"How Dare You Come To A Muslim Area ?"

Sometimes you think it's a good thing Labour won in 2005. I imagine had this been a Tory Home Secretary that the Labour Party would as one be denouncing the Islamophobic racists in the Home Office.

Home Secretary John Reid's attempt to connect with British Muslims was hijacked by radical protesters claiming he was an "enemy" of Islam.

Others attending a speech he gave to a 30-strong group of Muslims in Leyton, east London, were angered by calls for Muslim parents to look out for the signs of brainwashing in their children in the fight against terrorism.

Mr Reid was 10 minutes through his speech when well-known extremist Abu Izzadeen, clutching the hand of a small boy, interrupted him. The Home Secretary had just listed a number of terror attacks around the world when Izzadeen began his tirade and forced him to stop.

"How dare you come to a Muslim area when over 1,000 Muslims have been arrested?" he said. "You are an enemy of Islam and Muslims, you are a tyrant. Shame on all of us for sitting down and listening to him."

The Home Secretary stood and watched as police officers ushered him out of the room, followed by hoards of cameras, photographers and reporters. Continuing his diatribe, Izzadeen accused the Government of state terrorism and said Mr Reid, Tony Blair and George Bush with their crusade could "all go to hell".

After the furore died down, Mr Reid said: "This is not a new experience for me or for those involved in politics. There will always be people who will not be prepared to take part in a dialogue, but who will try to intimidate and shout down. They are not confined to the Muslim community."

But Mr Reid had only just re-started his speech when a second protester, radical Anjem Choudary, stood up to protest.

"Muslims do not need British values," he said. "We believe Islam is superior, we believe Islam will be implemented one day. It is very rich for you to come here and say we need to monitor our children when your Government is murdering people in Iraq and Afghanistan."

In his speech Mr Reid stressed that the terrorists were waging a "violent and indiscriminate war" and warned that communities needed to be more aware of signs of terrorist activity. He urged Muslim parents to look out for the "tell-tale signs" of radicalisation in their children.

"These fanatics are looking to groom and brainwash children, including your children, for one thing," he said. "Grooming them to kill themselves in order to murder others. Look for the tell-tale signs now and talk to them before their hatred grows and you risk losing them forever."

I'm not sure I'd have used that last argument - does Mr Reid actually think about his audience ? Just as a Christian would prefer a child to be in heaven rather than on earth but doomed to hell (believe it or not such a view would have been quite mainstream only a few generations back), so a religious Muslim parent might not consider having a martyr in the family to be 'losing them forever'. After all, they could argue, they'll meet again in paradise. Life on earth is short, and eternity a long time.




UPDATE - of course what the press reports fail to mention is that the vast majority of moderate Muslims at the meeting threw themselves on the hecklers, roughed them up, and slung them out the doors ;-)

Lib Dems For Suicide Bombers

And againat the evil Jewish Conspiracy, as reported on the Today Programme (RealAudio, 20 mins in).

Baroness Tonge: "The pro-Israel lobby has a grip on the western media - a financial grip".

She went on to repeat the remarks about suicide bombers which Charles Kennedy considered to be 'completely unacceptable and 'not compatible with Liberal Democrat party policies and principles'.

Only one, nuanced change to her views. The bomber pilot who inadvertantly kills non-combatants is no longer merely the moral equivalent to the suicide bomber deliberately targeting civilians. No - he's worse. After all, the bomber pilot "goes home for a beer" afterwards. I don't think these guys do, actually.

Her views were echoed by MEP Chris "wallowing in your own filth" Davies.

Upper Class Lefties

We've seen the background of media darling Jon Snow.

But compared to the Guardian's Felicity Arbuthnot, Snow is a raving Tory. Anyone who can seriously compare US policy in Iraq with Pol Pot's Year Zero has a different angle on reality. No wonder she and John Pilger are as close as any two people can be without signing a civil partnership form.

Idly wondering about her aristocratic-sounding name, I did a quick Google.

Blimey.

Felicity Anne Clarendon-Hyde (mind you, if she came from this family, she might have married down) married into a family of blue-bloods whose connections are straight out of a Python sketch. A little map of a corner of upper-class Britain, with more soldiers 100 years ago and more solicitors now.

Thelma Grace Arbuthnot. Born 3 October 1911. Died 23 June 1974. Married first, 8 October 1932, Somerset Struben de Chair, ygr son of Admiral Sir Dudley Rawson Stratford de Chair, KCB, KCMG, MVO. Divorced 1950. He remarried more than once.

Rodney Somerset de Chair. Born July 1935. Educated Wellesley House, Broadstairs. Married first Sarah Trubshawe. Married second, 10 July 2000, Camilla ("Cilla") Joy Victoria Burdett-Blackett.

The younger generation are doing well :

Alexander Broadbent Arbuthnot. Born 1 May 1986. Educated Westminster under school; Eton College; Imperial College, London (Physics).

Katherine Rose Joste Arbuthnot. Born 14 July 1989. Educated The Lycée, then Highfield, then Wycombe Abbey.

Eleanor Sophie Duff Arbuthnot. Born 11 August 1992. Educated The Lycée, then Wycombe Abbey.

Alice Wemyss Tempest Arbuthnot. Born 31 May 1998. Educated The Lycée.

I see David Hare, another upper-class leftie, also married in. Different world.

"May Allah Curse The Pope"

At Mass today :

"We pray for Pope Benedict, that he may bring understanding to those of different faith - even those whose misunderstanding is deliberate. Lord hear us.

Lord, graciously hear us".



Meanwhile at Westminster Cathedral ....

Boom ! Boom !

Douglas Murray gives David Cameron both barrels.

There is the worrying fact that David Cameron has now joined the legions of politicians who have decided to speak about Islamic theology and get it fanatically wrong. Mr Cameron said yesterday that Muslim terrorists:

Are driven by a wholly incorrect interpretation - an extreme distortion - of the Islamic faith.

Aside from the distastefulness of a Tory leader feeling the need to interpret Islamic scripture, this statement is simply untrue. Muslim terrorists are driven chapter and verse by justifications in the Koran. They may be debatable interpretations, or interpretations which may be argued away from, but to pretend that their Koranic impetus is "wholly incorrect" or an "extreme distortion" is itself wholly incorrect and an extreme distortion.

Be fair - he's following in the footsteps of those great Islamic scholars Tony Blair and George Bush, both of whom have said much the same thing.

If Mr Cameron is going to take the reins of government he is going to have to look like he can run a country, and - most importantly - the country's foreign policy. He must prove himself worthy of the task. Monday's speech gives me less hope on this front than I had previously thought possible. Although he offered no specific answers to the problems of resurgent Islamo-fascism, and though he spent a deal of time attacking our friends for wholly justified policies of containment, the only answer Mr Cameron gave was that we should introduce a new style into our foreign policy. It should always raise alarm-bells when politicians talk style and not specifics. Style does not save lives. Cameron said:

I believe that in the last five years we have suffered from the absence of two crucial qualities which should always condition foreign policy-making. Humility, and patience.

This is not just disagreeable stuff - and un-statesman-like stuff. It is dangerously misguided stuff - the result of a man who appears to see foreign policy through the eyes of domestic habit.

What we need to demonstrate least of all with Iran at the moment is "patience". Patience on the part of the international community has all but given Tehran a nuclear bomb. An increase in our level of "patience" now will produce a permanent existential threat to Israel and the West, and ensure the whole Middle East goes nuclear within a few years.

And as for "humility". It is simply embarrassing that a candidate hoping to lead one of the world's foremost military powers should hope to win votes by speaking like this. This is domestic posing - deeply trivial and irrelevant. What will an onslaught of "humility" directed at Syria and Iran achieve at the moment? Anything? Of course not. And what Cameron worryingly fails to realise is that it is our weakness - our humility - which makes the Ahmadinejads, Assads and Nasrallahs of this era hate us even more. Our weakness is a provocation to them (witness the upsurge in Hezbollah-sponsoring defiance in the last year). Mr Cameron's deeply misguided message is that we need an increase of weakness when he should realize that our weakness - perceived or otherwise - is the problem, not the solution.

Where I part company with Mr Murray is in recognising that, like it or not, David Cameron has sound electoral reasons for his foolishness. Anti-Americanism has been the (only) acceptable prejudice of the educated English for the last few years, and recent polls showing a majority in favour of decoupling from US foreign policy may well have had the same effect on him as the 1933 East Fulham by-election had on Stanley Baldwin.

Just as Baldwin's reluctance to rearm (supported all the way by Labour and the Liberals, who both voted against the introduction of the first Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons) had dire effects in 1939 and beyond, so Cameron's desire to chime with the thoughtless prejudice of the Brits will not do them any favours either.

In Churchill's words : "The cheers of weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to echo, and their votes soon cease to count. Doom marches on."

Don't Quote Me On That ...

Muslim leaders have accused the Pope of attacking the Islamic faith after a speech earlier this week in which Benedict XVI referred to the concept of jihad, or holy war.

In his address at the University of Regensberg in Germany on Tuesday, Benedict quoted from a book recounting a dialogue on the truths of Christianity and Islam between Manuel Paleologos II, a 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor, and an educated Persian.

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the Pope said.

"He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached’."

Apparently aware of the delicacy of the issue, Benedict described the phrases on Islam as "brusque", and pointed out several times that he was quoting - although he neither explicitly agreed with nor repudiated the emperor's views.

"Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul," the pontiff said.

But in the Islamic world this has been taken to indicate that the Pope straightforwardly endorsed Manuel Paleologos's views.

Some people are just waiting to be offended.

A statement issued by the Vatican last night to clarify what was meant and to apologise for causing offence appears only to have made things worse.

Because this isn't about peaceful co-existence. This is about imposing one's will on the spiritual enemy. In fact, the greater the apology, the less likely it is to be accepted - because it's taken as a sign of weakness, to be exploited further.

No religion has been mocked and vilified more in the last 40 years than Christianity. And it continues - because the consequences don't involve bodies with knives pinning notes to their chests, decapitation, explosions, burning buildings or trains.

Faced with such things, Western society retreats, draws back, self-censors - engendering a sense among the bad hats (and among those who share the aim even while having reservations about the method) that there is no limit to the retreat - no ground on which the enemy will turn, stand and fight.

They may well be right.

Discuss

"Women will thus only have as much freedom as their men are willing and capable of guaranteeing them. It is a major flaw in many feminist theories that they fail to acknowledge this. The difference between women’s rights and women’s illusions is defined by a Smith and Wesson, not by a Betty Friedan or a Virginia Wolf."

Fjordman on men, women, feminism and Islam.

It's Cognitive Dissonance Time ...

The problem : The World Bank are refusing to give money to some countries unless they comply with the World Bank's conditions.

The solution : Refuse to give money to the World Bank unless they comply with Hilary Benn's conditions.

Gun Dealer "had lots of guns" shock horror

Sigh.

Most weapons, which also included automatic and semi-automatic weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition, were found at the house, which is believed to belong to a registered gun dealer.

Detectives said some weapons may be legal, others may not.

Can't Say We're Not Being Told ...

" ... some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they're all terrorists — and that encourages other people to do the same. If that demonisation continues, then Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists — 700,000 of them in London" :
Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain in the Sunday Telegraph - remarks which are unreported by either the BBC or Guardian.

The interview also contains the famous Muslim/Christian parallel.

"When the IRA was blowing people up, the entire Catholic population of Britain was not demonised, so why is it happening to the Muslim community ?"



"Britain ... is in danger of turning into Somalia with chip shops" : Mark Steyn.

Brrr !

A parent committing suicide is indubitably a Bad Thing. IMHO any parent has a motive for suicide, but one just shouldn't drop a burden like that on the kids.

Via the Backword One, the story of the woman whose affair with the poet Ted Hughes caused his wife, the writer Sylvia Plath, to top herself. Not exactly a sympathetic portrait.

The only close friends of hers [Plath’s] whose phone number he possessed were Gerry and Jillian Becker; but Jillian did not ave Ted’s number. She called Suzette Macedo – but she, too, had no idea of Ted’s whereabouts. So Suzette phoned Assia. Thus it was the mistress who had the grim task of notifying Ted Hughes.

At work, Assia also spread the news. "Something terrible has happened: Sylvia has killed herself," she announced, stepping into art director Julia Matcham’s office.

Assuming that Assia must be overwhelmed with guilt, Julia sympathised: "Oh, you must feel awful."

Assia’s eyes opened wide. "Why should I? It was nothing to do with me."

Plath left her two small children motherless. Unforgivable.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

But in best Thomas Hardy tradition, the dead wife loomed larger in the poet's consciousness than she had when alive. Assia's 'nothing to do with me' started to sound somewhat hollow.

She increasingly doubted the permanence of Ted's commitment to her. In her view, Sylvia would remain his precious wife, while she was cast for ever in the role of mistress. "At the forefront is Sylvia, and after that, the Grand Scheme, the Genius, the children, and the fixity of the sun, the millions of hawks and fishes and owls, and nightshade that I neither see nor hear."

A horrifying thought began to creep in: that she was inviting Sylvia's doom on herself. She confided in her diary: "She had a million times the talent, 1,000 times the will, 100 times the greed and passion that I have. I should never have looked into Pandora's box, and now that I have, I am forced to wear her love-widow's sacking, without any of her compensations.

"What, in five years' time, will he reproach me for? What sort of woman am I?

The gruesome Gothic gripper moves remorselessly towards its denouement.

" ... in one diary entry Wevill blames the ghost of Plath for making her suicidal."

Old Ted - what a card.

Wevill, 42, gassed herself with Shura, her four-year-old daughter by Hughes, in 1969 after discovering that he was having an affair. It was an eery re-enactment of the suicide six years earlier of the American poet Sylvia Plath — the wife Hughes abandoned after starting an affair with Wevill.

He sure could pick 'em. Two motherless toddlers and a dead one.

Campaigner arrested because 'the leaflet contained Biblical quotes'

From This Is London :

A police force was caught up in a freedom of speech row after its officers arrested an anti-gay campaigner for handing out leaflets at a homosexual rally.

South Wales police admitted evangelical Christian Stephen Green was then charged purely because his pamphlets contained anti-gay quotations from the Bible.

Mr Green faces a court appearance today charged with using 'threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour' after his attempt to distribute the leaflets at the weekend 'Mardi Gras' event in Cardiff.

A spokesman for the police said the campaigner had not behaved in a violent or aggressive manner, but that officers arrested him because 'the leaflet contained Biblical quotes about homosexuality'.

The rally was held in what was previously considered to be a public park, Bute Park.

The anti-gay campaigners were first asked by police to leave the site of the show following 'complaints from the public', and complied with the request. However, they were approached again by police when they began handing out leaflets at the entrance to the park where the Mardi Gras was staged.

Mr Green refused to stop distributing leaflets and was arrested, and then questioned for four hours at a police station. He was charged after refusing a caution.

The leaflets were headed Same-Sex Love - Same-Sex Sex: What does the Bible Say?, and included a series of quotations from the 1611 King James Bible, a text usually regarded as one of the foundation stones of the English language.

The charge against Mr Green is that he used 'threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby', contrary to the Public Order Act 1986.

Surely this is a sign that we are well into the Interphase.

Touche

Snafu on Ian Huntley :

Why should any prisoners be given anti-depressant drugs?

Prisons are supposed to be depressing places to be!

Tim Blair on Germaine Greer's curmudgeonly Steve Irwin "tribute".

Why the bitterness, Germaine? Someone take a bite out of your gingerbread house ?

Molly/Misbah

I think I'd try to be a tad more nuanced than the Dumb One, but I think he's got the basics right on this sad story.

Yep, it’s Mohammed Sarwar MP

My mind is open because at the end of the day we have to ensure what is in the best interest of the children, the mother and father and I'm sure they will listen to me.

Yes, we need to decide what is in the best in interests of the child. We need some kind of body that can make these choices, something like, ooh, I don’t know, a family court perhaps ? () .... here we have Mohammed Sarwar, sitting in our Parliament, making our laws, but when the law goes against a ‘brother’, suddenly that’s just grounds for more discussion. Heads they win, tails we throw again. Just don’t expect anyone is the MSM to ask him what he thinks of the grounds the father uses to justify his actions.

A UK court had, for good or ill, awarded custody of Molly to her mother. Mr Sarwar seems to consider that an opening position, up for amendment - and so far the Brit media agree. If only Molly's father had been an American religious cult member, her mother might have found more media sympathy.

From the moment Mr Sarwar announced his intention to fly off to Pakistan as an honest broker, I had a feeling he might play the role the same way that Idi Amin acted as an honest broker between the Red Army Fraction and the Israeli hostages at Entebbe.

God-Shaped Hole

The battle by scientists against "irrational" beliefs such as creationism is ultimately futile, a leading experimental psychologist said today.

The work of Bruce Hood, a professor at Bristol University, suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force.

English Blood, Irish Heart ...

The body of a British tourist who died on holiday in Ireland was flown back to the UK with an extra heart and pair of lungs, it emerged last night. The extra organs were found in a plastic bag stitched inside the body of Louis Selo, 55, by a pathologist who performed a second post mortem once the body was back in Britain.

A Cheerful Anniversary

While Blair toyed with the idea of welfare reform in 1997, Clinton's 1996 legislation (which made benefits only temporary rather than an open-ended State commitment), while not perfect, has been fantastically successful. Surprise surprise - all those poor unemployed and single parents, the most excluded and victimised, let down by society etc etc were quite capable of finding jobs, once they realised the benefits had an end date.

As City Journal's Kay Hymowitz pointed out, it didn't get a good press from the poverty lobby.

It seems a good time to remember the drama—make that melodrama—that the bill unleashed in 1996. Cries from Democrats of “anti-family,” “anti-child,” “mean-spirited,” echoed through the Capitol, as did warnings of impending Third World–style poverty: “children begging for money, children begging for food, eight- and nine-year-old prostitutes,” as New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg put it. “They are coming for the children,” Congressman John Lewis of Georgia wailed—“coming for the poor, coming for the sick, the elderly and disabled.” Congressman William Clay of Missouri demanded, “What’s next? Castration?” Senator Ted Kennedy called it “legislative child abuse,” Senator Chris Dodd, “unconscionable,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—in what may well be the lowest point of an otherwise miraculous career—“something approaching an Apocalypse.”

Other Washington bigwigs took up the cry. Marion Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund called the bill “national child abandonment” and likened it to the burning of Vietnamese villages. Immediately after President Clinton signed the bill, some of his top appointees quit in protest, including Edelman’s husband, Peter, who let loose with an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled, “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done.” No less appalled, the Chicago Tribune seconded Congresswoman Carol Moseley Braun’s branding the bill an “abomination.” And while in 2004 the New York Times lauded the legislation as “one of the acclaimed successes of the past decade,” the editors seem to have forgotten that they were irately against it before they were for it, pronouncing it “draconian” and a “sad day for poor children.”

Now - who would have thunk it ? Nu Lab guru and aothor of the terminally boring "The State We're In", Will Hutton, has become a convert.

We know now that it has worked even better than its architects imagined, with major implications for the way welfare systems will be designed in future and for the wider politics of social spending. According to the Brookings Institution's Ron Haskins, the numbers claiming benefit in the United States have shrunk by 60 per cent and there has been a 30 per cent increase in single mothers at work. The incomes of the families formerly claiming benefit, mainly headed by women, have risen, sometimes dramatically.

The poverty rate among black children and children in female-headed families in 2000 fell to its lowest recorded level. Since 1995, the Index of Child and Youth Well-being has improved almost every single year. In 2000, the number of children being placed for fostering fell for the first time since 1980 and has continued falling. There has been a social revolution. The welfare mom has become the working mother. Even cases of child maltreatment have fallen.

The major conservative criticism of PRWORA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) is that it didn't address the problems of the fatherless child, and by converting single mothers on benefit to working single mothers took small children away from their only parent.

But Blair bottled it when he sacked Frank Field. In those days he just couldn't bear the potential for bad press. He's changed now, but it's all too late for Britain's underclass.

A Sombre Anniversary

It is three years since a stunned nation awoke to the horror that was Mary Riddell's sixth anniversary piece about Diana, which concluded with the meaningless statement that "personal tragedy is too frail a foundation to bear the weight of public recrimination".

Three years on, she's decided that Diana did make a difference after all.


"Look at a generation plagued by mental illness, by eating disorders and by the cult of fame, then say that Diana left no legacy".

Another Daniel Come To Judgement ?

Immigration to Britain today is fundamentally different from previous settlements because it is changing the composition of the nation, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality said last night.

Trevor Phillips, who provoked controversy last year by challenging the concept of multiculturalism and saying that Britain was "sleepwalking to segregation", said the social significance of the current wave of immigration was being overlooked.

More young people were arriving to compete for jobs with settled workers and a growing number of incomers were setting up their own institutions, such as churches, shops and media outlets.

Also, high levels of emigration by British nationals, at a time of record immigration, were having an impact on the make-up of the country.

''The result is that, though the total population numbers may not rise hugely, the composition of the population changes," Mr Phillips said in a speech to the Royal Geographical Society, in London.

He said that while the white ethnic population had fallen over the past 20 years there had been a 96 per cent increase in the number of ethnic minority Britons.

"We desperately need immigrants to sustain our workforce," he said. "But in this new world of more rapid and more diverse immigration, coupled with an unprecedented threat to global security, we cannot continue to pretend that there are no costs faced by our changing communities."


The full speech is here.

Guardianista Grief ...

A burglar is targeting his area, so his neighbours discuss setting man-traps in the gardens and hiring an ex-military guy, recommended by a jailed killer, to 'track down' the thief.

"But what if he kills him? We could be accomplices to murder," protested one neighbour. To my dismay, the proposal was vetoed.

What kind of murderous Nazi are we dealing with here, one asks ?

Just a Guardian correspondent after four years in South Africa.





(via Tottenham Lad, also posting on Ian Blair and Ruth Kelly)