Takuan Seiyo returns with an examination of the behavior of radical Jewish leftists — whom I often call “suicide Jews” — and the harm that they do, both to the Jewish community in America and to the West at large.

F Street
by Takuan Seiyo

This is a new initiative. It will be called F Street, in cadence with J Street. The latter is a lefto-Jewish PAC working in good faith to destroy via its hallucinatory delusions the very object of its tender concern: Israel.

The F stands for Fool, and F Street will be an effort to advocate with respect to group foolishness that harms America and works to destroy the fools themselves first. K Street, for kamikaze, would have been apt, but the K is famously taken.

Typical subjects for this column might be like the Julia Gorin classic “To Serve Man”, reports on Feminist organizations promoting the spread of sharia in the West, or anything Mike Huckabee. Another good candidate would be accounts of the activities of Protestant church groups resettling Somali refugees among Eloi Midwestern Nordics in order to reap, a generation later, this [now removed from YouTube, available here] predictable harvest.

Content contributors to F Street ought to know their subject, have no related biases, and have the required teflon coating to ward off volleys of “racist,” “anti-Semite,” “homophobe” and other such projectiles that will be coming at them 120 mph. For the particular strain of dhimmo-lunacy that interests us on F Street is shared disproportionately by Jews, mainstream Protestants, single women, the GBLT community, academics, West Germans, and Scandinavians.

We begin on November 23, 2009. Phil Wolf, a car dealer in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, erects an anti-Obama sign and explains, “Since Fort Hood, I’ve had it. You can’t suggest things. You can’t profile. You gotta call a spade a spade. Everything I have read about Mr. Obama points right to the fact that he is a Muslim. And that is the agenda of what Muslim is all about. It’s about anti-American, it’s about anti-Christianity.”

Maybe it’s not the most eloquent way of putting it. The birth certificate issue is perhaps a misfire akin to going after Bill Clinton’s sex life. There have been far more consequential issues in both cases. But the feeling this billboard conveys may be shared by a hundred million Americans — such as those who queue at 5AM for a Sarah Palin book signing or a handshake with Glenn Beck. And their numbers grows in proportion to the volume of the gaseous Saul Alinsky genie hovering above the White House, all the pretending that Saul is Paul notwithstanding.

But let’s get back to our story. According to the KDVR Channel 31 report, “the ADL issued a statement calling the billboard an exploitation of the Ft. Hood shootings that is ‘divisive and offensive,’ and perpetuates hateful and harmful stereotypes about Muslims.”

It would be interesting to check how many Muslim organizations are reciprocally punctilious in stopping “hateful and offensive” stereotypes about Jews. But not a better friend has a Jew had among the gentiles in all of history than the sort of Christians who live in Colorado. The ADL might worry less about Muslim stereotypes, and more about stereotypes bolstered by people like this urinating on a figure two billion people consider the Son of God or at least the greatest man who ever lived.

ADL’s mission statement proclaims: “To stop the defamation of the Jewish people… to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” I have no quarrel with the first goal, and in the interest of brevity will avoid taking apart the second one. But when the ADL stokes the fires of resentment and alienation of the white Christian majority against the Jewish people, I see a serious problem.

ADL has a Hispanic/Latino Affairs section, which gives people the wrong idea that Benedict Arnold was Jewish. “Building and strengthening relationships with the Hispanic/Latino community in the fight against bigotry”, informs the ADL site, to take up the slack when Abe Foxman is too busy to pronounce that, “It is time to shine the spotlight on those who have seized upon the immigration debate as an opportunity to advance their agenda of hate, bigotry and white supremacy.”

The Hispanic/Latino community reciprocates as wholeheartedly as the Muslim one does. “An egregious Zionist assault on Academic Freedom at UCSB,” informs the Nation of Aztlan’s “Voice,” when it does not instruct that “Oprah Winfrey exposes Satanic Jewish Practices.”

In the alphabet soup of “Hispanic” and Jewish organizations united to decry “The Rise in Hate” that their own activity rises, La Raza is paramount. To get a better idea of what La Raza is, someone ought to skip from Spanish to German, for Abe Foxman’s sake, and say aloud with the proper Hochdeutsch accent, die Rasse. But even that would not begin to hint how richly the leadership of America’s Jewry has earned its retirement condo on F Street.

Consider the Radical Muslim terrorist-enabling project known otherwise as the Religious Worker Visa Program. “The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society hailed the bill’s passage,” crows HIAS’s Web-page. A few more examples of this once-venerable institution’s flight into diminished-capacity clouds may be found here. Among them is the Progress by Pesach advocacy by 13 national Jewish organizations.

“What a joke for a program claiming to speak on behalf of American Jewry,” writes the (self-designated) “J-blogger,” The Kvetcher. “Let this be clear. The Jewish community does not perceive amnesty and an end to raids as ‘progress’ at all.”

Would it that people like that had a louder voice and a more public profile in the Jewish community. Alas, it’s the opposite.

Cut back to Wheat Ridge, Colorado. Other then the ADL, one local media maven took up a crusade against the car dealer who had had enough. “It’s out of control,” [David] Sirota said. “This conservative hatred of Barack Obama is out of control, and this brings together all those strands of it: the racism, the anti-Muslim fervor. It’s one thing to criticise the president on health care, or Wall Street reform, or immigration. But this is outrageous. And I think it’s a fair question to ask why these questions about religion and ancestry are being directed so viciously at the first African-American President of the United States.”
– – – – – – – – –
Where does one acquire the alien-life-form mental chip that produces this sort of thought process? Whence came this obsession with race or with enforced equality that’s against the very order of the Universe? Not a single right-of-center person I know, or know of, cares whether Obama is black. All would be glad to vote for Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams. The rejection of Obama, his eligibility and his set of ideas is far stronger among blacks like Pastor James Manning, than Phil Wolf’s billboard evinces.

Again, I stare across a chasm at an American Jew, and so do millions who can rarely express it even if they feel it. In case of Sirota, that chip-from-space is imbedded in his resume: stints with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Al Franken Show, the radical Center for American Progress, the eponymous Progressive States Network, and more.

Sirota’s outlook is not a random occurrence. The Socialist Senator Sanders is Jewish. The “progressive” Senator Al Franken is Jewish. All 13 Jewish U.S. Senators are leftists of various stripes. It appears that of the 31 Jewish members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 30 are leftists.

Sirota’s erstwhile employer, The Center for American Progress, known as the (Jewish patron’s) Soros front has at least two Jews on its five-member executive committee, one of whom, Winnie Stachelberg, maintains a high profile in activities such as “40 Years of LGBT Jewish Activism”.

Judging by the names, half of the Senior Staff are Jewish. In the same way it appears that half of the 20 directors of Sirota’s current passion, the Progressive States Network are Jews.

Reality check: 2% of America’s population is Jewish.

If the ADL, like the SPLC, is an ethnic shakedown operation, it’s disgusting, but the mental chip is more worrisome. Yosi Sargent, the Obamoid whom Glenn Beck made famous, boasted, “I drank the Kool-Aid. I am alive with it, I believe — an Obama saying — ‘we are the change we have been waiting for.’“

If I looked like this, if my name were Yosi, if I worked for Yitzhak Rabin before working with frenzied zeal for BHO, I would not be surprised if white Christians in a nation founded and made great by white Christians grew to hate me. Let alone if these peoples’ ancestors had given mine a safe and blessed harbor from the persecution and poverty that had been the latter’s lot in Europe

One day, I was driving and listening to the Dennis Miller Show. Miller was asking his Jewish liberal “sidekick” Sal if there was anything that Obama could do that would cause Sal to oppose Obama. Sal said, “No.”

Sal then said, earnestly, that he feared “right wing Christians.” Obama was his shelter. He did not actually recite the 23rd Psalm, but as he spoke I was transposing in my head the immortal lines to modern times:

Barack Hussein Obama is my shepherd, I shall not want;
He makes me lie down in Green captures.
He leads me beside shill paupers.

What a difference a wee 3000 years makes. The Jewish writer(s) of yore had enough wholesome vitality to write the 23rd and other such cornerstones of Western Civilization. But the main output of the modern Jewish intellectual ranges from Rules for Radicals on the left, to A People’s History of the United States on the right.

It bodes ill. The 2008 FBI official hate crimes statistics are out (hat tip Debbie Schlussel,

and 67% of U.S. “religion-inspired” Hate Crimes are against Jews. Schlussel comments further, “More than a few of those anti-Semitic hate crime perpetrators are, in fact, Muslims. Missing from the FBI stats are the stats on the perpetrators of these crimes.”

But there is more to this, as I wrote in May 2009:

Political choices have faces on them too. In March 1994, Rashid Baz, a Lebanese immigrant cab driver in New York, looking for Jews to kill, fired at a van full of Hassidic boys, killing one. In February 1997, Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, a Palestinian immigrant, shot seven people and killed one on top of the Empire State building, because he objected to U.S. support for Israel. In July 2002, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian immigrant, murdered two people and wounded four at Los Angeles Airport’s El-Al Israeli Airlines terminal. In November 2003, in Paris, Adel Boumedienne, an Algerian “jeune” born in France, cut the throat of his longtime friendly Jewish neighbor Sébastien Selam, gouged his eyes out and boasted, “I killed my Jew.” In January 2006, a gang of 20 mostly African Muslim immigrants led by Youssef Fofana, kidnapped and tortured to death Ilan Halimi, 23, a French-Moroccan Jew, in Paris. In July 2006, Naveed Afzal Haq, a Pakistani-American, shot up the Jewish Federation of Seattle, murdering two and wounding four while screaming, “I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel.” This is just a quick snapshot, and a preview of things to come.

A Jewish politician for the Labour Party in Birmingham just had her own preview. She was denied the opportunity to vie for a ward councilor post because of being “White and Jewish.” But why would there even be a Jewish Labour politician, let alone in a city whose ex-lord mayor, incidentally the one who found her unacceptably Jewish, is a Mahmood Hussain? Such a level of madness cannot be cured through persuasion. The patient can recover only through eating copiously of the bitter fruits of her own derangement.

Those fruits may be quite fruity, for on the other side there are deranged persons too. In my readers’ mail, there is an almost-daily love note like this:

Instead of spreading more Jew Spew nonsense — do yourself, your Tribe, and the rest of genuine Humanity a huge favor, and spend your time editing that vile, twisted evil, racial-hatred stratagems contained in the Talmud. The poisoned source of 99.9% of the misery of Humanity. Every aspect of your Tribe involves invading a Human society, infiltrating, plundering, looting, and obliterating everything every-one else has created. Your Race lives as acidic parasites, and the “blessings” of the Tribe are the gifts of Lucifer.

It’s an unfortunate impediment to Jewish self-introspection and self-correction that such “critique” is usually uttered by psychopathic morons. But it would be a tragedy for Jews to infer, therefore, that all antagonistic feelings toward them are similarly mad and gratuitous.

The more American Jews drink Yosi Sargent’s Kool-Aid, the more hate Jews will attract as a group from the much larger and still favorably predisposed white Christian majority — gradually dispossessed and diminishing though it may be. And the progressives’ Yemeni and Dominican darlings will no more return those warm Jewish feelings than Black America has.

The more Jews seek to defeat traditional America and create an Erewhon of all colors, religions and sexual orientations living in perfect equality in the land of Washington, Franklin, Edison and Truman, the more they will be sawing off the solid branch on which it has been their good fortune to perch for so long.

Previous posts by Takuan Seiyo:

2008		Oct		14		The Real Mark-to-Market
		Dec		1		You Say Mumbai, I Say Bombay
2009		Apr		8		The Deadly Jive of Jiverly Diversity
		Jun		2		The American Press: The Unbearable Lightness of Treason
				12		Critique of the Culture of Kevin MacDonald
		Jul		31		Sons of Onan
		Sep		2		Be the Change

My, what a reasonable set of interrogatives we have here. Mr. Warner sets up a possible dialogue…if one dares to enter such an exchange.

You could call this scenario, “Just Askin’, dude”…

He prefaces the scene this way:

When you study the incident of Major Hasan at Fort Hood, you realize that there were some questions that needed to have been asked. But, no one knew what to ask, since the wrong questions might seem, well, politically incorrect. No one wants to be politically incorrect. We don’t want to offend.

Darn right. “Offense” is our worst sin. So zip your lip, smile and keep moving.

If you look around you will find that no one is asking any Muslims hard questions. Never mind the Major Hasan types, no one asks questions to the Muslim at work. It turns out that there are many questions that each and every Muslim should be asked. These are simple ones that deal with the core of Islam. Every Muslim knows the answers.

What follows are his queries, omitting his answers because it would be more fruitful first to contemplate the possible response you might get from your Muslim acquaintance. For example, consider what it would be like if you were asking these questions of Rifqa Bary’s daddy:

• “Do you believe that the Koran is perfect?”
• “Is Mohammed the ideal Muslim?

Mr. Warner notes:

Islam is only partially based on the Koran. Far more of a Muslim’s life is governed by Mohammed than the Koran and Allah. Why is this so important? The practical way to understand Islam and what Muslims believe and think is to know about Mohammed. This is very good news. Anyone can understand Mohammed’s life.

Having set the stage with our opening inquiries, we are ready to make it more personal. So you ask your local friendly Muslim:
– – – – – – – – –

• “Am I a kafir?”
• “Have you ever deceived a kafir?”
• If you are a Christian, ask: “Over 60 million Christians have been killed in jihad. Christians are persecuted daily in Islamic lands. Have you ever apologized for this?”
• If you are a black American, ask: “Islam sold [and sells – D] slaves on the West coast of Africa, the east coast of Africa and the Mediterranean. You [Muslims] enslaved over a million Europeans. Why do you never take any responsibility for slavery?”
• If you are a Jew, ask: “How do you see the war against Israel as jihad?”

We do not ask questions [because] we have become a nation of deceivers under political correctness. We don’t ask Muslims any question that would make them feel “uncomfortable”.

Darn tootin’! The only species permitted to be made uncomfortable are those Neanderthal conservatives and Christian fundies (oops, redundancies abound: all conservatives are neanderthals; all Christians are fundamentalists).

Mr. Warner claims:

It is completely reasonable to ask anyone about their ideology. Christians, Jews, liberals, conservatives and every other ideology have to answer questions about what they believe. Why not Muslims?

That is the true question for kafirs: “Why are Muslims the only people in the world who don’t have to be asked difficult questions about what they believe?”

And the true answer is because Muslims have perfected the thin-skinned, aggrieved attitude. Questions make them feel bad. Can’t give offense, only abject apologies for the audacity of daring to exist in your warty kafir self. The whole world was supposed to be Ummah-ized by now. Why are you being so difficult??

Now you’ve seen the questions. Go over to Red Country to see what Mr. Warner has to say in response.

Then start a dialogue. At least the conversation will be real for a change. Scimitars optional.

Hat tip: Kenny from The Frozen North

As we all know, Canada’s Human Rights Commissions have done a very effective job of muzzling any criticism of Islam by citizens of the Canadian Federation. Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant served as salutary examples, celebrity victims chosen pour encourager les autres. A few well-chosen prosecutions — actually, the proceedings of the HRCs don’t even rise to the level of prosecutions — can establish a climate of fear among the rest of the population, inducing docility and self-censorship.

Unfortunately for the elite gutmenschen who would squelch all unapproved discussion, the problems that are censored out of public discourse do not go away, nor are they removed from public consciousness. Not only that, popular ingenuity has a way of getting around the chokehold placed on the media. Vlad Tepes points out the technique employed Canadian talk radio host, who played the issue deftly to avoid any HRC offenses, and still made the issue clear to his audience:

Tuesday Dec 15 2009 a caller to Lowell Green’s CFRA 580 AM radio talk show, was about to discuss adoption in Islam and how it relates to the story of the 75 year old woman who is about to be lashed, probably to death, for having some minor social contact with her adopted son.

Lowell interrupted the caller and explained as clearly as he could, that he could not allow the caller to continue. That he knew what the caller was going to say. That he knew what the caller had to say was likely true. That the station would likely be heavily fined, the host may well lose his job but would certainly be reprimanded for allowing the caller to continue, and that the consequences to the station and staff overall would be greater than the station could bear. That the caller should feel free to trash talk Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism or Buddhism but nothing may be said of Islam that may make it look bad, even if true.

– – – – – – – – –

I am certain what Lowell said is exactly the truth. I hope the rest of us take note. Islam has effectively already removed the most important freedom we have. The freedom to speak what is actually true, and therefore, the freedom to make decisions based on valid information for ourselves.

Kudos to Lowell Green for finding a way around the PC restrictions on speech.

His approach may prove a useful template for future resistance as the “hate speech” screws tighten on us all across the West.

We shall have to resort to samizdat and subterfuge, but we will not be silenced.

Fjordman sent us the news excerpt below, and included this note:

You know it has to be bad when The New York Times starts worrying about left-wing violence. It’s apparently a long time since Socrates and Aristotle lived in Athens. The economy in Greece is getting worse and public debt is climbing. Meanwhile, the country is being overrun by colonists from Third World countries, especially Muslims, and the left-wing establishment is cheering for this. This is only going to get worse and worse until something finally snaps, and that goes for the entire Western world, not just Greece:

An excerpt from the article:

Debate Rages in Greece About Right of Police to Enter University Campuses

A new wave of violent attacks against academics is sweeping campuses in Athens and Thessaloniki, leading Greek professors to question a law that bans police officers from entering university grounds.

The law exists nowhere else in Europe, but it has been sacrosanct in Greece since the fall of a military dictatorship that bloodily suppressed a student rebellion at the Athens Polytechnic in 1973 in which at least 23 people were killed.

Last weekend saw a peak in the violence, which has spiraled in recent months along with general social unrest, a spike in crime and a resurgence of domestic terrorism.

Hundreds of anti-establishment protesters stormed university buildings during demonstrations being held in memory of a teenager who was shot and killed by a police officer a year ago, an event that sparked some of the worst riots ever in the capital.

The rector of the University of Athens, Christos Kittas, was sent to intensive care Sunday, after being beaten by assailants using iron bars and then thrown out of his office.

– – – – – – – – –

Mr. Kittas, who was discharged from the hospital on Wednesday after recovering from a heart attack, called on fellow academics and politicians to tackle the problem on campuses. He said he “felt dead inside watching young people who could be my grandchildren or students commit crimes and vandalize the shrine to free thought.”

Last week, a professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Gerasimos Sapountzoglou, was targeted by extremists who beat and throttled him when he refused to stop a lecture. Several other academics have suffered similar attacks in Athens and Thessaloniki in recent months.

Anastassios Manthos, rector of Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University, who was knocked unconscious in a similar campus raid last year, said things had gotten worse. “The violence in universities, and in Greek society in general, is explosive and unprecedented,” he said.

Ayman al-Zawahiri is unhappy with President Obama. The No. 2 leader of Al Qaeda — should we call him “Bin Laden’s Joe Biden”? — evidently thinks that Mr. Obama is no better than George W. Bush, given the Light-Bringer’s recent policies towards Muslims in Afghanistan and “Palestine”. Al-Zawahiri says that President Obama is “at war with Islam”. If only.

In other news, the total number of Muslims in the UK has reportedly reached 2.4 million. EU Muslims cite Britain as their preferred destination, because the UK is the friendliest towards Islam.

Thanks to Barry Rubin, CSP, Esther, Gaia, JD, Lurker from Tulsa, Sean O’Brian, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in. Headlines and articles are below the fold.
– – – – – – – – –

	USA
	Frank Gaffney: War Courts for War Criminals
	Medicaid Cuts Will Affect Thousands on SoonerCare
	Canada
	Chanukah Celebrated in a Calgary Mosque
	Europe and the EU
	Black Nativity Angers Italy’s “White Xmas” Party
	EU Parliament Ceiling Falls Down Again
	France: Brawl Engulfs President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Grand Debate
	Italy: Berlusconi in Pain, Will Remain Hospitalized
	Norway: Teachers Go Wild After Christmas Party
	Officials Say Priest Attacks Menorah in Moldova
	Spain Sentences Barcelona Subway Terror Cell Men
	UK: David Miliband Bans Envoys From Helping the BNP
	UK: Just for Once, The Archbishop is Right … Treating Christians as Cranks is an Act of Cultural Suicide
	UK: Judges Acted ‘Irresponsibly’ Over Binyam Mohammed, Says Foreign Office
	UK: Millionaire Who Fought Off a Knife-Wielding Burglar is Jailed (While the Intruder is Let Off)
	UK: Rocket-Shaped Minaret Sparks Row
	UK: Single Mother of Eight Living in a £2.6m Mansion — So Much for Labour’s Housing Benefit Crackdown
	UK: Sharia Law Sneaked Into Labour Budget
	UK: Taliban Can be Admired for Their Faith and Loyalty, Says Bishop
	UK: We Are Being Gagged: The Right to Speak Freely is Being Undermined by Those Who Should be Protecting it
	Israel and the Palestinians
	Barry Rubin: Why All the Excuses for Palestinian Intransigence Don’t Make Sense
	Vandals Deface Russian Sacred Place in Jerusalem
	Middle East
	Air Strike ‘Kills 70 Civilians’ In Yemen
	Military Mutiny in Iran?
	Terrorism: Obama in ‘Crusade Against Islam’, Says Al-Qaeda No.2
	South Asia
	Al Qaeda Offers ‘Condolences’ For Innocent Victims
	Allow Afghan Women to Give Massages: Army Adviser
	British Forces Bishop Apologises for Suggesting Taliban Should be Praised for Their Faith and Sense of Loyalty
	Indian Kashmir Women’s Deaths ‘Not Murder’
	Malaysia Hearings Start in Catholic ‘Allah’ Fight
	Pakistan: No Muslim Involved in Suicide Attacks in Country’
	Pakistan: Four Suspected Blackwater Operatives Arrested in Islamabad
	Rules of Engagement Killing U.S. Soldiers
	Australia — Pacific
	Rabbit-Proof Fence Grossly Inaccurate: Keith Windschuttle
	Sub-Saharan Africa
	Canada Recalls Spitting Diplomat From Tanzania
	Pictured: Islamic Militants Stone Man to Death for Adultery in Somalia as Villagers Are Forced to Watch
	Immigration
	Study Reveals Impact of Immigration on UK Faiths
	UK: Muslim Total Hits 2.4m as They Say: UK’s Nicest to Us
	Culture Wars
	‘Witch Hunt’ Expected Under New U.S. ‘Hate Crimes’ Law
	General
	Garbage in, Global Warming Out
	Inconvenient Truth for Al Gore as His North Pole Sums Don’t Add Up

Frank Gaffney: War Courts for War Criminals

A ticking political time bomb has been largely obscured by official Washington’s preoccupation with screwing up our health care system: Americans are dead-set against a foolish, ill-considered and reckless decision to give the 9/11 plotters civilian trials — and constitutional rights — within spitting distance of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.

And spit they will. A lawyer representing one of the accused has made clear that his client and the ringleader of the conspiracy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) will plead not guilty, and use the trial as a platform to inveigh against this country and its policies.

Never mind that KSM and his friends had previously announced they would proudly admit their guilt and demand to be executed for this horrific war crime. Now, Attorney General Eric Holder has given them what the self-described mastermind of the September 11 attacks has wanted from the moment he was captured: A lawyer and a trial in New York…

— Hat tip: CSP

[Return to headlines]

Medicaid Cuts Will Affect Thousands on SoonerCare

OKLAHOMA CITY — The first round of Medicaid cuts will affect thousands of Oklahomans on SoonerCare, from their visits to the dentist to higher co-payments and prescription costs. But with the state’s budget crisis, more cuts could be coming and there are fears of what could be on the chopping block next.

Christmas is less than two weeks away. The tree is trimmed and stockings are hanging over the fireplace, but another thought is hanging over the Hill family this holiday.

“We got the equipment now and I don’t know if we’d lose it, but we wouldn’t be able to maintain it. I mean every six weeks, every time they want to check it out it was $500. Where do you come up with an extra $500,” said Mike Hill, whose daughter could be hurt by the cuts.

Kimberly Hill, 25, has Spinal Muscular Dystrophy. Her wheelchair and ventilator keep her going and Medicaid keeps them going, but cuts to the program could change all that.

“This equipment is vital to her living a normal life and without it they want to send her to a nursing home. Now we’re not going to let that happen, that just ends up being the way with life, and that’s debt and that’s the way we’ll go,” Mike Hill said.

The Oklahoma Health Care Authority Board approved a $17 million cut in the state’s Medicaid program SoonerCare just days ago. Now this family fears funding for durable medical equipment for adults will be on the chopping block.

“If the revenue continues to come in short, we’re going to have to increase the amount of cuts in the future. And we’re going to have to make some even more difficult decisions, that’s not just cutting the muscle but also losing the limbs of the program,” said Deputy Chief Officer Nico Gomez of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority.

The equipment from Medicaid is a necessity that’s helping Kimberly graduate from OSU with a political science degree and volunteer for political campaigns. She said she’s scared and doesn’t want to be in a nursing home, but her family said they could be facing cuts in the next 3 months.

“We’re willing to fight do whatever necessary, do the research, help fight for all her friends who are all in the same situation and just fight till the end,” Kimberley’s father said.

The approved changes made to the services will go into effect January 1.

— Hat tip: Lurker from Tulsa

[Return to headlines]

Chanukah Celebrated in a Calgary Mosque

It was all about dialogue Sunday at a Calgary mosque.

The Muslim community learned about the Jewish holiday Chanukah.

Muslim and Jewish families met at the Green Dome Islamic School and Mosque.

They spent the day sharing their beliefs and traditions, something both groups say is very important

“We live in a multi-cultural society and we have to know each other, we have to understand each other, we have to understand our values and customs which may be different from my values and customs so we need a better understanding of each other,” said Iman Syed Soharwardy with the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada.

“There’s more things that are similar than are different in various faiths and it’s very important for people to get together and learn about each other and talk to one another and understand what those similarities are,” said Judy Shapiro with the Calgary Jewish Community Council.

Soharwardy says this is probably the first time Chanukah has been celebrated in a mosque.

— Hat tip: Esther

[Return to headlines]

Black Nativity Angers Italy’s “White Xmas” Party

ROME (Reuters) — A nativity scene featuring a dark-skinned Jesus, Mary and Joseph that has gone on display in a Verona courthouse has created heated debate in a city with strong links to Italy’s anti-immigration Northern League party.

The nativity’s appearance coincides with the League’s controversial operation “White Christmas,” a two-month sweep ending on Christmas Day to ferret out foreigners without proper permits in Coccaglio, a small League-led town east of Milan.

The Christmas scene — featuring a dark-skinned baby Jesus dressed in a red shirt and lying in a manger — was the idea of Mario Giulio Schinaia, the chief Public Prosecutor in Verona.

“History teaches us that baby Jesus and his parents were very probably dark-skinned,” Schinaia told Reuters. “This nativity belongs to a universal Christmas tradition that brings together the whole of Christianity in celebration.”

The nativity has caused heated reactions in the rich northern town, where resentment toward foreigners has spread as the number of immigrants, particularly from north Africa and eastern Europe, continues to rise.

“It is a useless act of provocation, just like the suggestion not to have a nativity scene at all, in order not to offend Muslims,” Northern League farm minister Luca Zaia told one paper, referring to proposals in recent years that town halls and stores should no longer sponsor Christmas scenes.

“Magistrates have other problems to deal with: I hope they spend as much time thinking about lawsuits and trials,” he said.

The Northern League, an ally of conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with key cabinet posts including the interior ministry, has used its growing political clout to secure tough new laws including making illegal immigration a crime.

League proposals have ranged from separate buses and trains for immigrants to banning new mosques and forbidding the serving of Chinese food and kebabs in towns under its control.

Schinaia defended his black nativity scene, saying it was not intended to be polemical but to encourage debate.

“There shouldn’t be a white or black Christmas, only a merry Christmas for everyone, of every skin color, ethnic background and nationality.”

— Hat tip: Sean O’Brian

[Return to headlines]

EU Parliament Ceiling Falls Down Again

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS — Part of the ceiling in the EU parliament complex in Strasbourg fell down over the weekend, in the second such incident in 18 months.

The cave-in saw three concrete slabs, each measuring 25 square metres, in the Pierre Pflimlin office block give way on Saturday (12 December) following heavy rain, a parliament source said.

The offices, which normally house communications staff, were empty. But the collapse took place just 48 hours before MEPs and civil servants are due to arrive on Monday for the last plenary session of the year.

The building, named after a former parliament president from the 1980s, was inaugurated in 1991 at a cost of €38 million.

The latest incident comes after a 10-tonne chunk of the ceiling in the Strasbourg plenary chamber fell down in August 2008.

The 2008 cave-in saw parliament conduct an inspection of the entire complex, which exposed flaws in the construction of glass walkways, but which missed the Pflimlin problem.

The Strasbourg seat has been a source of embarrassment for MEPs in recent years.

In 2007 officials found alarming levels of asbestos. In 2006 it emerged that Strasbourg authorities had been overcharging the EU by millions of euros a year in rent for 25 years. In 2002 Legionnaires disease was found in the plumbing.

It has also become a symbol of bureaucratic waste.

Thousands of EU staff are forced to decamp from Brussels to Strasbourg 12 times a year due to a 1992 political deal between the UK and France naming it as the legislature’s official residence.

— Hat tip: Sean O’Brian

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France: Brawl Engulfs President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Grand Debate

A gathering of citizens in the eastern French city of Troyes has demonstrated the explosive nature of the “great national identity debate” launched by President Nicolas Sarkozy in an effort, say critics, to shore up support on the right.

About 100 people were seated in a hall to discuss what it meant to be French, one of dozens of debates on the subject being held around the country during the next few weeks. Laurent Bacari, a young schoolteacher, got to his feet.

— Hat tip: Steen

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Italy: Berlusconi in Pain, Will Remain Hospitalized

ROME — Premier Silvio Berlusconi is in pain and will remain hospitalized until at least Tuesday with a fractured nose and two broken teeth from an attack by a mentally disturbed man who hit him in the face with a statuette, doctors and aides said.

The attack shocked Italy, already gripped by a tense political climate and highly polarized between Berlusconi’s supporters and his critics.

It also raised questions about the security surrounding the premier. A government official said he expected the premier’s protection to be tightened, as security officials held an emergency meeting.

The 73-year-old Berlusconi was rushed to the San Raffaele hospital in Milan with his face covered in blood after the attack in the northern Italian city Sunday afternoon.

TV footage showed that the assailant had come close to Berlusconi and hurled a souvenir statue of Milan’s Duomo, the Gothic cathedral that is a symbol of the city, hitting him in the face. Italian newspapers say the statuette was made of metal.

The attacker, a 42-year-old man with a history of psychological problems, has been arrested. After a night of questioning at a police barracks, the man was moved to the San Vittore prison in Milan, the ANSA news agency said. Police have identified him as Massimo Tartaglia.

The premier lost a lot of blood and is taking antibiotics and drugs for “persistent” pain, the hospital said at midday. His vital signs are normal and he is eating with difficulty but will not need surgery, his doctor, Alberto Zangrillo, said.

Berlusconi’s spokesman said the premier is tired and has a strong headache.

“We try to keep him at rest. He would like to re-immerse himself into his frantic activity, but doctors say caution is necessary,” Paolo Bonaiuti told Italian media.

The premier asked to see newspapers upon waking up at the hospital Monday and was visited by aides, Bonaiuti said.

The premier had to scrap some plans, including a meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Rome on Wednesday, his office said. The attack also put at risk Berlusconi’s participation at a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he was scheduled to travel on Thursday.

Berlusconi received calls and well get-well wishes from Italian and foreign officials, including the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Berlusconi’s entry into politics has further polarized a society that is traditionally divided into fiercely opposed factions. Along with widespread solidarity for the premier, groups praising Berlusconi’s assailant mushroomed on Facebook in the aftermath of the attack.

Roberto Maroni, who as interior minister is in charge of police forces, said he had counted some 300 Facebook groups praising Tartaglia. He also mentioned Youtube videos showing the attack with comments inciting more violence.

Maroni, who presided over the meeting in Milan, said the security detail would be reviewed, but he also added he did not see any immediate faults. Typically, about 30 secret service agents protect Berlusconi at his public appearances. But the premier, who considers himself a man of the people with a taste for showmanship, also likes to mingle with his supporters and shake hands.

“Berlusconi has the right to get close to his supporters because this is democracy, this is politics,” said Maroni.

Aides and other people who have seen Berlusconi in recent days describe him as worried by what he called a climate of hatred surrounding him.

Zangrillo, who is Berlusconi’s personal physician and the first one to come to the premier’s aide after the attack, said Berlusconi was shocked.

“Staring at his bloodied hand, he told me: ‘There’s a climate of hatred, I expected this would happen,’“ Zangrillo was quoted as saying by Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading newspaper. Bonaiuti, Berlusconi’s spokesman, had similar comments.

Berlusconi is entangled in a sex scandal and faces criminal trials for corruption in Milan after an immunity law was overturned earlier this year. He has faced protests, with tens of thousands marching in Rome on Dec. 5 to demand his resignation. And a turncoat recently alleged Berlusconi had ties to the Mafia, an accusation Berlusconi has forcefully dismissed.

Berlusconi himself has launched vehement attacks at the judiciary, saying the magistrates who put him on trial are politically motivated.

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Norway: Teachers Go Wild After Christmas Party

From Norwegian: Teachers in an elementary school in Sunndal went wild after a Christmas party, throwing furniture out of the windows.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Officials Say Priest Attacks Menorah in Moldova

VIDEO HERE www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgBXfpFGSGI

CHISINAU, Moldova — Dozens of people led by an Orthodox priest smashed a menorah in Moldova’s capital, using hammers and iron bars to remove the candelabra during Hanukkah, officials said.

The 1.5 meter(5-foot)-tall ceremonial candelabrum was retrieved, reinstalled and is now under police guard.

Police said they were investigating the Sunday attack but there was no official reaction from Moldova’s Orthodox Church, which is part of the Russian Orthodox Church and counts 70 percent of Moldovans as members.

The U.S. Embassy and Chisinau city government condemned the attack. City officials called on the church to investigate. The head of the church, Bishop Vladimir Cantarean, was at his mother’s funeral in Ukraine on Monday and was expected to make a statement when he returns, the church said.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Spain Sentences Barcelona Subway Terror Cell Men

A Spanish court has sentenced 11 men to prison sentences for belonging to a terror cell plotting to stage suicide bomb attacks in Barcelona.

The group of men — 10 from Pakistan and one from India — were accused of conspiring to blow up part of the city’s transport network.

Police discovered the plan during a series of raids in January 2008 after a cell member approached the police.

The men received sentences of up to 14 years in prison.

The judges in the case said the men had been found guilty of belonging to a terror organisation but not of actually conspiring to stage a terror attack as the amount of explosives found was insufficient to do so.

The group’s ringleader, Ahmed Mirza, a 40-year-old imam, was sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison.

Judge Gomez Bermudez said that the cell had plotted to detonate their bombs on Barcelona’s metro system, in an echo of the 2004 Madrid bombings that killed 191 people.

The prosecution said the bomb had been planned to proceed the 2008 general elections in response to the presence of Spanish troops in Afghanistan.

— Hat tip: Sean O’Brian

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UK: David Miliband Bans Envoys From Helping the BNP

David Miliband has secretly banned British embassy staff from giving help to BNP leader Nick Griffin.

The Foreign Secretary has also ordered diplomats not to assist the far-Right party’s other MEP, former National Front leader Andrew Brons.

A letter, entitled ‘Handling Extremist MEPs’ and marked ‘Restricted’, was circulated to the heads of Britain’s European embassies after the pair were elected to the European Parliament in June.

Written by Matthew Rycroft, the UK’s top European Union diplomat, it says far-Right MEPs, like other British members of the European Parliament, can be sent ‘factual written briefings’ on policy issues but nothing else.

British MEPs from mainstream parties can normally expect private briefings from officials and to be offered the chance to meet diplomats and Ministers.

Mr Rycroft wrote: ‘FCO Ministers have decided that there should be no other contact with MEPs of any nationality who represent racist or extremist views.’

The letter adds that other Government offices have also been advised to restrict help. As a direct consequence of the policy — revealed after a Freedom of Information Act request — the BNP MEPs have not been invited to two Foreign Office receptions.

Last night, the Foreign Office said the letter was to remind diplomats of the ‘longstanding’ policy on those who represent racist views.

The disclosure follows the row over Mr Miliband’s attack on the Conservatives’ alliance with the Latvian Fatherland And Freedom Party and one of its MEPs who, the Foreign Secretary said, had an ‘anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi past’.

But it also comes after Labour’s decision to abandon its policy of not sharing the same platform with the BNP — paving the way for Nick Griffin’s controversial appearance on Question Time with Justice Secretary Jack Straw.

— Hat tip: Sean O’Brian

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UK: Just for Once, The Archbishop is Right … Treating Christians as Cranks is an Act of Cultural Suicide

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, comes in for a lot of stick — not least from columnists like me.

But in the past few days, he has said something important. He has criticised Government ministers for thinking that Christian beliefs are no longer relevant in modern Britain, and for looking at religion as a ‘problem’.

Many Government faith initiatives, he observed, assumed that religion was an eccentricity practised by oddballs, foreigners and minorities.

This is not just a seasonal exercise in special pleading by a Church leader. Dr Williams has put his finger on what should be a cause of extreme disquiet — the war of attrition being waged against Christian beliefs.

In recent times, there has been a string of cases in which it is no exaggeration to say that British Christians have been persecuted for expressing their faith.

[…]

The curious fact is that Labour’s hostility to faith is highly selective. It does everything it can to protect and support minority creeds while appearing to do everything it can to attack Christianity.

The root of this double standard is the unpleasant prejudice that minority faiths hail from cultures where people are less well-educated and so cannot be blamed for their beliefs. This, of course, is a deeply racist attitude, and is commonly found on the Left.

[…]

Unlike U.S. mainstream Churches which, as descendants from the English Puritans, remain deeply wedded to the Biblical tradition, the Church of England has always looked down on true Scriptural believers as half-wits.

With such a half-hearted foundation of religious belief, it has been more vulnerable than other Churches to the secular onslaught against religion.

Dr Williams exemplifies this weakness by trying to go with the flow of social change and is for ever apologising for Christianity.

Certainly, it did some terrible things in the past to people of other faiths. But it is also responsible for the astonishing achievements of western civilisation.

Rather than complaining about politicians, Dr Williams should use his office to teach the nation about the seminal importance of Christianity to this society. But to do that, he has to have faith in his own Church — a faith that too often appears to be lacking.

— Hat tip: JD

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UK: Judges Acted ‘Irresponsibly’ Over Binyam Mohammed, Says Foreign Office

Lawyers for the Foreign Secretary have launched an extraordinary courtroom attack on High Court judges who want to disclose intelligence material related to allegations of torture involving the CIA.

David Miliband accused the two senior judges of irresponsibly “charging in” to a diplomatically sensitive area over what happened to former terror detainee Binyam Mohamed while held by the Americans in Pakistan.

Jonathan Sumption QC, appearing for the Foreign Secretary, told the Court of Appeal the judges’ stance was “both, in many respects, unnecessary and profoundly damaging to the interests of this country”.

Mr Sumption added: “I would go so far as to say their views were irresponsible.”

— Hat tip: Esther

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UK: Millionaire Who Fought Off a Knife-Wielding Burglar is Jailed (While the Intruder is Let Off)

A millionaire businessman who fought back against a knife-wielding burglar was jailed for two-and-a-half years yesterday. But his attacker has been spared prison.

Munir Hussain, 53, and his family were tied up and told to lie on the floor by career criminal Waled Salem, who burst into his home with two other masked men.

Mr Hussain escaped and attacked Salem with a metal pole and a cricket bat. But yesterday it was the businessman who was starting a prison sentence for his ‘very violent revenge’.

Jailing him, Judge John Reddihough said some members of the public would think that 56-year-old Salem ‘deserved what happened to him’ and that Mr Hussain ‘should not have been prosecuted’.

But had he spared Mr Hussain jail, the judge said, the ‘rule of law’ would collapse.

He said: ‘If persons were permitted to take the law into their own hands and inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting the criminal justice system take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse.’

Salem, who has previous convictions, has already been given a non-custodial sentence despite carrying out what the judge called a ‘serious and wicked’ attack.

Mr Hussain’s nightmare began on September 3 last year when he, his wife, 18-year-old daughter and two sons aged 18 and 15 returned from their mosque during Ramadan to find three intruders in their home in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.

They were tied up and told to get on the floor if they did not want to be killed. One of Mr Hussain’s sons managed to escape and alerted Mr Hussain’s younger brother Tokeer, 35, who lived a few doors away.

Mr Hussain made a break for freedom by throwing a coffee table at his attackers. He and Tokeer chased the gang and brought Salem to the ground in a front garden.

Reading Crown Court heard how Mr Hussain and his brother then beat Salem while he lay on the ground, using a cricket bat, a pole and a hockey stick — leaving him with a fractured skull and brain damage following the ‘sustained’ attack.

What is the law on defending your home?

If you use force which is ‘not excessive’ against burglars then the law is on your side.

Last year’s Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill contained clauses to protect people from prosecution if they act instinctively and out of fear for their safety.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw said:

‘Law-abiding citizens should not be put off tackling criminals by fear of excessive investigation.

‘For a passer-by witnessing a street crime or a householder faced with a burglar, we are reassuring them that if they use force which is not excessive or disproportionate, the law really is behind them.’

Salem’s condition meant he was unable to enter a plea to false imprisonment. He was given a non-custodial sentence-in October.

Salem, of Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, did not give evidence at Mr Hussain’s trial. Michael Wolkind, QC, representing Mr Hussain, who runs a soundproofing company, said his client’s actions were ‘taken in the agony of the moment’ and that his ‘calm judgment was not available’.

‘If there was a call to arms it was down to the extreme moment of stress,’ he said. Mr Wolkind said Mr Hussain, a devout Muslim, blamed himself for the attack and felt guilty for not protecting his family properly. ‘It will take him a number of years to recover,’ he said.

The court also heard from psychiatrist Dr Phillip Joseph who said Mr Hussain was a calm person who kept himself in control, but that his body had chosen the ‘fight rather than flight’ option.

During mitigation a number of letters from Daily Mail readers who had supported a campaign against the businessman’s conviction were read to the judge.

The court heard that Mr Hussain’s wife Shahwen has had a mini stroke since the attack.

Judge Reddihough sentenced Munir Hussain to 30 months in jail for grievous bodily harm with intent. Tokeer was given 39 months because the judge said he had not faced as much provocation as his brother.

‘However, the attack which then occurred was totally unnecessary and amounted to a very violent revenge attack on a defenceless man.

‘It may be that some members of the public or media commentators will assert that Salem deserved what happened to him, and that you should not have been prosecuted and need not be punished.

‘The courts must make it clear that such conduct is criminal and unacceptable.’

Razi Shah, Mr Hussain’s solicitor, said his family were devastated but hoped the conviction could be overturned at appeal.

Last night an MP condemned the decision to jail Mr Hussain as ‘perverse’. Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, said: ‘It’s absolutely disgraceful. The public are sick to the back teeth of this kind of decision.

‘Whatever the rights and wrongs, the starting point should be that this man’s home was violated. He must have been absolutely petrified.

‘A person who inflicts this kind of misery is free to go out and do it again somewhere. It’s always the same, the real criminals get away scot free.’

The 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act sets out the terms on which people might ‘use no more force than absolutely necessary’ against criminals.

Victims or those who intervene to stop a criminal have the backing of the law if they act instinctively, if they fear for their safety and act accordingly, if they act to prevent a criminal escaping, or if their use of force is neither ‘excessive nor disproportionate’.

— Hat tip: Gaia

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UK: Rocket-Shaped Minaret Sparks Row

A DECISION to build a huge rocket-shaped minaret and two giant arches in the style of Muslim headscarves on one of Britain’s most historic streets is sparking outrage and risks escalating racial tension, according to community leaders.

Council chiefs in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets are using millions of pounds of public money to push through the bizarre scheme in Brick Lane, a symbolic melting pot of immigrant communities for more than 400 years.

— Hat tip: Steen

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UK: Single Mother of Eight Living in a £2.6m Mansion — So Much for Labour’s Housing Benefit Crackdown

A year after the Government vowed to crack down on housing benefits, a single mother of eight is still living in a £2.6million mansion funded by taxpayers.

Francesca Walker receives more than £90,000 a year in housing allowance to meet the rent on the five-bedroom villa, plus other payouts of £15,000.

A defiant Miss Walker, 34, insists that she and her children aged from six to 16 are completely justified in living there as the council could not find them a big enough home.

And, bizarrely, she claims that ‘living in this house is holding me back’.

Miss Walker, whose near neighbours include David Cameron, Elle Macpherson and Hugh Grant, said: ‘I’ve started my own business making organic soaps and bath products but any money I make I have to pay straight back to the council so there’s no incentive for me to work hard to grow my business.

Picture: Francesca Walker with Mohammed, daughter Rashida and son Moustapha in her £2.6million mansion

[…]

Miss Walker was given the house last September on a three-year lease because a rule introduced in April 2008 forces local authorities to place tenants in private properties if suitable council homes are unavailable.

This was intended to promote fairness but has caused, in some cases, huge cost to the taxpayer.

Last month, it was revealed that a Somali family of nine are living in a £1.8million central London house costing £1,600 a week.

And a family of eight Afghan immigrants have been housed for the last 14 months in a £ 1.2million house in Ealing, West London, at a cost so far of £168,000.

— Hat tip: JD

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UK: Sharia Law Sneaked Into Labour Budget

THE Treasury plans to rewrite Britain’s tax rules to usher in a new wave of Sharia law for the country’s financial system.

The one-line revelation is buried in the 212-page pre-Budget report.

It is among a string of startling details which barely merit a mention in Alistair Darling’s controversial mini-Budget — prompting fresh accusations that Labour is “burying bad news”.

The Government wants to tap into the fast-growing Sharia finance market, set to top £205billion a year, and turn London into the “global gateway for Islamic finance”.

Many conventional financial products are not Sharia compliant because Muslim clerics view conventional loans, which involve interest payments, as sinful.

The UK Government was one of the first Western countries to issue a state-backed sukuk, an Islamic bond. It now wants to rewrite tax laws to stop Muslim businessmen being unfairly taxed when they try to raise money on their companies.

Conventional loans allow them to take equity out of their business, using the property as collateral, but to be Sharia compliant a Muslim “sells” the business to the bank and then rents it back. That leaves the businessman facing a bill for capital gains tax and the Treasury wants to level the tax playing field.

Mohammed Amin, head of Islamic finance at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: “The UK has become the leading Western country in Islamic finance by taking a series of measures to ensure that Islamic finance is taxed no worse and no better than conventional finance.

“The pre-Budget report continues this progress by including measures to equalise the tax treatment of property refinancing transactions.” Ministers are also considering issuing Government bonds to Islamic banks to help them comply with new financial regulations.

With three independent Islamic banks and high street names at the forefront of compliant accounts, London is one of the world’s largest centres for Islamic finance.

Sharia-compliant mortgages, car insurance and even baby bonds are available for Muslims wanting to avoid “riba” — interest payments.

Supporters say the Government is wisely getting in on the ground floor of a market which could net the City billions in the future.

Critics warn Labour is rushing into a financial system it does not fully understand and question how far laws should be rewritten to accommodate Islamic practices. The Financial Services Authority says its policy is one of “no obstacles, no special favours” for Islamic finance.

Last week’s pre-Budget report includes the revelation that bankers will still net £4.5billion in bonuses this year despite the so-called super-tax on the City.

Ministers also used the cover of the report to admit the Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme, permitting deferment of interest payments, has been an abject failure.

Shadow Housing Minister Grant Shapps said: “It’s gone the way of many other Brown initiatives. We’ve stumped up for the expensive consultancy bills but the actual scheme has failed to help more than a handful of hard-pressed families.”

A Communities and Local Government spokeswoman said: “The Government has widely publicised that fortunately only 15 families have so far needed the backstop help of the Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme.”

— Hat tip: Steen

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UK: Taliban Can be Admired for Their Faith and Loyalty, Says Bishop

The Rt Rev Stephen Venner called for a more sympathetic approach to the Islamic fundamentalists that recognises their humanity.

The Church of England’s Bishop to the Forces warned that it will be harder to reach a peaceful solution to the war if the Afghan insurgents are portrayed too negatively.

His comments came as the Prime Minister visited Afghanistan and warned that the Taliban was fighting a “guerilla war” aimed at causing “maximum damage”. Gordon Brown said soldiers were discovering improvised explosive devices every two hours.

Mr Brown stayed overnight in the Allied base in the southern city of Kandahar, the first British Prime Minister to spend the night in a war zone since Winston Churchill. His visit came days after the death of Lance Corporal Adam Drane, the 100th member of the British forces to die in Afghanistan this year. His death brought the total number of British service personnel who have died since the start of operations in 2001 to 237.

Bishop Venner stressed his admiration for the sacrifices made by the British forces fighting in Afghanistan but also urged the need for a reassessment of how the Taliban are viewed.

“We’ve been too simplistic in our attitude towards the Taliban,” said Bishop Venner, who was recently commissioned in his new role by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

“There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the west could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it’s not honest really.

“The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.”

— Hat tip: Sean O’Brian

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UK: We Are Being Gagged: The Right to Speak Freely is Being Undermined by Those Who Should be Protecting it

The dismissal of the case against Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang is a victory for common sense, but the right of free speech, which has been at the heart of our democracy for centuries, is being stealthily eroded.

Common sense has, for once, prevailed. The criminal case — yes, criminal case — against a Christian couple, Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang, has been dismissed.

Hopefully, the Vogelenzangs can get on with their lives and start to rebuild their hotel business — a business that has almost been destroyed because of the allegations against them.

Thanks to the donations of thousands of Christians, The Christian Institute was able to pay for Mr and Mrs Vogelenzang’s legal defence. We did so because it was a significant case of free speech, not just for Christians, but for every person’s right to question someone else’s beliefs.

[…]

Everyone now knows about the Vogelenzangs but at The Christian Institute we deal with many other cases. Indeed, over the past year, we have dealt with approximately 170 separate incidents where Christians have had their liberty infringed, only a fraction of which ever make headlines.

We might also consider redefining so-called ‘hate crimes’ and ‘hate incidents’. The definition of ‘hate’ is alarmingly elastic.

— Hat tip: JD

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Barry Rubin: Why All the Excuses for Palestinian Intransigence Don’t Make Sense

The Arab-Israeli, or Israel-Palestinian, conflict is the most misrepresented subject in the entire world. The most basic facts are often distorted and the most fantastical of narratives provided, even in college classrooms, about what has actually happened.

On the most single important issue in this framework-why isn’t there peace, who wants and doesn’t want peace, and how can peace be achieved-there is a common set of arguments against Israel. It goes like this:

How can the Palestinians make peace when they are suffering so much and when Israel builds settlements, or Israeli leaders make statements saying they want to keep some of the territory or won’t give up east Jerusalem, or do a variety of other things? The idea that the Palestinians yearn for peace, are eagerly trying to make some kind of agreement, but are only stopped by Israeli intransigence seems completely self-evident to the point that any challenge of this idea is ridiculed, ignored, or treated as some kind of dishonest manipulation.

People think that when they’ve made these points it constitutes some kind of devastating, unanswerable rebuttal proving why there is no peace and why Israel is responsible. In fact, these statements are all either long outdated or simply beside the point.

In addition, many of the things said are factually wrong. Israel has neither constructed new settlements nor expanded their boundaries for fifteen years. But for the moment let’s leave aside the factual issues. It is easy to show that these claims are inaccurate but either ears are shut or the columns of the publications are closed to such responses.

Still, nothing could be simpler than to answer these claims.

Here’s the answer…

— Hat tip: Barry Rubin

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Vandals Deface Russian Sacred Place in Jerusalem

Unknown vandals have defaced an Orthodox Holy Trinity cathedral in Jerusalem, the Russian clerical mission’s official website reports.

“Two red inscriptions in Hebrew reading ‘Death’ and ‘Death to Christians’ have appeared on the altar of the Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral,” the statement says.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Air Strike ‘Kills 70 Civilians’ In Yemen

The Saudi Arabia air force has bombed a market in Yemen killing 70 civilians, rebels in the north of the country say.

The rebels, known as Houthis, have been fighting Saudi and Yemeni forces since August this year and accuse the Saudis of frequent attacks across the border.

Bani Maan, the village hit by the air raid is in the border region between Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

The Yemeni army has reportedly claimed it carried out the attack, not Saudi Arabian forces.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Military Mutiny in Iran?

Leading commentators and diplomats have been pondering for quite some time why the Iranian leader is not prepared to act against the revolution in a major way. The “China model” could be applied, a brutal, fast, and extremely violent strike against the opposition. According to conventional wisdom, tyrants will use all means to eliminate their opponents. So why haven’t the mullahs adopted Chinese methods?

Tanks and soldiers

Applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran, it means the following:

• At a given time (e.g., around three o’clock in the morning) soldiers would raid the cities and arrest everybody suspected of even the slightest “green” revolutionary inclination.
• All communications with the outside world would be temporarily shut down.
• People would wake up with a statement by the leader proclaiming the definitive end of all demonstrations. Then thousands would be executed.

Speed and brutality are the key aspects of the China model. Why does Khamenei not activate this model?

This summer he did consider this, before he became ill. He even gave carte blanche for the arrest of opposition leader Mousavi. But Khamenei has subsequently stopped its implementation. Why? Because he had been told that this would provoke an explosion that would likely engulf him and his regime.

Revolutionary Guards

At the time, I also heard another reason, which, if true, would be the main reason. There are serious doubts about the military itself. The army and parts of the Revolutionary Guards (abbreviated as RG) would, under those circumstances, choose the side of the opposition and the people. The military power of Khamenei would be broken. This, however, was speculation without proof.

Now there is evidence to support it. On December 10, a statement signed by a number of officers and commanders of the Iranian army was released. The regular army of Iran had not been involved in the suppression of the population.

— Hat tip: Sean O’Brian

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Terrorism: Obama in ‘Crusade Against Islam’, Says Al-Qaeda No.2

Dubai, 14 Dec. (AKI) — An audio message purported to be the voice of Al-Qaeda’s number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has accused US president Barack Obama of engaging in a crusade against Islam. “What American president Barack Obama is doing is nothing more than a new episode of his crusader war against Islam,” said al-Zawahiri, in the 26-minute-long message posted to Islamist websites.

He also spoke about the Palestinian question and the division between the Gaza-ruling movement Hamas and the West Bank ruling Fatah.

Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor, asked both Palestinian political groups to carry out a jihad or holy war.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Al Qaeda Offers ‘Condolences’ For Innocent Victims

(CNN) — An al Qaeda spokesman released a video message in English offering condolences to its “unintended Muslim victims” killed in attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Adam Gadahn, also known as Azzam the American, appeared in a 17-minute video released on Islamist online forums late Friday.

Al Qaeda “have condemned and continue to condemn” all attacks by Western powers or “secular political forces,” Gadahn said.

“We express our condolences to the families of the Muslim men, women and children killed in these criminal acts,” he said in the video. “And we ask Allah to have mercy on those killed and accept them as shohadaa (martyrs).”

“We also express the same in regard to the unintended Muslim victims of the mujahedeen’s operations against the crusaders and their allies and puppets, and to the countless faceless and nameless Muslim victims of the murderous crusades” in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Waziristan regions and Swat Valley, and elsewhere, he said.

It is a rare example of al Qaeda offering condolences to the families of those killed in the group’s own attacks.

[…]

The video did not address the troop surge, but Gadahn had a general warning to any countries partnering with the United States in the region.

“Those who have made the foolish decision to stand with America and its allies in their losing war against Islam … you have not only betrayed Islam and Muslims and left the fold of faith, but you have also caused the destabilization of nations and the displacement … of thousands of weak and oppressed people,” Gadahn said.

“The blood of countless Muslims is on your hands, and the security and very future of the countries you claim to defend and serve has been placed in jeopardy because your external enemies are taking advantage of your heedlessness as you fight and kill your fellow countrymen for American dollars.”

The al Qaeda member is an American-born Muslim convert who has released video and audio statements in the past.

— Hat tip: Sean O’Brian

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Allow Afghan Women to Give Massages: Army Adviser

A Swedish army gender adviser in Afghanistan has taken the Armed Forces to task for only employing local men to perform massages on troops stationed in Mazar-E-Sharif.

In a written internal document submitted from Swedish headquarters at Camp Northern Lights, Gender Field Adviser Captain Krister Fahlstedt of Afghanistan force FS17 took exception to an army contract specifying that on-base massage services should be performed by men..

“The agreement specifies, with no further explanation, that the physiotherapists (masseurs/masseuses) should be men,” wrote Fahlstedt in his November submission.

— Hat tip: Esther

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British Forces Bishop Apologises for Suggesting Taliban Should be Praised for Their Faith and Sense of Loyalty

A church of England bishop has apologised for suggesting the Taliban should be admired for their religious conviction and loyalty.

The Right Reverend Stephen Venner, the Church’s bishop for the Armed Forces, acknowledged that his comments appeared ‘incredibly insensitive’ and stressed his support for British troops in Afghanistan.

He said he was ‘deeply grieved’ to have caused offence.

But one MP accused him of offering ‘comfort and succour to our enemies’ with his remarks.

Bob Russell, Liberal Democrat member for the garrison town of Colchester in Essex, said: ‘Why did he not talk about the loyalty of our troops?

‘The bishop would have been well advised to concentrate on boosting the morale of our armed forces rather than boosting the morale of our enemy.’

Dr Venner, 65, later apologised for his comments in a newspaper interview.

He said it was ‘one small phrase in quite a long interview’ intended to suggest that not all members of the Taliban were ‘equally evil’.

He told the BBC: ‘If that has caused offence, I am deeply grieved by it because that’s the very last thing I would want to do.’

Dr Venner also issued a statement condemning the Taliban’s tactics and expressing his backing for UK forces.

He said: ‘The way the Taliban are waging war in Afghanistan is evil, both in their use of indiscriminate killing and their terrorising of the civilian population.

‘No religion could condone their actions. I give my full support to the British and allied troops who are engaged in the country.’

Dr Venner, who retired as Bishop of Dover last month, was commissioned in his new role by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

— Hat tip: Gaia

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Indian Kashmir Women’s Deaths ‘Not Murder’

Two Muslim women whose deaths sparked major independence rallies in Indian Kashmir earlier this year were not murdered, investigators said on Monday.

Many Kashmiris opposed to New Delhi’s rule over the Muslim-majority region have accused Indian security forces of raping the 17-year-old girl and her 22-year-old sister-in-law before their bodies were found in a shallow stream.

“The CBI today handed over its report to the high court. It says the women had drowned and had not been raped or murdered,” Central Bureau of Investigation lawyer Anil Bhan told reporters in Srinagar.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Malaysia Hearings Start in Catholic ‘Allah’ Fight

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church urged a court Monday to let Christians use “Allah” as a translation for God and overturn a government ban that has become a symbol of religious grievances in Muslim-majority Malaysia.

The High Court began hearing legal arguments in the dispute, which began in late 2007 after the government blocked non-Muslims from translating God as “Allah” in their literature, saying it would confuse Muslims..

Authorities have insisted that Allah should be used exclusively by Muslims to refer to God, and its use by other religions would be misleading.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Pakistan: No Muslim Involved in Suicide Attacks in Country’

KARACHI: Floating the idea of a change in the Pakistani society, Jamaat-e-Islami’s top leadership at a congregation of the JI’s workers unanimously blamed the United States’ agencies for terrorism, chaos and anarchy in Pakistan.

“The US wants international control on the Pakistani nukes, and terrorism is just a pretext to achieve that target,” said JI’s chief Munawar Hassan at a one-day training congregation held at Nishtar Park on Sunday.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Pakistan: Four Suspected Blackwater Operatives Arrested in Islamabad

Islamabad, Dec. 13 (ANI): Four alleged agents of American spy agency Blackwater were arrested by Pakistani security agencies while they were trying to forcibly trying to enter into Lahore Cantonment on Saturday.

According to The Nation, lethal weapons including AK-47 rifles and spy gadgets were recovered from their possession at a checkpost near Sherpao Bridge.

Sources said that security personnel intercepted a suspected vehicle near Sherpao Bridge in which four foreigners were sitting.

The sources further revealed that the suspects started arguing with the law-enforcing agency officials. When the arrested agents failed to produce necessary documents and the purpose of entering into the most sensitive area in the city, they were arrested and taken to an unidentified location for further interrogation.

Following their arrest, the law-enforcement agencies have been put on high alert across the provincial metropolis and armed patrolling had been intensified.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Rules of Engagement Killing U.S. Soldiers

You won’t believe how politics handcuff troops in Afghanistan

New military rules of engagement ostensibly to protect Afghan civilians are putting the lives of U.S. forces in jeopardy, claim Army and Marine sources, as the Taliban learns to game plan based the rules’ imposed limits.

The rules of engagement, or ROEs, apply to all coalition forces of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Their enactment is in response to Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s complaints over mounting civilian deaths apparently occurring in firefights.

Despite the fact that the newly arrived U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, imposed the more restrictive ROEs to minimize the killing of innocent civilians, however, the Taliban is well aware of them and has its own forces acting in ways to counteract them.

The impact of new restrictions has created increasing frustration and concern among U.S. Army and Marine Corps troops who now are compelled to follow these rules despite the danger of letting the Taliban live to fight again another day.

Critics see the new ROEs being more oriented toward defensive rather than offensive operations, as evidenced by recent charges of murder against two U.S. Army snipers because they had targeted a Taliban commander who reportedly wasn’t holding a weapon.

The actual ROEs are said to be classified U.S. and NATO secrets, but based on individual soldier accounts, those restrictions include the following:

— Hat tip: JD

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Rabbit-Proof Fence Grossly Inaccurate: Keith Windschuttle

RABBIT-PROOF Fence, the film that in the eyes of millions of children around Australia tells the true story of the Stolen Generations, is “grossly inaccurate” and should be withdrawn from schools.

Keith Windschuttle, a frontline warrior in the history wars, has questioned the veracity of the film — though not the book on which it was based — in the third volume of his series, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, to be released next week, The Australian reports.

In Phillip Noyce’s award-winning film, three young indigenous girls are snatched from their family’s embrace on a remote settlement in Western Australia, forcibly removed by a racist government bent on “breeding out the colour”.

Based on a true story, the movie tells of Molly, Daisy and Gracie and their remarkable 2000km trek home following the rabbit fence. It remains the most vivid and poignant example yet of what has come to be known as the Stolen Generations.

The problem is, this big-screen version of their journey, which is now a staple of school curriculums across the country, does not include all the details of the original story.

Windschuttle has researched the experiences of sisters Molly Craig, 14, Daisy Kadibill, 8, and their cousin Gracie Fields, 10, for his book.

According to the historian, Molly and Gracie were removed from their families on the Jigalong Depot more than 75 years ago because of their “sexual activity with white men working in the area”.

The West Australian chief protector responsible for their removal, Auber Octavius Neville, had not been trying to “breed out the colour” by marrying off half-caste Aboriginal girls to whites as depicted in the film, Windschuttle said.

His claim was born of a review of state archives, where he found a letter to A.O. Neville in December 1930 by a Mrs Chellow, from Murra Munda Station near Jigalong, in which Molly and Gracie were accused of “running wild with the whites”.

“Running wild’ was said to be a contemporary euphemism for promiscuity, which meant the girls were having sex with the white males in the area,” Windschuttle writes in the preface of his new work.

He told The Australian yesterday: “They didn’t say these girls were sc—ing boys, they said they were running wild . . . anyone from that era knows the meaning of the term.

“That is the big lie of the film. Neville did not use child removal in order to breed out the race.”

— Hat tip: Sean O’Brian

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Canada Recalls Spitting Diplomat From Tanzania

A Canadian junior envoy who caused a diplomatic spat by spitting at a Tanzanian policeman and journalist has been recalled.

Canada’s High Commissioner Robert Orr was summoned by the Tanzanian foreign ministry over the incident last week.

“In the best interest of all involved parties, the Canadian official will be leaving Tanzania at the earliest possible time,” Mr Orr said.

However, the journalist concerned says he still wants to take legal action.

“Justice must be done. Repatriating him is only one stage, but it doesn’t mean that it’s over. I will go to the police, to make sure that they hold his passport,” Jerry Muro, from the Tanzanian Broadcasting Corporation (TBC) told the local HabariLeo newspaper.

He says he was spat on at the police station where the diplomat was taken last Wednesday.

The diplomat was arrested after he reportedly spat at a traffic policeman on duty in the middle of a traffic jam in the Banana district on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam.

Tanzania’s foreign ministry says the incident was a humiliation not just for the police officer and journalist concerned, but for the entire country.

— Hat tip: Sean O’Brian

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Pictured: Islamic Militants Stone Man to Death for Adultery in Somalia as Villagers Are Forced to Watch

Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim, a 48-year-old, was buried in a hole up to his chest and pelted with rocks until he died.

The group responsible, Hizbul Islam, also shot dead a man they claimed was a murderer.

But the verdict was so shocking that it prompted a gun battle between rivals within the group that left three militants dead, witnesses said.

The executions took place yesterday in Afgoye, some 20 miles south-west of the capital of Mogadishu.

Hizbul Islam fighters ordered hundreds of residents to a field, where a rebel judge announced that the two men had confessed to murder and adultery.

A woman who had confessed to fornication had been sentenced to 100 lashes, he added.

‘This is their day of justice,’ the judge, Osman Siidow Hasan, told the crowd. ‘We investigated and they confessed.’

But when some Hizbul Islam fighters wanted to delay the executions, a bloody gun battle broke out between the two factions, shocked residents said.

‘Three Hizbul Islam fighters died and five others were injured after they fought each other,” Halima Osman, an Afgoye shopkeeper, told Reuters in Mogadishu by telephone.

‘Some wanted to delay the execution while the others insisted. They exchanged fire. The group that was against the execution was overpowered and chased away,’ she said.

Once the gun battle was over, the militants coldly carried out the verdicts.

A relative of the murder victim shot the first as he lay on the floor.

‘I could not watch,’ local man Ali Gabow told Reuters. ‘The lady who had been with the second man was only given 100 lashes because she said she had never married.’

The U.S. claims that al Shabaab is al Qaeda’s proxy in the failed Horn of Africa state. That rival Islamic groups are beginning to align their practices with al Shabaab is a chilling twist in the already frightening militancy that is gripping the country.

President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed’s Western-backed government controls just a few strategic sites in Mogadishu.

Western security experts say the country has become a safe haven for militants, including foreign jihadists, who are using it to plot attacks across the impoverished region and beyond.

There are some fears that Somalia could become the new pre-9/11 Afghanistan.

Al Shabaab, and to a lesser extent Hizbul Islam, are fighting the government to impose their harsh interpretation of Islamic Sharia law across the drought-ravaged country.

Al Shabaab clerics have banned movies, dancing at weddings and playing or watching soccer in the areas under their control, as well as carrying out executions and amputations.

Fighting has killed 19,000 Somali civilians since the start of 2007 and driven another 1.5 million from their homes, triggering one of the world’s most acute humanitarian disasters.

The chaos has also spilled offshore, where Somali pirate gangs have made tens of millions of dollars in ransoms targeting commercial shipping in the Indian Ocean and busy Gulf of Aden.

— Hat tip: Gaia

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Study Reveals Impact of Immigration on UK Faiths

Britain is home to 1.1 million Muslim immigrants, according to a comprehensive study of faith and migration.

The finding will be published in a report by the IPPR, the respected left-of-centre think-tank, which will conclude that thousands of Muslims have moved to the UK because it is more sympathetic towards Islam than other European countries.

It comes days after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that the proportion of the UK population who are foreign-born has almost doubled in the past 20 years to 11 per cent, or 6.7 million people.

— Hat tip: Steen

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UK: Muslim Total Hits 2.4m as They Say: UK’s Nicest to Us

BRITAIN’S Muslim population has hit 2.4million because the UK is seen as the best country in Europe for the Islamic faith, a report is to reveal.

There are 1.1million Muslim immigrants and 1.3million UK-born Muslims — mostly the ­children of newcomers.

Muslims quizzed said there was less open hostility to Islam in Britain than other EU countries and that the Government is ­sympathetic to them.

But critics seized on the f­indings as confirmation that Labour’s multicultural policies are pandering to Islam.

Sir Andrew Green, of the ­pressure group Migrationwatch, warned the Muslim ­population in Britain was likely to be even higher than research showed.

He said: “The rapid rise in the Muslim population is just one way in which mass immigration promoted, even encouraged, by this Government has affected the whole nature of our society.”

Muslim illegal immigrants were unlikely to respond to Government-linked surveys, he added.

The population research is to be published next month in a new “faith map” of the UK drawn up by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think-tank with close links to 10 Downing Street.

Even the authors admit the increasing numbers of immigrants of different religions will be “challenging” for social cohesion in the UK. The report found in the past decade a rise of 275,000 in the number of Muslims who were born in Pakistan or Bangladesh living in Britain.

The increase is equivalent to twice the population of Oxford.

And the number of Somali-born UK residents had also risen sharply — from fewer than 40,000 in 1999 to 106,700 this year.

Many of the newcomers had migrated to Britain from other parts of the European Union.

They claimed to prefer the UK because of “latent Islamaphobia” abroad, the report said.

The “faith map” showed that 4.5million immigrants living in Britain had a religious affiliation.

Of those, around a quarter were Muslim and more than half Christian. Polish Catholics and African Pentecostals also were also among the fastest-growing religious communities in the UK.

The findings were based on previously unpublished results of the Labour Force Survey, which quizzes 200,000 people each year.

Researchers said traditional church attendance had declined over the last decade but evangelical Christianity was growing.

The report, called Faith, ­Migration and Integration in the UK, says: “A challenging change is that brought about by the arrival of migrants with an established faith organisation whose traditions and beliefs differ from that of the UK-born population.”

A separate report found British Muslims are the most patriotic in Europe. Seventy-eight per cent think of themselves as British, says the Open Society Institute. In Germany it was 23 per cent.

— Hat tip: Gaia

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‘Witch Hunt’ Expected Under New U.S. ‘Hate Crimes’ Law

Lawyer who handled Boissoin saga says Obama plans to bring back ‘inquisitions’

The lawyer who handled the years-long battle by Pastor Stephen Boissoin over “hate speech” charges for a letter he wrote to the editor of a local newspaper that cited the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality is forecasting a nationwide “witch hunt” in the U.S. prompted by an expanded “hate crimes” law signed by President Obama.

[…]

“I would be shocked if you did not have 100 times more problems with this legislation than we are. Your system is set up to encourage lawyers to do this, and you have so many more people, there is more opportunity for people to take offense,” he said.

“There are certain people in society who look to the government for everything, including to help them with their hurt feelings. The government was never made for that,” he said.

Regardless, “there are those who want the government to bless their approach to life, whatever it is, because they have this view. They come to the point they want the government to say … you are right.”

“We’ve learned from history that’s a very bad idea. You get persecution, which is exactly what’s happening here,” he said.

Then those interests want the “power of the state to punish anyone who disagrees,” he said. The result is, “doing exactly what we did 500 years ago. They will be going on a witch hunt, [repeating] the Spanish Inquisition.”

“This is not theoretical. We’ve already seen it, hospitals, school boards, religious organizations pummeled with this. There are board meetings going on as we speak … talking about what they can do to avoid having complaints,” he said.

— Hat tip: JD

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Garbage in, Global Warming Out

My colleague, Dan Calabrese, summarized what happened:

The exposure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia demonstrate beyond a shadow of any doubt that — at the very least — global warmist climate researchers a) dumped data they didn’t want others to see; b) manipulated data to hide information that didn’t support their preconceived conclusions; c) didn’t know how to explain the lack of warming over the past decade; and d) conspired to attack their critics and prevent their work from being published.

My colleague, Dan Sherrier, called it what it really is, a scam:

Global warming is perhaps the most brilliant scam in all of history.

Less ethical scientists who want government subsidies can offer interpretations of data that further a politician’s ability to justify seizing more power. Or, you can invest in “green” companies, knowing that the government will stack the decks for those companies to do well. There’s plenty to gain.

And, my colleague Jerome Corsi reported on honest research that shows global cooling for the last decade over the United States and Canada:

The mainstream media is reporting the World Meteorological Organization’s assessment of global average temperatures asserting this decade is “the warmest on record,” without mentioning the WMO data actually documents the United States and Canada experienced cooler-than-average conditions since 2000.

To provide one more blow to the junk science used to produce a political result for the United Nations and the Obama administration, I will draw upon my formal education in mathematics and computer science, and my early professional experiences using mathematical modeling, to explain how easy and tempting it was for the named climatologists to do what they did.

— Hat tip: JD

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Inconvenient Truth for Al Gore as His North Pole Sums Don’t Add Up

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal.

World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal.

Meanwhile, five hours of negotiating time were lost yesterday when developing countries walked out in protest over the lack of progress on their demand for legally binding emissions targets from rich nations. The move underlined the distrust between rich and poor countries over the proposed legal framework for the deal.

Last night key elements of the proposed deal were unravelling. British officials said they were no longer confident that it would contain specific commitments from individual countries on payments to a global fund to help poor nations to adapt to climate change while the draft text on protecting rainforests has also been weakened.

Even the long-term target of ending net deforestation by 2030 has been placed in square brackets, meaning that the date could be deferred. An international monitoring system to identify illegal logging is now described in the text as optional, where before it was compulsory. Negotiators are also unable to agree on a date for a global peak in greenhouse emissions.

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”

Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.

“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Maslowki, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.

He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” he said. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at, based on the information I provided to Al Gore’s office.”

Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”

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Most readers are familiar with Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, the Austrian anti-jihad activist who is facing a “hate speech” charge for one of her recent presentations on Islam.

The evening after her “Islamophobic” speech was publicized in the Austrian press — on November 26th, 2009 — Elisabeth gave the third in a series of lectures on Islam. Considering that her previous presentation was the one that brought down the “hate speech” charge on her head, Elisabeth’s lecture that night drew a lot of attention.

The video below shows the first part of her lecture about sharia law, which was the final seminar on the topic presented in Vienna. Listen to what she says and see if there’s anything that’s untrue, or inflammatory, or that passes the bounds of reasonable opinion. Like Geert Wilders, she is being targeted for speaking up about matters that the political elite prefer to keep under the rug.

During her presentation Elisabeth refers to the media gathered outside the venue who want her to make a statement:

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for the subtitles.

The full transcript of this portion of Elisabeth’s lecture is below the jump.
– – – – – – – – –

I want to thank you and also thank you for your support

I will need any kind of support and can tell you that I will not give up

I will not back down because this is a matter of principle: the truth

Because if we can’t tell the truth any more we can close down everything. Science and schools.

This is what we are talking about. Not about me — Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff — it’s about our future

And it’s about our children. It’s not about me. It just hit me — it’s not the first time and it will not be the last time

I am attracting such things. But somebody has to do this. And it will be me who is doing this.

The irony of the story is, that today we will talk about freedom of opinion

This was not planned. I mean we always planned to talk about freedom of opinion

But we didn’t plan that the whole story gets such an explosiveness.

They would like to head me off and force me to make statements.

Statements which are then misinterpreted. And this is no freedom of opinion any more.

And as we said last time that there is no freedom of opinion any more — we have the best example for this now.

It’s nice that ESW thinks she has to save the world, but there are other people who are concerned

Never mind! It’s just not comfortable if you are a matter of public interest of NEWS

I just wanted to tell you that I don’t know how long I can keep up

I just ask for your understanding. If I keep up — okay, if not, please understand it.

Okay, today we will talk about how Islam is influencing our lives

Person in the audience asks for documents

Person in the audience asks if they will be informed about the developments in the case via the homepage of ESW

ESW answers: no, you will not read anything on my homepage

ESW: we did not make any decision yet

ESW: I will not make any statements in public and I ask you not to talk in public either

Person in the audience says something which is not understandable

A statement to the article in NEWS: 95% of the article are correct

Some things are wrong, respectively wrongly quoted and misinterpreted but 95% are correct.

Even though I wanted to counter, I could not, because it’s the truth what they wrote

And it will be the truth in front of the court

We will talk about the fact that Islam is a religion and a state

You know this already. But media don’t and they don’t want to know it. But we will know it.

No relevant statements

Before we start I want to mention one fundamental point: I am a critic of Islam

You know this. If you want to hear positive things about Islam, you are wrong here.

Then you have to go to the Islamic community, where you will hear the other side.

I never said — and I will never say — that the Muslims are evil.

I always said, that I feel for the Muslims. And you will agree with that.

I feel sorry for them, because they suffer from this slavery

There were never overall denunciations. We are talking about Islam!

Not about Muslims. I want to clarify this.

I call upon my right for freedom of opinion with this lecture.

This is my right. And I call upon it.

And I ask all of you for objective statements.

No polemics, no agitation. Just objective statements and questions.

There are always people who kick over the traces

But we don’t want to make the Islam-Lobby a case for attacking us.

The Islam-Lobby, these are the do-gooders. We are not their idiots.

Another point: It’s interesting that in our male-dominated justice it’s always the women who are accused

Accused because of agitation. We should think about this.

A patriarchy in justice

I am a mother and I am a feminist. And I will not let this happen.

That women are pilloried again. Think of Oriana Fallaci. Think of Susanne Winter.

Think of Brigitte Bardot who was convicted so often. I am just the next in line.

It’s always the women.

Why is it always women. Why is it women who go out and not men.

And as a feminist I feel attacked.

I fight for women and I fight for my daughter. For that she can grow up in freedom and dignity.

This is important for me. I don’t want my words to be perverted.

So if we have a discussion, then please in an objective way.

Thank you.

Applause

Any questions?

We will discuss this quietly. And we will have the breaks in here.

We will talk about Sharia today.

It’s Sharia, which is a problem for us. We will go in more detail.

There is Sharia in finance resp. monetary system.

We will talk about the organisation of Islamic states.

We will talk about the term “Islamophobia” and how they use it, to prohibit criticism on Islam.

We will talk about human rights in Islam. A point which affects me at the moment.

We will talk about women’s rights and — if we have time — about female circumcision.

We could miss this out and you read about it.

Honour killings, which of course have a relation to human and women rights in Islam.

We will talk about western politics of respectfulness

How the west practices appeasement towards Islam

And how this is done

If we have time, we will talk about mosques

That mosques are not only a place of prayers but have many functions

Only at the end we will talk about prayers

We will talk about tabooization and how it is done

Some of these taboos we have seen already

Let’s see how far we come

Which consequences does Sharia have for Europe?

What happens if Sharia is implemented? In fact, it is implemented already.

This is a subtle implementation, but it’s creeping quickly

Subtle and quick — this seems to be an antagonism

The Sharia — the Islamic law — is responsible for serious violation of human rights

These violations of human rights in Islamic countries concern Muslims and Non-Muslims.

The discrimination and sexual degradation of women

A woman is only half the worth of a man. Her words, her evidence, her position in society.

Sharia means censorship and prohibition of criticism.

We have seen this already. What happened today is — Sharia.

They wanted to muzzle us

Compared to our standards, sharia means inhuman punitive measures

I talk about the so-called “hudd”-punishments. Cropping off hands, stoning.

All the cruelties, which — as they say — have nothing to do with Islam.

Refusal of individual rights of freedom

You know by now that one loses any right of freedom when one converts to Islam.

Dictating what to do and prohibition

Your might remember the book of Qaradawi

which was used in high schools in Islamic religious education

Where you are in detail told what you are allowed to do and what you must not do

You are patronized — in a way in which I don’t even patronize my child-daughter

And they are patronizing adults — concerning clothing and food

Remember: “May men pick brows? May men wear gold jewellery?”

All this is regularized in Sharia.

There is no Islam without Sharia.

You cannot separate one from the other

There is no separation!

An Islamic society with the sharia is an ideal.

This should be the target state in Islam, designed by Mohammed

Which means, Saudi-Arabia is the ideal society, the ideal Islamic society

Don’t forget — it’s a governmental construction

Remember the first page. Islam is a religion and a state.

As soon as we acknowledge Islam, we have a state within the state

The Islamic law is beyond any discussion

As according to the Islamic point of view, divine law stands above state law.

And because there is no discussion, we are facing all the problems

That’s it

There are very small ranges of interpretation

But you may remember the closure of the Ijtihad in the 11th century.

This terminated any possibility of interpretation

As long as this door is closed (gate of ijthihad)

There will be now change, no maceration, no advancement of Islam

Okay, no discussion and — of course — no denial.

An Islamic state cannot say: we leave sharia

Polygamy. It is allowed for men in sharia

You know that men can marry 4 women at the same time

The Koran says this is possible if all are treated in the same way

This is also pedals the man. It makes life difficult for men.

First of all polygamy stokes resentments among the women

Very often it causes jealousy, hate and disaffirmation between them

And it is also a stress-situation for the men, not only physically

It is an emotional stress. They have to consider, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

“do I really treat my wives in an equal way?”

Monogamy is only regulated by law in Turkey and Indonesia.

Whereas in Indonesia it is softened already because of sharia

Modest corporal punishment is allowed

And again it might be a problem for the man, that his religion

Allows him to beat his wife whom he loves — or not. This is emotional stress.

In sharia it’s not the courts which decide on compensation-money

The families have the right to claim it

Or they can claim the death of the delinquent or certain vendetta. There is no jurisdiction in this case

Burglary is punished with a “hudd”-punishment — amputation

Scholars say that this is a determent. But I doubt this.

Man in the audience: “What about the Sharia-courts in Great Britain?”

They deal with family, marriage and inheritance law

I have not heard about any other judgements. Not yet.

Here we have some examples how sharia is realized. We will not discuss this now.

I give you the points and you connect them

If you say, yes, this is sharia and it’s awkward, then it’s time to stand up and say: not with us!

If you say, no this is nonsense, it’s just far-fetched cases, then it’s also okay for me.

But these cases did really happen

Sharia constitutes the different clothing-directives

There is a head-scarf surah, although it’s controversial

They dispute, if this surah really has to be interpreted in this way

But as it is practised today, I assume that it is valid

There are more and more head-scarves, which means it is understood in this way

I look at the facts and do a reality-check. And they are becoming more and more.

What theologians say is in this case not relevant

Sharia contains different rights for men and women

Women are not treated equally by this religious law. This is a fact.

One can refer to their books, although they’d like to explain differently. It is a fact.

According to the Koran resp. Mohammed’s intention, women are subordinate in all domains

She doesn’t even have the right to her children

According to our law — yes. According to Koran respectively sharia — no.

And from which legal position will the judges act?

Above all, when we will have the first muslim public prosecutors and judges. Which law are they to execute?

Evidence of women, you know that, only counts half the evidence of men.

Women only have restrained right to give evidence.

Previous posts about the hate speech case against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff:

2009		Dec		5		Fighting a Hate Speech Charge in Austria
				11		Heckling the Counterjihad

The aggressive secularization of Western cultures continues apace, and overt expressions of Christian belief are the primary targets of PC governmental restrictions. The Netherlands is no exception to this, and the multicultural brigades of Dutch diversity are busy beavering away at the last vestiges of Christianity in Holland.

Our Flemish correspondent VH has translated a couple of articles on the topic. First, from De Dagelijkse Standaard:

Amsterdam Public Transport may prohibit necklace

by Frank Verhoef

“This cannot be allowed, confessing your religion this way.”

The Amsterdam public transport company (GVB) may demand that an employee not wear a visible chain (with a Christian cross). That is what the D66-Judges* of the Amsterdam Court have determined today. We are assuredly not a Christian country, they must have thought. An employee (an Egyptian immigrant) found it discriminatory that he is not allowed to wear his necklace with a Christian cross, while the GVB staff are allowed to wear an Islamic headscarf. The employee filed a summary procedure because he felt that the GVB treats religions unequally.

The Court disagrees with the employee, as the GVB refers to a general dress code: no worker should wear visible chains. According to the Amsterdam court that a “reasonable ruling with regard to the required security measures and the desire of a uniform and professional appeal. Regardless of whether what the GVB does here is right, I know a solution to the employee’s problem.

For example, he may start wearing a cap that bears a Christian cross (that will be allowed though, GVB?), or he puts the cross on a little rope to his neck instead of a chain. Or he pins a Christian pin on his clothing. He should continue this until he, too, can express his religion, like Muslims, or he should demand that headscarves — which unlike a Christian cross, of course have a professional appeal — be prohibited by the GVB. This is also still possible.

Note:

* “D66-Judges,” a term used for weak Islamized leftist judges who think a criminal is a victim (and vice versa). D66 is the center-left anti-Wilders party.

And from De Telegraaf:
– – – – – – – – –

School ‘too diverse’ for Christmas tree

Many students are outraged at the decision of the Hague College not to put a Christmas tree in the school this year. This is because the tree is associated too closely with the Christian feast. In the atrium there are now only some garlands and a few little lights. The school board wants to stress the “international character and diversity within the school” this way.

Traditionally there was always a meters-high tree in the hall. The Board believes that as of this year the practice will be discontinued, and would rather stress the “international character and diversity” in the Hague school, as the 20,000 students could read on the HHS website. The school instead opts for “light and warmth” that everyone may complete in his/her own way, according to the supervisor.

Thirty percent of the pupils are of immigrant descent, as well as twelve percent of the teachers.

Soon after the publication of the HHS the discussion broke loose on the Internet. Many students do not agree with the measure and are angry. “Because a handful of religious zealots are offended by a tree with some lights and colored balls, the rest of the school community now has to suffer,” one student said. “Why do foreign students come here to the Netherlands? Exactly, because they want to experience a different culture. This way they might as well have stayed at home,” another student wrote.

Free Hal is a regular commenter and sometime contributor at Gates of Vienna. Below is his latest essay.

The causes of PC multiculturalism
by Free Hal

In case you’ve forgotten, here are a few more-or-less random examples of multiculturalism in action:

• A 14-year-old schoolgirl arrested, fingerprinted, photographed, held in a police cell for 3½ hours, and questioned on suspicion of a race-based public order offence. She had asked to sit at a different science table because the other three pupils only spoke Urdu.
• A 10-year-old boy (just inside the age of criminal responsibility, “doli incapax” ending at age 10) arrested, charged, and brought before a judge. He had responded to taunts from an 11-year-old that he was a “skunk” and a “Teletubby” with the word “Paki”.
• The makers of the Channel 4 documentary “Undercover Mosque” subjected to a year-long police investigation for investigating extremism in mosques.

You can find similar stories most days, usually accompanied by a helping of bafflement.

We know multiculturalism exists. The question is why?

In this essay I maintain that the cause of PC multiculturalism and self-loathing is the welfare state and, specifically, the welfare state’s justifying ideology, collectivism.

By “collectivism” I mean the morality of group rights. The idea that you are judged, and have rights, based on your group identity. You’re poorer than average? Here’s some money. You’ve come here from a poor country? Here’s a house, some money, and a TV. Feel bad about those cartoons? We’ll ban them.

Collectivism clashes with traditional morality, which is based on our individual actions and intentions. You built a house from nothing? It’s yours. You bashed an old lady over the head for her handbag? Jail for you.

Think of the welfare system as the computer hardware, collectivism as the operating system, and the various PC utopias as the software applications.

Surprisingly, few of the thinkers who warn us about cultural relativism and multiculturalism have convincingly traced its roots.

A summary of some of the best explanations follows: Melanie Phillips, Theodore Dalrymple, Paul Gottfried, Fjordman, Geert Wilders, and Mark Steyn. There isn’t the space to do them justice, and I would recommend reading all of them.

Melanie Phillips
– – – – – – – – –
She puts our enervating political culture down to the general philosophy of relativism amongst intellectual elites, and a lack of appropriate pride in our institutions and traditions.

You can’t disagree with this view. But it restates the situation rather than explains it. It would be wrong to call her reasoning tautologous, but moral and cultural relativism describe the texture of western self-loathing rather than its roots.

Where did the cultural relativism come from? You get the impression that we only need a good shake to get out of it.

Theodore Dalrymple

He explains political correctness as “communist propaganda writ small”. Marxism, unlike fascism, survived its denouement, and has retained its attraction to intellectuals because of the status it gives them, and they have evolved it into a more resilient form.

Theodore Dalrymple puts the blame on European political elites’ attempts to make the public financially dependent and their attempt to reduce belief in European culture.

These points go further than Melanie Phillips’, but still strike me as observations rather than explanations. They do not explain why the non-elites, the voters, have allowed political correctness to continue. Commentators generally skirt around this issue. British scepticism for egg-heads, and scorn for politicians, are poor soil for a self-serving elite. It is unlikely that British voters tolerate soft-core Marxism for the privilege of supporting unnecessary academics.

Theodore Dalrymple seems to me to come close to a theory about elites conspiring to manipulate and rob their electorates. In other words, the public are unwilling dupes. Whilst he is right about the anaesthetic effects of political correctness and the welfare dependence, I don’t think these factors are enough to force the public to get themselves robbed. Given that every percentage point of the vote must be fought over, it is hard to see the public as mere victims here.

Modern day liberal Marxism goes a long way to explain the mentality of PC self-loathing, but doesn’t explain how it arises.

Paul Gottfried

In “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy”, Paul Gottfried states that multiculturalism denies civil society its independence by casting it into competing groups. All of them are subject to the state’s authority, and depend on its patronage. Heretics fare badly, and there is “the substitution of designated victims for the older adoration of religious martyrs”. “Third World, gender, and lifestyle victims” become the new “suffering just”.

Paul Gottfried is right about the guilt-trip side of multiculturalism, and the state’s interest in undermining civil independence. But he too falls for the temptation to blame the elites rather than the public.

This is a similar to Theodore Dalrymple’s belief that multiculturalism is a deliberate government policy. It is true, but doesn’t explain public tolerance of it.

Fjordman

A brilliant and sensitive defender of our western heritage. His conclusions — e.g. that we have “no intellectual cadre that can think” — are the more devastating for being thoughtfully researched.

For him, “cultural Marxism” is a Gramscian strain that survived the fall of communism, and our treacherous elites promote it for their selfish ends. He is right. But like others, he avoids the unpalatable conclusion that those self-serving elites may be doing the public’s bidding. To be fair, he has expressed doubt that democracy is up to the challenge (“Democracy not Working”), but I think he lays too much emphasis on the role of (admittedly unscrupulous) elites.

Geert Wilders

His speeches to the Dutch Parliament accuse a cowardly and self-serving elite of handing over Western civilisation as an outgoing President might hand over the keys to the Oval Office. In a 2008 budget debate he stressed the disconnection between “the leftist canal-zone” (the high-price areas near to the Amsterdam canals where left-wing celebrities and politicians tend to live) and “The other Netherlands (which) consists of people who have to pay the bills”.

As one might expect from a democratic politician who still values state provision, this line avoids criticism of the electorate. Elite swindlers dupe the unsuspecting tax-paying public, and the public haven’t queried the bill yet.

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn looks further than the elite for an explanation. First, he sees PC multiculturalism as one of the absurd symptoms of “civilisational exhaustion”. And the most civilisationally exhausted society, Europe, is the most absurdly multiculturalist.

Like Melanie Phillips, his argument doesn’t quite get to the root of the problem. For example, does PC multiculturalism cause civilisational exhaustion, or vice versa? No-one with sense would describe self-loathing and cultural relativism as a symptom of “civilisational vigour”. And if civilisational exhaustion is the deeper cause, how did it arise? And what is the cure? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a good shake is all we need.

Second, he appears to suggest that that exhaustion is the result of deathbed demographics — or is it the other way around? The question matters because unless you can identify a relatively fundamental cause, then it’s hard to find an intervention point that will work.

Perhaps it is just a matter of age — western civilisation has had a good long run and has had enough of leading? Mark Steyn, rightly, has little time for historical inevitability.

In “America Alone”, he suggests it is the result of the luxury of American military protection since World War I. If that were the case then it would not explain why America shares much of Europe’s self-loathing.

Second, why should self-loathing and multiculturalism, be the symptoms of shrinking demographics? Japan and China have deathbed demographics, and yet neither of them is falling for our PC multiculturalism. Japan still has low levels of immigration, and virtually no Islamic immigration, and shows no sign of abandoning its orderly culture. China appears to be combining a demographic crunch with civilisational resurgence, and is cited by Mark Steyn as an example of the ‘strong horse’ feared and respected by Jihadis. Russia has, if anything, even worse demographics, owing to disease and low male life expectancy, but shows no wish to abase itself before Europe. And whilst the British birth rate is significantly higher than Germany’s, PC multiculturalism appears to be higher in Britain. And America, whose population passed the 300 million mark two years ago, is playing catch-up with Britain in the self-loathing stakes.

I’m exaggerating slightly. And I think that there is merit to Mark Steyn’s view about demographics. But, those demographics look more like a reinforcer of self-loathing than its main cause.

I go along with these writers in that Europe’s elites bear a disproportionate share of the blame since they are not mere agents but trustees. However, they couldn’t get away with it without the implied consent of the voters.

Collectivism — the philosophical poison

Collectivism is the philosophical poison at the heart of Western self-loathing and PC multiculturalism.

At least half of all wealth created in European countries is spent by the state, which generally forces higher earners to subsidise consumption for lower earners. It is a good deal for lower-earners, who make up a majority of the electorate.

This system operates by coercion, but it is not just a mafia racket. It requires stability for the wealth to be created in the first place, and a justifying ideology to minimise opposition. Monarchies use the ideology of the divine right of kings. Welfare democracy uses collectivism.

Collectivism has been successful. Its meaningless language about “compassion” (forcible extraction of money from someone else), “social justice” (equal incomes), “investment” (subsidised consumption), and “giving money to the rich” (reducing tax), is accepted at face value.

Collective wishes trump individual rights at the ballot box. And collectivism trumps individual morality philosophically, for lacking “social justice”, “compassion”, and “investment”, and for “giving money to the rich”. The days before collectivism were the Bad Old Days.

There are plenty of self-serving intellectuals to flesh out this crude orthodoxy: western culture was dull and unspectacular; individual responsibility is oppressive; self-restraint is repression; self-reliance is impossible.

Collectivist rights extend to other victim groups as well as the below average-earning majority: religious rights, racial minority rights, gender rights. Anyone who can stake a claim to a collective hardship has a collective entitlement, via the taxman.

This process irritates Europeans who find themselves on the wrong end of minority entitlements, e.g. the right not to be offended. This explains the tension on the ground between socialism and multiculturalism. But most recipients tolerate this rather than endanger the welfare flow.

The general public don’t much like the absurdities of multiculturalism, or the abuse of their history. But most will put up with it in favour of the drive for “services”. Not because they like it but because it is useful.

None of this happens suddenly or calculatedly. It is more like a set of habits that reproduce and develop over time, which explains their unquestioning acceptance.

Why multiculturalism?

Multiculturalism’s power derives from guilt. A century ago, British history focused on the high points of our history: the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar and Waterloo. Today, it focuses on guilt: guilt over the Nazis (whom the British resisted); guilt over slavery (which the British eradicated); guilt over racism (which, prior to PC multiculturalism, was seldom a problem within Britain).

Multiculturalism is so useful because it disempowers people before the state. People will do appalling things if the state doesn’t take control for them. And it fits neatly with collectivist ideas which are lucrative to the majority of voters.

Multiculturalists are not slow to take up the opportunity. See for instance the calculated comments of the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, on the eve of Remembrance Sunday 2007, that Britain was becoming like Nazi Germany. Or, in 2000, Jack Straw’s (the UK Home Secretary) comments that the English are “potentially very aggressive, very violent” and — shock, horror! — “increasingly articulating their Englishness”.

Guilt overpowers opposition. Any accusation of chauvinism, or “being right-wing”, is enough to end discussion. Godwin’s Law states that “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one” and the discussion is effectively ended. This is why it is used so frequently to vilify opponents — see, for instance, Pim Fortuyn, here, and here.

Multiculturalism is a very efficient method of overcoming opposition to collectivism and its utopias.

The future

What does all this mean now that things appear to be unravelling?

If I am right — that PC multiculturalism stems from the welfare state — then PC multiculturalism will continue. But it will cause more and more ethnic conflict as the limits to the tax-take hit home.

If people can’t increase overall tax-take by going after higher earners, they will transfer that hostility to other groups competing for welfare. Different groups will blame each other for taking more than their fair share of the welfare pot, and will cast each other as less deserving.

We can expect this scramble for welfare to fall out along ethnic lines. Partly because of the disproportionate consumption by Islamic populations; partly because European populations don’t see immigrant groups as having such strong collectivist entitlements as themselves; partly because multiculturalism entrenches ethnicity; and partly because the European ethnic divide is so deep.

The collapse of the welfare state will turn PC self-loathing into a sense of betrayal that is deaf to reason. Ethnic hostility may not be the primary or immediate cause of European breakdown but will be its apparent cause — a harbinger, and the thing that people blame.

Conclusion

It should be obvious from the above that I have deep misgivings about welfare democracy, and that I think collectivism and its tendrils are poisonous.

If welfare is the underlying cause of these problems, then the question is whether a state can be devised that doesn’t become a welfare state. The experience of America, from Founding Fathers to President George Bush, let alone President Obama, suggests that this isn’t possible. If not, then we need to devise ways to live and flourish without a state authority.

Anti-Semitism in Europe is commonly attributed to the political Right. Every time a European nationalist speaks up for his country — even in the mildest, most reasonable fashion — the “neo-Nazi” bugaboo is invoked, and a hysterical fascistophobic frenzy begins in the media.

This assignment of Jew-hatred primarily to the Right is not just an exaggeration, it is a fallacy: among “persons of European background”, anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel are overwhelmingly found on the political Left. When it comes to excoriating Jews, European nationalists can’t hold a candle to the Socialists and the Anarchists.

Among other ethnic groups — i.e. the “New Europeans” — the most virulent Jew-hatred comes from Muslim immigrants. Accurate statistics about such matters are understandably hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence suggests that anti-Semitic European Muslims are more numerous, more vocal, and more violent than even the anti-globalist Left and the anarchists of Antifa.

A case in point may be found this recent news item from Vienna:

Chabad Rabbi Attacked in Vienna

A Muslim man attacked a Chabad rabbi Saturday night as he was conducting the annual ceremony to light the public Chanukah menorah in Stefenfaltz Square in the city of Vienna, Austria.

The attacker hurled himself at Rabbi Dov Gruzman, principal of the city’s Jewish school run by the Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidic movement, and began punching him, a local resident told Arutz Sheva.

As the rabbi tried to hold off his attacker, the Muslim suddenly bit his victim, severing part of his finger in the process. The Muslim was caught and arrested by police, and was held for questioning. The rabbi was evacuated to the hospital where doctors rushed to reattach his finger.

– – – – – – – – –

Gruzman told Arutz Sheva that the Muslim had raced towards the entrance at the beginning of the ceremony and began to curse the Jews who were there and the Jewish people in general. “I tried to hold him off, to keep him away from the entrance and he bit me really hard, and that’s how he injured me,” he said.

The event itself did not discourage Rabbi Gruzman, and in fact strengthened his resolve. “We are glad that such an event occurred,” he said. “Today, because of what happened, we are planning [a much larger event]. We increased the number of sufganiot [Chanukah jelly doughnuts] from 50 to 700 — and this is our answer to the attack and to anti-Semitism.”

However, the rabbi himself will be unable to participate in Sunday evening’s ceremony due to the fact that he is still hospitalized, and being monitored for infection from the bite. Nevertheless, he emphasized, through the Chanukah lighting ceremony he sends his blessing to every Jew around the world.

That Jew-finger is hardly halal. What will the righteous mujahid have to do to purify himself after partaking of such an unclean meal?

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes.

The big news of the day concerns Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was attacked by a disgruntled member of the audience after giving a speech at a political rally in Milan. The attacker hit Mr. Berlusconi in the face at close range with a souvenir sculpture of Milan’s cathedral. The prime minister suffered a broken nose, cuts, and two damaged teeth. He spent the night in the hospital.

In other news, police in St. Cloud, Minnesota, believe they have identified the hate-filled person who posted obscene anti-Islamic cartoons on the city’s telephone poles this past week.

Thanks to Esther, Fjordman, Frontinus, Gaia, JD, KGS, Steen, TB, TV, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in. Headlines and articles are below the fold.
– – – – – – – – –

	Financial Crisis
	Drugs Money ‘Saved the Banks From Collapse’ During Global Crisis, Claims UN Drugs and Crime Chief
	US Should Take Germany as Example, Says Obama Advisor
	USA
	CAIR Finally Under Investigation
	CAIR: Franklin Graham Repeats Attack on Islam
	Freedom in the Balance
	Get Global Warming Out of Our Schools
	Investigator: Air Tran Fears ‘Flying Imams’ Fallout
	Judge Rules Effort to Strip ACORN of Federal Funds Unconstitutional
	Muslims in US Equally Vulnerable to Radicalisation as in Europe: NYT
	NYC: Gyro Stabbing Suspect Claims His Life Was on the Line
	St. Cloud: Anti-Islamic Cartoons Spur Nonprofit to Offer Reward
	St. Cloud: Police Say They Know Who Posted Anti-Islamic Cartoons
	U.S. Agencies Investigating Interpreters Suspected of Helping Al Qaida at Gitmo
	Young Muslim Women in West Are Increasingly Vulnerable to ‘Honor Killings’
	Europe and the EU
	Ambassador Wants Danish-American Eco-Boom
	Belgium Waffles — Two Nations, After All?
	Chabad Rabbi Attacked in Vienna
	Copenhagen Climate Summit: 1,000 Anarchists Arrested
	Danish Police Arrested at Least 200 Climate Activists Today as They Attempted to March on Copenhagen Docks.
	Denmark: 80,000 Jobs Saved
	Italy: Berlusconi’s New Bloomer as He Sends EU Leaders Doodles of Women’s Knickers at Summit
	Italy: PM Silvio Berlusconi Taken to Hospital After Being Attacked at Rally in Milan
	Italy: Attacker Breaks Berlusconi’s Nose
	New Religious Newspaper in France
	Northern Irish Dissidents Forming “New IRA” — Report
	Rights Group Condemns Creeping Anti-Roma Extremism
	Swiss Man Builds Mock Minaret to Protest Ban
	UK Muslims Are Europe’s Most Patriotic
	UK: ‘Our Faith is Being Targeted … and We’ve Been Thrown to the Lions’: The Christian Hoteliers Accused of Insulting Muslim Guest Reveal
	UK: Ministers Told: Don’t Call Islamic Extremists “Islamic Extremists”
	UK: Swine Flu Pandemic ‘Less Lethal Than Expected’
	UK: Schoolboy, 12, Suspended for ‘Crisp Dealing’
	UK: Speculation Mounts That Gordon Brown May Call an Early Election
	North Africa
	Muslim Scholar Publishes Anti-Christian Book in Egypt
	Israel and the Palestinians
	Israeli Settlements Are More Than Legitimate
	Jewish Lobby Wages War on Christmas Trees
	Middle East
	Iran Leader Says Opposition Protests “Anti-Islam”
	Iranian Scientist Who Vanished ‘Gave Nuclear Secrets’ To UN Inspectors Sent to Qom Site
	Muslim Inventor Set to Take Orthopaedic Prayer Rugs Worldwide
	US Baghdad Chief Confirms Syrian Security Failure
	Yemen’s Houthis Hold Secret Meet With Iran
	Russia
	In Shift, U.S. Talks to Russia on Internet Security
	South Asia
	‘Israelis in Goa Disastrous for Tourism’
	Lahore Falls to Extremists
	Taliban Was the Target of German Airstrike: Reports (Roundup)
	Tigers Shot Trying to Surrender: General
	Far East
	China Demotes Editor After Obama Interview: Sources
	Philippine Kidnappers Demand Animal Sacrifice
	Sub-Saharan Africa
	Somalia Islamist Militants Execute 2 Men
	Immigration
	Britain’s Tolerance to Islam Results in More Than 1m Muslims Setting Up Home Here
	Letter From Spain
	Tom Tancredo: 3 Months After Joe Wilson, Obama Still Lies
	Culture Wars
	Beyond Debate?
	Climate: The New God of Left-Wing Christianity
	Coming to a School Near You: The Dangerous Religion of Howard Zinn

Drugs Money ‘Saved the Banks From Collapse’ During Global Crisis, Claims UN Drugs and Crime Chief

Drugs money saved some banks from collapse at the height of the global crisis the United Nations’ drugs and crime chief claimed today.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, told the Observer that there were signs that some banks were rescued by billions of dollars that ‘originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities.’

Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa explained that in the second half of 2008, lending was the banking system’s main problem.

‘The system was basically paralysed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another,’ he told the newspaper.

He said he had seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were the ‘only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the verge of collapse last year.

Costa said that as a result, a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economics system, effectively laundering it.

The UNs’ drugs and crime chief said that he was first made aware of evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system around 18 months ago, although he would not name countries or banks that may have received drugs money.

A British Bankers’ Association spokesman told the newspaper: ‘We have not been party to any regulatory dialogue that would support a theory of this kind.

‘There was a clear lack of liquidity in the system and to a large degree this was filled by the intervention of central banks.’

Costa’s claim comes as police launch a new anti-drugs campaign that aims to appeal environmentally-minded cocaine users with the message that snorting cocaine destroys the rainforest.

The campaign warns that for every gram of cocaine made, four square metres of rainforest are destroyed.

The campaign, headed by the police and Greenpeace, comes amid evidence that cocaine use is on the increase among young people in the UK.

It has been suggested that lower prices have contributed to the prevalence of the drug.

— Hat tip: Gaia

[Return to headlines]

US Should Take Germany as Example, Says Obama Advisor

One of President Barack Obama’s senior economic advisors Paul Volcker said the US could take a leaf out of Germany’s book when it comes to creating an export-based economy.

Speaking in an interview with news magazine Der Spiegel, Volcker said he admired Germany’s economic model, and suggested that the US should consider a shift towards exporting to help the US recover from the economic crisis.

“In some ways, I think the labour cost is higher in Germany than it is in the United States but you can somehow maintain that export edge,” Volcker said, “You are dedicated to exporting, we are dedicated to financial engineering and it hasn’t worked out too well.”

— Hat tip: Esther

[Return to headlines]

CAIR Finally Under Investigation

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a longtime partner of the FBI in its efforts to reach out to American Muslims, now appears to be under criminal investigation by that same FBI. It’s a refreshing breakthrough of sanity in the FBI’s dealing with the domestic terror threat — and it came to light just as CAIR was poised to win yet another victory in its ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation against anyone who dares draw attention to jihadist activity in the United States.

CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim “Honest Ibe” Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Yet despite the many indications that CAIR was not exactly a paragon of patriotism and loyalty to Constitutional values, the FBI worked closely with CAIR for years — until the organization’s unindicted co-conspirator status was too much even for the politically correct Feds, and the FBI ended work with CAIR in fall 2008.

— Hat tip: JD

[Return to headlines]

CAIR: Franklin Graham Repeats Attack on Islam

Muslim civil rights group calls for meeting to clear up ‘misconceptions’

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization today requested a meeting with Christian evangelist Franklin Graham to discuss his latest remarks attacking Islam.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it has received a number of complaints from concerned Muslims who watched an interview last night on CNN during which Graham stated in part: “…we have many Muslims that live in this country. But true Islam cannot be practiced in this country. You can’t beat your wife. You cannot murder your children if you think they’ve committed adultery or something like that, which they do practice in these other countries… I don’t agree with the teachings of Islam and I find it to be a very violent religion.”

SEE: Franklin Graham Repeats Attacks on Islam (Video)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByovBdIRV2o

In 2002, Graham said terrorism is part of “mainstream” Islam and claimed the Quran, Islam’s revealed text, “preaches violence.”

In 2001, Graham stood by remarks he made about Islam at the dedication of a chapel in North Carolina. At that event, he said: “We’re not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He’s not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It’s a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion.”

Following that incident, CAIR called for a meeting between Graham and national Muslim leaders to “come together as people of faith to promote inter-religious understanding and mutual respect.” Graham did not respond to CAIR’s 2001 letter.

In a new letter sent today to Graham, CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad again called for a meeting at which Graham could be offered accurate and balanced information about Islam.

Awad wrote: “I believe your views on Islam are unworthy of a respected religious leader and are based on misinformation and misconceptions that could be cleared up in a face-to-face meeting with representatives of the American Muslim community.”

In his letter, Awad quoted the Quran, which states: “Invite (all) to the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching; and argue with them in ways that are best and most gracious: for your Lord knows best who have strayed from His Path and who receive guidance.” (16:125)

Franklin Graham is the son of Billy Graham, an internationally-known Christian minister who is respected by Muslims worldwide.

CAIR is America’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

— Hat tip: TB

[Return to headlines]

Freedom in the Balance

The war in Washington is far more than a battle between political parties; it is a war for the survival of America. Forget the labels; forget the political affiliation. Focus on the people who believe that America must remain a nation that honors its Constitution and cherishes the freedom of every individual. These are the people who must be elected. People who want to transform the foundation of America must be rejected. Freedom cannot co-exist with a government that insists on controlling its citizens.

For generations, government has been moving away from the idea of constitutional limitations. Now, Congress no longer even pays lip service to the Article I, Section 8 congressional limitations of power. Now, led by a devout, admitted “wealth-spreader,” the federal government is moving rapidly to bury all traces of individual freedom. The new government now under construction will require that the pursuit of happiness begin at the desk of a federal bureaucrat and follow only the path prescribed by government.

The federal government has already imposed, or is imposing, what is called Sustainable Development. This “sound-good” label obscures the control government exercises over where an individual may live, what type of transportation must be used and even the kind of materials that may be used in his home. This is not freedom; this is tyranny.

Government has taken control of land use through wetland, critical habitat, urban boundary zones and other control mechanisms. Government is attempting to take control over all water in the United States, as well as the activities that may affect water (S. 787).

Government ignored its constitutional limitation when it used its citizens’ money to bail out those financial institutions it favored, while allowing others to go broke. Government didn’t even consider the Constitution when it fired the CEO of General Motors, reorganized a private corporation and used tax dollars to buy a controlling interest.

Government is taking control over energy use by declaring carbon dioxide to be a pollutant and allowing the EPA to regulate it. Government is attempting to create a “cap-and-trade” program that will not only control the energy available to individuals, but will also produce windfall profits for the government at the expense of the individual.

Nothing in the Constitution authorizes the government to take control of the health-care industry. Nevertheless, legislation now pending will create more than 100 new bureaucracies to take control of virtually every facet of health care.

The federal government has become the tyrannical king our forefathers fought so hard to cast off.

The next two elections will determine whether the great American experiment succeeds — or not.

— Hat tip: JD

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Get Global Warming Out of Our Schools

Because of the recent revelations of “Climategate” (see source materials below) and my experience raising two children in private and public schools in California, I believe we need to start a nationwide campaign to get “global warming” immediately removed from the curriculum of our schools.

We cannot wait for politicians or activists to do any more damage to our future generation. “Global warming” is not just an objectionable and discredited scientific theory. Teachers are grafting the loony climate-change premise onto lifestyle, religion, and politics in “science” classrooms. It cannot stand.

The leaked e-mails and subsequent evaluation of their contents, which inspired the term “Climategate,” sound the alarm that we have been fooled for thirty years. There is good cause to believe that the “global warming” data was contorted to achieve a desired result, that true facts were suppressed or destroyed, and that truth-tellers were censored by climate gurus on a mission.

Even if a local school district does not want to accept that “global warming” has been completely debunked, the argument can be made that the “theory” is so suspect that it will likely be investigated in Congress, if not in a criminal fraud venue. It cannot be passed off to students as “settled science.” Insist on removing “global warming” until there is consensus sometime in the future.

For those who do not have children, or whose children are either young or grown up, let my recent personal experience with public school science instruction provide an insight:

— Hat tip: JD

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Investigator: Air Tran Fears ‘Flying Imams’ Fallout

Worry over ‘predatory lawsuits’ keeping Atlanta ‘dry run’ very ‘quiet’

A licensed private investigator who has looked into the conflicting reports over the Air Tran Flight 297 incident in Atlanta — described by some passengers as an apparent “dry run” for a hijacking — says the details are being kept quiet because the airline doesn’t want to be targeted with lawsuits like what happened in the “flying imams” case in Minneapolis three years ago.

According to a report from Douglas Hagmann, founder and director of the Northeast Intelligence Network, and a multi-state licensed private investigative agency, “everyone from the airline to the TSA and other government agencies want to keep [the situation] very quiet.”

“The reasons, I have been told, is fear of predatory lawsuits, negative publicity from accusations of religious profiling, and the obligatory subjugation to mindless mandatory Muslim sensitivity training that make a mockery of our American system of values,” he wrote.

— Hat tip: JD

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Judge Rules Effort to Strip ACORN of Federal Funds Unconstitutional

The U.S. government’s move this fall to cut off funding to ACORN was unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Friday, handing the embattled group a legal victory.

U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon issued the preliminary injunction against the government, saying it’s in the public’s interest for the organization to continue receiving federal funding.

ACORN claimed in its lawsuit that Congress’ decision to cut off its funding was unconstitutional because it punitively targeted an individual organization.

Gershon said in her ruling that ACORN had raised a “fundamental issue of separation of powers. They have been singled out by Congress for punishment that directly and immediately affects their ability to continue to obtain federal funding, in the absence of any judicial, or even administrative, process adjudicating guilt.”

[…]

ACORN’s lawsuit was filed in federal court in Brooklyn and sought reinstatement of the funds. Quigley said millions of dollars in funds should begin to flow again to ACORN next week. The judge said the “public will not suffer harm by allowing the plaintiffs to continue work on contracts duly awarded by federal agencies.”

— Hat tip: JD

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Muslims in US Equally Vulnerable to Radicalisation as in Europe: NYT

New York, Dec. 12 (ANI): With the surfacing of a string of terrorism cases in which American Muslims were involved, US counterterrorism experts have been forced to change their earlier perception that Muslims in the United States were not very vulnerable to radicalisation.

During the lull following the 9/11, it was thought that American Muslims were well assimilated in diverse communities, and hence, they showed little extremist capabilities unlike their European counterparts.

But recent cases — including the Fort Hood rampage, the alarming account of five young Virginia men who went to Pakistan and are suspected of seeking jihad and David Coleman Headley accused of last year’s Mumbai terror attacks — are causing concern among American counterterrorism experts, the New York Times reports.

“These events certainly call the consensus into question. The notion of a difference between Europe and United States remains relevant,” said Robert S. Leiken, who studies terrorism at the Nixon Center in Washington.

But the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American operations like drone strikes in Pakistan, are fuelling radicalisation at home, he added.

“Just the length of U.S. involvement in these countries is provoking more Muslim Americans to react,” he added.

— Hat tip: Esther

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NYC: Gyro Stabbing Suspect Claims His Life Was on the Line

The man suspected of stabbing and killing a college student who cut in line at a Midtown food cart told cops that the victim’s brother put a knife to his neck moments before the fatal altercation. Ziad Tayeh, 26, is on trial for manslaughter after a 2006 dispute with 19-year-old victim Tyrone Noel Gibbons, his brother Shannon Gibbons, and a friend at the Halal Chicken and Gyro stand at 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue. After the three men cut in line, they exchanged words with Tayeh: “I was hungry,” he told police during a videotaped confession screened for jurors. “They called me a punk!”

— Hat tip: Esther

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St. Cloud: Anti-Islamic Cartoons Spur Nonprofit to Offer Reward

A St. Cloud human rights group has offered a $1,000 reward in the hopes of finding the person responsible for posting anti-Islamic cartoons in the city this week.

Create CommUNITY, a nonprofit organization that promotes racial harmony, announced Friday that the money would be posted with the Tri-County Crime-Stoppers for information that leads to an arrest and conviction in the case.

The crude cartoons were found stapled to a pair of utility poles Tuesday. They depict the prophet Mohammed in derogatory ways, the Qur’an and a swastika. One of the posters was stapled to a pole outside the Mandeeq Shop, a discount store named in honor of the native name for Somalia.

The city attorney’s office is investigating whether the cartoons violate any criminal statutes and, if they do, the case could be treated as a bias crime.

Police have received tips in the case but have made no arrests.

— Hat tip: KGS

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St. Cloud: Police Say They Know Who Posted Anti-Islamic Cartoons

St. Cloud police said Friday evening that they have identified the person responsible for posting obscene anti-Islamic cartoons at two locations this week.

While police believe they know who posted the obscene material, no one has been arrested or cited as they wind up their investigation, according to Sgt. Marty Sayre. The suspect’s name has therefore not been released.

The police reports will be forwarded to prosecutors for review and possible charges.

Help from witnesses and the public were credited with moving the investigation forward.

Graphic, sexually explicit cartoons were posted on utility poles in the 10 block of Second Avenue Northeast and the 300 block of Fifth Avenue South. They were found Tuesday.

Sayre said prosecutors have told investigators that they will pursue charges in the case. State law prohibits the distribution of obscene material, which is defined as work that the average person would find offensive and serves no literary, artistic, political or scientific purpose.

The incident can be reported as a bias offense. Being reported as such does not mean it will lead to an enhanced sentence, but can be reported for statistical purposes.

St. Cloud Police Department reported nine bias offenses in 2008, according to the FBI Hate Crime Statistics report.

At least two advocacy groups have come forward to condemn the cartoons. The state chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations spoke out against the cartoons Thursday and asked other religious and political leaders to do the same.

“Our state’s political and religious leaders need to speak out strongly against anti-Muslim hate, just as they would speak out against any other form of intolerance,” said CAIR-MN Communications Director Jessica Zikri on Thursday.

On Friday the executive director of Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas issued a statement condemning the cartoons. Steve Hunegs called the acts heinous and urged anyone with information to come forward.

“It is tragic that extremists cling to racist, xenophobic, anti-Islamic, and other bigoted ideas,” Hunegs said in a statement. “The Muslim community is an integral part of the diverse and democratic society in Minnesota and we stand in solidarity with them.”

Anyone with information about the incident can contact police at 251-1200 or Crime Stoppers at 255-1301.

Create CommUNITY offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who gives information that leads to the arrest of the person responsible.

— Hat tip: KGS

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U.S. Agencies Investigating Interpreters Suspected of Helping Al Qaida at Gitmo

Law enforcement sources said up to 10 Arabic and Pashtu linguists employed by the U.S. military were being investigated on suspicion that they helped Al Qaida inmates conceal information during interrogations at Guantanamo.

Almost all of the suspected interpreters were hired on a contractual basis by the Defense Department in the aftermath of the Al Qaida suicide strikes on New York and Washington in 2001.

“The possible new spy ring involves several Arabic linguists, some also Egyptian and Syrian immigrants,” Paul Sperry, a leading analyst on Al Qaida at the Hoover Institution, said.

[…]

Critics, citing political pressure, asserted that the Pentagon failed to eliminate the alleged Islamist moles at Guantanamo. They said the Pentagon ignored proper vetting procedures and employed Muslims with family links to jihad groups in the Middle East and Pakistan.

The alleged moles were said to have been in contact with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, charged with planning the 2001 attacks and scheduled to stand trial in New York City. A report prepared for the U.S. intelligence community asserted that Mohammed and other Al Qaida detainees were believed to have benefited by the moles.

— Hat tip: JD

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Young Muslim Women in West Are Increasingly Vulnerable to ‘Honor Killings’

Since the brutal slaying of 37-year-old Aasiya Hassan and the murder charges filed against her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, in February, there has been at least one murder labeled as an “honor killing.” In Arizona, an Iraqi immigrant was accused of running over his daughter with his car.

These two cases have triggered a lot of writing and discussion about honor killings and domestic violence. Here in Erie County, a number of seminars have been offered in various communities in the hope of raising awareness of the widespread violence against women. Many of these community discussions have focused on the issue of whether Hassan’s killing in Orchard Park was in fact committed by the husband — who has pleaded not guilty — as a kind of Islamic honor killing. Some Muslims were offended by that labeling of her murder, and summarily oppose the use of any term but domestic violence to describe the act.

As a major part of my teaching at the University at Buffalo Law School, where I offer a course titled “The Effects of Culture and Religion on Family Laws,” I have been researching honor killings and domestic violence for the last several years. Hassan’s murder trial is scheduled for next year. Until we hear the evidence, none of us can really know if this killing was meant in some way as an honor killing or whether it was just another terrible act of domestic violence.

But although we don’t know the facts yet, we do know that this would not be the first time a Muslim woman has been killed in this country in the name of “honor” at the hands of her husband or her father. There have been numerous cases of such murders being committed in the United States, murders that clearly fit into the typical pattern of honor killings.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Ambassador Wants Danish-American Eco-Boom

Danish green initiatives couple with American high-tech innovation is the key to a sustainable future, according to the US ambassador

Cooperation between Danish companies within the field of renewable energy and American high-tech companies stand to be greatly expanded if Laurie S. Fulton gets her way.

The US ambassador to Denmark is gearing up for a green technology boom across the Atlantic, praising the Scandinavian country’s clean energy efforts, especially in wind power.

Fulton, who took the post early this summer, is working hard to promote cooperation between leading Danish companies and American manufacturers such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Intel.

‘I’m currently putting together a major seminar, scheduled to be underway in the first half of 2010,’ she told Berlingske Tidende newspaper.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Belgium Waffles — Two Nations, After All?

Ever since it was carved by treaty out of the Dutch, French, and German borderlands after the Napoleonic wars, Belgium has been an odd kind of country—short on space, sunlight, and national identity. It was a shotgun marriage of two peoples, the Dutch-speaking Flemings in Flanders and the French-speaking Walloons in Wallonia, who, apart from a shared Catholicism had almost nothing in common. Since Brussels, the Belgian capital, is also the seat of government for the 27-nation European Union, Belgium has become a symbol of the unity-in-diversity that EU bureaucrats aspire to. But the marriage of Flanders and Wallonia, never a love match, has in recent decades entered a thrown-crockery phase. It has become a burning question whether the country is headed for an outright divorce, of the sort that broke Czechoslovakia into two countries after the Cold War.

The question has largely been answered. Belgium already looks less like a country than a loose confederation of two states. Partly thanks to half a dozen reforms pushed through since the 1970s by nationalists on both sides, French speakers and Dutch speakers inhabit different cultural universes. Most people have never heard of the major politicians, the major actresses, and sometimes even the major athletes on the other side of a country that is smaller than Maryland. They inhabit different political universes, too. Except in one nettlesome suburban area of Brussels, Flemings and Walloons are not permitted to vote for the same parties at the national level. They don’t even obey the same laws. A major political squabble in recent years has involved whether Flanders or Brussels (which is itself an autonomous region) sets the noise pollution standards for planes flying into Zaventem international airport.

The main stereotype that outsiders bring to Belgium is the idea that all of this conflict was sowed for no very good reason by obstreperous Flemish fascists. And that is why the first thing the Flemish nationalist leader Bart De Wever wants to explain as he settles in for lunch in the dining room of the Flemish parliament in Brussels (that’s separate from the Belgian parliament a few hundred yards away) is that his New Flemish Alliance party (N-VA) is not to be confused with the Vlaams Belang. Foreign coverage of Belgium tends to focus on the VB, a right-wing party that used to be called the Vlaams Blok. Along with its appeal for Flemish autonomy, the VB mixed in a big dollop of strongly stated anti-immigrant rhetoric. Its style resembled that of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France or the late Jörg Haider’s Austrian People’s party. The VB was very successful, too, winning key posts in Antwerp and increasing its score every election until it suddenly stalled out earlier this decade.

De Wever’s N-VA is not that kind of party. It is true that his party splintered off from the same postwar movement of the nationalist right. Both parties believe that Dutch-speaking Flanders should break away from Belgium, leaving French-speaking Wallonia to fend for itself. But De Wever, who used to be a university professor specializing in 19th- and 20th-century political history, stresses that the VB, by getting wrapped up in anti-immigrant agitation, became an enemy not just of his own party but also of the cause of Flemish nationhood more generally. “They are the ‘objective ally’ of the Belgian state,” he says, “the most principled argument for Belgium. People think: ‘If this is the face of an independent Flanders, we’re better off with Belgium.’?” De Wever favors instead what he calls an “inclusive nationalism.”

The second thing he insists on is that Americans may have an especially hard time seeing what is wrong with Belgian federalism as it now exists. With its already enormous devolutions of political authority to Flanders and Wallonia, Belgium now looks like the kind of federalism that American states’-rights advocates used to dream of. What needs to be remembered, he explains, is that the United States started as a loose confederation of independent states, which have slowly (and perhaps excessively) coalesced over the centuries. “We’re different,” he says. “We started as a unified nation-state and slowly but surely fell apart.”

The Belgian state, in fact, now has little to do. National responsibilities of the smaller kind—from road-building to education—have migrated downward to the regions. National responsibilities of a larger kind have migrated upward to the European Union. Belgium uses the euro. And although there is still no EU army, cash-strapped Brussels has decided to pretend there is. It recently announced the closure or downsizing of dozens of military bases.

One of the roots of Belgium’s instability is that it has seen one of the swiftest reversals of ruling class and subject class that modern history affords. In the early years of the Belgian state, French-speaking Walloons were top dog. They remained the country’s elite until well after the Second World War. The faded French shop signs you can see in certain old neighborhoods in Dutch-speaking Ghent are a lingering reminder of the time when a Fleming had to speak French to participate in national life. Walloons almost never learned Dutch. Today the Dutch-speakers are rich and the French-speakers are poor, and the two generally communicate, if at all, in English.

Over the summer, Erik Buyst, an economic historian at the University of Leuven, wrote an enlightening short essay on how that happened. In the 19th century, Flanders was behind the eight-ball. You could say it was wiped out by free trade, just as Wallonia was enriched by it. Flemish agricultural products were undercut by cheap foodstuffs from America, and Flanders could not make linens—once the mainstay of its economy—as cheaply or as well as Britain. The country emptied out, much as Ireland did during the potato famine. A lot of Flemish nationalism, in fact—the kind De Wever and other modernizers want to overcome—is of an “Irish,” never-forget-a-slight variety. Wallonia, by contrast, had coal and iron mines, which in turn bred engineering expertise, which made its upper-middle classes masters of the cobalt and copper deposits in Belgium’s vast, inhumane Central African empire. Wallonia was an exporter of locomotives and other advanced machinery.

In the middle of the twentieth century, though, that situation got turned upside-down. A shift in energy resources was a big reason why. The coal mines of the South were depleted, requiring Belgium to import oil, and convert its industries to it. That meant building refineries on the coast, which was Flemish. Belgians, rightly or not, often describe coastal Flanders as the second-largest petrochemical economy in the world outside of Houston.

Wallonia is described through its own similarly graphic metaphor: as Britain without Thatcher. That the income of Flanders overtook that of Wallonia sometime in the mid-1960s is not just an accident of natural resources. It had political causes too. The heavily unionized South, with its rigid system of wage bargaining and a lavish welfare state won through uncompromising labor agitation, was totally resistant to change. For all the attention Flemish nationalism has received, the Walloons also gave an impetus to the breakup of Belgium, for their own economic reasons. They wanted to seize control over national economic policy in order to protect their dying industries. Wallonia would be an economy of coal, iron, and steel or it would be nothing. It wound up nothing. “In contrast with e.g. Glasgow or Bilbao,” Buyst writes, “a successful reconversion to tertiary activities never materialized.”

That scared foreign investors, particularly American ones, who were pouring into Europe in the decades after World War II. Already by the 1960s, 80 percent of the foreign companies present in Belgium were in the Flemish north, according to the Ghent university political scientist Carl Devos. Wallonia is now a basket case. Charleroi, the regional hub, shows a lot of the outward signs of a city run by a Socialist party machine: 30 percent unemployment, life expectancies that have receded to their levels in the 1950s, municipal council members sitting in jail, and a tendency of helpful locals to describe it as “our Detroit.”

It is not surprising, then, that much of the rhetoric of Flemish nationalism has a Reaganite ring to it. Flanders, with 58 percent of Belgium’s people, is paying for 66 percent of its social services, amounting to 4.4 billion euros in welfare transfers, according to the Action Committee for Flemish Social Security. That is an astonishing amount of money in a country of 11 million people.

That does not necessarily mean that the Flemish nation is going to storm out of the Belgian household in a huff. A number of things make the Belgian state extremely difficult to dismantle. But these factors for cohesion are all weakening.

First is Brussels, the love child of the Flemish-Walloon pairing, which both cultures claim as their capital. It is historically a Flemish city in the heart of Flanders, but it became the seat of the Francophone elite in the last century, to such an extent that Belgians used to joke that Brussels controlled three colonies: Flanders, Wallonia, and the Congo. It is now the bureaucratic capital of the European Union as well, which has French as one of its two working languages. An independent Flanders would either have a mammoth and expanding Francophone megalopolis at its very heart, or it would be a doughnut-shaped entity with one of the most dynamic cities in Europe excised. For the first time in recent months, though, certain Flemish nationalists have begun to moot the possibility of setting up their own country without Brussels in it.

The second factor holding Belgians together is their monarchy, whose binding capacity comes from a paradox: (a) The royal family is Francophone, and (b) Dutch-speakers have traditionally liked it better than French-speakers do. A referendum was held after World War II on whether King Leopold III ought to be returned to power. (He had been removed by the Nazis and sent to Germany under mysterious circumstances.) Flemings supported his return; Walloons opposed it. But today, the monarchy has been politicized by the task of keeping the country in one piece, and Flemings have grown increasingly republican. Barely a majority of Flemings support the monarchy. Although the royal family now speak Dutch better than they did, most young people see the royals as favoring the Walloons.

Finally, there is the country’s national pension fund, which would have to be broken up along with the country, probably along a formula highly unfavorable to Flemings. But in a time of demographic decline and a mounting ratio of dependent retirees to active workers, the Belgian welfare state is no more viable over the long term than any other. (Given the massive unemployment in the South, it is probably less viable.) It cannot fulfill the role of holding the country together if it is an actuarial fiction. A complicating factor is the Belgian government’s role in rescuing three major banks in last year’s banking crisis. This creates another incentive for the status quo—but it puts pressure on state services, too.

There is an irony here, and one that has given Flanders’s nationalistic modernizers an opening. Historically, both Flanders and Wallonia have pushed for more autonomy, but in very different ways. Flanders has traditionally wanted more respect for its culture, following the model of other great but downtrodden peoples seeking to gain full civil rights. There is a Catalonian or Québécois aspect to the way they lobbied for university instruction in their own language, winning those rights only on the eve of the Second World War. They were willing to give up a bit of economic power, as the economist Olivier Boehme has shown, in defense of cultural purity. Wallonia, by contrast, took its culture for granted. Its priority was seizing the policy levers it needed to keep its dying industrial economy intact. Both sides got exactly what they wanted. But the romantic, ethereal, “cultural” agenda of the Flemings won them real-world benefits. The hard-headed, brass-tacks, “objective” agenda of the Walloons has been a disaster in practical terms.

One of the results of this reversal of fortunes has been a high-stakes battle around history, an attempt to show the Flemish cultural agenda as somehow corrupt at its heart. There are not many places in Europe where the battle rages more furiously over who deserves blame for the country’s 20th-century mistakes. (Spain is one.) Each side tries to portray the other as having committed worse excesses of collaboration. One side claims the Nazis freed Flemish POWs before Walloon ones; the other notes that Flanders had no collaborators more zealous than the Francophone fascist Léon Degrelle.

In public relations terms, the Francophones won this battle in a rout. It is the Vlaams Belang in Antwerp, not the National Front in Charleroi, that became the focus of worries that the Belgian right was fascistic and beyond the pale. Over the past couple of decades, Flemish and Belgian conservative parties erected what they called a cordon sanitaire around the Vlaams Belang to keep it out of government, citing its position on immigrants as xenophobic. Whether this was good politics or not, today it looks increasingly unfair, as all Belgian parties, left and right, Flemish and Walloon, come to the realization that reforms of immigration policy will be necessary to protect the Belgian school and social-service sector. Gerolf Annemans, the VB’s leading intellectual, says that the cordon sanitaire is “purely political.” Most of his opponents would agree with him, although they do not say so on the record.

On the other hand, De Wever is right that the VB’s focus on immigrants was a mighty distraction from the important business of establishing workable Flemish governments. VB leaders used to eschew contacts with serious mainstream nationalist parties where they existed and governed (Catalonia and Scotland), preferring to spend time consorting with unstable atavists like Jörg Haider. Although the VB still gets a quarter of the vote in Antwerp, the N-VA and another liberal nationalist party are, if you take their votes together, quickly catching up. Most analysts believe the VB’s star has been falling since the Socialists passed them as Antwerp’s largest party in 2006.

De Wever sees the Catalans and Scots as allies always, and as models sometimes. “Barcelona,” he says of the Catalan capital, “is living propaganda for self-rule.” It is Catalonia, the engine of the Spanish economy, that offers the best parallel to the Flemish situation at the moment. “Our cultural battles are over,” says De Wever. “We are not second-class citizens anymore.” He is right about that, but it is a pleasant surprise to hear it. There is nothing rarer than a nationalist party or a civil-rights movement willing to take “yes” for an answer.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.

— Hat tip: TV

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Chabad Rabbi Attacked in Vienna

A Muslim man attacked a Chabad rabbi Saturday night as he was conducting the annual ceremony to light the public Chanukah menorah in Stefenfaltz Square in the city of Vienna, Austria.

The attacker hurled himself at Rabbi Dov Gruzman, principal of the city’s Jewish school run by the Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidic movement, and began punching him, a local resident told Arutz Sheva.

As the rabbi tried to hold off his attacker, the Muslim suddenly bit his victim, severing part of his finger in the process. The Muslim was caught and arrested by police, and was held for questioning. The rabbi was evacuated to the hospital where doctors rushed to reattach his finger.

Gruzman told Arutz Sheva that the Muslim had raced towards the entrance at the beginning of the ceremony and began to curse the Jews who were there and the Jewish people in general. “I tried to hold him off, to keep him away from the entrance and he bit me really hard, and that’s how he injured me,” he said.

The event itself did not discourage Rabbi Gruzman, and in fact strengthened his resolve. “We are glad that such an event occurred,” he said. “Today, because of what happened, we are planning [a much larger event]. We increased the number of sufganiot [Chanukah jelly doughnuts] from 50 to 700 — and this is our answer to the attack and to anti-Semitism.”

However, the rabbi himself will be unable to participate in Sunday evening’s ceremony due to the fact that he is still hospitalized, and being monitored for infection from the bite. Nevertheless, he emphasized, through the Chanukah lighting ceremony he sends his blessing to every Jew around the world.

— Hat tip: Vlad Tepes

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Copenhagen Climate Summit: 1,000 Anarchists Arrested

Nearly 1,000 people were arrested in Copenhagen yesterday as anarchists and left-wing activists fought running street battles with police in the Danish capital as negotiations continued at the climate summit.

Cobble stones were thrown through the windows of the former stock exchange building and foreign office buildings in the city, but police made a large number of pre-emptive arrests under a controversial anti-hooligan law.

Suspected troublemakers were herded into a closed-off street, made to sit down and then tied up with plastic cuffs. They were then bused to a detention centre set up for the climate conference.

Police said four cars were set on fire during the evening. One policeman was hurt by a stone and a Swedish man injured by a firework.

“You don’t have to use that kind of violence to be heard,” said Connie Hedegaard, the Danish minister presiding at the United Nations talks. She condemned rioters after welcoming the main march at a candlelit vigil outside the conference centre.

One activist group accused the police of abuse complaining people had been forced sit on the road for hours in near-freezing temperatures.

The day’s main demonstration — a march involving 40,000 people — remained good natured but there remain fears that a hard-core of more violent demonstrators may still be waiting until later in the week, when President Barack Obama and other world leaders will arrive, to protest.

Inside the Bella Centre, delegates at the COP15 climate summit gathered around flat-screen TVs, showing both the police crackdown and the peaceful rally of environmental compaigners.

Despite the protesters’ urgings, there are growing fears that the summit could degenerate into an undignified global squabbling match with poor nations accusing their rich counterparts of forging a “backroom deal” at a secret dinner.

The split that the meeting has exposed between wealthy and impoverished nations was laid bare with news that ministers from a select clique of 40 countries were dining together away from the summit venue.

The meal, held behind closed doors at an undisclosed location, was viewed as a last-ditch attempt to cobble together a politically acceptable deal after a week of discussions marred by in-fighting, and “greener than thou” posturing over who is most to blame for global warming. Ministers are desperate to have a document ready when heads of state arrive for the final stages of the two-week conference on Thursday.

Leading them will be Gordon Brown, who has fashioned himself as a global champion in the battle against climate change, and who is arriving ahead of other top statesmen in a bid to stamp his authority on the meeting.

But so far officials from 194 countries have failed to make any substantive agreements on even the most basic goals.

Arguments are still raging over targets and deadlines for limiting global temperature rise, as well as the extent to which rich nations should fund green projects for poor ones, and whether emerging economic superpowers like China should balance green considerations against much-needed development.

Washington and Beijing have also traded insults over whether China should fund its own green measures or receive handouts financed largely by the West.

With signs of an irreconcilable split growing between the large and powerful and the small and poor, last night’s dinner, attended by countries including Britain, the US, China and India — was viewed as an attempt by mostly bigger, better-off nations to strike a deal in private.

“A lot of the deals are done in back rooms but there has to be transparency at the same time,” said Keith Allott, of the World Wildlife Fund, which claims smaller nations are being left out of the process.

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, attempted to paint a brighter picture of the conference, insisting he was optimistic of a deal by the time heads of state arrived.

“This remains difficult in process terms because we have 100 and something leaders arriving on Thursday and we have to get to an agreement by the time they leave,” he said.

“The world is doing what it has never done before, which is trying to peak emissions and see them fall. It is not a done deal, it remains in the balance.”

Mr Brown plans to travel to Copenhagen on Tuesday evening, a day earlier than planned, in an attempt to help “seal the deal”. Downing Street sources said the Prime Minister was expected to hold one-to-one meetings with key figures including Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General.

He will attend a formal dinner on Thursday and an all-day session on Friday before returning to Britain that night. A source said: “He remains concerned that the commitment for a deal is still short of what is required.”

A productive meeting at Copenhagen is widely seen as being crucial to the credibility of the global campaign on climate change. But the first week saw slow progress. Rich and poor repeatedly clashed over the need to reduce greenhouse gases, with Africa and the small island states threatening to walk out unless the developed nations committed to deeper cuts.

Many of the exchanges were bad-tempered, souring an event that aspires to be a vehicle for better global co-operation. He Yafei, China’s vice minister of foreign affairs, said he was “shocked” at US climate change negotiator Todd Stern’s assertion that Beijing did not need any American money. “It’s not just about the US and China, it’s the whole international community,” he said, insisting that climate change was historically the fault of the West. “The US is a developed country and China is part of the developing countries. To tackle global climate change we need to work together.”

Ian Fry, the representative of the tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu, has also claimed that even the more vulnerable countries’ intended target to restrict global warming to a rise of 1.5C will leave his island underwater because of rising sea levels.

However, the G8 and major developing economies believe it is realistically impossible to restrict temperature rises to less than 2C. They have also accused developing nations of demanding more “go green” cash than they actually need.

After seven days’ negotiating there is so far only a draft agreement on the table. The framework for a possible “Copenhagen Protocol” talks about cuts for developed nations of between 25 and 45 per cent by 2020, and calls on rich nations to pay their poorer cousins to reduce their emissions. But blanks remain in what negotiators term the “square brackets” — where officials must eventually insert precise figures and dates.

There is also the question of making the agreement enforceable in law. Britain has already suggested that a further summit will be necessary in six months’ time to address the issue.

— Hat tip: Gaia

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Danish Police Arrested at Least 200 Climate Activists Today as They Attempted to March on Copenhagen Docks.

About 1,000 protesters from across Europe had joined the march on the fringes of the UN climate summit but police quickly moved to disrupt it as it targeted the Danish shipping giant Moller-Maersk.

A couple of hundred protesters, many of them British, were corralled at a junction near the American embassy about a mile from their target in an echo of the controversial “kettling” tactics deployed at G20 protests in London earlier this year.

Outnumbered at least 2-1 by police in full riot gear, the protesters were told that they would be searched individually and then released. But when some of the activists refused to co-operate the entire group — including a Times reporter — were told that they were under arrest and taken to a requisitioned warehouse in Valby, on the outskirts of town, where they were processed and put into cells.

The reporter, who was later released, said that there had been no violence.

The police had already deemed the demonstration illegal and quickly stormed a float on which the ringleaders were travelling, grabbing their megaphones. “Take a chill pill, police,” one demonstrator shouted before having his loudhailer confiscated. “We haven’t done anything yet.”

A Copenhagen police spokeswoman confirmed around 200 arrests. “It was an illegal demonstration. They were bringing gas masks and things to throw,” she said.

Activists at the summit, where at least 115 world leaders are due to sign an accord to tackle global warming on Friday, had already complained of heavy-handed treatment from the police after mass arrests yesterday.

Police said that they had released all but 13 of 968 protesters arrested during a mass march on the summit venue yesterday afternoon. Of those, only three — two Danes and a Frenchman — were due to appear in court on preliminary charges of fighting with police.

Conference delegates were taking the day off today, enjoying the sights of Copenhagen, although environment ministers and their top negotiators were meeting informally at the Danish Foreign Ministry and at hotels around the city trying to agree financing terms and emissions targets under a new deal. An agreement is likely to include a green tax on the shipping industry.

An estimated 40,000 people joined yesterday’s march toward the Bella Centre, the sprawling conference centre that is hosting the 192-nation summit. They chanted and carried banners reading “Demand Climate Justice,” “The World Wants a Real Deal” and “There is No Planet B” as they marked for miles past officers in riot gear, police dogs and the flashing lights of dozens of police vans.

Police said that riot squads moved in to arrest activists at the tail end of the demonstration when some of them started vandalising buildings. Windows were broken at the former stock exchange and the Foreign Ministry. A police officer received minor injuries when he was hit by a rock thrown from the group and one protester was injured by fireworks, Flemming Steen Munch, a police spokesman, said…

— Hat tip: TB

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Denmark: 80,000 Jobs Saved

From Danish: The Danish finance minister says that the financial policy and lower interest rates saved up to 80,000 jobs.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Italy: Berlusconi’s New Bloomer as He Sends EU Leaders Doodles of Women’s Knickers at Summit

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi shocked leaders at an EU summit on Friday by sending them doodles showing women’s underwear through the ages.

He passed round his etchings of bloomers and thongs as the leaders discussed climate change at the meeting in Brussels.

His vulgar prank caused titters among some, but indignation among others who passed them back to him.

European leaders present included Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen and EU foreign envoy Baroness Cathy Ashton.

It is understood the rude drawings passed across Mr Brown’s desk, but it is believed he ignored them.

Mr Berlusconi, 73, started doodling as the leaders discussed giving more money to help poorer nations combat the effects of climate change.

At first, the other leaders thought he was making his own calculations with a view to taking part in the complex talks. Then they realised he was sketching women’s underwear.

One source said the etchings were headed ‘Women’s knickers through the ages’.

The doodles are said to have included loin cloths used by Egyptian women, Victorian bloomers, French satin knickers, thongs and G-strings.

‘No one could believe it,’ said a source. ‘He was scribbling away and then sent round some jottings with women’s knickers on it. Some people were amused. Some were not.’

Mr Berlusconi has been plagued by allegations of sexual impropriety since April. His wife Veronica filed for divorce after his attendance at a girl’s 18th birthday party.

Patrizia D’Addario, a 42-year old escort girl, claimed that she had spent the night with Mr Berlusconi.

He denied any knowledge of her being a paid escort.

— Hat tip: Gaia

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Italy: PM Silvio Berlusconi Taken to Hospital After Being Attacked at Rally in Milan

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been struck in the face after leaving a meeting in Milan.

He was left ‘profusely bleeding’ from the mouth.

It was reported that a protester in a crowd hit Berlusconi with either his fist or a blunt object as the Prime Minister signed autographs outside the Piazza del Duomo..

The 73-year-old was rushed away from the scene in a car.

News reports said a man, in his 30s or early 40s, was immediately detained as the suspected assailant and taken to police headquarters.

Witnesses told reporters the assailant appeared to have punched Berlusconi while holding a metal object in his fist.

State TV showed Berlusconi with blood on his lips as he was lifted to his feet by aides.

A spokesman for Berlusconi says he didn’t immediately have any information about the incident, which happened after the premier delivered a long, rousing speech to his conservative supporters Sunday evening.

According to Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, a small group of protesters were shouting slogans and whistling during the rally.

There were reports of scuffles between the protesters and security staff.

During the gathering Berlusconi told supporters: ‘They paint me as a monster, but I don’t think I am one — firstly because I am good-looking and secondly because I’m a decent chap.’

The attack follows a controversial few months for the Prime Minister, who was the subject of allegations that he slept with prostitutes after his wife filed for divorce.

Last week tens of thousands of people attended an anti-Berlusconi rally in Rome.

— Hat tip: Gaia

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Italy: Attacker Breaks Berlusconi’s Nose

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was rushed to the hospital Sunday evening with a fractured nose and bloodied lip after a man threw a statuette at the premier’s face from close range at the end of a political rally.

Mr. Berlusconi had been shaking hands with supporters in a dense crowd when a man wielding a statuette broke through the crush of people and assaulted the premier. Mr. Berlusconi’s bodyguards hustled the premier into the back of a car while police detained the attacker, identified as 42-year-old Massimo Tartaglia. Police said Mr. Tartaglia didn’t have a criminal record.

Mr. Berlusconi, 73, will remain in charge of Italy’s government while he is in the hospital.

A billionaire media mogul with a penchant for making controversial public statements, he has long been one of the most polarizing figures in Europe’s political landscape. Sunday’s attack, however, shows how tensions in Italy are running higher than ever.

“This hurts the country,” said Paolo Bonaiuti, a spokesman for Mr. Berlusconi’s conservative government. “What worries us is the climate of violence.”

Support for Mr. Berlusconi remains strong among many Italian voters. However, swaths of the Italian public have become increasingly angry with the premier during the past year. Mr. Berlusconi’s personal life has undergone heavy scrutiny since last spring, when his wife announced she wanted a divorce. More recently, Mr. Berlusconi has made repeated calls for deep changes to Italy’s constitution and judicial system after Italy’s Constitutional Court struck down a law shielding sitting prime ministers and other top officials from criminal prosecution.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is in a Milan area hospital after he was attacked at a political rally in the northern Italian city. Video courtesy of Reuters.

Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa, who was standing near Mr. Berlusconi when he was assaulted, told an interviewer on television that the attack stemmed from “all the tension we’ve seen in this period,” adding: “For months there has been a campaign of hatred against Berlusconi.”

The Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, called the attack “a serious and worrying act that shows the real risk of violent words turning into violent acts.”

The incident took place moments after Mr. Berlusconi addressed a political rally in Milan, which was open to the public.

Among the crowd was a group of protesters who repeatedly shouted at him during his speech. Mr. Berlusconi had interrupted his speech to challenge the protesters, booming: “We must oppose you, because you want to transform Italy into a screaming piazza.”

“Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you,” Mr. Berlusconi yelled, pointing at the protesters.

After his speech, Mr. Berlusconi made his way through the crowd, greeting supporters along the way. Police said Mr. Tartaglia attacked the premier with a souvenir sculpture of Milan’s spire-laden cathedral. It is unclear how the assailant got close enough to strike him.

Doctors attending to Mr. Berlusconi planned to keep him in the hospital under observation, Mr. Bonaiuti said. He said the premier had suffered a cut to his lip and damage to two teeth, as well as a fracture along the bridge of his nose. Images of the premier with a swollen, blood-smudged face were splashed across Italian television.

The attack is likely to fuel debate in a country already divided over Mr. Berlusconi’s leadership.

Last week, he delivered a speech at a meeting of European Union leaders, calling for changes in the Italian Constitution. The speech drew immediate protest across Italy. He also lashed out at Italy’s President Giorgio Napolitano, a respected figure who is considered the guardian of the constitution.

Mr. Napolitano condemned Sunday’s attack as a “grave and rash act of aggression.”

“Political and institutional conflict must remain inside the limits of responsible self-control and civil dialogue,” Mr. Napolitano said.

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New Religious Newspaper in France

From Dutch: Bayard Presse is publishing the first free (Christian) religious paper, which will initially be given out in Marseille.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Northern Irish Dissidents Forming “New IRA” — Report

BELFAST (Reuters) — Republican dissidents in Northern Ireland have formed a new militant organisation to escalate attacks which have targeted British army and police this year, the Sunday Times reported, citing Republican sources.

A spokesman in Belfast for Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, said: “We have no knowledge of it so we can’t comment on something that we know nothing about.”

— Hat tip: Esther

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Rights Group Condemns Creeping Anti-Roma Extremism

Bucharest — A Romanian Roma rights group on Thursday condemned a growing “extremism” against the minority in European countries, according to a report.

The Romani Criss association said 2009 was the year of “reinventing extremism in Europe” adding “the situation is alarming, as extremism against Roma is gaining ground in several European countries.”

— Hat tip: Esther

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Swiss Man Builds Mock Minaret to Protest Ban

Shoe-shop owner, Guillaume Morand, who is not a Muslim, built the mock minaret as an extension of his chimney and sprayed it in gold paint in defiance of a constitutional amendment approved in a nationwide referendum last month.

“It was scandalous that the Swiss voted for the ban,” Britain’s TimesOnline quoted Morand as saying. “Now we [the Swiss] have the support of all the far-right parties across Europe. This is shameful.”

Morand said he viewed the ban was all the more “scandalous” given that Switzerland actively encourages Arabs to “visit the country and to spend their money here.”

The far-right Swiss People’s Party, which initially called for the ban, accused Morand of using the tower for self-publicity but Morand insists the plastic tower is a “message of peace and tolerance.”

“Our minaret is pretty. You could say I’m proud of it and I’m happy that people are talking about it,” Morand, 46, said.

Morand said, however, that his neighbors were not pleased with the structure and have “showered him with racist insults,” the paper reported, adding since the minaret was erected this week at least one of Morand’s neighbors has threatened to demolish it.

Morand also said local police have photographed the structure and have threatened to file a report, which could lead to a legal battle but the shop-owner is not worried and says “I think I’ll just get a letter from a judge. If they give me a fine, I will contest it. There’s no justification for a punishment over this.”

Peaceful religion

Meanwhile on Saturday some 500 protesters gathered outside parliament in Bern to condemn the ban on the building of new minarets, which Switzerland has only four of.

Some were seen with cardboard placards reading “Islam” and “We are Muslims, not Hitler,” as organizers from the Swiss central Islamic council, sought to send a message that Islam is a peaceful religion that teaches its followers to respect other faiths.

Nicolas Blancho, a Swiss Muslim co-organizer of the demonstration, told the crowd that Muslims are not seeking to impose Shariah law in Switzerland, the domestic ATS news agency reported.

The minaret ban drew widespread criticism internationally, with U.N. high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay calling the ban “deeply discriminatory, deeply divisive and a thoroughly unfortunate step for Switzerland to take.”

The Swiss government sought to assure the country’s 400,000 Muslims, who are mainly of Balkan and Turkish origin, that the outcome was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.”

Switzerland has around 200 mosques, with just four minarets between them.

— Hat tip: TB

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UK Muslims Are Europe’s Most Patriotic

Muslims in Britain are the most patriotic in Europe — but more than a quarter in some parts of the country still do not feel British, according to a new study.

The report, funded by George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist, found that on average 78% of Muslims identified themselves as British, although this dropped by six points in east London.

This compares with 49% of Muslims who consider themselves French and just 23% who feel German.

The findings, based on more than 2,000 detailed interviews, suggest that Muslims may be better integrated in Britain than in other parts of the European Union.

— Hat tip: JD

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UK: ‘Our Faith is Being Targeted … and We’ve Been Thrown to the Lions’: The Christian Hoteliers Accused of Insulting Muslim Guest Reveal

When they called their hotel The Bounty House, Benjamin and Sharon Vogelenzang did so in the hope it would be ‘filled with peace and plenty’. The sentiment might sound corny, but they meant it.

The couple have spent ten years refurbishing a large, rather plain building in the Liverpool suburb of Aintree, hoping to run a ‘boutique’ guest house in accordance with their own deeply felt Christian beliefs.

But there has been little peace or plenty in recent months for the Vogelenzangs, and soon there might be no Bounty House either.

Last week, they were cleared of insulting a Muslim guest when high-profile ‘hate crime’ allegations were thrown out by a judge to public applause. But, faced with £400,000 of debt and the wreckage of a business they say has been all but destroyed by the controversy, there has been little celebration for Ben and Sharon — just bewilderment at the way they have been treated.

The experience has left them questioning their faith in the police, in the Crown Prosecution Service and in a British establishment that seems bent on protecting all manner of rights and sensitivities. Unless, that is, you are a church-going Christian.

It has done little to improve their confidence in the way their case was handled to learn that Detective Constable Tracy O’Hara, the officer who played a leading role in the prosecution for the unusual crime of religiously aggravated harassment and took charge of their interrogation, is a leading light in the Merseyside Police Gay And Lesbian Support Network.

‘It was a nightmare we couldn’t wake up from,’ said Sharon, speaking for the first time since their disturbing ordeal began eight months ago. ‘We are ordinary, hard-working people. We are also law-abiding and we have always had faith in the law and the police. They are supposed to protect standards of decency. Now we feel betrayed.’

Even today, the Vogelenzangs are cautious in what they say — understandably so. They have received abusive emails and threats of violence and are anxious to return to some semblance of normality. But there is no disguising their shock at a turn of events that has come close to ruining them.

‘The whole thing has been a stomach-churning experience. It has upset us and our family physically,’ said Ben. ‘We think the Christian faith is being targeted by those in authority and that we have been thrown to the lions.

‘It is all to do with political correctness. Minority groups seem to be treated fairly, but people like us in the majority groups are being pushed to one side. It is completely unbalanced.’

[…]

‘One of the two officers took notes and the interview was recorded on tape. It was extremely hard to sit there and listen to a lot of lies being told about us.’

In retrospect — though the police always acted professionally — Sharon feels they were trying to ‘push’ the case, in which she and her husband were accused of breaking Section Five of the Public Order Act.

‘We had already spent an hour each with our solicitor,’ she said. ‘It felt like a nightmare, even though he said it was a low-level accusation and didn’t think that it would warrant us being charged.

‘But he warned that if it did go that far and we needed his firm’s services, we would be means-tested to see if we would be eligible for Legal Aid. I knew we could not afford their services. So even before I got into the interview room with the police officers, I was scared.

‘The officers kept saying how serious these accusations were. They stuck to questions about the events that allegedly took place. They didn’t ask what we personally believed.’

Sharon said the six hours in the police station ‘felt like being in a bad dream — a surreal experience we couldn’t escape from’.

She added: ‘DC O’Hara, who asked most of the questions, was professional and courteous but very determined in her manner. It felt like she asked us the same questions twice.

‘The other female officer, Detective Sergeant Rhodes, also started asking me the same questions until my solicitor stepped in and said, “I think she has already answered that.”

‘The officers told us that a serious complaint had been made against us. We felt intimidated and humiliated. They kept saying we were there voluntarily, but if we hadn’t gone in they would have come and arrested us on our doorstep.’

As Ben points out, it was shocking enough to be there in the first place. ‘We are totally law-abiding citizens,’ he said. ‘We grew up with the idea that the police are your friends. I am not so sure now.’

[…]

Fortunately for them, and for the course of justice, Judge Clancy was listening — and he threw out the case after only a few minutes’ summing up, without even retiring to consider his verdict.

Describing Mrs Tazi’s evidence as ‘inconsistent’, he said that her account could not be trusted and that she was not quite the religious person she had presented herself to be in the witness box.

He referred to a conversation with the ambulance driver who took her to the pain-management course, in which she had told him the hotel owners ‘were taking the p*** out of me’.

Ben said: ‘We were surprised how fast the judge reached his decision.

‘We were also amazed at the media interest — newspapers and TV stations from all over the world were ringing up.

‘When we came out of court, we were so relieved — stunned but relieved. There was sustained applause for five minutes after the verdict was given.’

Life is still difficult, though. The threats and abuse have left them fearful. ‘Some of the messages are scary,’ said Ben. ‘They were saying things like, “We will get you. We will smash you up. We know where you live.”

‘Will these threats be investigated as vigorously as the allegations against us? That remains to be seen.’

— Hat tip: JD

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UK: Ministers Told: Don’t Call Islamic Extremists “Islamic Extremists”

MINISTERS have been BANNED from using words like Islamist and fundamentalist — in case they offend Muslims.

An eight-page Whitehall guide lists words they should not use when talking about terrorism in public and gives politically correct alternatives.

They are told not to refer to Muslim extremism as it links Islam to violence. Instead, they are urged to talk about terrorism or violent extremism.

Fundamentalist and Jihadi are also banned because they make an “explicit link” between Muslims and terror.

Ministers should say criminals, murderers or thugs instead. Radicalisation must be called brainwashing and talking about moderate or radical Muslims is to be avoided as it “splits the community”.

Islamophobia is also out as it is received as “a slur that singles out Muslims”.

The guide, produced by the secretive Research, Information and Communications Unit in the Home Office, tell ministers to “avoid implying that specific communities are to blame” for terrorism. It says more than 2,000 people are engaged in terror plots.

The guidance was branded “daft” last night by a special adviser to ex-Communities Secretary Hazel Blears. Paul Richards said: “Unless you can describe what you’re up against, you’re never going to defeat it. Ministers need to be leading the debate on Islamic extremism and they can’t do that if they have one hand tied behind their back.”

The Home Office said: “This is about using appropriate language to have counter-terrorism impact. It would be foolish to do anything else.”

— Hat tip: Steen

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UK: Swine Flu Pandemic ‘Less Lethal Than Expected’

A study by the chief medical officer has revealed that there have been only 26 fatalities out of every 100,000 people with the illness

The first flu pandemic of the 21st century is less lethal than experts feared, killing only 26 out of every 100,000 people who became ill, a study by the chief medical officer reveals today.

But a third of deaths have been among healthy people who would not have been eligible for vaccination under the present strategy. Sir Liam Donaldson and colleagues say in their paper published online that vaccination may have to be extended to a wider population than at present.

— Hat tip: Esther

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UK: Schoolboy, 12, Suspended for ‘Crisp Dealing’

A 12-year-old pupil at a Liverpool school where fatty drinks and snacks are banned has been suspended for “crisp dealing”, it is reported.

Joel Bradley was caught allegedly selling a packet of Discos at a marked-up price of 50 pence.

The student at the Cardinal Heenan High School was given a day’s suspension because it was the second time he had been caught.

His father, Joe, told the Liverpool Echo the youngster was being “victimised” for the enterprise, which could earn him as much as £15 a day.

Mr Bradley, from Norris Green, admitted he too had once been caught selling canned drinks, chocolate bars and crisps from a van outside the school.

He said: “I think the school has made a beeline for him because of what I’ve done.”

Cardinal Heenan’s head teacher Dave Forshaw said: “We are a healthy school and proud of it.”

— Hat tip: JD

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UK: Speculation Mounts That Gordon Brown May Call an Early Election

Alistair Darling is preparing to deliver a pre-election Budget in the spring, despite a wave of speculation that Gordon Brown may opt for an early contest.

Treasury officials are working on the expectation that there will be a Budget in mid-March, even though David Cameron yesterday became the latest politician to suggest that the election will come on March 25. If he is right there would not be time for a Budget, which cannot come earlier than three months after the Pre-Budget Report.

Labour and Conservative chiefs admitted that they were on the alert for an early election, but Mr Brown was reported to be holding to his favoured date of May 6.

Mr Cameron said that the Tories were ready for a March poll. “I have said to all my team to be ready in the new year for an early election. All systems are go, we are clearing manifestos,” he told Sunday Live on Sky News.

— Hat tip: Frontinus

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Muslim Scholar Publishes Anti-Christian Book in Egypt

by Mary Abdelmassih

Cairo (AINA) — Christian in Egypt are up in arms this week over a controversial book issued as a free supplement with this month’s Al-Azhar magazine, describing Christianity as a Religion of “idolatry” and claiming that the Holy Bible is a misquotation of the original one. The book was published by State-owned corporations that are financed by taxpayers, Christians as well as Muslims.

The controversial book is titled “Scientific Report” and authored by Dr. Muhammad Imarah, a member of Al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Academy (IRA), which is affiliated with the Ministry of Religious Endowments. The book discusses Christian dogma, casts doubts over it, and asserts that Christianity is a “religion of polytheism.”

Coptic lawyer Naguib Ghobrial, president of the Egyptian Union of Human Right Organization, has filed a complaint with the Attorney General against Dr. Mohamed Imarah, accusing him of adopting a systematic approach to “ruin Egypt by inciting sectarian rifts between the sons of one nation and defamation of a divine religion recognized by the Egyptian Constitution.”

Ghobrial added that what Imarah wrote “defames the Christian dogma, in contradiction with Article 98 of penal law dealing with derision of religion.”

Ms. Elaine Kellini, Coptic member of the People’s Assembly, said she has ordered a copy of Imarah’s book and would take legal action against him, if it was proven that he defamed Christianity.

The Egyptian Newspaper Al Destoor in its December 7 issue reviewed the controversial book, saying Imarah published his book in reply to a proselytizing book called “We Are Ready To Answer” by an unknown Christian author who took the alias name of Dr. Samir Morcos. Imarah said the book was presented to the Islamic Research Academy (IRA) to obtain permission for publication, which the IRA duly turned down, “as it contained many false allegations regarding Islam, making of the Koran a lie, therefore promoting hatred towards Christians,” and that he was obliged to answer back.

In a second statement to Al-Destoor, Imarah said that the Islamic Academy approved unanimously in its 25 June 2009 his “Scientific Report” and approved the recommendation to have it published as a supplement to Al-Azhar Magazine. He also changed his assertion about the origin of the alleged anti-Islam book, saying it was likely issued by foreign entities wanting to tamper with the tenets of Islam and harm national unity.

Yesterday Al-Destoor wrote that “Islamic Research Academy announces support for Mohamed Imarah in his attack on Christianity,” stressing that Aly Abdolbaqi — Secretary of the Islamic Research Academy — said that the Academy supports Imarah in his “Scientific Report” response, and that he is ready to stand by his side on this issue.

In the first chapter of the book Imarah cites eleven reasons why that the Bible, with its Old and New Testaments, has been distorted from its original version.

In the second Chapter Imarah accuses Christians of making Jesus a God with all the functions of God Almighty, a substitute for the Father and “Creator of all things.” “They have gone beyond the Trinity and the multiplicity of gods, to reach idolatry, in which Jesus takes the place of the Father.” He went on to attack the Gospel of St. John, saying: “this Gospel alone takes one on the path of idolatry and polytheism, makes the ‘Word’ — Christ — as a substitute for God.”

In the third and last chapter Imarah criticizes the anonymous Christian author about infallibility, sin, and miracles, which is denied to all prophets and messengers with the exception of Christ alone. “This book goes as far as denying Mohamed, the Prophet of Islam, of miracle-making,” writes Imarah.

Most Christians in Egypt, believe that no such Christian writer or proselytizing book ever existed or was presented to the Islamic Academy, and that this imaginary book was used by Imarah, whom has a history of defaming Christianity, as a pretext to defame Christianity again. Many have questioned the usefulness of the laws of defamation of religions adopted by the State, when they are not applied uniformly

In December, 2006, Dr Imarah wrote a book called “The Sedition of Takfeer [apostasy],” which published by the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, which is under the auspices of Al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Academy (IRA), It included a paragraph which “explicitly described Christians as infidels, just like Magus and idol-worshippers, who are destined to eternal hellfire in the afterlife and whose property and lives can be lawfully seized during their lifetime.”

The defamation of Christianity and the incitement of Muslims against Egyptian Christians was so grave in this book that Dr. Imarah was threaten by a barrage of lawsuits. At the time, Imarah apologized, explaining that the paragraph in question was no more than a quote from a century-old book by the grand Islamic Imam Mahmoud Hamed El-Ghazali, defining faith and atheism. His excuse was that he quoted the old text without “thinking.” The book was recalled and later printed with the derision of Christianity removed.

None of the Muslim scholars interviewed wanted to give their opinion about Imarah’s new “Scientific Report,” except the controversial Sheikh Youssefel Badry, who told Freecopts “what came in Imarah’s book is the truth as advocated by the Koran, Imarah brought nothing new,” adding “the Bible is not the word of God, and God never pledged to save it (from distortion)”

According to Free Copts, the Coptic Orthodox Church has no intention of responding to the new book, so as not to give it undue importance, especially that “Imarah brought nothing new to what he previously wrote, and we have answered him several times in the past.”

Dr. Safwat Bayaadi, President of the Anglican Communion in Egypt, told Copts-United that he is writing to Grand Sheikh Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, expressing his disappointment. “This book is attributed to Al-Azhar, and when a prestigious and official state institute like Al-Azhar does that, we have to ask how could this happen?”

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Israeli Settlements Are More Than Legitimate

Critics may assail them on other grounds, but no one can deny that they are legal. In fact, the 1922 Mandate for Palestine encourages them.

President Obama asserts, seconded by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, that “America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” in the West Bank. Both have praised the 10-month freeze on new residential building — excluding eastern Jerusalem — that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced late last month.

Netanyahu now calls for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to resume negotiations or take the blame for lack of progress when the “one-time-only” freeze expires. Abbas’ precondition — adopted after Washington’s pronouncements — is that all Israeli construction, including in eastern Jerusalem, must cease permanently.

Too bad international diplomacy doesn’t have a replay button. If it did, the parties could look back at history, which would show that Israeli settlements not only are legitimate under international law but positively encouraged.

The basic relevant provision, the League of Nations’ 1922 British Mandate for Palestine, Article 6, encourages “close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands not required for public use.” Most Israeli settlements in the West Bank have been built on land that was state land under the Ottomans, British, Jordanians and, after the 1967 Six-Day War, under the Israelis, or on property that has been privately purchased.

The United States endorsed Article 6 by signing the 1924 Anglo-American Convention, a treaty stipulating acceptance of the mandate. The League of Nations is long gone, but Article 6 remains in force. The United Nations’ 1945 Charter, Article 80 — sometimes known as “the Palestine article” — notes among other things that “nothing in the charter shall be construed to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or peoples or the terms of existing international instruments.”

Eugene Rostow, U.S. undersecretary of State for President Lyndon Johnson — who is an authority on international law and the coauthor of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which outlines requirements for Arab-Israeli peace — reaffirmed this principle. In 1990, he said: “The Jewish right of settlement in the West Bank is conferred by the same provisions of the mandate under which Jews settled in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem before the state of Israel was created.”

As for Resolution 242’s call for “secure and recognized boundaries,” according to Rostow in 1991 in another piece, a careful look at the wrangling over the resolution in 1967 makes it clear that it did not mandate Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sinai peninsula to the post-1948 armistice lines.

Many who allege that Jewish communities in the West Bank violate international law cite the 4th Geneva Convention, Article 49. It states that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But Julius Stone, like Rostow a leading legal theorist, wrote in his 1981 book, “Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations,” that the effort to designate Israeli settlements as illegal was a “subversion . . . of basic international law principles.”

Stone, Stephen Schwebel, a former judge on the International Court of Justice, and others have distinguished between territory acquired in an “aggressive conquest” (such as Nazi Germany’s seizures during World War II) and territory taken in self-defense (such as Israeli conquests in 1967).

The distinction is especially sharp when the territory acquired had been held illegally, as Jordan had held the West Bank, which it seized during the Arab states’ 1948-49 war against Israel.

Further, Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention was intended to outlaw the Nazi practice of forcibly transporting populations into or out of occupied territories to labor or death camps. Israelis were not forcibly transferred to the West Bank, nor were Palestinian Arabs forced out of it. Two years after President Carter’s State Department determined that Israeli settlements violated international law, President Reagan said flatly that they were “not illegal.”

One can argue, as Reagan did and Obama does, that Israel’s establishing towns in the disputed territories after 1967 obstructs diplomacy, or, as some Israeli critics do, that building Jewish communities near Palestinian Arab population centers disperses the country’s Jewish majority too widely. But one cannot accurately declare the settlements illegal.

Eric Rozenman is Washington director of CAMERA, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

— Hat tip: KGS

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Jewish Lobby Wages War on Christmas Trees

A new front for religious battles: Hotels and restaurants. The “Lobby for Jewish values” this week began operating against restaurants and hotels that plan to put up Christmas trees and other Christian symbols ahead of Christmas and the civil New Year.

According to the lobby’s Chairman, Ofer Cohen, they have received backing by the rabbis, “and we are even considering publishing the names of the businesses that put up Christian symbols ahead of the Christian holiday and call for a boycott against them.”

Fliers and ads distributed among the public read, “The people of Israel have given their soul over the years in order to maintain the values of the Torah of Israel and the Jewish identity.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Iran Leader Says Opposition Protests “Anti-Islam”

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned opposition leaders on Sunday to distance themselves from protesters whom he accused of acting “against Islam” as he labeled the June presidential election legal and said the case was closed.

“Those who shout slogans in the name of these people (opposition leaders), hoist their pictures and speak of them with respect are in a point which is the exact opposite of Imam (founder of the revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini), revolution and Islam,” Khamenei said on state television.

Iran’s official media accuses pro-opposition students of tearing up a picture of Khomeini, during a state organized rally on last Monday that turned violent when the opposition hijacked the rally to protest against the government.

Referring to the disputed June election, which the opposition says was rigged in favor of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khamenei said:

“The election is over. It was legal and they could not demonstrate their claim (of vote fraud).”

“Some people created riots and encouraged people to stand against the system… paving the way for our hopeless enemies to undermine the Islamic revolution.”

The elite Revolutionary Guards urged the judiciary on Sunday to confront in a “revolutionary way” those behind an “insult” to Ayatollah Khomeini.

Khamenei said the opposition rallies where illegal.

“They are openly violating the law, they insulted imam Khomeini,” he said.

The leader urged authorities to identify “those behind the insult to imam Khomeini.”

Meanwhile the exiled leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, arrived in Iran on Sunday on a visit where he was due to meet top officials including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A Hamas statement from Meshaal’s Damascus headquarters said the visit was part of a regional tour, but gave no further details.

— Hat tip: TB

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Iranian Scientist Who Vanished ‘Gave Nuclear Secrets’ To UN Inspectors Sent to Qom Site

An Iranian scientist who vanished six months ago has revealed secrets of his country’s nuclear programme with international weapons inspectors, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

Shahram Amiri briefed United Nations nuclear monitors in a clandestine meeting at Frankfurt airport just hours before they flew to Iran to inspect a hidden uranium enrichment plant, according to French intelligence sources.

An award-winning atomic physicist, Mr Amiri had worked at the heavily-guarded underground site at Qom. He was attached to a Tehran university named by the EU last year as part of the regime’s nuclear-proliferation operations.

— Hat tip: JD

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Muslim Inventor Set to Take Orthopaedic Prayer Rugs Worldwide

Ritual prayer for Muslims with knee problems can be painful, but an entrepreneur in Germany has patented a revolutionary solution to facilitate the centuries-old tradition — orthopaedic prayer rugs.

Adnan Pirisen’s idea for the padded prayer rug came to him in the middle of the night.

“I’d been thinking that as Muslims we start to get knee pain over the course of time from kneeling at prayer, but we always dismissed it as part of life and duty,” the 46-year-old Schwentinental resident told The Local on Friday.

Pirisen’s 71-year-old mother suffers from knee pain, and he’d begun to have similar problems when he had his eureka moment. By the time his parents took a pilgrimage to Mecca for the Hajj last year, he had a prototype ready to send along with his mother, who reported substantial interest from other Muslims.

Just a few months later in April 2008, Pirisen patented a more streamlined version of the orthopaedic prayer rug, which packs up into a handy tote bag.

“My parents told me that the people in Mecca all had bags to carry their rugs, but they were unwieldy and difficult to deal with in high temperatures, so I thought it would be great to combine the rug with the bag to make things easier,” he said, adding that people can also use them to carry water, books and other necessities.

Now after one month of online sales, he has sold some 500 rugs and plans to take his softer, gentler version of the prayer mat with a 12-millimetre cushion to fellow Muslims worldwide. He has even specialised to include a child-size rug and the extra-cushy “Lux” version. Inquiries from potential business partners have already come in from the Netherlands, England, France and Dubai — where he plans to attend a trade show next year.

“I had nothing to do with rugs before,” the Turkish-born entrepreneur told The Local. “I was an electronic technician and owned my own business for years.”

He now employs his wife, two sons and a foreign sales representative with plans to expand in their Schleswig-Holstein home just outside Kiel in 2010.

“It’s really fun for me, it was always a dream of mine to invent something that would help people,” he said. “I thought that everything had already been invented, but that’s not true.”

Orthopaedic surgeon and director of the Göttingen University Hospital Wolfgang Schultz told news agency DDP that padding for the knees while praying was a sensible idea.

“The pressure to the knee is very strong doing this, particularly during extended kneeling,” he said.

— Hat tip: TB

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US Baghdad Chief Confirms Syrian Security Failure

The general stated that the United States is providing security support to Yemen within the framework of military cooperation provided by Washington to its allies in the region. He added that the U.S. ships found in Yemen waters are not only there for monitoring but for also for hindering the flow of arms to the Houthi rebels.

Petraeus added that he has asked Syria to exert greater effort to prevent terrorist infiltrators from passing through its territory into Iraq. He revealed that the recent drop in the number of infiltrators from 110 to less than 10 per month was due to al-Qaeda movement restrictions and not because of Syrian efforts.

Petraeus also revealed that officials of the former Iraqi regime are in Syria, including Izzat al-Douri, Saddam Hussein’s former vice president. The officials are living in Syria with complete freedom and some even own satellite channels. The general emphasized that this has created tension between Iraq and Syria. He said Iraqis hopes that Damascus will limit the activities of Saddam Hussein’s remaining supporters who are now calling for a change in Iraq’s new regime.

The full interview will be aired on Al Arabiya on Monday Dec. 14 at 7:00 KSA local time (16:00 GMT).

— Hat tip: TB

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Yemen’s Houthis Hold Secret Meet With Iran

Unnamed intelligence sources on the Saudi-Yemeni border detected a secret meeting between Yemen’s Houthi rebels and an official from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and top Hezbollah leaders, press reports revealed Sunday.

Arab and Egyptian sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the meeting was held last month to plan for an escalation of the conflict between the Shiite rebels and the Yemeni and Saudi forces, London-based Asharq al-Awsat reported.

According to the sources, Yemen’s refusal to receive Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki for the second time was motivated by knowledge of the meeting which Yemen sees as proof Tehran is backing the Houthis.

The Yemeni army says it recently thwarted several attempts by Iranian ships to smuggle weapons to the rebels. The ships in question, however, did not bear any official flag.

The sources told Asharq al-Awsat they were surprised by Jeffery Feltman’s, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, statements that there is no evidence supporting the involvement of Iran in the Houthi conflict.

“Many of our friends and partners have talked to us about the possibility of outside support to the Houthis and we have heard the theories about Iranian support to the Houthis,” Feltman said in a regional security conference held in Bahrain.

“To be frank, we don’t have independent information about this,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, Ali Mohamed al-Ansi, director of the Yemeni National Security Bureau, said there is strong evidence that Iran is backing the Houthi rebels but he cannot disclose details to the media.

“The ship Yemen intercepted in October was smuggling arms to the Houthis,” he said on the fringes of the Manama dialogue, the conference held in the Bahraini capital to discuss the strategic and security challenges facing the Gulf region. “We also have proof that it was coming from Eritrea.”

In addition to Iran, Ansi said Houthi rebels are also backed by al-Qaeda.

— Hat tip: TB

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In Shift, U.S. Talks to Russia on Internet Security

Mr. Sokolov characterized this new round of discussions as the opening of negotiations between Russia and the United States on a possible disarmament treaty for cyberspace, something Russia has long sought but the United States has resisted.

“The talks took place in a good atmosphere,” he said. “And they agreed to continue this process. There are positive movements.”

A State Department official, who was not authorized to speak about the talks and requested anonymity, disputed the Russian characterization of the American position. While the Russians have continued to focus on treaties that may restrict weapons development, the United States is hoping to use the talks to increase international cooperation in opposing Internet crime. Strengthening defenses against Internet criminals would also strengthen defenses against any military-directed cyberattacks, the United States maintains. An administration official said the United States was seeking common ground with the Russians.

The United Nations discussions are scheduled to resume in New York in January, and the two countries also plan to talk at an annual Russia-sponsored Internet security conference in Garmisch, Germany.

The American interest in reopening discussions shows that the Obama administration, even in absence of a designated Internet security chief, is breaking with the Bush administration, which declined to talk with Russia about issues related to military attacks using the Internet.

— Hat tip: JD

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‘Israelis in Goa Disastrous for Tourism’

A book published by the Council for Social Justice and Peace (CSJP), an arm of the Roman Catholic Church in Goa, presents Israeli tourists as a “burden” to those who live in the area.

Claiming the right to say no: a study of Israeli tourist behavior and patterns in Goa was authored by 11 seminarians in 14 sections and totals 96-pages in length.

The study was based on an undercover survey and personal experiences of the members of the seminary as they traveled around Goa finding Israelis in the many tourist spots.

Officially released by the Goa archbishop Filipe Neri Ferrao on Sunday, the book critiques the behavior of Israeli tourists with copies available for sale at several church-supported outlets throughout Goa.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Lahore Falls to Extremists

From Dutch: Lahure used to be the liberal center of Pakistan. In recent years, Pervez Musharraf has given a free hand to Muslim extremists.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Taliban Was the Target of German Airstrike: Reports (Roundup)

Berlin — German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg came under renewed pressure on Saturday, after media reports that a lethal airstrike in Afghanistan had been aimed directly at Taliban fighters, rather than vehicles they had seized.

The September attack, which claimed up to 142 victims according to NATO reports, came after the government had decided to take firmer action against the Taliban, according to a report by daily Leipziger Volkszeitung.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Tigers Shot Trying to Surrender: General

NEW DELHI: The Defence Secretary of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, told a battlefield commander to kill Tamil Tiger rebel leaders rather than allow them to surrender in the closing stages of the country’s civil war, the former army chief Sarath Fonseka alleges.

General Fonseka, who retired as military chief last month and is a candidate in presidential elections next month, told the Sri Lankan newspaper The Sunday Leader that Gotabaya Rajapaksa, brother of the President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, instructed soldiers not to take prisoners as the Tamil Tigers were overrun by Government troops in May.

— Hat tip: Esther

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China Demotes Editor After Obama Interview: Sources

BEIJING (Reuters) — The top editor of a Chinese newspaper that interviewed U.S. President Barack Obama has been demoted, sources said, in a move they described as fallout from Communist Party censors’ anger over its handling of the story.

Xiang Xi, the top editor of the Southern Weekend weekly newspaper who interviewed Obama during his visit to China in mid-November, has been named as “executive” editor-in-chief and placed under a new top editor this week after pressure from the ruling Communist Party’s propaganda department, said three employees of the paper.

They all requested anonymity, saying they feared punishment for speaking about the move, which has also been discussed on Chinese-language Internet sites.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Philippine Kidnappers Demand Animal Sacrifice

Tribal gunmen refused to hand over 47 hostages on Sunday as a four-day kidnap drama in the southern Philippine jungle took a bizarre twist with demands for animal sacrifices.

“The negotiations are in stand-off,” said Alfredo Plaza, a government spokesman for the negotiating team..

About 400 soldiers and police were on standby around the gunmen’s mountain hideout on the strife-torn southern island of Mindanao.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Somalia Islamist Militants Execute 2 Men

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Witnesses say Islamist militants have executed two men accused by the fighters of murder and adultery.

Witnesses in the town of Afgoye southwest of the capital say the Hizbul Islam militants on Sunday stoned to death the man accused of adultery and shot the man accused of murder. They say the militants summoned the town’s residents to watch the executions.

Islamic courts run by radical clerics have ordered executions, floggings and amputations in recent months. In some areas militants have also banned movies, musical telephone ringtones, dancing at weddings and playing or watching soccer.

— Hat tip: Esther

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Britain’s Tolerance to Islam Results in More Than 1m Muslims Setting Up Home Here

More than a million Muslims have migrated to Britain because it is more sympathetic towards Islam than other European countries, a study has found.

Latent Islamophobia in Europe means that many of those who move to the continent eventually end up in Britain, because it is seen as more tolerant.

There are now some 1.1million Muslim immigrants in the UK, according to the report by IPPR, the Blairite think tank. It means around 46 per cent of Britain’s 2.4million-strong Muslim population were not born in this country.

Migration: There are now 1.1m Muslim immigrants in the UK, which means about 46 per cent of Britain’s Islamic population were not born in this country

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, said: ‘The rapid rise in the Muslim population is just one way in which mass immigration promoted, even encouraged, by this Government has affected the whole nature of society.’

— Hat tip: Steen

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Letter From Spain

“No Whites Allowed.” Thus read the signs at the entrances of several bars in the alleys of Torrejón de Ardoz, a town of 100,000 just 20 kilometers from downtown Madrid. Over the past 10 years, this working class burg governed since 2007 by the People’s Party (the more conservative of Spain’s two major parties) has seen its population increase by around 3,000 a year. According to the local immigration department, created in 2008 and managed by a Romanian immigrant, almost 25% of torrejorenos are foreigners. This is the average proportion of foreign residents in the suburbs of both Madrid and Barcelona. The highest concentration of immigrants, however, is found in certain rural areas of the south and southeast, where the need for agricultural workers offers North Africans as well as Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans a chance to improve their job prospects.

The tale of Torrejón’s barrio de la estación, a formerly quiet neighborhood which turned into a no-go area after the arrival of African Muslims (most of the former residents of the alleys left when police stopped patrolling the area and their calls to report violent incidents and anti-social behavior went unanswered), represents the downside of immigration in Spain, which is rapidly transforming the face of the nation as well as its ethnic and religious composition, and is creating new social and political cleavages.

— Hat tip: Fjordman

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Tom Tancredo: 3 Months After Joe Wilson, Obama Still Lies

Three months ago, my former colleague Joe Wilson famously yelled, “You lie!” when Barack Obama falsely claimed, “There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”

Liberals went nuts, but Rep. Joe Wilson was right. Obama conceded as much when two days later the White House issued guidelines to close some of the loopholes that allowed illegal aliens to acquire health insurance in the House bill. But despite those guidelines, illegal aliens are still eligible for Obamacare under both the House and Senate bills.

An analysis by the non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies exposes how easily illegal aliens will be able to exploit our health-care system under Obamacare. The health-care bill contains four provisions that increase government spending. There are two massive government expansions: the much discussed “public option” and a sharp increase of Medicaid subsidies. In addition, it includes two ostensibly market incentives: the semi-private “Health Insurance Exchange” and “Affordability Credits” that are basically tax credits for low income households. However, the Exchange will be heavily subsidized by the government, and families eligible for “Affordability Credits” are not paying taxes, so a “tax credit” is just another form of welfare.

What this means is that any part of the health-care bill that illegal aliens are eligible for will involve subsidies by the American taxpayers. Illegal aliens are eligible for all of them! The CIS study notes that the House bill contains absolutely no provisions excluding illegal aliens from the public option or Health Insurance Exchange.

[…]

According to The Hill newspaper, this was a concession to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who threatened to block the bill if illegal aliens were banned.

— Hat tip: JD

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Beyond Debate?

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the “madness of crowds”? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible “authority”. Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to “save electricity”, while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on … electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them (see box page 36)? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously?

Whether rational or not, global warming theory has become a political orthodoxy. So entrenched is it that those showing any resistance to it are described as “heretics” or even likened to “Holocaust deniers”.

[…]

Such pronouncements from these commentators and from other people highly placed in government, international organisations, the press, academia and science make the debate seem closed and the conclusion beyond dispute. Yet the plain fact is that there is something deeply unscientific about the theory of global warming. Despite this, it has gained such widespread, uncritical acceptance that any scientist expressing a doubt often finds his or her actions tarred with accusations of the rankest political and personal motivations.

How this situation came about says much about how science is co-opted to sway public opinion. The case is built, deliberately or not, on misleading images and interpretations that have been perpetuated by parties with a vested interest. It morphs into a tool for governments to intimidate their populations into passive acceptance of very real changes: from the tiny, such as accepting miserable fluorescent light instead of the incandescent light we’ve been used to; to the major, like welcoming nuclear power plants and obliging rainforest tribes to make way for biofuel plantations.

Indeed, much of what is presented as hard scientific evidence for the theory of global warming is false. “Second-rate myth” may be a better term, as the philosopher Paul Feyerabend called science in his 1975 polemic, Against Method.

[…]

Social scientists call it “cascade theory”: the idea is that information cascades down the side of an “informational pyramid”, like a waterfall. It is easier for people, if they do not have either the ability or the interest to find out for themselves, to adopt the views of others. This is, without doubt, a useful social instinct. As it has been put, cascade theory reconciles “herd behaviour” with rational choice, because it is often rational for individuals to rely on information passed on to them by others.

Unfortunately, it is less rational to follow wrong information, and that is what can often happen. We find people cascading uselessly — like so many wildebeest fleeing a non-existent lion — in so many everyday ways. A lot of economic activity and business behaviour, including management fads, the adoption of new technologies and innovations, not to mention the vexed issues of health and safety regulation, reflect exactly this tendency of the herd to follow poor information.

[…]

Even restricting our survey to the past 100,000 years, the relationship is not as Gore and others think. Far from increases in CO2 leading to higher temperatures, the ice-core record shows rises in temperatures preceding (by between 200 and 1,000 years) increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Which is what you would expect. Slightly higher temperatures mean more plant and animal life, and that means more CO2.

— Hat tip: JD

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Climate: The New God of Left-Wing Christianity

With the ClimateGate revelations of flimsy “science” behind the man-made global warming theory, the role of the religious left in promoting this fraudulent scheme now deserves serious media scrutiny. Because that is unlikely, consider the following:

Dr. James Wanliss, Associate Professor of Physics at Presbyterian College, has written The Green Dragon, a book about how environmentalism is actually committed to “the reconstruction of a pagan world order” and “rejection of Christian spirituality.” Wanliss argues that the environmental movement “is a religion with a vision of sin and repentance, heaven and hell. It even has a special vocabulary, with words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘carbon neutral.’ Its communion is organic food. Its sacraments are sex, abortion, and when all else fails, sterilization. Its saints are Al Gore and the InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

“Both professing Protestants and Roman Catholics bear a burden of guilt for the current political mess we are in with the global warming and other hysterias,” he argues. “If the church had not turned from the gospel of Jesus Christ it is unlikely the Green Dragon would have been able to so deeply sink its fangs into our lives.”

Major U.S. religious groups involved in the “climate change” campaign include the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, the Catholic Campaign on Climate Change, the Evangelical Environmental Network and the Evangelical Climate Initiative.

Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, identifies evangelical leftist Ron Sider as a key figure behind the Evangelical Environmental Network and the Evangelical Climate Initiative. “He’s been pressing for wealth redistribution for over thirty years, and the global treaty being touted to fight global warming is nothing if it isn’t an exercise in wealth redistribution,” says Beisner.

— Hat tip: JD

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Coming to a School Near You: The Dangerous Religion of Howard Zinn

Sunday night, the History Channel airs The People Speak, a star-studded presentation of Howard Zinn’s Voices of A People’s History of the United States. Accompanying this series is the Zinn Education Project, a curriculum meant to expose children from pre-school through high school to American history through the philosophical lens of Zinn.

[…]

But to truly understand Zinn, and why his work has no place in public education, all a person needs to know is this — Howard Zinn is not an historian at all; Howard Zinn is a religious zealot.

Now, this is not to say that Zinn or his followers believe in God. Theirs is a secular religion, but religion none-the-less. It is a faith in what Rousseau called the natural morality of man, an innate goodness that has only been corrupted by the oppressing evil of power, wealth and property. It is a belief that when man is truly free, free from ‘wage slavery,’ from bankers and bosses, from states and from God, he will at last be purged of all sin. Laziness and violence, covetousness and anger, all of these will disappear when the liberation arrives. The religion is Marxism, Zinn’s denomination, Democratic Socialism (or possibly Anarcho-Syndicalism), but all of it, in the end, is simply Communism.

— Hat tip: JD

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Gort, who is a regular Gates of Vienna reader and commenter, forwards this email discussion about the Blessed Prince of Hope and Change:

Since you ran a piece about the Messiah offending the people of Norway by slighting the king, etc. I thought I’d send you a judiciously edited email exchange between a friend of mine and another friend in Norway.

First, what was sent to Norway:

Well, I’m glad that Obama showed the Norwegians who and what he REALLY is. That is, I’m glad he showed any in Norway who were naive about Obama up ‘til now. We had a article in our paper written by Steinar Opstad and he was lamenting the fact that he had been hearing and reading that Americans didn’t like their president. That was about a month ago. I hope he understands now. I wonder if Barack HUSSEIN Obama would have snubbed the Saudis or the Iranians as he did the Norwegians. We’ve got a Mooselimb resident as we see it!

Then, what came back:

Hello.

I am afraid that you are wrong if you think that this visit from Obama has been an eye-opener for Norwegians. If anything, Obamamania is more intense than ever before.

I feel ashamed when I look at how most of the Norwegian politicians have behaved the last week. Teenage girls waiting for The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, is what comes to mind. There they were sneaking out their telephones and cameras to take photos of Obama as he passed by them on his way to the podium.

We have also learned that they (our members of parliament) feel deeply hurt because the most powerful business leaders had managed to squeeze some of them out from the dinner that was given by the Nobel committee.

And how about Mette Marit. Being so overtaken by the speech during the ceremony that she took to tears?

(Just like everybody else. The people [politicians] interviewed by NRK after they came out from the ceremony were all “star struck” and looked like they had been smoking something far more dangerous than their socks.)

– – – – – – – – –

And what about the costs and the CO2?

Norway paid 100 million NOK, only for the police.

What were your costs for 2 jumbo jets filled with secret service and staff members?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the total cost for this was close to 1 billion Norwegian kroner, that is ca 130 million dollars.

And all this just because that fool who is the leader of the Norwegian Nobel Committee wanted a photo of himself and Obama in his photo album!

Torbjørn Jagland is the name of the nitwit, a former Prime Minister, now head of the European Counsel in Geneva.

A good socialist taxing the Norwegians to death, has now, since it was Norway’s turn, ended up in a job where he is paid 2 million NOK pr year, with no tax.

And from 1st of January 2010, Norwegian pensioners living abroad have to pay 15% tax to Norway.

For good measures he should have offered to pay at least 15% tax of his salary to Norway, but so far we have heard nothing of that sort from him.

I am so appalled by the whole show, that I will not even start on what I think about the hypocrite environmental aspect of the whole affair.

So, apparently there are plenty of kool-aid drinking Norskies these days. Uffda!

Gort

The Dems hate the Rasmussen polls because they leave out the bozos who don’t bother voting. In other words, they only want to tally people who are registered voters and thus might actually have some effect on election outcomes. How elitist of Rasmussen to leave out the lazy. Obviously he hasn’t read the Democrat rules: everybody counts, even those who don’t know jack squat and can’t bother getting up out of the chair to vote.

On the other hand, I can see their point: with ACORN around to raise the dead for the sake of elections, the Dems don’t need to bother with reality. Fraud is so much more reassuring and predictable.

Today, Mr. Rasmussen brings an early Christmas present: Hamlet’s Obama’s newest decline in voters’ perceptions of his performance:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 23% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -19.

Today is the second straight day that Obama’s Approval Index rating has fallen to a new low. Prior to the past two days, the Approval Index had never fallen below -15 during Obama’s time in office (see trends).

The “Trends” history is an interesting data page. If you scroll up the months you can see that the decline is bumpy but very steady. Inexorable, I do hope. If I remember correctly, his negatives began in July or so. Now they’ve stayed in the steady two digits for a while.

It makes you wonder where he’ll be when his State of the Union address rolls around in January. Another bit of speechifying I plan to read rather than watch. His back-and-forth head weaving distracts me from whatever it is he’s saying. It feels like I’m behind one of those cars with the bobble-head dog in the back window. Maybe it’s a gesture meant to entrance the audience?
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So celebrate everybody! Go see that *** MINUS NINETEEN *** Disapproval Index. Scroll down the page to the image; notice how the red and green lines are moving away from one another, leaving an ever-widening gap, one that Obama will eventually fall into, never to return. I look forward to yet another Democrat “poseur-as-ex-president” act. He and Bill and Jimmah can get together and count their loot. Maybe he can head the UN when he’s done ruining the country? A fitting job for someone with no executive experience.

Have a glass of wine and be of good cheer. This new low means the American people are smarter than those Beltway Boobs thought we were.

Can you hear us yet, Mr. President?

For the crime of “insulting Islam”, Geert Wilders will go on trial in Amsterdam next month, exactly one year after the inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama.

As most readers know by now, Mr. Wilders is being prosecuted for making statements that are factually true, and for voicing opinions about Islam which are unremarkable by the standards of this blog, and which are based on the observable behavior of violent and intolerant Muslims all over the world.

The trial is a judicial farce, a shameless attempt to put an end to the political career of Geert Wilders. He is inconveniently popular with the voters of the Netherlands, so the elite governing class has decided to run him out of office by non-electoral means.

Our Flemish correspondent VH has translated a couple of articles about the upcoming trial. First, from the PVV website, news of a demonstration planned for the day the trial begins:

January 20: Demonstration for freedom of expression

Demonstrate against the political process used against Geert Wilders

January 20, 2010 will be a crucial day in the defense of our freedom. That day the political process against Geert Wilders will begin. Commissioned by the Amsterdam Court, the Public Ministry has summoned Geert Wilders. The indictment reads: Insulting Muslims as a group, inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims because of their religion, and inciting hatred and discrimination against non-western immigrants and/or Moroccans because of their race. This even though the earlier prosecutor saw no cause in the evidence for the prosecution to proceed.

Are you also against the political process against Geert Wilders, and do you want to defend freedom of expression? Come to Amsterdam to demonstrate! On January 20 at 9:00 in the District Court in Amsterdam.

Geert Wilders: “On January 20 a political court case will begin. I am being persecuted for my political convictions. Freedom of expression is balancing on the edge of a cliff. If a politician can not criticize an ideology any longer, there is no end to it, that will mean the end of our freedom. But I will remain combative: I am convinced that I will be acquitted “.

Date:

Wednesday January 20 next, starting 09:00

Location:

Rechtbank Amsterdam [Amsterdam Court]
Parnassusweg 220 [map]
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Directions from Amsterdam CS (train station):

• Take tram number 5 or metro number 51 to “Station Zuid/WTC” (South/World Trade Center).
• From Station Zuid/WTC:
• Follow the footpath (the WTC building is to your right hand side).
• Walk through the pedestrian/bicycle tunnel and then turn left
• Continue straight ahead and walk though the next pedestrian/bicycle tunnel
• You then are in front of the Court building

VH adds:
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For those who might think of organizing anything abroad, here is a list of Dutch Embassies.

An essay on the ramifications of a successful prosecution of Geert Wilders, from Het Vrije Volk:

What if Wilders is sentenced?

by Joost Niemöller

Next month the trial against Geert Wilders will begin. He has received the summons. It all depends now on the political opinion of the court, because there are no facts in this case. And what if Wilders goes to prison for four years and loses the right to be elected? What if criticism of Islam becomes punishable? What then will remain?

Geert Wilders has received the subpoena of the Public Prosecutor. It can be read on the PVV website. On Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 09.00 hours, Wilders must appear in the Amsterdam Court. He is accused of:

1.		intentionally insulting a group of people, namely Muslims “because of their religion”,
2.		inciting hatred against “a group of people, namely Muslims,” “because of their religion’,
3.		inciting discrimination against “people, namely Muslims” because of their religion, and
4.		inciting hatred against people, namely “non-western immigrants and / or Moroccans” because of their race.”

The proof: A pile of statements made by Wilders in the media, plus the film Fitna.

What should a judge do with these accusations?

1.		Establish that Muslims have been intentionally insulted,
2.		find evidence that the statements of Wilders incite hatred against Muslims,
3.		find evidence that the statements of Wilders incite hatred against non-western immigrants and Moroccans, and
4.		find evidence that he actually did incite discrimination.

Can you objectively prove something like that?

In other words: What is the difference between criticism of religion, as a means of convincing, and criticism of religion with no other purpose but to hurt people?

I am not a lawyer. But according to me something like that can never be proven objectively. No matter which way the court argues its verdict, it will ultimately come down to an opinion.

It’s already hard enough to prove to whether anyone intentionally or unintentionally caused the death of a person. But the result, death, is still an easy fact to establish, and deliberate actions can with a certain degree of reasonableness be distinguished from coincidence.

As everyone will acknowledge, with incitement to hatred, discrimination, and incitement to insulting we find ourselves on subjective quicksand. What is hatred? When is someone offended, and when has this been induced deliberately? What is discrimination? All mud.

In the explanatory text accompanying the Dutch Constitution, concerning discrimination, for example, it says:

“Discrimination is difficult to define. The government described the scope of the prohibition of discrimination as the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of qualities or characteristics of persons which are in all reasonableness not relevant to the determination of entitlements and obligations in a particular area of social life.”

And:

“The concept of discrimination has a pejorative meaning and points to a distinction that is offensive.”

What brings us back to that “insult.” Whereby discrimination thus is also reduced to a subjective experience.

Think of having to deal with that, being a judge. Where can the facts be found in all this? Where do the opinions begin? The court cannot do anything else but give an opinion about interpretations of opinions. And because this is all about political views, it will also be a political process. With major political consequences.

If Wilders is charged both with defamation (Article 137c: “He who […] expresses himself in an way insulting of a group of people because of their race, their religion or belief, or their hetero- or homosexual nature or their physical, mental, or intellectual disabilities…”) as well as hatred (Article 137d: “He who […] incites hatred against or discrimination of people or violent behavior against person or property of people because of their race, their religion or belief, their gender or hetero- or homosexual nature or their physical, mental, or intellectual disabilities…”) may risk a prison sentence of four years. With a sentence of one year or more, of Wilders’ voting rights can also be withdrawn, which means that he is not allowed to exercise his franchise, and also can not be elected (Article 56 of the Dutch Constitution.) In this last instance Wilders then would be forced outside the regular political system by the court.

Will a judge let such a thing happen? That is impossible to predict. In the case against Volkert van der Graaf, the murderer of Fortuyn, the judge did not sentence him to a life imprisonment, because, as the official press release reads:

In the opinion of the court, the attack, although it did not yield a risk to the continuation of democracy, has undoubtedly infringed on such an important democratic process as the national elections on May 15, 2002. The murder of the victim influenced on the election process, but the scale and nature cannot be determined in the context of the criminal proceedings.

Whether the murder of Fortuyn really “had not yielded a risk to the continuation of democracy” was obviously nothing more than a political opinion of the court. If the then PvdA leader Ad Melkert had been assassinated [a Socialist, had also contributed to the demonizing of Fortuyn], the court there might have had a different opinion about it. But that verdict in the Fortuyn murder case at that time (April 15, 2003) caused no uproar in the media. They thought it was right this way. That was for me the moment when I lost my faith in the ability of judges to judge objectively in politically sensitive cases. And also in the critical abilities of journalists when they have their political prejudices standing in their way.

And that was at least murder case.

Now, with Wilders, it will be a case of aqueous issues such as ‘hate’, ‘insult’, and ‘discrimination’.

Thus, with those statements, the case can still really go any direction. There is also an appeal possible. And there is European law. It seems to me likely that somewhere in he legal proceedings Wilders will bump up against a judge who intends to impose his own political opinion, which is not imaginary. The probability that the Dutch media will express their outrage in such a case is, I think, rather small. In contrast, however, the chance of popular outrage seems quite high. The chance of an even more extensive polemic against Islam seems even greater. But what are the options left for the latter?

If Wilders is convicted, it will put an end to his political ability to fight Islam. Because then he will be disabled as a functioning politician. But it then goes even further. Because in such a case, from then on it also will be a criminal offense to criticize Islam. Muslims may at any time feel “offended”, “hated” and “discriminated against”. Judges in such cases must take account of the verdict against Wilders. This will not only cut off the political means to fight the Islam in the Netherlands, but also the public debate on Islam will have to go underground.

Or even worse: then a violent struggle against the Islam remains the only possibility. For that we will owe thanks to a court with a political opinion.

So what great lesson did the military and the President take from the experience of the massacre at Fort Hood? Why, the most obvious one, of course: we need more Muslims in the military:

Army recruiter Sgt. Chris McGarity is on the front lines of the military’s effort to add troops who speak Arabic and understand Middle Eastern culture – a battle that grew more challenging after the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas.

McGarity says he recently signed up an Arab-American high school student who lacked only her parents’ approval to enlist. Then came the Nov. 5 rampage at Fort Hood. The Army has charged Maj. Nidal Hasan, 39, a Muslim and Arab American, with killing 13 people and wounding 32.

The high school student’s mother “made her withdraw her application,” McGarity says.

Such experiences illustrate heightened fears of discrimination and harassment aimed at Arab-American and Muslim troops since the Fort Hood shooting, says Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force lawyer who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which advocates for separation between church and state in the military.

Muslims in the military experience “horrible” discrimination, he says.

Before the shooting at Fort Hood, the foundation had 80 Muslim clients who had reported instances of discrimination and harassment, Weinstein says. Complaints jumped 20% to 103 in the weeks after the shooting. “We had people almost immediately … being told ‘you people’ should not be in the military,” he says.

This news article is so studded with stupidities and down-right dangerous ideas that it makes me want to…what?

Well, here are a few ideas:

• Encourage young men and women to stay away completely from the stupendously ignorant and blind bureaucracy of our present-day military.
• Explain to parents that having their children chose a military career is as good as signing their death warrant.
• Encourage colleges to refuse ROTC groups, but not for their usual Leftish loony reasons. Rather, we want to keep our best and our brightest alive. That psycho killer, Hasan, got his way paid through ROTC. If that doesn’t bring shame on the organization, what does? Is the ROTC even capable of self-exanimation?
• Let the Muslims out of the military ASAP. That obviates any need for more Muslim chaplains, interpreters, etc. The military is not an equal opportunity employer for jihadists but you’d never know that by listening to what the bureaucrats say.

I support our military men and women. However, I reject totally the current system; it is killing them. This latest example of wanton and brutal murders was shoved under the carpet of psychobabble by those in charge, from our feckless President all the way down. Senior military officers callously sacrifice our young as they mindlessly follow Muslim Brotherhood instructions about how to integrate Muslims into our services.
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The Muslim Brotherhood are the ones running this campaign and it’s time for our young men and women to refuse to go through this charade any longer. They put their lives on the line and they risk courts-martial for doing so. They are not even on the level of cannon fodder anymore. At least being cannon fodder gave you the luck of the draw and the rules of engagement were fair. The way things are now, you can die anytime some high ranking American Muslim jihadist takes it into his head to open fire. Anywhere, anytime, and for one reason: because YOU are an infidel.

This is beyond disgusting. It is immoral and it will destroy the fabric of our country if we permit the Pentagon and its Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators to keep cutting up the cloth of our military culture. This is a fixed game with a marked deck, guys. Get out while you can.

Here is more tripe:

Weinstein says he regularly gets complaints from troops who report name-calling, extra duty on holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, anti-Muslim graffiti scrawled on prayer centers, and officers who encourage their troops to kill Muslims or demand Christian prayer.

Waahh…mommy, he called me a name. Grow up or get out, you thin-skinned child.

Here’s more bright planning for recruitment:

As the U.S. fights wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mission to recruit troops who have language and cultural skills useful there has become so critical that the Army created two programs to achieve that goal.

Last year, the Army sought 270 recruits who speak Arabic, Pashto, Dari and Farsi – the languages of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan – to serve as military interpreters, says Douglas Smith, spokesman for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky.

A second recruiting program began in February in New York and has expanded to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas. That program targets non-citizens who have been in the U.S. at least two years and have special language and cultural skills from the Middle East, China and Korea, he said.

“Non-citizens have stepped forward to serve this country in previous wars since the American Revolution,” the military says in its briefing papers on the program.

Just what we need. More infiltration. And these people are going to trust translators like this? How about we either bring our troops home or we train them in the needed language skills? This is so lazy and incompetent that it defies explanation. Or at least any explanation that says much for the success of our eventual survival.

You can read the rest of the p.c. molasses mush here. It’s simply too creepy and suicidal to repeat any more of that MSM cant.

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Meanwhile, what about Fort Hood? I avoided the subject for a long time because it was too painful to think about something so deliberate and so unnecessary. Our military leaders should be found guilty of failure to protect their troops, of dereliction of duty, of gross negligence. Anyone in a position of authority who knew about this killer and did nothing but wring his or her hands should be dishonorably discharged. Instead, they’re going to court martial just the murderer, while all those career-minded criminals who let him go on his rampage face no consequences for their malfeasance.

I was looking at the pictures of the dead and wounded today. That’s hard to do in the best of circumstances, but when you gaze on those faces and realize that their “superiors” set them up for death it is even more painful. Think of all the lives shattered by those lazy time-servers: children who grow up without parents, parents left childless, a baby left unborn in its mother’s womb. In fact, all the children of the massacred who won’t be born. Think of the boy from Mexico who managed to earn a PhD in Arizona. A kid who survived the boat trip from Laos only to be killed in this “haven” of America. The dead grandparents, the brothers and sisters.

Our nation ought to be in mourning for these families. Instead, the White House is lit up like nothing happened. They have a big gingerbread house and lots of decorations. “Fort Where?” Oh, yeah, right, someone suffering from PTSD killed a few people. Unfortunate.

Here are the names. Look at them. These were real people with real lives who bled and died at the hands of a parasitic opportunist. Think of their families this Christmas and all the Christmases to come. A calculus of loss that eats at the innards of America while our leaders carry on with their posing and posturing.

These men and women died in the cause of someone else’s paranoid hatred:

• Mike Cahill
• Major L. Eduardo Caraveo
• Staff Sgt. Justin M. DeCrow
• Capt. John Gaffaney
• Specialist Frederick Greene
• Spc. Jason Dean Hunt
• Sgt. Amy Krueger
• Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka
• Pfc. Michael Pearson
• Pvt. Francheska Velez (& baby)
• Lt. Col. Juanita Warman
• Pfc. Kham Xiong

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These men and women were injured: Spc. Grant Moxon, Joey Foster, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, Spc. Keara Bono, Ray Saucedo, Cpl. Nathan Hewitt, Amber Bahr, George Stratton III, Staff Sgt. Alonzo (Mac) Lunsford, and Staff Sgt. Joy Clark.

The breadth and depth of America was represented here, some places more than once: North Carolina., Iowa, Idaho, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah, Wisconsin, Minnesota (by way of Laos), Chicago, California, Tennessee, Arizona (via Mexico), Georgia, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Attention must be paid to the memory or honor of each of these soldier-citizens or we will not survive the parasites who are killing us. Protect our military — encourage them not to serve in a project designed to kill or undermine them.

Hat tip: Fjordman