Wednesday, 6th February 2008
3:16pm
David Davis clearly scents that he can inflict political damage with the Sadiq Khan bugging affair. Today we read that the Justice Secretary Jack Straw may or may not have been wholly candid about what he was told about Khan’s prison visits to his constituent and childhood friend, Babar Ahmad. It is said that his adviser, who told him about the visit, ‘forgot’ to tell him that the visit was being bugged.
Who knows? Who cares?
Davis appears to be exercised by what he believes to be a breach of the Wilson Doctrine, the guidance drafted in 1966 which said MPs’ phone calls should not be bugged and which was updated a couple of years ago to include other surveillance of MPs. But as Straw made clear in the Commons, the bugging of the conversation between Khan and Ahmad did not breach the Wilson Doctrine. Straw informed the House: In a written answer on 12 September 2007, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said: ‘The Wilson Doctrine applies to all forms of interception that are subject to authorisation by Secretary of State warrant’ [my emphasis].
And Straw also said:
Any authorisation for the interception of telephone calls and other public telecommunications requires a warrant personally signed by the relevant Secretary of State…Under the 2000 Act, the regime in respect of intrusive surveillance operations by the police and other domestic law enforcement agencies is different. Under these provisions, which originated with the Police Act 1997, passed in the closing months of the previous Administration, with our support, there is a hierarchy of approvals depending on the nature of the surveillance concerned. In the case of eavesdropping operations, authorisation by a chief officer of police or officer of equivalent rank in the Metropolitan Police Service is required. This regime is supervised by the chief surveillance commissioner — currently Sir Christopher Rose, formerly a senior judge of the Court of Appeal. Ministers play no part in these authorisations. Where any operation involves the use of premises of HM Prison Service, neither the Prison Service nor the Minister concerned is asked for any additional authorisation.
In other words, the bugging of the Ahmad/Khan conversation was not covered by a Secretary of State warrant— and therefore was also not covered
by the Wilson doctrine. This fact was, for some reason, ignored by Davis in the debate in the House and in his continued agitation in today’s papers.
Moreover, one continues to ask the question — who was the source of the Sunday Times leak, and what was his/her agenda? Former Detective Sergeant Mark Kearney, the police officer who carried out the bugging and says he was pressurised into doing so by the Metropolitan Police even though he protested it was out of order, claimed to be ‘horrified’ at the leak to the Sunday Times — but is himself facing criminal prosecution for leaking information to the media.
Meanwhile, the question of whether Khan or Ahmed was the target of the bugging becomes a little muddier. The Sun reports today:
Security sources told yesterday how 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui asked lawyer Mr Khan to represent him after being accused of being the ‘20th hijacker’. The Labour whip was not allowed to see Moussaoui and was barred from seeing court papers in the run-up to the trial. But the MP for Tooting, South London, acted as a consultant to the self-confessed al-Qaeda agent — jailed for life in 2006.
Human rights lawyer Mr Khan, 37, who says he loathes terror groups, was the only practising Muslim on Moussaoui’s team. It brought him to the attention of MI5 and MI6. One security source said last night: ‘It is hardly surprising he came to the attention of security services in view of the people he was associated with.’ Mr Khan later defended extremists and Brits held in Guantanamo Bay. Last year it was revealed that five members of his family belonged to fundamental group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
It may well have been that, although Babar Ahmed was self-evidently the target of the prison bugging, which had clearly been directed at more of his visitors than just Sadiq Khan, the police were not uninterested in Khan himself and in the combination of the two of them. This merely underlines the point that — while there is no suggestion that Khan has done anything wrong — as two chief surveillance commissioners have said, it would clearly be madness for MPs who have contact with terrorists or who are suspected of being involved with terrorism or extremism to be exempted from surveillance.
Which is why it is so regrettable that David Davis has chosen to fan the flames of a story which, although he may not wish to do so, is surely intended to undermine counter-terrorism policing. Maybe Straw hasn’t told the truth about what precisely he was told when. But who benefits from all this? Not the public that needs to be protected from terror, that’s for sure.
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Monday, 4th February 2008
2:59pm
On Harry’s Place, Potkin Azarmehr makes a most timely protest against London’s School of Oriental and African Studies which is hosting a celebration of the 29th Anniversary of the Islamic Republic. For the second year running, therefore, SOAS is providing the Iranians with a propaganda platform for a regime which, among other horrors, persecutes its own students. As Potkin observes:
Well if you could give the SOAS Administration the benefit of the doubt last year, a repeat of the same ‘symposium’ makes it impossible and cretinous to do so this year. For once again, an invitation by the Cultural Centre of the Embassy of the I.R. of Iran, accompanied by a poster with the heading ‘In Praise of the 29th Anniversary of the Victory of the Islamic Revolution’, has been sent out to embassy staff and associates for a 3 ay event, 6-8th February at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, with the usual reception starting at 6:30 pm. At a time when only recently, 43 Iranian students, across Iranian universities, have either been arrested or abducted by the Islamic Republic agents, it is a travesty of common decency and human values for the SOAS university to allow this cultural facade by the Islamic Republic to be held in a British university.
Here from the website of
Kamangir is a list of some the Iranian students who have been imprisoned by the regime for voicing any dissent:
- Arash Paknejad (m), Mozandaran University
- Saeid Habibi (m), as member of student’s human rights reporters
- Anoshe Azadbar (f), Tehran University
- Elinaz Jamshidi (f), Azad University of central Tehran student of communication
- Mehdi Gerilo (m), Tehran geophysics center
- Nader Ahseni (m), Mazandaran University
- Behroz karimizade (m), Tehran University
- Nasim Soltan-beigi (f), Alame Communication University
- Ali Sa`lem (m), Polytechnic University, student of Master degree in polymer
- Mohsen Qanim (m), Polytechnic University
- Rozbeh Saf-Shekan (m), Tehran University
- Yaser (Sadra) Pirhaiaty (m), Shahed University
- Saeid Aqam-Ali (m), Yazd University
- Ali Kolaee` (m), Azad University of Shahriar City
- Amir Mehrzad (m), (high School Student)
- Hadi Salary (m), Rajaey University
- Farshid Ahangaran(m), Rajaey University
- Amir Aqai (m), Rajaey University
- Milad Omrani (m), Rajaey University
- Keivan Amir Eliasy (m), Master of industrial engineer
- Soroush Hashem-poor (m), Ahvaz University
- Farshad Doosti-poor (m)
- Sohrab Karimi (m)
- Javad Alizade (m)
- Mohammad Salleh Auman (m)
- Mehdi al-lahyari (m), Sharif industrial University, student of master degree
- Rozbehan Amiri (m), Tehran University, Student of computer sciences
- Bahram Shojaee (m), Tehran-south Azad University, Student of Chemistry engineer
- Saied Aqakhani (m)
- Majid Ashraf Nejad (m)
- Peiman Piran (m), by other student report about him*
- Aabed Tavanche (m), Polytechnic University
- Soroosh Dastestany (m)
- Amin Qazaei (m)
- Bijan Sabaq (m), Mazandaran University
- Anahita hosini (f), Tehran University
- Morteza Khedmatlo (m)
- Mohamad Pour Abdol-lah (m), Tehran University
- Bita Samimi-zad (f), Polytechnic University
- Behzad Baqery (m), Mazandaran University
- Soroosh Sabet (m), Sharif University
- Morteza Eslahchi (m), Allame University
Kamangir says:
In the past month and half, many students from different cities and universities have been arrested, on charges related to holding peaceful ceremonies for the celebration of the 7th of November, the National Day for Students. They have been behind the bars since.
Shouldn’t SOAS be organising instead a day in solidarity with these students who are the victims of the Iranian revolution? But SOAS is not alone in grovelling to tyranny. Look at what’s happening across the pond at Columbia university. The Iranian news network Press TV reports: A delegation of professors from the Columbia University is to visit Tehran to apologize to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The academic delegation is to apologize to the Iranian president over the offensive remarks made by the university's President, Lee Bollinger, prior to Ahmadinejad's address to the university students in September 2007. One of the university's professors who spoke on condition of anonymity told Mehr News Agency that the main purpose of the trip is to apologize to President Ahmadinejad.
These ‘offensive’ remarks consisted of Bollinger telling Ahamdiejad home truths about his regime when the Iranian leader was — disgracefully — invited to speak at Columbia last year. Bollinger’s remarks were intended to lance the boil of that invitation. This was a wholly inadequate initiative since the invitation itself, which should never have been proferred, was a propaganda coup for Ahmadinejad, for whom it helped cement his power over the people of Iran — including these unfortunate students. Not content with that, a bunch of Columbia academics now intends to grovel for forgiveness for speaking truth to tyranny.
Truly, the observation that throughout history the intellectual mind has repeatedly shown itself to be in thrall to violence and the illegitimate exercise of power is once again being proved to be horribly spot on.
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2:14pm
It appears that there has been a problem with publishing readers' comments over the past few days. Hopefully this will be resolved very soon.
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Tuesday, 5th February 2008
2:07pm
So the inevitable has now happened. Less than two weeks after Hamas breached the security barrier between Gaza and Egypt, thus facilitating the free flow of advanced weaponryincluding long-range rockets, anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft missiles from Egypt into Gaza and of terrorists from Gaza into Egypt, and one day after Egypt ‘resealed’ that border, two human bomb terrorists have struck the southern Israeli town of Dimona and murdered one woman and critically injured another.* It was intended to be far worse: the second bomber was prevented from detonating himself only by the quick thinking of Kobi Mor, a police officer from an elite unit who happened to be on the scene. The Jerusalem Post reports:
He shot the terrorist in the head, and when the latter in his last breath still tried to press the detonator button, shot him four more times and killed him. Mor managed to kill the terrorist before he could explode and without hitting his explosive belt, thus preventing a much more devastating attack.
The bombers came across the porous border with Egypt; they were from the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, affiliated to the Fatah party of the visionary of peace Mahmoud Abbas — who condemned the bombing but only after condemning an earlier Israeli anti-terrorist raid in the West Bank. Meanwhile the
BBC, with its unfailing capacity to distort and belittle the war against Israel, describes today’s atrocity as
Rare suicide bombing hits Israel.
Rare? It's had a brief respite in recent months from completed atrocities thanks mainly to the reviled security barrier, that's all. But the attempts are unrelenting -- and now the defences have been breached. Only last Saturday, two other human bomb terrorists were intercepted by Egypt; and there have been other attempts. As Amos Harel in
Haaretz records:
Hani and Rami Hamdan, the two brothers from Gaza caught on Saturday wearing explosive belts in Sinai by the Egyptian security forces, four kilometers west of Rafah, were not operating independently. Just a day earlier the Egyptians arrested 15 armed Palestinians in Sinai, 12 of whom were members of Hamas. Last week, another cell of five Palestinians was arrested near the Taba crossing, and explosive belts were found in their possession.
Meanwhile Hamas has consolidated its strategic victory in wrongfooting and running rings round both Egypt and Israel. As Harel writes:
Cairo now finds itself facing conflicting Palestinian pressure. Hamas is demanding to set up an orderly crossing through Rafah. If Cairo refuses, the Hamas policemen will ensure that Palestinians sneak into Sinai, like they did Sunday. Hamas wants larger supplies of fuel and electricity from Egypt. This is also something that Egypt will find it difficult to oppose, since the organization enjoys public support in Egypt, where it is regarded as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
However, if Egypt agrees to Hamas' demands, it will come into conflict with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is opposed to any compromises with the Islamic organization, and to tensions with the Americans. Cooperation with Hamas in opening the Rafah crossing means a perpetuation of the Hamas rule in Gaza and a deepening of the rift between Fatahland in the West Bank and Hamastan in the Gaza Strip.
On the face of it, Israel may find some satisfaction at finally seeing Egypt drawn into the Gaza quagmire. But the situation is not a zero-sum game in which a loss for Cairo is an advantage for Jerusalem. Gaza has remained an Israeli problem.
And for all of us.
* UPDATE Although there were initial claims by the al Aqsa martyrs' brigade that it carried out the bombing and that the bombers came across the Egptian border into Israel, Hamas now claims that it was responsible and the bombers came from Hebron and entered Israel where there is no security barrier in the south. This is not yet confirmed. This confusion in itself presents a fresh security risk for Israel as as result of the breach of the Egyptian barrier, as Amos Harel writes in Tuesday's Haaretz: The explanation for the confusion is not at all reassuring for Israel: It seems a number of different organizations have all sent terrorists at the same time to the Negev. It is likely that those who sent the terrorists do not have continuous contact with them, and therefore they do not know if those who carried out the attack are actually their men. Therefore, if the Egyptians have not intercepted all of these groups, more terror attempts are to be expected via Sinai.
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Monday, 4th February 2008
12:57pm
There’s a tremendous hue and cry over the claim that Sadiq Khan, a Labour MP and government whip, was bugged by the police when he met his constituent and childhood friend, Babar Ahmad, in Woodhill prison in Milton Keynes where he is fighting extradition to the US on charges that he ran a website raising funds for Taliban and Chechen terrorists. There has been general outrage at the revelation, which appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Times, on the grounds that bugging an MP breaches the Wilson Doctrine which has prohibited the covert surveillance of MPs since 1966.
However, as was noted today by both
Dean Godson in the Times and the
Telegraph leader, the outrage is more than a little synthetic. The suggestions that have been made that Sadiq Khan was singled out by the Metropolitan Police because a) he is a Muslim and b) as a former legal adviser to the Muslim Council of Britain has been a thorn in the side of the Met through taking a series of controversial malpractice cases against them, are demonstrably absurd for this reason: it was not Sadiq Khan who was being bugged, but Babar Ahmad. The police had been listening in to a number of his conversations with visitors at the prison, and he was seated at a table that had been specially adapted for this apparently routine purpose. Indeed, the Sunday Times tells us that
at least six of the tables have had their panels hollowed out to hide bugging equipment. They are known as ‘talking tables’. Inside each panel is a microphone, a battery, an antenna and a transmitter. Such is the secrecy surrounding these tables that even the prison officers are said to be unaware of them. They are operated and maintained by specialist detectives permanently based at the prison.
In other words, it was Ahmad’s conversation with Khan that was bugged. Khan was not specifically targeted; while it is true that the police decided not to suspend the bugging even though they knew an MP was visiting Ahmad, it is more accurate to say that Khan fell into the net that they had thrown around Ahmad. While MPs must in general be free to speak to their constituents, this surely should not mean that MPs should be given special rights which might impede a criminal investigation. This point was made by both the former Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Swinton Thomas, who said in his report of 2005/6 that
the interception of communications is the primary source of intelligence in relation to serious crime and terrorism
in a way that was unforseen at the time of the Wilson Doctrine which thus placed MPs ‘above the law’, and by his successor Sir Paul Kennedy, who as the
Guardian reports called last year for the doctrine to be scrapped, saying:
It is fundamental to the constitution of this country that no-one is above the law or is seen to be above the law. But in this instance MPs and peers are anything but equal with the rest of the citizens of this country and are above the law.
The Shadow Home Secretary David Davis, who has led the running on this affair after disclosing that he had alerted the Prime Minister to this occurrence last November but had received no reply (No 10 denies ever receiving it), says he in turn had been told about it by a ‘source’. Davis has just told me that he does not argue that MPs should never be bugged; he can conceive of situations where they should be if the police have reason to think they are either ‘conduits or implicated’ in a crime. (There is no suggestion of illegality by Sadiq Khan). But in that case, he says, Parliament should be told that the Wilson Doctrine has been suspended, as it itself said would happen in circumstances where this was justified.
Hmmn. Davis is no pushover, for sure; and yet I can’t help thinking that this is a howling gale that has been whipped up inside a teacup. I suspect agendas are at work here which we cannot yet identify. This is by no means the first time the Met has been leaked against by exceedingly well-informed sources. The government is to make a statement about the affair this afternoon. I await developments with interest.
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10:53am
I have previously commented on the government’s craven decision to call Islamic extremism by everything except its proper name, resulting in the Home Secretary’s Orwellian description of it as ‘anti-Islamic’. Today the Guardian reports on a manual of state censorship now issued by the Home Office which enshrines this doctrine of institutionalised deception:
Reflecting the government's decision to abandon the ‘aggressive rhetoric’ of the so-called war on terror, the guide tells civil servants not to use terms such as Islamist extremism or jihadi-fundamentalist but instead to refer to violent extremism and criminal murderers or thugs to avoid any implication that there is an explicit link between Islam and terrorism. It warns those engaged in counter-terrorist work that talk of a struggle for values or a battle of ideas is often heard as a ‘confrontation/clash between civilisations/cultures’. Instead it suggests that talking about the idea of shared values works much more effectively.
It shows that the government is adopting a new sophistication in its approach to counter-terrorism, based on the realisation that it must ‘avoid implying that specific communities are to blame’ if it is to enable communities to challenge the ideas of violent extremists robustly… ‘This is not about political correctness, but effectiveness - evidence shows that people stop listening if they think you are attacking them.’
‘A new sophistication’, eh? I’d call it a new sophistry. As I recorded last year in my book Londonistan, the police have long been avoiding the I or M words, referring instead to ‘international terrorism’ among other euphemisms. Since the police themselves are in despair about the extreme paucity of information about I****** terrorism being volunteered to them from within the M***** community, the strategy would hardly seem to demonstrate ‘effectiveness’. Talking about ‘shared values’ amounts to no more than meaningless platitudes if it is forbidden to talk about the ideology which seeks to supplant them. That ideology can only be defeated if its characteristics are talked about frankly, and that cannot be done if the entire subject is prohibited. Fanaticism cannot be fought if people refuse even to name what they are fighting.
This ‘new sophistication’ is simply all about giving in to terror and intimidation. It principal effect is to give Islamism in Britain a free pass and to systematically conceal from the British people what is happening to their country. For what it also does is to define the problem as ‘violent extremism’; but the threat is not from violence alone but from the religious extremism that seeks to Islamise Britain, and whose strategy is to use cultural creep as well as terrorism to achieve its ends. Examples of this are occurring all the time. Yesterday, the
Sunday Telegraph reported that female Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of superbugs:
Minutes of a clinical academics' meeting at Liverpool University revealed that female Muslim students at Alder Hey children's hospital had objected to rolling up their sleeves to wear gowns. Similar concerns have been raised at Leicester University. Minutes from a medical school committee said that ‘a number of Muslim females had difficulty in complying with the procedures to roll up sleeves to the elbow for appropriate handwashing’. Sheffield University also reported a case of a Muslim medic who refused to ‘scrub’ as this left her forearms exposed.
They are refusing because they say to expose their arms is against Islam. They are thus demanding an exemption on religious grounds. According to the ‘new sophistication’ of the Home Office, however, it would seem that we cannot record that fact in case it might reveal the unsophisticated truth — that this is indeed a clash of cultures.
The Telegraph story does not record what action if any has been taken against such students refusing to obey elementary rules of hygiene in medical practice. In any properly functioning society, they would be removed instantly from the course. But Britain is sleepwalking to cultural suicide. In Oxford, members of the Church of England, no less, have supported the demand made by the Central Oxford mosque that the amplified call to prayer should be broadcast three times a day over east Oxford as ‘our right’.
The Telegraph, however, reported that at least one Oxford resident, Dr Allan Chapman, a member of Oxford University's Faculty of History who lives in the shadow of the mosque, has understood precisely what is at stake here:
‘It seems to me this is a move to torment and torture non-Muslims,’ he said. ‘It's not a matter of people's right to religious freedom, it's about making Islam the religion of public space - getting into people's houses and work places. If this is granted it will show that Muslims have the upper hand in a Christian country. The letters we have had in from all over the country about this have moved from a scale of stiff upper lip outrage to murderous fury. We see an element of Islamic dictatorship being introduced and an aggressive minority trying to seize the middle ground.’
Thanks to the craven idiocy of the British government and the ‘sophisticated’ intelligence service which provides it with so much of its lethally false analysis, it is in the process of succeeding.
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11:55pm
It’s been a pretty average few days for British dhimmocracy. It was reported that the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir Ali, has received death threats and is now under police protection for saying that Islamic extremists had created no-go areas across Britain where it was too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter, and that people of a different race or faith faced physical attack if they lived or worked in communities that were dominated by a strict Muslim ideology. Apparently he took a number of phone calls threatening his family and warning him that he would not ‘live long’ if he continued to criticise Islam.
This seems to be the equivalent of saying, ‘If you insult Islam by saying that it is a religion of violence I’ll kill you’.
In other words, it proves the truth of the Bishop’s remarks in a hideously graphic way. His point was further amplified by an item in the
East London Advertiser which reported:
The Holocaust Memorial Day marking the genocides of the 20th century was marred on Sunday when a gang of youths stoned Jewish tourists on a guided tour of London's East End. A group of 96 visitors looking at sites of Jewish interest were attacked by youths hiding behind a fence in a back street in Whitechapel. Two were struck by the missiles, an American woman just starting a new post at London's Metropolitan University and a Canadian lecturer. The woman had blood pouring from her head and needed hospital treatment.
The tour was organised by leading local historian Clive Bettington, who was later asked by police if he wanted officers to accompany him in future, but declined. ‘That would be admitting there are “no go” areas,’ he said. An eye-witness said: ‘Stones started to come down on us and some in the group were scared and ducked. I looked over the fence and saw four Asian youths throwing stones. They were laughing, then ran away.’ Tower Hamlets' newly-appointed senior police officer responsible for youth involvement, Ins. Paul Sloan, is treating the incident as ‘an anti-Semitic attack and as a “race hate” crime. [He said:] ‘We might accompany them in future. That's one of the tactics we would employ, but that's not routine.’
In other words, east London
is now a no-go area for people identifiable as Jews involved in an act of Jewish remembrance. What’s even worse than these developments is the reaction of the British government and establishment in refusing to acknowledge what is happening. When Bishop Michael made his carefully considered remarks, he was disowned by his own church leadership, MPs and government ministers, all of whom said they ‘did not recognise’ the situation he was describing. Now that he himself has shockingly become a victim of the no-go area of the mind that Islamism is creating in Britain, the government still refuses to support him publicly and denounce this appalling descent of Britain into religious intimidation. According to the Sunday Telegraph, while the Islamist Muslim Council of Britain had the wit to say that the threats to the Bishop were ‘totally unacceptable’,
Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, who attacked the bishop for his remarks, declined to comment.
But there’s worse — far worse. Last summer, it was
revealed that welfare benefits were being paid to the multiple polygamous wives of British Muslim men.
The government set up a review to establish whether or not the state should continue to pay out income support, jobseeker's allowance and housing and council tax benefits to ‘extra’ spouses. Today the
Sunday Telegraph reported that, yes, this practice now has the government’s official blessing.
Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, the decision by ministers means that polygamous marriages can now be recognised formally by the state, so long as the weddings took place in countries where the arrangement is legal.
This is a truly lamentable development in Britain’s seemingly inexorable embrace of Islamisation. Monogamy is a bedrock value of British society and western civilisation. It underpins individual autonomy, the rights and dignity of women and, further down the line, liberalism, capitalism and democracy. By not only turning a blind eye to but actually incentivising and rewarding polygamy, the government does three things. It abandons Muslim women to lives of servitude and oppression and thus treats them as second class citizens not entitled to the protection of their human rights granted to everyone else. It bestows official blessing upon the development of a parallel separate Islamic jurisdiction in Britain, thus hastening the Balkanisation of Britain and the development of an Islamic state within a state. And it effectively waves the white flag of surrender to the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated strategy is to Islamise Britain by first establishing separate development for Muslims and then using that as a springboard to Islamise the country. A nation that does not even insist that its own rule of law must apply to all its citizens without exception is well on the way to cultural suicide.
But then as a devastating
report by the Centre for Social Cohesion makes all too clear, much of the British governing class is indeed abandoning women from various Middle Eastern and South Asian communities to extreme and appalling sexual ‘honour’ violence through both a craven and pusillanimous refusal to do much about it — and, perhaps most frightening of all, the infiltration of the police by the very attitudes that are the cause of the violence.
Several women’s groups, particularly in the Midlands and northern England, say they are often reluctant to go to the police with women who have ran away to escape violence because they cannot trust Asian police officers. Zalikha Ahmed, director of the Apna Haq refuge, says: “We have to be careful with them especially the Asian ones. We don’t visit the station when certain Asian officers are on because some of them are perpetrators, and one of them on record said that he would not arrest someone who used force on his wife. Some of them would just expose us for what we do.” Another worker in a women’s group in the North, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said: “We had instances when a [Asian] chief inspector offered his help to a family by tracking a girl down – we were appalled.” According to some women’s groups such problems appear to be practically common in the West Midlands police force...
Women’s groups have reported that many senior Asian policemen and councillors openly put their loyalty to their culture, community and religion before their loyalty to the rule of law. Informal nationwide networks of taxi drivers, community elders and religious groups now exist to co-operate to track down and punish, with death if necessary, those who break community traditions and offend their religious codes. High profile Islamic organisations have repeatedly tried to block attempts by the government, the police and the judiciary to tackle the violent abuse of women by arguing that the community will feel ‘victimised’ by any laws aimed to halt the violence. Elected officials – of all ethnicities – have sought to block the activities of women’s groups for fear of offending Asian voters. Most troubling of all, perhaps, is the increasingly widespread belief that where religious and cultural practices conflict with British laws, traditions should take priority.
It must be added that the report also states that individual police officers have gone to great lengths to protect women who are at risk and to prosecute the perpetrators of the violence against them. The police have also dramatically escalated their attempts to deal with these offences of sexual ‘honour’. In addition, Muslims themselves are starting to rise up against these practices. These are positive developments. However, such fragile moves towards reform are grievously undermined by the government’s policy of appeasing Islamism by giving in to its demands — a policy whose ultimate destination, willed or not, is nothing less than the dismemberment of British society.
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Friday, 1st February 2008
1:43pm
On the Commentary blog, Abe Greenwald has a great line about Obama:
Reuters reports that if Barack Obama becomes President, he’ll hold a summit with all leaders of Muslim countries: 'Once I’m elected, I want to organize a summit in the Muslim world, with all the heads of state, to have an honest discussion about ways to bridge the gap that grows every day between Muslims and the West.’
Is he planning on doing this before or after bombing Pakistan?
What a wally (Obama, not Abe). What a menace he would be.
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1:30pm
Such is the scale and ferocity of the British media propaganda onslaught on Israel that the sane and sensible piece by Robin Shepherd in yesterday’s Times was as unexpected as a rose on a dunghill. Writing about the
obsessive desire to beat the Jewish state with any stick available
he noted:
Apologists for extremism had long argued that occupation rather than ideology was the ‘root cause’ of terrorism. Terrorism would therefore cease once occupation ended. That argument has now been conclusively defeated. Since Israel withdrew, Palestinian militants have fired more than 4,000 rockets from Gaza at Israeli civilian targets. Now, there is not a state in the world that could ignore this kind of barrage. So what were the options? One was reoccupation. Another was to carpet-bomb the areas from which the rockets are being fired. Many states would have done both. Israel has done neither…
The condition of the residents of Gaza is dire. But ultimate blame for this surely rests with Hamas, other militants and the culture of violence in Palestinian society that sustains them. In the absence of all this there would, of course, be no security barrier, no military incursions, no trade restrictions and no sanctions. In the topsy-turvy world of British and European commentary, however, reasoned argument is cast aside. The frenzied, rhetorical onslaught against the Jewish state is at best intellectually lazy. At worst it forms part of a hateful agenda that shames those who indulge in it.
Bravo.
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12:59pm
The government-commissioned report that says teachers should avoid instilling patriotic feelings in their pupils because British history is ‘morally ambiguous’ has caused people to choke on their cornflakes this morning. The Times reports:
Three quarters of teachers felt obliged to tell students about the danger of patriotism. The survey suggested neither pupils nor teachers wanted patriotism endorsed by schools…It said: ‘To love what is corrupt is itself corrupting, not least because it inclines us to ignore, forget, forgive or excuse the corruption. And there’s the rub for patriotism. Countries are morally ambiguous entities: they are what they are by virtue of their histories.’
The authors added: ‘It is hard to think of a national history free from the blights of warmongering, imperialism, tyranny, injustice, slavery and subjugation, or a national identity forged without recourse to exclusionary and xenophobic stereotypes…Dr Hand, the co-author of the report, said: ‘Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both called for a history curriculum that fosters attachment and loyalty to Britain, but the case for promoting patriotism in schools is weak. Are countries really appropriate objects of love? Loving things can be bad for us, for example when the things we love are morally corrupt. Since all national histories are at best morally ambiguous, it’s an open question whether citizens should love their countries.’
This is not just pernicious but perverse. No-one has called for patriotism to be ‘promoted’, merely for pupils to be taught about their country’s history and institutions so that they can feel as a result a sense of belonging, attachment and loyalty. If pupils are ignorant about the country in which they live they will have no such feelings — which is precisely what has happened, and why Brown and Cameron are so concerned (despite Brown's intention to remove Britannia from the 50p coin -- some confusion here, surely). Ignorance of a country’s past, of the values that have shaped it and the story of its achievements, means that people rattle around inside it without any feeling of shared commitment or obligation. That is the way a society ceases to be a society. Proper history teaching does not mean that shameful aspects of its past should be omitted; it means teaching the history in an objective fashion so that pupils can make up their own minds about individual events. But since this country was the crucible of western democracy and liberal values, for which countless thousands of its citizens fought and died, its story — warts and all — can hardly fail to instil a sense of the value and worth of the country which its citizens will therefore wish to defend. Indeed, the very act of teaching a narrative of national identity in and of itself instils a sense of belonging to a collective enterprise.
But of course, the authors of this report do not acknowledge any such criteria of objectivity, let alone the duty to transmit a culture down through the generations which is the very essence of education. No, the explicit basis for their conclusion is that Britain is intrinsically ‘corrupt’ and its history characterised solely by ‘warmongering, imperialism, tyranny, injustice, slavery and subjugation'. No-one should be the least bit surprised that ‘academics’ from the prestigious Institute of Education, no less, should come out with such sub-Marxist counter-cultural claptrap. For this has been the orthodoxy in the education establishment for the past three decades. It is the reason why the teaching of British political history and the story of the nation has been all but excised from the curriculum, replaced instead by bursts of disconnected propaganda gobbets about ‘slavery’, ‘empire’ (which of course was all bad) and the oppression of the poor, women and minorities (with Hitler thrown in for good measure because of the crowd-pulling appeal in the classroom of extreme violence). In the 1980s, when the then head of the curriculum body — himself a historian who was aghast at this negation of education in British schools — tried to turn the tide of cultural nihilism, he lost hands down to a teaching body which declared in terms that the teaching of British national identity was intrinsically racist, colonialist and xenophobic.
The education establishment has been intent for decades on destroying Britain's national identity in an attempt to turn it into Planet Gramsci. It has succeeded.
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