre; possible harm to the surrounding transport network in respect of movements to and from the site for both pedestrians and vehicles; loss of employment use in a Locally Significant Industrial Site and potential harm to the viability and function of the remaining Locally Significant Industrial Site; low public transport accessibility inappropriate for a large-scale community facility; lack of adequate on-site parking with resulting overspill on-street parking likely to cause unacceptable traffic management problems and traffic congestion, to the detriment of traffic flow and road safety in the vicinity of the site.

From these you can have an idea of the broadness and scope of reasons that can be used. Other common issues are noise, and congestion at particular times like Fridays at prayer times or when there are Koran lessons for children.

The second approach - although what is predominantly used is the first - goes more to the core of what Islam is. The organization's website states: "Also, it is hard to see how a Local Authority has the power to grant planning permission for a mosque, since the purpose of a mosque is to promote a doctrine that incites killing, enslavement and war. You don’t need to be a skilled lawyer to understand this point – you have to be a skilled lawyer to find a way around it."

This conviction was evident when the mosque buster was asked how he responds to people who say this is an infringement of freedom of religion. He answered:

I understand people who say that, and it would be the case if Islam were simply about private contemplation and reflection, the way that Christianity in a parish church is, but the problem is that you have two legal principles that conflict. You have this issue of freedom of religion and you have the public order issue, it's not an issue of censorship, it's a public order issue that [you have] if you have people preaching warfare, preaching violence, preaching killing and enslaving against another part of the population: that is against the most founding principles, [which were established] before freedom of religion was established within English law, within any law.

The British planning lawyer clarifies the relationship between these approaches when he advises his clients: "Don't focus on the religious and political aspects, focus on the technical ones, but what we are doing is trying to stop the area from being Islamized". But the two issues, i.e. the political question and the concern about community safety, are in fact indissolubly interconnected; he acts from knowledge of the intimidation and violence that the mosques regularly bring with them.

He observes that mosques are increasingly being built in the UK in numbers which are disproportionate to the need for them, and often in areas with hardly any Muslim population.

The Law and Freedom Foundation also offers advice to local activists on how to go about the business of mosque busting. Gavin Boby's is an original approach, even the way he talks gives you the immediate impression that he brings something new and different (lawyer-like but this time in a good sense) to the anti-Islam movement.

Boby has become a household name in the counterjihad movement, and others outside the UK are following his example, like Geert Wilders in Holland, whose party recently launched the “MoskNee” (“MosqueNo”) project. Still to remain in continental Europe, the mosque buster spoke at the Brussels ICLA conference on July 9 2012.

He was also invited to speak in Ottawa, Canada by the organization Act for Canada, which points out that the University of Alberta's former Chair in Islamic Studies explained how the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Banna hoped to change "the status of the Mosque, bringing it from a static place of worship to a center of Islamic revolution", while Youssef Qaradawi, unconditionally endorsed by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in Canada, wrote: "It must be the role of the mosque to guide the public policy of a nation, raise awareness of critical issues, and reveal its enemies. From ancient times the mosque has had a role in urging jihad for the sake of Allah". Gavin also spoke in Toronto and Montreal.

In August/September 2012 Mr Boby toured Australia on invitation of the Q Society of Australia, according to which many Australians still do not fully understand how important mosques and mosque-building are in Islamic doctrine and how crucially different a mosque is from a church or synagogue. Many Australians did not know that in their country there are already over 340 mosques and Islamic prayer rooms, many of which are rooms in once secular public buildings and public spaces.

As can be expected, there is controversy and attempts to stop this mosque-busting lawyer from giving speeches wherever they are scheduled, and he has been vilified by the mass media.

But what really matters is that it works. Maybe his activity can be the inspiration to find other specialistic, professional ways to use the law against the Islamization of our countries.

Giuliani: Institutionalized Political Correctness Jeopardizes Safety

2013-04-27T05:43:00.002+01:00

Sean Hannity of Fox News interviews Republican Rudolph Giuliani, who was New York City major at the time of 9/11, on the Boston bombings.

The elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the dead main suspect, was already on a government watch list. Not only that. The US government had been warned multiple times by the Russians about him and how dangerous he might be, and Homeland Security, as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said, knew that Tamerlan left the U.S. for Russia last year. What shocks Giuliani is that he had been dropped from the watch list after he travelled to Russia, whereas that trip, obviously to Chechnya, should have been reason to place him higher on that list.

The former mayor has always thought, he says, that not being able to call a spade "a spade", or the Fort Hood massacre "terrorism" and not "workplace violence", would lead to a situation he calls "institutionalized political correctness". That means that workers in the bureacracy - either in the military or law enforcement - get the message from above that the keyword is being over cautious with classifying people and crimes, to the point of hampering investigations and security.

"I'm not even sure if we can use the description 'Muslim extremist' any longer", he adds.

Muslims Pelting Dogs Get Just Deserts

2013-04-27T04:38:00.000+01:00

Fantastic video showing a mob of disgustingly coward Muslims in Casablanca, Morocco, throwing rocks and bottles at two German Sheperds walking down the street with their human companion.

But the splendid animals react by mauling the bastards. It is not clear why the dogs' owner tries to stop them, they were only defending themselves.

Islam considers dogs "unclean". It forbids believers to keep dogs, and the punishment for doing that is the loss of one or two qiraats from a Muslim's hasanaat (good deeds) each day, meaning it is easier to go to Hell.

Muhammad made statements to the effect that dogs are "impure" and worse, and these edicts have always affected dogs in a tragic way, leading to the cruel treatment of these wonderful, loving and faithful animals.

The statements regarding dogs are not found in the Quran but there are many of them in the hadith, collections of traditions which are a primary foundation of Islamic theology and the basis of many Islamic laws. Muhammad ordered that and all black dogs and most other dogs should be killed.

Islam is unfortunately spreading like a wildfire. It is crucial that Muhammad’s teachings are examined: was he really a prophet or someone with mental problems?

h/t to The Muslim Issue.

Want to Know if a Site Is Blocked in Iran?

2013-04-26T23:21:00.000+01:00

There is a website with a test that tells you if a particular site on the internet is blocked in Iran, predictably called Blockediniran.

I can't find any source that can give information about the reliability of this test, which I presume will not be 100%. In fact, while the OK answers (not blocked) are definite, the BLOCKED results are more cautious, saying: "It appears as though this site IS blocked in Iran".

Among the websites banned in Iran are Jihad Watch, Daniel Pipes, Fox News and The Daily Mail.

Very understandably not blocked are The Guardian, The Times, Occupy Wall Street, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein.

My site, Enza Ferreri, is blocked in Iran.

Is Released Boston Bombings Saudi Man Really Innocent?

2013-04-26T21:04:00.003+01:00

Just after the Boston Marathon bombings and before they knew the identity of the two main suspects, the Tsarnaev brothers, the police questioned Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, a Saudi man, as a "person of interest". He was running away from the scene of the crime after the explosions like so many others, but he had acted in a way that a witness found suspicious.

He was just at the finish line of the Boston Marathon when the bombs exploded and he got injured but, instead of seeking medical assistance, he was running away.

This is the summary of the story so far:

•A Saudi national originally identified as a “person of interest” in the Boston Marathon bombing was set to be deported under section 212 3B — “Security and related grounds” — “Terrorist activities” after the bombing
•As the story gained traction, TheBlaze’s Chief Content Officer Joel Cheatwood received word that the government may not deport the Saudi national, originally identified as Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi
•Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano refused to answer questions on the subject when confronted by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) on Capitol Hill.
•An ICE official said a different Saudi national is in custody, but is “in no way” connected to the bombings.
•A congressional source, however, says that the file on Alharbi was created, that he was “linked” in some way to the Boston bombings (though it is unclear how), and that documents showing all this have been sent to Congress.
•Key congressmen of the Committee on Homeland Security request a classified briefing with Napolitano
•Fox News’ Todd Starnes reports that Alharbi was allegedly flagged on a terrorist watch list and granted a student visa without being properly vetted. Sources close to the investigation also told him the Saudi is still set for deportation.
•New information provided to TheBlaze reveals Alharbi’s file was altered early Wednesday evening to disassociate him from the initial charges
•Sources say the Saudi’s student visa specifically allows him to go to school in Findlay, Ohio, though he appears to have an apartment in Boston, Massachusetts
•Sources tell us this will most likely now be kicked from the DHS to the DOJ and labeled an ongoing investigation that can no longer be discussed.

Now, as former Muslim Brotherhood member turned peace activist Walid Shoebat observes, many from Alharbi’s clan are involved in terrorism and are members of Al-Qaeda. A list of 85 terrorists listed by the Saudi government shows that several people belonging to the Alharbi clan have been active fighters in Al-Qaeda. And there are several Alharbi clan members in Guantanamo.

Saudi Arabia is a highly tribal society, and both clan and family ties are important and tell you a lot about people:

There are specific Saudi clans that are rife with members of Al-Qaeda, which makes it quite alarming as to why nearly a hundred thousand student visas are issued to these. Americans are clueless as to clan ties when it comes to terrorism.

Lesson one: Terrorism and crime by the Saudis is interlinked extensively within families, as we see in the Harbi clan.

Shoebat had warned a couple of weeks before the Boston Marathon bombings about the threat of Saudi infiltration into the United States, saying: "Many of these Saudi nationals are criminals and terrorists".

The mainstream media are ignoring the question marks surrounding former "person of interest" Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, but Glenn Beck is doing his investigative journalist job and The Blaze is reporting on it:

Beck proceeded to highlight the background of the Saudi national first identified as a “person of interest” in the Boston bombings, Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, noting that the the NTC issued an event file calling for his deportation using section 212, 3B which is proven terrorist activity.

“We are not sure who actually tagged him as a ’212 3B,’ but we know it is very difficult to charge someone with this — it has to be almost certain,” Beck explained. “It is the equivalent in civil society of charging someone with premeditated murder and seeking the death penalty — it is not thrown around lightly.”

Beck continued, noting that after Secretary of State John Kerry met with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud on Tuesday, the FBI began backtracking on the Saudi national from suspect, to person of interest, to witness, to victim, to nobody.

Then, on Wednesday, President Obama had a “chance” encounter with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud and Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir.

“Wednesday at 5:35 p.m. the file is altered,” Beck said. “This is unheard of, this is impossible in the timeline due to the severity of the charge….You don’t one day put a 212 3B charge against somebody with deportation, and then the next day take it off. It would require too much to do it.”

“There are only two people that could revoke the deportation order — the director of the NTC could do it after speaking with each department, the FBI, the ATC, etc. — which is impossible to do in such a short period of time, — or, somebody at the very highest levels of the State Department could do it. We don’t have any evidence to tell you which one did it,” Beck said...

If, as an ICE official said last week, there is actually a second Saudi in custody, who is it? Beck asked...

It is still unclear why the government is stonewalling the media on information as to why the file initially labeled Alharbi as a threat, only to change that designation later in the week. Is there a legitimate threat that’s being covered up? Did the government have actual concerns about Alharbi, but was too quick to connect him in this instance and is now trying to stave off embarrassment?...

“The Bush administration would later block the investigation into Saudi involvement into 9/11, even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and would eventually force the redaction of a 28-page chapter of the 9/11 Commission report regarding foreign, specifically Saudi, support for some of the Al-Qaeda hijackers,” Beck said, noting that the questionable relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States goes back further than the current administration.

But, he said, we have now taken that relationship to a whole new level. “On January 14, 2013 President Obama met with Saudi Minister of Interior,” Beck remarked. “Two days later Janet Napolitano signed agreement with Saudi minister allowing ‘trusted traveler’ status on Saudi student visitors, meaning greatly reduced security checks and scrutiny.”

“This is trusted traveler status that we don’t give to some of our most trusted allies, and we gave it to Saudi Arabia last January?” Beck said. “So they can just walk into our country no questions asked?”

“There is a pattern,” he said. “There is a relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia the American public doesn’t know about. The case of Abdul Rahman Ali Al-Harbi is only the latest example.”

Even prior to the Boston bombings, Republican lawmakers had expressed concern about the "potential risks" of a Department of Homeland Security decision granting "trusted traveler" status to airline passengers from Saudi Arabia.

Lesbian Nurse Stripped Naked in Front of Female Patient

2013-04-23T22:43:00.002+01:00

The UK's Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) heard that a lesbian 70-year-old psychosexual counsellor and registered nurse took her patient to New York and paid for a luxury hotel where she stripped naked in front of her.

Over an 18-month period Trisha Birch lavished the woman with gifts, treated her to meals out, gave her cash and sent 'inappropriate' texts: it is said she failed to maintain "professional boundaries" with the female patient.

David Clark, for the NMC, said Patient A refused to give evidence because she suffers from “nightmares” about the experience.

Swiss Referendum to Curb Immigration

2013-04-23T17:11:00.002+01:00

Eight million people live in Switzerland. It may not seem much, but this is a small country.

The Alpine nation has now a high density population due to the demographic boom through immigration that it has recently experienced, with an increase in its population size from 7.2 million in 2000 to 8 million in 2012, and a rise of 140% from 1990 to now.

Moreover, almost a quarter, or 1.8 million people, are foreign, and one person in five in the Swiss Confederation does not have a Swiss passport.

The country's environmentalists are now acting like an improbable nationalist right-wing bulldog against foreign invasion. The organization Ecology and Population (Ecopop) has collected 120,700 signatures, more than the 100,000 required by law, to call for a referendum to limit the growth of the population, and therefore the number of immigrants, to 0.2% per annum, and to demand that a tenth of foreign aid be given to birth control.

The right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP) has also collected enough signatures to force a referendum that demands an even more restricted limit on immigration. By law the number of referendums cannot exceed 4 per year.

Ecopop, which stresses the fact that its members are not racist or xenophobe, embraces the unfounded, debunked theories of American biologist Paul Ehrlich exposed in his 1968 book The Population Bomb (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) . Growth by 0.2% per annum of the population would be considered a level compatible with the preservation of natural resources of the country.

"Switzerland currently has one of the densest populations on the planet, with 480 inhabitants per square kilometre in 'Mittelland'," or central Switzerland, Ecopop leader Andreas Thommen told AFP, insisting "this development is not at all sustainable in the long-term."

If the group manages to overcome some bureaucratic problems and legal issues, the referendum will be held in 2015. According to an internet survey of 7,653 users, 75% said they were in favor of the imposition of the quota, 20% against and 5% undecided. Which means that, to date, the referendum is sure to pass.

How ironic if immigration in a Western European country could finally and drastically be reduced not for the real reasons of preservation of our highly precious culture, values, religion and political principles from developing countries' populations with different views of the world, in particular Muslim populations, but on the basis of a fallacious - but fashionable with the in-crowds - environmental dogma!

“Arab Spring” in Central Asia?

2013-04-22T17:37:00.021+01:00

Mirroring what is happening in the world, there is an Islamic revival in the Caucasus and Central Asia, with all that it means for local Christians.

The predominantly Muslim Central Asian Republics, after the collapse of the Soviet Union of which they were part, have seen an increase in the persecution of Christians. The fall of dictatorship, in a pattern similar to that of post-war Iraq and the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, seems to have “liberated” the radical elements within the Muslim communities.

The now independent countries of Central Asia are the following five, in order of population size: Uzbekistan (just under 30 million people), Kazakhstan (16-17 million), Tajikistan (7-8 million), Kyrgyzstan (5-6 million), which is particularly topical now because it is where the family of the Boston bombings suspects lived for a time, and Turkmenistan (just over 5 million), for a total population of 64.7 million in 2012, the vast majority of whom are Muslim. Another Muslim-majority country that was part of the Soviet Union is the Republic of Azerbaijan, the largest in the Caucasus, at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, with a population of over 9 million, 95 percent of whom are Muslim.

What is paradoxical is that, while during the Soviet era the ruling Communist Party, through the education system and official propaganda, imposed so-called "scientific atheism" (a name reminiscent of so many Western atheists who, à la Richard Dawkins, fallaciously declare the denial of God to derive from science), for Christians in Central Asia and the Caucasus the end of the Communist regime, which was supposed to bring freedom of religion among other freedoms, brought instead another form of religious oppression.

It may have freed Christianity but, by freeing Islam as well, it unleashed hostility against Christianity, from governments as well. Churches are raided, closed and torched, crosses are burnt, fathers are arrested and fined for holding a prayer meeting and religious leaders for not registering the church (while at the same time the strict legislation makes it impossible for churches to register), believers are beaten up during raids on their homes, Christian literature is destroyed, and families are restricted to owning only one Bible. There is growing intolerance, and the media target organizations and beliefs.

The organization Russian Ministries' Facebook page says: "However due to the strictness of the laws in these countries, it is practically impossible for churches to register and practically all religious materials are illegal, meaning that it is becoming more or less de facto illegal to practice Christianity".

It does not end there. In Azerbaijan "The government is also intent on vilifying Christians to the public. Government-controlled mass media accuses believers of occult practices, hypnosis, and extremism, while newspaper articles encourage discrimination and physical abuse of Christians and other minorities".

In the article Central Asia: Growing Religion Oppression, Anneta Vyssotskaia, of the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission, writes:

During 2007 there were numerous reports of restriction and persecution of Christians in Central Asia. However, these may be only the tip of the iceberg of the real situation regarding persecution of the Christians living and worshipping God in the predominantly Islamic environment. Most of what would be considered persecution in Western countries is just part of daily life for every Christian there; persecution comes from family, neighbours, Muslim religious leaders and the government. Most of these cases may never become generally known. Religious legislation in these countries is undergoing changes that restrict worship and evangelism even more. Despite this, the number of Christians is constantly growing.

In Uzbekistan a small Baptist church which has endured more than a decade of official harassment was again raided during Sunday morning worship on 24 March. "The secret police officer who led the raid told the Baptists that 'all believers are backward-looking fanatics who drag society down'". This pronouncement again rings a bell to Western ears. Take away the raid and you can hear our own "progressives" and "enlightened" gay-marriage supporters saying very much the same.

In its survey analysis of freedom of religion or belief in Kazakhstan, Forum 18 News Service found serious, continuing violations of human rights, including:

attacks on religious freedom by officials ranging from President Nursultan Nazarbaev down to local officials; literature censorship; state-sponsored encouragement of religious intolerance; legal restrictions on freedom of religion or belief; raids, interrogations, threats and fines affecting both registered and unregistered religious communities and individuals; unfair trials; the jailing of a few particularly disfavoured religious believers; restrictions on the social and charitable work of religious communities; close police and KNB secret police surveillance of religious communities; and attempts to deprive religious communities of their property. These violations interlock with violations of other fundamental human rights, such as freedom of expression and of association.

And it is getting worse. In Kazakhstan, a proposed new Criminal Code expected to be approved by the government in May and presented to parliament in July, if adopted in its current form, would allow those who lead unregistered religious communities to be imprisoned for up to three months, and those who share their faith for up to four months.

Perhaps for the first time since Kazakhstan gained independence in 1991, a court ordered religious literature to be destroyed, in the form of 121 Christian books confiscated from a believer who was handing them out on the city streets when police arrested him. He was given a fine corresponding to a month’s wages.

In recent weeks and months there have been many incidents in which Central Asian churches have been raided, often without warrant, and, if Christian literature or an on-going service were found, church members were given a heavy fine (in some cases as much as 100 times the monthly minimum wage) for possession of illegal material or unregistered religious activity.

To counter this worsening situation, on February 6 in Washington, DC Russian Ministries organized a briefing to raise awareness of the worrying trend among U.S. leaders, which was attended by 90 people, including people from the State Department.

The goal was to mobilize and get support from the global community to develop policies and put pressure on the governments of the Muslim former Soviet republics so that they give more freedom to the churches and leaders there.

Among the causes of suppression of religious freedom there appear to be both blasphemy laws and laws intended to combat religious extremism and terrorism, which seem to mistakenly conflate militant Islam and Christianity, as is the case of the new law introduced in Kazakhstan in late 2011.

In that country, with the declared intention to stamp out Islamic extremism and “to counter manifestations of religious extremism and terrorism”, Christians and other innocent faith minorities have increasingly become victims of the reform, aggressively implemented: after a year, among other abuses, 579 religious communities had been stripped of their registration rights.

Therefore Christians suffer from the presence of Islam in two ways: directly, through the various torching of churches, burning of crosses, attacks on apostates and the usual niceties, and indirectly, for becoming scapegoats of Islamic radicalism.

Anneta Vyssotskaia explains:

As religious liberty for churches in Central Asia deteriorates, some common trends are evident. Governments are increasingly negative about Christian outreach, especially amongst the Muslim population, and want to control it more or stop it completely.

They fear tensions may escalate where the number of Christian converts in the local population is growing. In other instances governments legislate to control minority religious bodies due to concerns about the activities of Islamic groups. However as Christians are a religious minority throughout Central Asia they are restricted by such laws along with these Islamic and other minority religious groups. In addition local Muslim communities regard Muslim converts to Christianity as 'traitors' and enemies and persecute them in various ways.

Sergey Rakhuba, President of Russian Ministries, an expert on mission issues related to Russia and the former Soviet Union, says in the above video: "In the 'stan' countries you cannot bring Bibles, you cannot bring literature, you cannot evangelize or share your faith outside of your home; but, in the case of Uzbekistan, you cannot even share your faith with your children, you cannot pray, and a meeting of more than 3 people is considered a violation of this law, and that's why people suffer and get imprisoned".

Mission Network News reports:

It's like going back to the days of the cold war, he [Sergey Rakhuba] says. "Evangelical churches are not allowed to do anything outside of their homes, even inside their homes. If they gather together for prayer meetings they are punished and are penalized. Many pastors have already been thrown into prison there."

While it's reminiscent of the days of communism, Rakhuba says, "This is a new wave of persecution that's based on radical Islamism, on nationalism, and even mainline churches like the Orthodox church...is the reason for persecution of local believers in Russia and Ukraine or other Slavic countries."

The information presented will help create a policy guide for Christians in the region to help fight laws that are meant to fight terrorism. "Based on those laws, evangelical Christians--for their most humble actions--are punished just for having prayer in their own home. So, we'd like to create some policies and to encourage governments to change it."

In parallel with what happens in the Arab countries, we see in Central Asia the Christian communities targeted on two fronts: attacked by Muslim mobs, neighbours and leaders on one hand, and attacked or not protected by governments, police/army and local officials on the other.

While the motivations of the former are the same (Muslims being Muslim), the reasons behind the latter may have less to do with Islam than in the Arab world. Kazakhstan’s 1995 constitution, for example, stipulates that it is a secular state, and the governments of the Central Asian republics are wary of theocracy and Islam in the political sphere, although Islamization in the region is increasing.

To help or contact Russian Ministries, visit http://www.russian-ministries.org/ or http://www.mnnonline.org/groups/RMI

Anti-Christian Atheism and Unethical Behaviour

2013-04-18T22:30:00.002+01:00

Following my article Effects of Atheist Propaganda Come Home to Roost, - although on Free Republic the comments were favourable to my position - readers of my blog have posted comments that need a more analytical and detailed answer than allowed in the comments section.

Complex subjects require complex treatment. Furthermore, there seems to be much confusion about the theme of Christianity and ethics.

For example, an anonymous reader calling himself "roger in florida" wrote: "I believe you are very misguided if you equate Christianity with morality or cannot understand that atheists, such as myself, are incapable [he then explained that he meant "capable"] of morality".

Indeed I never made (and it would have been absurd to make) such a sweeping generalization as that atheists are incapable of morality.

I was myself an atheist (and now am an agnostic) capable of morality, as I am sure many others are.

Besides, if we want to be specific - and this philosophical topic requires it - everybody is capable of morality, in varying degrees, with possible pathological exceptions.

The devil is in the detail, it is those different degrees that make all the difference.

The late-18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between "autonomy" and "heteronomy": the former is the capability of giving oneself moral guidance and rules, the latter applies to individuals when their morality is determined from outside themselves, through fears of losing social approval and of punishments like those associated with the penal system.

The vast majority of individuals will have a combination of the two, in proportions that will diverge greatly. Children and adults who are generally considered immoral, like criminals, will need more external guidance and deterrents.

Anyway, my article was about a specific connection between atheism and immoral behaviour, not a generic one.

Another reader, aLeRGya, addressed this thus: "I don' think implying what Dr. Dawkins is promoting directly leads to the dilemma relating to the video is that simple. Correlation does not imply causation".

Of course, as exposed by the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, we cannot logically derive causation from correlation or temporal coincidence.

But here we do not need to.

When a company invests large sums of money to advertise a product and then it sees the product's sales soar, it is a highly plausible hypothesis that the advertising campaign caused the increase in sales.

In fact, this pattern follows that of a scientific experiment: you change one variable (the experimental variable) and, coeteris paribus (all the rest being equal), the change in the responding variable (the result) will likely be due to your intervention, proportionally to how much the rest has been maintained equal.

The very fact that companies and other organizations and agencies keep spending lots of money in advertising is in itself a sign that this method achieves the desired objectives.

What is true for advertising of products is also true of advertising of ideas, propaganda, which was literally what I explored in my article, i.e. an atheist advertising campaign in Britain.

The population of a country like Britain had been exposed, until the 1950s, to an education following the values of Christian ethics, which centre around self-discipline and self-constraint in all areas of life, not just sexuality as it is vulgarly assumed but also eating, drinking, shopping and spending, drug taking, personal relationships, and so on in every sphere.

In the last 5-6 decades the British population has been subjected to a politically Leftist, anti-clerical, militant atheist propaganda and bombarded with messages similar to and pointing in the same direction as those described in my article.

God does not exist, therefore enjoy your life and live for today: commenters who criticize my piece for making the connection between atheism and absence of ethical thinking (ethics requires exactly that, going beyond the "now" and instant self-gratification) overlook the fact that Leftist, militant atheists are the first to make that connection, as evidenced in this particular bus and train advertising campaign.

Some, more ascetic people, in seeing those slogans, may have thought of a different kind of enjoyment, but the vast majority will have understood right in thinking that it was an invitation and encouragement to a relaxation in sexual behaviour, which Christianity rightly sees as covered by ethics but atheist moral philosophers, like Peter Singer who has influenced Richard Dawkins, do not.

Here is what Peter Singer, one of the main contemporary proponents of atheist ethics, writes on pages 1 and 2 of his book Practical Ethics (Amazon US), (Amazon UK) , when giving the basic foundations of his ethical system:

Some people think that morality is now out of date. They regard morality as a system of nasty puritanical prohibitions, mainly designed to stop people having fun...

So the first thing to say about ethics is that it is not a set of prohibitions particularly concerned with sex. Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.) Accordingly, this book contains no discussion of sexual morality. There are more important ethical issues to be considered. [Emphasis added]

For a utilitarian like Singer, a consequentialist moral philosopher, to so easily neglect the specific consequences of sex, the human activity that leads to the conception of children, is an incredible mistake.

Throughout this period from the '50s to now Britain has experienced a vast rise in the incidence of teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy, sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS/HIV, divorce, abortion, broken families, multiple marriages, fatherless children, eating disorders, overeating, obesity, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, over spending, obsessive shopping, indebtedness, sexual child abuse, neglect of the elderly, loss of sense of community, individual isolation, and more.

To argue that there is no causal connection between these two sets of events stretches credibility way too far.

Try to bombard people for decades with the message: "People have been telling you that in the morning you should get up from the right side of the bed. Well, they were wrong. People who say that are superstitious, pervert ignoramuses. We are on the right side of history, on the side of progress, have science in our support and we tell you that you should get up from the left side of the bed".

The human mind is very plastic, malleable, flexible and adaptable.

If, after half a century of people's hearing this message continuously repeated in overt or subtle ways in their living rooms from the TV, in cinema screens, classrooms and college halls, in newspapers, political, academic, entertainment and indeed any public discourse, even on billboards on buses and trains, would you be surprised if people who had always got up from the right side of the bed eventually get up from the left, and would you not see that the first set of phenomena caused the other?

There could be other concomitant causes too, there always are in sociological events of a certain complexity, but atheist, anti-Christian, anti-ethical propaganda is undoubtedly a major one.

The reader aLeRGya also makes a reference to the Catholic Church's so-called "paedophile" scandal, which is nothing of the sort and will be treated in a future article.

Do Entitlements Come before Safety?

2013-04-17T21:28:00.002+01:00

Boston Bombing Could Reset National Political Debate:

Although it's unclear who was responsible [UPDATE: This was written before there were suspects], the Boston bombings are likely to again place terrorism at the top of the national agenda and put President Obama to the test as a leader in a time of crisis.

He has already been put to the test numerous times, and he failed them all. How many tests do you want?

The reality is that Obama's response is likely to define his administration and, more important, help determine whether Americans feel safe in their own country for the foreseeable future.

At the presidential election most voters preferred freebies to safety. Now we see the results. Obama is perfectly capable of spending lots of money his government does not have to give people the full benefit of a big welfare state but is totally incapable of fighting Islamic terrorism.

If the incident turns out to be terrorism, Obama will never be able to repeat the mantra that predecessor George W. Bush's supporters used in describing his administration's efforts to protect the homeland after 9/11: He kept us safe.

The way to keep the West safe is not to stage wars in Afghanistan, Iraq or anywhere else in the Muslim world, but to expel Muslims from Western countries and prevent them from entering our borders again. There is terrorism only in countries with a Muslim population. Muslim-free countries have no terrorism.

Monday's incident was the first big bombing in the United States since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. U.S. officials acknowledge that some potentially serious incidents were foiled, and there was a mass killing which many defined as an act of terrorism in November 2009. That's when Army Major Nidal M. Hassan fatally shot 13 people and wounded 30 more at Fort Hood, Texas.

In the UK, as well as in the USA, there would have been many more Islamic terrorist attacks if the security services and police had not constantly kept an eye on the Muslim "communities".

Will this new atrocity on American soil serve as a wake-up for people?

About an hour before the Boston bombings, I happened to be interviewing Republican pollster Bill McInturff about the political climate, and he made a prescient comment. "A president's agenda often gets hijacked by big events" that demand his attention and change his priorities, McInturff told me. This could be what happens in the wake of the Boston tragedy.

Will American people now realize that Barack Hussein Obama is not the right man for the job?