An orgy of hatred

Atheists in America hate Christians. Atheists in Israel hate the ultra-Orthodox



In recent days I’ve been quarreling with all my friends. They are good people, these friends – liberal, tolerant, moderate and sensitive to any injustice. These are people that in our complex reality were never confused between good and bad. This is why I love them, among other things. I’d like to think that we are cut from the same cloth. That’s why I’m so amazed to see how uncaring and hateful they become when a group of people known as the haredim comes up for discussion.

My liberal friends propose various steps against the haredim and religious: A cadet who cannot bear female singing will not be an officer in the IDF, said one friend. As simple as that (“as simple as that” or “at once” are words that always accompany discussions about the haredim.) A segregated bus shall be stopped! The driver and bus operators should be sent to jail. A yeshiva that will not teach the core curriculum shall be closed at once! We shall not allow primitive ignoramuses to be raised here, and at our expense no less. A neighborhood that features separate sidewalks for women shall immediately lose its municipal services! They can go ahead and choke in their own garbage.

There are more proposals that are even more terrifying. Disconnect haredi neighborhoods from electricity, water and whatnot. The same people who would quiver, and rightfully so, if such proposals were made about Gaza, forget that behind the dark clothes, odd views and challenging (and annoying) behavior lie human beings. They are different than us, but they are human beings.

I’ve been following haredi society for many years yet I don’t remember such anger. And that’s odd, because the secular fury comes at a time when secularism is winning while the haredim are on the defense. Once upon a time the haredim sought to educate us. They made pretenses of telling us where and what to eat, what to do on Shabbat, where and how to be buried, and how to get married. Some time has passed, and the seculars won most battles.

Today it’s the seculars who wish to educate the haredim. The seculars are upset by the segregated bus routes. This doesn’t upset haredi women, but it does upset the secular Tania Rosenblit. The seculars are upset that math is not being taught at yeshivas. They know better than haredi parents what’s good for their sons. The seculars are upset by the relationship between men and women in haredi society. Why can’t the haredim be like us?

Wild incitement

I look at the holy secular anger and fail to understand it. It lacks the modesty of one who looks at another society from the outside. It has no hesitation – maybe we are wrong after all? Perhaps we failed in understanding the other?

I, for example, very much want the haredim to study the core curriculum, I will try to convince them this is needed, but I won’t enforce it upon them. Why? Because somewhere in my head I’m not certain that the core curriculum is truly important for the life meant for a haredi child. Perhaps for him math and English are less necessary than another Talmud class? In all such matters I will hesitate, because in my view when a civilized liberal looks at someone who is different, this should be done with the required modesty.

However, the seculars are furious and are unwilling to show any modesty in the way they look at the haredim. Had I been a religious Jew, I would be concerned. I would take this fury seriously and understand how I contributed to it. I would try to calm the atmosphere through some concessions.

And here I get to the heart of the matter: We need a new social covenant. The old status-quo may have secured political calm, yet caused a flare-up in secular-haredi relations. Both sides must be brave and go for a new covenant premised on a simple principle: Life in the country will be secular in every way. The haredim will let go of their need to care for our secular souls. This means buses on Shabbat, civil marriage and everything associated with a modern state.

On the other hand, the secular majority would allow the haredim to have full cultural autonomy within their neighborhoods. This means letting go of the need to education them and allowing them to live their life as they see fit. And yes, this means segregated buses in haredi population centers and tolerance to haredi education.

That’s the principle. Implementing it isn’t simple because there would be red lines, of course. If the haredim want to educate their children by beating them up, we won’t agree to. However, within the boundaries of logic, we must make every effort to accept the differences of the other.

In my arguments with my liberal friends, one of them sometimes places a hand on my shoulder and asks in a concerned voice: “Amnon, what happened to you? After all, you are secular, a devout atheist; what’s happening to you?” So here is the answer: It appears to me that being a liberal, progressive and humanist today means resisting this blatant incitement against the haredim; standing up against the bon-ton and saying: I’m not taking part in this orgy of hatred.

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ADL: Fighting Yesterday's Battles

Charles Jacobs

The ADL is now caught flatfooted by its own paralysis

Republicans are all over national TV, arguing passionately over which (and whose) approaches - given the sorry state of American society - might best set things right. They know Democrats will use the best barbs they throw at each other against the eventual GOP nominee; even so, the most thoughtful among them value sharp debate about our serious problems - to test and clarify ideas. So if Republicans can do this, why not the Jews?

World Jewry is under significant strain. Iran presents an existential threat to Israel; the age-old virus of anti-Semitism has morphed into anti-Zionism - more difficult to fight; Muslim clergymen on every continent rage against the Jews; much of the far left loves "Palestine." The media and academe daily assault the Jewish state. Indeed, the story of our epoch is that the Jews live in a new time defined by a new threat: a Left/Muslim alliance - that attacks both Israel and Jews. This alliance menaces Europe's Jews and has spread to parts of the American elite, especially on our campuses.

Do Jews have the right leadership and organizations to deal with this threat? Why is public discourse on such vital issues absent? Who would try to block such a critical conversation? The ADL, for one.

It was sad to read the Anti-Defamation League's letter to The Advocate ("ADL fires back," Dec. 16 - see below), not solely for its personal attack, but also because it reflects how a once respectable and important Jewish organization has now reached new lows. The problem for the ADL, and this is not restricted only to this group, is that it has been unable - decades - to adjust to the new reality, and is now caught flatfooted by its own paralysis.

For decades, as Israel was defamed in the media, I watched ADL choose not to be the Anti-Defamation League for the Jewish state. (That's precisely why CAMERA was born.) For years, as Islamic Jew-hatred and leftwing anti-Zionism overtook rightwing anti-Semitism as the bigger threat to Jewish life, we've seen the ADL flinch. Students from around the country told me that ADL did not answer their calls as they were harassed and intimidated by anti-Israel faculty, students and administrations. (That's precisely why the David Project - and Stand with Us - were established.) But sure enough, when ADL found a swastika on some bathroom stall in Iowa, my mother-in-law got a fundraising letter.

Shifting the focus away from skinheads, neo-Nazis, and Christian bigots and onto radical leftists and Muslim Jew-hatred would be extraordinarily difficult. It would require a massive and unpopular effort: leading the Jews to think difficult thoughts about their new situation, thoughts that put them at odds with their comforting universalist theology of Political Correctness. And it would be costly: ADL would forfeit loads of leftwing money - and its liberal bona fides. The organization would hardly ever get a letter published in The New York Times. It would be viciously attacked by Islamist leadership. CAIR would be relentless. Abe Foxman, ADL's head, acknowledges that Islamic Jew hatred is the biggest threat we face (he's still shy about the radical left) - yet ADL spends much, much more time, effort, resources and focus on the older, less dangerous threats while practically ignoring the new, more ominous ones.

Stuck between a rock and hard place, the response of Ken Jacobson, ADL's national director, to our criticism (with an arrogance that only a $50 million budget might explain) could do nothing but call me names (the Defamation League?!) and skirt the issues.

Jacobson calls our study of ADL press releases - showing they are all but silent on Muslim anti-Semitism - "amateurish." But in the absence of information about ADL's internal budget - what proportion of funds is spent on Christian, Nazi, leftist, skinhead vs. Leftist/Islamic anti-Semitism - the data on ADL's press releases was the best statistical stand-in we could find. We strongly recommend that ADL's donors review its budget for a true understanding of the organization's priorities.

Jacobson suggested better indicators of ADL's deep concern about Islamic anti-Semitism. He cited its Center on Extremism. But see for yourselves that the center seems stuck in another world, almost totally devoted to Nazis and skinheads - with not one Islamic group named. In his letter last week to The Advocate, Professor Barry Rubin of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel, wrote that a visit to ADL's Web site might leave you thinking that left-wing anti-Semitism, "the most significant form of Western-origin anti-Semitism," just doesn't exist.

Jacobson says ADL issues more reports today on Arab anti-Semitism. Yes, ADL loves to monitor and issue reports. In the age of video, who is reading these reports? For the most part, Jews and the public don't have a clue about the nature and extent of Islamic hatred. Finally, he says ADL trains law enforcement officials. Can he mean about the theory and practice of Islamic Jew-hatred in the West?

Jacobson mocks our concerns about ADL's backing a sale of a Michigan school building to the radical Islamic Cultural Association (ICA). He says we're "playing six degrees of Islamic separation." Actually, it's one degree: the ICA was originally funded by the North American Islamic Trust, identified by federal officials as a Muslim Brotherhood front.

Most tellingly perhaps, ADL's letter is silent on the shocking matter of its continued presence on a Detroit interfaith committee that includes CAIR, a Hamas front. ADL's excuse is that the NAACP and law enforcement groups also sit on the committee. But aren't Jews funding ADL to do the hard work of exposing our enemies? Shouldn't the ADL chapter quit the committee and then educate black leaders as well as law enforcement officials about the menace of Islamic anti-Semitism? Isn't that what the ADL is supposed to be doing?

The transformation of ADL into to a politically correct, liberal organization creates a leadership vacuum for the Jewish community. This, combined with the lack of public debate on the Islamist-Leftist threat, increases our vulnerability.

SOURCE




A brave, noble campaign. But I still don’t believe a man should stand trial twice for the same crime

Peter Hitchens

I can’t rejoice over the conviction of David Norris and Gary Dobson for the murder of Stephen Lawrence. I wish I could.

I am sure that both these men have done bad things. It may be that they are guilty of this awful murder, but I fear that their guilt is not proven beyond reasonable doubt. And I am revolted by the fact that the authorities were so shamefully negligent that Norris was severely beaten up by other prisoners while on remand.

If we set out to achieve justice – and I will come back to that – then we must be sure that justice is what we actually get. A show trial in which justice seems to have been done, and hasn’t been, actually makes all our lives worse. If these are the wrong culprits, locked up to make us feel good about ourselves, then we have responded to evil with evil.

Much worse for me, a British patriot intensely proud of our centuries-long struggle for freedom under the law, this whole prosecution is a violation of our heritage. The rule against trying anyone twice for the same crime is essential for liberty. And it is absolute. It must apply even when it makes us weep or vomit to obey it. The rule of law is only any use if it stops us doing things we would really, really like to do. If laws can be overridden by convenience, desire or because of effective campaigning, they are not laws.

Remember Thomas More’s great defence of law in Robert Bolt’s wonderful drama A Man For All Seasons. More’s accuser says he would 'cut down every law in England' to go after the devil. More retorts: 'Oh, and when the last law was down, and the devil turned on you, where would you hide, all the laws being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man’s laws not God’s, and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?'

Then he says quietly: 'Yes, I’d give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.'

We too must give the devil – and the devil’s friends, Norris and Dobson – the benefit of law, for our own safety’s sake.

I am sure of this because I have been to many of the worst places in the world, and the thing they all have in common is that there is no rule of law. They may pretend to have democracy (easy to do; our own democracy is increasingly a pretence). They may claim to have 'human rights'. But with no rule of law, nobody is safe, ever.

Now, the campaign to get justice for Stephen Lawrence and his bereaved, dignified family has been a noble one. When our sister newspaper, the Daily Mail, bravely accused a group of low-life crooks of being his murderers on its front page and dared them to sue, I rejoiced.

This was a good and courageous use of the power of a free press, one that my trade can always be proud of.

It also blew into fragments a smug slander, ceaselessly directed at conservative popular newspapers by ignorant and malicious media Leftists. They sneered from their state-subsidised desks that we were 'fascists' – racial bigots who believed in repression of free debate.

After that front page, this libel simply could not be advanced any more by any thinking or informed person. Better still, it was clear that what really motivated conservative popular journalism was a thirst for justice. But at that stage, thanks to the 1996 failed private prosecution of several of the alleged killers, that was as far as it went. The courts had failed. The guilty must therefore be marked as what they were and shamed.

Others, with quite different aims, then sought to use the case for their own ends. They wanted a politically correct inquisition into the police, already weakened by Left- liberal attacks in the Eighties but still a deeply conservative institution.

And the Blair Government, which despised British liberties, saw an opportunity to smash the ancient double jeopardy rule.

The Macpherson report, a bizarre document that few of its fans have ever read, never found any actual evidence of racial bigotry in the police. That is why it had to dredge up the old Sixties revolutionary slogan of 'institutional racism'. This is a presumption of guilt that has been used ever afterwards to enforce political correctness in the police force.

Thanks to this case, and what followed, have racial killings ceased? On the contrary, they are more common. Are murders and other crimes investigated more thoroughly? Hardly.
This country contains many families, as deeply wounded as the Lawrences, whose losses have also gone unavenged by justice, and who have no hope.

SOURCE




At last: Britain prosecutes MUSLIMS for "homophobia"

The Muslims had to be pretty blatant for it to happen but it has happened. They'll get a slap on the wrist at most, of course. A white holocaust denier got 4 years jail for things he said on his website so it will be interesting to see what this lot get

Five Muslims who distributed leaflets calling for gay people to be executed have appeared in court accused of inciting hatred. One leaflet said the death penalty had been passed against all homosexuals and showed a mannequin hanging from a noose. Another showed a figure burning in a lake of fire with a list of punishments for homosexual acts.

The five defendants, all from Derby, are the first to be prosecuted under new laws banning the stirring up of hatred due to sexual orientation.

Ihjaz Ali, 42, Razwan Javed, 28, Kabir Ahmed, 28, Umar Javed, 38, and Mehboob Hussain, 44, were arrested following complaints about leaflets distributed in Derby before a gay pride parade in July 2010. The material was handed out in the street as well as posted through letterboxes.

The first, called Death Penalty?, claimed that Allah permitted the destruction of gay people and ‘the only question is how it should be carried out’.

The second, called Turn or Burn, featured the figure in a blazing lake with the warning that the decriminalisation of homosexuality was ‘the root of all problems’. A third, GAY – God Abhors You –told of severe punishment for homosexuals.

Bobbie Cheema, prosecuting, told Derby Crown Court the pamphlets were threatening, offensive, frightening and nasty and had been ‘designed to stir up hatred and hostility against homosexual people’.

Gay men who received the leaflets told the court they feared they had been personally targeted. One witness, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said he was handed one leaflet in person and received three more in the post. ‘Being a gay man, I thought it was meant for me,’ he said. ‘I felt like I was being targeted. I thought it meant I was going to be burned or something like that.’

Another, who received two of the leaflets in the post, said: ‘I felt threatened. I wondered whether I would be getting a flaming rag through my letter box.’

The jury heard that in the weeks before the gay pride parade, Ihjaz Ali approached police about staging a protest against it.

Ali, who the prosecution say organised the distribution of the leaflets, showed officers a list of slogans intended for use on placards and literature. The slogans included ‘paedo gays, you will pay’, ‘turn forever or burn forever’ and ‘Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’.

His request was refused and he was later arrested on the back of the welter of public complaints about the leaflets.

Ali allegedly told the officers who questioned him that it was his duty to express laws laid down by Allah.

Miss Cheema told the jury: ‘These five defendants were part of a small group who distributed horrible, threatening literature, with quotations from religious sources and pictures, which were designed to stir up hostile feelings against homosexual people.’

The court heard that all five defendants accept they distributed the leaflets but deny charges of intending to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation under laws introduced in March 2010.

The maximum penalty for the offences is seven years in jail. Ali faces four charges while Hussain and Umar Javed are charged with two counts each. Razwan Javed and Ahmed are charged with one count each. The trial, which is expected to last three weeks, continues.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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Opponents of homosexual marriage to be discriminated against?

The hostility below is undoubted but it is unlikely to convert into action because the biggest critics of homosexuality are Muslims. And discriminating against Muslims would be deemed unacceptable. Muslims seem to be higher on the hierarchy of political correctness than are homosexuals -- otherwise Muslims would long ago have been condemned for their "homophobia"

One of my superstar former students, writing about his experience at one of our nation's premier law schools, sent me a note after reading my MOJ post on marriage, religious liberty, and the "grand bargain." Here is the text, with names removed to protect the innocent:

I had a first-hand experience with this reality in law school. One of my constitutional law professors taught the section of our course relating to same-sex marriage under the "inevitability" banner. I met with him in office hours later to talk to him about something else, but I brought up a question that I have been wrestling with: if the SSM advocates are right and opposition to SSM becomes analogous to racism in our society, what will happen to Catholics and others whose views on SSM cannot and will not change? Are they to be excluded from public office, political and judicial appointments, or places of trust and responsibility within private institutions (e.g., law firm partnerships)? I posed the question to him because I was curious to hear his response, since he is generally a kind and reasonable person who seemed open to other viewpoints.

His response was very disappointing, and it shook my confidence in him. He responded to me by saying something along the lines of:

"Well, they [Catholics and others] will either have to change their views or be treated in the same way that white supremacists and the segregationist Senators were treated. They were excluded from the judiciary entirely for decades because of the South's views on race."

He evinced no sympathy for the traditional marriage position or those who hold it. They were to be relegated to the ash heap of history. He said all of this to me knowing full well (because I had foolishly just told him) that I was a Catholic who opposed SSM.

Is anyone prepared to say that the view expressed by the professor is merely a fringe opinion in the contemporary academy? Is anyone prepared to say that it is the view of only a small minority, or a minority at all, in what University of Virginia sociologist Jonathan Haidt calls the liberal tribal-moral community of contemporary academia? Would anyone deny that there is a significant element in the elite sector of the culture---an element with real power over the lives and careers of people like my former student---that wishes to penalize or discriminate against those who refuse in conscience to yield to the liberal orthodoxy on issues of sex and marriage? Consider the professor's own words. He made no effort to hide his goals and intentions. On the contrary, he made it abundantly clear that Catholics and others who persist in their dissent are to be treated the way we treat white supremacists. They are to be stigmatized, subjected to discrimination, and denied the right to hold certain offices.

And this professor, as my student observed, is a "generally a kind and reasonable person who seems open to other viewpoints." What are we to expect, then, from those who are even less "open to other viewpoints"?

SOURCE






Hong Kongers resist idiotic photo ban

Should be more of it

More than a thousand people protested outside a Dolce and Gabbana store in Hong Kong on Sunday after the Italian clothing store allegedly prevented people from taking photographs of its shop front.

The protest followed reports that a Dolce and Gabbana security guard had stopped a photographer taking pictures of its shopfront from the pavement outside. More than 13,000 people had protested over the incident on Facebook.

People gathered Sunday outside the fashion brand's flagship Hong Kong store taking photos while some carried placards denouncing the store's actions. Dozens of police were deployed to maintain order.

"Trying to ban us from taking pictures in a public space, shame on them!" one protestor said on Cable News television.

Dolce and Gabbana Hong Kong did not immediately return calls for comment.

On Saturday, local politician and lawmaker Frederick Fung reportedly created a stir in the store by calling out slogans and confronting the manager while customers browsed among the luxury goods. Fung, who belongs to a pro-democracy political party in Hong Kong, had said the Italian brand needed "to make an announcement and apology".

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A wretched 'reform' that could put a lame-duck into the British Prime Ministership

Precisely because the two most boring words in the English language are ‘constitutional reform’, people tend to ignore the subject. This is a pity, because such reforms normally have huge implications that are very far from boring.

For example, until a few weeks ago, if the Prime Minister chose to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament and call a General Election, he could easily do so.

This was a vital power — particularly at times (like now) when the country was ruled by an unstable coalition, with Cabinet members at each other’s throats to some degree or other.

However, as a result of the new 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act, a prime minister has lost that device. For this most offensive and self-serving law of modern times has removed the Queen’s prerogative power to dissolve Parliament. Instead, the power has been placed in the hands of Parliament itself.

Parliamentary terms are now fixed at five years. This means that the next General Election is scheduled to be held in May 2015. Of course, there are circumstances in which an election could be called earlier, but they are dependent on a complex set of events.

For example, Parliament can be dissolved if two-thirds of the House of Commons votes to do so on a no-confidence motion. But unless 434 of the 650 MPs currently in the House vote for the end of the Government, that won’t happen. Even the Blair government, after its landslide in 1997, did not have support on that scale.

Alternatively, the government may resign at any time: but an election is triggered only if, after 14 days, no one else can form an administration.

This could be a means of David Cameron getting an immediate election. However, the process would be messy. It might accidentally put a lame-duck, unelected Miliband government into power.

What’s more, trying to engineer an election in this way would be construed as an act of cynicism and would damage the Conservative Party hugely.

The truth is that very few people seem to be aware of this new Act, and that a major constitutional change has happened. Certainly, no one voted for it.

The new law — which can keep a government in power long after it has passed its sell-by date — has put a sizeable hole in the hull of the glorious ship that used to be called British democracy.

It could, one day, mean this country is ruled — and I use that term advisedly — by a succession of rocky minority governments, or coalitions, that try to stagger on to complete the requisite five-year term. That would be a travesty of democracy.

However, lumbered as we are with five-year Parliaments, we must get used to the notion that when a government runs out of steam it cannot be removed by a simple Commons vote of confidence (as happened to Jim Callaghan’s decrepit Labour government in 1979).

Nor can it resign and ask the country for a new mandate (as Edward Heath did in February 1974). Instead, Britain can become saddled with incompetent, and unrepresentative, governments until the five-year term elapses.

Tragically, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is but the latest example of the inevitable problem that comes with any attempt to change, or rig, the British constitution: that such changes, or riggings, always have serious unintended consequences.

Often, these are plain to see; but another feature of constitutional reform is that the politicians who legislate for such changes are usually acting out of cynical motives and care little about the effects.

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Shackle the free press? Crikey, it just doesn't bear thinking about

Gerard Henderson comments from Australia

As the saying goes: "Can you bear it?" In much of the Western world, the established media is under threat from social media. It is at this time that some who once benefited from old media become critical of all journalism.

Take the Crikey publisher, Eric Beecher, who is a former newspaper editor. In his submission to the independent media inquiry, headed by Ray Finkelstein, QC, Beecher declared that there was not enough focus on "quality journalism" in Australia, which he regards as central to "civilised society".

All well and good. Except for the fact Beecher's Crikey newsletter is not the embodiment of quality journalism. For starters, it does not engage a fact-checker. Indeed, the online publication actually proclaims the fact it publishes undocumented "tips and rumours". Crikey also, on occasions, publishes the home addresses of people who are targets of its occasional contributors.
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Last month, Crikey reported on my (alleged) poor behaviour while attending an ABC TV pre-record function in Sydney. I was in Washington DC at the time. On another occasion, Crikey published an article by Mark Latham containing my home address. Both pieces were followed by after-the-event apologies. Neither would have got through in the first instance if Crikey had proper editorial checking. Yet Beecher sees fit to call for more government regulation of the print media and to lecture-at-large about quality journalism.

Then there is Latham himself. The former Labor leader has lodged a complaint with the Press Council concerning recent reports in The Sunday Telegraph about his behaviour at a public school swimming program in Camden. The newspaper reported he vehemently criticised Bev Waugh, mother of the cricketers Steve and Mark Waugh, about the program.

These days Latham apparently believes he is a victim of media intrusion and that his utterances in public places should not be reported. If the Press Council upholds this complaint, media freedom will be severely curtailed. Latham is a columnist with The Spectator Australia and The Australian Financial Review and appears as a commentator on Sky News (part-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd). In addition, Latham receives an indexed superannuation benefit of around $75,000 a year, due to his time as a federal parliamentarian. In other words, he is the beneficiary of taxpayer funding.

As the Transport Workers Union official Wayne Forno pointed out in the AFR in 2003, virtually all the jobs Latham held, up to and including becoming Labor leader, were "provided by the ALP". His employment after politics is a consequence of his time as a Labor MP.

In recent years Latham has been banging on about the primacy of privacy. In August last year he wrote that "no matter one's standing in society, a basic right of citizenship is the capacity to enjoy the quiet pleasures of a private life".

The problem is one of double standards. The Latham Diaries (Melbourne University Press, 2005) named a married Labor parliamentarian as having had a "long-running relationship" with a female lobbyist in Canberra, who was named. Latham also identified a female journalist in Sydney with whom he "once had a fling". And he cited a former ALP staffer whom he claimed had an affair with the "missus" of a senior Labor official in Melbourne. And now Latham is pleading with the Press Council to prevent a newspaper from reporting a public exchange he had with a swimming coach.

In August 2002, Latham issued a release of a speech he planned to give in a grievance debate in the House of Representatives. He misjudged the time limit, and only the first half of the speech was delivered. In the second half, Latham attempted to defend his actions in breaking the arm of an East European-born taxi driver, who had a wife and dependent children, during an altercation. Latham named the taxi driver and then asserted that the man "aspired to workers' compensation and that's what he's now got". It is a callous and cruel comment that also took no account of the taxi driver's right to privacy.

The call for greater regulation of the print media does not just come from former editors and ex-politicians. In his decision in Eatock v Bolt last September, Judge Mordecai Bromberg made findings concerning not only what the News Limited columnist Andrew Bolt wrote about "fair-skinned Aboriginal people" but also what he did not write. Bromberg objected to Bolt's "tone" and said it was important "to also read between the lines". This, despite the fact the law is supposed to be about establishing facts - not making inferences.

There is good reason for the media to act responsibly. But there is also good reason to preserve a free media, independent of excessive regulation. And there is no reason to listen to the likes of Beecher and Latham on what constitutes responsible media behaviour. It's just not bearable.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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Victory for pro-life nurses in lawsuit against NJ hospital

UMDNJ agrees not to force nurses to assist with abortion cases

As a result of a federal court hearing Thursday, a New Jersey hospital has agreed that it will not force nurses to assist with abortion cases. Alliance Defense Fund attorneys represent 12 nurses who filed suit against the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey after the hospital sought to require the nurses to help with abortion cases in violation of federal and state law.

“No pro-life medical personnel should be forced to assist or train in services related to abortions. The hospital has finally done the right thing in agreeing to obey the law and not force our clients to do any work on abortion cases in violation of their beliefs,” said ADF Legal Counsel Matt Bowman, who represented the nurses before the court Thursday. “The hospital agreed not to penalize our clients in any way because they choose not to participate in abortion according to their legal rights.”

The hospital agreed not to replace the pro-life nurses or reduce their hours. The nurses affirmed that if a woman suffers a true emergency from an abortion, they will help protect her until other staff, such as the emergency team, arrives moments later. Because the abortions are all elective, outpatient surgeries, and the court is requiring the hospital to fully staff all abortion cases with non-objecting medical personnel, the pro-life nurses should never actually be needed in any such case.

At Thursday’s hearing, the judge warned the hospital that the nurses can return to the court if the hospital penalizes them, assigns them to work abortion cases, or pretextually attempts to require them to assist with abortions.

Last month, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey issued a temporary restraining order, with the hospital’s temporary consent, that prohibited the hospital from coercing the nurses until the court could further consider the case at Thursday’s hearing.

Federal law prohibits hospitals that receive certain federal funds from forcing employees to participate in abortions. UMDNJ receives approximately $60 million in federal health funds annually. In addition, New Jersey law states, “No person shall be required to perform or assist in the performance of an abortion or sterilization.” The lawsuit requests that the hospital be ordered to obey these laws and to return part of the federal taxpayer money it has received in light of its violation of federal conscience laws.

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Turnabout in Britain: How Cameron and Clegg vowed to hand back our liberties but are instead planning illiberal changes to justice system

What a difference 19 months makes. Speaking in the sun-lit Downing Street gardens as he launched the Coalition back in May 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron promised it would be ‘committed to civil liberties and curbing the power of the state’.

Nick Clegg added that after years of Labour authoritarianism, theirs would be a government ‘that hands you back your liberties’.

Now, however, almost unnoticed, this same Government is planning to enact highly illiberal changes to the justice system.

If, as Mr Cameron intends, they become law later this year, the consequences will be an unprecedented growth of secret hearings in both civil court cases and inquests; to deny ordinary citizens the ancient Common Law right to challenge evidence against them; and to make it far more difficult to call wrongdoing by government agencies to account.

Greater secrecy in court would have a further by-product: the stifling of investigative journalism, for which information rev-ealed through the legal process is often critically important.

‘Many of the biggest recent scandals were exposed through a combination of journalism and litigation,’ says Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty. ‘These proposals would bring the shutters down for ever.’

The key points, set out late last year in a Green Paper on Justice and Security, include a sweeping power to allow Ministers to withhold evidence they deem ‘sensitive’ from any civil open court hearing or inquest, if the Minister thinks disclosure would cause ‘damage to the public interest’.

The courts would not be able to weigh such assertions against the need for open justice, while the terms ‘sensitive’ and ‘public interest’ are not defined.

The key points, set out late last year in a Green Paper on Justice and Security, include a sweeping power to allow Ministers to withhold evidence they deem ‘sensitive’ from any civil open court hearing or inquest, if the Minister thinks disclosure would cause ‘damage to the public interest’

But lawyers say the types of material that could be concealed are likely to embrace not only national security, but policing, relations with foreign governments, and government commercial contracts. In most cases, the Minister exercising this power would also be a party to the case – an extraordinary conflict of interest, which breaches another Common Law principle, that ‘no one shall be a judge in his own cause’.

The Green Paper also states that in cases where this ‘closed material procedure’ was invoked, the only person apart from the judge and the lawyers representing the Government who would be allowed to see the secret evidence would be a ‘Special Advocate’.

These advocates are security-vetted barristers of the type already used in immigration hearings involving national security – such as that of Ekaterina Zatuliveter, the Russian Commons researcher who MI5 claimed was a spy.

Special Advocates are not only forbidden from talking to their clients, they may not even speak to their ‘normal’, open-court lawyers.

‘The Government can make an allegation, but you have no way of countering it because you can’t find out what the client’s response might be,’ one former Special Advocate says. ‘They might claim your client had been identified doing something incriminating by their beard. You can’t even ask whether they had a beard at the time.’

A further key point from the Paper is that in cases where the evidence was secret, all or part of the court’s eventual judgment would remain secret too.

One result would be that a citizen who lost a case against the Government would never find out why. Another would be the steady accumulation of secret legal precedents: case law hidden from the public.

Whitehall sources say the Green Paper proposals are the direct consequence of the efforts of this newspaper and others to expose British Government complicity in the ‘extraordinary rendition’ and torture of terrorism suspects such as the former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed. Two years ago, we persuaded the Court of Appeal that hitherto redacted details of his treatment, contained in a High Court judgment, should be published.

After the 2010 Election, say the sources, MI5’s Director-General, Jonathan Evans, began a Whitehall lobbying campaign, arguing that the scrutiny Mr Mohamed’s case had directed at his agency had caused severe damage. He was also trying to overturn a decision by the Supreme Court, made after former Guantanamo prisoners sued the Government for damages.

Although the Government had already settled the case by paying them millions, MI5’s lawyers tried to get the court to agree that even without legislation, they should have the right in future to have evidence heard in secret, concealed from all but Special Advocates.

The Supreme Court’s response was withering. In the words of one of its judges, Lord Kerr: ‘The right to be informed of the case made against you is not merely a feature of the adversarial system of trial, it is an elementary and essential prerequisite of fairness.’

Lord Kerr also rejected the Government’s argument – repeated in the Green Paper – that allowing the judge to see all the evidence would protect individuals’ rights.

This was ‘deceptively misleading ..... To be truly valuable, evidence must be capable of withstanding challenge. I go further. Evidence which has been insulated from challenge may positively mislead’.

Mr Evans was undaunted. Months ago he was boasting that if he could not get his way at the Supreme Court, he would persuade Mr Cameron to grant it through an Act of Parliament.

But though the new proposals’ origins may lie in Guantanamo, their scope is far wider. What price the 7/7 bombings inquest if Ministers could conceal evidence merely by classifying it as ‘sensitive’? What would be the chances of the recent case filed by female Green campaigners, who discovered they had been seduced by undercover police officers?

‘It’s incredibly dangerous,’ says one leading QC. ‘All too easily, “sensitive” can mean simply embarrassing, or inconvenient.’

In a foreword to the Green Paper, Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke claims these ‘commonsense proposals’ would merely ‘better equip our courts to pass judgment in cases involving sensitive information’.

The Paper asserts that the existing use of secret evidence and Special Advocates in immigration cases has proven them ‘capable of delivering procedural fairness’.

Interestingly, the Special Advocates themselves disagree. On Friday, 59 of them – of a total of 69 – submitted a response. They said: ‘Contrary to the premise underlying the Green Paper, the contexts in which closed material procedures are already used have not proved that they are “capable of delivering procedural fairness”.’

In fact, their experience had shown that they ‘represent a departure from the foundational principle of natural justice, that all parties are entitled to see and challenge all the evidence relied upon before the court . . . They also undermine the principle that public justice should be dispensed in public.’

Yet all three main parties have indicated they support the plans, and to date, only one MP has publicly opposed them, the Conservative David Davis.

‘They are a disgraceful assault on the principles of open justice,’ he says. ‘When it comes to curbing misbehaviour by the executive, we would end up with the least effective courts in the English-speaking world.’

‘When you think about it, it is rather ironic,’ adds Ms Chakrabarti. ‘The Green Paper has emer-ged as a result of terrible scandals. And yet the Government’s answer is not to ensure greater public scrutiny, but less.’

SOURCE






Australian government doles out tough love for unemployed teenage parents

COOKING classes will be among the life skills programs offered to teen parents in the Federal Government's tough-love welfare trial.

The first 1000 teens to join the trial, which ties Centrelink payments to efforts to finish year 12, have been sent letters telling them what they have to do. From next Monday, teenagers who have children between six months and six years old must book a meeting with welfare staff to discuss their education plans.

If they fail to meet appointments and do not have a valid excuse, they could lose parenting payments.

During the first Helping Young Parents meetings, discussions will also cover free support measures, such as childcare, that can be used to allow more study time. Other support measures include cooking tuition, parenting classes and budgeting advice.

The classes are separate from the requirement young parents must try to finish year 12 or its equivalent.

Human Services Minister Brendan O'Connor said the trial, which in Victoria will run in Hume and Shepparton, had been designed to give young people a range of skills. "This is about equipping them with the education that will help them enter the workplace," he said.

He said cutting off parenting payments would be a last resort, and that a reprieve was possible. "If parents do have their payments suspended, as soon as they get back in touch with Centrelink and start up their activities again, they will have their payments back-paid," he said.

The back-pay rule will help placate concerns from social services groups' that cutting welfare could lead to more problems for young families.

To coincide with the first Centrelink meetings, a new blog site will go live on January 16, allowing young parents to talk directly to other participants.

Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten said encouraging teens to finish school would help them later in life.

SOURCE




Muslims in Norway and the dishonest Left-run Norwegian government

Like all Leftists, the Norwegian Left hates their own society so crippling it by importing a large number of hostile immigrants turns them on. Some excerpts below from a very comprehensive article

So far I've listed three separate incidents in which Muslims in Norway have expressed their willingness to have individuals they believe are guilty of offending Islam killed. Zahid Mukhtar has gone on record twice, expressing the desire to have Salman Rushdie killed, and expressing sympathy for the killing of Theo Van Gogh. Again it's necessary to point out that in his capacity as spokesperson for the biggest Islamic organization in Norway, Zahid Mukhtar simply reflects the views of the other members of the organization, eighty thousand of them, to be exact.

Upon hearing these comments, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg felt compelled to implore Mukhtar to retract his statements, as Stoltenberg felt that Mukhtar's statements would portray the rest of the Muslim community in Norway in a less than flattering light. Notice here that Mr. Stoltenberg acknowledges that Mukhtar acts in his capacity as an official spokesperson.

"It has devastating consequences for Muslims in Norway when their spokesperson expresses sympathy for the horrible murder that occurred in the Netherlands. Such attitudes make it so much harder to combat racism and xenophobia. I'm a strong proponent for a society where different religions and cultures can co-exist, but I absolutely do not condone violations of basic human rights. The right to live and the right to express oneself freely are part of those basic human rights, and when they are violated we need to have a zero tolerance policy," says Stoltenberg.

Mr. Stoltenberg equates criticism of Islam and Muslims with racism. He claims that statements like the one made by Zahid Mukhtar severely damage the fight against racism and `Islamophobia' in Norway. A more correct assertion would be that such statements give Norwegians a better insight into the twisted ideology that espouses such values. Mr. Stoltenberg's statement also gives us a good insight into the mentality of the political establishment in Norway, and it explains why the political establishment is so reluctant to criticize Islam. They deliberately refrain from doing so because they believe it will create a massive backlash against Muslims in the country, and that it would be detrimental to the political establishment's efforts at creating a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society in Norway. Mr Stoltenberg clearly stated here his and the government's intentions in this regard.

The statement made by Mr. Stoltenberg in this case is also completely contrary to the reaction from the political establishment in Norway in the aftermath of the 2011 Oslo attacks, when the political Left systematically targeted anyone who had ever dared to write anything negative about Islam. The Left feverously attempted to incriminate those they perceived had contributed to the creation `Breivik the terrorist'. Honest and law-abiding individuals who had never in their lives advocated violence were all of a sudden the targets of a massive smear campaign, and unlike Zahid Mukhtar - who indeed expressed sympathy for terrorism on several occasion - these conservatives were indirectly blamed for the Oslo attacks.

Bashim Ghozlan was also in the media spotlight in 2009 when he refused to denounce infamous statements made by Yusuf al-Qaradawi in 2009 in which Qaradawi stated:

"Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption.The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was a divine punishment for them.Allah willing; the next time will be at the hand of the believers."

Bashim Ghozlan told Dagbladet:

"I do not wish to comment on those statements. I know Qaradawi as a respected religious scholar and we watch his TV programs. But I do not wish to comment on his political statements."

If Bashim Ghozlan was appalled by these statements, which most sane people would be, he would have categorically distanced himself from such vile rhetoric and condemned it. These despicable statements both condone previous genocides and express the desire to commit future genocides. By refusing to distance himself from them, Ghozlan has already indicated that he doesn't find them offensive. He doesn't believe that the pogrom in the past perpetrated against the Jews and potential new ones in the future perpetrated by the hands of the Muslims is `such' a bad thing. It's sad to think that these are the people that the political establishment in Norway incorrectly labels as `peace-loving' and `democratic'.

But this wasn't the only controversial view that the Muslim leadership advocated. The Islamic Council Norway was also unwilling to oppose death penalty for homosexuality, because the answer of this question hadn't been finalised by the European Fatwa Council, which is headed by none other than Qaradawi. The very same vile anti-Semite who expressed the desire to eradicate the Jews of the face of the planet:

The leader of the Islamic Council Norway, Shoaib Sultan, confirms that the matter is still being looked at by the Fatwa Council, and that they don't know when they'll get an answer. Sultan does not wish to comment on the statements made by Qaradawi, and referrers to the leader of the Islamic Council and its leader Senaid Kobilica, who also doesn't wish to comment. Kobilica refers to Basim Ghozlan, leader of the Islamic association of Oslo.

Another example of the Norwegian Muslim community's unwillingness to embrace traditional Western values occurred in 2006 during the Mohammed cartoon crisis, which resulted in worldwide Islamic riots and several dozen fatalities. The artist who drew the cartoons has been the victim of Muslim revenge attacks since then, and today has to live under 24/7 police protection.

Norway was affected by these incidents due to the actions of a small Norwegian periodical called Magazinet, which decided to publish the cartoons. This led to the attack on the Norwegian embassy in Iran and the attack on Norwegian soldiers in Afghanistan by a large mob of armed Afghani civilians. Norway was also strongly condemned by Islamic nations and by Muslims living in Norway for having laws guaranteeing freedom of speech, which allowed Magazinet to print these cartoons.

One would assume when taking all of these factors into consideration that the Norwegian Government would defend Vebjorn Selbekk, the editor of Magazinet and make it obvious to Muslims that in Norway freedom of speech and freedom of expression are rights that we're not willing to compromise on. But, sadly, that was not the case. The Norwegian Government sided with the Islamic nations and practically forced Selbekk to make a humiliating apology for having exercised his obvious right to express himself freely.

This is just another incident which clearly exemplifies the undemocratic nature of the Muslim community, and its inability to reconcile its views with modern Western democratic principles. And there is no way that the political establishment wasn't able to see this undemocratic side. It wasn't simply hatred directed at Norway from beyond its borders; it was also hatred directed at the country from inside its borders, from members of the Norwegian Muslim community. Several Islamic organizations in Norway actually filed police reports against Vebjorn Selbekk for having printed the cartoons:

This incident took place just over a decade after the assassination attempt on William Nygaard. But even so the political establishment yet again failed to criticize the Muslim community for advocating views and values that ran contrary to Norwegian and Western values. Instead the Government tried to convince the Norwegian people that we have to exercise our freedom of speech sensibly. In other words we shouldn't use our freedom of expression to offend Islam. And once again we get a glimpse into the world of double standards exposed by the very same establishment that chastised Norwegian conservative commentators in the wake of the Oslo attacks.

But this wasn't the end of the Mohammed cartoons controversy in Norway. Things flared up again when the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet decided to publish a cartoon depicting Mohammad as a pig in 2010. This led to more Muslim demonstrations. And this time specific threats were directed at the Norwegians because of `perceived' insults. Again, this was done by members of a community that Norwegian authorities portray as democratic. One of those present at the demonstration was Mohammad Mohyeldeen, who stated that:

"When are the Norwegian government and media going to understand the seriousness of this? Maybe not until it's too late. Maybe not until we get an 11 September on Norwegian soil. This is not a threat, but a warning."

What is worth noting here is that Mohyeldeen was able to utter this threat without being corrected by the other Muslims who were present at the demonstration. No one in the crowd tried to stop him or to criticize him for making these threats, which raise the questions whether the other Muslim were in agreement with him. The fact is that several thousand Muslims were appalled and moved to demonstrate to get their message across when Dagbladet printed the cartoon, but the same individuals did nothing when these threats were made against Norway. This would indicate support for Mohyeldeen's statement, which again lays bare the undemocratic nature of the Muslim community in Norway.

The episodes mentioned above are just a few out of many, but they are incidents that should really have prompted the political establishment in Norway to change their attitudes towards the Muslim community. It cannot be denied that the Muslim community in Norway espouses an ideology that is hostile to Western values and that many of its members hold views that are deeply offensive to people who cherish democracy.

Another thing worth noting is that the Muslim community in Norway are highly organized, and that they often speak with one voice. The authorities in Norway will concede if pressed sufficiently that there is only a tiny minority of the Muslim populace that exhibit undemocratic views, but evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Both during The Satanic Verses protests and the two Mohammad cartoon protests the Muslim community managed to muster several thousand people, which would tend to indicate that these protests were not spontaneous displays of displeasure, but rather staged occasions of political and religious dissent.

The fact that Muslims are over-represented in assault rape cases would tend to indicate that they have a lower regard for women than the average Westerner, and there is evidence to back up this claim. In Oslo newly released figures indicate that 70 percent of all domestic abuse in the capital is perpetrated by non-Westerners. Another claim that brings weight to the assertion came in 2006 when reports presented by special investigators working for the UDI estimated that more than two thousand young women of non-Western ancestry in Norway were forcibly married between 2004 and 2006. Forced marriages are common in Muslim countries, so it's reasonable to assume that the majority of these young women were indeed Muslims.

Now sit back and take some time to think about this fact. To force a person to marry a complete stranger is one of the cruellest things that anyone can do to another human being. Choosing a partner is a crucial life decision. It will to a large extent determine the level of happiness that this person will experience. It will also determine the future of his/her children, and what opportunities are made available to the individual. To take this choice away from someone is cruel beyond words, and there is absolutely no place for it in a civilized society.

The people who perpetrate these crimes have absolutely no respect for the most basic human rights, so how can the authorities allow it to happen? Prime Minister Stoltenberg was quoted earlier in this essay saying that controversial statements made by Muslims could jeopardize the work of combating racism and xenophobia. Does he also believe that publishing less desirable facts about Muslims also increases the level of `Islamophobia' in Norway?

Failing to criticize this gross abuse of human rights is highly disrespectful towards the victims of this practice. Claiming that the people responsible for such abuse are just as democratic as any other ordinary Norwegians is a punch in the face of the victims. A more honest description would be that Muslims who engage in this kind of cruelty view women as a mere commodity, which can be traded in order to obtain certain benefits, such as money or a permanent residence permit. And realising that this is a common practice within the patriarchal Muslim community in Norway gives us a better understanding of why Muslims are over-represented in Norwegian assault rape statistics.

And when we analyse all the statistics and facts that are available to us, it appears that violence is more commonly accepted within the Muslim community in Norway than among the rest of the population. In 2007 an imam in the city of Drammen (approximately 40 kilometres west of Oslo) was arrested by police after reports of children as young as seven being physically abused at various Koran schools in the city. The imam was accused of beating the children with a cane if they failed to recite verses from the Koran correctly. This abuse took place over a period of several years at three different Koran schools in the city before the police eventually intervened. I'm not even going to mention what would have happened if this abuse had taken place in a Norwegian school and the children were beaten because they failed to correctly recite various passages from the Bible. Needless to say it would have been a media bombshell. However, the news about the Imam in Drammen wasn't a big news story at all and it hardly generated any media attention.

All of these episodes, combined with the opinions expressed by the leadership of the big Islamic organizations in Norway, give us an insight into the mentality of the average Muslims residing in the country. When we start putting the pieces together, the picture that emerges shows us that members of the Muslim community have values and views that are at odds with those of the majority population. And the fact that Muslims keep showing up in the media for all the wrong reasons indicates that the behaviour displayed by them as a group is pretty static.

However, despite the extremely undemocratic behaviour exhibited by Muslims in Norway, there is very little negative media scrutiny of the community. The political establishment constantly attempts to tone down any criticism.

It's worth noting that Norwegian Christians are not being accorded the same treatment. Conservative Christians in Norway - i.e. individuals who don't accept the official socialist government's interpretation of the Bible, and who reject homosexuality and abortion, etc. - are referred to in Norway as `Morkemenn', literally meaning `the dark men', or as Christian fundamentalists. This derogatory term is meant to silence the opinions of this group, and it is often used in newspaper articles and public discourse. It's the equivalent of calling someone a Nazi in a debate over immigration. Unlike their Muslims counterparts, Christian conservatives are also always asked to explain their views and opinions by supporters of the Left. Sadly, Islam does not face the same demands, which is a sign of intellectual dishonesty.

This pattern of exculpating dark forces in Norway - which is exactly what Islam is - will not be able to continue indefinitely. Sooner or later something will have to give, and when it does all the emotions that have been held in check by the very strict use of propaganda and political dishonesty will no longer have any effect.

I believe that we will see major political and ideological changes in the next few decades in Europe. The sad part is that the tumultuous times that are ahead of us could have been avoided if the elected representatives of the European peoples had been able to show more integrity and moral courage.

When the Norwegian authorities tell us that Muslims in Norway are peaceful, hardworking, and democratic, they don't really have any hard evidence to back up this claim. As a matter of fact, there is ample hard evidence and empirical data that can be used to refute all of their claims. The authorities' arguments are basically empty shells, and will eventually collapse.

More HERE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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If we go by the daft definition of racism proffered by Diane Abbott's own social set, then she *is* a racist

Brief background on the Abbott story here. She is a black British Leftist politician and something of a loose cannon

Is Diane Abbott racist? By any reasoned, rational assessment, of course she isn't. There's far more to being a racist than writing the occasional clumsily worded tweet. But if we go by the definition of racism proffered by Abbott's own social and political set – particularly by the Labour Party – then she is a racist. After all, who was it who redefined racism to include speech and action that is not even consciously bigoted ("unwitting racism") and to include "any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person"? Yep, it was Labour and its various cliques. Abbott has fallen victim to her own mates' ruthless relativisation of what constitutes racism.

One of the most destructive legacies of the New Labour years was the racialisation of everyday life: the way in which all of us were encouraged to see racism in every off-the-cuff remark, tense encounter in the workplace, and even playground scuffle (last year more than 20,000 under-11s in British schools were punished for "racist" or "homophobic" behaviour). By turning the hunt for racist behaviour into a new moral crusade for a chattering class that was seriously bereft of one, New Labour did not defeat the scourge of racialised thinking. Rather it did the very opposite, inviting us all to think in increasingly racialised terms and to have our Offence Antennae permanently switched to High so that we might spot anything even remotely racist. The end result was a more divided, tense and racialised society, which is a far cry from the kind of equality and peace fought for by generations of anti-racists.

Under New Labour, racism was most clearly relativised through the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. It was Macpherson's report, published in 1999 and enthusiastically backed and adopted by New Labour, which introduced the idea of "unwitting racism" – the idea that one can be racist without even knowing it – and which defined as racism any incident that is deemed to be racist by the victim of it or by any other person. In short, almost anything – any dumb remark or thoughtless comment – could now be labelled a "racist incident". New Labour divorced racism from power and politics and reconceptualised it as a form of bad manners that was allegedly widespread in impolite society.

Abbott's daft tweet conforms very well to the surreal New Labourite definition of racism. She may not have intended to be racist, but so what, you can still be an "unwitting" racist. And as other people have judged her tweet to be racist, that apparently means that it is racist. The bizarre furore over Abbott's tweeting should remind us that, sadly, racial thinking has not been defeated but rather has been intensified in the post-New Labour era. Perhaps it's time to go back to having a serious definition of racism – which is after all a very serious thing. We should aspire to live in society of equals, not one in which both whites and blacks alike are continually invited to play the victim card.

SOURCE






ACLU Demands W. Virginia County Stop Funding Annual ‘Jesus Fest’ Event

A battle is brewing in Charleston, West Virginia, between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Harrison County Commission.

Every August, a two-day festival called Jesus Fest takes place in Clarksburg. And each year, the county provides $2,000 in funding to the initiative — support that the ACLU is claiming must end.

In a Dec. 20, 2011 letter, the state’s ACLU office asked county commissioners to stop funding the festival, as it is an initiative which promotes Christianity. In the eyes of the ACLU, this is clearly a constitutional breach. Below, find a description of Jesus Fest:

The event is a family oriented festival with a focus on creating unity in the Body of Christ, which is accomplished through an interdenominational approach utilizing ecumenical leadership and the involvement of local area churches. The event focuses on evangelism and outreach to the unsaved by means of family oriented activities and events in an atmosphere of interdenominational praise and worship and the preaching of the gospel. Reaching out to the hurting and oppressed is a biblical mandate for us as a redeemed people.

In the letter (it can be read in its entirety here), the organization charges that the funding of the festival directly violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as West Virginia’s constitution. Here’s a portion of it:

The ACLU claims that it is acting on behalf of Harrison County residents who have complained and are bothered by the county’s support for the Jesus Fest. The commission has not yet made a decision regarding funding and is waiting for a recommendation from Prosector Joe Shaffer before taking any action on the matter.
Click here to find out more!

Commissioner Ron Watson says that the group is “waiting to see what kind of legal ground” it stands on in addressing the matter.

Watson also clarified some misconceptions about the monies being used. Rather than coming from taxpayer dollars, Jesus Fest is funded from video lottery and table game revenue. This money comes from the state and is, thus, distributed to the county. According to Watson, this money funds other festivals and community events as well.

“Fairs and festivals its not taxpayers money,” Watson explains.”It’s money we fund all fairs and festivals regardless of what the subject manner is. It is usually open to the public. And doing so that money does not come from property tax money. It comes from what I call devil’s money which is gambling money from video lottery and table games that the county has received.”

B.K. Vanhorn, who organizes the Jesus Fest, says that the festival gets the same privileges as other local celebrations. For instance, the commission also provides funds for the Italian Heritage Festival and the Black Heritage Festival.

Watson, like Vanhorn, doesn’t see any problem with the funding of the Jesus Fest. Another commissioner, Michael Romano, who is a member of the ACLU, is standing up against the organization’s stance on this matter as well.

The Commission has given Jesus Fest $2,000 each year for the past five years.

SOURCE




Wave of shootings baffle Swedish police

Baffled? They shouldn't be. It's just Muslims doing what Muslims do. Malmo is Muslim-dominated. It's probably Sunnis shooting Shias or vice versa. No mention of the M-word below, of course

A new wave of execution-style shootings in Sweden's third largest city has left police puzzled, raising concerns that Malmo has become a magnet for gang-related killings.

On Thursday dozens of police took to the streets in the southern Swedish city of 250,000 to try calm the public and to collect tips about the attacks, which come only a year after a suspected serial shooter was arrested there.

"We've never experienced anything like this before. It's exceptional that there have been so many murders in such a short period of time," police spokesman Lars-Hakan Lindholm said. "People are worried of course and want to talk about it."

In less than six weeks, five people have been shot dead in execution-style killings, prompting local police to ask for back-up from national investigators and for Malmo Mayor Ilmar Reepalu to call on the country's justice minister to implement tougher gun laws.

Sweden's gun control laws are fairly strict. Penalties for possessing illegal arms typically involve fines or up to one year in prison, but serious breaches of the law can result in a four-year sentence.

Lindholm said that due to the fast escalating death-toll police presence has now been bumped up by about 30 extra officers in the city on weekdays and by around 40 on the weekends. Malmo is an eclectic city, where about 40 percent of its residents are first- or second-generation immigrants.

The latest murder occurred on Tuesday, when a man in his late 40's was shot dead in broad daylight on an open street near his Malmo home.

Two days earlier, a 15-year-old boy was killed in the midst of the Malmo New Year celebrations.

"They're almost like executions," Lindholm said of the killings, but noted that there are still no suspects in the slayings and police remain baffled to what the motives might be.

The killings have upset many Malmo inhabitants who, just last year, saw the end of a near seven-year shooting terror by a lone gunman that targeted immigrants.

That suspect, 39-year old Peter Mangs, is currently facing charges for allegedly killing three people and attempting to murder another 13 victims in a series of sniper-like attacks.

Police say they see few links between Mangs and the latest shootings however, having largely ruled out that they're dealing with a copycat.

Instead, they indicate the incidents could possibly be gang-related, as the victims seem to have been carefully picked out.

"There is nothing pointing to that these are random shooting acts. There have been specific targets and the targets have been hit," Superintendent Borje Sjoholm told reporters at a newsconference earlier this week. "There are some common denominators between the five murders," he added. [Like what? Sunnis shooting Shias?]

In the light of the shootings, demonstrators will stage a protest against organized crime and illegal arms in Malmo on Friday. Some 4,800 people have so far signed up for participation.

SOURCE





Official anti-racism: the new British nationalism?

I must say I was rather surprised by the explosion of self-congratulation when the white killers of a black guy were convicted. Blacks attack whites all the time in Britain and it gets only minor attention. Is it wrong for whites to attack blacks but not wrong for blacks to attack whites? Very strange. Perhaps you have to be a guilt-ridden Brit to understand it -- JR

Once the British state and establishment used the politics of race to boost its authority. Today, in pursuit of the same self-serving ends, they are instead engaged in a phoney moral crusade behind official anti-racism. Is that anything to celebrate?

The conviction of two men for the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 has sparked a national celebration of this apparent victory over the evils of racism. Every section of the media and political elite has jostled to line up behind Lawrence’s parents and sign up to the official anti-racist consensus. As one leading press figure put it, the guilty verdict is ‘a triumph’ not only for the Lawrences but for British justice, policing, politics and the media.

For those of us who campaigned against racism in the bad old days of the 1980s, this looks like so remarkable a turnaround in attitudes that one might almost wonder if we are living not just in another century but on a different planet. Thirty years ago when I joined a group called Workers Against Racism, there was no sympathetic media coverage or mainstream political support for the Asian families being burnt out of housing estates or the black youth being routinely brutalised by the police. The national debate was all about the scourge of ‘immigrant scroungers’ and black ‘muggers’. Those who fought against racists were branded extremists, the flipside of the fascists.

Let’s be clear. This was not the ‘unwitting’ prejudice described by the Macpherson inquiry into Lawrence’s murder as the basis of ‘institutional racism’ in the UK. It was deliberate, politicised and vitriolic racism, popularised from the top down and enforced by the state as a weapon to divide the working class and consolidate white support for the authorities.

Living in Moss Side, Manchester during the 1981 riots, I remember police vans cruising the streets while riot cops beat their batons on the side and chanted ‘Niggers, niggers, niggers – out, out, out!’. A veteran comrade of mine recalls being arrested in east London around the same time while carrying some Workers Against Racism pamphlets, and being repeatedly asked by the police ‘Do you like monkeys?’ and ‘Why do you live in a monkey cage?’ (that is, his largely black council estate in Hackney). After the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham exploded in a riot sparked by police brutality in 1985, in which an officer was killed, the Metropolitan Police arrested hundreds of youths and told the white kids to cooperate because ‘we only want the blacks’. And so it went on. The incompetent police investigation into the Lawrence murder should have come as little surprise.

And the problem went far beyond police ranks. Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher is remembered for her declaration about British culture being ‘swamped’ by immigrants. But there was little more sympathy for the victims of racism among leaders of the Labour Party and trade unions. In 1982, we marched from London to Brighton to call on the TUC to take a stand against racial discrimination and violence. Our message was not well received.

Now look at the contrast with the carnival of official anti-racism around the Lawrence murder verdicts this week. What has brought these remarkable changes about? New Labour home secretary Jack Straw summed up the widespread view that, ‘if Britain has changed for the better in the intervening 19 years… that’s above all down to two extraordinary people, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s parents’. Are we really to believe that the Lawrences have magic powers to transform a nation?

What has happened over the past two decades is that Britain has undergone a major cultural shift as the old politics of nationalism and race have lost their grip on public consciousness. This would have happened whether or not Stephen Lawrence had been murdered by racists. Indeed, the fact that his killing remains the benchmark for racist violence 19 years on shows how rare such incidents have become.

But here is the thing. The truth is that the less overtly racist British society has become in recent times, the more the authorities have started preaching about the evils of racism and launching new crusades against it. What has altered most is the perception of racism. Where once it was society’s guilty secret, now there is a concerted effort to trawl for and publicise any hint of racially incorrect language or behaviour from the school playground to the football pitch. The less racism is in evidence, the more everything appears to have been racialised. Why?

Official anti-racism has become the beleaguered elites’ political weapon of choice. The old British Establishment used the traditional politics of nationalism, race and empire to assert its authority. Those days are long gone. Instead, today’s political and cultural elites have seized upon the new orthodoxy of official anti-racism to try to give them a sense of moral purpose. Official anti-racism has also become a tool both to demonise and to discipline the white working-class people whom the elites fear and loathe.

The Lawrence case has indeed played a big part in this process, though not in the way widely assumed this week. The key was not so much the murder itself, but the publication of the 1999 Macpherson report into the case, which formally rewrote the state’s doctrine on the politics of race.

Macpherson introduced two landmark changes. First, it introduced a new official definition of a race crime. A racial incident is now ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. Such a sweeping subjective definition of a race crime has inevitably confused debate and fostered the view that racism is everywhere and that ever more laws and initiatives are required to police it.

Second, Macpherson defined the problem of ‘institutional racism’ at the heart of British society, leading to the reorganisation of the police and other public institutions around this assumption. But whereas the Sixties radicals who coined the phrase were talking about the deliberate wielding of power by a racist state apparatus, Macpherson explicitly rejected any such link between institutional racism and the exercise of power. The report stated that the Metropolitan Police was not racist; the problem was more the ‘unwitting words and actions’ of individual officers acting together.

Once racism is reduced to a problem of the individual rather than the state or society, the solution becomes re-education to alter individual attitudes. This is an open invitation to the state to intervene to police people’s words, actions and even thoughts – particularly those of the white working class now seen as the source of the problem. Macpherson even proposed that the use of racist language in your own home should be made an explicit criminal offence. The report led to an explosion of race-based codes of conduct, awareness training and surveillance measures throughout British institutions.

New laws have made it possible to charge people with ‘racially aggravated’ offences, rather than just old-fashioned assault or criminal damage, and sentence them more stiffly on conviction. The law has thus extended into punishing an individual, not just for what he had done, but for what he was assumed to be thinking when he committed an offence - his supposed ‘racial motivation’. This was reflected in the sentencing of those two men for the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Redefined on this individualised basis, racism has been taken up as the cause of the moral crusade. Declaring that you are not a racist has become the bottom line that helps mark you out as one of the ‘right-thinking people’, in the words of one police chief. In an age when many of the old moral certainties have been badly eroded, distancing yourself from racist remarks and following the new etiquette is seen as one of the few ways to draw a clear line between Good and Evil.

That is why every British leader and institution is now so keen to swear their abhorrence of racism, as a pass to the moral high ground that might once have been provided by declaring their belief in God. As the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission boasted after the Lawrence verdicts, racial prejudice is now seen ‘as a secular sin that is not to be tolerated’. And the worst sinners are now deemed to be the white working classes, who must have the new catechism/etiquette of official anti-racism drummed into them at every opportunity. That is why, for example, any hint of racism around football, patronisingly seen as a modern opiate of the masses, is made such a public example of today.

It was against this background that the killing of Stephen Lawrence was belatedly singled out by the authorities as so important. It became more than a murder inquiry; not just a criminal case, but a political cause, as the Met’s deputy commissioner Cressida Dick effectively admitted this week: ‘All murder cases are absolutely dreadful, but this case for reasons you will all understand is extremely important, not just for the Metropolitan Police, but for society at large.’ It had become a way for the state to regain some moral authority around official anti-racism.

I have little sympathy for the two men jailed for the killing of Stephen Lawrence. But for some of us who campaigned against racism on the basis of a belief in freedom, equality and democracy, the wider changes the case has become a vehicle for have not been for the better.

Indeed, some of the most worrying political and legal trends evident in recent years have been promoted in the name of official anti-racism post-Lawrence. These include the rewriting of the law along subjective, arbitrary lines through the redefinition of a race crime; the spread of conformist codes of conduct that police language and thought and suppress open debate; the institutionalisation of mistrust and mutual surveillance; and the notion that people are to be judged on their private attitudes at least as much as their public actions.

In the name of ‘zero tolerance’, the codes of official anti-racism have turned intolerance of offensive views into a ‘value’, even a virtue. Indeed, such is the intolerance of those suspected of harbouring sinful thoughts today that anything can apparently be justified to get them – up to and including, as Brendan O’Neill argues on spiked today, the abolition of such an historic principle of the justice system as the law against double jeopardy. This is the modern elite’s version of the old corrupt copper’s mantra – if they’re wrong’uns, anything goes to get them.

On spiked, and even before that in LM magazine, we have argued from the start that there is no benefit for those who believe in freedom in the phoney moral crusade of official anti-racism launched around the Lawrence case. As I wrote here 10 years ago, ‘It is the new thought police, rather than the old racist ones, who are running riot through Britain today’. The exploitation of the Lawrence verdict this week confirms that official anti-racism is now every bit as authoritarian and intolerant as the state racism of old.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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Ten per cent of all murders in Britain are carried out by bail bandits

More than 10 per cent of murders in are committed by criminals released on bail for another crime. In the last five years, more than 350 killings were carried out by so-called ‘bail bandits’. It means that more than one violent death a week could have been prevented if the suspect had been locked up instead of being
let out.

Despite the worrying scale of serious crime by bailed suspects, ministers are planning a huge rise in the use of bail for suspects. Thousands more could be released every year before their cases reach trial in an effort to save millions in prison costs.

But the move is raising concerns that more innocent people will be victims of suspects who would otherwise have been behind bars.

Javed Khan, chief executive of Victim Support, said: ‘It’s traumatic enough being a victim of serious crime. It adds insult to injury when a victim finds out that the offender was on bail at the time. ‘These figures are a cause for concern and could further undermine confidence in the justice system.

‘We know that victims want an effective criminal justice system that cuts crime and stops reoffending. ‘That is why justice agencies need to work harder at stopping people committing serious offences while on bail.’

The Tory MP for Witham, Priti Patel, said: ‘The Government has to look at these figures carefully and address how the public can be protected from these individuals. ‘They should also look at how they can clamp down on bail order breaches and, most importantly, make sure these individuals are properly prosecuted. ‘This is making a mockery of the criminal justice system.’

Official figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that over five years, 11 per cent of murders were committed by offenders bailed over another offence. Between 2006 and 2010, some 238 murders were committed by in England and Wales by bailed suspects out of a total of 2,107. Bail bandits committed 125 offences of manslaughter in the same period out of a total of 1,305. They were also responsible for 446 rapes, or nearly 90 every year. That is four per cent of all rapes carried out in the period. In addition, more than 900 sexual offences were committed against children by bailed criminals.

Overall, suspects who could have been locked up were responsible for seven per cent of all serious crimes, including murder, manslaughter, serious assault, rape and sex offences against children.

Bailed suspects commit one crime every four minutes, including a fifth of all burglaries and one in six robberies.

Cases where bailed criminals have committed horrific crimes are among the most notorious in recent years. Father-of-three Garry Newlove, 47,was kicked to death in 2007 after confronting drunks who damaged his wife’s car. His killer, teenage thug Adam Swellings, had been released on bail that morning after being convicted of assault.

Other cases include Jonathan Vass, a 30-year-old ex-bouncer, who slit the throat of his former girlfriend while on bail for raping her.

The figures are the latest to provoke fears that too many criminals are escaping with ‘soft justice’. Last month the Daily Mail revealed that 50 people a day suffer a violent or sexual attack by a convict who has been spared jail.

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke has proposed a huge increase in the use of bail. Thousands more suspects could be released on electronic tags that alert the authorities if they do not comply with their curfew. Around 9,200 fewer criminals every year will be remanded into custody before trial.

Officials insist the measure will be used only when the alleged offence means there is ‘no prospect’ of the suspect being jailed if found guilty. They say prosecutors will be given the power to challenge bail decisions if they fear the public may be at risk.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: ‘Dangerous offenders who pose a threat to society should always be remanded into custody while they await trial.

‘To strengthen this, the Government recently signalled its intention to allow prosecutors to challenge a Crown Court bail decision where they feel a potentially dangerous prisoner could be bailed. 'Bail is only being modified for minor offences where the defendant would not receive a jail sentence if convicted. ‘The decision to grant bail is taken by the police and courts based on the full facts of each case.

'They take extreme care, particularly when making decisions about cases involving violent crimes.

‘The overwhelming majority of people bailed do not reoffend and are often given strict conditions such as electronic tags and curfews. ‘Anyone who reoffends while on bail will usually receive a longer sentence as a result.’

SOURCE





Divorced British parents will have right to see their children under new law

This is already in place in Australia

Ministers are drawing up new rules to put courts under a legal duty to ensure divorced parents are guaranteed access to their children. Parents who refuse to accept the orders will be in contempt of court and risk serious penalties or even jail.

The move will delight fathers’ rights campaigners who believe dads are penalised under the present system which usually grants mothers custody.

The Coalition is hoping to succeed where Labour failed. In early 2005, it tried to force mothers to let partners see their children by threatening to impose penalties such as night curfews and electronic tagging.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Tory work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith have apparently agreed a different approach which they hope will be more successful.

Around 3.8million children - one in three - live without their father.

Last night children’s minister Tim Loughton said: ‘Our vision is to establish that, under normal circumstances, a child will have a relationship with both his or her parents, regardless of their relationship with each other.

'We must do everything we can to improve the system so that it gives children the best chance of growing up under the guidance of two loving parents.

'All the evidence tells us that children genuinely benefit from a relationship with both parents, with the potential to make different contributions to their child’s development.

'The culture has shifted away from the traditional view that mothers are primarily responsible for the care of children. Increasingly society recognises the valuable and distinct role of both parents.

'We are looking closely at all the options for promoting shared parenting through possible legislative and non-legislative means.'

Mr Loughton’s comments indicate that ministers have gone against a key finding of November’s family justice review, which rejected equal access for mothers and fathers, saying it would put too much pressure on judges. It is believed that the law could be changed by amending the 1989 Children’s Act to include presumption of shared parenting.

Another option would be for the Government to support a backbench bill by Tory MP Charlie Elphicke, which will be debated later this month. The bill requires courts and councils which are enforcing contact orders for children ‘to operate under the presumption that the rights of a child include growing up knowing and having access to and contact with both parents involved’.

Nadine O’Connor, campaign director for Fathers4Justice, said a Government move would be a ‘massive step forward’. 'It is saying that dads have as many rights as mums,' she said. 'I will believe it when I see it, but the reform has to apply across the family justice system.'

SOURCE





Free yourselves from the lefty ghetto

Lefties, as a rule, only read other lefties. This seems to be the case with George Monbiot. His attack on libertarianism (This bastardised libertarianism makes ‘freedom’ an instrument of oppression, 19 December) is the usual mix of unwillingness and inability to understand anything outside the intellectual ghettoes of the left.

He claims to have asked: “Do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?” - as if that were some knock-down refutation never made before. Of course we do. Our difference with him isn’t that we are against courts and the other modes of dispute resolution. What we deny is that social peace requires an enlarged and omnicompetent state run by his friends.

He claims we “pretend … that only the state intrudes on our liberties. [We] ignore … the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free.” Not quite. We do believe that the state is the foremost violator of our right to life, liberty and property. But we also observe that banks are licensed and regulated creatures of the state, and that big business in general is only big because of state-granted privileges like limited liability, infrastructure subsidies, and tax and regulatory systems that cartellise costs and flatten competition from outside the magic circle. There is a difference between believing in free markets and supporting actually existing capitalism.

You could have published an attack on libertarianism that didn’t border on misrepresentation. Or perhaps not. That would have meant exposing your readers to genuine libertarian positions. And that might, in a few cases, have opened the gates of their intellectual ghetto.

SOURCE





Australia: Political correctness kills a black kid

Authorities could not intervene in neglectful childcare arrangements for "cultural reasons"

The Department of Child Protection has admitted to not intervening on behalf of an eight-year-old girl, who has since died in the desert under questionable circumstances, despite knowing she was living with a convicted child snatcher.

The girl, whose name and photograph has been suppressed for cultural reasons, died from severe dehydration on Tuesday after she was found more than 12 kilometres from the Tjirrkali Aboriginal Community, 180 kilometres north-west of Warburton.

She was in the company of Augustine Winter Miller, 38, who was the partner of the girl's carer Tania Little, who was also no relation to the girl.

Ms Little made headlines when she admitted to stealing a three-day-old baby from Perth's King Edward Memorial Hospital in 2007 and was given a suspended sentence by the Kalgoorlie District Court the following year.

The department said it had paid Ms Little to care for the girl through its family crisis program since 2010. But it said it was not culturally appropriate to intervene in the girl's care because it was common practice with Aboriginal children to leave living arrangements up to the extended family.

But Goldfields community leader Daisy Ward said the little girl was abandoned to two people who were not related to her or from her country. This was despite the girl having family, including both parents, a brother and aunties and uncles on both sides, who lived in the alcohol-free and traditional community of Jameson, Ms Ward said.

Ms Ward said that the girl should have gone back to her family instead of strangers. "I feel sick thinking about it. The duty of care goes back to the parents," Ms Ward said. "The carer that was looking after her should not have let her go [hunting]. There was a big responsibility [over her care].

"Only family should have had her. They should have had her in the first place, when she was little. It still goes back to parenting and the parents did wrong."

It is not known whether the girl's family were even notified that she had gone to live with a stranger since the community is not speaking to media.

The girl's mother Ann-Marie Lane had given up custody of her daughter and a son, when they were young, because she was not coping. The older boy went to live with his father in Jameson and her then two-year-old daughter went to live with a grandmother, Nola Grant. Ms Grant eventually died from kidney failure when the girl was aged about six.

The girl then went to live with Ms Little but details are sketchy about what arrangement was made between the grandmother and Ms Little over the care of the little girl before Ms Grant died.

It appeared that Ms Little had helped the older woman care for the girl when Ms Grant became increasingly unwell. Ms Little then took over custody and sought financial assistance for her new ward from the department in May 2010.

The department provided payments to Ms Little through Centrelink for more than a year but did not question the appropriateness of the convicted child snatcher to be her carer or seek out the girl's actual family.

"The department is unable to comment on the specifics of individual cases for reasons of family privacy," it said in a written statement. "...The department responds to notifications of concern regarding the safety and wellbeing of children and young people. Where necessary, the department will make alternative arrangements for children whose parents are not able to care for them. "However, if the extended family makes arrangements to ensure the safety and wellbeing of a child, the department will not need to intervene.

"These sorts of arrangements made by extended family are culturally appropriate and not uncommon in Aboriginal communities."

It said the type of financial assistance it provided was to pay for food, utilities and any undertaking of urgent travel, as well as provide bereavement assistance where applicable.

The department has denied any knowledge of the girl having gone to live in the Tjirrkali Aboriginal Community, 180 kilometres north-west of Warburton, where Mr Miller resided.

Mr Miller was known to police because he was a convicted child sex offender after forming a relationship with 14-year-old girl who he said had been promised to him as a wife. Mr Miller is not considered a traditional man except that he has gone through traditional men's business as an adult.

Since April last year the Laverton man and Ms Little formed a relationship and she joined Mr Miller in the Tjirrkali Aboriginal Community, where he hunted and operated as a bush mechanic.

It was his skills as a mechanic and his knowledge of bush survival that have caused the Warburton community to question how he and the little girl came to be lost in the desert for four days.

The girl died despite valiant efforts of police and a Warburton nurse to try and resuscitate her when she was found unconscious at 2pm on Tuesday.

The pair had been on a hunting trip since Saturday and were found halfway between their abandoned two-wheel drive car, which was 25 kilometres into the remote desert, and the community.

The girl's death is still being investigated by police for the state coroner and is being treated as suspicious as a precautionary measure.

In the meantime the Warburton community is baying for Mr Miller's blood in the way of pay back, which under tribal law allows the men to spear him for failing to ensure the girl's safety.

It is understood that the mother, Ms Lane, has flown to Warburton to collect the body, which is to be laid to rest in Jameson.

Mr Miller is meant to reside in Kalgoorlie until his next court hearing for firearm charges. He was released from custody by the Magistrates Court on the condition that he was to report to local police every day from Monday to Friday.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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