Næste salamiskive.

Judges could be forced to bow to Sharia law in some divorce cases heard in Britain. An EU plan calls for family courts across Europe to hear cases using the laws of whichever country the couple involved have close links to.

That could mean a court in England handling a case within the French legal framework, or even applying the laws of Saudi Arabia to a husband and wife living in Britain. The Centre for Social Justice think tank today attacked the so-called Rome III reform as ludicrous. […]

At least nine EU states – not including the UK – are said to want to push ahead with the Rome III plan. EU judges want Sharia law applied in British courts

I Peter Greenaways mave

(klip fra Il Ventre Dell’architetto, The  Architects Belly) – Interesant  interview med Greenaway her på Politiken (min.5:25)  Greenaway hylder You Tube og mener at filmmediet sidste gang gav livstegn fra sig, da Fassbinder levede. Jeg ville måske  udstrække det til 1999, da Kubrick døde. Jeg går heller ikke meget i biografen, engang imellem hen på det jeg stadig kalder Filmmuseet. Forleden så jeg Righteous Kill, hvor Brian Dennehy også medvirker (sammen med Al Pacino og Robert de Niro, der spiller sig selv som sædvanlig, det er derfor man ser dem.) Han er blevet ældgammel. Kvalitets-tju-bang.  Det er sådan noget som gode skuespillere fordriver deres og vores tid med at lave. Lidt som dansk teater der næppe  uddeler Reumert priser for de forestillinger, de stakkels skuespillere skal medvirke i. Skuespillerne kan leve af det, publikum kan ikke. I Politiken interviewet siger Greenaway, at H.C. Andersen jo var homoseksuel. Det er en myte  med 199 liv, første gang tilbagevist i Hjalmar Helwegs indfølte bog om Andersen fra 1927. Så måske genopstår filmen også fra de døde ? Men se de  fem minutter fra Politiken, man kan godt læse avisen, bare man er god til overspringshandlinger.

“Asien börjar i Malmö”

Genom decennier har danskarna blickat klentroget och med rynkade näsor över Sundet, mot Malmö, staden där Asien börjar, mot det karga, vindpinade, svenska Storebrors- och förbudssamhället, där social permafrost dödat all individualism, där en glädjelös, nyttomaximerande överhet med byråkratisk nit lägger livet till rätta.

Hvorfor har vi ikke kommenteret de artikler, spørger nogle. Svaret er, at vi gider ikke. Det var noget Strindberg sagde, det forår 1887 han boede i Skodsborg og sad og kiggede østover Øresund. Jeg kan ikke huske  hvor han skriver det, men jeg ved jeg husker rigtigt. Den smule har jeg tilfælles med Søren Kierkegaard – udover at have gået på samme skole og at der også er meget jeg ikke  giiider – at jeg aldrig kan huske hvor jeg har læst tingene. Det var forresten hos Kirkegaard, jeg første gang opdagede at man kunne “træde i Characteer”. Så gik der mange år uden at nogen trådte i karakter, og idag træder  alle og enhver i karakter i tide og utide og uafprut, som min gamle ven advokaten sagde, bare de skal en tur i Netto. Jeg vil ikke træde i den.  Hvem ved, om man  har én at træde i, hvis det endelig skulle være ?

UK: Behov for opførelse af et hus hvert sjette minut de næste 20 år

Tilvandringen er løbet fuldstændig ud af kontrol i det ellers gennemkontrollerede Storbritannien, med et tilsvarende eskalerende behov for opførelse af nye boliger. Absurditeten i dette land er på Monty Python’sk niveau, dog ikke spor sjovt for briterne. Sketchen her har en vis relevans for denne problematik (LFPC).

THE United Kingdom will have to build one house every six minutes, day and night, seven days a week for the next 20 years to meet the current scale of immigration, Labour MP and former minister Frank Field warned yesterday.
He said immigration would account for 70% of population growth in the next 20 years – that is seven million, or seven times the population of Birmingham. In 2007, immigrants were arriving at the rate of almost one every minute.

 

He recalled that he and Tory MP Nicholas Soames had established a cross-party group on balanced migration, designed to stimulate and inform a non-partisan and calm debate about the issue.

“For many years, probably a generation, immigration has been a no-go area to British politics. ‘Racist’, ‘Little Englander’, ‘xenophobe’ – those who have raised the subject have been insulted, abused and, all too often, silenced.” […] Field hits out over immigration levels

Immigration and welfare: a bad mix

Christopher Caldwell har skrevet en række artikler, vi har henvist til, blandt andre Islam on the Outskirts of the Welfare State og A Swedish Dilemma .Den 7 maj udkommer hans  nye bog : Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.

Christopher Caldwell: How benefits can be a divisive force in a pluralist society.

Immigration and welfare are a bad mix in other ways, too. Comprehensive welfare systems (transfers, pensions, healthcare) tend not to arise in societies of mass immigration, such as the United States. In the present downturn, many assume that one path to recovery is to give up some economic dynamism and return to the welfare model that existed from Attlee to Thatcher. But Britain is not the place it was until the 1970s. Welfare states require consensus and society may now be too multicultural to provide it.

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Danske muslimer – 89,1% stemmer rødt

Muslimer i Danmark er røde. I hvert fald vil kun en ud af ti muslimer stemme på regeringen og dens støttepartier, hvis der var valg nu. DR har fået foretaget en analyse af analyseinstituttet Capacent blandt muslimer i Danmark, og til spørgsmålet om, hvilket parti de ville stemme på, hvis der var valg nu, løber Socialdemokraterne med 58,3 procent af de muslimske stemmer. Omregnet i mandater svarer det til 103. Samlet set ville den nuværende opposition, Socialdemokraterne, De Radikale, SF og Enhedslisten få 89,1 procent af stemmerne. Regeringen og Dansk Folkeparti får lille opbakning

Muslimerne i Danmark stemmer rødt, Muslimerne er vilde med Helle Thorning, Sådan er undersøgelsen foretaget. Resultatet er ikke  just nogen nyhed, sådan er det overalt i Europa. I Sverige så ekstremt, at hvis 500.000 svenske muslimer og godt 1 million andre indvandrere kunne mobiliseres til at stemme (dem med stemmeret, naturligvis), ville landet ikke få en borgerlig regering mere i overskuelig fremtid, hvis nogensinde. At Alliancen overhovedet kunne vinde med den snævrest tænkelige margin i 2006, var allerede lidt af et mirakel, der ikke ret sandsynlig gentager sig, de seneste meningsmålinger til trods. I det perspektiv er statsminister Reinfeldts uændrede asylpolitik, i realiteten et politisk selvmord i fuld offentlighed. Hele det politiske  billede er parallelforskudt, og trods ringe  idésammenfald med venstrefløjen, er det med til at cementere et  ægteskab mellem de to parter, der har store  konflikter indbygget i sig fra fødslen.

A large majority of Dutch journalists say that they no longer work in certain neighbourhoods because they fear they will be targets for violence, shows a survey held on behalf of journalists’ union NVJ. NVJ asked criminologist, professor Frank Bovenkerk to examine the nature and scale of aggression against journalists on the streets. Of the 691 journalists who filled in Bovenkerk’s questionnaire, 492 said they now avoided certain neighbourhoods when doing their work.

At some time in their career, 374 of the 691 journalists had been confronted with physical aggression or threats. Those working for regional media were most often the victims of violence, in particular cameramen and photographers. A total of 75 journalists reported damage to their equipment or vehicles. There were 36 who reported physical assault, leading to hospital admission in 6 cases.  Vast Majority of Journalists Avoid “Certain Districts”

Nogle nøjes med at henstille verbalt til en “pæn tone”, men danske  journalister kunne sagtens tale med om  mere  håndfaste metoder, hvis de turde (se “»Intern instruks til DR medarbejderne«), men det er tys tys. Som man kan se af de hollandske tal, er journalisterne dér allerede tyranniseret betydeligt på retræten. Nylig var der lignende tal fra Sverige og Norge.  Melanie Phillips skar torsdag i København det valg ud i pap, som heller ikke en fri journalistik kan undslå sig:

“This is the paradox we are facing: A liberal society has to exercise very robust, muscular  and  indeed sometimes  illiberal measures to defend itself. If it does not do that, it will not  survive as a liberal society. That is the paradox of liberalism. If  you don’t  want to do that….fine, it’s your choice sunshine, but  you are gonna have a country that’s going to be engulfed by islamization and violence. Liberalism is in danger  of disappearing up its own backside.”

Penge- og arbejdsløs

Var fjärde ungdom står utan jobb i Sverige – 24,3 procent. Det är bara Spanien i hela Europa som har en högre siffra. Ändå har det tills nyligen varit relativt tyst om detta jätteproblem. I teorin lever vi i den mest solidariska av världar. De “svaga” hjälps upp av teoritunga yrkesutbildningar som ger entrébiljett till universiteten, av höga ingångslöner och lagskydd mot lynniga arbetsgivare.I praktiken lämnar vi ungdomar, lågutbildade och invandrare i sticket. Anna Dahlberg: Sveket mot de unga

Hvad  Dahlberg ikke skriver om, for det kan man ikke, er  hvorfra arbejdsløsheden også kommer, og hvor pengene forsvinder  hen, for det er historien om Riksdagens godhedskrig mod den dårligtst stillede del af den svenske befolkning, ikke mindst syge, børn og gamle. Dens “generøsitet” koster trecifrede milliardbeløb,(se også her) men ingen journalist eller forsker, der har sin karriere kær, vil røre ved den historie. Et lille eksempel her fra Fria Nyheters serie om Kommunefakta:

2007 var kostnaden för ekonomiskt bistånd 1049,3 miljoner kronor. Av dessa gick 738,5 miljoner kr till utrikesfödda och flyktingar, vilket motsvarar 70,4 % av det totala biståndet. Andelen utrikesfödda var 21 % den 31 december 2007.

Kommunfakta: Stockholm, men tallene er gennemgående for enhver provinskommune. Bemærk “utrikesfödde”, ikke med udenlandske rødder født i Sverige.

Vestens farligste vandrehistorie

Nicolai Sennels gør op med tidens farligst vandrehistorie: At integrationen går fremad.

Som tidligere psykolog i Københavns Kommune har det altid været mig en gåde, at venstrefløjens og en række borgerlige integrationsministres udokumenterede påstand om integrationens langsomme, men sikre succes, lever så velgående. Denne vandrehistorie har desværre fået samme sandhedsværdi som ordsproget om, at tiden læger alle sår. For det gør tiden jo som bekendt ikke altid: Efter lange skænderier ender mange med at blive skilt, og efter et overbevisende antal trafikuheld bliver fatale vejkryds heldigvis nedlagt. I virkeligheden …………

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Man behøver ikke hedde Samuel Huntington for at se, at der i disse dage, måneder og år udspiller sig en global kamp på værdier og viljestyrke, ideer og identitet. Kampen er nok militær og konkret, men den har også en mere abstrakt karakter af en kamp om hjerterne, der udkæmpes overalt, hvor islamister tester vores fundamentale principper.Det sker i FN, det sker i EU og mange andre internationale fora. Men det sker også i Danmark.

Og her havde vi i går besøg af en ægte kulturkæmper. I skikkelse af den britiske journalist Melanie Phillips, som lagde vejen forbi et København badet i sorgløs sol. […]

Som Melanie Phillips står på talerstolen, ligner hun ikke ligefrem en kulturkæmper. Tynd, nærmest ranglet, taler hun tidens politiske dogmer midt imod. Hun beskriver dem som en fortælling om uimodsagt dyd. Er man uenig i dyden og dydens nysprog, er man at regne for kætter. Afviser man FN’s åbenbaringer, hedder det, at man stiger af verden. Verden har nemlig kun én retning; deri det skræmmende perspektiv, siger Phillips. Verden er blevet unilateral. Tvivler du på FN-ideologien om harmoni, tolerance og afskaffelse af had, drager du verden i tvivl og står ganske udenfor. Politik er blevet et manikæisk spørgsmål om at være for eller imod. Den europæiske elite er for. De umoralske masser uden almen dannelse er imod, og skal rette ind, og gør de det ikke frivilligt, så skal de tvinges.  Michael Jalving i Jyllands Posten

Melanie Phillips, speech, the Sappho Award, 4/23/09

Freedom of speech is one of the core values of the free world. Without free speech there can be no free thought. Yet freedom of speech is under threat as never before; and as with the threat to the free world in general, it is a threat being mounted both from outside and from inside. The onslaught from without is being facilitated by erosion from within.

The onslaught from without comes from the Islamic jihad. A few weeks ago, the United Nations Human Rights Council approved a resolution calling upon member states to provide legal ‘protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general.’

Since the proposal came from Pakistan and had the backing of the 57-government Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the UN’s largest voting bloc, it was clear that Islam was the only religion the drafters had in mind.

And now ‘Durban II’ — the second World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance under way this week in Geneva – threatens to prohibit criticism of Islam as a form of incitement.

This all part of a relentless strategy to use the UN as a vehicle for the jihad to rewrite international law and overturn the core values of the west.

In March last year, the OIC developed what the Associated Press called ‘a battle plan’ to use the law against ‘Islamophobia’ by curbing free speech. That month, it changed the mandate for the UNHRC’s rapporteur on freedom of expression, who was now to be expected to report to the Council on all instances in which individuals ‘abused’ their freedom of speech by giving expression to racial or religious bias. In short, the UN voted to force the official charged with protecting freedom of expression to suppress it instead.

In June last year, the UNHRC president Doru Romulus Costea announced that criticism of sharia law would not be tolerated. This followed pressure by Islamist delegates after NGOs tried to raise the plight of women under sharia. In a curious turn of phrase, the Egyptian delegate claimed that silencing these NGOs was necessary to ensure ‘that Islam will not be crucified in this Council’.

As we have seen from the ‘Durban 2’ meeting in Geneva this week, the UNHRC has turned the human rights it is supposed to protect into a mockery of the term. This is because it has been hijacked by the Islamic states which have turned the UN — the iconic embodiment of western liberal values of reason and negotiation, justice and peace — into a kind of metaphorical suicide bomb strapped to the underbelly of the free world. In the form of the UN, the west now unwittingly embraces a deadly weapon that threatens to destroy it.

Just as the west can’t see that the UN club of terror in fact promotes the negation of freedom, so the west is being equally undermined from within by a crisis of confusion over the core values it is supposedly trying to defend.

It has repeatedly sold the pass over freedom of speech. First there was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie over the Satanic Verses in 1989 when Britain failed to prosecute a single person for threatening to murder him. Then there was the Mohammed cartoons furore.

Now London has turned into a magnet for libel tourism, with the draconian British libel laws being successfully used by wealthy Arabs to intimidate authors and publishers into censoring exposes of the hidden links between Islamic terror and its financing.

You might call this the ‘jihad of the word’ — the suppression of free speech which is such a crucial part of the global jihad. For terrorism is by no means the only threat we are facing. What we are up against is a pincer movement by global Islamism to attack the free world, using both terrorism or hard jihad and cultural infiltration or soft jihad. The two work both together and separately to advance the same end: the Islamisation of the west.

And that’s because the real ground on which we are being attacked – even though so many of us don’t recognise this – is the battleground of the mind. The Islamists understand very well that if they can control public discourse and what is in people’s minds, they will win this great war of civilisation. The ‘jihad of the word’ both recruits terrorists to the cause and confuses, demoralises and terrorises the designated victim population.

All over Europe, elites are caving into the soft terrorism of the ‘jihad of the word’. But Britain is the principal target and recruitment centre for both kinds of jihad, because it has allowed the creation of the most extensive network of terrorism and radicalisation outside the Muslim world.

The reason for that is the hollowing out of British culture, which has paralysed it through the prevalent doctrines of multiculturalism, human rights law and cultural Marxism otherwise known as political correctness. These have rendered Britain’s political, security and intellectual establishment incapable of acknowledging this pincer movement and therefore dealing with the threat. They fully realise the threat of terrorism; but they fail to acknowledge the true nature, origins and full strategic dimension of the attack. They fail to grasp the cultural dimension of the onslaught because they refuse to acknowledge that this is a religious war.

Instead they think it’s terrorism driven by ‘grievances’, that it’s fuelled by a ‘distortion’ of Islam, and that the antidote is to win the hearts and minds of Britain’s Muslims by acceding to their demands that Islam is afforded a privileged status in British society which afforded to no other minority group. So instead of holding the line for western and British values, the government and security establishment show at every juncture that they will cave in to intimidation.

Thus the British government and security world won’t use the word ‘terrorism’ in conjunction with the words ‘Islam’, ‘Islamic’, ‘Islamist’ or ‘Muslim’. One senior official said: ‘We must talk in a language which is not offensive.’ Another said that the terrorist threat must not be described as a ‘Muslim problem’. In a speech on counter-terrorism earlier this year, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, even declared the ‘violent extremism’ that threatens us to be ‘anti-Islamic’.

But if we can’t even name the threat we’re up against we will never defeat it. The problem in the UK is further that the government defines this threat as ‘violent extremism’, not ‘religious extremism’. It does not regard religious fanaticism as a threat; and so when Muslims refuse to tolerate any criticism of Islam, it doesn’t see this as a threat to British values.

On the contrary, so anxious is the British government to pacify the Muslim community that it genuflects to their demand that no offence should be caused to their religion. The government believes it can thus defuse anger and control ‘violent extremism’. But it is the British government being controlled and led by the nose to surrender its core values.

Moreover, in so doing it is abandoning the many truly moderate British Muslims who are neither violent nor extreme and do not subscribe to the interpretation of their religion being imposed by Islamist fanatics. Instead they subscribe to the separation of religion and state and the value of free speech and want to live as British citizens under one law for all. But by seeking to appease the extremists, the government makes it much harder for such moderate Muslims to stand up to them.

The reason the government is so bamboozled and confused is that Britain and Europe have been weakened by their own internal cultural confusion and erosion of core values – a confusion the Islamists are busily exploiting. This is true of two issues in particular: multiculturalism and the fear of giving offence.

Many people think multiculturalism just means showing respect and tolerance to other cultures and faiths. If that were so, it should be unarguable. We should all support respect and tolerance. That’s what a liberal society requires. But that’s not what multiculturalism is at all. It is a specific doctrine which holds that all minority values must have equal status to those of the majority. Any attempt to uphold majority values over minorities is a form of prejudice. That turns minorities into a cultural battering ram to destroy the very idea of being a majority culture at all. And so, since no culture can assert itself over any other, liberalism cannot assert itself as a dominant cultural force. Instead society must fragment into a kaleidoscope of equal — and opposing —values, and liberal values must give way to their opposite.

That is what happened over the Mohammed cartoons. Freedom of expression is a key liberal precept. But under multiculturalism, that cannot trump the doctrines of a minority faith which holds that to publish these images is to give offence. So the minority wins over the liberal majority, and Europeans decry not the violence and intimidation, the kidnappings, riots and murder which followed the publication of the cartoons but the offence to minority religious feelings that was given in publishing them.

Worse still, multiculturalism has reversed the notions of truth and lies, victim and victimiser. Since minorities can do no wrong, they cannot be held responsible for acts such as suicide bombings — which must instead be the fault of their victims if they are from the ‘oppressive’ western world. This key confusion, which has caused intellectual and moral paralysis in the west, plays directly into the pathological Muslim victim culture which makes dialogue impossible. Because so many Muslims genuinely believe they are under attack by the west, which is a giant conspiracy to destroy Islam. So they perceive their own aggression as legitimate self-defence, and the west’s defence as aggression.

This fundamental untruth has created a dialogue of the demented. Instead of treating it as the mad discourse that it is and refusing to play along with it, Britain regards it as an extension of its own multicultural, minority rights doctrine which routinely reverses victim and aggressor where any ‘vitim’ or minority group is concerned. So the untruths driving the terror are merely deepened – particularly since the left, which controls British and European culture, demonises America and Israel. So the central Islamist perception of the Big and Little Satan — based on the Big Lie that America and Israel are not the victims of Islamist terror but instead are aggressors seeking to destroy the Islamic world — is echoed in mainstream British discourse where anti-Americanism is rampant and Israel is well on the way to being delegitimised altogether.

This acts as an echo chamber for Muslim prejudice, reinforcing it and fuelling the sense of paranoia and victimisation. And it has also released the virus of Judeophobia, with claims of a world Jewish conspiracy that are a re-run of the medieval blood libels leading to rising numbers of physical attacks on Jews. Our debased liberalism thus negates the power of reason, the key characteristic of liberal thinking, promotes murderous prejudice and weakens the west in its defence against Islamism by paving the way for its distortions and twisted thinking to take even deeper root.

Another example is the insistence that Islamic terrorism should be represented as having nothing to do with Islam and that to link them is evidence of ‘Islamophobia’. This in itself is the jihadi tactic of using the west’s own corrupted values to sow confusion and be fashioned into a weapon against the west. The west’s victim culture, the belief that all minorities are victims of the majority and so any attempt to hold them to account is a form of prejudice, is used to label all attempts to tell the truth about Islamic violence or cultural conquest as a form of prejudice in order to silence it. Because of the dominance of victim culture and the terror of being accused of prejudice against an ethnic minority, as well as the implicit threat of violence unless this demand is met, the west has caved into this.

This has turned freedom inside out. In London, Islamists freely demonstrate on the streets with their calls for infidels to be beheaded or death to the Jews tolerated by the police as their right to free expression. By contrast, enraged passers-by who protest at such displays find themselves threatened with arrest. Thus defending western liberal values is criminalised by a society exercising tender liberal regard for the interests of minorities.

In similar vein Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom party who defends western freedom against Islamic violence, faces prosecution in the Netherlands for criticizing Islam. It was Geert Wilders who was banned by the British Home Secretary from entering Britain for threatening public order — while allowing into the country a procession of Islamists who preach death to the Jews, the destruction of Israel and the defeat of the west. This is because it is Muslims who threaten violence when hearing something that displeases them — while the authorities know that whatever vile threats or libels are thrown at the Jews, they will never harm anyone. So in Britain, the doctrine of free speech has now been replaced by the doctrine that violence pays.

It’s not just fear that has turned all this inside out. It’s the overriding importance within western society of not giving offence, which has paralysed us when we are faced with the same demand made of us by Muslims. The prohibition against giving offence arises from the importance we now attach to the subjective individual, and thus the primacy of respecting their feelings. With the rise of group rights and victim culture, the giving of offence is seen as an assault on someone’s very identity. It is therefore classed as prejudice regardless of whether it is well-founded in truth. Prejudice is the crime of crimes, and so the giving of offence is criminalised as hate speech.

British authorities repeatedly cave in over this question of giving offence to Muslims. In Britain, attempts to criminalise as hate speech truth-telling about the jihad took the form of a law against incitement to religious hatred. This was watered down after a campaign which seemed driven mainly by outrage that popular comedians would no longer feel able to tell jokes about religion on TV. But the law was nevertheless still passed.

A TV Dispatches programme uncovered disturbing evidence of incitement to the murder of homosexuals and the killing of British soldiers along with hatred of ‘unbelievers’ going on below the official radar in ostensibly respectable British mosques. But instead of prosecuting such fanatics, the police turned on the Dispatches producers, accusing them (in a complaint eventually thrown out by the broadcasting watchdog) of selective editing and distortion and undermining community cohesion.

On another occasion, a Muslim police community support officer stopped two Christian preachers from handing out Bible extracts in a Muslim area in the Midlands. They were told they could not preach there and that attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity was a ‘hate crime’. The officer involved did not uphold the law of the land, which gives people the freedom to say in public whatever they want within the law. Instead he upheld the Islamist principle that this particular area of an English city was a Muslim area, within which it was not permissible to do anything contrary to Muslim principles such as preach Christianity.

Such developments have been made possible by the acceptance within Britain and Europe of the need to prevent ‘hate crime’. Hate crime marches under the banner of human rights. Yet hate crime criminalises the wrong kind of thought. So it is actually a totalitarian measure that is contrary to human rights. This apparent contradiction has come about because ‘human rights’ have been transformed from the rights of the individual to the rights of the group — which has turned ‘human rights law’ from a tool of freedom into an instrument of oppression.

European elites now use hate crime legislation to silence people with opinions that do not conform to prevailing orthodoxy. Under it, favoured minorities are being treated differently from the majority, for whom freedom is restricted and justice stood on its head.

In 2000 Alison Redmond Bate was convicted of obstructing a police officer who stopped her preaching with her mother on the steps of Wakefield cathedral after a crowd of more than a hundred gathered and shouted at them to shut up. The previous year, she had been found guilty of wilful obstruction after allegedly ‘unsettling’ the crowd by warning them not to turn their backs on God. Allowing her appeal against conviction, Lord Justice Sedley upheld true liberal principles when he observed that free speech had to include ‘the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative’.

But this ringing re-statement of western core values certainly didn’t apply to George Staunton , a 78 year-old war veteran who embellished posters he was putting up on a wall for the UK Independence Party — which opposes British membership of the EU — with the legends ‘Don’t forget the 1945 war’ and ‘Free speech for England’. As a result, he was arrested and charged with racially aggravated criminal damage – a case that was eventually dropped by the police, who boasted nevertheless of having launched a ‘dramatic, painstaking, dawn-till-dusk surveillance operation against racist graffiti’ –which netted one 78 year-old man whose crime was to believe that Britain should be independent of Europe to uphold the liberties for which it had fought .

In Britain last year, a law banning incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation was amended in the House of Lords to include a ‘free speech’ clause, exempting from prosecution general discussion or criticism of homosexuality — a move which campaigners hailed as providing protection for comedians (again!) and those opposed to same-sex unions. However, another bill (the Coroners and Justice Bill) has now overturned this legal protection for free speech; as a result, the crime of inciting homophobic hatred could in theory could now target Christians and others expressing a religiously principled opposition to homosexual practices, for which they would face a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.

All these are examples of my point that, far from expanding liberty ‘human rights law’ diminishes it. It has become a tool to enforce the power of minorities against the majority and enforce a narrative of unchallengeable virtue — even if this is actually a narrative of lies — by shutting contrary views out of public discourse altogether. By a ‘narrative of unchallengeable virtue’, I mean attitudes which are considered to be expressions of some absolute truth which brook no dissent whatever and are impervious to any counter-argument, mediating context or factual evidence because they are held to embody a kind of secular version of metaphysical belief.

One of the most conspicuous examples of this is Israel, the target of a systematic campaign of demonisation and delegitimisation based on lies which are regarded as uncontestable truths. This particular ‘narrative of unchallengeable virtue’ has led to an eruption in Britain and Europe of prejudice, bigotry, bullying and physical attack against Israel and the Jewish people. And it has also created the Orwellian situation where blood libels which incite hatred, peddling the calumny of a cosmic conspiracy by Jews who are deemed to have hijacked public policy and control the world, are now considered perfectly acceptable in mainstream debate; but any protest by Jews at this true hate-speech is deemed to be proof positive of the sinister Jewish power to control public debate, thus creating an argument it is impossible to refute.

But then Jews can never be the victims of one of those fashionable ‘phobias’ because Jews fall foul of the prevailing Marxist definition of prejudice, which holds that only those with power can be guilty of prejudice and can never be its victims. Since Jews are seen as controlling western capitalism, they are never to be seen as victims – despite, ironically, thus being conspicuous victims of the bigotry of that very observation. But Muslims are always powerless because they are of the third world, not the capitalist west; and so they can claim to be victims of ‘Islamophobia’.

Thus lies are given precedence over truth — because I suggest that truth can never constitute prejudice. Real prejudice inescapably involves lies or distorted thinking. Although some people are indeed truly prejudiced against Muslims – just as some people are prejudiced against any people or creed – ‘Islamophobia’ is a myth. A phobia is not a type of hatred but a type of fear; and fear of Islam is not a prejudice but a reasonable reaction to the violence and assault on western freedoms being carried out in its name.

Yes of course many Muslims reject this interpretation of their religion; but the fact is that holy war against the free world is being perpetrated in the name of Islam, sanctioned by the highest religious authorities in Islam and in accordance with its theology and history. It is as absurd to say anxiety about this is a ‘phobia’ as it would have been to say resistance against Nazism was a phobia towards Germans. There are, after all, Muslims who bravely speak up against Islamic extremism; are they too to be deemed ‘Islamophobic’? That’s how absurd this is. Yet while ‘Islamophobia’ is being used to shut down legitimate and indeed essential debate about Islam and what is being done in its name, no such attempt is being made to stop the gross defamation of Judaism rampant in the Arab and Muslim world which is fuelling the jihad and hatred of the west.

So where should a liberal society draw the line when it comes to the giving of offence? My own view is that giving offence should never be criminalised. Take Holocaust denial, which is a form of antisemitism. In Britain, this is not a crime and I do not think it should be one. After all, if antisemitism were to be criminalised much of English literature would have to be censored.

But the problem is that such prejudice can easily shade into incitement; and the difficulty is over where that line should be drawn. For example Hizb ut Tahrir, which works towards the overthrow of the west and the restoration of the Caliphate but whose activists in Britain are not associated with violence, is recruiting thousands of impressionable young British Muslims to the cause of overthrowing the British state and inspiring hatred towards their fellow Britons, along with Americans and Jews. Should it be allowed to do so?

I suggest that context makes a difference. For example, Holocaust denial should not be a crime in the UK because there it is unlikely to lead to much harm. But in countries like Austria or Germany where Nazism remains a serious potential threat, those sentiments can become an active risk to the security of the state. So criminalising Holocaust denial there is much more understandable.

Similar considerations should surely apply to Muslim extremism, which does not take place in a vacuum. In Britain and Europe, radical Islamist sentiments are being used to recruit terrorists and radicalise young Muslims against their own country and fellow citizens. Those sentiments are therefore an active danger to the security of citizens and the state.

In other words, freedom of expression is a core principle of our western liberal democracy — but it is not the only principle and not the supreme principle. It has to be balanced against other principles, such as the preservation of life and liberty.

In some quarters, any diminution of free speech is said to undermine our liberal values. But the paradox of liberalism is that it can only defend itself against attack if it sometimes uses robust and even illiberal measures. If we take the view that any such measures are out of the question because freedom cannot ever be constrained without liberalism being destroyed, the consequences of such doctrinal preciousness may well be that liberalism simply disappears up its own backside.

Unless we understand not just the values we need to uphold but also the vulnerability of our own culture and the internal contradictions within post-Enlightenment liberalism, we will not be able to defend it against the onslaught being waged against it. Which is why organisations like the Free Press Society and gatherings like this of people like yourselves are so important.

Thank you again very much.

Sappho.dk

Folkekirken: “Det  kommer ikke til at ske i Danmark”. Javel, ja.

The Central Mosque of Brent was previously a church built around the 18th century but it is now used exclusively for Muslim ceremonies.

The Forest Gate Church, now a mosque, was built by Henry Wright in 1886 and was a Christian church for over 120 years.

St Mark’s Cathedral in Peckham is now called the New Peckham Mosque.

The Brick Lane Church is more than 250 years old, being built in 1743 as a French Protestant Church. By 1819 it had became a Methodist Chapel and in 1898 it was converted into the Spitalfields Great Synagogue. It now serves the local community as a mosque.

The Wembley Central Mosque in Middlesex near west London is yet another church which has been converted into a mosque.

The Glodwick Baptist Church in Oldham was opened in 1927, but is now the Glodwick Jamia Mosque, Dar-Ul-Aloom Nasqshbandia and Muslim “Community Welfare Centre.”

The Green Lane Mosque is based in Birmingham and is one of the biggest and well known mosques in the United Kingdom. It was first used as a church in 1890. Via  Des églises converties en mosquées en Angleterre, videos fra et udvalg af kirkerne.

Selektive svenske markedskræfter

Sverigedemokraterna (SD) får inte sända reklam i TV 4. Det meddelar kanalen redan innan partiet har hunnit söka reklamplats. Kanalen har bestämt att bara riksdagspartierna får köpa partireklam inför EU-valet den 7 juni och Moderaterna, Kristdemokraterna och Folkpartiet har tackat ja till erbjudandet. TV 4 säger nej till SD-reklam

Den kommercielle trashkanal,  TV 4 slægter svensk public service på. Som bekendt har også den som politik, at kun siddende riksdagspartiet kommer i TV inden riksdagsvalg. Det gælder om at gøre systemet  så uflytteligt og selvpræserverende som muligt, og det lykkes udmærket. Svenske medier lever i registreret partnerskab med magten.

Vedkommer de tamilske tigre  os ?

I Norge  har tamiler været særdeles aggressive, også  her forleden. Også i Danmark og i Canada. Hvad forestiller de sig ?

The people in question are Tamil Canadians. The banners they have long waved are the colours of the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group banned in Canada whose goals (if not methods) are supported by most of Canada’s 200,000-strong Tamil community. They want Canada to intervene in the bloody civil war that may now be in its final stages, as the Sri Lankan government bears down on the Tigers’ last stronghold. Is this our fight? I’d say no. But Tamil Canadians see it differently. . ….There’s another question: How will Canada evolve when so many people have multiple allegiances, to homeland and to host land? Can you belong to more than one nation?

Irakere i Sverige

Vi skriver af og til, at der er  100.000 i landet. Fra 1980 til til 2008 er der kommet 113.000. Dertil skal lægges de, der er født i landet i tidsrummet – antal uvist.

Serbien

Venner af bloggen ferierer syd for Beograd og sender disse fotos:

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receiving the 2009 Sappho Prize by Trykkefrihedsselskabet for her book “Londonistan“. From journalist and broadcaster Peter Whittle´s introduction:

“I think it’s fair to say that she’s a singular and particular courageous voice in Britain. She is perhaps the best known journalist to the majority of people. Her voice is singular and unique….

She was  “Young journalist of the Year 1976, and she was the winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996, the most prestigeous prize for journalism in Britain. Perhaps it’s her formidable work that means her critics, when they are attacking her, are often reduced to personal abuse, as opposed to actually  answering the questions she  poses in her work. In the case of one particular interview that Melanie did in 2003 in the Guardian, that she used to work for, the interviewer said with a certain amount of wishful thinking on his part, that she was “tiring of the battle”, as he put it. Well, he hadn’t seen anything yet, because in 2006 Melanie produced  Londonistan, her most important work yet”.

 ( © Snaphanen & Trykkefrihedsselskabet.)

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Et endnu hypotetisk scenarium med store konsekvenser for verden: Hvis/når Pakistan kollapser i en række Taliban-lignende ministater styret af sharia, er ét af de helt store spørgsmål hvad der så sker med landets ca. 100 atombomber. De umiddelbare perspektiver er oplagte, og skræmmende, men et afledt spørgsmål man kun kan gisne om på nuværende tidspunkt vil være, hvad de vestlige Gutmenschen og socialister vil sige, hvis USA som her antydet ‘går ind’ og sikrer kontrollen med bomberne. Vil det blive en gentagelse af selvsvinget over den ‘ulovlige angrebskrig’ mod Irak? Vil sortklædte autonome gadekorps foranstalte uroligheder fordi ‘Pakistan har lige så meget ret til atomvåben som USA’? Skal der virkelig et atomangreb mod en europæisk by til før gammelt tankegods om at forsvare os selv og påføre fjenden størst mulige tab bliver gangbart igen? Via Jihad Watch (LFPC):

[…] The prospect of turmoil in Pakistan sends shivers up the spines of those U.S. officials charged with keeping tabs on foreign nuclear weapons. Pakistan is thought to possess about 100 – the U.S. isn’t sure of the total, and may not know where all of them are. Still, if Pakistan collapses, the U.S. military is primed to enter the country and secure as many of those weapons as it can, according to U.S. officials.[…] Does Pakistan’s Taliban Surge Raise a Nuclear Threat?

Den gensidige afhængighed

På Rosengård finns 2 fritidsgårdar, 1 friluftsbad, 1 vattenlekplats, 1 spontanidrottsplats, 2 sporthallar, 1 ishall, 1 vanlig idrottsplats med 1 gräsplan för 11-mannafotboll, 1 grusplan för 11-mannafotboll, en grusplan för 7-mannafotboll och skolfriidrottsytor i norra delen av Rosengård, och ytterligare 1 med 2 gräs- och en konstgräsplan för 11-mannafotboll, 1 tävlingsarena för friidrott, 1 basketplan, 1 sandplan för fotboll och 2 tennisbanor med asfalt. 9 källarmoskeer samt europas största församling i mokseén Islamic Center. Läxhjälp av studenter från Malmö högskola alla dagar i veckan. Är det det detta Alliansen skall rusta upp för 20 miljarder med sannolikt anlitade polacker. De 20 miljarderna tänker de slussa från barn, gamla och sjuka.Stenkastningen kommer INTE att upphöra. Tvärtom. – Metoden har ju vistat sig ytterst lönsam.. MB

Hvis der er noget der passer som hånd i handske, er det svenske pædagoger og politikere og indvandrere i Rosengård, der tér sig som psykotiske 12 årige i verdens flotteste ghetto. For femte nat i træk har pædagogernes uvorne unger skabt sig tosset, og for 127 gang vil pædagogerne “vidta åtgärder” (cirka lig med “tiltag”, standard lingo når man gerne vil lyde af noget, uden at blive konkret.), altså sende flere  penge og pædagoger. Det ikke bare ikke hjælper, det gør det være og være og værre. Og meget dyrt. Det er ikke tragisk, det er komplet latterligt at se to parter, der supplerer hinanden så godt, fordi de aldrig nogensinde kommer til at tale samme sprog. Nya bränder på Rosengård i natt, Jag kommer aldrig att åka tillbaka till Rosengård.

Storbritanniens åbenbart uendelige ressourcer til befolkningskontrol

Historien her skulle vist være tænkt som pikant underholdning, men læser man den i sammenhæng med andre historier fra dette land om drakonisk overvågning og sindelagskontrol bliver morskaben så som så. Hvad der burde være en banal sag om husspektakler af den mere uskyldige slags bliver til noget med anholdelser, “anti-social behaviour”, tilhold, trussel om fem års indespærring og, I kid you not, en vaskeægte “environmental Health Officer”. Men briterne finder sig jo pænt i regimentet, så hvad skal man sige? (LFPC)

A woman who was given an Asbo for engaging in noisy lovemaking with her husband has breached it after just five days. Sunderland magistrates issued Caroline Cartwright with a four-year order preventing her from “making excessive noise” last Thursday.

But she has been arrested by police officers after reports she was flouting the ban with husband of 24 years, Steve. Now she could find herself jailed for up to five years when she appears at Houghton Magistrates on Monday.

Last Thursday, Cartwright, 48, of Washington, Tyne and Wear, was convicted for five breaches of a noise abatement notice and fined a total of £515. Magistrates considered whether or not an anti-social behaviour order was necessary to restrict her behaviour.

An environmental Health Officer told the court Sunderland Council had received 250 complaints on its logging system and recordings made from a neighbour’s house – through a soundproofed wall – were played in open court. […] Women arrested for breaching ‘noisy lovemaking’ Asbo

Far-Right Crimes Up Sharply in Germany

Interessante kontraster mellem denne historie, og historien fra Holland nedenunder. Hvad skal man konkludere af denne stigning? Man kunne jo alternativt lave en anden modstilling end mellem højre/venstre eller tyskere kontra ‘udlændinge’ – hvordan ser billedet ud hvis man kigger på kriminalitet, herunder vold, begået af politiske og religiøse ekstremister under ét (oftest forenet ved antisemitisme), kontra kriminalitet begået af islamkritikere i almindelighed? Artiklens fokus kan desværre risikere at blive udlagt som en begmand for ‘sådan nogle som os’. Begge historier via Gates of Vienna (LFPC):

Political crime is on the rise in Germany, and far-right crimes in particular rose 16 percent in 2008, according to new government figures. Part of the increase is a result of new statistical standards, but the numbers on the right include two murders. […]

Far-right crimes accounted for two thirds of all “politically motivated” crimes last year, which reached 31,801 — an increase of 11.4 percent and the highest level since 2001. […]

But the rise was also driven by a growing far-right youth scene whose members dress like left-wing anarchists, in black-hooded jackets. “They are attracting young people to a greater extent than the conventional far-right scene has been able to so far,” Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said in a statement. Left-wing politically motivated crimes rose 14.6 percent to 6,724. Far-Right Crimes Up Sharply in Germany

Hollands efterretningstjeneste: “Extreme Left more Dangerous than Extreme Right”

Som altid skal de officielle vurderinger af ‘moderat’ og ‘ekstrem’ islam vægtes ud fra et udgangspunkt hvor det er vores langsigtede interessers overlevelse der er kriteriet. ‘Moderat’ er ikke bare et spørgsmål om de benyttede metoder og om fravær af erklærede antidemokratiske mål, eller en moderat placering på en islamisk skala. Ægte moderat vil betyde, at selv ved stigende muslimsk befolkningsandel vil de vantro ikke opleve forringelser af levevilkårene. At “the resistance within the Turkish community to radical Islamic ideologies in general remains great” er et pauvert grundlag at basere en fremtid på. I Tyrkiet selv, der i årtier har været regeret af streng kvasi-sekulær kemalisme som modvægt til islam, er den ikke-muslimske befolkningsandel faldet til omkring 1%. Vil selv de allermest moderate hollandskboende muslimer være en garant mod en lignende udvikling? Jeg er ikke i tvivl om at dette spørgsmål ikke er blevet stillet, så meget desto mere fordi der ikke findes nogle beroligende eksempler at holde op (LFPC).

THE HAGUE, 23/04/09 – The AIVD secret service is concerned about far left and Islamic extremism. Conversely, there is scarcely any threat from the extreme right, according to the AIVD annual report on 2008.

The AIVD warns that radical Muslims often wear a mask. The service “has observed in the past year that the well-known Salafist centres (…) express themselves more moderately in public than in closed circles. Outwardly, they try to create the impression of fostering integration of Muslims into Dutch society, while behind closed doors, polarising statements are made that could have a negative effect on society in the longer term.”

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