Som(me)bre

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. The British Army lost 60,000 casualties in the first 12 hours of fighting. 20,000 dead and 40,000 wounded, the greatest loss in their history. More poignantly, many of the volonteer army had joined in 'buddy' outfits, according to their trades. You had regiments of bakers, companies of miners and so on, often all from the same close knit towns and villages. They were mown down by the Germans, like grass before a scythe.

When deaths in Iraq of coalition troops do not equal the amount of accidental deaths in the US armed forces in a year, we have to remind ourselves of what our grandfathers and great grandfathers went through in a few hours.

The Best Policy Is No Policy

This bleak assessement on Somalia by J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University and an academic fellow of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:

After they make short shift of Somalia’s shambolic government—notwithstanding the last ditch attempt at the U.N. this week to shore it up with the appointment of a new International Contact Group—the (Islamic Courts) Union will turn its attention to destabilizing (neighbouring) Somaliland, whose democratically elected, secular government has already been declared anathema by the Union’s chief ideologist, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the al Qaeda-linked head of al-Ittihad. (This month alone, the Somaliland government has intercepted two major arms shipments destined for Union-aligned jihadis from well-wishers in Arabia.) Then the Union will turn on Ethiopia and Kenya, both countries with large ethnic Somali populations with significant pockets of jihadi infiltration.

Can the US do much about this potential situation? Nearly anything the US does in Somalia, covert or overt, will be used to blame and discredit it regionally with moderate, important countries like Kenya. Already this is the media reaction locally. It is basically misplaced criticism, but it sells in the global anti-American market.

The US should rather rely on the natural ability of Somalis to implode and their penchant for pissing off everyone who happens to be their neighbour. This the Islamic Courts militia will surely do, sooner or later.

Meanwhile it should support openly the efforts of the regional AU group (IGAD) and the UN/European contact groups that are trying to build ( how I hate the word!) an "inclusive" solution.

I doubt they will succeed, but if then the Jihadis anger enough neighbours and clans, the US can use covert means, with proxy allies, to keep Somalia tied up in endless clan warfare, which traditionally renders them strategically harmless.

If an agressive, expansionist Jihadi state did emerge via the Islamic Courts, you would be surprised how quickly the US would be asked for help by various currently lukewarm "allies" like Kenya and Ethiopia.

I dont think Somalia seriously threatens any shipping lanes and is a poor choice for terrorist hideouts. The region is not vital to world energy or security, but due to large minorities of Somalis in Kenya and Ethiopia, plus Islamic ambitions to destabilize the Horn of Africa, the last thing the US should have is a searchlights-and-trumpets prescence, which will then be used by Islamists to rally a regional cause.

Tread softly, carry a big stick, shut up and keep one's eyes open. That's about it for US policy now.

UN: Some Kenyans Are More Kenyan

Despite being the oldest group of humans yet researched by New Zealand's Massey University DNA project Kenya's Turkana people are not, according to the United Nations, 'indigenous'. Having some 35,000 years of history won't quite qualify one for favoured treatment by the UN's new Human Rights Council. Yet if you arrived in Kenya 500 years ago, you will get General Assembly recognition and special 'rights'.

This is the useful conclusion of the UN's newest body. Gone from the disbanded old Human Rights Commission are champions of humanity like Saddam's Iraq ( which once chaired it),Syria and Zimbabwe. In are new champions of humanity like Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia.

Saudi Arabia is busy modernizing it's image and industry with oil-boom cash. The kingdom just exported a batch of Hand Amputation Machines to Nigeria's sharia Kano State.

Meanhile the new UN Rights Council has the urgent task of sending to the General Assembly a 'vital' bill guaranteeing the rights of 'indigenous peoples'.

To most people, 'indigenous' has the simple meaning of people who were the original inhabitants of a land. Thus in Africa the Bushmen, Pygmies, Baka, Berbers and other groups are rightly nominated in the UN list of indigenes. However it also pays to be colourful, exotic and live next to the world's greatest wildlife parks, even if you are Tribesman-Come-Lately.

Thus Mjikenda and related Swahili Kenyans, who have lived around Mombasa for at least a millenium, are not indigenous enough. They don't wear lion's manes, red-ochre and wave long spears, but rather shapeless, white cotton tunics called kanzu.

Maybe Kenya's Agikuyu who arrived there around 1100 AD are indigenous? If you've been checking out the fate of the 35,000 year old Turkana, you will know this answer. The fact that we have have 1 million year old ancestor hominid sites at Lake Turkana, where live the You-know-who tribe , still won't swing it for those "non-natives".

They drink an awful lot of coffee in the corridors of the UN - what else is there to do in Diploland? Like Legoland it's a place where only fantasies take shape. This leads to reading lots of coffee-table books. There have been more big glossy books written about Kenya's Maasai people (arrived in Kenya around 1450 AD via Chad and Sudan)than any other East African tribe. No surprise then that the only people in Kenya who qualify for 'indigenous', in the UN's report, are the Maasai. There is talking turkey. Then there is talking Turkana, and the Unocrats have the balance right.

How the Kenya Government will vote when the Human Rights Council bill reaches the General Assembly, nobody knows. Hopefully it will be in favour of a bill which declares 90% of their own Kenyans 'foreigners'. Kenyans of Maasai origin are good, normal citizens and frankly need no special affirmation compared to any other inhabitants.

Stand by for waves of professional Masaai activists clad in beads and shukas claiming back the whole country they once ruthlessly conquered from the 'pre-indigenous' people who were inconveniently in Kenya before them. One of the special UN rights for the 'indigenous' is naturally land. That's material enough for 56 more books, 3 mini-series and "Maasai, The Movie!".

Somalia's Endless Sorrows

The recent victories by the Somali Islamic Courts militia over various "Anti-Terrorist Alliance" warlords, supposedly funded by the USA, may seem a small story in these days of Iran, Al-Zarquawi and such. However, it has the potential to become a very large issue in the global war on terror, for Kenya regionally and for Al-Qaeda. The BBC has an excellent primer on the situation here.

East African countries have reacted by making the losing warlords persona non grata, calling for their trial at the ICC, freezing assets and other measures, led by Kenya. This they may later come to regret, if the Islamic Courts militia harden their stance to implementing a Sharia style "Taliban" state on Kenya's borders - a move that could have devastating consequences. It could easily extend to Kenya's north eastern tribes demanding a similar Sharia sytem in Kenya itself. However, in face of the Islamic Courts winning hand, there seems little to do for Kenya but offer them a cautious welcome and see what's next.

There is no doubt the Islamic Courts militia are sheltering a Al-Qaeda members, including one involved in the vicious East African embassy bombings of 1998. The Islamic Courts militia have certainly received training from outside Somalia. The defeated warlords might have remained a card in the deck to temper the courts and could re-emerge in Somalia's chaotic snakepit of clan politics.

On the other hand Kenya via the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development has employed immense time and effort to get the provisional Somali government off the ground, and the fractured,fractious body actually has set up in the town of Baidoa - but the capital Mogadishu is held by the Islamic Courts and the Somali government has no armed forces at all. If anything the warlords alliance was their "armed force". The Islamic Courts militia could crush the provisional government in a day. Ominously, the Islamic Courts have rejected a Somali government idea for African peacekeepers.

All the more reason to heed the 1858 "Compedium of African Geography", when that vintage book said that the inhabitants of the Somali coast are "violent, boisterous and turblulent" and "best left well alone".

Beeb Boob

It's nice that even the BBC corrects it's bias now and then. Regarding the open distortion of the "Hadji Girl" U.S. Marine song I said to BBC Newsonline:

"Kill Iraqis Marine Song" by Adam Brookes Updated 21:53 GMT 13/06/06 contains a crucial omission. Nowhere does it state the Marines song is about insurgents killing children (not Marines) and Marines trying to save the children and kill the insurgents.

In fact it gives the complete opposite "hint" that it is the Marines who are killing children and enjoying it. Seeing the song ( as I have) shows very clearly the Marines are singing about killing hostage taking/human shield type of insurgents.

Is this not a totally crucial piece of information? Why the omission that makes the story seem biased?"

Rightspeak was surprised and delighted to receive the following reply from the BBC:

"Thank you for your comments. We accept that our initial story was deficient and should have made it much clearer what the killing in the song lyrics referred to. We revised the story in the light of this. We subsequently did an updated story to include the marine's apology, which spelt out much more clearly the thrust of the song.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5081930.stm

But you made a fair criticism about our first story. We do aim to cover stories as objectively and accurately as possible."

Kind regards
BBC News website

Red-Faced Ken

Elsewhere in the blog is noted the low-life Mayor of London, "Red" Ken Livingstone, and his lavish welcome of anti-semitic, suicide-bomber blessing "moderate" sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi in 2005. Such is the quality of public life in UK that creatures like Livingstone and George Galloway thrive in politics. The left apparently sees no disconnect between the anti-feminism,anti-sexuality,anti-democracy and anti-free speech of radical Islam and itself.

However, the left is not about "equality", "human rights" and "inclusion" but about a ruthless, self-righteous elite who hope to seize power and hold it through social coercion, in the name of a mythical and abstract "collective good". Therefore anything anti-American or anti-Western, however disgusting, is preferred in all circumstances. This is the real reason for the love affair between the radical left and radical Islam, which operates exactly the same way.

Even Red Ken might be taken aback by Qaradhawi's latest remarks, courtesy of the wonderful MEMRI service:

Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: Kerry who ran against Bush, was supported by homosexuals and nudists. But it was Bush who won [the elections], because he is Christian, right-wing, tenacious, and unyielding. In other words, the religious overcame the perverted. So we cannot blame all Americans and Westerners.

Interviewer: How should a homosexual or a lesbian be punished? We mentioned the story of the people of Sodom and how Allah punished them, but how should someone who commits this abomination be punished today?

Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: The schools of thought disagree about the punishment..... Some say we should throw them from a high place, like God did with the people of Sodom. Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement. The important thing is to treat this act as a crime."

This is the sheik who Livingstone said was "just like" Pope John Paul II.

Crazed White Christians

Imagine a pair of Christian fundamentalists went around the East Coast of the USA, sniping and shooting dead ten non-white American Muslims. At their trial,notebooks and texts show where they had written how Jesus Christ inspired them to kill "black devils" and how other figures like Hitler were drawn in portrait, labelled "A Good Leader". Would you be hearing about this from the MSM and the left from now until.....hell froze over?

There is such a sensational case, but you will hardly hear details about it because it involves a pair of Muslim influenced killersshooting what they called "white devils" on behalf of one "Allah". These are the Beltway Killers who terrorized the Eastern USA a while back. The leader was John Muhammed and his acolyte Lee Malvo. Ample evidence was produced at the trial of the religious nature of the serial killings, including notebooks and other writings. Bin Laden was featured heavility in Malvo's notebooks as a "Good Muslim". Malvo confessed to Islamic indoctrination from Muhammed who repeatedly talked of "shooting white devils" at a level of six victims a day, if possible.

Going by stories on the BBC, AP and other agencies there is no mention whatsoever of any link with Islam in the John Muhammed case. Even minor media like the Richmond Times Dispatch of Virginia where the shooting occurred merely mention "indoctrination", without using any further description of what kind. The 'Religion of Peace' is unmentioned.

One victim of the shootings who survived still does not understand. He tells the Richmond newspaper,

"I never expected to understand 'why' they were doing what they did -- it's not socially rational behavior -- but I did find a sense of closure in hearing 'what' they were doing."

Even by Koranic standards, it was not religiously rational, but that religious impulse was the fire that stoked the killings.

Visiting Another World

Just returned from another of my pleasurable visits to Madagascar, a country that ranks much further down the poverty list to Kenya. It's a strange and beguiling place; Africa is so close, so many people seem African in looks (then again, many seem Polynesian) but it is not like Africa, or anywhere else. Some interesting contrasts to mainland Africa were:

* There appear to be no slums and the average Malagasy owns a house,most of them sturdy if traditional.

* Despite the obvious poverty, crime and especially violent crime, is a paltry fraction of Kenya's level.

* Many people openly state they wish they had been colonized by the British, not the French, when you say you are from Nairobi.

* The matatus are amazingly organized, with pre-booked seats for up-country travel(!), little offices for each company and no touts whatsoever.

* The women are beautiful and polyglot in novel ways, not that Kenyans lack beauty. The Malagasy generally are discreet and quiet - but not in the South.

* The dead are venerated, and regularly dug up and re-buried after a prolonged party. In Madagascar, the dead are more important than the living!

* There are almost no sects and tent churches, everyone attends a mainstream church.

The Last Word

From an interview today broadcast on UKs' Channel 4, Ms. Ayaan Ali Hirsi hits the nail and the truth squarely on the head:

Interviewer: "Some say that you have gained notoriety because you say what Westerners want you to say about Islam."

Ms. Ali: "On the contrary, I say what the Westerners do not want to hear about Islam. They do not want to confront (the reality of) what I say."

Perfect!

Dutch Courage

It seems Dutch MP Ayaan Ali Hirsi may not be moving to the USA any time soon, after witch-hunting Dutch immigration Minister Rita Verdonk was ordered by Parliament to hold back on cancelling Hirsi's Dutch citizenship.

The tale is more revealing of the culture wars in America than anything else. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think thank, welcomed Hirsi should she move countries. That is, American conservatives were willing to embrace a Third World black female who stands for religious tolerance and for women's rights, especially within Islam.

Contrast this to the leftist administrators of the USA's famed Yale University. Despite voiciferous objection, they granted a university place to high-school educated Ramtullah Hashemi. He is the former unrepentant official spokesman for the fanatical, misogynist Taliban 'government' of Afghanistan. Hashemi routinely defended stoning women to death for adultery and banning them from going to school or even from selling bread.

Thinkers say that the left long ago lost the battle of the mind in the West. Some even say the Western left is willing to appease the forces of intolerance, the way the intellectual classes of Europe fawned before fascism and Stalinism in the 1930's. Go figure.

Warmonger Fascist Bush Is.....Vindicated?

The gravest charge against George W. Bush is that he took the Coalition into war with Iraq in 2003, fully knowing Iraq had disposed of all it's WMD. However, now that volumes of captured documents from Iraq are becoming translated, it's clear that Saddam wanted to maintain to his own military, neighbouring countries, Iraq itself and the USA the belief that he had WMD until as late as December 2002.

An excellent article in the Christian Science Monitor reveals Saddam thought that the WMD he did possess in the 1991 Gulf War were the only things that kept the Coalition from toppling him then - and these would do so again in Gulf War II. He also needed to instill fear into the rebellious Shiites and Kurds he had previously gassed and terrorized, keep Iran guessing and maintain morale amongst his generals.

Saddam sent allies such as the Yemenis in 2002 to inform Dick Cheney that Iraq would retaliate with WMD if attacked, reinforcing belief that he possessed them. Vice President Tariq Aziz stated his generals were "stunned" and lost morale when he informed them in December 2002 that he actually had none and was bluffing. George Bush was not.

These documents of the innermost workings of Saddam's regime show that Bush made an error, but that he was right in saying every major intelligence agency in the world thought Saddam still had WMD and there was no reason to believe otherwise. Saddam wanted it that way.

Hold Her Down, You Zulu Warrior!

What is it about South African politicos that makes them turn into moonbats when it comes to HIV/AIDS? First we had the bizarro President, Thabo Mbeki, inviting all the AIDS cranks and wingding thinkers to conferences. There they doubted the existance of any virus. Mbeki thus enraged Nelson Mandela and became a laughing stock amongst African scientists.

Now disgraced ex-VP Jacob Zuma, on trial for rape, not only admits he had sex with an HIV positive woman whose status he knew of, but that he afterwards "took a shower" because that way the risk of AIDS was "very low".

The fact is that Zuma, a Zulu from a non-circumcising tribe, has a 6 to 8 fold higher chance of catching AIDS in any case. That the Vice President of a quasi-modern nation can propagate "unsafe sex followed by a shower" almost defies belief. This statement has undone years of work by safe-sex campaigners all over Southern Africa.

How should Zuma know his exceptional risk staus. Well, from a French medical study that confirmed beyond doubt that non-circumcised African males like Zuma are at extreme HIV risk. Where was this landmark study done? South Africa.

Geeks, The New Cultural Icons

Interesting to see a typical European approach to American electronic innovation. Having failed to come up with products that anyone would want to buy, let alone decent music, (French pop is ear-destroying rubbish), the French have decided to punish the world’s coolest company, Apple. So a digital format for encoding songs is “online culture”? I wonder what the geeks in Silicone Valley who thought up the iPod think of that?

France's Lower House of Parliament passed a law on Tuesday that could challenge Apple Computer's dominance of the online digital music market by making it open its iTunes store to portable music players other than its iPods.

"These clauses, which we hope will be taken up by other countries, notably at the European level, should prevent the emergence of a monopoly in the supply of online culture," Richard Cazenave and Bernard Carayon, National Assembly deputies from the ruling UMP party, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The US take on this?

"The vote today by French lawmakers is a direct attack on Apple's ability to design its own products and on the company's intellectual property rights, which will have a chilling effect on future innovation," said Jim Prendergast, the executive director of Americans for Technology Leadership.

"Apple could immediately pull its iTunes product from France, giving consumers less choice when it comes to popular digital music," he added.

If only they would. Then the French could listen eternally to Edith Piaf on bulky CD players.

Peace Activist = War Dupe?

After months of captivity, American Christian Peace Team “peace activist” Tom Fox, to use the MSM’s curious wording, has been found tortured and shot in Iraq. Fox was a man of firm convictions, knowing full well the likely dangers he and his fellow team members faced when they entered Iraq:

“If Jesus and Gandhi are right, then I am asked to risk my life, and if I lose it to be as forgiving as they were when murdered by the forces of Satan.”

Of course, Mohammed was neither Jesus nor Ghandi, but a man who led dozens of raids, sieges and attacks on other Arabs and Jews, and countenanced execution and assassination, even of surrendered prisoners, as a matter of course. Occasionally he and fellow Muslims took the wives of men killed captives as their own.

Who says so? Islamophobes? Christian right –wingers? Well, no. All this is taken from the most sacred Islamic Hadiths and the Koran itself. Any resemblance between Ghandi, Jesus and Mohammed is purely co-incidental.

Not wishing to disparage the memory of Tom Fox, are his ilk “peace activists” at all? Or could they more likely be called “war dupes”? Fox’s CPT group is exceptionally anti-American, anti-Israeli and pro-Muslim. They denounced the Coalition in Iraq, blamed all the violence on Bush and Blair and previously joined Palestinians in other anti-Israeli “peace activist” tours of the Middle East.

When newspapers published the Mohammed cartoons, even in captivity Fox and his fellow CPT members issued statements denouncing the abuse of their “gracious Muslim brothers”, as they stood over him with AK-47’s and throat-knives. The "apologies" were not, in this case, coerced but rather volontary.

Fox reminds one of fellow U.S. “peace activist” Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer. Rachel’s “peace” was relentless verbal, intellectual and propaganda assault by her group on one sides only – the Jews. After her death, radical Palestinian elements readily admitted they used people like Corrie as part of their “war activism”. So much for Ms. Corrie’s deluded pacifism.

From his quote about Jesus and Ghandi, Fox obviously had something of the traditional Christian martyr about him. Sadly, the Swords of Righteousness group who took him captive had the Islamic “shahid” concept of martyrdom, which is not the same. Christian martyrs have always been non-violent, as was Christ himself. Their suffering was persuasive in shaming the Romans and other persecutors into conversion. The Islamic “shahid” is just as likely to be violent, as was Muhammad. He can, after recent fatwa, even be a suicide bomber or homicide pilot. His violence is likely to be persuasive in intimidating others to convert to Islam.

The murder of Fox by Islamists was no doubt proceeded by all the “letter of the law” Koranic injunctions. As Fox was a person of the “kitab” ( Bible) they were not allowed to kill him right away. They had to offer him a chance to pay “jizya” (a tax on Christians and Jews) and “feel himself subdued” (Koran). If that failed, they had to offer him the chance of conversion to Islam,or death (Koran,Hadiths). Maybe Fox chose death – the actions of a brave, principled and sadly misguided man.

Martyrdom is meant to move us morally, as a spectacle, a narrative and a religious act. As Martin Roth points out, Stephen, the first Christian martyr, prayed for those who killed him, as Christ did for his killers when he was on the cross. Anyone who can't tell the difference between these theologies and those of jihad shahids is a theological imbecile....or a secularist. If it comes to choosing between Tom Fox and a shahid, I think we know which way most of the world wishes to go.

Burnout

Kenya is in the world media for all the wrong reasons, following the government's astounding raid on the Standard newspaper and KTN television. Masked policemen, rumours of "Russian" or "Bosnian" mercenaries, wholesale confiscation of computers, sabotaging equipment, burning piles of newspapers and an amazing admission by Kenya's hitherto respected police chief Hussein Ali that he neither knew about nor sanctioned the operation have left Kenyans and foreigners deeply disturbed. Citing "state security", the raids were sparked by reports that leading oppositionist Kalonzo Musyoka had secretly met President Mwai Kibaki. Such secret meetings in Kenya are so well-established that citizens are never surprised about them. The idea that schmoozing in State House between supposed "rivals" is a matter of "state security" has convinced nobody.

What is new is that in the relatively liberal state of media in Kenya, the internet was able to disseminate CCTV pictures of the mysterious raiders at work - something unthinkable a decade ago. Kenya is soon to pass the kind of puerile "freedom of the press" that used to give rise to media copy like this:

' Sources state that the perpetrator of the deed is a well known local tycoon from the area. However some say he could have been acting on orders from a higher authority.'

The burned out veteran generation of Kenya politicians are more and more like failing men, grasping feebly at a power which is passing to a younger generation, one that simply will not put up with "Big Man" politics any longer. The current government is like a rotting ship, the crew of which keep kicking new holes in the hull, as they sink. Few expect it to pass more months without a vote of no confidence - despite our bloated, hyena-like Members of Parliament, who have no wish to give up their enormous salaries and privileges for the hustle of a campaign.

Tutu Frootie

Having a sane voice in the old anti-apartheid struggle does not make you qualified to comment on other matters, except sometimes as an ass. Enter, braying, one Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The prattling prelate attended a UN conference on Danish cartoons in Qatar and said the following:

He lamented the negative stereotyping of Muslims and wondered why North Ireland's Protestants and Catholics, the Oklahoma City bombers or even the Nazis had never been labeled ''Christian terrorists.''

The IRA in Ireland are Marxists using religion as a Leninist 'front'. They have never been a Catholic religious movement. Secondly no Christian priest or minister encourages, blesses and sanctions bombings in Ireland - unlike the thousands of Muslim clerics who support such (and worse) worldwide. The Oklahoma bombers were agnostics bombing in the name of a non-religious ideology and the Nazis were materialists who openly despised religion.

Torquemada In A Turban

Post war children grew up listening to the stories of the appeasement of Europe towards fascism in the 1930's. Never could we experience how free thinking people then really felt, as they saw the dark clouds gathering. Now we can, thanks to religious fanatics who use Islam's name.

We also never really appreciated the vile pandering to fascism, in between bouts of dubious indignation, that many the Western left indulged in then, ending infamously in the 1939 The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. But now we can, seeing the contemporary left dance their grotesque piroutte with forces utterly destructive to everything we hold progressive. Do these useful idiots not know that radical Islam detests them the most? That they will be the first to feel the reality of creeping sharia?

"God Bless America" is a phrase they readily sneer at. "God Bless Hitler", carried by a Muslim, they cannot comment on. As a German newspaper wrote, "We can't really know what this sign is means". Indeed, Homo Occidentalis seems to have lost all ability to think when confronted with Torquemada in a turban.

Let us for a minute imagine a meeting of minds with the Mullahs. Let us, together with our witless MSM media, push with them the point that what has really offended Muslims is "images" of Mohammed, which are supposedly "forbidden" and especially derogatory ones. Let us propose a truce. The West will no longer publish any images of Mohammed - even flattering ones as Shias often do. Instead, we will vigorously, in every media, attack, criticise, evaluate, question and deny (if we wish to) his role as a prophet, a passage to God or even as a holy man, in the spirit of open religious discourse. Now ask yoursef, what will be the reaction of the Mullahs? We all know this answer.

After hundreds of years of enlightenment,science and liberalism, the West now stands apparently on the brink of negating the very fibre of it's free civilization, to return us to a dark age when bad religion, the more intolerant and ignorant the more effective, will rule our lives again, like an Islamic Inquisition. We sleep-walk to our doom,led by our Chamberlainesque elites. For "Peace In Our Time", think "Religious Peace In Our Time"...... and keep on walking.

Cartoonmania

Muslims all over the world are protesting, smashing, shooting, cursing, attacking and threatening everyone from Danes to kaffirs (unbelievers)  generally  regarding  mild cartoons, by Western satirical standards, of Mohammed published in an obscure Danish newspaper.  

Muslims would never  print cartoons of Jews or Christians in any way derogatory whatsoever. Which is why the renowned Arab newspaper Al-Quds published this, just one example of Muslim newspapers showing what not to publish and whom not to insult.

As we know, Islam is the religion of peace, tolerance and brotherhood. Anyone who does know know this is subject to prosecution under Section 121.(2) of the new British ‘Racial and Religious Hatred Act,  2006'.

Having read the Gospels and Epistles and then the Koran, I have to say that ‘Christianity’ and ‘ Muhometanism’ ( to use the quaint expression of former times) are, as CNN or any other liberal newsorg will tell you, really just one and the same. For example, we all remember in the Gospels the many lines that resemble these  from the Koran, with the chapter and verse in brackets:

Non-believers are: the “worst of created beings” (98:6), are “miscreants” (2:99, 24:55), are the worst beasts in Allah’s sight (8:22, 8:55); (Christians and/or Jews are) turned into “apes and/or pigs” (2:65-66, 5:58-60, 7:166); (idolaters are) unclean (9:28); “evil” is upon them (16:27), evil (2:91, 2:99); “wicked” (80:42, 9:125); the “wrong-doers” (42:45, 2:254, 5:45); evil-doers (42:44); they have no good in them (8:23); are “guilty” for disbelieving (45:31, 83:29); on the side of Satan and are fighting for him (4:76-77); of the party of Satan (58:19); Allah assigns them devils for protecting friends (7:27); they choose devils for protecting friends (7:30); are partisan against Allah (25:55); “enemy” and “perverted” (63:4); disgraced lives (22:9); hypocrites (4:61); have a “diseased heart” (2:10, 9:125); are ill (84:20); deaf, dumb, and blind, and have no sense (2:171); deaf and dumb and in darkness, Allah sends them astray (6:39); have no sense (5:103); a folk who do not understand (9:127); their fathers were unintelligent and had no knowledge or guidance (2:170, 5:104); are “a folk without intelligence”/ “most ignorant” (8:65, 6:111); losers who are deceived by Allah (2:6), and deceived by Satan (4:60); liars/they lie (2:10, 9:42, 16:39, 16:105, 59:11) “losers” (7:179); foolish and liars (7:66), liars and losers (58:18-19), in false pride and schism (38:2), the lowest of the low (95:4-6).

What to do about such people? The Koran and Hadith (epistles), like the Gospels, tells us repeatedly to kill, behead, crush, burn, fight, treat harshly, rape, tax, place in ghettos and so on all the above categories of wicked persons.  The Sermon on the Mount and the preaching from Mecca are really identical. Jesus Christ, as did Mohammed, led numerous wars, fought 36 offensive battles, supervised a number of massacres including that of beheading 800 Jews, married the women of those he had executed and had a 9 year old wife. All religions are equally the same and cannot be criticised. So saith the Book of Multiculturalism 2:36

George W. Chirac,Warmonger

They say that Europe eventually follows everything America does, but only  later. Who ever thought we would hear this? (Hat tip: the excellent Eurosoc).

In his speech, Mr. Chirac bluntly declared, "In numerous countries, radical ideas are spreading, advocating a confrontation of civilizations."  As a French official put it,  "This is more than a clash of civilizations. It is a cancer within our country that if unchecked will destroy all of France."

Chirac continued,

"The leaders of states who use terrorist methods against us, as well as those who consider using in one way or another weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would expose themselves to a firm and appropriate response on our part,"  referring to France’s nuclear capability.

No Free Speech Please, We’re British

The gravest threat to free speech is contained in the republished Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. The Blair government is ignoring the wisdom of the House of Lords, who insisted that only speech containing threats of violence ( in effect, verbal assault) should be so covered. The British government have re-introduced the previous broad clauses with different language.

If Parliament passes this bill in the forthcoming vote, one hopes British people will engage in massive civil disobedience and that the Lords will once again rescue the populace from this corrupt legislation.  Excellent rebuttals of this legislation are all over the Internet, for example  Ecclesia’s site here. As usual, Blair won’t listen.

Indeed the only group openly campaigning for this bill are  some fundamentalist  Muslims, especially ones who wish to  use future litigation against other communities to silence  the ancient British rights to praise, ridicule, attack, support or take the absolute micky out of anyone, as they see fit. Indeed cynics are right that it is simply pandering to extreme Muslims to offset Labour’s woes over Iraq involvement.

The right to offend by free speech is also the right to confront power, to ridicule it and mock it. Why should religious power be exempted from this?

In seeking to sanitize all possibility of offense from religious commentary, the Government is abusing human rights in Britain, and will cause enmity between communities, rather than foster tolerance. British Christians, the secular and particularly writers and artists in Britain are  against this bill.

Why indeed should we stop with religious or racial hatred acts? Why not make all forms of offense "hate crimes", including against  the obese, the thin, people from Essex, French farmers, the rural or for that matter, politicians, who seem intent to undo the fundamental right of everyone in Britain to take the piss out of anyone they choose?

The spectre of British police being used a ideological or theological thought-crime investigators is so repellant and orwellian what we must seriously wonder if a free society is possible when the right to offend
the powerful or the established is taken away from the people. And this by those elected to guard our very freedoms.

UPDATE: Due to intense pressure, the worst parts of this  bill were happily defeated on 1st February, only the second defeat in the House of Commons in the Blair government reign.  Regrettably the ‘thoughtcrime’ of ‘hatred’ in various other forms was still included.  

Skinny Dipping

Wonderful news for Kenya’s tourist industry – the US navy has intercepted a Somali pirate ship, fired across it’s bows  and detained 10 ‘skinnies’, the US forces nickname for Somali gunmen. They also freed 16 Indian crewmen the pirates had captured. Sailors aboard the dhow told the US  Navy that pirates hijacked the vessel six days ago near Mogadishu and  then used it to stage  attacks on merchant ships.

It was not long ago that our tours industry suffered a major blow when these same Somali  pirates attacked an American cruise ship on it’s way to  Mombasa.  Naturally everyone in Kenya is relieved and I doubt we will be hearing the usual  anti-American chatter from our  biased news media.

My Compedium of African Geography (1858) describes the inhabitants of the Somali coast as “treacherous ,boisterous and turbulent” and warns the coast is to be avoided and the people “ best left well alone.” Nothing much has changed.  Most Kenyans will be hoping the US Navy keeps up it’s attacks and patrols on these sea-vermin.

In an excellent irony, the pirates were captured by the USS Winston S. Churchill, named after a renowed someone who knew a thing or two about chasing fanatical Muslim tribesmen around , see for example “The River War”.

What of the punishments for piracy these days?  "The disposition of people and vessels involved in acts of piracy on the high seas are based on a variety of factors, including the offense, the flags of the vessels, the nationalities of the crew, and others,"  said a very PC-sounding Lt. Leslie Hull-Ryde of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain. Whatever happened to  that old favorite, walking-the-plank?

A Lost Struggle

“An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve the public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. . . .” Joseph Pulitzer, 1912

The famous words of Pulitzer, he of the  renowned  ‘Nobel equivalent’ prize in journalism, have an ironic meaning today as the  old fashioned media struggles to maintain itself as a force in  the USA.  Hugh Hewitt has a brilliant, even elegiac piece, on a brave attempt by Colombia School of Journalism to  produce new and competitive journalists with specialist  skills.

Hewitt finds all the old problems in just analyzing the 16 students of one intake group. No matter that anywhere in the Western world (even Germany), a solid third of the population is centre right and that  in the US this proportion is a majority. Of the 16 young journos, 11 voted for John Kerry and just one for George Bush.  All 16 thought it obvious that Bush is something of a “dolt”, despite he has a Yale degree, a Harvard MBA and  defeated four consecutive Democratic candidates the entire international media judged to be a lot “smarter” than himself.  All were for homosexual marriage. None own a gun. Very few attend religious services.  

So there is no more hope of intellectual or ideological diversity coming out of this group of supposedly “new” journalists than the present MSM: a conformist echo-chamber, where a single left-centre “progressive” viewpoint dominates all reportage.

The fact the profession is rapidly becoming “feminized” ( over 70% of new journalistic candidates are women)  will produce a gender distortion in future reporting as well. If you accept the left’s view that we  can only first speak from our racio-gender perspective, wait for more reportage as “feelings”. Recent brain studies show women empathize with those in pain, regardless of if those people have done them wrong or not.  This will in future need balancing with a male perspective of ‘earned’ retribution.  Stand by for more incidents such as the BBC reporter who found herself “weeping” as  poor, dear  old terrorist Arafat was flown out of Ramallah. She was reprimanded by the BBC.  A decade from now she will probably be in line for the Pulitzer.

Hewitt’s wanderings through the famed halls of Colombia has uncovered nothing new. Casual research has long shown the mis-reflection  of the  people’s mainstream thoughts by the  left-centre  MSM mirror. Tellingly, a  recent UCLA study  has finally shown this scientifically. The good professors were amazed to discover almost no a major media  player in the USA was other than left-centre.  One of the few exceptions was Fox News. The message is clear. ‘Diversity’ is a great virtue according to the traditional media, as long as that diversity does not include the ideological  variety.

So how will the Colombia programme combat the inexorable decline  in the image of the MSM in the USA as ‘Bias Central’?  The idea is to increase the level of training of the journalists so that they become capable of even finer analysis, research and deep study of whatever it is they are writing about. These “skills” will  place journalists in the MSM back on a pedestal of  ‘truth’ from the mire of biased “news-views” they are now perceived to be in. Hewitt thinks the effort is doomed, and I agree. The very concept of  objective ‘truth’ has been undermined by the relentlessly amoral post-modernism purveyed and pushed by the very same Mainstream Media.

The great aspect of the internet is that it allows enormous numbers of true experts to  publish their own commentary and reportage on news events instantly to a worldwide audience, let alone a local one. No journalist, even if as brilliant as Einstein, can expect to be able to  absorb all the skills that non-media experts possess. Before, it was an extreme struggle to get your views heard. A newspaper could write a thousand wrongs, and one could struggle for an equal number of nights firing off indignant letters to the editor, to be received in total silence. To have, effectively, ones right of reply denied. Journalists could say things were ‘facts’ and then spin those facts. The average person had no way of either checking the ‘fact’ or replying.

Blogging and the internet have provided  a greater democratization of opinion and comment in news than any other invention since perhaps the newswire teletape of over 100 years ago. They truly open the door for “people’s journalism” for the significant proportion of  people, worldwide, who have centre-right social or economic opinions.  There has always been something inherently undemocratic about  the media’s self-appointed, self-anointed ‘expertise’. If you can amass enough capital to own a printing press or run a radio station, you can mobilize, influence and shape  people or even events.  This was the only way to become heard until the revolution of the internet and blogging. Now all you need is a $800 computer – or sometimes, like the pro-democracy bloggers in Iraq, just a cybercafe account. One can only hope that centre-right media in the new internet forms will never assume the monopoly of the old MSM.

The nature of the internet medium will probably prevent that. There will remain a (lesser) place for the  “legacy media” , the great newspapers, the famous news hours, the entertaining news-spinners and the like. Yet those media will never dominate opinion and shape it towards left-centre views again, or be able to exhibit such shameless partisanship without worry of correction.

The Regressives

Andrew West is one of the more thoughtful journalists on the left. He is willing to look at the downside of leftism with candor, if not yet with courage.

He writes, regarding left attitudes to Christians, in the Australian Herald:

"Even worse, progressives and their militantly secular allies in the media, have been extremely patronising toward evangelicals -- indeed, toward most people of faith."

How wrong he is.

He cannot mean  towards the most authoritarian, anti-secular, theocratic, woman-dominating, homophobic, agressive and anti-Western religion commonly known: Political Islam.

Militant Islam has only to bleat, and all the progressive sheep follow. The only religion(s) the multi-cultis despise and condescend regarding are naturally those in the moderate Western mainstream - which includes evangelical Christians for the most part.

My blog is continually bombarded by smug "progressives" trying to point out that evangelicals or Christians generally are "just the same is Wah'aabi Muslims".  Despite there being absolutely no scriptural basis in the Gospels for   forcing conversion on people of other faiths, we are routinely told  the Gospels are basically the same as the Koran, which has an entire full  ideology of war making,  “submission”, infidel tax, dhimmi (apartheid) status and much else.

I grant that perhaps 400 years ago there was less to choose between these two religious systems in their militancy, scriptural sanction or not, but Christianity has moved on. Islam has not - nor are the "progressives" pushing it.

Meanwhile the "progressives" continue trying to wreck the  spiritual/philosophical foundations of the Western mainstream...oblivious to the fact that more Western "progressives" are converting to Islam (even in Australia, I will bet) than Muslims anywhere are convinced to join the "progressive" ship.

The progressives not only lose out on the birthrate in this matter, but the brain-conversion rate too.

For their collusion in wounding and weakening the most dynamically moderate society the world  has seen,  Western "progressives" would be better called the "regressives". Churchill foresaw the Iron Curtain - but they are blind to the Iron Crescent.

A Tale of Two Sickies

It’s been very interesting to compare the approach  to public information between Ariel Sharon’s medical team and that of  last year’s  mortal crisis of his enemy, Yassir Arafat.

Arafat was whisked off to France with an “undisclosed ailment” . Doctors treated him in  absolute secrecy, gave almost no medical evidence of his condition apart from the very vague and allowed a controversy to blow up after his death when the cause  of  his passing was hidden from the public.  Perhaps the persistent media reports that Arafat, who like many Middle Easterners found it hard to distinguish between riding a camel and  plonking a peachy  male rump and thus   died of AIDS , were not wholly unfounded.

Compare with the  detailed medical briefings, almost to the point of breach of patient confidentiality, with Sharon’s medical team. Surely this can have nothing to do with the fact that Israel is the only democracy in the region, with a full and vibrant free press?

Meanwhile the   MSM has been hammering away at the meta-lie that Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque started the Intifada. Typical of these comments are Scotland's The Sunday Herald who state , “he ignited the Intafada  of 2000 with his provocative visit….”. My guess is  over 70% of Europeans believe this  trash, proof indeed that propaganda can work well in democracies.

A  better view of the truth can be found in members’ of Araft’s government own words:

“Whoever  thinks that the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is  wrong.. . . This Intifada was planned in advance, ever since President  Arafat's return from the Camp David  negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President  Clinton.” (Palestinian Communications Minister Imad Al-Faluji,  3 March 2001. Translated by MEMRI )

War Photo of 2005

A U.S.  soldier  hugs and talks to a dying  Iraqi girl, aged 3, one of many  Iraqi children  blown to bits by a   suicide bomber when they surrounded a US Humvee that was distributing sweets and toys.

The soldier is also running to try and reach U.S. medics who could better help the girl than the nearby Iraqi hospital, but she died in his arms. The US soldiers were incensed and kept saying, “Why did he wait till we were with the the kids? Why did he not just target us when we drove away?”

Which brings me to my  one of my New Year Resolutions for 2006.  I  was born just after World War 2.  Some of my earliest memories were looking  at the pictures of Dad’s huge ‘Colliers’ World War II picture book that my family had – a war he participated in. I remember how obvious it was to me that the Nazis, with their death’s head  cap badges, their sinister  emblems, their uncanny knack for the haut couture and pagentry of fear and force were people of  plain and pure evil. Any small child could notice that, long before he could read the captions of what those fascists actually did.

The same pictures of the black hooded jihadis, with  their Arabic scrawlings of death wishes on their scarves , their bombings and beheadings, evoke in me now towards the end of my life the same recognition of looking at pure evil, at an articulated love of death. In 2006 I will continue to fight them with my feeble pen and failing wit and do that way the little I can, to hasten the defeat of  Islamic fascists. I hope to continue to pour scorn, ridicule  and venom on the dupes and allies they have among the so-called “progressives” of the world and if my words hurt either of these  groups in 2006,  all the better.

Butt of the Year 2005

The 2005 award for Best Ally in the War on Islamic Fascism goes to Prime Minister John Howard and Australia in general.

Quote of the Year goes to historian Victor Davis Hanson: “The more left-wing the Westerner, the more tolerant he is of right-wing Islamic extremism.”

Sisterhood Solidarity Award, 2005:  “Every minute in the world a woman is raped, and she has no one to blame but herself.” Sheikh Feiz Muhammad

Most Hopeless European of the Year goes to ex- French Prime  Minister and drafter of the failed EU constitution,  Valerie Giscard d’Estaing:  “It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text.”

Dying Like..... Cows

My usual Xmas safari work brought me into contact with the vicious drought ravaging most of Kenya. The Maasai Mara National Reserve was bone dry, with Cape Buffalo beginning to show tell-tale ribs and pelvis bones. They are the first to die off in a drought. However, there is ample grazing in the Mara for Maasai tribal herds, if needed. Yet the rains are months away. The situation will get far worse there.

The situation in the north of Kenya was grim. On two trips to Shaba National Reserve we found a half dozen emaciated, immobile cows abandoned to their fate (to be eaten alive by hyenas). The grazing is almost non-existant, even in the boundries of the game reserves. More depressing was to pass Isiolo and see a cheerful young Borana woman who sells fruit to our camps. She was gaunt, her skin without the shiny, smooth glow of African health. She was obviously stricken with AIDS.

“Fatima” is a Muslim and there is a serious problem with HIV in Muslim communities. This is buried even deeper under “speak-no, see-no” taboos than among Christian Africans. “Fatima” ( not her real name) said she had recently had “typhoid”, the usual Kenyan shorthand to explain away a bout of AIDS. Last time I saw her , she looked almost double in weight.

Meanwhile, the friendly mechanic who rebuilt the safari body of my Land-Rover passed away from AIDS on Sunday, aged about 26 years old. It’s been a sobering start to the New Year.

Kenya badly needs donations to help in famine relief. Friends of Kenya is one site where tax-deductible (USA only) donations may be made. Give generously.

Hajj-iography

As has become normal, CNN presents us with yet another annual “Hajj” documentary. Are the lefties at CNN trying to convert us? More likely they are just displaying the usual dhimmi behaviour.   The whole crew are there. Happy converts, compliant Muslim women, ooh-ing and aah-ing Western reporters wearing headscarves  asking  patsy questions.

Notice when CNN does anything with Catholics, the questions abound about homosexual priests, child abuse, the role of women.Not even Pope John Paul’s funeral commentary was spared this sort of grilling. Catholicism of course is a cornerstone of Western civilization, something the left is trying to deconstruct as fast as possible.

Not once is anyone asked how they feel about women being excluded from mosques or the from the  kabaa (  housing a meteorite, dating from when pre-Islam was a religion that worshipped star and moon gods). Or  how the “peaceful” religion deals with suicide bombers and so on.

The left is fascinated by militant Islam for sinister reasons. Firstly, Islam gives vent to their fantasies of control, domination and being dominated that are at the heart of their illiberality. Secondly, Islam is  anti-capitalist and anti-Western which dovetails into the secret and open loathing they feel for the capital and social markets. Thirdly, Islam appeals to counter the agnostic and atheist voids that the hard left often have in their materialist approach to life.  Lastly, since the left is motivated above all by anti-Americanism, Islam’s pathological hatred of the USA fit’s quite nicely, thank you very much.

Pity CNN did not take time off to show these Iranian adherents of the “religion of peace” chanting away in religious rapture during this years Hajj in Mecca.

Crowd: Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel!

Man: All together now: Death to America! Death to Israel!

Crowd: Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel!

Polling Around

Here in Kenya the government always complains whenever opinion polls are published that seem to eternally show it as unpopular. You figure that’s just politics. Yet, perhaps they have a grievance. The Bush administration surely does. Associated Press, one of the world’s major  “impartial” news agencies, is forever publishing polls in conjunction with Ipsos, that show the “majority” of Americans are opposed to almost everything the Republicans  have as an agenda.

That smells like a rat, given that US politics  has been largely centre-right for two decades now. And you would be right to hold your nose.  The latest AP/Ipsos poll shows “most” Americans think President Bush should have a  court order to wiretap suspected terrorists who are US citizens by 56% to 42%.

The trouble, as you can check from the Ipsos poll data at their website , is they managed to ask  42% Democrats and only 30% Republicans, in their poll sample. No wonder they got the answer they did.

Ipsos self-description is “a non-partisan, objective, survey-based research company made up of campaign and political polling veterans.” Really? It’s an old media sales trick of the MSM to commission “polls” whose pre-determined and  cooked outcome will be used to sell media to Joe Public, via “shock” results.

Bush Derangement Syndrome Expands

After the worldwide emphasis on Bush “ignoring” black people in Hurricane Katrina, it’s surprising that two of the USA’s most liberal and influential papers, who led the MSM stampede to vilify Bush as a racist, have now published contrary stories. Check The NY and LA Times revisionism here.

In fact it seems, after exhaustive research, that white people died in more numbers, proportionally, in New Orleans, than blacks.  

“Of the 380 bodies formally identified in New Orleans thus far,” the Los Angeles paper said, “a disproportionate number were white -- as measured against the city's population.”

If the maligning of GWB was not more evidence of Bush Derangement Syndrome, we could now say we have conclusive proof that Bush hates white people. Somehow we can’t see the worldwide media running very far with this startling fact.

Naked Arabs

*Sometimes I have to slap myself to keep my blog from becoming stodge. The perils of lonely pajama vigils, one supposes.

It seems Islam was a lot more fun about 100 years ago, these gals, from vintage arab postcards are seriously fly. No wonder those boys in Australia are rioting, if this is what you are banned from dating in the guise of  “protecting my sister “ from infidels.

I am not sure however about the purdah pic.   I can’t really get turned on with thru-the-bars-fondling, It causes more than razor-rash  when you go for a little lunge…….. but it obviously heightened the senses  in ways that are lost on us poor kaffirs. (Thanks to  Beautiful Atrocities)

Racial or Religious Riots?

Confirmation, if any were needed, that the Australian “race riots” are actually  more “Muslim riots” than anything else. The Australian carries an excellent analysis of the failure of multiculturalism with the following very illuminating data:

“Studies by Monash University [show]…. the most revealing test of immigrant integration, the marriage rate….. by the end of the '90s less than 10 per cent of second-generation marriages of people of European descent were to someone from their parents' country. Much the same was true of immigrants from south and east Asia. Only 6 per cent of Indians married within their ethnic group, as did only 18 per cent of Chinese. In short, most immigrants, whatever their race, married Australians of other nationalities.

However, for the Lebanese, of whom most of marriageable age were Muslims, these figures were reversed. No less than 74 per cent of Lebanese brides and 61 per cent of Lebanese grooms married within their own ethnic group. Moreover, these figures had increased since the early '90s, when they were about six percentage points lower.”

Is it racist to point out the extraordinary difficulty most Muslims seem to have have worldwide, in marrying and accommodating tolerantly to people of other faiths?

MSM Watch, Part 394

Just as predicted, the world media mis-information of the Australian riots as a “race” problem  is shown up just 48 hours later ,with the news that Muslim gangs have attacked, and in once case burned down, four Christian churches  in Sydney.  

“A community hall linked to a Uniting Church was burned to the ground early yesterday, carol-singers were spat on and church buildings peppered with gunfire.” Read it all.

Elsewhere, Agence France Press shows the hopeless bias of world media, who no longer bother to hide their naked distortions. Here is what they report, December 14th:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - One day before Iraq’s historic parliamentary elections, US President George W. Bush defiantly defended his case for war and said he would preemptively attack another country if he deemed it necessary.

Here is what Bush actually said:

“In an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”

UPDATE at 12/14/05 5:32:29 pm:

The story linked above has been edited by AFP to remove the outrageously biased headline, but the original is still posted here :

Hardy Perennial

Lana Hampton asks a question that perennially puzzles and troubles me. Why do black Americans vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party, the party of slavery and Southern racism and not  Lincolns’ Republican party, which brought freedom?  It appears illogical and one hopes it is not the same cultural syndrome we suffer politically in Africa. That is, government does little for us, even abuses us, but we long for it to get bigger  and  “do more”.  Democrats in the USA are certainly the party for that.

"Race" Riots In Australia

The problem is not merely as the MSM spin it, one of "racism" by white Australians. The fact is Islam contains a strong superiority complex that is very akin to classic racism, in the ideas of "umma", "dar el harb", "dhimmi", “kafir” and so on. These could be characterized as a kind of "socio-spiritual racism".

Indeed, given Islam’s' patriarchal bias,  ideas of male-female relations,  religious inclination to umma ‘apartheid’, and ready invocation of  retaliatory violence, the behavior of the Australian Lebanese  gangs and groups in continuously harassing and insulting non-Muslim women is par.  It is this behavior that seems to have mostly   sparked the Australian riots.  

The mix of religious and social ideas contained in mainstream Islam is simply incompatible with Western belief systems. Couple this with the exclusionary, closed world of male Islam with its innate superiority complex (the “dhimmi/kafir” idea) and you have all the elements of social combustion.

The liberal elite have a hard time understanding this, but the plainer people of Cronulla are actually going straight to the point, albeit in disgusting ways one cannot approve of.  Also what is not explained by the multi-cultural template is that there are Pacific Islanders, Orientals and others involved in the  crowds in Cronulla, and they are not being attacked by the “whites”. Indeed , according to live blogs,some seem to support the actions against Muslim males.

However these things are spun by the MSM and multi-cultis, the plain facts are that Muslim society is the one that is  mainly exclusionary, that rejects modernism, let alone post-modernism and has supremacist ideas  far deeper than the rioting white yob's tattoos on Cronulla beach.

Enviro-sense

Now that the greatest producer of hot air on the planet, the  Montreal climate change conference, has concluded, some wise words from the top science editor of  the BBC Online, hardly a right wing source of media:

David Whitehouse writes in  BBC Focus :

“... for every glacier in the Alps or Greenland that shows signs of shrinking, there are others elsewhere in the world that show signs of growing… the mantra of 'global warming happening due to humanity's flagrant release of greenhouse gases' is now an established political correctness. Many  [scientists]…… realise there are significant areas of doubt but if they voice that doubt they run the risk of losing research funds. When scientists are afraid to express doubts we are all in trouble, human-made global warming or not.”

Of course here in Kenya, our MSM media repeatedly parrot the meta-story progapagated  by the environmental left of impeding disaster, all caused by Bush.  It is almost impossible to find dissent to this highly incredible “news”.

Light Headed

There is deep silence in most liberal media when nut-case  President of Iran Ahamedinejad  is shown on the BBC World  TV on 7th December, informing clerics  that during his recent and highly nasty UN speech, he was surrounded by  an Islamic “halo of light” .

"(An Iranian) said when you began with the words 'in the name of God,' I saw that you became surrounded by a light until the end [of the speech]," Ahmadinejad appears to say in the video. "I felt it myself, too. I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there, and for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink."

"They were astonished as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic." The fact the  UN delegates were probably too gobsmacked to blink,  by this  Holocaust denier who calls Israel a “tumour” to be  “wiped off the map” and is seeking Nukes to do it.

Whilst the appeasement media lined up dozens of spinners and commentators over the false and absurd “God’s command to Bush to  invade Iraq” hearsay, the BBC clip has sunk like a complete stone  (even on the BBC website) and has been  ignored.

Wondercat

This is Smudge, born    98% African Wild Cat , in Maasailand,  Southern Kenya. Her parents  belonged to a wonderful old  Maasai katmeister called “Ole Simba” which, appropriately enough,  means “Mr. Lion.”  Her scientific race is Felis Lybrica Sylvestris: there are a few dozen sub-species of these cats in Africa. Closely related to Kenya’s  Sokoke Cat breed. Smudge probably has a few domestic genes from the spread  of feral cats into Maasai territory.

I have owned  cats all my life. This is the most amazing cat I have ever  known. She is exceptionally clever, with an almost simian intelligence.  Her only modes are “asleep” and “alert”. Felis Lybrica eat large amounts of insects in the wild. She hunts every sort in my garden, from extraordinary distances like 25 yards away.  Her eyesight is amazing. She also kills lizards, snakes, rats and  loves corn. Smudge climbs trees at night and hauls birds  out of their nests, and can catch flying ones by leaping like a Caracal. During the rainly season, she catches winged termites.

Exceptionally social ( was brought up surrounded by Maasai tribesmen) and loving, she nonetheless has wild cat  attitude. You will  get a playful nip and a swipe for various “offences”. Delights in attacking long hair,  dangling feet and much else. Explores all boxes, burrows, tunnels and the like a weasel.  Climbs trees  like a python. Plays like lion cubs do,  lots of fake gentle bites and claw extensions.  I love her.