Who governs Britain is the question we must now answer. One week ago, the British people voted, by a slim majority, in favour of leaving the European Union. The voters gave their opinion. That is all they did. But by doing so they provoked a Constitutional crisis for the United Kingdom, which may yet turn … Continue reading Who Governs Britain?
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In the UK, Parliament is the ultimate authority. All power is held by it. While technically, sovereignty resides with the people, in the UK this is ceded to and implemented by a group of elected representatives called Members of Parliament. The UK is NOT a plebiscitary democracy; it is a representational one. Elected Members of … Continue reading Parliament is Sovereign in the UK
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The British Project was — and is — simply this: to make the world England. To profit from it and get rich on the military colonisation of other, weaker people, yes, that was its stimulus. But its philosophical motivation was to make the world England. When I was at school, we had maps on the … Continue reading The British Project: the sun goes down
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Finesse might be David Cameron’s middle name. He was a long-time and successful PR man before entering politics, and, having been one myself, I can assure you that this is a training that makes you grasp every opportunity to show how good you are. And of course, how stupid, incompetent and generally just bad your … Continue reading Finesse: Cameron’s booby-trap
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Captain of the UK ship of State, Dave ‘Mine’s a Pint’ Cameron nailed his colours to the mast and finally had the worm-eaten hulk torpedoed from under him. And what did it? His own insufferable Tory hubris and his barrow-boy addiction to gambling. Thanks to Cameron, the end of Europe as we know it has become likely. The voters in Britain just pulled out the props and the sky fell in.
Well, that was what it felt like this morning as I turned on my pc and suddenly realised that the UK had altered the course of history. The sky has not actually fallen in, of course, but apparently it is dark with the bodies of money-men throwing themselves off tall buildings in the City of London. They will soon be joined, I should not wonder, by the corpses of Tory grandees caught on the wrong side as the traditional ‘Night of the Long Knives’ is enacted.
We have just seen the biggest single political event since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Not just in European, but world terms. The echoes of the cataclysm are booming through the corridors of power from Washington to Moscow. Vlad ‘The Slayer’ Putin must have chuckled in his morning bath of chamomile leaves as his aides brought him the good news.
Wot no pint Dave?
Having narrowly escaped being the PM who oversaw the end of the UK, Mine’s a Pint Cameron looks likely to be the one who oversaw the beginning of the end of both the EU and the UK. Capital effort, old boy. Spiffing.
Certes, rarely has luck conspired against a politician to the extent that it has Cameron, but we are reminded of the old saw: ‘those who live by the sword, die by the sword.’
Cameron chanced his arm on Scotland and only just got away with it. He gambled again, that he could offer a meaningless promise of a referendum on Brexit when it looked like he would have to share power with the Liberal slimy-say-anything party.
That whole disgrace to politics has not enough spine between its entire membership to complete one functioning vertebral column. Nevertheless, Cameron knew it could be relied on, after a couple of quiet phone-calls promising ministerial posts to incompetent Liberal dishrags, to kybosh the idea of a referendum. Oh dear no, against our ‘principles’, that is. Home Office, Dave, I think we just earned that.
But Cameron’s own party, the Conservatives, actually won the 2015 General Election outright and guess what? Its voters remembered that little thing about the referendum.
Which, by the way, is what being ‘hoist by one’s own petard’ means, children.
So now, because of his big floppy opportunistic mouth, Dave ‘Mine’s a Pint’ Cameron becomes a laughing-stock of an ex-Prime Minister, while some very ugly people whoop and cheer his long-deserved defenestration.
Nobody knows. This is the quintessential leap in the dark. Nobody actually thought it would happen; even I believed it would be a narrow ‘Remain’ victory. I don’t think anyone was prepared either for the decision or the strength of it.
In fact the decision is not legally binding and will have to be ratified by Parliament. Then the procedure for leaving the EU — called, bureaucratically enough, a Section 50 process — will have to be put in motion by the UK Government. But woe betide a Parliament that tried to overturn such a clear indication of popular will.
Then, the EU is not monolithic and consists of a spider’s-web of treaties. While the 1972 Treaty of Accession — which subordinates the UK’s sovereignty to the EEC and its successors and formalises membership — will be repealed early on, there are literally tens of thousands of words in myriad subsequent treaties and accords that will have to be gone through line by line.
Wildly optimistic estimates suggest that it will take two years to complete the exit process; more sober ones five; those familiar with the EU might suggest, ‘try ten.’
For the immediate future then, nothing will happen; it’s business as usual, quite literally. But major changes are a-coming and people need to prepare themselves.
However, this is not the end to the shenanigans. The UK is not the only member state of the EU that is fed up with its relentless centralisation and the way Germany in particular has used its apparatus to silence all opposition. There may well be calls in other EU states for referendums.The EU itself looks distinctly queasy this morning.
The Euro, that painted sepulchre of its hubris, is now on far shakier ground than it was yesterday, which is probably why the pound, at time of writing, was holding against it — and both were plummeting against the US dollar.
We should be prepared for a spate of calls by pro-EU stooges in the UK and also from other nations — and yes, I do mean the Germans — for a re-run of the referendum. After all, the standard EU method of dealing with referendum results it doesn’t like is to coerce the relevant nation into holding another one, while large numbers of snarling goons, er, ‘senior politicians’, promise every calamity from simooms to plagues of locusts, should the voters make the same mistake again.
Domestically, things have got very confused. England voted overwhelmingly for Brexit but Scotland, by an even bigger majority, to Remain. The Scottish Government, which is nationalist and seeks a new referendum on Scotland’s membership of the UK, has already stated that it is bringing forward plans for just that.
In 2014, the Scots voted, by a fair margin, to stay in the UK; but they voted last night by an even larger one to stay in Europe. This difference between the two primary partners in the UK may well cause their divorce. We do have to say that none of the potential candidates for Mine’s a Pint’s job look even remotely like they could persuade the Scots to stay, in a future Scottish independence referendum. Meanwhile the pox-raddled old hoors of the Labour Party that played Unionist poodle last time are laughing-stocks, after every promise they made turned out to be as empty as Balliol’s cloak.
The Damoclean Sword of Independence has two edges and it cuts both ways. Last night it may have been unhitched from the rafters to plunge relentlessly down at the British State, while slicing a chunk off the EU on the way.
What interesting times we do live in to be sure.
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On Thursday this week, the people of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will vote in a crucial referendum. For the first time in over 40 years, they will have the chance to express a view about the European Union (EU). To decide, in fact, whether they wish to remain a part of it or not.
In 1973 a referendum led to the UK joining the European Economic Community, as it was then called. Then, because Harold Wilson was unhappy with he membership terms, after the Labour Party that he led came to power, a second referendum was held in 1975.
Many people, like me, voted ‘yes,’ in both referendums. Under the same circumstances, given the same choice, I would vote the same way again now; but the circumstances have changed beyond all recognition.
In order to avoid the accusation of blinkered thinking, I will state that I actually live in France. I have, in total, lived here for 9 out of the last 23 years; and I have loved most of it. I love France, I like the French and I like the place I live in. I am fluent in French and I have profited from the arrangement, there is no doubt.
Nevertheless, my vote is to to leave and I strongly advise everyone else to do so too. Let me explain why.
At root the question being asked in the referendum is this and only this: do the benefits of being a part of the EU count for more than the loss of sovereignty that it has entailed? Has it delivered democracy, powerful economic growth and security in sufficient measure to make up for its centralisation of power?
The UK has a Constitution formed by several discrete documents, of which the earliest and most important is the 1707 Treaty of Union between Scotland and England, which brought it into being. However, neither Scotland nor England themselves have written Constitutions and they have completely separate legal systems. (All laws applicant in both jurisdictions are effected by two separate Acts, one for Scotland and one for England.)
Within these separate jurisdictions, the individual national Constitutions depend on two things: jurisprudence and Acts of Parliament. In other words, court decisions under Common Law form one part, while specific Acts approved by the Parliaments form the other. One function of an ‘Act of Parliament’ is to change, modify or repeal existing laws which no longer, in the collective opinion of Parliament, represent the view of the broader society or a fair and reasonable position in the light of present knowledge.
While countless thousands of words have been written about the British Constitution, it may be summed up like this: within a structure of partner nations defined by treaty, an extremely flexible, transparent and accountable structure of Common Law and Parliamentary Acts established through the courts and by public Parliamentary debate, defines the civil state of the people.
If this sounds like what you imagine the EU to be, you may be in for a nasty shock.
The most powerful body in the EU is the European Commission. This has the sole right to draft and propose laws. It negotiates treaties between Europe and other nations or supra-national bodies and it represents the EU at international level. The Commission also enforces EU Law upon member states. Commissioners are appointed by the Council of Ministers (the Heads of State) by qualified majority voting and the Commission as a whole must then be ratified by the European Parliament (EP). The Commission serves for five years, with no further accountability.
In essence, the Commission is the Government of Europe. But not one single elected politician sits on it. Every Commissioner, including the President, is an appointee. There is no democratic sanction on or requirement for accountability on any of them. No European Commissioner, ever, has been called up in front of their nation’s own Parliament and required to publicly explain themselves.
Laws are passed by national politicians acting out of role; the Council of Ministers. None of these campaign, during the domestic elections that select them, on their performance on the Council; so there is no accountability for their actions there.
The ‘European Parliament’, is but an expensive talking shop; it is an advisory body with limited powers of examination of and regulation over the Commission, the bureaucracy and the laws being passed. The EP may not propose Laws, as that is reserved to the Commission, although it may scrutinise them. However, no one nation may block any law through the EP; it always requires multinational cooperation. Most of the laws that the UK’s European Parliamentarians voted against over the last five years were passed anyway.
So while the British peoples are used to and have over centuries developed, a system of Parliamentary democracy that does provide transparency, that does provide accountability, that does protect minorities and which is able to minutely scrutinise and, ultimately, have democratic and public sanction over the Government, in the EU this is far more the ideal than the reality.
The ‘democratic deficit’ produced by this is the consequence EU’s origins as a trading bloc. It was never intended to be a super-state, which is what it now is.
As if this were not bad enough, successive enlargements of the EU have removed an already distant decision-making apparatus ever further from the people it governs. From the six original members of the EEC, which were France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, the EU has bloated to twenty-eight. In part, this was the fault of successive British governments, which saw enlargement as a foil to deeper integration.
Unfortunately, we got expansion alongside deeper integration, just without the democracy. All the British rejection of the so-called ‘European Constitution’ — which did propose some democratic control over the runaway behemoth — did, was to exacerbate the problem. This delighted the European bureaucrats, who had been shaking in their boots in fear that the prospect of a democratic Europe might actually become reality. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty, the cobbled-together surrogate for it, contained all that was bad in the proposed Constitution and little that was good.
As well as this, the dreaded ‘two-speed’ Europe has, likewise, come into existence. The Euro project has provoked rapidly greater integration between the nineteen countries of the so-called Eurozone. This has led directly to an explosion in laws, regulatory structures and, of course, because this is the EU, bureaucracy.
Worse — if it could be — because there is a legally-binding presumption that all member states will eventually join the Euro, those laws, structures and bureaucracies affect all the non-Eurozone EU member states too, including the UK — despite the fact that it has an ‘exemption’ from ever joining.
The democratic crisis has finally come home to roost in this last year. Greece, a sovereign nation, has collapsed in all but name and must now dance to the tune of money-lenders in Berlin. Italy is not far behind and could fail at any time.
These nations have been ruined because they are part of the Eurozone. Were they not, their currency values would have fallen, their goods and services would have therefore been cheaper and they would have seen inflows of money, leading to jobs and wealth. But the powerful German economy keeps the Euro too high for this.
At the same time the presence of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain in the Eurozone keeps the Euro lower than it would otherwise be. Were it not so, Germany would today have priced itself out of competition, especially with Italy, a formerly (pre-Euro) successful manufacturing nation. So the Euro drains money from the southern European countries and gives it to Germany and the northern ones.
The EEC and its successors, the European Community (EC) and the EU were never designed to deal with a re-unified Germany. For the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany sought economic assistance from its European ‘partners’ to help with the reconstruction of the bankrupt former East Germany. But those days were over fifteen years ago and today, the economic power of a unified Germany has once again destabilised Europe.
That Britain was right to avoid joining the Euro is now crystal clear. Southern Europe will soon be bankrupted by it, with the exception of Greece, because it already has been. What was not clear, fifteen years ago, was the extent to which the European bureaucracy would proliferate on the back of the introduction of the common currency. If it had been bloated before — and it was — today it is beyond even Orwellian nightmare. This phantasmagorical monster is the result of a failed dream. And, yes, the EU has failed.
The promise of a Europe run by transparent, representative government and elected politicians is dead. We — through our national governments — said we did not want elected European officials. We did not want a proper European Presidency. We rejected the so-called ‘European Constitution’ that was at least an attempt to lay the foundations of a democratic Europe. And now we must drink the sour milk that we are left with.
The moment of reductio ad absurdam has arrived. Without an elected and transparent supranational government, what we have is the Soviet Union, German Capitalist version. The EP may, as happened in 1999, vote ‘no confidence’ in a Commission, but, crucially, it cannot choose the replacement.
It is not, now, a question of a ‘democratic deficit’. The EU is a democratic vacuum. And just as happened in the Soviet Union, the cumbersome behemoth we have created is dragging down the European economy. Its flagship, that painted sepulchre of hubris, the Euro, has already ruined one member state, as others teeter on the brink.
This is not what we were promised; Thursday’s referendum gives us the chance to correct that.
The economy was not the only thing we had in mind when we voted to join the EEC, however. Then, the Cold War was at its height.
We lived under the rules of three: the three minutes between the air-raid sirens going off and our being incinerated and the three days it would have taken the Red Army to cross the Rhine. At that fateful point we would launch nuclear Armageddon ourselves and be likewise vaporised. We were on the cusp of the final conflict; batteries of Bloodhound missiles looked east along the coast like grim sentinels, painted, incongruously, angelic white. European war was both recent and imminent.
In the 1970s, joining ‘Europe’ was the only sensible choice, not just in the interests of the UK, but in order to preserve and promote the Europe we believed in from external threat.
It is not like that any more. Anyone who thinks Vladimir Putin, for all his faults, desires to see Russian tanks on the streets of Berlin or Paris is delusional.
Today, the threats are different. An unprecedented wave of sexual assaults on women is sweeping Europe right now, and the perpetrators are incomers who not recognise, indeed even despise, our culture. ‘Security’ is not just defending against nuclear war or terrorist attack; it is also making the streets safe and, while policing is a national issue, the EU has signally failed to coordinate an adequate policy to address uncontrolled migration from outside. Germany, indeed, has broken every protocol of Europe by negotiating directly with non-EU states over the migrant crisis an, by doing so, drastically worsened the plight of the other EU states. That was why the protocols were in place; and Germany need not pretend that it is a ‘good European’ now.
While the German behaviour is inexcusable, the EU’s ‘response’ to the Syrian migrant crisis has been piecemeal and positively counter-productive. Its agreement with Turkey means that the most educated and qualified individuals leaving the Syrian conflict zone are resettled there, while Europe has to take those who are of least use to us and who cost the most.
While this is happening, the very states that are bearing the brunt of the assault of economic migrants, are left floundering, bankrupted and completely unable to resist.
On security, then, as on democracy and economic management, the EU has failed.
There is a possibility that a referendum vote for the UK to leave would lead to the collapse of the EU. Today it has pauperised whole nations and spawned a bureaucratic monster that even Joseph Stalin could not have dreamed of. One would have to say that its demise is long overdue.
The EU has shown that it cannot contain German economic power; rather it has become the instrument of it. Without the EU, European nations would be free to make new international agreements that would allow them to redress the imbalance, just as free nations always have. For example, the southern nations, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, might form one such bloc. The former Communist nations, which also share a common cultural heritage, might form another. Nations would be free — as they should be — to negotiate agreements where they desire and not to, where they do not.
Such initiatives would help to counter German economic dominance and, with the termination of the Euro project that would be a pre-requisite, allow such new blocs to develop and operate economic policy in their own interests. This would be a good thing, not only for Europe in general but also for Germany, which can have no long-term interest in seeing its neighbours go bankrupt. Yet this road is blocked by the simple existence of the EU, lying like a monstrous pile of scrap in the way.
My late brother, who had a pithy way with words, would describe something so ruinously clapped-out as to be unrepairable as needing to be ‘rubbed out and drawed in again’. That is exactly where the EU now finds itself; but it will not do the necessary deed alone. Someone has to pull the trigger. Somebody has to let the curtain fall on the farce that it has become.
Referendum voters in the UK just might strike a blow for liberty and fairness. They might deliver the shock that puts an end to the insanity, like the crazing of a car windscreen penetrated by a single pebble. They might even be the saviour of a free and democratic Europe; and lest we forget, not for the first time.
To do that, they must use their referendum vote to leave the EU.
At its best, Europe is a collection of fiercely independent but interdependent states. This dynamic is what gave us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. Our culture is at once flawed and disparate but beautiful. Europe is more vibrant, diverse and colourful than any other continent. European is what we are, but it is our differences that make us who we are.
By contrast, the Kafkaesque monstrosity of the EU has made a Europe with all its anarchic liberty and zest excised. It propels us, inexorably, towards a grey, anodyne, ersatz pseudo-Europe with no colour and no life, because it absolutely intends to remove all the very differences that make us who we are. It cannot do otherwise; that is what it was set up to do and, like a driverless juggernaut, it will not be deflected from its path. We have to ask ourselves, urgently, if what it has been designed to achieve is really what we want.
By voting, in this referendum, out of an EU that has failed to deliver democracy, failed to deliver strong economic growth across its territory and failed to deliver security, Britain could, as it has done before, give Europe the opportunity to realise its potential.
Therefore we must vote to leave in the referendum, for while it may be cathartic in the short term, by doing so we might rekindle the flame of European freedom in the longer. A little revolution from time to time is a good thing, don’t you think?
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Outside Pulse nightclub in Orlando on the night of the Islamist shootings.
Islam is locked in a war with secular democracy and moderate Muslims themselves.
Ten days ago a Canadian, Robert Hall, had his head hacked from his body in a brutal public murder. Two days later, over 100 people were gunned down in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida; forty-nine died. Two days after that a married couple, both police officers, were stabbed to death in their home outside Paris and their infant child held hostage until the killer was shot by police.
There is nothing whatsoever to connect these victims, on the face of it. Nothing. A middle-aged professional, young people in a nightclub, serving police officers. They died in equally unrelated
Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his partner Jessica Schneider, murdered in the name of Islam. Pic: Reuters
locations — the Philippines, the USA, France.
But they are connected all the same: they were all murdered in the name of Islam.
These are but the tip of the iceberg; all over the Middle East, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, in the same time, hundreds of innocent people were murdered — in the name of Islam. And most of them were Muslims.
Robert Hall (left) prior to being murdered in the name of Islam
These victims join the tens of thousands of others who have been murdered, raped, or enslaved in the name of Islam, just since 2000. If we go back to the 20th century, we find that millions were murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of Islam. When we call the roll of violent, murdering ideologies of that century, we always forget one; Nazism, Communism — and Islam.
Yet we may not speak a word against this. We may not name what we see, what is manifest, what is plain as day — that Islam perverts men into monsters who kill, rape and enslave in its name and expect a heavenly reward of unlimited, unending sex with 72 perpetual virgins for doing so. (The Orlando shooter was homosexual and we wonder what he imagined his reward might be; 72 Christians, perhaps — the porn star, not the religion.)
Despite the blindingly obvious truth about Islam, we are not allowed to say a word against it. Why? Because Islam is mainly practised by people who do not have white skin. And the intellectual fascism of ‘identity politics’ insists that no-one of non-white skin colour may ever be criticised for anything.
This of course reveals the excruciating irony that ‘identity politics’ is itself a form of racism; but then, you have to have some intelligence to divine that. Bill Maher calls it the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, and Bill is right on point.
Well, enough is enough. Identity politics is indeed a form of racism and fascism, and a spade should be called a spade.
This war began a long time ago and we ignored it. We misnamed it, pretended it might go away. We vacillated, imagining that our trinkets and compromises, our cavilling appeasement, might quench our enemy’s thirst for blood. But all that failed long ago.
We are not ‘at war with terrorism’ — or rather that is too tautological a euphemism to let pass. All states, everywhere, are perpetually at war with terrorism. That is why a state exists: to protect the people from terrorists. But nobody says ‘the King of France gave land at the mouth of the Seine to the Normans so that they could protect the country from terrorist attack’. They say, ‘from the Vikings.’
To be at war against terrorism is a permanent and necessary part of a state’s very reason to exist; to use this term to describe our current crisis is to deliberately deny the real name of the enemy.
We are not at war with a people, or a ‘race’. We are at war with a Dark Age socio-political ideology that promotes injustice and is based on a pack of barefaced lies. This war is no different from the war against Communism. It’s not about people. It’s about ideas.
Islam is just a religion; just a set of ideas. It is an ideology invented to make some men rich and powerful by controlling women, children and all the weaker men. It’s just our old enemy, the patriarchy; and it is no less hideous, oppressive or murderous for being a version mainly promoted by men with non-white skin.
Islam stands against literally every single value that Western democracy believes in. Every value that European democracy — and that includes the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa, for better or worse — has fought for centuries to develop and preserve.
Islam hates women and gays, considers that children have no rights, animals have no rights. I insists that anyone who does not accept it as the literal truth should be killed. It hates art. It hates poetry. It hates music. It hates science. It hates secularism. It hates democracy.
Anything that could be considered civilised, Islam hates. It would rather turn the world back in to a desert nightmare of brutality and discrimination where warlords do as they like. Where women are personal chattels of men to be raped when they are nine, or burned alive when they break its rules about marriageor for refusing to be whores for jihadists. Where they have acid thrown in their faces for not covering them. Where homosexuals are thrown from rooftops then stoned till they die. Where the ‘crime’ of having an opinion is punished by death.
The last war that European civilisation fought against Islam — a defensive war, just as this one is –lasted for a thousand years. This time the enemy is ahead of us. We now can see that there was no victory before the Gates of Vienna in 1683; just an armistice and we did not seize the opportunity it afforded us to smash the enemy forever.
Instead of striking the head from the serpent, we took our boot from its neck and let it go. We allowed it compassion — which is a part of our culture. But it is not a part of the enemy’s and anyone who thinks that jihadists will spare the sword, should the world ever be unfortunate enough that they do seize the advantage, is barking mad.
Surely, if Islam is indeed a religion of peace, then no blasphemy could be greater than murdering, raping and enslaving in its name. Where, then, are the screaming hordes who protested against cartoons of Mohammed and called for the artist to be killed — for blasphemy? Those who called for the death of Salman Rushdie for the same? These men killed no-one, raped no-one, enslaved no-one; yet their ‘blasphemy’ was such that it merited death.
Why are the same people who called for this not out on the streets right now, demanding that the atrocities committed in the name of their religion must stop?
Such protesters are nowhere to be seen. One might even be forgiven for thinking that murder, rape and slavery are not ‘blasphemous’ at all, and that could only be because Islam — the religion of peace — actually condones them.
Do they, then, Muslims all support the jihadists? No, of course not, but the fact that the majority of Germans were not Nazis did not prevent the Holocaust; and the fact that the majority of Muslims are decent people, who do love peace, has not and will not prevent more killing.
If moderate Muslims are to neutralise the jihadist threat, then they need our assistance, because they too are under threat — indeed, they are under the greatest threat of any, since, after all, they live with the jihadists in their midst.
We need all the support we can get from moderate Muslims, yet this is confounded by Political Correctness. Partly, this is our own fault. We have allowed the Regressive Left to set a picket line around Islam, so that it may never be criticised, even by Muslims; just look at how they treat Maajid Nawaz, Ayan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie.
This very ring-fence helps to muzzle moderate Muslims and to deliver them up to the jihadists. It isolates them from their natural allies — non-Muslim moderates — and pretends that this is ‘defending a culture’. It is more important , for the ‘identity politics’ airheads, that This attitude — promulgated by the regressive left, those ‘useful idiots’ — is pure racism in itself. It is, as Maher says, the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. After all, how could we possibly imagine that people of brown skin could do better? And not only that, they must be allowed to do their worst without a word of protest.
Well if Islam, as a culture, has value, it is not in its ability to murder the innocent. Peaceable Muslim communities have already proven themselves to be rich recruiting grounds for jihadist murderers who have but rarely been turned over to the authorities and who, rather, are all too often hidden instead.
If there is a solution — other than massive ‘ethnic cleansing’, which nobody wants to see, even if it were possible — then it is in mobilising moderate Muslims to denounce extremism and violence. It is in standing with them against the jihadists. It is by funding their organisations and helping them to counter jihadism within their own communities. It is in protecting them from the threats they surely receive and ensuring that their voices be heard, by Muslims.
Furthermore, Islamic apostates — threatened with death by Islamists — must be protected and their voices must be heard. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain, according to this article in the UK Guardian, assists about 350 people a year to leave Islam in the UK, ‘the majority of whom have faced threats…either by their families or by Islamists.’
The ghettoisation of Muslim communities turns them into pressure-cookers where violent extremists dominate. This is exacerbated, not hindered, by the politically correct Regressive Left.
In its towering conceit and racism, the Regressive Left considers it better that moderate Muslims be terrorised in their own communities by extremist Muslims, than that they be helped by non-Muslims. After all, goes Regressive thinking, they all have brown skin; they should be allowed to get on with killing each other undisturbed by white colonialists trying to enforce Western mores. Meantime, the Regressive Left gets on with really important things, like whether a man with a beard can legitimately ‘identify’ as a woman.
Why is it that public debate is always between an Islamic extremist, or a barefaced apologist for extremism, and someone of the political right, usually white? Because to expose the schisms within Muslim communities is to confuse the all-important message — white bad, non-white good. So what if moderates are sacrificial lambs? The Regressive Left couldn’t care less.
Our strategy must therefore be twofold: on the one hand to completely disgrace the Regressive Left and its intellectual fascism of ‘Identity Politics’. On the other we must massively support moderate Muslims, politically and financially, wherever they live, while denying any support or platform to Islamist extremists.
There is no certainty that we will win this war, even with the best of our efforts. What is certain is that if we continue to refuse to recognise what is happening and do not take immediate steps to counter it, then we shall lose it. Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ may yet come true; and none of us will be the better for it.
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Most people know about the activities of so-called Islamic extremists, operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and, most prominently and gaining the most attention, in the Levant conflict zone, principally Syria and Iraq. But how extreme are they? Do they have justification for their behaviour from the Qur’an, as they repeatedly claim to?
Just this week, new reports arrived of how the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) murdered 19 Yazidi women by burning them to death in steel cages because they refused to become sex slaves. In Pakistan a mother burned her daughter to death for marrying without consent. These are but the tiniest tip of an iceberg of atrocities that never stop.
Naturally, any thinking person must be repulsed by such evil; but not a week goes by now without some example of completely intolerable behaviour, carried out by Muslims, frequently on women, somewhere in the world. In fact, hardly a day passes.
Yazidi women captured as sex slaves under Qur’anic authority
Saudi Arabia, which has gained for itself the reputation of being the most sadistic and barbarous legally constituted state on the planet, routinely carries out ‘punishments’ — better described as tortures, many ending in death — all the time. We now know that at least 14 million Africans are held as slaves by Muslims. 14 million. In 2016.
But many of us in the West know Muslims; we eat in their restaurants, shop in their convenience stores. Clearly, these Muslims are good, decent people. So the bombers, the beheaders, the immolators, the lapidators, the slavers and kidnappers must be misunderstanding Islam, right? They must be misreading the Qur’an?
Wrong. They are doing EXACTLY as the Qur’an insists they must, to be good Muslims. If they do not do so, then they will receive no reward in the afterlife. This is why the poison of Salafism — which advocates strictly following the letter of the Qur’an — is so effective and why moderate Muslim states so quickly collapse before it. Salafism — founded in and exported and funded by Saudi Arabia — perverts decent people into monsters by persuading them that if they do not follow the letter of the Qur’an, they are not ‘true Muslims’.
Unlike other Abrahamic faiths, there is no contradiction in Islam, although there appears to be. However, once you understand the Qur’an’s structure and the ‘Doctrine of Abrogation‘, which states, with Qur’anic authority, that only the last verse on any given subject has authority, the apparent contradictions disappear. Unfortunately what is left is the most savage and violent creed amongst the major religions.
On June the 8th 2016, a Christian blogger called Dom the Conservative posted on her site an analysis of ISIL’s behaviour which showed, again, that the vile acts they perpetrated are absolutely in line with the Qur’an’s instructions. Every single atrocity that comes to light, carried out by groups like ISIL, Boku Harum and many others, is mandated in the Qur’an and not only that, the specific method of killing to be used is described, in detail.
Dom and I would surely disagree about many things; she is a Christian and I am an atheist. But she is an excellent and erudite scholar and she makes her case with passion and rigorous fairness. There is no disagreement between us that the fundamentals of Islam are contained in the Qur’an, along with the Hadith and Sharia, and that so-called ‘extremists’ — whose behaviour is indeed extreme — are just doing as the Qur’an tells them.
Yet in the comments to her post I saw the usual depressing litany of apology and dissembly from Muslims and their helpful idiots. ‘Oh, Islam is not like that.’ ‘Islam means peace.’ (It doesn’t; it means ‘submission’.) Well, all I can say is these people have never studied the Qur’an, have been misinformed about what it says or are lying. (Taqqiya.)
There is only one answer to this; you have to read the Qur’an. So I have uploaded translations of it, in English. I have placed links to these below. Please download, my apologies for their size, and distribute them widely.
Before you read the Qur’an, there are a few things you should know. In the first place, it at first appears resolutely self-contradictory. On any topic, there are peaceful verses and those of appalling violence. It is almost as if there were two writers, hopelessly at odds with each other.
It is entirely possible that there was never a living Mohamed and that the Qur’an was indeed made up by several authors. It wasn’t written down until 80 years after his putative death in any case; but that debate is for another day.
If we go with the standard narrative, Mohamed spent the first part of his life in Mecca, where he was weak and subject to the authorities, and so his preachings were peaceful and calm. After he and his followers had finally caused so much trouble that they were evicted, they fled to Medina, where they discovered highway robbery as a profession and soon moved on to large-scale banditry and genocide. The verses from this period are much more violent than the earlier ones.
Islamic scholars call these the ‘Meccan’ and the ‘Medinan’ verses respectively, for obvious reasons.
(Now you should read this post about the Doctrine of Abrogation, if you have not already.)
Briefly, Mohamed’s followers were aware of the inconsistencies so the Prophet (allegedly) asked Allah, who explained that when he gave a verse that contradicted an earlier one, he ‘took back’ the original so that he could substitute it with ‘something better’. The earlier verses were not to be forgotten, but they no longer had authority. So only the later verses of the Qur’an remain ‘in force’ — which means, these are the ones that ‘true Muslims’ must follow. This is called the Doctrine of Abrogation, and its effects, when understood in the context of what the Qur’an actually says, are chilling.
But how do you know which is which? The books (Suras) of the Qur’an are not ordered chronologically, but by length. Well, there are clues. The Medinan (violent) Suras are longer than the Meccan ones. The explanation is that the Prophet had more time by then. Secondly, while there are some peaceful verses in the later Suras, there are almost no violent ones in the earlier; so, if you are reading a fair few horrific verses, it’s likely to be later. Then there is geography. If the verses discuss Medina or areas close to it, then they are Medinan.
Many Islamic Scholars believe that Sura 9, which is the most violent, ‘abrogates’ or overrides all earlier Suras. It would do no harm to begin your reading there, in view of this.
Quran – Saheeh International Translation (‘Saheeh’ or ‘Sahih’ just mean ‘reliable.’) This is an approved translation.
Quran by M.M.Pickthall (A solid version made hard to read by the use of archaic English.)
The Koran translated by N J Dawood (This is the most readable version, by one of the greatest Orientalists of his era; but it is rejected by Islamic scholars because Dawood was not himself a Muslim.)
Quran by Yusuf Ali (Another authorised version.)
Word by Word Quran (Relates the Arabic text to specific English words; not really a readable translation but useful for those learning Arabic.)
Quran Transliteration (This is not a translation but an attempt to let the non-Arabic speaking reader have some idea of the sound of the words.)
Finally, you should read this appraisal of the ‘Doctrine of Abrogation’. This doctrine is essential to understanding Islam and how it behaves in the context of the Qur’an. PIG_abrogration_naskh
The post Qur’an: Read It Yourself appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
The leaders of the patriarchy’s PR machine known as ‘religion’ — elderly men in dresses kissing each other
The patriarchy invented the Abrahamic sky-god death-cults of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and so these are the most extremely misogynistic of the major religions. Their hatred of women oozes like pus from every page of their texts. Women are slaves, the chattels of their fathers, to be sold off as sex slaves to male owners for whom their only function is to provide male heirs and, perhaps as an unfortunate by-product, replacement baby-factories like themselves.
From within the patriarchy, it is practically impossible to see it. It’s like the old saw: you can’t see the wood for the trees. We all contribute to it, willy-nilly. Just look at your name — or mine, for that matter: Rod Fleming. My name and my father’s name. But wait: why? What did he do? He fucked my mother, that’s all. Just as your father fucked your mother. But that was where his input ended. Who carried you through gestation? Who went through the pain and potentially lethal risk of parturition so that you could be alive? Your mother did. And where is her name? Nowhere. Your legal title is determined by a brief sexual encounter that ended in an ovum being fertilised. That’s it.
So should I change my name? To Rollo, my mother’s maiden name? But wait, her mother was a Martin, the Rollo name came from a similarly brief encounter. In fact, look at your ‘family tree’. It’s all based on male inheritance. If you could trace it back a thousand years — and precious few, if any, can do that — it would still just be the record of the path of forty or so fucks. That’s it. Of the women whose labour — literally — allows it to exist at all, nothing is known. Just the men.
Another elderly man in a dress acting as pimp for the patriarchy
This is so pervasive that we don’t even see it. Yet it is the badge of the patriarchy: the lineage of father through son, though in fact, men are largely irrelevant to the process. One man could, were he diligent enough, impregnate what, ten women a day? That’s over three thousand a year. One man. Just one. If we had a culture that was 99% women, not only would it survive, it would boom, just on the efforts of those 1% of men; but all the actual work would still be done by women. Populations are strictly dependent on the number of fertile mothers.
Consider the other scenario: a culture 99% male. Within a generation or so, this would die out. It has no hope of survival. There just are not enough women to keep it going, assuming they produce babies at the same ratio of 99:1 male to female.
So how did we ever get the idea that men are more important than women are?
The answer is in the web of lies and propaganda spun by the patriarchy and disseminated by religion, philosophy and even science. A lace of dishonesty and deception that has one end: to maintain male supremacy and ensure female subordinacy. That simple.
Plato, the Greek philosopher, can be credited with much of the basis for the modern Western patriarchy, though the rot goes further back in time. Perhaps most importantly, his ‘Middle Platonism’, a discourse of the relationship of humans and deities, was probably the stimulus for Paul the Apostle’s writings, which are actually the oldest texts in the New Testament canon — which is the operating manual of the Western patriarchy.
Plato was an unambiguous misogynist of the very worst order. He believed that like attracted like and so men who were attracted to women were displaying their feminine side. As far as he was concerned, only a man of pure masculinity was fit to govern, which meant that men should never fall in love with women, as this rendered them unfit for office of state. No, women were for the production of babies to continue the patriarchy. They were like cattle to be milked, and servicing them was an onerous task that men had to carry out in order to ensure future generations — of men.
So, men were supposed to love other men. Still, Plato couldn’t quite get himself to go along with the physical side. Why? Because in a relationship in which one man has sex with another, one must give and the other receive. However, the act of being penetrated makes a man into a woman, and for Plato, that was the worst possible thing that could happen. So how did he square this circle? Easy: invent an ideal society in which men fall in love with each other but don’t have sex, while occasionally fulfilling the noxious civic duty of impregnating women whom they do not love, for the future of the nation. Love and sex become separated, and sex becomes shameful and immoral, while ‘love’ — which, remember, for Plato was properly only that between two men — exalted. That is what ‘Platonic Love’ really is, and a better recipe for a sick and dysfunctional society could not be imagined.
This, dear reader, is the cockamamie ‘philosophy’ upon which Western ‘civilisation’ is based, as handed down and modified by the Romans, the Catholic Church, a few other more or less rabid Protestant kirks, the Enlightenment thinkers, imperialist Europe and so on. Result: the United States of America, the most dysfunctional and terminally fucked-up culture on the planet…except for Islam. But while Islam is just as sick and deranged and has the numbers, the USA has the biggest and most expensive killing machine on the planet.
It’s no accident that the most homophobic and sexually repressed culture in the developed world is also the most religious, nor that the religion that infects and animates it is Christianity. This cult was deliberately shaped to serve the ends of the Roman Empire in its conquest of all the cultures around it. Whether or not you believe there was a historical Jesus, it is undeniable that Paul the Apostle set up the Pauline church to fit directly into the political structure of Rome, and that subsequent ‘Fathers’, synods, Councils and committees refined this. So much so that it became the natural choice of the Roman Emperor Constantine when he sought to establish one official religion for the whole Empire. (We discuss this in depth in ‘Why Men Made God‘.)
For a nation founded on the solid imperialist principles of land theft, slavery and ruthless use of overwhelming military force against much weaker opponents (while carefully avoiding situations in which it might get trounced, as happened in Vietnam,) Christianity is a natural choice of religion. USicans have much to thank Plato, Paul and all the other developers of the cult for.
This background in religion and philosophy explains the modern Western patriarchy, as well as how and why it is, right now, attempting to roll back the limited gains made by women in the twentieth century. The misogynistic, patriarchal right seeks to re-establish the status of women as chattels, their sexuality the property of first their fathers and then their husbands, aided and abetted by their close male relatives.
The striking similarities between the Western patriarchy and the Islamic one exist because Islam is itself a half-baked pastiche of Platonic and Roman Christian ideas, with a dose of good old-fashioned barbarism and a few Arab fairy-tales thrown in just to make things interesting. In other words, the philosophical and religious bases of the Western and the Islamic patriarchies are the same, so it is not surprising that they should be so alike. And anyway, there are only so many ways you can say ‘men are better and if you disagree we’ll rape you’.
When George W. Bush described Islam as ‘a fine religion’ many of us though he had finally flown the coop. But in a way he was right: Islam is very similar in its misogyny, homophobia, condemnation of women and absolute insistence on male supremacy to the Southern Baptist cult Dubbya was rendered stupid by — or at least, stupider than he started out.
Indeed it is arguable that in a few limited senses, these cults are even more viciously misogynistic than Catholicism. So Dubbya was praising the similarity between them — which, if you hadn’t noticed, is their hatred of women — and, had somebody not tried to park some airliners on prominent USican landmarks, there’s a good chance that Islam would still have Presidential support. Which just goes to show that birds of a feather flock together.
There would be no divide between the rabid mullahs of Islam and the USican Republican right on a huge range of issues: both condemn contraception and abortion, because they recognise that these represent women’s choices, and neither has any time for that. Both condemn sex before marriage, for the same reason. Can’t have the girls trying out a few partners to see if any actually ring the bell, can we — while, of course, men can fuck blue and be lauded for their manliness. Both hate homosexuality because they recognise, as Plato did, that the sexually recipient partner is, by definition, not a man, at least in the act of sex. Since, in these miserable cults, the most dishonourable thing a man can do is to be womanly, actually performing as a woman in sex is intolerable to them.
This is why the same song is heard from all across the Christian and Muslim world. Even where ‘being homosexual’ is permitted, actually having sex is condemned. Why is the act of sex between two people with male genitalia so reviled? Because in order to carry it out, one of them must become a woman. It has nothing to do with queasiness about the other functions the anus performs and everything to do with the symbolic act of the surrender of manhood in the act of sex. Since ‘being a man’ is the most highly-vaunted status in the patriarchy, rejecting that is to flaunt it.
Even worse and more offensive to the patriarchy is to appear to be a man while performing sexually as a woman. This is the reason why transsexualism, or at least one form, the True or HomoSexual form, has historically been so widely tolerated in the Islamic world; transsexuals are not pretending to be men, claiming status to which, in the patriarchy, they have no right.
(It is deeply saddening to see how, as the poison of Saudi-funded Salafism has spread to Indonesia, that country’s historic tolerance of its colourful transsexual minority has been compromised by extremists.)
All of this hatred and intolerance has one root: misogyny and the establishment of male supremacy – otherwise known as the patriarchy.
None of these attacks on human dignity, nor the suppression of women and their rights, would have been possible without religion, which has served as the ideal form of social control and the most powerful weapon in the patriarchy’s war against women.
Humans may indeed be preconditioned in an evolutionary sense to accept spirituality. The belief in things that we don’t exist may even have uses. As Michael Shermer says, if you hear a rustling in the savannah and run up a tree, and there’s nothing there, then all that happens is you get laughed at; but if you hear a rustling in the grass and think it’s the wind, but actually it’s a lion, you’re lunch. That is a powerful stimulus and we are all subject to it.
However, as we show in ‘Why Men Made God‘ religion is much more than spirituality, or the early cultic practices of shamanism or animism. Religion is an established method of controlling large numbers of people and determining the way they will think and act. It is an organised mechanism through which the church and its leaders may become vastly wealthy. And it is operated by the patriarchy.
God was made by men in man’s image for one purpose alone: to give moral justification for the establishment of male supremacy and the suppression of women. Religion is the mechanism by which this is enforced. It should follow that if we want to enhance the situation of women and roll back the tide of their suppression. alongside those of homosexuals and transsexuals and indeed any other class that the patriarchy oppresses, then we have to name the enemy and face up to the challenge that it presents: and that enemy is called religion.
In order to become a free, tolerant and equal society, the patriarchy must be destroyed and its religions have to be swept away.
The post The Patriarchy made God appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
The Reliance of the Traveller — the Sharia codebook
In Arabic they are ‘halal’ and ‘haram’. Sharia — contained in a manual called The Reliance of the Traveller actually extends to over 1200 pages of text which specify every imaginable action or aspect of life. Everything from how to brush your teeth or how to put on your clothes, to how to beat your wife or kill your enemies. It is, literally, not just unnecessary for Muslims to think for themselves, it is haram (forbidden).
Muslims are obliged to follow Sharia all the time. There are punishments for transgressions ranging from fines to floggings to forced amputations to death. To reject Sharia wholly is de facto to become apostate, which demands a punishment of death.
Sharia is, by far, the most pernicious ideological evil that afflicts the world today.
Please do not take my word for this; I would rather you researched it yourself, for then you will know what Islam, with its debased code of Sharia, really is: the most anti-human and totalitarian ideology the world has ever seen.
So that you can do this research I have made a full copy of the Sharia code available HERE. Please download it and read for yourself. Be warned though, it’s a big file. At present I only have it in .pdf but I will try to make a conversion into .epub, which will be much smaller and easier to read.
A tiny selection of examples, comparing haram (forbidden) with halal (permitted), is below. If you are one of those duped by the platitudes of Islamic apologists or the ridiculous ‘regressive left’, they may surprise you. They certainly give the lie to the fallacy that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’. Sharia is much, much greater than the tiny number of examples below but I have made this list to show that it is not just a matter of not eating pork.
I originally made this list using the words ‘haram’ and ‘halal’ but it seems to me that this is a form of dissembly, in using foreign, unfamiliar words. So I have used English translations instead. While ‘forbidden’ is a decent translation of ‘haram’, halal is more difficult. In all cases it means that the action is permitted, but in many it also means that the action is mandated or even obligatory. I have used ‘permitted’ and ‘mandated’. The latter means that it is something that Muslims should do, rather than that which they may do.
Philosophy is forbidden.
Science and technology are forbidden unless they can be used as weapons.
Modern Western lifestyle is forbidden.
All music is forbidden.
All poetry is forbidden.
All representations — photographs, drawings, paintings, sculpture — are forbidden.
All works of fiction are forbidden.
Education in non-Muslim countries is forbidden.
Giving money as charity to non-Muslims is forbidden — but taking it is mandated.
Friendship with non-Muslims is forbidden.
For a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man is forbidden but for a Muslim man to marry a non-Muslim woman is permitted, as long as she converts and agrees to raise any children as Muslims.
For women to show their faces in public is forbidden.
Using women as concubines is permitted.
Husbands raping their wives is permitted.
Muslim men raping non-Muslim women is mandated.
Muslim men marrying girls, Muslim or otherwise, as young as 6 is mandated. raping them at age 9 is also mandated.
Sex with women outside marriage is forbidden but sex with slaves is permitted.
Arguments against Islam are forbidden but preaching Islam is mandated.
Anti-Islamic writers and beliefs, and their followers, are forbidden and should be put to death.
Expressing love for one’s wife in public is forbidden but stoning women to death in public is mandated.
Smoking and drinking alcohol are forbidden.
Killing the innocent is forbidden but non-Muslims are not innocent by definition, so killing them is mandated.
Killing anyone who will not submit to Islam is mandated.
Following any law other than Sharia, despite the local law, is forbidden.
Allowing non-Muslims to permanently settle in a Muslim nation is forbidden but going to a non-Muslim nation for settlement purposes is mandated.
Killing Muslims during war, even by accident, by the adversary, is forbidden but killing innocent civilians of non-Muslim enemy nations, deliberately, in retaliation is mandated.
Men wearing clothes below the ankle is forbidden.
Disobeying a husband’s orders is forbidden but beating a wife is permitted.
Dialogues at Islamic Shura Council, by the Ulema, or between Islamic scholars about how to run a country are mandated, but allowing ordinary people to voice their opinion is forbidden.
Condemning non-Muslims about anything is permitted but condemning terrorists amongst Muslims is forbidden.
Travelling the world is permitted but allowing non-Muslims, even charity workers, into Muslim lands is forbidden.
Shaving off one’s beard is forbidden but shaving pubic hair is mandated.
Waging war against non-Muslims is mandated.
Laws of non-Muslim nations are forbidden but seeking justice from non-Muslim courts is permitted.
Allowing women to work is forbidden.
Democracy is forbidden, but using it to seize power and then destroy it is mandated.
Education for women is forbidden, except insofar as it might help her to run the household for her husband.
Apostasy from Islam is forbidden and punishable by death.
Download: The Reliance of the Traveller
The post Sharia: Halal and Haram appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Christopher Hitchens. Pic: The Montreal Gazette
Hitchens was a true man for all seasons; he could be funny, eloquent and incredibly gracious. But at the same time he was erudite and staggeringly well-read, with a brilliant mind. Enraged, as he often was by religious hypocrisy, he could focus a righteous anger on his adversary that was truly spectacular to watch.
Hitchens, throughout his life, was a passionate atheist. Not just convinced or committed, but passionate. He saw religion as fundamentally anti-human. His low opinion of it was fairly universal but he reserved his most scathing attacks for the Abrahamic cults of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, sparing or favouring none. They were, as far as Hitchens was concerned, offensive to the conditions of being human in general and to being a thinking individual in particular.
Christopher Hitchens was never cursed with false intellectual modesty and he suffered fools very badly indeed. He made no attempt to hide his own intellect or grasp of the subject to hand, in order to entrap his opponent. On the contrary, he adopted a thoroughly Nelsonic approach to debating which, like the great admiral’s view of the duty of a naval officer, was ‘to seek out the enemy and destroy him.’ Occasionally, you do have to love the English and producing a man like Hitchens is a good reason to. We shall but rarely see his like again.
So to celebrate the great man, journalist, raconteur, bon viveur and atheist, I give you Part One of a collection of his finest rapier-thrusts, posted on YouTube by Agatan Fnd. Part Two will surely follow.
The post Christopher Hitchens’ Finest Moments appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
