The British blogger Aeneas received an email yesterday from a reader in the Netherlands with this appeal:

I saw you support the Geert Wilders petition, so I hope you don’t mind me contacting you.

There is something very disturbing going on right now in Holland concerning Geert Wilders and Fitna. A journalist has suggested lifting Geert Wilders’ security so Muslims can kill him. I am asking as many people to please spread the word. My government is such a coward bunch who are very capable of doing just such a thing.

These awful statements of non-Muslims are very dangerous and have to be exposed, I am absolutely outraged and disgusted.

I hope you will help me and expose this bastard journalist, his name is Henk Hofland.

Aeneas passed the message on to me because he knew I had several Dutch contacts. It turns out that the incident was a real one, but — like most “forward this to everyone you know” stories — was not quite as egregious as the emailer indicated.

Michiel Mans was the first to reply to my email, and he had this to say:

H.J.A Hofland, Henk, (1927), is an ex-communist, journalist, active columnist who writes, among others, for the NRC, a very politically correct newspaper.

He made his statement on a TV talk show on 29 February (well before the release of Fitna). The statement had a somewhat sarcastic undertone. It was made in a “what shall we do with Geert Wilders” discussion (without Wilders or his adherents) in a Pauw & Witteman infotainment episode.

He did indeed say “drop Wilders’ protection.” In his vision the movie would jeopardize many people’s lives, and by canceling Wilders’ own security he would feel what it is to be threatened. He did not say “so Muslims can kill him”. I saw this episode and just checked the tape again.

Like all Dutch Public TV news, background and infotainment , P&W is full of politically correct guests and opinions. The same episode had a priest who thought a shrink ought to take a look at Wilders, and a politician who talked a lot of PC bollocks.

Only once in a while will one of the guests have a non-PC opinions. In these cases at least two well-spoken PC people sit at the other side. The two presenters themselves are not, how shall I put it, the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman (Johnny Carson?).

Here is a re-broadcast of the program (in Dutch).

Below the jump is an embedded Dutch-language video of the incident.
– – – – – – – – –

Our expatriate Dutch correspondent H. Numan had this to add:

Several attempts to get rid of Wilders’ security have been made, and none remotely successful. Rutger van Santen, a purebred left-wing journalist, working for Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (a government station, and extremely left-wing at that), got punished for less.

When I wrote back I told him, “Geert really seems to be at the center of the hurricane right now. I don’t reckon much for his life expectancy, even with the bodyguards.”

But H. Numan does not entirely agree:

I’m not to sure about that. It took a lot of effort to prevent a spontaneous Reichs Kristallnacht when Van Gogh was murdered. Most mosques got 24/7 police protection, and they really needed it. Many attempts were made to torch Muslim schools and mosques, but this was — of course — not mainstream news.

If some jihadist fundy pops Wilders, rest assured the response would be fierce (to say the least). I expect this might be the trigger incident for a civil war or the beginning of serious ethnic cleansing. It might very well lead to a massive uprising, not from Muslims, but from the Dutch.

This must be known in Muslim circles as well, so I expect serious organizations (political Muslims in the Netherlands, or Al Qaeda) would not be so stupid as to go that far. The result would be counterproductive.

Of course, some lone loony like Mohammed Bouyeri might do it. Or something like the Hofstad group. One of their plans was to drive a minivan to the Binnenhof, loaded with explosives and blow up the place, after gunning down Wilders.

Be aware that the government is in very serious problems right now. their rating popularity is far less than Bush. It is actually negative… GeenStijl published yesterday a sarcastic piece to compliment PM Balkenende, as he has been proposed as first Euro president.

Why? If we keep telling the truth about this not-so-popular PM, they might select somebody else… anything to get rid of him! 😀

Constant scandals keep popping up. I reported about Eveline Herfkens, who got a huge housing subsidy. The latest here is she refuses to pay back a single cent. Two PvdA ministers need spin doctors to boost their image. These two (Vogelaar and Cramer) are considered the worst in the cabinet, and they badly need it. The scandal here is that the spin doctor is (what else) a PvdA marketing guru, the fee gigantic (€30,000/month) and charged to the public purse.

The finance minister (Wouter Bos) sued a magazine (Weekend) for publishing photos of his family without permission, and charged it to the ministry.

Minister Guusje ter Horst survived a scandal for drunk driving and swept it under the carpet when she was mayor of Nijmegen, but now Nijmegen will pay €65,000 in taxes for using her official limo privately. Which doesn’t sit well with the public. If you are me, try it, we’ll have to pay everything.

And more, and more, and much, much more…

In other words: the government is in really serious trouble. The last they want or need is Wilders being popped.

Wilders (PVV) + Verdonk (ToN), the SGP (Calvinist fundies, just one or 2 seats) + VVD are polled at 51 seats and rising. The VVD would be the third partner, as the PVV is polled at +15, ToN on +20 and the VVD at fifteen seats or less.

See what I mean?

Pasha Kara Mustafa, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, never managed to bring Muhammad to Vienna in 1683. But the Austrian Social Democrats have succeeded where Kara Mustafa failed, and have named a Vienna city square “Muhammad Asad Square”.

Our Austrian correspondent ESW has the story.

Austria’s contribution to the EU’s Year of Intercultural Dialogue
by ESW

Vienna — The square in front of the gate to the headquarters of the United Nations in Vienna is named after a Muslim: “I am proud of the fact that a Viennese street sign recalls (the prophet) Muhammad,” said Omar Al-Rawi, SP-councilor and in charge of questions of integration of the Austrian Islamic faith community.

The designation of the previously nameless place as “Muhammad Asad Square” goes back on his initiative, said Al-Rawi. The city of Vienna honored this by contributing to the EU’s intercultural dialogue. I wonder when the Buddha and the Japanese emperor will be honored in Vienna.

“By naming this square Muhammad Asad Square, Vienna is honoring a man who spent an important part of his life in this city,” said Al-Rawi.

Leopold Weiss was born a Jew in 1900 in the city of Lviv in Galicia, and moved to Vienna, where he went to school and studied philosophy.

Weiss later moved to the British Mandate of Palestine, staying in Jerusalem at the house of an uncle, the psychoanalyst Dorian Weiss. He picked up work as a stringer for the Frankfurter Zeitung, selling articles on a freelance basis. His pieces were noteworthy for their understanding of Arab fears and grievances against the Zionist project. Eventually contracted as a full-time foreign correspondent for the paper, his assignments led him to an ever deepening engagement with Islam, which after much thought resulted in his religious conversion in 1926.

He spoke of Islam thus:
– – – – – – – – –

“Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure.”

He traveled through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and ended up in India where he met and worked alongside Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher, who had proposed the idea of an independent Muslim state in India, which later became Pakistan.

Asad’s parents were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

After Independence and the Partition of 1947, Asad was appointed Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations. Towards the end of his life, he moved to Spain and lived there with his second wife, Paola Hameeda Asad, until his death.

Talal Asad, an ethnologist residing in the United States, visited Vienna for the first time in commemoration of his father. He says, “Integration means discussion of social conflicts.” He added that integration could only work eye to eye. He praised the Social Democrats for their contribution to (Muslim) integration.

Note: The three photos shown above are of Omar Al-Rawi in front of the UN building with the sign “Muhammad-Asad Square”, Muhammad Asad, and Talal Asad, respectively.

I’ve reported reported several times about the two Austrian tourists, Wolfgang Ebner and Andrea Kloiber, who were kidnapped in Tunisia back in February by Al Qaeda and are now being held in Mali.

Several “deadlines” for demands to be met have come and gone — the most recent, as far as I can discover, was April 6th — and yet Mr. Ebner and Ms. Kloiber are still alive.

However, the same thing can’t be said of all the people mediating their release. According to the latest news from Reuters, three of the intermediaries negotiating for the release of the hostages have been killed by Tuareg tribesmen:

Austria said on Thursday it was continuing to work to free two Austrians held hostage by al Qaeda in the Sahara region, despite reports that an intermediary negotiating their release had been shot dead.

The Algerian daily El Khabar on Wednesday quoted an unnamed security source as saying that a Malian intermediary had been killed about a week ago near the Algerian-Malian border.

A spokesman for the Austrian Foreign Ministry said he could not confirm the report, but that efforts to save Andrea Kloiber, 43, and Wolfgang Ebner, 51, were continuing.

“There has not been any interruption to our efforts to save the hostages as the report suggests,” Austrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal said, adding that no new deadline had been set by the abductors.

– – – – – – – – –

On Thursday, El Khabar quoted a former Malian rebel leader, Hassan Fagaga, as saying three mediators had been killed. He said they were Touareg tribesmen.

El Khabar and another Algerian newspaper, Ennahar, said negotiations for the release of the Austrians with a group whose leader they named as Abdelhamid abu Zeid had been postponed because of the killings.

The couple disappeared in February while on holiday in Tunisia. Al Qaeda’s North African wing said it had kidnapped them, and demanded the release of 10 Islamic militants held in Tunisia and Algeria. Security sources in Algeria said it also wanted a cash ransom.

An al Qaeda statement posted on the Internet last Monday said the group was now only seeking the release of a Muslim couple held in Austria, and that Austria was responsible for the fate of its citizens after a deadline expired. But it was not clear if this statement came from the captors.

One suspects that there is more going on here than meets the eye.

Al Qaeda has lowered its demands. At one time they had demanded millions of dollars and the release of terrorist prisoners in Tunisia and Algeria. Now the only requirement is that two Muslims in an Austrian prison be released — a demand which Austria, at least in theory, could actually meet.

And now three of the mediators are dead. Is this a battle between rival factions who don’t want to subdivide their slices of the pie? An operation by one of the intelligence services? Or something else?

This story just gets murkier and murkier.

Hat tip: insubria.

Keep the Muhammad al-Dura hoax in mind when you watch this BBC news video about yesterday’s incident in the Gaza strip in which a Palestinian video cameraman was killed, allegedly by “indiscriminate” Israeli shelling.

I’m no video expert, and the BBC segment is brief, tiny, and very jiggly, so I’ll leave it to analysts more experienced with video forensics to dig out the technical details from this news clip.

Richard Landes at Augean Stables has experience with Pallywood and its staged news. Here are his questions about the BBC video sequence:

My puzzlement is:

• whether the injuries displayed on the young men are compatible with a tank shell
• whether a tank shell could have hit both the youngsters and a car 100 meters away
• why the car is not on fire in one image and is very prominently in flames in the other

These are good points. You see a kid lying on the ground next to his bike, with a splodge of blood on his side and his shoes some distance away, like Calvin after a surprise attack from Hobbes. Is that how a victim of overhead shelling would appear? And what about the lack of any other evident damage nearby from the shell?

This whole thing smells fishy to me, but then I’m paranoid after years of fauxtography and Pallywood “news” footage.

I noticed another discrepancy in this video, and I welcome feedback from technically-minded people who know more about videography than I do.
– – – – – – – – –
For more than twenty years I was a landscape painter, and spent a lot of time outdoors in the variable light and weather plying my trade. One of the trickier aspects of the job was to get the “time of the painting” exactly right, to fix the moment of the day represented by the light in the painted image so that it was consistent throughout the depicted landscape. Learning to do this made me acutely sensitive to the length and direction of shadows.

The subliminal skills honed by all those years of painting kept niggling me as I watched this video over and over again, until I eventually became conscious of what was bothering me.

The first minute or so of the video consists of a brief segment allegedly shot by the dead cameraman, followed by three segments shot subsequently along the road where the bike-riding kids and the burning truck appear. The first and third of these segments are part of the same general video sequence, but the second one — about fifteen seconds, from 00:42 to 00:57 — is from different footage. It shows the mourning spectators milling about next to the roadside fence.

It’s difficult to be certain, because the camera angle is from the opposite direction, and the sequence is very brief and jiggly. However, the shadows look distinctly longer in this shot, and the cast of light is more orange, as if it were a half an hour or so closer to sunset. In the other sequences, the shadows of the brush on the other side of the road do not cross the road entirely, but in the middle segment they appear to intersect the opposite bank a short distance beyond the spectators.

I’ll go out on a limb here and offer a very amateur opinion: the middle segment was shot a half an hour to forty-five minutes later than the “dead” children and the burning truck.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Even if none of this video was staged, even if all the events actually occurred as described, this report has all the earmarks of a classic Pallywood production. The events are drawn entirely from Palestinian accounts, presented from the Palestinian point of view, and transmit uncritically all the conclusions and value judgments of the Palestinian stringers who supply the material.

In contrast, anything that would reflect badly on the Palestinians is invariably preceded by the phrase “Israel says”. Palestinian accounts are reported as fact, while Israeli versions are alleged, and obviously meant to be questioned. This is typical of MSM reporting on Gaza and the West Bank, particularly by the BBC.

Staged or not, this report is a disgrace.

Hat tips: TB and Augean Stables.

I’ve written several times previously about Ehsan Jami, the apostate from Islam who has risked has life by encouraging other Dutch Muslims to become ex-Muslims.

According to today’s Expatica, in the face of renewed intimidation, Mr. Jami has decided to close down his organization of ex-Muslims:

Dutch politician Ehsan Jami is closing down his Central Committee for Ex-Muslims. He claims people are scared to join the organisation because of threats from Muslims.

Jami sits on the municipal council in Voorburg, formerly for the Labour Party, now as an independent. He presented plans for a committee for former Muslims last year. He was subsequently assaulted in the street and was provided with police protection.

Jami was planning to make a cartoon animation on the Prophet Muhammad, which was to feature explicit sexual scenes, but recently agreed to give up the idea in response to an appeal from Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin.

What the article fails to note is that Mr. Jami “agreed to give up the idea” under pressure from the government. According to rumor, the state turned the screws on him by threatening to withdraw his protection detail if he went ahead with his movie plans.
– – – – – – – – –
Obviously the Dutch government is unwilling to experience a repeat of the Fitna crisis, and is prepared to go to any lengths to avoid one.

So what does the future hold for Ehsan Jami?

Jami is currently holding discussions with a political party on the possibility of his standing for a seat in parliament in the next election. However, he is not prepared to reveal which political party is involved.

Anyone want to bet it’s not the Labour Party?

Hat tip: Fjordman.

In the comments on last night’s post about the the dire situation of bloggers in Sweden, Skalman gave a concise and lucid description of the demographic mess that the Swedes find themselves in.

It’s worth reproducing here in its entirety. I’ve edited it slightly for spelling, punctuation, and clarity.

Not all of us are interested in committing demographic suicide. However: you miss a few vital points here that can explain the low birthrates of the native Swedes and other Europeans.

One: High taxes. The tax pressure in Sweden and in the rest of Europe makes a lot of people crumble. As an example: Every dollar I make costs my employer (at least) two dollars because he has to pay a fee (tax) to the state that is just about equal to what I earn. On top of that he has to pay VAT (25%), energy tax (even VAT on the energy tax [I know, it’s madness]), environmental tax and so on when he buys raw material and electricity to run the machines.

On top of this he also has to pay a state tax of 30% of the yearly profit.

When I get my salary I, for a starter, will have to pay 30% in tax. I will have to pay VAT (25%) whenever I buy something and when I buy gasoline ($2/liter) only about 25% is an actual cost for the fuel and the remaining 75% of the price is made up of different taxes such as energy tax, environmental tax and on top of that VAT.

The total tax pressure here are estimated to a total of about 70% of the monthly wages.

The taxpayers carry such a heavy burden that every child is a question of economy. This is in large part due to the fact that we, as taxpayers, have to support at least 60,000 new “Swedes” every year and this has been going on for the last thirty or so years, and it is now taking a tremendous toll on ordinary people’s income.

At the same time we see a decrease in the resources of the National Health Service, public schools, the judicial system, military, and so on.

The reason for not making babies in Europe is, to make it short, that we have to support a large number of cuckoo-babies that our leaders and moral elite have forced upon us without really asking for our permission and at the same time they (and a bunch of others) have managed to build a system of oppression that effectively deals with anyone daring to question this madness.

Finally, hoping that all this text has made some impression other than confused, I will give you an example:
– – – – – – – – –
My wife and I, together earning more than average here, are in the position that we have to ask ourselves if we can afford to have a third child, because when my wife (pediatrician) is home for maternity leave we lose about $2000 every month. Not one single family with income such as ours is able to sustain their normal life with such a loss.

As an opposite example: Any family on social welfare can have as many babies as they like and do not have to ask themselves whether they can afford it or not. The welfare system takes care of it all, and if they need a bigger apartment, that is paid for by the social security system even if this happens to be a family with (already) fifteen children.

They can have as many babies as they want and the expenses are paid for by me and other taxpayers who at the same time can’t afford to have babies of our own since we have to pay for imported cuckoos.

There you have a strong reason for the demographic suicide that you write about. To me, living in the midst of this upcoming hell, it looks more like demographic genocide than anything else.

I hadn’t planned to write about Lionheart anymore on this blog, for a number of reasons.

The first one was that his decision to return to his homeland filled me with foreboding; I couldn’t just say “good luck, old boy” and wish him well. Listening to the audio tapes of his conversations with the police, and their refusal to tell him anything of substance, was distressing. It was obvious they didn’t care what happened to him.

The second and even more important factor was what he could face in prison, should the “justice” system in England find him guilty of a sin against the Race Crimes the English Parliament had put in place back in 1988. They certainly prepared ahead of time, didn’t they?

Third, I thought he ought to make a stand that would help his fellow countrymen. If an Englishman has to seek asylum in the US because of the draconian, insane laws of his country it might be enough to begin to make some changes in his homeland.

Fourth, Paul is a private person. Getting the details on his story took a long time…and I may still not have them right. I only give you the story as I understand it. Consider this post my part of the elephant.
– – – – – – – – –

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

As most of you know, Lionheart’s problems began when he saw the squalid deterioration in his neighborhood, now another no-go area in England. It was the open heroin trade, the prostitution of young girls, and watching his friends go down the hole of narcotics addiction that moved him to complain to the police. I believe he even helped the police before they turned on him. What a sense of betrayal!

At least one of the Pakistani gang members read his blog posts and made a complaint to the police. They also trashed his business, his home, and threatened him with harm. Paul was forced to retreat, to live in his car.

Around Christmas time, when Paul was out of the country, a friend called him to say that he had been contacted by the authorities who wanted to talk to Paul. However, the detective constable (I may not have my terms correct here) assigned to his case was either on leave or on other assignments because he was not available for a discussion of the charges or the likely situation until some weeks later.

When Paul finally did talk to the officer assigned to his case — he just called them up from the US the day before his warrant would go into the system — the results were ominous, in my opinion. They couldn’t protect him in jail, they couldn’t say if he would be held without bond pending trial, and they seemed callously indifferent to his fate. He faced a cold-blooded bureaucratic indifference. He was simply a name, a case to be resolved. “Tell your attorney to call us because we won’t talk to you” was the gist of their advice.

What I also found surprising was the low-tech ineptitude of the police. They didn’t have a tracer on the call, and evidently didn’t have caller ID. They asked if he was in Scotland, perhaps…never having any idea he had the ability to get very far away, to America. It never crossed their minds. After all, what was Paul to them but a lower class, uneducated bloke who could be pushed around at will?

Had they known of his travels, I wonder what, if any, difference it might have made in their bored, complacent attitude? They suspected he was taping the conversation, as I’m sure they were too, but they had no way of proving it and I’m not even sure it was illegal for him to do so. English law is confusing, to say the least. Besides, in for a penny, in for a pound: if they were so hell-bent on getting him to come to the station so he could be “interviewed” (so he could be charged and a date assigned for a preliminary hearing), what harm could it do him at this point to attempt to protect himself by recording the conversation? IMHO.

I was pleased he had done so. However, Paul’s seeming indifference to his fate, even though he was afraid of being killed in jail, left me quite uneasy.

The situation gave Paul pause, too. He was torn between the relative safety of the US and his growing desire to return to his homeland and all that was familiar. His longing for England left him quite depressed and unable to act. It seemed to me he could not envision a life spent among strangers, some of whom were already attacking him (on Gates of Vienna, among other places).

Frankly, I was sick with fear. The very people — the Pakistani criminals — he had reported, and who had been jailed as a result of their activities, would be waiting for him in an atmosphere where he would be alone and unprotected. In fact, long before he left England, he had been reduced to living in his car, his livelihood and his flat destroyed by these people.

A journalist he met took him in during that period before he fled. She gave him shelter when he had no place else to go. Her flat mate was involved in some way with the BNP (British National Party). It is my impression that this person was part of the “new guard” out to change the platform and direction of the BNP to make it a party acceptable to average Englishmen.

Lionheart — Paul — is not politically inclined. It simply doesn’t interest him. He saw no harm in attending some of the meetings while he was living with these people. In fact, I question the desire to tar him with the brush of the past sins of the BNP. How does a party change if everyone ignores their behavior? Individual people have this problem, too. Change isn’t noticed and there is a concerted effort to keep the person you used to know firmly in the cubbyhole to which you first assigned him, no matter how negative that place is.

The obvious incidents of name-calling and condemnation by association that occurred after the Counterjihad meeting in Brussels made me realize that Paul would not be well received in some quarters in the US. In fact, it would turn out even worse: some accused him of fabricating his story. That’s what happens when people decide on a template for their agenda: if you fit the template, then you are bad and must be shunned.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Meanwhile, what of his sojourn in America? Well, since the Luton paper has revealed that he was in South Carolina, I wanted to address that without invading anyone’s privacy.

I’m not one usually given to see God’s intervention in things, but I was amazed at how things turned out for Paul. A man emailed him and offered him a refuge. They were strangers to one another, so it was a leap of faith on both their parts. Paul gladly took him up on his proposal and got on the bus, Gus, to be deposited in the town where he was picked up by his Good Samaritan.

As it was to turn out, not only did he have a place to stay, but this was no mere room in a motel. Paul was given a rent-free condominium for his own use. The family who took him in also invited him to come to their house for family meals. They were very concerned about his predicament.

At that point, the three of us began to talk about the situation, and to investigate the possibility of asylum. Paul eventually found it would take over a year to do the processing, with no guarantee he would be accepted. He never quite got around to filling out the papers, and his heart was longing for home.

I confess that his decision to return made me angry and depressed. I had invested so much in the notion of his safety that it felt as though he was Daniel returning to the lion’s den. However, I also told him he was every bit as immovable as the saint whose name he carries: Saint Paul was quite stubborn — as you can see on reading his Epistles. Our modern Paul should take up tent-making just to keep the story congruent with the letters to the early church.

As he flew back to England, having found a place to stay, I will admit I shed a few tears of frustration, abandonment, etc. In addition, I knew the people in South Carolina who had taken him in were distressed, too. We all feared for him.

The fact is that Paul’s departure left a cloud of depression on everything. I knew I would continue to support him as I’d outlined in my covenant to him, but my heart had gone out of it.

I wrote Paul and his American host before beginning this post so that they would know it was going up. I had been reluctant to do so before, fearing that it might be an invasion of privacy. However, now that the story has appeared in the Luton paper, the cat is out of the bag so telling of my part in his not-so-excellent adventures does no harm.

The police in Bedfordshire continue to be indifferent, even arrogant. Here’s their statement in the Luton article:

A spokeswoman for Bedfordshire Police said: “I can confirm that someone has been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred and has been released on police bail to return in May.

“He hasn’t been charged but if he chooses to identify himself then that’s his concern.”

In other words, charges against him are “pending.” How’s that for a sword hanging over your head? Arrested, but he’s not charged. He will be charged if he doesn’t show up in May, perhaps to be imprisoned for said charges. The fine legal point seems rather moot to me. Obviously, the police are aware they’re enforcing an idiotic law at great cost to the English taxpayer. But, hey, it’s just money, right? What is that in the face of the great behemoth of Multicultural dogma?

I’m glad I was able to be a part of Paul’s journey for a while. I will continue to stay in touch with him as long as his email stays current. And, no doubt, there will be some miniscule mention of his fate in England’s tabloids.

His story is worth telling, and I hope he does take the time someday to put it down on paper. On the other hand, as I told him one time, I will never be his editor. I would have to bang him on the head with a board to get him to change one jot or tittle of what he writes. In fact, Paul may be editor-proof because he would no doubt give up publishing a book if anyone dared to take a blue pencil to his words. You’d think he was Irish. In fact, I’ve found Hungarians easier to edit than Lionheart. Definitely, Saint Paul is chortling, even now.

My thoughts and prayers go with him, wherever he journeys. I plead with the cosmos to keep him from being killed by terrorists who want revenge and are anxious to silence him so they can keep pouring heroin and child prostitutes into Paul’s homeland.

I pray for England.

Don’t call Islam “dangerous” when you’re in Singapore, or you could get three years in the slammer.

According to Al Arabiya:

Singapore charges two for anti-Islam pamphlet

Singapore authorities have charged a Christian couple with sedition after they distributed pamphlets that negatively portrayed Islam, court documents showed on Thursday.

Ong Kian Cheong and Dorothy Chan, both in their late-forties, were charged by a lower court on Tuesday under the sedition act for distributing evangelical cartoon pamphlets titled “The Little Bride” to two people last year.

The pamphlet, published by gospel literature publisher Chick, tells a story of a young Christian girl who warns her friends about the pitfalls of becoming Muslim and describes the religion as “dangerous”.

– – – – – – – – –

The pair could face a fine of up to S$10,000 (7,370 U.S. dollars) and imprisonment of 3 years. They are out on S$10,000 bail each and their passports have been taken away.

The government of the ethnically mixed Southeast Asian city of 4.6 million is highly sensitive about race and religion. It says strict legislation and regulation of the media is needed to ensure peace.

In Singapore, 51 percent of the population is Buddhist, 14.9 percent Muslim and 14.6 percent Christian.

I notice the proselytizing couple were handing out “Chick tracts”, which are familiar to many Americans. I make no apologies for Chick — his pamphlets display a dumbed-down caricature of Christianity. But jail for those who hand them out…?

We live in interesting times.

Hat tip: TB.

Fjordman sent us a link to this article about Mullah Krekar, and included a thumbnail sketch of the Mad Mullah of Norway:

Krekar is an open supporter of Osama bin Laden, whom he has called the “jewel of Islam.” But according to the European Union, we cannot deport him. That would violate his human rights.

Mullah Krekar has been a thorn in the side of Norway for years. He has helped maintain jihad terrorism websites, advocated the killing of Australian soldiers in Iraq, and threatened retaliation if he is deported.

But he can’t be deported because he faces possible execution if he returns to Iraq. Like those Somali pirates who can claim asylum in the UK if they ever manage to get there, Mullah K. can remain safely ensconced in Norway no matter how bad a boy he is.

According to Aftenposten:

Krekar can stay in Norway

After months of quiet diplomacy, the Norwegian government has given up on efforts to send former terrorist-group leader Mullah Krekar back to his homeland.

Krekar, who has been under an expulsion order after being determined a threat to Norway’s national security, initially came to Norway as a refugee from Iraq in the early 1990s.

It later emerged that he was the head of guerrilla group Ansar al-Islam and he repeatedly violated the terms of his asylum by travelling back to northern Iraq to lead guerrilla activities.

Krekar is the only person in Norway ever to have been sentenced to deportation because he is a danger to the country’s security.

However, Norway has not been able to deport Krekar because he faces the death penalty in his homeland. Norway will not extradite anyone if they are under threat of execution when they are returned to their country of origin.

– – – – – – – – –

[…]

Mullah Krekar’s lawyer, Harald Stabell, is satisfied with the outcome. “An agreement for deportation would not have held up in relation to international regulations on human rights,” said Stabell to newspaper VG.

However, he notes that Krekar continues to be without rights in Norway and the deportation order remains in place.

[Labour and Inclusion Minister Bjarne] Hanssen confirmed the decision to let Krekar stay, but said: “With the proviso that I assume the police will protect Norwegian citizens from a person that is regarded to be a danger to the country’s security.”

This is a nasty little trap we have gotten ourselves into…

The West has to import lots of questionable Third-World immigrants for the sake of Multiculturalism, and to save poor refugees from persecution, and to make up for its own lack of willing low-wage laborers.

If our guests turn out to be criminals or worse, pointing out that fact is evidence of “racism”, and can cause the offender to be fired or prosecuted.

If a violent and dangerous criminal happens to be among the new arrivals, he can’t be deported because — surprise! — his prospects would be worse at home.

Then, presumably, he can get all his uncles, aunts, parents, grandparents, wives, children, and cousins into the country under the “family reunification” rules.

And then all of the above subsist at taxpayers’ expense on generous welfare payments.

Are we all lunatics, or what?

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

By the way — in the photo above, you’ll notice that Mullah Krekar appears to have the “Muslim stigmata”, the red bruise on the forehead that comes from the frequently repeated and extra-zealous banging of the head on the mosque floor during prayers.

Our expatriate Dutch correspondent H. Numan has translated an article from yesterday’s De Telegraaf about the latest initiative by the Islamic countries to suppress the activities of Geert Wilders.

The insertions in square brackets and the brief paragraph after the article are H. Numan’s commentary:

Muslim nations: prosecute Wilders

Geneva — The Muslim nations which are members of the UN human rights council [now there is a contradiction in terminus] appealed to the Netherlands to prosecute Geert Wilders for inciting hatred worldwide.

Under leadership of Iran and Pakistan [two nations excelling in human rights protection] Muslim nations called upon the Netherlands to fight the rising trend of “Islamophobia” and discrimination against immigrants to our country.

This call to arms came due to the Fitna movie made by Geert Wilders, in which the PVV leader pleads his case that the Koran is a fascistic book. The parliamentarian hopes Muslims will, after seeing his movie, tear out the verses that call for violence, according to him.

“Despite an impressive number of laws, and many plans to prevent racism and xenophobia, recent actions of certain individuals inciting racism and religious intolerance shocked the Muslim world,” said the Pakistani ambassador Masood Khan to the UN Council for Human Rights, which met Tuesday in Geneva.

“A slanderous documentary by a Dutch parliamentarian meant only to vilify Muslims and subvert the message of the Koran is condemned worldwide,” according to Khan.

The UN Council for Human Rights focuses on enforcing the human rights treaty worldwide.

– – – – – – – – –

Also the Iranian ambassador Alireza Moaiyeri questioned discrimination against minorities in the Netherlands.

Junior minister Albayrak [Dutch, despite the name, the religion and holding two citizenships] repeated in front of the council once more that Wilders’ vision is not shared by the Dutch government. “Preventing prejudice and respecting freedom of religion are primary elements of our integration policy.”

She added that the Prosecutor General’s office is investigating whether the law has been broken by the Fitna movie. Furthermore the Dutch Muslims stand behind the concept of freedom of speech as a basic right in the Dutch society, said Albayrak.

Being lectured about human right abuse by Iran and Pakistan is roughly the same as being lectured by Robert Mugabe about financial misbehavior. Today we know the League of Nations lost all credibility when its members proved no more than a paper tiger defending themselves against Italy, Japan and Nazi Germany. Today we see the United Nations tries to beat that sad record.

“Enoch Powell was right.”

Those are the Four Words that you may not speak or put into writing in Great Britain today.

If you are so rash as to do so, you risk being publicly humiliated, losing your job, and perhaps being arrested for “inciting racial hatred”.

Last year Nigel Hastilow discovered this rule to his great misfortune. Mr. Hastilow was a Tory candidate standing for Parliament, and published the following in a newspaper editorial:

When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most say immigration.

Many insist: “Enoch Powell was right”. Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 “rivers of blood” speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably.

He was right. It has changed dramatically.

No more candidacy for Mr. Hastilow! He was forced to resign for saying the Four Words.

I have written previously about Enoch Powell and his infamous speech, but that was back in 2005, when Gates of Vienna had virtually no readers, so I’m re-posting it below.

Preventable Evils

Jonah Goldberg’s column in yesterday’s NRO reminded me of Enoch Powell’s famous “Rivers Blood” speech in 1968. There have been other reminders of it recently — one of the commenters here at Gates of Vienna mentioned it, and, as a result, people searching for “Enoch Powell rivers of blood” often wash up here at the Gates and are detected by our site meter. Apparently Enoch Powell is making something of a comeback.

Like the designation of Churchill’s famous words as the “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” speech, the shorthand “Rivers of Blood” for Powell’s speech is something of a misnomer — the eponymous sentence is actually this: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’”. But such are the vagaries of collective memory; people recall “Rivers of Blood”, so “Rivers of Blood” it is.

Enoch Powell was a Conservative member of Parliament when he gave the speech. I was living in England at the time, and I remember the occasion well. He was immediately reviled in the press and on the BBC, and lost his position in the Tory shadow cabinet as a result. The conventional wisdom loathed him, and he was depicted as a demagogue and a would-be Hitler.

But he was also ridiculed. I was a teenager in those days, and avidly read the satirical weekly Private Eye. In its pages he was mocked as a ludicrous throwback and a bigot. The editors enjoyed using file photos of him and adding silly graphics and speech balloons to make their points. Since he attracted a following among Sir Oswald Moseley’s heirs, all the derogatory labels tended to stick.

It is hard to look at the writings of people who have been declared beyond the pale. Presumably there are points worth noting in Mein Kampf and Das Kapital, but the verdict pronounced by history on their authors tends to prevent close scrutiny. Even so, it is worth revisiting what Powell said in the light of today’s events. His words were not those of a frothing madman, but an intelligent and carefully-chosen argument.

The key paragraphs of the speech were at the beginning:

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical. At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician.

There’s the rub for an elected politician who also feels a duty to posterity: how to identify and deal with those events which occur now but will have significant effect so far in the future that it is politically safe to ignore them.

He goes on to describe an encounter with a constituent:
– – – – – – – – –

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries. After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: “I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

Notice that even in 1968 the reign of PC thinking had already taken hold; Powell knew that his words constituted a heinous thought crime in the eyes of the enlightened.

Notice also that it was the black immigrants from Commonwealth countries who were considered to be the great danger. It was to be another decade before Elvis Costello sang, “London is full of Arabs” (in a song mocking the successors of Enoch Powell). In 1968 the Arabs weren’t a danger. Why would the Arabs come? They were not in the Commonwealth.

But come they did, seeking political asylum to avoid persecution by their own governments for their dangerous versions of Islam. And, in even greater numbers, Muslims from Commonwealth member nation Pakistan immigrated to settle in Britain.

Powell went on:

What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking — not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s Office. There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

…It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.

No matter how much it pains us to say it, we have to acknowledge that Powell was precisely right. Whatever his motivations, despite any racism or bigotry on his part, he was right.

And he hit other nails on the head:

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it “against discrimination”, whether they be leader writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same news papers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong. The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming. This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.

These words can only remind 21st-century Americans of the unchecked flow of illegal immigrants across our borders, and of the bedclothes pulled up over the heads of most of our elected leaders.

Demonstrating that he was not your typical racist, Powell said:

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American negro. The negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.

And then there is this, all too familiar to us in 2005:

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.

Plus ça change…

And this one is uncannily prescient:

We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population — that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate. Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population.

Powell concluded his speech with this:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”… Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

Regardless of his racist motivations, regardless of any demagogic ambitions he might have had, Enoch Powell was right. He lived until 1998, long enough to see that much of what feared had already come to pass. In 1968 he was in the unenviable position of someone in 1931 warning of the danger that Hitler posed to the world.

But the timeline of Islamofascism is slower than that of the Nazis. It is not yet 1940 for us; it is still 1938 or 1939. There is still time. But is there any evidence that our leaders have the nerve and the wherewithal to deal with the preventable evils of our time?

Hat tip: LN.

Fjordman’s latest essay at The Brussels Journal concerns an attempt by Sweden’s press Ombudsman to crack down on all those dangerous abuses of free speech to be found in blogs.

This story has been around for a few days in Swedish and Danish — Steen posted about it on Monday — but Fjordman’s article is the first account in English that I know of:

Yrsa Stenius, the Swedish press Ombudsman, wants to press charges against certain bloggers. She is worried about developments on the Internet, where anybody can just write anything they want. She says this has gone too far. She fears this trend could even spread to the mainstream media, unless something is done and a legal precedent is established to rein in unruly bloggers.

At the same time, the extreme left-wing thugs of Antifascistisk Action (AFA), who frequently physically assault critics of mass immigration, for instance members of the small party the Sweden Democrats, recently destroyed the car of a 90-year-old woman and wrote “nasse” (Nazi) on top of it. As it turned out, they picked the wrong car. Why doesn’t Ms. Stenius and the rest of the establishment worry more about the violent activities of AFA, instead of “impolite” bloggers who do nothing more than write words on their websites?

Yrsa Stenius is originally from Helsinki, Finland, from the country’s Swedish-speaking minority. She has been associated with Aftonbladet since 1979, and was even their political editor-in-chief in the mid-80s, and was a columnist for them as late as 2007.

[…]

Aftonbladet has close ideological ties to the Social Democrats, the country’s dominant party for most of the past century. According to journalist Karen Jespersen, Helle Klein, political editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2007 and a former leading member of the Social Democratic Youth League, has stated that “If the debate is [about] that there are problems caused by refugees and immigrants, we don’t want it.” During a demonstration organized by Islamic and anti-racist organizations in December 2006, Klein stood in front of a banner which read “A Sweden for all — Stop the Nazi violence” and held a speech warning against Islamophobia in the media. Klein has voiced strong sympathy for terrorist organization Hamas in her editorials, while warning against the threat to world peace posed by Israeli aggression and the Christian Zionist Right in the USA. She still blogged at Aftonbladet‘s website as of April 2008.

– – – – – – – – –

[…]

Shouldn’t it worry Ms. Stenius that a representative of one of Scandinavia’s largest newspapers, with close ties to the country’s largest political party, thus cooperates openly with an organization known for physically assaulting members of a legal opposition party, even in their private homes? Isn’t that worse than what a few bloggers may or may not write about mass immigration at their private websites? I don’t know much about the specific mandate of the press Ombudsman, but according to the Wikipedia entry, the PO “is to determine whether the actions of a newspaper is in line with good journalistic practice.” Well, I hereby suggest that Yrsa Stenius does some research into the organization AFA, and asks whether it is “good journalistic practice” for Swedish journalists to cooperate with such an organization. Perhaps she should also take a look at potential ties between AFA and Expo.

There’s much more information at The Brussels Journal about this latest example of Swedish illiberality.

At the Counterjihad conference in Brussels last October, one of the featured speakers was Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo.

Dr. Sookhdeo had just published a book, Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam, and I bought a signed copy from him while I was there.

I skimmed the book later while I was traveling, but have only now buckled down to reading it in detail. It’s a thoroughly researched and scholarly book with copious citations, and rewards close examination.

Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction (pp. 12-13):

…[T]he war on Islamic terrorism is just one aspect of a “long war” which has lasted 1400 years already. This is the history of Islamic expansion and pursuit of political dominance which are best expressed in the Islamic doctrine, institution and practice of jihad. Based on the models of Muhammad and the early Islamic state, jihad has determined the relations of Muslims to non-Muslims ever since, including the theory, ideology, rules and practicalities of waging war. The foreign policy of the Muslim state is linked to jihad which is the basis of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims.

While modern Muslim apologetics tries to reinterpret jihad in purely defensive modes (in a moral sense as against evil in society and in a spiritual sense as the individual’s fight against temptation and personal sin), there is no doubt that in Islamic history jihad has normally been viewed, both in traditional Islamic law (shari’a) and in Islamic practice, as the armed conflict against non-Muslims (and against heretical or apostate Muslims) permanently waged to ensure the victory of God’s chosen community and religion, the umma (the whole body of Muslims worldwide), over all polytheistic powers, peoples and lands.

– – – – – – – – –

Only under severe constraints, when non-Islamic power was overwhelming, could the jihad imperative be suppressed for a while, as under colonial rule. This concession derived from shari’a principles of darura (necessity) and maslaha (public good) which permit the breaking of shari’a principles when Muslims are weak and Islam is in danger. Such suspension of jihad however, is always temporary and jihad can be reactivated at any time if Muslim strength is deemed capable of changing the balance of power and reasserting Islamic dominance.

The book has hundreds of citations and additional material in the endnotes, and, being an inveterate reader of footnotes and endnotes, I’m going through those as well. One of the notes on the above passage is a quote from Hizb ut-Tahrir literature (note 9, p. 543):

In fact the Islamic ideology did not only define the foreign policy, but it also demonstrated the method by which this foreign policy was to be practically executed and therefore carried to the whole world. This demonstration is in the guidance of the Messenger and it is al-Jihad… (Zahid-lvan Salam, Jihad and the Foreign Policy of the Khilafah State, (Khilafah Publications, 2001), pp. 42-43, http://www.challenging-islam.org/library/jihadpolicy.pdf, viewed 17 November 2006)

Dr. Sookhdeo’s dedicated research demonstrates that violent jihad is not an aberration, but is firmly grounded in the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sunna, and has been a mainstay of classical Islam for more than a millennium. As time permits I will scan other passages from the book and post the excerpts here.

As of this writing, Amazon says Global Jihad is “out of stock”. The book is also being sold at the Church Society bookstore, but I’m not sure if that site can process transactions outside of the UK.

There may be other places where the book is available online. I recommend that readers track down a copy; it is well worth the purchase price.

Zenster is a frequent commenter here at Gates of Vienna. Since Dymphna and I have sworn off covering the presidential election campaign until next fall, Zenster has stepped up to bat in our stead with this guest-post.

The Liberal Left Invokes a Discredited Racist Doctrine
by Zenster

I will ask that for one moment that everybody please disregard all of the media hype and preconceived notions or perceptions that have been bred up over the past year of Democratic Party electioneering.

Let’s please have it understood that Barack Hussein Obama is not Black. He is, by proper definition, a mulatto, being descended from both black and white parents. Rest assured that Obama plays himself up as a Black Man but that in no way changes his actual genetic and ancestral heritage. What it does signify is that Barack Hussein Obama is more than willing to ignore racial realities within his own personal realm when they conflict with his overall political vision.

What this bodes in terms of how he will deal with racial issues upon becoming President is not at all heartening. Furthermore, it is a bellwether of even more disturbing possibilities with respect to how such a man might seek to run this world’s greatest superpower.

In an obscene reinvention of Jim Crow doctrine, the thoroughly reviled “One-Drop Rule“ has found new life in American liberals and with Barack Hussein Obama in particular:

The one-drop rule is an historical colloquial term in the United States that holds that a person with any trace of sub-Saharan ancestry (however small or invisible) cannot be considered white and so unless the person has an alternative non-white ancestry that he or she can claim, such as Native American, Asian, Arab, Australian aboriginal, the person must be considered black.

By Obama’s own reasoning it would seem as though this long discredited and viciously racist notion — that even the slightest bit of Black ancestry makes a person entirely Black — suddenly has new validity and pertinence in our time. Perish the thought that — as Black Supreme Court jurist Thurgood Marshall insisted — “classifications and distinctions based upon race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society.” As Stephen Thernstrom’s article goes on to note:
– – – – – – – – –

The [Census] Bureau will not tabulate data for every possible racial mix reported by respondents. But they are keeping track of a mind-boggling 63, so that we will have figures, for example, on the number of people who consider themselves part-white, part-black, and part-American Indian. But when the figures are to be used to determine whether civil rights laws have been violated, these distinctions will disappear. Citizens who say they are not only white but also a member of a “minority race” will be counted as belonging to the “minority race” — period.

In other words, for these purposes, it is still the case that a white mother can have a black child but a black mother cannot have a white child.” [Emphasis added]

The towering moral hypocrisy whereby a man of mixed racial heritage has arrogated himself the label of “Black Man” by dint of an incredibly offensive racist doctrine and yet eludes any calumny for doing so speaks volumes about the Liberal Left’s selective memory. That Barack Hussein Obama has become “Black enough” through such discredited genetic chicanery serves up notice that — quite possibly — nothing else about him may be as it seems.

This racial sleight-of-hand is also reflected in Barack Hussein Obama’s reluctance to unequivocally condemn incredibly anti-American and generally racist sermons given by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Far more conspicuous is the dissonance between Wright’s oratory and his lifestyle.

Wright is about to move to a 10,340-square-foot, four-bedroom home in suburban Chicago, currently under construction in a gated community.

Even less publicized is how white the gated community of Tinley Park is:

White persons, 2000		93.2%		(Versus 73.5% state average)
Black or African American persons, 2000		1.9%		(Less than one eighth the state average of 15.1%)
Persons below the poverty line, 1999		2.5%		(Less than one quarter of the state average of 10.7%)

— Courtesy of US Census Bureau Statistics

While Jeremiah Wright is entitled to live wherever he pleases, it is difficult to imagine a less Black community than Tinley Park being his choice. Likewise, while Trinity United Church describes itself as “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian”, it is also difficult to imagine someone less Christian than Louis Farrakhan, whose well-known anti-Semitic and anti-White screeds — calling whites “blue-eyed devils” and the “anti-Christ”, while describing Jews as “bloodsuckers” — are nothing less than hatemongering. Yet, Reverend Wright has seen fit to bestow upon Louis Farrakhan one of his church’s Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Lifetime Achievement Trumpeteer awards.

In Jeremiah Wright we find a dangerous amalgam of zealotry and hypocrisy. While perhaps of a different magnitude, Barack Hussein Obama seems no less inclined to manipulate public perception of himself and his background with distinctly similar methods. Combined with his inability to disavow Jeremiah Wright as a mentor and spiritual advisor, all of this indicates that Barack Hussein Obama may be carrying forward a hidden agenda driven by ulterior motives about which we know nothing.

While no political candidate is expected to be entirely transparent, there is a cloud of intentional obfuscation and misdirection that obscures Barack Hussein Obama. A cloud that he continues to use as a screen, while so many aspects of his personal philosophy and political agenda cry out for disinfecting sunlight.