Indian Voices Will Be Heard in Bahrain

I’ve written previously about the exploitation of foreign workers in the Persian Gulf countries. The most recent post on this topic was about “guest workers” in Kuwait, who have been unable to appeal to the embassies of their home countries to redress their grievances.

But that situation is about to change, at least for Indian nationals, in Bahrain. According to AKI:

Bahrain: Indian embassy invites expat workers to air complaints

Guest workers in DubaiThe Indian embassy in Bahrain will on Friday hold an open house to allow the embassy officials to monitor the complaints and issues of Indian nationals applying for the government’s current six-month amnesty for expatriate workers.

The open house will be hosted by the Indian ambassador Balkrishna Shetty, and several other embassy officials will be present at the event.

In a bid to curb the violation of labour norms, Bahrain announced a special amnesty scheme for all foreign workers on 1 August. Under the amnesty, the government has asked all illegal immigrant workers and their employers to regularise their work permits or face heavy penalties.

– – – – – – – –

Shetty and other Indian ambassadors, mainly from Middle Eastern countries, will gather in the Indian capital, New Delhi, on 10-11 September to discuss the problems faced by women workers in these country, particularly housemaids.

The Indian government’s earlier decision to impose tighter regulations that would govern household workers starting from 1 September will now come into force only after this meeting, Shetty was quoted as telling the Bahrain daily Gulf Daily News.

The meeting has been called amid the growing concern in India about the rising complaints of housemaids working abroad being abused by their employers and their contracts violated.

Hundreds of thousands of women, mainly from Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra states in India, are employed as domestic help in these countries.

One of the options the government wants to float for discussion at next month’s meeting is a minimum monthly salary for housemaids, and a ban on women workers travelling to countries, which have no labour pacts, Shetty said.

Indian ambassadors accredited to 10 countries where large numbers of Indian domestic servants are employed will attend the meeting. Besides Bahrain, these include Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Libya, Yemen, Jordan and Malaysia.

Bahrain has become the second country after the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to announce an amnesty scheme for foreign workers.

As of last Sunday, 2,733 Indian nationals had applied to the Indian embassy in Bahrain for help in filing amnesty applications, Shetty said.

“About 70 percent of them had no passports, and they are being issued emergency certificates or outpasses,” he said, quoted by Gulf Daily News.

The enforcement of laws and official policies in the Arab world is subject to the whims of the despots that run the countries. It remains to be seen whether these new reforms will have any real-world effects, or exist only on paper.



Hat tip: insubria.

The Right Hand Has No Idea What the Left Foot is Doing

You may dissolve into hysterical laughter or cry in sympathetic pity at the report of Britain’s latest tippy-toe move down the dark tunnels of dhimmitude:

Husbands with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits following a year-long Government review, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, the decision by ministers means that polygamous marriages can now be recognised formally by the state, so long as the weddings took place in countries where the arrangement is legal.

The outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men with more than one wife, as is permitted under Islamic law. Ministers estimate that up to a thousand polygamous partnerships exist in Britain, although they admit there is no exact record.

This article say “the outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men”…I wonder how many Mormons there are in Britain and if they have plans to come out of the closet…except Mormons don’t live on welfare, so maybe they don’t count.

The decision has been condemned by the Tories…

Gee, I wonder why? Maybe they share a brain among them, which is more than we can say for their honored assemblages on the other side of the political fence.

Here’s the nitty-gritty:

New guidelines on income support from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) state: “Where there is a valid polygamous marriage the claimant and one spouse will be paid the couple rate … The amount payable for each additional spouse is presently £33.65.”

Income support for all of the wives may be paid directly into the husband’s bank account, if the family so choose. Under the deal agreed by ministers, a husband with multiple wives may also be eligible for additional housing benefit and council tax benefit to reflect the larger property needed for his family.

Please note the oxymoron: “valid polygamous marriage.” It’s known as bigamy by real people, but bureaucrats have their own separate lexicon…which yields terms like “valid polygamy.” Next there will be “obligatory honor killings,” and government will pay for the burial expenses.

The Telegraph estimates:
– – – – – – – –

The ruling could cost taxpayers millions of pounds. Ministers launched a review of the benefit rules for polygamous marriages in November 2006, after it emerged that some families had benefited financially.

The review concluded in December last year with agreement that the extra benefits should continue to be paid, the Government admitted. The decision was not publicly announced.

Four departments – the Treasury, the DWP, HM Revenue and Customs, and the Home Office – were involved in the review, which concluded that recognising multiple marriages conducted overseas was “the best possible” option. In Britain, bigamy is punishable by up to seven years in prison.

But not if you’re Muslim. For British Muslims, it’s not gaol, it’s government gold.

And Mohammed scores another big one against the British government. Way to go, Mo!

For the byzantine regs on how to actually get away with this chicanery read the whole article. Then line the birdcage with it.



Hat tip: TR

Is Britain a No-Go Area?

Michael Nazir-AliI’ve written previously about Michael Nazir-Ali, the Anglican Bishop of Rochester. Dr. Nazir-Ali made recent headlines for uttering the unutterable: there are “no-go zones” in British cities, due to the presence of thousands of Muslim immigrants and their descendants clustered in urban areas.

For his cardinal sin Dr. Nazir-Ali was reprimanded by the cognoscenti of Britain, including members of the Anglican hierarchy. There are some things you just don’t say.

Deny the Trinity… Trash the Bible… Urinate on a crucifix… But keep your hands off our Multiculture!

Now the good bishop has received death threats for his efforts:

The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, is under police protection after he and his family received death threats over his claim that parts of Britain had become “no-go areas” for non-Muslims.

The Bishop is also facing anger from the most senior members of the Church of England hierarchy for his comments on Islam.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has made Islam a priority of his archiepiscopate and set up a Muslim-Christian forum to promote relations between the faiths in 2006. One senior cleric told The Times yesterday: “The Bishop of Rochester is in effect threatening to undo everything we have done.”

[…]

Dr Nazir-Ali was in India when staff at his home in Rochester took a number of phone calls threatening his family and warning him that he would not “live long” if he continued to criticise Islam. He has been given an emergency number at Kent Police, along with other undisclosed protection measures, and said that the threats were being taken “seriously”.

– – – – – – – –

Speaking to The Times, Dr Nazir-Ali, who is on the conservative evangelical wing of the Church and is Britain’s only Asian bishop, said: “The irony is that I had similar threats when I was a bishop in Pakistan, but I never thought I would have them here. My point in saying what I did was that Britain had lost its Christian vision, which would have provided the resources to offer hospitality to others.”

He said that this absence of a Christian vision had led to multiculturalism. “Everyone agrees that multiculturalism has had disastrous consequences, and that segregation and extremism have arisen from this.”

Ah, Dr. Nazir-Ali, if only it were true! I agree with you, and most of our readers do, but thousands of well-educated and well-meaning people sincerely believe that Multiculturalism is the best thing since sliced tofu.

The Bishop said in an article in The Sunday Telegraph that Islamic extremists had created no-go areas across Britain where it was too dangerous for nonMuslims to enter. He said that people of a different race or faith faced physical attack if they lived or worked in communities that were dominated by a strict Muslim ideology.

Dr Nazir-Ali told The Times: “I have had 1,000 letters, and 95 per cent have been supportive. There is no point in being in denial. We have to face the consequences.”

The Bishop went further last night with an additional statement posted on his website. He said: “It has been asked what I meant by ‘no-go’ areas. I would wish to make it clear that I was not referring, as some have implied, to the situation which arose in some neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland some years ago which the authorities felt constrained from entering.”

IRA, Al Qaeda — same thing!

He said that he was referring to a development reported by bodies such as the Commission on Integration and Cohesion last year and Trevor Philips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, more recently. The Bishop said: “This is the phenomenon that is referred to as ‘parallel lives’, ‘separated’ or ‘self-contained’ areas or communities.”

The French have a bureaucratic designation for their no-go areas: Zones Urbaines Sensibles, or ZUS. We need an English-based Newspeak nomenclature for the phenomenon. Perhaps “Areas of Cultural Integrity”? Or “Multicultural Identity Regions”?

Anything to obscure the unpleasant reality.

He said that Christian workers in some areas were unable to practise the full range of ministry “either because it is felt to be inadvisable or because of intimidation by extremist views and actions”. In addition, converts to the Christian faith found it “difficult or impossible” to live in certain areas. “This is too widespread a phenomenon to be ignored and deserves proper discussion and debate,” the Bishop said.

“I repeat what I said in an earlier comment, that I deeply regret any hurt and do not wish to cause offence to anyone, let alone my Muslim friends, but unless we diagnose the malaise from which we all suffer we shall not be able to discover the remedy.” Muslims should only be granted the right to broadcast a “call to prayer” from a mosque in Oxford if church bells are allowed to ring out across Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia, Christian campaigners said yesterday. Eddie Lyle, chief executive of Open Doors, the missionary agency that serves persecuted Christians, called for “reciprocity” from Muslim countries. The Rev Charlie Cleverly, Rector of St Aldate’s in Oxford, said this week that the proposal for an Islamic call to prayer from a mosque in Oxford should not be approved by the city council.

1985, Anthony Burgess’ novel of a dystopian future Britain, opens with these words:

It was the week before Christmas, Monday midday mild and muggy, and the muezzins of West London were yodeling about there being no God but Allah:

“La ilaha illa’lah. La ilaha illa’lah”

Bev Jones shoved his way through the multiracial shopping crowd past the screaming Diskbutik, the tinseled supermarket, the former pub that was now a travel agency specializing in trips to Mecca but still known as Al-Bulnbush, turned the corner of Tolpuddle Road on to Martyr Street and arrived at Hogarth Highrise.

Mr. Burgess was prescient. The muezzins of Oxford are likely to yodel a call to prayer very soon, long before any church bell rings out over the dusty streets of Riyadh.



Hat tip: Queen.

“Jihad Is Everthing the Golden Rule Is Not”

The paperback edition of Dr. Andrew Bostom’s book, The Legacy of Jihad (complete with a new preface) is due out this Spring. The following review from The Winter 2008, Middle East Quarterly is by Professor Johannes J.G. Jansen, whom Bostom calls “the Netherland’s leading contemporary scholar of Islam.”

He also credits Jansen’s work as definitive examinations of the Islamic movements that gave rise to Al Qaeda.

The Legacy of Jihad The re-edition of this remarkable book in paperback form will make it accessible to more people. However, if you can afford it, I recommend the hard-bound version. It’s a lovely book just to have.

Professor Jansen says:

Bostom’s book amply documents the systematic and destructive character of Islamic jihad, refuting the much-repeated argument that jihad is a “rich” concept that has many meanings and that jihad first of all signifies “inner struggle.” Jihad is first of all war, bloodshed, subjugation, and expansion of the faith by violence. The book implicitly devastates the fashionable but uninformed opinion that all religions are elaborations of the Golden Rule. Jihad is everything the Golden Rule is not. [my emphasis – D]

Jihad has been extremely effective and has served Islam well. In the light of this success, it can hardly be expected from Muslim leaders that they renounce jihad for more peaceful methods for propagating their faith. Renunciation of jihad would simply not be in the interest of Islam. But it would, to the contrary, be very much in the interest of the rest of the world. How should the rest of the world react to Muslim insistence on the legitimacy of jihad? Do modern, free, and democratic societies have the stomach to withstand jihad? This question becomes more and more important when jihadists see themselves increasingly not as an alternative to Christianity, Judaism, or any other faith but as an alternative to democracy. One almost gets the impression that present-day jihadists fervently desire to add Islam to the list that starts with Nazism and communism.

Bostom not only presents us with classical mainstream Islamic sources and their justifications for jihad, plus witness reports from victims that survived by accident, etc., but he also quotes contemporary Muslim clerics. For example: Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926) discusses “martyrdom operations,” a relatively new tactic of jihadists. Are such operations jihad or suicide? This is an important question because Islam forbids suicide. Luckily Qaradawi, regarded by many in the West as a moderate, knows the exact difference between suicide and a martyrdom operation. Someone who kills himself is “too weak to cope with the situation” in which he finds himself. “In contrast, the one who carries out a martyrdom operation does not think of himself. He sells himself to Allah in order to buy Paradise in exchange.”

If this is how the moderates reason, what can we expect from the radicals?

Answer? Not much…
– – – – – – – –
Dr. Bostom’s book is not easy to read, but it is worth the effort. Besides having to wade through the descriptions of the Islamic ritual of making piles of Hindu heads, you come across fascinating bits of history.

For example, the people we now know as gypsies fled from the Muslim invasions into India. They gradually made their way across the world, the first exodus coinciding with the Arab invasion of Sind (India). Surprisingly, the Roma are of Hindu stock, though many later converted to Christianity. Nonetheless they maintained their Roma identity. “Roma” means simply “man”, and they referred to themselves as Roma chave, or “sons of Rama,” the Indian God:

Even today, a visit to the new community of Romanies in Skopje in the southeastern part of Yugoslavia is like entering a village in Rajasthan…with regard to their language, a large number of the words in different dialects are of Indian origin…as their persons and customs show much of the Hindu character…

[Chapter 40: “Muslims Invade India]

Dr. Bostom has a full account of the Armenian genocide – you know, the one the Turks say didn’t happen. Turkey stonewalls better than the USSR ever did. On the other hand, they’ve had more practice at it.

What I find amazing is that he managed to write this amazing compendium while maintaining his medical practice. Truly productive people are examples to the rest of us, we of the couch potato brigade.

Perilous Times Ahead for Sweden

Steen drew my attention to this YLE article about the decline in refugee applications in Finland and other parts of Europe. It appears that making the Rom part of the EU (via the admission of Romania) cut down on the number of asylum-seekers, since they can now move wherever they want, mostly Italy.

The number of persons applying for refugee status in Finland declined dramatically last year. Immigration officials say just 1,400 foreigners applied for refugee status, down a little over 40 percent from the previous year.

Refugee applicants have also been falling in other EU countries, except for Sweden. The Finnish Immigration Service said applications have declined because the largest applicant group in previous years, the Romany from Eastern Europe, have been excluded with EU enlargement.

Of all the nationalities, only Iraqi applicants have shown a significant increase, nearly 30 percent more than the preceding year. A solid 300 Iraqis applied for refugee status in Finland, still far short of the 18,000 applying for asylum in Sweden. [emphasis added]

Notice that Sweden is the exception — Sweden is still experiencing a massive and accelerating influx of refugees, particularly from Iraq.

Our Swedish correspondent LN sent us a series of graphs of Swedish labor statistics and a partial translation of an article from the Swedish blog Falkblick (“the Falcon’s Gaze”) about the new labor figures. LN says that the appearance of these statistics in Falkblick was probably the first time they were published in a Swedish blog.

The Falkblick post is entitled “the fiasco in pictures”:

Contemplate the following pictures, retrieved from page 63 in the report’s collection of tables; they represent the labor market participation for immigrant groups born in different countries. The deep green color at the bottom of each respective figure shows the part of the population that supports themselves with their own work, light green through part-time or temporary work, and the various colors above with different compensation programs, different employment efforts, and direct benefit dependency, in the active ages 20-64 years.

With LN’s help, I have replaced the significant titles and descriptions in the original graphs with their English translations. Since the graphic is so long, I put it below the jump. Scroll down to see some interesting results.
– – – – – – – –

Sweden labor graph

Figure 2.10: Labor market status according to the social model, 1992-2002 by country of origin and birth, within the population aged 20 to 64 years.

Notice that native Swedes persons of Swedish background perform the most work and collect the least in benefits. Each successive group works less and freeloads more, with the “Middle Eastern and North African” group being the most parasitical.

Another interesting thing to be found in these graphs is the change over time of the behavior of southern Europeans in Sweden. They started out as freeloaders, and later became more like “other Western countries”, with most of them working for a living.

The southern Europeans presumably have assimilated to Swedish customs. Assimilation is always the key, and it is precisely assimilation that the Swedish government no longer requires from its newly arrived immigrants.

Muslim Stigmata

Family Security Matters has the most comprehensive post I’ve seen on the (probably) al-Qaeda-sponsored plan to kidnap a British Muslim soldier, torture him, and eventually behead him – all for the entertainment of their fellow-fundamentalists. First they give the background story at Western resistance from last year:

In January 2007, police carried out raids in Birmingham. At the time, there was hostility and resentment from Muslim “representatives” to the raid. Dr. Mohammad Naseem, chairman of the Birmingham Central Mosque, claimed Britain was becoming a police state, and compared Muslims in Britain to Jews living under Hitler. Mahmoud Shadrajeh, head of the improbably named “Islamic Human Rights Commission” – himself a supporter of Hizbollah’s terrorism – claimed the Birmingham raids gave to the public a “bad image” of Muslims.

Adam Mussa of the Muslim Brotherhood-founded Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) claimed: “Some of the people arrested are just individuals with loud voices, who are vocal about various neighborhood issues, but that doesn’t make them terrorists. It’s not fair. This seems to be happening again and again. This is a form of victimization and your average ‘Mo Public’ is feeling very cynical. When you come in and do a job you should make sure you clean up after yourself, and that’s what the police need to do here.”

The raids happened as there had been intelligence that a cell of British Islamists had planned to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier. A particular Muslim soldier had already been targeted, and was under protection. It was revealed shortly after the arrests that he was a corporal in military intelligence, chosen from a shortlist of 25 individuals.

Adam Mussa justified his hostility to the Birmingham raids by ridiculing the notion of such a plot. He said: “So for a Muslim to kill another Muslim is much worse, it’s like killing a member of your own family, because they share the same beliefs as you.”

Salma Yaqoob of George Galloway’s “Respect” party who is a Birmingham City Councillor, representing Sparkbrook, said: “The reality is that people are asking why are we being picked on, why are we being persecuted, because that’s what it feels like when all they want to do is get on with their day-to-day lives.”

As a result of the cumulative hostility from the Muslim community and its so-called “representatives,” police announced that 50,000 leaflets would be distributed, to reassure members of the Muslim community that they were not being “picked on.”

Fat lot of good that did…the Muslim community is not reassured by leaflets, and the grievance mentality of being “picked on” appears to be the default emotional condition of the majority of British Muslims.

At any rate, plans went forward:

A total of 25 soldiers had been on the terrorists’ “hit list”. The British Muslim soldiers on this hit list lived at addresses from the West Country to Glasgow. There are said to be hopes that no “mole” within the Ministry of Defense provided the alleged terror cell with inside information on the soldiers on the hit list.

[…]

24-year old Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi last summer became the first British Muslim soldier to be killed in Afghanistan, and his death had been celebrated by Islamists of the now-banned group Al Ghurabaa. Al Ghurabaa had been a spin-off from Omar Bakri Mohammed’s Islamist Al-Muhajiroun group. Disturbingly, considering the raids of Wednesday happened at locations in Birmingham, at Sparkbrook Mosque in Birmingham, Channel 4’s Dispatches filmed undercover. Here, an imam said last summer: “There was an individual who was killed in Afghanistan recently. A Muslim name, he came from a Pakistani family. Do you know what they had written in a tabloid newspaper? ‘Hero of Islam’. ‘Hero of Islam’ who went into Muslim Afghanistan to kill Muslims. Why? Because their crime is implementing Islam. The ‘Hero of Islam’ is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.”

Family Security Matters has been following the trial:

Parviz KhanThose shrill cries claiming persecution can now be exposed as false. A trial is currently taking place in Leicester Crown Court. And it is only now revealed that 37-year-old Parviz Khan, one of the nine people arrested in late January and early February 2007, has pleaded guilty to plotting to kidnap and decapitate a British Muslim soldier.

Khan, an “unemployed charity worker,” admitted his guilt earlier this month, but the news was suppressed until a trial involving two other individuals, Amjad Mahmood, 33, and Zahoor Iqbal, 31, began. These two denied involvement in the plot.

– – – – – – – –
What I hadn’t been able to find is any commentary on Mr. Khan’s bruised forehead. Had the police been having a go at him with billy clubs, perhaps? Why no mention of it by the MSM? Strange that it would go unremarked…

Well, sorry, this is nothing as pedestrian as torture. What creates these Muslim stigmata is the effect of devout head-pounding fervor. Fundamentalist Muslims do not touch their head to the ground in prayer. Instead, they bounce their cranium forcefully onto the stone floors on which they kneel. Performing this act of adoration five times a day will get you that prune-shaped hematoma our head-banger suspect now sports. By their bruises you shall know them.

And these people have the nerve to complain about Gitmo…

In Bondage in Kuwait

This email is from our Austrian correspondent ESW, and concerns her personal experiences with “guest workers” in Kuwait.



Dear Baron,

Workers in DubaiI need to add my two cents’ worth to your post on workers’ exploitation in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. As you know, I lived in Kuwait in 1990 and again from 1997 to 2000. You cannot imagine the things I saw and heard.

In 1990 I got stuck in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. This is not the place for the entire story of my journey back to Austria. But let me tell you one of the most harrowing images I have stored in my memory: As our convoy — made up of Austrian citizens — approached the border between Iraq and Turkey near a town called Zakho, we found that the border had been closed for the night. We managed to bribe the guards into opening the border control area. The mountainous area was dimly lit at 3 a.m., but I was able to see the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of not so affluent Asian migrant workers lying asleep on the rugged and rocky ground, waiting for the gates to Turkey — and to freedom — to open in the morning.

I had seen these same workers driving in open trucks, children being baked in the hot desert sun, squashed between the family’s belongings in the open area in the back of the truck. We were lucky in that we were welcomed upon our return to Austria. The Asians were not welcomed at all because they brought with them problems: the countries they had left could not provide jobs for them; their families were dependent on the workers’ incomes and were now destitute.

When I returned to Kuwait in 1997, nothing had changed for the hundreds of thousands of maids and drivers. They were still in bondage. It starts with their sponsors — the Kuwaiti employer —confiscating their passports, making it impossible for the workers to run away, that is, to flee the country. Without their passports and — even more important — without the so-called iqama, the stamp in the passport with the work permit, they are stuck. Not even the embassies can help these poor souls.

Considering what we all know about Arab supremacy, what do you think the Minister of Labor is going to do to help when the Indian ambassador is at his doorstep? Nothing. You guessed right. So all these representatives can do is provide safe houses for these maids to hide in until things are sorted out with their sponsors.
– – – – – – – –
When summer approached and with it the unbearable heat, the number of visa requests rose steadily. The larger the family, the more maids and drivers were required to travel with these families. It sickened me having to stamp visas for the maids, knowing perfectly well that they would not have a wonderful and relaxing time in Austria, that they would have to work just as hard as in Kuwait, running after misbehaving and abusive children, often having to double as sex slaves. We at the embassy also knew perfectly well that the maids went along to work, which is actually illegal according to the visa regulations. But what could, what should we have done? It was an impossible situation.

It is well-known that maids were often forced to sleep in the kitchen, under the table, on a foam mattress. There is no law that regulates working hours, vacation time, or sickness compensation. Migrant workers, according to the law, fall into a special category. There are no lawyers they can contact because there is nothing these lawyers can do. If the workers do get vacation time, and that’s a big if, they usually travel home to the Philippines or India or Sri Lanka, or wherever they are from.

And they always return, which should tell us a thing or two about their lives back home. How bad must life be in these countries, that an abused maid leaves her family to return to Kuwait? To 40 Kuwaiti Dinars in salary, about $120.

Maids and drivers, which means boys and girls, are strictly segregated. Imagine the boredom. Imagine what happens if they do get together. Imagine the consequences. An illegitimate pregnancy. And that’s when the s**t hits the fan.

I usually enjoy reading the newspaper. Yet one of the saddest aspects of reading Kuwaiti newspapers was reading about abused maids. The English-language newspapers were filled with news about maids who had committed suicide by jumping out of windows.

Imagine how bad things must be to commit suicide, without saying good-bye to your family. Imagine the loneliness. Just imagine.

I couldn’t back then. I can’t now.

ESW

Letter from Spain: The Popular Party and Some Other Popular Spanish Parties

This is the third in a series of letters from AMDG at La Yijad en Eurabia.



As indicated in my previous letter, while it is not evident that any conservative strategy will be able to count on the Popular Party (Partido Popular, PP) as the major party of the right, most of PP’s leaders are actually “libcons”. Consequently, the tactic proposed to confront that situation is to promote the advance of anti-immigration, populist parties that would keep in check the liberal leaning of the PP (I use liberal in the American sense, meaning progressive). The rise of those parties is expected to force the PP to act as a conservative party, even though keeping a certain amount of liberal rhetoric is acceptable, or even necessary.

I dedicate this post to investigating the parties better suited to implement that strategy, and I propose that they should focus on the local political level at this stage.

There are some alternatives to the right of the PP, all of them with a very reduced significance. The aim of the counter-jihad should be to help them to get at least one seat in Parliament, even if this is still daydreaming in Spain.

Which are those parties? I would divide them into moderates and radicals. The radicals follow in most cases a strategy that can only discourage sensible voters. The left must actually be very happy with them; does it actually operate them by proxy? If there is any hope, it would of course lie with the moderates. I have been able to spot only two of those Spanish moderate parties that oppose Islamisation: Alternativa Española and Iniciativa Habitable.

The first (AES) is a conservative Catholic party with some anti-libertarian whims (not really worth concern). They define themselves as “Catholics in politics” more than Catholic politicians, and they started in 2003 as a reaction to those progressive measures of the PP. They resented especially that the PP had then a majority in the parliament, yet the PP implemented many liberal policies (Spanish), and this is precisely the kind of party I am looking for.

AESI have only a few buts. Their insistence in some topics — i.e. abortion — is somehow tiring, even if extremely relevant both from an ethical point of view and from a plain political view in the current demographic situation of Spain. Their web site has a cumbersome navigation scheme and discouragingly lacks interactive possibilities. As far as immigration is concerned, they reject racism and xenophobia but also the current uncontrolled invasion. They propose to favour controlled immigration, prioritising those with a background that is “Hispanic and culturally close to ours”. I think this is fair enough if it is strictly implemented and not just a rhetorical statement.

Their results in the last national elections (2004) were disappointing, specially taking into account that they invested a reasonable amount of resources. Nevertheless, it should be taken into account that they had started only the year before, in 2003. They will have my vote next 9th March.

The second party I am focusing on is Iniciativa Habitable (Leefbar Initiative, so to speak). It is a more recent party; a real grassroots one. They have no past and a very discreet present; their future is a big question mark. You can see here the statistics of their web page, with an average of 50,000 pages visited weekly. They have translated some articles from the Brussels Journal. Look at this: IH proposes restricting the concession of Spanish nationality. Concessions as from 1985 should be revised (Spanish). As far as I know, no other Spanish party has a similar proposal. Only for that, they have my support (and my vote in local elections).

Habitable


The fact that they have no past can be an asset in Spain, to avoid being associated with the extreme right, the Franco regime, and so on. But their present is very discreet. They are actually a group of friends who decided it was the time to do something more than regretting the situation. I met the co-ordinator, Manuel Leal, and Alberto Grasa last Christmas. I saw honest, reasonable citizens concerned about the future of their children; I decided immediately to help them.
– – – – – – – –
Habitable


The party has not any relevant infrastructure nor financial means to compete in national elections; they will not even try it. Still, they were successful in the last local elections (2007), even if they only participated in a few villages and small cities. Their name has started to be heard here and there. I am convinced that, in Spain, the local elections are the entry key for the anti-Islamisation and anti-immigration parties. At that level, they are immune to the accusations of “racism”, “intolerance”, “fascism”, etc. because the neighbours know the candidates personally in many cases.

There is a third interesting party, Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC). As you can guess by the name, their scope of action is just in Catalonia. They got a modest success there in the local elections in 2003 (4 concejales, representatives in a city council) that they multiplied to 17 concejales in the last ones (2007). It is just 17 concejales out of a total of 8,932 in Catalonia, but their influence can be measured by the hysteria generated among the mainstream parties. It was funny to see them all against PxC, a newcomer.

Their leader, Anglada, has a right wing neofranquist background. The Spanish entry in Wikipedia indicates that he was a candidate of Frente Nacional in the 1989 European parliament elections. This is sometimes agitated against him by the left, and even by the “moderate” right, but, as the results of the local elections show; this trick is losing the effectiveness it used to have.

This is the situation, and these are the conclusions: First, there is no anti-immigration or anti-Islamisation party with a seat in Spanish Parliament, nor is it foreseen in the near future. The strategy I would propose is to influence the policies of the Popular Party. The best tactic for this strategy is to promote the advance of anti-immigration parties at local level. I have found two that meet my requirements.

I am of course open to your comments and questions. My next post will be a status report on Spanish immigration.

— AMDG

Changing the Subject

To our regular commenters: I have a request.

In many of our recent posts — for reasons that aren’t clear to me — no matter what topic is covered by the original posts, the comment threads are showing a disturbing tendency to divert to the topic of race.

I’m not arguing against any particular point of view, nor questioning the right of anyone to hold that point of view.

I’m simply concerned about the fact that posts having nothing to do with race are turned into heated arguments about race.

This is doing damage to our blog.

We have become anathema over the last few months as “enablers of European white supremacy”. Every time you turn a comment thread in to a race argument, it gives fuel to those who want to discount us and marginalize us. It makes it less likely that more mainstream blogs and other sites will link to us. It makes it that much harder to spread the Counterjihad message.

To Dymphna and me, these issues have nothing to do with race. They have to do with culture and ethnicity, in the broadest sense of those terms.
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Even though I disagree with some of you, I’m not denying you the right to posit a genetic component to cultural behaviors. I’m just asking you not to divert comment threads to this topic unless the post is already discussing this topic.

I ask you to indulge me, because what you are doing has a negative impact on the mission of Gates of Vienna, which is to stand against the jihad and roll back the Islamization of the West as effectively as possible.

If you agree with that mission, then I would like you to help us by not diverting the comment threads and thereby negating our purpose.

If you don’t agree with our mission, then this is probably not an appropriate place to be airing your opinions in the first place. There are other sites which specialize in racial topics, places where you would be readily welcomed into the discussion.

Because free speech is important to me, and because I believe that allowing open discussion is essential, I will continue with a policy of not deleting comments that stay within our guidelines (civil, temperate, on-topic, and showing decorum).

However, if commenters continue to divert threads in directions that I consider harmful to our mission, I will close the affected threads to further comments. It’s the only thing I can do, short of shutting down the entire blog.

I’d rather not do that.

Once again, I ask for your cooperation: please stop diverting threads into arguments about race.

Thank you.

More on Foreign Workers in Saudi Arabia

An email from a reader:

Concerning your post about the exploitation of foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, let me add a story told to me by a Filipina maid currently working in Canada.

She had worked as a nanny in Saudi Arabia. During Ramadan, foreign non-Muslim women were routinely raped by their Muslim masters, who were forbidden to have sex with their Muslim wives.

This particular maid avoided the situation by faking a conversion to Islam. As her passport was held by her employer, a typical situation, she was not free to leave the country. Ever resourceful, she fabricated a story of her mother dying and was allowed to, temporarily, leave.

Obviously, she never returned. She is now a pretty observant Catholic.

[Nothing follows]

Imagine There’s No Hitler

They have worked their will on John Barleycorn
But he lived to tell the tale,
For they pour him out of an old brown jug
And they call him home brewed ale.

— from “The Ballad of John Barleycorn”, an English folk song

No Hitler!Almost sixty-three years ago the armed forces of the Allies finished destroying all the significant military assets of the Nazi regime. The remnant of the German military under Admiral Dönitz surrendered, and the Allies occupied Germany. When Soviet troops entered Berlin and arrived at Hitler’s bunker under the Reichskanzlei, they discovered that der Führer had killed himself, after which his faithful servants had doused his corpse with gasoline and burned it in the garden above the bunker. Hitler was dead. The Nazis were finished.

But, like John Barleycorn, Adolf Hitler lived to tell the tale.

In sixty-three years scarcely a political argument has occurred without one side likening the other to the Nazis. Thanks to the miracle of internet searches, one can discover 708,000 online comparisons of George W. Bush with Adolf Hitler. Gates of Vienna is a “neo-Nazi hate site”. The government of Israel consists of “Zionist Nazis”. Denying food stamps to illegal aliens in the United States constitutes a “bureaucratic holocaust”.

Virtually no political discussion can proceed without a reductio ad hitlerum. Godwin’s law is now operative not just in online discussions, but everywhere — in cocktail party conversations, school curricula, debates between politicians, and literary manifestos.

When I was in college, one of my friends used an amusing tactic during arguments: when his opponent said something which he found difficult to answer, he would say, “That’s what Hitler said!” He was joking, and everyone present knew he was joking. The room would break up in laughter, and the conversation would move on to other topics.

But it’s not a joke anymore.

Nazis, Nazis, Nazis! Nazis are everywhere, behind every tree, under every bed, waiting in the wings, ready to resume their quest for worldwide domination.
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Any time the tenets of political correctness are questioned: Nazi!

Whenever a political opponent disagrees: Hitler!

It’s time to stop letting Hitler live rent-free in our heads.

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I bring all this up because of a discussion that occurred in a comment thread about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

Snouck, Fellow Peacekeeper, and others assert the pointlessness of likening the Palestinians to the Nazis. The currency of Nazism has been so devalued that it no longer serves any useful purpose to compare current political groups or persons to the Nazis or Hitler.

That horse has been beaten to death. It’s a spent scene, man.

Historically speaking, the connection between the Arabs we now know as “Palestinians” and Adolf Hitler passed through the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni. But beyond that, the affiliation was very slight.

Modern Palestinians are like the Nazis in only two ways: they support a totalitarian political movement, and they want to exterminate the Jews.

That’s it. They don’t promote an ideology of racial supremacy. They have no fantasies of Götterdämmerung. They do not advocate eugenics, or sterilize the unfit.

Oh, yes, they fight pitched battles in the streets with rival factions, and tend to solve political arguments with automatic weapons. But they hold that in common with virtually every illiberal political group on the planet.

Looking at the general case, any group that pushes totalitarian methods could be compared with the Nazis: Kim Jong-il, the Chinese Communists, Hugo Chavez, the Social Democrats in Sweden, Robert Mugabe… All of these thugs are like Hitler.

Similarly, those who hate Jews are like Nazis. Those who want to keep the unfit from breeding are like Hitler. Political groups that advocate state control of capitalism are like Nazis. Anyone who wishes to silence dissent is like Hitler.

Everyone is like the Nazis and no one is like the Nazis.

Hitler has outlived his usefulness. It’s time to put him back in his bunker and bulldoze the rubble over him.

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I invite other bloggers and commenters to take the Pledge:

I, [insert name here], do solemnly swear that I will no longer invoke the name of Hitler, nor will I compare any current person or group to the Nazis.

The Pledge will be tough to carry out. We’re all so used to Hitler — how can we live without him? Who else can we use as a comparison when we encounter someone really, really bad?

Well, there are numerous candidates. Yasser Arafat. Ivan the Terrible. Henry VIII. Karl Marx. Michael Moore. Tamerlane. Woodrow Wilson.

Villains abound.

Hitler and the Nazis will continue to be acceptable in historical discussions, and any comparisons with their contemporaries — with, for example, Tojo, Mussolini, FDR, or Stalin — are perfectly appropriate.

But wouldn’t it be nice if no one ever compared his current ideological opponents to Hitler?

You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…