This is from Radical Islam, by Charles Jacobs:

This report is from Al-Monitor, translated into English from Al-Masry Al-Youm (Egypt).

(The picture accompanies the original Arabic article.)

It is incautious to trust information from a source named Al-anything, because there is a long established Arab custom of describing events as the reporter would like them to be rather than as they actually are. But it is also a long established Arab custom to torture prisoners, and we think this description has the ring of truth. For one thing, there doesn’t appear to be gross exaggeration: the torture – mostly heavy beating – is less severe than is common in most Arab and Islamic states.

The report provides a picture of how the Muslim Brotherhood’s regime in Egypt deals with those who hold a different political opinion.

Al-Masry Al-Youm spent three hours in total in the torture chambers established by the Muslim Brotherhood at the gates of the Ittihadiya Palace in the suburb of Heliopolis. [City of the Sun – a name recalling the long centuries when Egypt was ruled by Greeks – ed.] The central torture chamber … is secured with a cordon and iron barriers, where the Central Security Forces (CSF) prevent the access of any persons without the authorization of the Brotherhood.

The torture process starts once a demonstrator who opposes President Mohammed is arrested in the clashes or is suspected after the clashes end, and the CSF separate Morsi’s supporters from his opponents. Then, the group members trade off punching, kicking and beating him with a stick on the face and all over his body. They tear off his clothes and take him to the nearest secondary torture chamber from which CSF personnel, members of the Interior Ministry and the State Security Investigations Services (SSIS) are absent.

Before the interrogation process starts, they search him, seize his funds, cellphones or ID, all the while punching and slapping his face in order to get him to confess to being a thug and working for money.

They ask him why he took to the street, whether he got paid to take part in the protest and whether he supports Mohamed ElBaradei, founder of the Constitution Party, or Hamdeen Sabahi, founder of the Egyptian Popular Current or the dissolved Egyptian Nationalist movement. As long as this person denies the allegations, they beat him and insult his parents. After that, a person will videotape the interrogation and contact the Misr 25 TV channel to tell them about the interrogation and arrest.

After a while, the detainee is transported from the secondary torture chamber to the central one. On his way, the beatings and insults continue. Every time the prisoner encounters a member of the Brotherhood, that person gets in his share of the insults and beatings. They also may collectively insult him before he enters the central room, while a Brotherhood lawyer hands over his national ID card, his funds and his belongings to the SSIS chief. …

The health conditions of some of the prisoners was very bad and they were unable to answer questions. Some of them were bleeding all over their bodies, severely exhausted and not receiving any medical aid. However, some got a bottle of water to drink or something to use to stop their bleeding.

Once 10 people had been arrested, police officers and state security chiefs in the chamber demanded that the three Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the room secure passage for the prisoners to the nearby al-Nozha police station and prevented the Brotherhood members from attacking them again. This all really happened.

So the police and state security can exert some authority, but the Muslim Brotherhood must have its vicious way first.

The report indicates what sort of regime Obama is supporting in Egypt.

*

Political opponents of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have suffered worse atrocities than being beaten to a bloody pulp.

This is from a speech given last September by David Horowitz of the Freedom Center:

In August, the new Egyptian president sacked his military commanders, abrogated the Constitution, and assumed dictatorial powers greater than those possessed by his predecessor,  transforming Egypt into an Islamist state. Opponents of the dictatorship were crucified – literally nailed to crosses – in front of the government headquarters. It was the Brotherhood’s way of dramatizing its intentions to turn Egypt into a Medieval totalitarian state.

Dr Ileana Johnson Paugh – whose articles on this subject we often quote – brings our information up to date on how the pernicious Agenda 21 is making headway in America:

The one world government elites stand to make billions from the global warming/climate change scam. That is why they are not going to give up. Too many billions have already been invested to implement a society dependent on an omnipotent government that claims to control nature – they are not going to give up that easily or any time soon.

The fact that we are forced to pay, cap, swap, and trade carbon taxes on the open market does nothing to affect the level of pollution that takes place in [a very small portion of] the world. It is so arrogant to believe that humans can control the fury of Mother Nature when it is ready to unleash its ire.

Although scientists have debunked global warming and have proven that the globe has actually cooled in the last 16 years, our Secretary of State still promotes the myth of global warming. …

Climate alarmists have been meeting at Doha* to renew their vows made long ago at Kyoto to reduce the world to poverty. Though they don’t of course put it quite like that, that’s what it amounts to. Their stated intention is to “negotiate a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.”

The United Nation’s multifaceted assault on every human activity and its end goal to control and destroy capitalism to the benefit of the one world communist governance includes the U.N. Agenda 21 with its hallmark of Sustainable Development, Green Growth, Green Cities, Solar Energy, Wind Energy, alternative food and plant derived energy, Green everything from cradle to grave.

I have watched this complex Agenda 21 octopus encroach everything across the globe stealthily, with little resistance from the population. Why would anyone oppose such a kind and gentle goal of greening everything? Who does not want a green planet or clean air and water? Who does not want to recycle inputs in order to maximize the use of raw materials? The problem is that the goal is more nefarious than people are led to believe if they only took the time to read and inform themselves.

The United Nations is concerned about the size of our cars, our homes, our property, our farms, our wealth, the size of our “socially unjust” use of energy and resources, our recreational areas, the size of our hunting and fishing grounds, and the size and rights to our living space in general vis-à-vis a needy planet whose wildlife needs more space and wilderness devoid of humans. …

To conserve space and reduce human habitation to city dwelling in high rise and/or crowded spaces, the liberal architects and developers have come up with a new green idea – the 150-200 square foot home in an alley, the new “American dream.” Americans don’t know yet that this is what they want – they must be first convinced, indoctrinated, or coerced that this exactly how they want to live in the future.

The Northeast Washington neighborhood of Stronghold (close to the Capitol) is building a cluster of Lilliputian houses. Emily Wax, of the Washington Post, describes such homes as a dream of “compact bathrooms and cozy sleeping lofts that add up to living spaces that are smaller than the walk-in closets in a suburban McMansion.”

There is no secret that proponents of Green Growth and Agenda 21 hate suburban sprawl and wish to ban further building of homes in suburbia because it is unsustainable growth. They would love to move everyone into high-rises downtown within walking distance of everything, abandoning the land to the state.

Diminutive homes that can be bought with wheels were first designed by Tumbleweed Tiny House Co. in Santa Rosa, California in 2000. According to Wax, “their increasing popularity could be seen as a denunciation of conspicuous consumption.”

“Conspicuous consumption” has long been the phrase favored by communists to describe people living comfortably, owning property, and generally spending the money they have earned in whatever ways they like.

I have not met one person yet who was eager to live in a space the size of a prison cell unless forced to.

Boneyard Studios preferred the Smurf-sized houses to be built in a community connected to a neighborhood but zoning laws do not allow residential dwellings on alley lots unless they are at least 30 feet wide. No problem, it is time for D.C. to change its zoning laws and make them progressive.

The tiny homes sell for $20,000 to $50,000. Who can afford a real house when the economy has been driven into a downward spiral in the last four years and it is harder and harder to qualify for a real mortgage loan when you’ve been living in your parents’ basement unemployed? …

What are the best selling points of a “tiny” house? They are easy to clean, mobile, “save a ton of money on heating and AC,” and the price is right. Besides, the generational trend gurus instruct us that our love affair with a real house ended when progressives took over the economy and turned it into a disaster.

Saving money on heating and cooling, of course, features prominently into the playbook of Agenda 21 supporters who would prefer to roll back the clock to pre-industrial America in terms of energy use and living conditions, preferably to pioneer days. …

Affordable-housing promoters hope that “tiny” homes will replace the much maligned trailer parks and low-income housing – well, at least until a hurricane or straight line winds decide to make land in D.C.

Most living units will accomodate one person only. Families must be broken up, the bearing of children discouraged (though copulation promoted with “free” contraceptives). Life in these tiny spaces will of necessity be austere. As austere as in a prison cell. Little room for even essential belongings. No room to entertain friends. Almost none for books, recorded music or movies, photographs, pictures, any pet bigger than a fish, collections or hobbies. To stretch your legs you’ll have to go out into the public arena. That’s the idea, of course: privacy must be extremely limited; your activities must be visible, communal, controllable.

No dystopia yet conceived by any fiction writer, no actual communist society in all history, matches up to this nightmare.

Its only redeeming feature is that it will be so stagnant a society that it will perish through sterility and death – unless human instincts not entirely crushed will drive the regimented beings to rebellion and the overthrow of their enslavers.

Better recognize what’s coming now, and resist it, than enter that hell on earth.

* Lord Monckton was thrown out after telling the conference that there has been no global warming for the last 16 years – which is true.

PS. The UN must be destroyed.

Occasionally we repeat articles from our archive. To follow our recent discussion of “religious tolerance” (The curse of religion, December 3, 2012), and in the aftermath of America’s re-election of the would-be dictator Barack Obama, we re-present this burning coal pincered from the still glowing embers of the Christian furnace that burnt so fiercely for so many centuries. Compared to Calvin even the dictator L (see the book ad in the margin) is mild in his cruelty.

*

Beyond a certain point it is hardly possible to discern degrees of evil or degrees of cruelty. And yet I think it may be said of Jehan Calvin, dictator of Geneva in the sixteenth century, that he was more appallingly cruel and more intensely, intrinsically, through-and-through evil than other great persecutors, dictators and mass murderers of history. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Torquemada are the very names of evil, so what was it about Calvin that can distinguish him as specially terrible in his own nature than even any of these?

He oppressed the subjects of his dictatorship unremittingly and mercilessly; but so, you say, did the others. Not content with killing his enemies, he prescribed extreme tortures for them while they survived to suffer them; and yes, so did the others. But – and here we come to the nub of the case – Calvin was different in that he (often, if not always) personally specified the torments for the particular victim. He gave thought to the minutiae of their sufferings. All the others, even Catholic Inquisitors like Torquemada, issued general orders for terrorizing, torturing, killing. Calvin gave a personal service, tailoring his cruelty to his individual prey.

And that’s not all that distinguishes him among human monsters. Consider this: he was squeamish. He could not stand the sight of blood. He was afraid of pain. He felt horror at the thought of physical suffering – so he made thinking about it into a spiritual exercise, to strengthen by self-inflicted agony, as a monk does with a hairshirt, his resolve to do what was hardest for him in the service of his God. He ordered the infliction of agony, then meditated on the process, imagining it as fully as he could. He nourished his spirit on visions of torture.

This he did in private. The spiritual discipline he forced himself to undergo did not impel him to the prison and the public square to witness the torments and killings that he prescribed. He never attended a racking, a flogging, a breaking on the wheel, a burning to death. That far in the service of his God he would not push himself.

This grooming of his soul by inflicting suffering on others, did not replace general orders of oppression. He gave those too. He instituted a totalitarian reign of terror. He was as convinced a collectivist as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the rest. He would allow “no liberty, no freedom of the will, for [a] man could only misuse such privileges. … [He, Calvin] must frighten him … until he unresistingly accepts his position in the pious and obedient herd, until he has merged in that herd all that is individual within him, so that the individual, the extraordinary, vanishes without leaving a trace.”

So wrote Stefan Zweig in his devastating dissection of Calvin and Calvinism, The Right to Heresy. He goes on:

“To achieve this draconian suppression of personality, to achieve this vandal expropriation of the individual in favour of the community, Calvin had a method all his own, the famous Church ‘discipline’. A harsher curb upon human impulses and desires has hardly been devised by and imposed upon man down to our own days [pre-Second World War]. From the first hour of his dictatorship, this brilliant organizer herded his flock … within a barbed-wire entanglement of … prohibitions, the so-called ‘Ordinances’; simultaneously creating a special department to supervise the working of terrorist morality … called the Consistory [which was] expressly instructed to keep watch upon the private life of every one in Geneva. … Private life could hardly be said to exist any longer … From moment to moment, by day and by night, there might come a knocking at the entry, and a number of ‘spiritual police’ announce a ‘visitation’ without the citizen concerned being able to offer resistance. Once a month, rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, had to submit to the questioning of these professional ‘police des moeurs’. “

The moral police poked into every corner, examined every part of every house, and even the bodies of those who lived in it. Their clothes and shoes, the hair on their heads, was inspected. Clothes must be dark and plain; hair must not be artificially curled.

“From the bedroom they passed on to the kitchen table, to ascertain whether the prescribed diet was not being exceeded by a soup or a course of meat, or whether sweets and jams were hidden away somewhere.”

They pried into bookshelves – only books approved by the Consistory were permitted.

“The servants were asked about the behaviour of their masters, and the children were cross-questioned as to the doings of their parents.”

Visitors to the city had their baggage examined. Every letter, in and out, was opened. Citizens could not write letters to anyone outside the city, and any Genevan permitted to travel abroad was watched in foreign lands by Calvin’s spies.

Spying became universal. Almost everyone, in fear of being thought heretical in the least degree, and to prove himself clean and upright, spied on everyone else.

“Whenever a State inaugurates a reign of terror, the poisonous plant of voluntary denunciation flourishes like a loathsome weed … otherwise decent folk are driven by fear to play the part of informer. … After some years, the Consistory was able to abolish official supervision, since all the citizens had become voluntary controllers.”

As far as he could, Calvin put an end to pleasure. Music – except for what Calvin deemed to be sacred – was forbidden. So was dancing, skating and sport. Theaters and all other public amusements including popular festivals, were prohibited. Wheeled carriages were not allowed. People had to walk to wherever they needed to go. Guests at family celebrations, even weddings and baptisms, were limited in number to twenty. (The names parents could give their children had to be from an approved list.) The red wine of the district could be drunk in small quantities, but no other alcohol. Innkeepers were not allowed to serve their guests until they had seen them saying their prayers, and had to spy on them throughout their stay and report on them to the authorities.

Punishments included imprisonment in irons, hanging, decapitation, burning to death.

“Everything was forbidden which might have relieved the grey monotony of existence; and forbidden, of course, was any trace of mental freedom in the matter of the printed or spoken word.”

“The first thought,” Stefan Zweig declares, “of any one of dictatorial temperament, is to suppress or gag opinions different from his own.”

One man who dared to argue with Calvin was a Spaniard named Miguel Servetus. A child of the Reformation, he innocently thought he could express his own boldly Protestant opinions. He thought Calvin was the very man to hear him expound his personal interpretations of Holy Writ. He could not have been more mistaken. For having the effrontery to send them to him, Calvin had the man thrown into prison. “For weeks … he was kept like a condemned murderer in a cold and damp cell, with irons on his hands and feet. His clothes hung in rags upon his freezing body; he was not provided with a change of linen. The most primitive demands of hygiene were disregarded. No one might tender him the slightest assistance.”

Finally, for daring to disagree with Calvin, Servetus was condemned to death by the dictator’s order. The death Calvin chose for him was “roasting with a slow fire”.

‘The prisoner was brought out of prison in his befouled rags. … His beard tangled, his visage dirty and wasted, his chains rattling, he tottered as he walked. … In front of the steps of the Town Hall, the officers of the law … thrust him to his knees. The doomed man’s teeth chattered with cold … In his extremity, he crawled on his knees nearer to the municipal authorities assembled on the steps, and implored that by their grace he might be decapitated before he was burned, ‘lest the agony should drive me to repudiate the convictions of a lifetime’. This boon was denied him. Relentlessly, ‘the procession moved on towards the place of execution. … The wood was piled round the stake to which the clanking chains had been nailed. The executioner bound the victim’s hands. … The chains attached to the stake were wound four or five times around it and around the poor wretch’s wasted body. Between this and the chains, the executioner’s assistants then inserted the book and the manuscript which Servetus had sent to Calvin under seal to ask Calvin’s fraternal opinion upon it. Finally, in scorn, there was pressed upon the martyr’s brow a crown of leaves impregnated with sulphur. … The executioner kindled the faggots and the murder began.

“When the flames rose around him, Servetus uttered so dreadful a cry that many of the onlookers turned their eyes away from the pitiful sight. Soon the smoke interposed a veil in front of the writhing body, but the yells of agony grew louder and louder, until at length came an imploring scream: ‘Jesus, Son of the everlasting God, have pity on me!’”

Needless to say, neither Jesus nor an everlasting God did anything to relieve the roasting man.

‘The struggle with death lasted half an hour. Then the flames abated, the smoke dispersed, and attached to the blackened stake there remained, above the glowing embers, a black, sickening, charred mass, a loathsome jelly, which had lost human semblance. …

“But where was Calvin in this fearful hour? … He was in his study, windows closed. … He who had really willed and commanded this ‘pious murder’, kept discreetly aloof. Next Sunday, however, clad in his black cassock, he entered the pulpit to boast of the deed before a silent congregation, declaring it to have been a great deed and a just one, although he had not dared to watch the pitiful spectacle.”

To this day, Jehan Calvin is regarded as a great Christian whose teaching continues to shape the lives of millions of citizens in the Western world through the Presbyterian and various “Reformed” churches. People are no longer burnt to death for disagreeing with the master. But dictatorship, in the name of similarly dogmatic collectivist faiths, is not absent from the modern world, not even from America now, in 2010. A much vaster community has fallen under an organizer of dictatorial temperament. His consistory has made it plain that they wish to control what you eat, how you live in your homes, and what you say. Children are being urged to impress the leader’s messages on their parents. The names of those who disagree with him are blackened, and the silencing of broadcast dissent is openly advocated.

What should be done about it? There are conservative voices maintaining that the way to resist incipient totalitarianism is to “return to Christian values”.

Our hope is that this reminder of how Christian values affected life in the past may serve not only as a cautionary tale against collectivism and dictatorship, but also as a rebuttal of the idea that Christianity can be a counterforce against them.

Jillian Becker   April 25, 2010 and December 6, 2012

This video confirms that the Obama administration’s political correctness helps Islam wage its jihad.

Video and text from Creeping Sharia.

Victims who lost their lives in the jihad attack at Fort Hood:

1. Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, 55, Havre de Grace, Md.

2. Maj. Libardo Caraveo, 52, Woodbridge, Va.

3. Cpt. John P. Gaffaney, 54, San Diego, Calif.

4. Cpt. Russell Seager, 41, Racine, Wis.

5. Staff Sgt. Justin Decrow, 32, Plymouth, Ind.

6. Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29, Kiel, Wis.

7. Spc. Jason Hunt, 22, Tillman, Okla.

8. Spc. Frederick Greene, 29, Mountain City, Tenn.

9. PFC Aaron Nemelka, 19, West Jordan, Utah

10. PFC Michael Pearson, 22, Bolingbrook, Ill.

11. PFC Kham Xiong, 23, St. Paul, Minn.

12. Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21, Chicago, Ill. and

13. Pvt. Francheska Velez’s unborn baby

14. Michael G. Cahill, Cameron, Texas [civilian]

 

32 others were wounded.

In our post The secret of Benghazi we listed questions that need to be asked and answered about the murderous attack on the American mission, but there was one question we omitted, perhaps the most important of all. Robert Klein Engler supplied it in a comment which we think needs to be put on our front page. It entails other, related, questions:

Many who have looked into the Incident at Benghazi are disappointed in the congressional investigation so far. The most important question that needs to be asked and answered is, “Who gave the order to ‘stand down’ at Benghazi?” Once that question is answered, the rest of what went on there will fall into place. “According to a Fox News report by Jennifer Griffin, former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty…were ordered to stand down three times following calls during the attack. The first two times occurred soon after they heard initial shots fired…and (they) requested permission to go to the consulate to help out…(Forbes).” The Examiner.com claims “…former House speaker Newt Gingrich…was informed by a U. S. senator that at least two media networks have recently been given…evidence about the Sept. 11 Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans… The networks obtained e-mail evidence from…the office of National Security Advisor James Jones…ordering a counterterrorism team to cancel a rescue mission at the U. S. consulate and CIA annex in Libya. According to Gingrich…they were told explicitly by the White House ‘stand down and do nothing. This is not a terrorist action.'” If this is true, why haven’t those e-mails been made public or asked for by those investigating the Incident at Benghazi? A newspaper like the Chicago Tribune or the Washington Post has resources they can use to seek out an answer and obtain those e-mails. What if there were a robbery at your local bank? Would a reporter investigate the robbery by first flying off to New York and interviewing a senior bank manager, only to discover an adulterous relationship and then spend time reporting that? It would be better to interview the bank tellers, customers and witnesses to the robbery at the local branch first. Why hasn’t something similar been done about the Incident at Benghazi? The FBI was at Benghazi, but for only three hours. How many witnesses did they interview? What did they find out? The man who led the attack on our “mission” at Benghazi is reported giving interviews on Arabic TV! Why has no US reporter contacted him and asked him what happened? The Incident at Benghazi should not disappear off the front page of our newspapers until the stand down question is answered. We are asking the media and our elected representative for help. Tell us the truth. Who gave the order to stand down at Benghazi? If for no other reason, answer the question to set the minds of our men and women in the military service at ease. They want to be assured someone has their back.

We suspect the answer to “who gave the order?” is “the President”. And we suspect that that is why the press is not investigating the Incident at Benghazi. Most journalists now see their job as protecting the President, helping him to achieve his far-left pro-Islam agenda; not reporting to us the events we need to know about, happening now in America and the rest of the world.  

*

And here is part of a highly pertinent comment on the above by our reader Liz. The question “who gave the order to ‘stand down’?” gives rise immediately to the question “why?” It had to be either given or allowed to be given by Obama.

The question should not only be who gave the order to stand down, but WHY did Obama allow it? Because no matter who gave the order, or even what the reason was, it is not a good enough reason to let four Americans die. And the responsibility for that is still Obama’s.

Liz thinks the fact that the order was given is cause to impeach the president, and we agree with her.

The Turkish broadcasters of the endlessly fascinating Simpsons cartoon – surely one of the most brilliant creations of the age – have been fined for blasphemy.

Blasphemy! Well done, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie!

This is from ANSAmed:

Just about everything that could be said and written about the super-popular cartoon ‘The Simpsons’ had been, except that it was blasphemous. Now even that ”milestone” has been reached, thanks to the watchdogs of Turkey’s television stations under the Islamic-leaning government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to the newspaper Hurriyet, Ankara’s Council of Radio and Television (RTUK) has handed down a TRY 52,951 fine (about 23,000 euros) to the private broadcaster CNBC-E for having broadcast an episode of the cartoon in which ”God is mocked”. In the episode, God goes so far as to offer coffee to the devil. In the eyes of RTUK, this ”can be considered an insult” of a blasphemous nature, and the cartoon was held to encourage young people ”to drink alcohol during New Year’s celebrations in New York City”. What’s more, ”one of the characters insults the religious beliefs of another to induce him to commit murder”, ”the Bible is burnt in public” and ” God and the devil are represented in human form”. ”In a country in which the head of the government thinks that a TV series must be historical documentation, it is entirely normal that the RTUK fails to understand the jokes in a cartoon,” said Hurriyet op-ed writer Mehmet Yilmaz.

Remember the Ayatollah Khomeini said “There are no jokes in Islam.”

As well as the death of freedom, and the death of music, the rise of Islam spells the death of laughter. Those gone, could anything worse happen to humankind?

Let’s blaspheme while we may.

And let those who object accept Bart Simpson’s repeated invitation to his enemies: “Eat my shorts!”

Fascism has always been ill-defined. It has come to mean little more than a style of behavior that the user of the word does not like.

So we must say what we mean by it, and that is: Government behaving as the master instead of the servant of the people. For decades now fascist authoritarianism has been manifested almost exclusively by the Left wherever it is in power. Socialism is intrinsically authoritarian. The Left is intrinsically fascist.

Fascist government can be less or more oppressive, less or more brutally sadistic.

In Britain it is becoming more oppressive and brutally sadistic, as the following stories demonstrate.

This is from PJ Media by Mike McNally:

Officials at a left-wing British council have removed three children from their foster parents because of the parents’ political affiliation and unsubstantiated allegations of racism against them.

Social workers from Rotherham council in Yorkshire, which is controlled by the Labour party, removed the three Eastern European children from the foster parents — and from what was by all accounts a stable and loving home — after learning that the couple were members of the right-of-center UK Independence Party, or UKIP. Among other policies, UKIP wants to tighten Britain’s notoriously lax immigration laws.

Council officials said the party was “racist,” and Joyce Thacker, the council’s director of children and young people’s services, said she had to consider the “cultural and ethnic needs” of the children: a baby girl, and an older girl and boy. But the council’s argument is a series of evasions based on a blatant lie. This is a clear case of left-wing officials abusing their power to persecute individuals for holding politically incorrect beliefs.  …

Just as Democrats spent the last few years playing the race card to silence critics of President Obama, when it comes to immigration and Britain’s relationship with Europe, British leftists have for years used accusations of racism to smear their opponents and to discredit their arguments.

UKIP is not racist. … The party campaigns not for an end to immigration, but for an overhaul of the system to end the wave of largely uncontrolled mass immigration that’s transformed large areas of Britain in recent years. It would also like to see Britain leave the European Union, which in recent years has moved from a trading bloc to an increasingly centralized and unaccountable political entity.

Both positions are supported by majorities of the British people. And both are fiercely opposed by the progressive, statist, bureaucratic liberal-left elite which controls swaths of British public life, and which invariably dominates the social services departments of councils such as Rotherham.

The couple appear to have unimpeachable credentials as foster parents. The husband works with disabled people and was a Royal Navy reservist for more than 30 years. His wife is a qualified nursery nurse. They’ve successfully fostered around a dozen children over a period of several years.

It’s been reported that the boy has been separated from his sisters and placed with a different family. …

Amid the political fallout from the Rotherham case, it’s important not to lose sight of who the real victims are: three vulnerable children, desperately in need of love and stability, who have been wrenched from parents who were providing both. …

While the council’s decision to remove the children is a chilling assault on freedom of thought and political belief, it’s also dreadful policy in practical terms. Britain is facing an adoption crisis. In 2010, just over 3,000 children were adopted, out of more than 65,000 in the care system, with the rest shunted between foster parents or languishing in children’s homes. The head of a leading children’s charity has warned that under the draconian rules imposed by social services departments, most parents wouldn’t be allowed to adopt their own children. …

You get the distinct impression that fanatics like Joyce Thacker and her colleagues would rather half the children in Britain were raised by the benevolent and right-thinking state than by any parent — however responsible and loving — who dares to deviate from the party line.

It’s difficult to imagine a more cruel and perverse manifestation of “progressive” left-wing thinking.

Only with the  last statement we disagree.  We don’t have to imagine worse. We are about to describe worse in the reality of socialist Britain.

This is what happens when a nation puts the responsibility for its health care – which is to say for each individual’s life and death –  in the hands of the state.

The story of National Health practice in one district is an example of practice throughout the United Kingdom. It comes from the Mail Online:

Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’.

Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’. …

Medical critics of the LCP insist it is impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result the LCP death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of euthanasia, used to clear hospital beds and save the NHS money.

The use of end of life care methods on disabled newborn babies was revealed in the doctors’ bible, the British Medical Journal.

Earlier this month, an un-named doctor wrote of the agony of watching the protracted deaths of babies. The doctor described one case of a baby born with ‘a lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies’, whose parents agreed to put it on the pathway.

The doctor wrote: ‘They wish for their child to die quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped. They wish for pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to their precious baby.

‘Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days.

‘Parents and care teams are unprepared for the sometimes severe changes that they will witness in the child’s physical appearance as severe dehydration ensues. 

‘I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby.’ …

In a response to the article, Dr Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London writing on the BMJ website, said: ‘It is a huge supposition to think they do not feel hunger or thirst.’ …

Amazing that anyone should suppose such a thing.

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children.

“Death pathways” sound peaceful and painless; a conscience-soothing euphemistic phrase for forcing children to die of thirst and starvation.

‘‘I have seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die’

She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.

‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.

‘I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. … ’

The power of life and death in the hands of bureaucrats. The sadistic use of that power. There you have a glimpse of America’s future under Obamacare.

Environmentalism does not posit the existence of a superhuman being, though some of its acolytes personify the earth as Gaia – the Greek name for an ancient earth goddess – and worship of the earth is implicit in the cult. But it is a religion, as much arising out of superstition, propounding an orthodoxy and demanding strict adherence to it with threats of penalty for disobedience, as any other religion. And it is being imposed on the United States in defiance of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

These are extracts from an article by Paul Driessen at Townhall:

Climate alarmists are meeting in Doha, Qatar, to hammer out a new international treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires this year. The US Environmental Protection Agency is poised to unleash its first wave of carbon dioxide regulations. And Congress is teaming up with the White House to legislate taxes on hydrocarbon use and CO2 emissions … 

This serious triple threat to our energy, economy, jobs, living standards, health and welfare is justified by assertions that the actions will stabilize Earth’s climate and prevent a litany of global warming horrors.

Our planet’s climate has never been stable, and never will be. There is no empirical evidence that carbon dioxide drives climate change, or that greenhouse gases have supplanted the complex and interrelated natural forces that have produced big and little ice ages, floods and droughts, stormy and quiescent periods throughout the ages.

Even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 280 parts per million before 1880 to 391 ppm (0.0391%) today, average global temperatures have flat-lined for 16 years; hurricane and tornado frequency and intensity have fallen to new lows; Antarctic sea ice continues to expand, while Arctic ice caps were reduced, not by warming, but by huge storms; and the rate of sea level rise remains steady.

While alarmists insist that Hurricane Sandy was “unprecedented” and proof that “climate change is real,” it is just one of many major storms that have battered New York and eastern Canada over the years.

Moreover, every ton of painful, economy-crippling US carbon dioxide reductions would be offset by 100 tons from India, China and elsewhere, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations would continue to climb.

But these inconvenient truths are irrelevant to climate campaigners, who are using “dangerous manmade climate change” as the best pretext ever devised to control energy use and economies. They simply hypothesize, model and assert that every observed weather and climate phenomenon is due to human CO2 emissions. Warmer or colder, wetter or drier, more ice or less, more storms, fewer storms, occasional big storms – if not now, someday, sooner or later. It’s exactly what climate alarmists predicted.

This is not science. It is political science, rooted in a loathing of hydrocarbons, economic growth and humanity.

It is ideological, religious – the only state-sanctioned, state-supported religion permitted today.

And like the super pontiffs of every other religion, its high priests grow rich by exploiting the superstition of the believers. Fortunes are being made out of the myth of manmade global warming.

Well-connected political cronies take hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for “green energy” and “global warming prevention” programs, funnel it to soon-to-be-bankrupt companies, keep a few million for themselves, and launder a few hundred thousand back to the politicians who brokered the deals. Obama campaign bundlers … received more than $21,000 of corporate welfare for each dollar they donated to the Obama reelection campaign. Big Green environmentalist groups also garner countless millions in taxpayer lucre.

The consequences for average workers [of Doha, EPA, and the carbon tax] and their families are dire. … The effects [of even one] will be disastrous. If all three are imposed … the impacts will be utterly devastating.

Ignoring these facts, extensive other evidence for natural climate change, and the numerous scientists who reject their manmade climate catastrophe claims, advocates of a new Doha climate treaty, EPA “CO2 endangerment” rules, and “carbon taxes” insist these actions are needed to avoid ecological calamities.

They are adamant in contending that carbon taxes will somehow benefit the economy, create jobs and balance out-of-control spending. One is reminded of Will Rogers insightful quip: “Suppose you were an idiot – and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Every one of these actions is intended to increase the cost of the hydrocarbon energy that powers our economy. But raising the cost of transportation fuels, electricity, lighting, heating, air conditioning, and thus of food, materials and equipment will severely impact the bottom line for factories, utilities, offices, farms, shops, airlines, shippers, hospitals, schools …

And even , as the writer points out, government itself.

The poorest families may get rebates for their increased energy costs … institutions will not. They will be forced to reduce wages and benefits, hire fewer full-time employees, lay people off, outsource operations to countries where energy costs are lower, or even close their doors.

Only government will never close its doors, sad to say.

Taxes paid by companies and employees will dwindle. Instead of paying taxes, newly jobless workers will collect unemployment and welfare – from shrinking government coffers. … [Shrinking because] these anti-hydrocarbon policies also mean the US Treasury will be deprived of hundreds of billions in lease bonuses, royalties, taxes and other revenues that it would realize from the development of our nation’s vast oil, natural gas and coal deposits. Instead, the United States will be forced to pay billions more for imported oil, often from dictatorial, unethical, environmentally reckless countries.

Environmentalism will impoverish all nations.

New hydrocarbon energy restrictions and green energy demands will deprive Third World families and communities of abundant, reliable, affordable energy, obstruct human rights progress, and keep entire nations impoverished. They will kill millions more from lung infections (from burning wood and dung), intestinal diseases (from contaminated water), malaria and other diseases of poverty and eco-imperialism.

“Eco-imperialism” is a word that should become common currency.

There are always people – too many of them – who want to rule the lives of others. They like to find big excuses for imposing their will on the rest of us. Today the most powerful of these types are the environmentalists. They’ve found the biggest excuse ever. A force majeure. If we don’t do as they say, the earth will burn up and  … what? All living things will perish? The new eschatology.

Within a hundred years of Christianity being made the state religion by the Emperor Theodosius in 380, Rome fell (476), and the western Roman Empire came to an end. The Christian ethos was against fighting to preserve civilization. A thousand years of darkness descended on Europe.

Will it take a hundred years for  – let’s coin a word for this new religion – Gaianity to reduce the declining West to poverty and stagnation, ripe for Islam to conquer?

We must not let it happen.