A guessing game.

In the passage quoted below, guess who the people are, by nationality and/or religion, or position of authority, whichever is suitable to the context. Fill in the blank spaces indicated by dotted lines. (The number of dots is no guide to the number of letters in the missing word.)

Suggest the time period in which it was written.

What would you suppose about the author?

Deep misery and continual oppression are the right words to describe the condition of the …… in the land of their fathers. They are entirely destitute of every legal protection and every means of safety. Instead of security afforded by law, which is unknown in these countries, they are completely under the orders of the …… and the ……,  men whose character and feelings inspire but little confidence from the beginning. It is only the European Consuls who frequently take care of the oppressed, and afford them some protection. With unheard of rapacity tax upon tax is levied on them, and with the exception of Jerusalem, the taxes demanded are arbitrary. Whole communities have been impoverished by the exorbitant claims of the  ……, who, under the most trifling pretences and without being subject to any control, oppress the …… with fresh burdens. In the strict sense of the word the …… are not even masters of their own property. They do not even venture to complain when they are robbed and plundered. Their lives are taken into as little consideration as their property; they are exposed to the caprice of any one; even the smallest pretext, even a harmless discussion, a word dropped in conversation, is enough to cause bloody reprisals. Violence of every kind is of daily occurrence. The chief evidence of their miserable condition is the universal poverty which we remarked in Palestine, and which is here truly astounding. It even causes leprosy among the …… of Palestine, as in former times. Robbed of their means of subsistence from the cultivation of the soil and the pursuit of trade, they exist upon the charity of their brethren in the faith in foreign parts. In a word the state of the …… in Palestine, physically and mentally, is an unbearable one.

The complete quotation and information about who wrote it will be posted soon.

Atheists have become a significant menace  in Britain. They pose so severe a threat that they could “drive religion underground”, according to Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

This is very good news to us, though we confess it comes as a surprise. We had no idea that our fellow atheists in Britain had become so forceful, and suddenly within sight of overwhelming success.

But before we uncork the celebratory champagne and start organizing victory parades, let’s take a closer look at this Phillips guy who’s issuing the warning to the British nation.

Are his judgments sound and his predictions reliable?

What else does he assert?

From the Telegraph, which published an interview with him:

Trevor Phillips … accused Christians, particularly evangelicals, of being more militant than Muslims in complaining about discrimination, arguing that many of the claims are motivated by a desire for greater political influence.

Christians in Britain are more militant than Muslims? Sounds a bit off-beam, that. Have Christians been bombing the London underground, buses, airports, nightclubs? Kidnapping Scottish boys and torturing them to death? Demonstrating aggressively against soldiers returning from battle? We know Muslims have been doing these things, so does Trevor Phillips have secret evidence that Christians have been doing more and worse?

No; keeping such information secret isn’t possible. So – Oh dear! – it looks as if he might have been exaggerating when he said:

People of faith are “under siege” from atheists … attempting to “drive religion underground”.

The Commission he heads is issuing a report tomorrow which, according to the Telegraph, says that some religious groups have been the victims of rising discrimination over the last decade. (We know that this would be true of the Jews, discriminated against and increasingly attacked mainly by Muslims, but the Telegraph report does not tell us whether the report deals with them.)

Mr Phillips went on:

Fundamentalist Christians … are holding increasing sway over the mainstream churches because of the influence of African and Caribbean immigrants with “intolerant” views. In contrast, Muslims are less vociferous because they are trying to integrate into British “liberal democracy”, he said. “Muslim communities in this country are doing their damnedest to try to come to terms with their neighbours to try to integrate and they’re doing their best to try to develop an idea of Islam that is compatible with living in a modern liberal democracy.

They are? Well now, there’s a revelation! And without the Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission saying so, who would ever have supposed it?

“The most likely victim of actual religious discrimination in British society is a Muslim but the person who is most likely to feel slighted because of their religion is an evangelical Christian.”

Wow! More, more … we need to know more about this man and his thoughts. The Telegraph informs us:

Mr Phillips, who is a Salvationist from a strong Christian background, expressed concern over the rise in Britain of anti-religious voices, such as Richard Dawkins, who are intolerant of people of faith.

No. That we know is plain untrue. Richard Dawkins is intolerant of irrational ideas, of “faith” yes, but not of people.

Anyway, “people of faith” are lucky enough to have Mr Phillips and his Commission dedicating themselves to their protection from dangerous atheists like Dawkins.

Phillips said that the Commission is committed to protecting people of faith against discrimination …

Yet this noble aim may be hard to realize because, it transpires, the Commission’s “£70 million annual budget … is to be cut drastically”.

Well, there’s good news again! Not quite warranting champagne, but worth a cheer or two.

Our verdict on this guardian of Equality and Human Rights: Trevor Phillips is misinformed, or lying, or dense, or overestimating the gullibility of Telegraph readers.

Which means we must reluctantly put the unopened champagne back in the refrigerator.

Celebrations are postponed. But still, ye British atheists, fight on! Strike terror into their craven hearts!

Recently seceded from the state of Sudan, South Sudan is to become an independent state on July 9, 2011. The majority of its population is Christian. The north is Muslim. Between the two countries is a disputed oil-rich area where the Muslims are attacking the Christians.

According to the following report by Faith J.H.McDonnell, they are also using proxy forces, notably the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), to attack the western region of South Sudan.

The Lord’s Resistance Army is so atrocious a thing that no words – “atrocious”, “evil” – seem strong enough to convey how evil it is.

The LRA is a Northern Ugandan rebel group led by the now-middle-aged madman Joseph Kony. For over twenty-five years it has been abducting children, and so brutalizing them that they become mindless killing machines. It has used these children to kill hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in Northern Uganda, Southern Sudan, and more recently, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By 2006, the LRA had abducted over 50,000 children to make child soldiers and sex slaves. …

Escaped child soldiers and other LRA abductees frequently have reported seeing Sudan Armed Forces trucks during their time in captivity … delivering food, weapons, and uniforms to LRA commanders. And in recent days, the LRA has teamed up with the Janjaweed, the killers in Darfur, receiving training and weapons at Islamic camps that have been set up there. For although some (usually secular elites, hostile to Christianity) refer to Kony as a “Christian,” his current belief system is a combination of the demonic and Islam.

Kony claims he is possessed by “spirits”. Possession by spirits and Islam – that’s demonic squared!

Details of horrific acts … have been repeated in villages all over East Africa since Kony began taking children in 1986, to ensure himself an ever-replenished army of boys and girls, some as young as five or six years old. …

The rebels gathered all the children together and started killing people right in front of their eyes. They forced the children to kill their own parents. After the slaughter, the boys had to carry large metal barrels, and the girls had to fetch water to fill the barrels. They built fires around the barrels, and while the water was heating up, the children were forced to hack up their parents and fellow children’s bodies and throw their dismembered parts in the boiling water. After some time, the children were then made to eat the flesh. In this way the LRA commanders knew that the children were so traumatized that they would do anything. They would not try to run away because there was nowhere and no one left to which to run.

That’s what happened. The children were forced to cook and eat their own parents. Behold Africa in the 21st century. Still the heart of darkness.

Why are the Muslims using the LRA to destabilize South Sudan?

They are targeting Western Equatoria State, which borders Uganda, because it is so fertile, and has the potential to be the breadbasket for the region. If it is destabilized, it will affect the food supply of the country, as well as lessening the possibilities of profitable commercial agriculture. Khartoum’s proxy militia is also targeting it because it is a strong Christian community. …

The people of Western Equatoria … have always been extremely self-sufficient… Now people are abandoning their homes and attempting to find shelter in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. …

The Equatorians do not want to be dependent on NGOs and the U.N. for their existence. At present they are trying to provide their own security with “arrow boys,” young men armed with nothing but homemade bows and arrows who protect against the well-armed LRA. They want the government to supply them with real arms, but there is little chance of that taking place if only for the reason that the Government of South Sudan is well aware that it is under scrutiny by the global community, and it is always held to a higher standard than the Islamists in Khartoum.

Can this really be true? Is defense with arms now held by “the global community” to be impermissible? Well yes, for some it is – Israel, for instance.

What is really needed to help the people of Western Equatoria State as Khartoum wages its proxy war against them via the LRA is the full implementation of U.S. law found in the “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act” of 2010. In this legislation, which was heartily supported on both sides of the aisle, Congress required the U.S. government to develop a regional strategy supporting multilateral efforts to stop the LRA. The president was to report on the creation of that strategy within six months of the act’s passage.

In November 2010, the Obama administration presented its strategy. The four major objectives were: protect civilians, apprehend Kony and senior commanders, promote the defection and disarmament of LRA fighters (remember these were abducted children), and increase humanitarian access to the region.

A fine strategy that was not implemented. The author of the report has this opinion:

Ending Khartoum’s proxy war on South Sudan would cost far less than our continual bombing of Libya, or our largess to President Mubarak’s successors in Egypt, or our unending jizya to the Palestinian Authority. And in this case, we actually would know that in helping the people of South Sudan we were helping true friends and allies in the fight for secular democracy and religious freedom.

Religious freedom? Freedom from religion is what’s needed. There would still be a struggle for control of oil fields, and men like Joseph Kony would still brutalize and kill for the joy of it. But one persistent excuse for the infliction of massive human suffering would be gone.

Today, on his special day of commemoration, we quote from Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We’ve taken it from PowerLine, where there are more MLK quotations.

Though we have no sympathy with his religious beliefs, we join the acclaim for the achievements of this great humanitarian.

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

George Soros works to destroy the free market liberalism which allowed him to make the colossal fortune he uses to work for its destruction. He does it through a string of organizations, chiefly his Open Society Institute, whose name is Orwellian: it aims to close the open society and establish totalitarian state control.

He has done, and continues to do, much harm in and to America.

He has also done, and continues to do, much harm in and to Europe.

His ambition stretches further yet.

“His goal is a new global imperium … that will be truly totalitarian,”  Srdja Trifkovic said in an address he gave to the H. L. Mencken Club in Baltimore on October 23, 2010.

Trifkovic deplored Soros’s lavish funding for campaigns to legalize cannabis, promote euthanasia, further abortion rights, impose gun control, and abolish the death penalty; and his support for radical feminism, gay activism, and same-sex marriage.

We agree with Trifkovic that Soros has had “an enormous and hideously destructive impact” on the societies he has targeted.

But we strongly disagree with him on how Western civilization could and should be defended.

Trifkovic said:

Soros’s vision is hostile even to the most benign understanding of national or ethnic coherence. … His hatred of religion is the key. He promotes an education system that will neutralize any lingering spiritual yearnings of the young, and promote the loss of a sense of place and history already experienced by millions of Westerners, whether they are aware of that loss or not. Estranged from their parents, ignorant of their culture, ashamed of their history, millions of Westerners are already on the path of alienation that demands every imaginable form of self-indulgence, or else leads to drugs, or suicide, or conversion to Islam or some other cult.

To understand Soros it is necessary to understand globalization as a revolutionary, radical project. In the triumph of liberal capitalism, the enemies of civilization such as Soros have found the seeds of future victory for their paradigm that seeks to eradicate all traditional structures capable of resistance. The revolutionary character of the Open Society project is revealed in its relentless adherence to the mantra of Race, Gender and Sexuality. …

Religion itself is no longer, if it ever was, a “traditional structure capable of resistance” to the post-national totalitarian nightmare envisioned by Soros and the left. The left despises Western religion but promotes Islam in its human-and-civil-rights guise because it helps undermine Western freedoms born of free market liberalism. If Trifkovic believes traditional religion can defend civilization, he is wrong.

Christianity or Judaism offer nothing to counter the zeitgeist of ever-loosening social constraints. “Spirituality” is a commodity marketed variously even within the traditional religions. The last bastion of civilization – of voluntary collective polities, democracies of free people in pursuit of happiness under law – is the nation-state, constitutionally protecting the individual, regardless of his identity with any race, gender, or sexuality, against being subsumed by collective (“human”) rights and privileges.

It might be that: the legalization of pot means greater numbers of children and adults will be stuck on stupid more often than they currently are; the legalization of homosexual marriage means greater numbers have (non-procreative) sex; the legalization of abortion may result in many more dead babies, but fewer dead women. All that may disgust the very traditionally faithful, but restoring the social stigma attached to it, let alone the legal proscription, is not going to happen.

All those are individual decisions. They do not jeopardize civilization. What will bring civilization down are the post-national leftist choice architects, the people who decide carbon dioxide is a pollutant, that you must have government health care, but forfeit it if you’re fat, that international human rights preempt justice and self-defense, that governments own everything and must distribute proportionally to collectives’ demands.

The globalization of welfare government – that is the dream of the left and Soros. Insofar as traditional religions preserve the ideas of the morality of institutionalized compassion and the compulsion of individual conduct they are easily coopted by the forces of darkness. In the coming Universal State, Muslims will be allowed to continue honor-killings as a collective right, but the right of an individual – to kill in self-defense, to expect justice, to start and mind his own business, to allocate his resources as he pleases, to provide for himself and his family, to have children and to raise them, and to say what he likes to whomever he wishes – will be regulated out of existence. “Civilization” will have been redefined as “acceptable choices”. Enlightened self-interest will be knowing the difference between private (cholesterol levels) and public (carbon usage) virtue. Religion can do nothing whatsoever to stop this, only a resurgence of belief in individual liberty and the free market can. Good luck with that.

C. Gee  October 28, 2010

Judge Stephen C. Robinson

The Washington Post explains it. It ‘s all about race.

The court-ordered election that allowed [some] residents of one New York town to flip the lever six times for one candidate – and produced a Hispanic winner – could expand to other towns where minorities complain their voices aren’t being heard. …

The unusual election was imposed on Port Chester after a federal judge determined that Hispanics were being treated unfairly.

The 2010 Census is expected to show large increases in Latino populations and lawsuits alleging discrimination are likely to increase, said Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a nonprofit election research and reform group.

“The country’s been changing in a lot of places, with minority growth in exurbs and commuter cities, and there will be a realization that those minorities can’t elect candidates of choice,” Richie said.

That will leave minority groups, federal prosecutors and municipalities looking for ways to keep elections from violating the federal Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities’ constitutional right to equal protection under the law.

In Port Chester, trustees had been elected two at a time every two years, with conventional at-large voting. Most voters were white, and there were always six white trustees even though Hispanics made up half the population and nearly a quarter of the voters. Judge Stephen Robinson concluded the system violated U.S. law by diluting Hispanics’ votes.

The standard remedy was to break a municipality into districts, with one district including many from the minority, thereby increasing the chances for a candidate backed by the minority group. The Justice Department proposed that solution for Port Chester.

But the village of about 30,000 objected to districts. It suggested instead a system called cumulative voting. All six trustees would be elected at once and the voters could apportion their six votes as they wished – all six to one candidate, one each to six candidates or any combination.

The system, which has been used in Alabama, Illinois, South Dakota and Texas, allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes behind specific candidates. Judge Robinson went for it, and cumulative voting was used for the first time in a New York municipality.

And surely not the last time. Obviously this idea has legs. It could become a peaceful caring way of disenfranchising despised classes and races, such as white males, Jews, Republicans, Tea Partiers, conservatives, individualists, soldiers, libertarians, anti-feminists, capitalists, free-marketeers, patriots, the rich, Iraq war approvers, habitual Rush Limbaugh listeners, global warming skeptics, big business executives, bankers, SUV drivers, fatties, Mormons, smokers, tobacconists, hunters, non-recyclers, furriers, gun-owners …

Note: This post needs correction. Please see comments by Malachi and Jillian Becker.

The liberals’ politics of fake compassion bring about, perfectly logically, the cult of fake victimhood. Self-designated victims lay claim to special consideration and special treatment. Often a bizarre rivalry arises between claimants – a “more victimized than thou” competition.

Of course they’d hate to be victims in reality. They’re not in need of help and compensation. They’re after privileges. They milk compassion out of their neighbors. Its a power-drive that is sometimes turned into tyranny: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It’s also blackmail of a kind: the blackmailing of good people with their own consciences. That it works so well for so many groups in America  – feminists for instance – proves the genuine kindness and generosity of most Americans. Those who give in to the special demands are probably aware they’re being played for suckers by the whimpering “look what you’ve done to me now” complainants, but feel it’s better to risk being exploited than to refuse pity and charity in case it’s really needed.

Fake victimization can bring cash rewards through law suits. And it can bring political advantage, as no doubt Democratic Congressmen Carson, Lewis, and Cleaver were hoping when they claimed recently that they’d been subjected to verbal abuse by protestors against the health-care legislation.

Mark Steyn comments:

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn’t, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. …

But that’s what the Democratic Party has been reduced to – faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they’re not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.

Isn’t that what societies with functioning media used to call “a story”?

Apparently not. As they did at Duke, the brain-dead press went along with it – and so, predictably enough, did much of the Republican leadership.

We have only just found out that this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is co-sponsored by the John Birch Society.

Is this harmful to the cause of conservatism?

Here is an interesting and seemingly objective account of the John Birch Society. What emerges from it is that if this organization is not as bad as it has been painted at the worst, it is also not as guiltless of bigotry, especially of a racist and anti-Semitic slant, as its apologists have claimed. It propagates ideas – anti-communism, anti-collectivism, anti-world government – that most conservatives would agree with; but it also propagates conspiracy theories that place it in the “cranky” category.

Furthermore, its reputation for being guilty of “racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, and “anti-Semitism”, whether fully or only partially or even unfairly deserved, should be an impediment to any close association with it unless and until it can prove its innocence – perhaps by emphatically and repeatedly denouncing such opinions. Mere denials, or statements to the effect that only “some members” held these views, won’t do.

All this considered, we’d say … yes – the conservative cause is more likely to be harmed than helped by this sponsorship.

And why give ammunition to the enemy on the left?

Reward should go to the deserving. But the judges who award the Nobel Peace Prize have bestowed it on the most undeserving, notably the terrorist (Yasser Arafat), and con-men (the authors of the IPCC report and Al Gore).

The following is from a chain email that has been going the rounds since 2008.

We are posting it here chiefly for what it says in the last 3 lines.

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena Sendler.

During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist.

She had an ulterior motive.

She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews (being German).

Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried, and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack for larger kids.

She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.

The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.

During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.

She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it to reunite the families.

Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Last year [2007] Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She was not selected.

Al Gore won — for a film on Global Warming.

Footnote: Thanks to one of our readers, Kelly, we learn that the essentials of the story of Irena Sendler are confirmed as true by this obituary.

She was Polish, not German. And we’re very glad to read that she was honored in her lifetime, and touched that she was nursed in her old age by one of the children she had saved.

More on the death throes of Britain, where PC once stood for the friendly, sturdy, common-sensical Police Constable, but now stands for the disease of which Britain is dying.

From the MailOnline:

A wealthy businessman was arrested at home in front of his wife and young son over an email which council officials deemed ‘offensive’ to gipsies – but which he had not even written.

And which was not said or written to a gipsy, and which no gipsy needed to have seen or read.

And it wasn’t even an ‘offensive term’ – it only rhymed with a term that is deemed offensive (and that we’ve never heard before).

The email, concerning a planning appeal by a gipsy, included the phrase: ‘It’s the ‘do as you likey’ attitude that I am against.’

Council staff believed the email was offensive because ‘likey’ rhymes with the derogatory term ‘pikey’.

What does ‘pikey’ mean? We’ve never heard it before. It is hinted in the story that it is a term that can hurt the feelings of some Irishmen.

The 45-year-old IT boss was held in a police cell for four hours until it was established he had nothing to do with the email, which had been sent by one of his then workers ….

But police had taken his DNA and later confirmed they would be holding it indefinitely.

The arraignment of this menacing criminal suspect cost thousands.

The businessman, who has asked not to be named, was also fingerprinted in the police investigation estimated to have cost taxpayers up to £12,000 [about $19,400].

He said two uniformed officers came to his house on a Sunday afternoon and said he would be handcuffed if he did not accompany them to the police station.

His computer and other internet equipment were also seized.

The email, from a computer at his company, was sent last August to a website at Rother District Council, in East Sussex, on which the public can comment on planning applications.

It was to record an objection to the gipsy’s mobile hme (mobile no longer) being concreted down ‘ in an area of outstanding beauty overlooking the Battle of Hastings site’.

The Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute the man who actually sent the email, although he too was arrested by the  Sussex Police on  ‘suspicion of committing a racial or religious-aggravated offence’.

The police officer who made the decision to make the arrests is a female. If you call her a silly cow, which she is, you would probably be arrested in Britain for a ‘gender-aggravated offence’.

Chief Inspector Heather Keating said: ‘Sussex Police have a legal duty to promote community cohesion and tackle unlawful discrimination.

‘We are satisfied we acted appropriately in identifying the owner of the computer used and through this, the identity of the writer of the offending line.’

At the Battle of Hastings the Normans conquered the Saxons in 1066. Between 1066 and 2010 Britain rose to rule over the greatest empire the world has even seen and then dwindled to a sick little idiocracy.