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More peaceful protest ...













Scott fisks the Fisk magnificently, Mick Hartley draws attention to Charles Moore who draws attention to Stewart Lee. Money quote :

"There is a great deal of talk about responsible journalism, gratuitous offence, multicultural sensitivities and so on. Jack Straw gibbers about the irresponsibility of the cartoons, but says nothing against the Muslims threatening death in response to them. I wish someone would mention the word that dominates Western culture in the face of militant Islam - fear."

Self Hating Liberal of the Week

In a week of fierce competition, listen to mockney BBC person Stewart Lee (of Jerry Springer fame/notoriety) on the Today programme yesterday, explaining (RealAudio) why "Christian iconography is up for grabs" but how Islam is off limits.

Some great editorials yesterday too.

Indie - "there is an important distinction to be made between having a right and choosing to exercise it."

Translation - abusing "our" religion is OK, abusing "theirs" - well ...


Guardian - " It is one thing to assert the right to publish an image of the prophet. But it is another thing to put that right to the test, especially when to do so inevitably causes offence to many Muslims "

Translation as above ...

Telegraph - "Our restraint is in keeping with British values of tolerance and respect for the feelings of others. However, we are equally in no doubt that a small minority of Muslims would be offended by such a publication to an extent where they would threaten, and perhaps even use, violence. "

Translation - we don't want to be attacked.

Times - "To move from there to holding ministers responsible for the editorial decisions of a free press in their nations, to urge that all products from a country be ostracised or, worst still, to engage in violence against people or property is to leave the field of legitimate complaint and enter one of censorship enforced under threat of intimidation. That free speech is misunderstood in much of the Islamic realm shows how much progress has yet to be made."

Translation - as above.

Hear No Evil, See No Evil ...

New Labour policing at its best. This is London, soi-disant capital of England, 2006. Click on photo to enlarge.














"Butcher Those Who Insult Islam"
"Behead Those Who Mock Islam"

"Europe, You Will Pay, Demolition Is On Its Way"

"Exterminate Those Who Slander Islam"

"You Dug Your Grave, Lie In It !" - masked 'protestors' outside the French Embassy.

Police look the other way, while placards say "Kill Those Who Insult Islam".

How about this one - "Be Prepared For The Real Holocaust"

Another policeman walks behind the poster "Europe you will pay, your 9/11 is on its way"

"Europe you will pay, Bin Laden Is Way" ??

"Europe. Take some lessons from 9/11"

"Newsnight Go To Hell !" (I didn't say they were all bad.)


They have every right to protest, as Christians have protested about Jerry Springer. But this is plain and simple incitement to murder. And the police, so quick to spot hate speech on some occasions, are ignoring it. No doubt they have their orders. Don't want to upset this guy's constituents.

UPDATE - Times report.

Police refused to act on complaints from passers-by to order the demonstrators to take down banners praising the British-born terror bombers as the “Fantastic Four”, saying that their job yesterday was to ensure that the protest by 500 Muslims passed off peacefully.

More :

There were sporadic clashes with passer-by over chants praising the four suicide bombers who killed 52 people last July 7.

People who tried to snatch away what they regarded as offending placards were held back by police. Several members of the public tackled senior police officers guarding the protesters, demanding to know why they allowed banners that praised the “Magnificent 19” — the terrorists who hijacked the aircrafts used on September 11, 2001 — and others threatening further attacks on London.

These were only a few hundred people out of over a million UK muslims - a tiny percentage. If the police can't act in this case, it's hard to imagine what they will act against.

BBC - Half Way Out From Cowering Under The Desk

BBC radio news headlines :

"BBC news has shown brief clips of the cartoons"

I watched the television news, but was disappointed not to hear

" ... and those of you who don't want to see the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) ... please look away now ..."

It seems to work for the footy ...

Gogginssss ....

From the Guardian :

Tony Wright, a clever Labour MP, said we had heard enough from the minister about who would not be prosecuted under the act. But who might be?

Mr Goggins - his boss, Charles Clarke looked simultaneously stony-faced and embarrassed at his side, which is quite a trick - said vaguely that you might get a poster "showing women wearing burkas, saying that such women are not to be trusted, er, could be suicide bombers, er, who knows what they are hiding under their coats, a poster of that kind ..."

All black she was herself, too, and cloaked and hooded up, as if she did not want to be known. "Now what in the Shire can she want ?" I thought to myself.

"Good day to you !" I says, going out to her. "This lane don't lead anywhere, and wherever you may be going, your quickest way will be back to the road." I didn't like the looks of her.

"I come from yonder" she said, slow and stiff-like, pointing back west, over my fields if you please. "Have you seen Goggins ?" she asked in a queer voice, and bent down towards me. I could not see any face, for her hood fell down so low, and I felt a sort of shiver down my back. But I did not see why she should come riding over my land so bold.

"Be off !" I said. "There are no Gogginses here. You're in the wrong part of the Shire. You had better go back west to Hobbiton - but you can go by road, this time."

"Goggins has left," she answered in a whisper. "He is coming. He is not far away. I wish to find him. If he passes will you tell me ? I will come back with gold."


(with apologies to JRR Tolkein)

Strange ...

As the cartoon controversy intensifies, two things become clear.

One is that the rationalists, the debunkers of religious myth, the righteous campaigners against primitive superstition, the brave artistic iconoclasts, are remarkably quiet.

The Indie hasn't put the cartoons on its front page. Nor has the Guardian, or New Statesman.

Richard Dawkins is quiescent, Johann Hari schtum.

Gilbert and George aren't planning a new show devoted to images of Mohammed.

BBC television, which was happy to offend Christians, blurs out the offending images in its news reports, as if the story is about hard core pornography.

A Simon Carr in the Indie has an explanation.

"Rowan Atkinson has been publicly worrying that the (Religious Hatred) Bill will stop comedians making jokes about Islam. Comedians don't make jokes about Islam. They make jokes about politicians and Jesus Christ and English vicars but we're just too frigging gutless to apply the same satirical intensity to Islam. The penalties, as Theo van Gogh found out, can be more severe than anything [government minister] Mr. Goggins is proposing."

Which is the second strange thing. Because, as we're always being told, the death penalty isn't a deterrent. And the people who tell us that are the same people who are keeping their heads down now.

Odd, that.


PS - the verdict in the BNP trial is due today.

Scotland the Barely Believeable

And, as primary school girls keel over with a wee smoke of heroin, the Scottish Executive move to protect children, fearlessly tackling the chip van menace.

The education minister will consider whether to strengthen council powers to take action beyond the school gates.

Peter Peacock said: "We're going to look at whether the impact of chip vans or other vans around our schools is negative.

"If we have to strengthen the powers of local authorities to act, then we would want to do that."

Stabbed two elderly women ? Page and a half of previous convictions ?

Scots social worker he say probation.

Sheriff Graeme Buchanan issued the rebuke over the social worker's recommendation.

He told the court: "It just beggars belief that for an offence as serious as this, a social worker should recommend a probation order.

We have been here before.

He said that for a social worker to consider the options of fines, community service or probation was absurd. The only sentence available for murder, he insisted, was life imprisonment.

I've heard of roasting, but what does this mean ?

"Kate Moss grilled for an hour by cops"

Busy Again ...

Go read - Clive Davis on the black Republican vote and Biased BBC on the cartoon wars, which have been slewing round the blogs for months (for example at Irene Adler and Samizdata), but which the MSM have just discovered.

The B-BBC story is interesting but alas untypical. When the Danish paper published cartoons on Mohammed, they were obviously not offensive enough to get a decent reaction from the Ummah. So someone in the protesting community (is that OK. Mr Goggins ?) of Denmark added a couple of 'extras' - the prophet with a pig's head and a couple worse than that.

The BBC are reporting the fake cartoons as being published by the newspaper.

Update 2 pm January 31.Rob Broomby on BBC Radio 4’s PM last night (and well spotted Eammon):
'The blue touch paper had been lit by a series of cartoons published in a Danish newspaper in September. One portrayed the Prophet Mohammed with a turban shaped like a time bomb. Another showed him with a face of a pig.'

The time bomb WAS in the newspaper. The pig wasn't. We pay £3 billion a year for untrue news that may (if the Koran-flushing story is any guide) cost lives.

Isiah Young-Sam Update

I thought I'd hang fire on this post lest I find myself doing seven years, but it seems God's above the devil yet.


Remember Isiah Young-Sam ? The young black Christian, victim of a targeted racist murder during the Lozells riots ? The one who DIDN'T get 24/7 BBC news coverage ?

Police may have found a clue.

Police are hunting the owner of a bandana found near where a 23-year-old man was killed in the Birmingham riots.

Isiah Young-Sam was stabbed in Lozells in October while walking home from the cinema with his brother and friends.

West Midlands Police said the bandana is black and white with a number of white crescents and stars.

It has been undergoing forensic testing and officers now hope people will recognise it and tell them who owned it or where it was bought.

Notice the absence of the R-word from the report.

I can't help thinking I've seen a design like this before.



Wiccans ?

No Posts Today

Busy ...

New NHS Cost-Saving Strategy Unveiled

Ministers are considering plans to let adults appoint someone who could block life-sustaining treatment if they were too ill to do so themselves.
The Mental Capacity Act, which comes into force next year, gives people the chance to appoint someone who can instruct a doctor on their behalf.

Under plans to implement the act, they would need to indicate if this included powers to refuse life-sustaining care.

But critics have said the proposals amount to "back-door euthanasia".

Excuse me, but are any of you straight ?

via the Indie.

(This Lib Dem nonsense is getting silly. I can't believe the amount of moralistic posturing going on. By those who think that by some miracle people shouldn't be interested in stories about politicians hiring a couple of prostitutes. Human nature ain't like that. Simon Hughes on the other hand was perfectly free to answer questions with 'none of your business'. He should have done, although people will always be interested in an MP's sexual predelictions - human nature again. See David Mellor, toes and mythical Chelsea strips.)

Ian Blair - Seventies Throwback

For every believable thing Ian Blair says :

"we’re picking up from lots of people that they’re very frightened. There is another side to it, though. Who are the people who are frightened? People who previously had lives which were broadly exempt from crime are now finding crime coming to them. "

He says something utterly stupid :

"If you’re not broadly against the police when you’re a teenager, you’re not much of a teenager."

Yeah, man - off the pigs !

Dalrymple on Saturday

When history is dangerous, the present is dangerous.

It is amazing what a couple of assassinations can do.

On Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. I too remember seeing young men (Leicester City supporters at the Hawthorns) in the white boiler suits, umbrellas, bowler hats and eyeliner of the film. Burgess really was a great futurist. His ideas of the Pelagian and Augustinian governments, as expressed in The Wanting Seed, are relevant today.

Augustinian governments believe in Original Sin, that man is naturally given to vices which need to be checked. Tend to be hierarchical and militaristic.

Pelagian governments believe in Man’s perfectibility and innate goodness. As this fails to produce the perfect society, so do initially liberal Pelagians tend to turn towards coercion, more laws and greater police powers. Remind you of anything ?

‘’Pelagius is fond of police,
Augustine loves an army’’

It’s fascinating to see that the ideas of Rousseau, the hippies and the Guardianistas were being expressed nearly two thousand years ago by Pelagius.

They Come Over Here And Take Our Jobs ...

I thought this was the sort of thing we were supposed to do.

Ian Blair - Right But Wrong

So the media be institutionally racist, be it ?

He's not quite grasped it, has he ? To a white liberal - a fair description of our media class - crimes committed by non-natives aren't as newsworthy. Partly because 'that's what they do', and partly because honest reporting of crime in, say, South London, would raise awareness of something they'd rather ignore.

Or in two words, Ruth Okechukwu.


UPDATE - to expand a little

Non-Natives being killed, robbed or otherwise abused are in general only of interest to a 'liberal' if they can be used as a cultural weapon against their enemies. In short, if natives are doing the abusing. See for example the remarkable difference between the coverage of the racist murders of Anthony Walker and Isaiah Young-Sam. This applies in Britain and also abroad, where for natives read 'Westerners'. American Christians who condemn the practice of homosexuality, for example, will be the subject of more critical media commentary than Iranian Muslims who hang homosexuals. "It's what they do" is an attitude never spoken (only evil right-wingers stereotype like that) but always present - unwitting and unconscious. See also Darfur and (particularly) the Congo, where millions more people have been killed than were ever shot by the police of apartheid South Africa - to an almost total silence.

Here, Ian - one story that did make the papers. I bet you can't imagine why.

Riffat Pasha claims she was kept captive for five years at the house where she was assaulted and threatened with her life, Sheffield Crown Court was told.
Police became involved when she outlined her plight in a letter which she left in the ladies' toilet at Atkinson's department store. She wrote on the envelope that it should be delivered to police or a doctor she had met during hospital treatment for tuberculosis.

It's That Day Again ...

So this post can be wheeled out again.

In other news : Simon Hughes says he's bowled the occasional doosra. This story will be dead within a day or two.

Arson or Attempted Murder ?

The BNP trial continues to be blogged by the defendants here.

"In Mark's speech he had referred to a Muslim businessmen who was arrested and convicted for barricading the doors of Manningham Labour Club, then petrol-bombing it while more than twenty elderly members were inside. Jameson points out that the local press cutting says that the fire-raiser was convicted of arson with reckless endangering of human life, but not of attempted murder."

At the time it struck me as an innovative way of fighting the far right - trying to incinerate a Labour club just down the road from where the ILP, predecessors of Labour, were founded in 1893.

Let's see what the Labour club's insurers have to say about the incident.

Manningham Labour Club was targeted by gangs on the rampage and resulted in some 22 members being trapped inside for one and a half hours while rioters hurled rubble and petrol bombs into the club and blocked the rear fire exit.

Just seconds after being released by the fire brigade from their horrific ordeal the building collapsed, and the police are treating the incident as attempted murder. At one point the gang surrounding the club was 600 strong and police are hoping that CCTV footage from the club may be able to show more details of those carrying out the violence.

Marsh, the club’s insurers, have met club officials and the insurance claim, estimated at £1 million, should proceed smoothly.

Publication: The Club & Institute Journal, August 2001

Beautiful

Worth the wait. After a blogging hiatus, the other Wise Woman returns, calmly filleting the arguments of one Professor Anthony Grayling like a forensic pathologist, wielding logic in place of a scalpel.

Lovely stuff. A chunk of precious ambergris on the shore of the blogging seas.


UPDATE - one more thought. Let's posit that the propensity towards evil is roughly constant in all times and all cultures. I can call it Original Sin, someone else can call it a biological imperative. At best, this can translate to 'everybody needs someone to hate', at worst to genocide.

Under which system - religious or utilitaran - is this tendency most likely to achieve free expression ? After all, as Grayling said, there was implied (and often explicit) anti-Semitism in Christian tradition for two thousand years, over which time perhaps several hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed. It took an avowedly non-Christian regime to kill several million in three or four years. We should not forget, though we cannot quantify, the "acts of evil that religious scruples have restrained".