One by one, the East End parishes and boroughs of London are becoming small de facto Islamic Republics. The latest  – not the only or the first as this report suggests – is Tower Hamlets. The police fear to act in them. Sharia law is enforced in them.

From the Telegraph:

Britain’s poorest borough …  has elected [Lutfer] Rahman as its first executive mayor, with almost total power over its £1 billion budget. At the count last night, one very senior figure in the Tower Hamlets Labour Party said: “It really is Britain’s Islamic republic now.”

Lutfer Rahman has links with “a Muslim supremacist body, the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) – which believes, in its own words, in –

transforming the “very infrastructure of [European] society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed… from ignorance to Islam.”

He won a democratic election, standing as an Independent, but –

We should be clear what this result was, and was not. It was a decisive victory. But it was not much of an endorsement by the borough’s people. Turnout, at 25.6%, was astonishingly low, with most voters (particularly the white majority, and they still are a majority) unaware of, indifferent to or turned off by the process. Lutfur’s 23,000-odd votes are only about 13 per cent of Tower Hamlets’ electorate.

It was not a victory for any sort of democracy.

Was it not? Okay, not a “victory” for the electorate, in the sense that most of the local population probably don’t want a jihadist in power, but if most of them couldn’t be bothered to vote then democracy hands the victory to those who do bother.

It was the execution of a careful and sophisticated plan by a small, well-financed and highly-organised cabal to seize control of a London borough. It deployed not just volunteers from the IFE and other bodies but also people paid to campaign by Lutfur’s business backers. Someone also paid for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of copies of the most pernicious literature ever seen in a British election, in which [Lutfer Rahman’s Labour Party opponent] Mr [Helal] Abbas was falsely smeared as a wife-beater, a bankrupt, a racist and and an insulter of Islam.

Britain has dhimmified itself. It has capitulated to jihad. Most Britons, of all classes, either passively accept Islamization or actively promote it. Prince Charles loves it. The Archbishop of Canterbury worked to have sharia law “partially”  adopted, and succeeded.

Fear of offending Muslims holds the nation in thrall.

That is real Islamophobia. Unfortunately there is all too little of the alleged sort – criticism, derision, outspoken rejection, organized opposition – that Muslims whine about. A cowering Western nation is a triumph for the jihadists, proving the efficacy of their terrorism.

So this is what the nation of Nelson and Wellington has come to? No spirit to resist? No pride, no courage?

This is Prince Charles, heir to the throne of Great Britain.

The meat he sells from his estates, under the label Duchy Originals, is halal – ie. the animals are killed according to the ritual requirements of Islam.

Europe, sick with guilt and slowly dying of the wrong cure, Socialism, its hopeless condition complicated by the infection of Islam, has been able for more than sixty years to indulge itself with sweet consolations – lavish social security benefits, early retirement, high pensions, “free” health care, long and frequent vacations, paternity leave – because strong, prosperous America was paying the big bills and guarding the door.

While Europe abused, resented, envied, denigrated, despised and mocked it, America steadfastly kept its watch. America created wealth. America paid for the defense of the West.

Then came a change. America made the terrible mistake of electing Barack Obama to the presidency.

At first Europe cheered, maliciously pleased that America would be less free, less strong, less prosperous, more like Europe itself. Envy was satisfied.

But slowly the effects of  a weakened, poorer, less free America began to be felt, first in the more vulnerable European economies – Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain – but soon to some degree in all of them. The gleeful Europeans began to feel the pinch. Lower social security handouts, shorter vacations, longer working hours and years? How could this be done to them, this sudden austerity, this deprivation? It was intolerable, outrageous. Violent protest was called for.

They had not noticed the link between their comfort and all that they despised about America.

What happens in the US elections this November is crucial, not only for America, but for the whole world.

This is the subject of an article in today’s PajamasMedia by David Solway, the Canadian columnist whose political comment is always astute and apposite. The whole column needs to be read here.

He writes, in part:

The US [is] a country struggling for its very soul and teetering on the edge of economic and political meltdown. The “culture wars” between left and right, traditionalists and post-modernists, individualists and statists, are common to every Western nation, but in America the outcome of these wars will determine the fate not only of the country but of the entire Western world. Like it or not, how it goes with America is how it goes with the rest of us.

Europe, as many believe, is almost, if not already, lost. … It could no more resist the Islamic onslaught that is demographically absorbing the continent than it could prevent itself from returning to its authoritarian past in the form of an unelected transnational bureaucracy operating out of the Berlaymont Building [which houses the European Commission, the body that undemocratically governs the European Union] … Britain is the hollow shell of a once great imperial hegemon, studded with mosques and vulnerable to shariah creep, reduced to a condition of plebeian boorishness … minus the slightest vestige of national pride and vigor — in short, a country whose prime minister takes paternity leave. …

The fact is that the remnant Lilliputian West has long depended on the Brobdingnagian stature and power of the United States to ensure its solvency, security, and ultimate survival. …

Envy and resentment of this sprawling and robust — and necessary — giant among the nations were the motivating factors. For without the brawny presence of the United States in the Hobbesian jungle of world politics, neither Europe, Britain, nor the former Commonwealth dominions … could have defended their Enlightenment heritage or relied upon their own feeble military resources to guarantee their longevity. Gratitude, however, does not come easily. Contempt and self-infatuation are far more attractive emotional reactions for the parochial accessories of the grand historical drama. All those in the West who picket American embassies, deplore American ambition, write anti-American articles, columns, editorials and books, and cry “Down with America” are precisely the sycophantic beneficiaries of American strength and munificence.

Europe … responded with unadulterated joy to the election of a statist, far left American president who apologized for American exceptionalism, adopted the socialist model of governance, pledged to reduce military expenditures, and brought his country to the brink of bankruptcy. Europeans did not realize — or did not want to acknowledge — that their “advanced” socialist experiment in welfare governance depended in large part upon American military spending for the continent’s defense, which permitted a liberated fiscal surplus to be invested in social programs, early retirement benefits, and a cradle-to-grave security network.

This is now changing. With the proposed reduction of American military spending … Barack Obama no longer looks like a godsend but a weak and untrustworthy ally — in other words, like a European — who is depriving the continent of its parasitical future.

Regrettably, it is not only Europe that faces the specter of political and economic collapse. For America itself may be entering the tragic denouement of its 234 year odyssey. The “coming darkness” was not prepared overnight …  Nevertheless, the consummation of this trajectory toward radical implosion arrived with the stunning 2008 electoral victory of Barack Obama, following hard upon the Democratic Party assuming control of both houses of Congress. …

It seems as if the country’s governing and intellectual elite has abandoned its responsibility for the preservation of America’s social and political integrity, surrendering by daily increments to the forces of dissolution both within and without its borders. America’s enemies couldn’t have planned it any better.

This is the reason that the November 2 congressional and Senate elections are absolutely critical to stopping and reversing the downward trend which Obama and the Democrats have accelerated. The momentum of calamity must be turned back and the ground prepared for a colossal changing of the guard in the presidential election of 2012. …

Allowing the Democrats to chart the infernal spiral to catastrophe is no longer a viable option. And giving Obama a second term would be terminal.

Are we now witnessing the beginning of a new assertiveness … or the hastening of precipitous decline? Is the great adventure gaining its second wind or is it merely winding down? Will the future be relinquished to an increasingly powerful China and an imminent Islamic caliphate to slug it out for world domination? Or will America shake off its ideological stupor and rise from the debris of its own making as, to our great relief, the once and future republic?

Was anyone really fooled into believing that Obamacare would provide more of the nation with better health at lower cost?

Now that the Health Care legislation has been passed and we can at last see what’s in it, as Nancy Pelosi promised we would, a great many bad things are being found in there. And a great many undesirable consequences are emerging.

Just one example of a nasty restriction buried deep: You may not be allowed to pay for treatment out of your own pocket. Section 2713 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act bans you from getting certain treatments at your own expense. You cannot buy immunizations and certain gynecological screenings, for instance, unless you first get government permission. (For more on this, see The Daily Caller here.)

And one highly undesirable consequence will be a severe shortage of doctors, as Investor’s Business Daily points out:

One of the marks of national health care is the waiting-list problem that plagues Britain and Canada. Delays in treatment have caused suffering and, in some cases, death. Soon, we’ll be waiting for doctors too.

Last week, the Association of American Medical Colleges reported that the looming doctor shortage will be worse than previous reports claim because of ObamaCare.

Rather than “a baseline shortage of 39,600 doctors in 2015, current estimates bring that number closer to 63,000, with a worsening of shortages through 2025,” says the medical college group’s Center for Workforce Studies.

Unless the country acts now, says the Center for Workforce Studies, we will be more than 91,000 doctors short in just 10 years. The number includes a shortage of 45,000 primary care physicians and 46,000 surgeons and medical specialists. …

Two years ago, the physician search firm of Merritt, Hawkins & Associates estimated that by 2020 the U.S. will need 90,000 to 200,000 more doctors than we will have. At that point, the wait to see a doctor for a routine visit would be three to four months. [Optimistically – JB.]

A year after the Merritt Hawkins report, Joseph Stubbs, president of the American College of Physicians, the country’s second-largest doctor group, talked about the arrival of “a catastrophic crisis” even before ObamaCare had been passed and signed. …

As alarming as those numbers are, the reality might be worse. The ranks will be thinned as physicians simply refuse to work under ObamaCare. In August 2009, 45% of doctors told our IBD/TIPP Poll that they would consider leaving their practices or taking early retirement if the Democrats’ version of reform were to become law. And it did.

The doctors cited various reasons behind their decisions to leave. But the most common explanations centered around the increased costs under the Democrats’ plan, the bureaucratic controls it would bring [mountains of paperwork, as in Britain – JB] and its lack of protection from runaway malpractice lawsuits. …

There’s an English proverb: “Every man at thirty is a fool or a physician.”

One might say that under Obamacare, only a fool would become a physician.

This video, which must be one of the most appalling ever made – sadistic, murderous, terroristic – is nevertheless being called, with justification, “the most honest political ad of all time”.

It seems at first to have been made in a spirit of bad-taste frivolity, possibly as satire, but it becomes clear that it is an expression of extreme hate and intolerance, produced in deadly earnest.

It proves beyond all question that the Global Warming Cultists are not just bigots and fools, but also profoundly anti-human.

At PajamasMedia, Zombie explains how it came to be made:

“10:10″ is a campaign to get people around the world to lower their carbon consumption by 10% in the year 2010. Global Warming and all that, you see.

It’s quite a large, well-organized movement, funded in part by the British government.

This morning, the 10:10 campaign released “No Pressure,” a much-anticipated video promoting the notion of compliance to the carbon-reduction drive, a video scripted by famed British screenwriter Richard Curtis (Notting Hill, Mr. Bean, etc.) and produced by a professional film crew with top-notch actors.

However…

Within minutes of its unveiling earlier today, “No Pressure” caused such an uproar that it was taken offline while the producers issued an apology.

Luckily, enterprising bloggers saved copies and have been frantically re-uploading them to YouTube, to prevent the video from disappearing down the memory hole.

Why? Because no video has ever provided such a revealing and shocking peek into the mindset of the Global Warming alarmists.

Before I say any more, you absolutely need to see the video itself:

What do you think? An effective way to convince people to lower their carbon footprint — or final proof that the Green movement are a bunch of crypto-fascists with violent fantasies of exterminating their opponents …?

To see a series of videos and ads which show the thinking behind “No Pressure”, go to Ed Driscoll’s article, also at PajamasMedia, here.

If we lose the video on our site, try going there to see it.

Also worth reading is an article by James Delingpole, revealing more about the video’s makers and their intentions, here.

Among his comments is this:

With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

Evil as it is, if the reaction to the video means that the Global Warming Movement has blown itself up, it will unintentionally have done great good. That may be too much to hope for, but at least it has discredited the 10:10 campaign itself, and perhaps made it harder for the ecofascists to go on preaching their destructive faith.

The Pope is in Britain making speeches, telling whoppers.

Here are comments on some of the things he’s been saying by an atheist, Tom Chivers, writing in the Telegraph:

He’s barely been here two hours and already he has said this:

“Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny’ (Caritas in Veritate, 29).”

The facts: The Catholic Church colluded with Hitler. It could have issued, but would not, an edict to German Catholics forbidding them to assist in the mass murder of the Jews. Almost all the Protestant churches (the exceptions being one or two small sects) actively supported the Nazis, not reluctantly but enthusiastically. A very few individual Christian clerics made personal protests and paid a personal price for doing so, but the churches stood with the regime.

Yet here is the scholarly Pope Benedict XVI blaming atheists and their “extremism”. He either believes or pretends to believe the persistent rumor that Hitler was an atheist, and that the National Socialist movement in Germany was generally atheist. In fact, Hitler was a Catholic.

So you heard it here first, people; the Nazis wished to eradicate God from society, and were “atheist extremists”. Those presumably would be the Nazis run by one A. Hitler, who in his book Mein Kampf said: “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

Hitler also said in a speech in Munich: “My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognizsed these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders.” There are dozens more quotes along these lines here.

There are indeed. But then Chivers goes on:

Let me stress: I am not saying the horrors of Nazism were the fault of Christianity. That would be idiotic. They were the fault of Hitler and his coterie … and, yes, of too many ordinary Germans. But to blame atheism for them is not only idiotic …  but demonstrably wrong: Hitler, and most Europeans of the time, were Christian, and doubtless many thought (wrongly; we can all agree that) that they were doing God’s work.

Not the fault of Christianity? There  Chivers is wrong. The Holocaust was long prepared for by Christianity. Two thousand years of anathematizing the Jews and persecuting them with impunity throughout Christendom culminated in the Final Solution.

We must also point out that far from it being “exclusion of God and religion”, it was Christianity itself that kept Europe in darkness for a thousand years.

The Pope dares to speak of  a “truncated vision of man and of society”? Throughout the Middle Ages, the would-be totalitarian Catholic Church punished free thought, blindfolded dissenting visionaries, and “truncated” uncountable numbers of men, women and children literally with sword, rack, and fire. Its victims were Christians and Jews. But atheism is the dangerous idea, the destructive force?

Pope Benedict XVI is neither ignorant nor stupid. But he has given his life to a fantastic dogma, and gained his eminence through it, and he cannot let that stern corrector and spreader of light Reality burst into the Gothick darkness in which he lives and reigns.

One of his cardinals, Walter Kasper, aroused indignation – to our surprise – with some remarks he made, and was dropped from the tour retinue, or “couldn’t come because he has gout”.  What he’d said was that when you arrive in Britain “you think at times that you’ve landed in a Third World country.” (A view that’s not hard to justify, actually.)

He also said that an “aggressive new atheism” was rife in British society.

It’s true that although Britain has an established church of which the monarch is the head, it has long been an irreligious country on the whole. But by no means can it be described as aggressively atheist, unless a few intellectuals like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens speak for the nation, which we don’t think they do.

What everyone – the Pope, the too-candid cardinal, and the newspaper columnists – seem to be forgetting is that Islam is spreading in Britain. The number of Muslims is increasing rapidly by immigration, birth and proselytizing. Successive governments have facilitated Muslim immigration. The heir to the throne is positively partial to Islam. The Archbishop of Canterbury urged that sharia courts be allowed to operate as a parallel legal system, which it now is, to the extreme disadvantage of subjugated Muslim women who might have hoped for some relief under British law.

But don’t expect the Pope, the Queen, the Archbishop, or opinionated cardinals to say anything critical of Islam.

It’s safer to fulminate against atheism.

Jillian Becker    September 16, 2010

In the vocabulary of the militant international Left, the word “peace” is a code word for “pro-tyranny” and “anti-freedom”.

This comes from a must-read article, titled The Peace Racket, by Bruce Bawer in City Journal (reprinted in the current issue from Summer 2007):

We need to make two points about this movement at the outset. First, it’s opposed to every value that the West stands for—liberty, free markets, individualism—and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values. Second, we’re talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations. It is also waging an aggressive, under-the-media-radar campaign for a cabinet-level Peace Department in the United States. Sponsored by Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich (along with more than 60 cosponsors), House Resolution 808 would authorize a Secretary of Peace to “establish a Peace Academy,” “develop a peace education curriculum” for elementary and secondary schools, and provide “grants for peace studies departments” at campuses around the country. If passed, the measure would catapult the peace studies movement into a position of extraordinary national, even international, influence.

The Peace Racket’s boundaries aren’t easy to define. It embraces scores of “peace institutes” and “peace centers” in the U.S. and Europe, plus several hundred university peace studies programs. …

At the movement’s heart … are programs whose purported emphasis is on international relations. Their founding father is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research five years later. Invariably portrayed in the media as a charismatic and (these days) grandfatherly champion of decency, Galtung is in fact a lifelong enemy of freedom. In 1973, he thundered that “our time’s grotesque reality” was—no, not the Gulag or the Cultural Revolution, but rather the West’s “structural fascism.” He’s called America a “killer country,” accused it of “neo-fascist state terrorism,” and gleefully prophesied that it will soon follow Britain “into the graveyard of empires.” …

Fittingly, he urged Hungarians not to resist the Soviet Army in 1956, and his views on World War II suggest that he’d have preferred it if the Allies had allowed Hitler to finish off the Jews and invade Britain.

Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America’s arrogant view of itself as “a model for everyone else,” he’s long held up certain countries as worthy of emulation—among them Stalin’s USSR, whose economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West’s. He’s also a fan of Castro’s Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for “break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron grip.” …

His all-time favorite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese loved life under Mao: after all, they were all “nice and smiling.” While “repressive in a certain liberal sense,” he wrote, Mao’s China was “endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood.” Why, China showed that “the whole theory about what an ‘open society’ is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of ‘democracy’—and it will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master teacher in such subjects.”  [See our post, Mao in the White House, October 15, 2009, for glimpses of what Mao’s China was really like.]  …

Galtung’s use of the word “peace” to legitimize totalitarianism is an old Communist tradition. …

The people running today’s peace studies programs give a good idea of the movement’s illiberal, anti-American inclinations. The director of Purdue’s program is coeditor of Marxism Today, a collection of essays extolling socialism; Brandeis’s peace studies chairman has justified suicide bombings; the program director at the University of Missouri authorized a mass e-mail urging students and faculty to boycott classes to protest the Iraq invasion; and the University of Maine’s program director believes that “humans have been out of balance for centuries” and that “a unique opportunity of this new century is to engage in the creation of balance and harmony between yin and yang, masculine and feminine energies.” (Such New Age babble often mixes with the Marxism in peace studies jargon.)

What these people teach remains faithful to Galtung’s anti-Western inspiration. First and foremost, they emphasize that the world’s great evil is capitalism—because it leads to imperialism, which in turn leads to war. …

Students acquire a zero-sum picture of the world economy: if some countries and people are poor, it’s because others are rich. They’re taught that American wealth derives entirely from exploitation and that Americans, accordingly, are responsible for world poverty.

If the image of tenured professors pushing such anticapitalist nonsense on privileged suburban kids sounds like a classic case of liberals’ throwing stones at their own houses, get a load of this: America’s leading Peace Racket institution is probably the University of Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies—endowed by and named for the widow of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, the ultimate symbol of evil corporate America. It was the Kroc Institute, by the way, that in 2004 invited Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan to join its faculty, only to see him denied a U.S. visa on the grounds that he had defended terrorism. [He has since been granted a visa by Hillary Clinton – JB.] …

What’s alarming is that these [peace studies] students don’t plan to spend their lives on some remote mountainside in Nepal contemplating peace, harmony, and human oneness. They want to remake our world. They plan to become politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, teachers, activists. They’ll bring to these positions all the mangled history and misbegotten ideology that their professors have handed down to them. Their careers will advance; the Peace Racket’s influence will spread. And as it does, it will weaken freedom’s foundations.

When Abdi Nur sought political asylum from Somalia in Britain, he was provided with a five-bedroomed house to accommodate himself, his wife, and seven children in the London borough of Brent, for which the tax-payers forked out £900 per week ($1,370).

But Nur considered Brent a “poor area”, and he didn’t think the (free) schooling his kids were getting was good enough. He would rather live among rich people. So he asked for a house in Kensington, one of the most expensive  parts of London.

And he got it – a luxury home valued at £2,100,000 ($3,15o,000), near a good (free) school.

Now his rent is costing tax-payers £8,000 a month ($12,020).

Neither Abdi nor his wife Sayruq has a job. They live entirely on welfare support.

(The MailOnline reports the story with more  details.)

Britain is in dire economic difficulty.

However did that come about?

Now there’s a real head-scratcher!

Within living memory, Britain was an imperial power, its empire so vast that the sun never set on it.

The sun has set, however, not only on Britain’s greatness but on its common-sense.

Here are two illustration of the country’s deplorable decay, told by Melanie Phillips:

Zenna Atkins [chairman of the Office for Standards in Education] said … “If every primary school has one pretty naff [bad] teacher, this helps kids realise that even if you know the quality of authority is not good, you have to learn how to play it…. If kids can manage to cope with one bad teacher that’ll be a good learning lesson for them in life – it is not necessarily an absolute disaster.” …

Can this woman think at all? What, indeed, were her qualifications for this post? … Illiterate at the age of 11, expelled from school and to have failed English O level – totally flunked it, with an unclassified ‘U’. Three times. Ms Atkins’s academic career is marvellously inglorious – she left school with an O level in biology – for the woman now in charge of the nation’s educational standards.

Next:

The Chief Inspector of Probation, Andrew Bridges [said]: “Murders and other serious crimes committed by prisoners released early from jail may have to be ‘accepted’ by the public as part of attempts to keep down the cost of the criminal justice system.” …

Some reoffending — even if it involved “serious” new crimes — could be the price that society had to pay for trying to cut down on the huge cost of the country’s rising prison population, said Mr Bridges …  While acknowledging that prison reduced crime, he described it as a ‘rather drastic form of crime prevention’ and said it was time to consider dealing with more offenders in the community.

He claimed that the public could never be perfectly protected and that the cost of a ‘small amount’ of reoffending could be outweighed by the ‘benefit’ of financial savings to the public purse …

Melanie Phillips concludes:

So Britain has an education regulator who believes that every pupil needs a useless teacher, and a probation regulator who believes the public will just have to get used to being murdered, attacked or burgled.

British  governments, no matter what political party is in power, do not care much for fulfilling their primary duty of protecting the citizenry: they much prefer to use the public purse to provide luxurious living for non-working immigrant Somalians  – see our post below, Where beggars can be choosers.