Italy to start immediate deportation of immigrants

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC-fOQSLqyg

From The Solomon Star - the leading newspaper of the Solomon Islands
AN Anglican priest is suffering from trauma after members of the Muslim community in east Malaita allegedly assaulted him.
Police in Malaita confirmed to the Solomon Star the incident happened on December 16.
Malaita Provincial Police Commander David Diosi said they are looking for suspect Jack Rade, who is the leader of the Muslim group in east Malaita.
Mr Diosi said witnesses reported Mr Rade threatened to “cut off the priest’s head and destroy everyone who goes against their will”.
He said last week when the police attempted to arrest Mr Rade, he lied to them and escaped from custody. Mr Diosi said communities in east Malaita retaliated to the attack by hijacking and damaging a jeep owned by the Muslim group.
He said the communities also demand compensation from the Muslims.
“The communities in East Malaita are demanding cash and shell money and if the Muslims don’t act they will be forced out of the area.”
Mr Diosi said the situation between the local communities and the Muslim group was very tense at the moment. Mr Diosi said people in the area are reportedly fed up of the Muslims

 Photogenic, fashionably mixed race and in consequence overrated, is it any wonder that Zzzzadie Smith likes Obama? He is, she says, "a genuinely many-voiced man, who doesn't just speak for you, he can speak you."  Speak yourself:

In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father. From talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you’re insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously. Because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experiences. Instead, citizens of the Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun, “we”. Throughout his campaign, Obama was always careful to say “we”. He was noticeably wary of “I.” I think by speaking so he wasn’t simply avoiding a singularity he didn’t feel. He was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy. His enemy latched on to his imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City. This ill-defined place where you can be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time.

Isn't this just an achingly pretentious way of saying he's a smarmy git? Or is "git" too straight and singular a morpheme?

Stating obvious but uncomfortable truths in a series of Telegraph articles, Will Cummins wrote:

It is the black heart of Islam, not its black face, to which millions object.

Predictably, fatuously, this comment was pronounced racist, although it explicitly puts content of character before colour of skin. "Not its black face" are the words, but people read "black face". Some people in the UK are very stupid indeed.

Some people in America are very stupid too, especially in the universities. Watch and despair (h/t David Thompson):

Thanks to "The Law" for this story:

ISLAMIC extremists have been condemned after plastering Burton streets with stickers bearing the slogan 'Jesus was a Muslim' - one day before Christmas.

The stickers appeared on the morning of Christmas Eve on lampposts in the Horninglow and Shobnall areas of town, and outside religious buildings including St Chad's Church, in Hunter Street.

The stickers - believed to originate from fundamentalist Muslim group Islam For The UK, as they included the group's website address - provoked an angry response from people living nearby.

"I think it's disgusting that someone would do this the day before Christmas, when we are supposed to be spreading racial harmony," one resident, who asked not to be named, told The Mail. "It's a real slap in the face for Christians."

(...)

On its website, Islam For The UK calls for Islamic Shari'ah law to be implemented in Britain, and condemns those Muslims who take part in Christmas celebrations.

Under the heading 'Christmas - The pathway to hellfire', an article on the website says observance of Christmas by Muslims will 'lead to hellfire - a punishment which is 70 times hotter than the fires of this world'....

Thanks to "The Law" for this article in the Jerusalem Post:

The Czech Republic, which takes over the European Union's presidency on January 1, defended Israel's strikes against Hamas on Tuesday.

While the EU has called for a cease-fire to end the violence between Israel and Hamas that has killed almost 350 Palestinians since Saturday morning, Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg insisted Israel had the right to defend itself, according to the Reuters news agency.

"Let us realize one thing: Hamas increased steeply the number of rockets fired at Israel since the cease-fire ended on December 19. That is not acceptable any more," Schwarzenberg told the daily Mlada Fronta Dnes in an interview.

The country currently holding the EU presidency, France, has condemned Israel's strikes and the rocket attacks from Hamas terrorists and called for both sides to stop immediately.

It also said it deplored the many civilian casualties and condemned Israel's "disproportionate use of force," echoing comments from UN Secretary-General Bank Ki-moon, who has also called for a cease-fire.

Schwarzenberg, a staunch ally of the United States, said Hamas had excluded itself from serious political debate due to its rocket attacks on Israel. He also hinted the group's putting its bases and gun warehouses in densely populated areas was the reason for the Palestinians' growing death toll.

"Why am I one of the few that have expressed understanding for Israel? ... I am enjoying the luxury of telling the truth," Schwarzenberg told the daily...

From the BBC:

Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was beaten by medieval prince Alexander Nevsky in a poll held by a TV station to find the greatest Russian.

Stalin came third, despite being responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviets in labour camps and purges.

Alexander Nevsky fought off European invaders in the 13th century to preserve a united Russia.

In second place was reformist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, who was assassinated in 1911.

More than 50 million people voted by phone, the internet or via text messages in the poll held by Rossiya, one of Russia's biggest television stations.

The voting took place over six months as 500 original candidates were whittled down to a final 12.

Stalin - an ethnic Georgian - was riding high for many months and was in the number one slot at one point until the show's producer appealed to viewers to vote for someone else, says the BBC's Richard Galpin in Moscow.

Stalin sent millions of people to their deaths in the work camps of the Gulag. Millions more perished in political purges or during the forced collectivisation of farms during his rule from the 1920s to his death in 1953.

Many in Russia do still revere Stalin for his role during World War II when the Soviet Union defeated the forces of Nazi Germany.

But now there is a much broader campaign to rehabilitate Stalin and it seems to be coming from the highest levels of government, says our correspondent.

"We now have to think very seriously, why the nation chooses to put [Joseph] Stalin in third place," said actor and film director Nikita Mikhalkov, one of the contest's judges, after the results were released.

The Chinese still revere Mao, too, showing that people get the government they deserve. The vote, and the way it is reported, also shows that Communism has got away with it. Just imagine the outcry if Hitler were voted "third-best German".

Update: Enoch sensibly reminds us that Stalin wasn't even Russian - he was Georgian. (Never shake thy Gori locks at me.) And Hitler was Austrian. And the British Royal Family is German.

When it's a rift in space. David L. Stevens of Cheltenham writes on The Times letters page:

Before Christmas we purchased a new set of decorative lights, which bore, in four languages, the message: "For indoor and outdoor use only." I found this instruction worrying, for it suggests that the manufacturers have discovered that, at exactly the junction between indoors and outdoors, there is a mysterious anomaly in the space-time continuum, where the use of these lights might be dangerous.

This must be one of those blink-and-you-miss-it thresholds. Others include:

1. Noon. It's morning, then it's afternoon before you know it.
2. The extra swallow that makes a summer.
3. Middle age for a Palestinian. Palestinians are "children" for a long time, and then they suddenly become "elderly".
4. The line between poverty, which fuels Muslim extremism, and affluence, which fuels Muslim extremism. 
5. The present. It's on its way, then before you know it, it's gone.

The present used to be a more leisurely affair. People used to say "presently" and "for the present". "Presently" meant both "currently" and "in a short time", and the implication was that you wouldn't mind waiting. But people don't say "presently" anymore. They are too busy going forward.

As for the past, it used to be a foreign country, where people did things differently. No longer.

WND reports on David Gaubatz's Mapping Sharia project:

When the five Muslims convicted this month of plotting to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix were charged, the New Jersey mosque where four of the men worshipped reacted to negative publicity by holding an "emergency town hall meeting" to calm neighbors and persuade Americans that Islam poses no threat.

But having investigated the Islamic Center of South Jersey one year ago, Middle East expert and former Air Force special agent Dave Gaubatz insists not only is the mosque a threat to national security, it represents a pattern that has prompted him to launch a massive project to systematically classify every known mosque in the U.S.

Mapping Shariah in America: Knowing the Enemy seeks by the end of next year to document in a rigorous, scientific fashion the controversial premise that the more a mosque or community of Muslims adheres to Shariah, or Islamic law, the greater its threat to U.S. national security.

"That's exactly, that's what the data are showing," Gaubatz told WND, who has charted about 100 of the estimated 2,300 mosques his team has identified across the country. "The more adherent you are to Shariah, the more likely you are going to find the material to back that up at the mosque."

No one else is doing this work in the United States – not the FBI, not the police, not the Department of Homeland Security. You can support the work of the Mapping Sharia Project here.

For the observant Muslim, Islamic law is an all-encompassing system that dictates every aspect of life, from food and clothing to the duty to participate in making the religion dominant over the entire world.

At the Islamic Center of South Jersey in Palmyra, where three of the Muslims in the Fort Dix case regularly worshipped and a fourth prayed a few times, Gaubatz found a strict, Shariah-adherent leadership that eagerly distributed jihadist materials supportive of seminal Shariah proponents such as Sayid Abul Maududi, the founder of the radical Pakistani party Jamaat-e-Islami, and Syed Qutb, whose ideas shaped al-Qaida.

"What is being overlooked in the Fort Dix case is where the suspects worshipped," he said. "Were they Shariah adherent? Who is the imam, what materials were at the mosque? They came up with the idea to attack Fort Dix for some reason. How and why?"

(...)

The significance of the Mapping Shariah project is underscored in the conflicting message to the public by a trustee at the Islamic Center of South Jersey, Ismail Badat, who insisted Muslims in the U.S. promote only peace.

Badat said the purpose of the emergency town hall meeting in the wake of the Fort Dix charges in May 2007 was "to clarify for our American friends and neighbors the fundamental beliefs, teachings and practices of Islam, and to make it clear that Muslims here, who are also Americans, do not in any way sanction the forms of violent and offensive behavior which have recently attained prominence in the media."

But Gaubatz found evidence to the contrary not only at the New Jersey mosque but at mosques related to other high-profile cases.

He personally conducted the mapping of the mosque tied to the Muslim who went on a shooting rampage at Salt Lake City's Trolley Square mall last year, and he found it ranked high on his scale.

In Blacksburg, Va., Gaubatz met the imam who was asked to pray at the nationally televised service for slain students at Virginia Tech last year and discovered he leads a Shariah-compliant mosque that backs the genocidal Islamist regime in Sudan.

The imam clearly did not like Virginia Tech, Gaubatz said, and handed him material by Maududi and the Saudi regime, which spends billions of dollars spreading the strict Wahhibist interpretation of Islam around the world.

"He said, if I want to be pure Muslim, and a true Muslim, study these. Look at these," Gaubatz said.

Gaubatz and his team gave its highest rating, a 10, to the Brooklyn mosque of Imam Siraj Wahhaj.

Wahhaj, a former board member of the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, "is in my opinion the most dangerous person in the U.S. in regards to our national security," Gaubatz said.

He has documented Wahhaj declaring in a lecture, "Muslims in America are the most strategically placed Muslims in the world. The U.S. government can't bomb them."

Gaubatz said his week-long assessment of Wahhaj's mosque also uncovered violent material calling for the death of law enforcement officers and instructing Muslims who commit a crime how to go underground.

Wahhaj also has called for recruiting gang members to help carry out jihad.

"Give them Islam, then send them back to the streets with UZIs," the imam said, according to Gaubatz.

Gaubatz contends many Islamic groups and organizations take on a legal and peaceful veneer in English-speaking settings but often preach quietly in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu "a very violent and anti-American jihad."

Virtually all Islamic leaders in the U.S. have been particularly careful since the 9/11 attacks about what they say publicly, Gaubatz said. But many Shariah-compliant mosques and schools distribute materials supporting or calling for violent jihad. In a widely distributed DVD, for example, an Islamic scholar in the U.S., Ahmad Sakr, declares in a pre-2001 sermon, "Do not follow the laws of the U.S. Constitution, do not follow the congressmen and other U.S. leaders, they will all go to hell, follow Shariah law." ...

The British Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, thinks government should take a hand in regulating the internet and international agreements to impose cinema style ratings will be a good first step. From The Telegraph:

...However, Mr Burnham said: “If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.” ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VKFCLN4J70&feature=related

Matthew Parris writes of his belief that only Christianity is the answer to the real problems of Africa which he contends lie in "crushing passivity," collectivity and the fear instilled by traditional African belief systems. I would add Islam to that mix, with its inshallah fatalism and the submergence of the individual in the collective. It is also a fear driven religion. Islam and Christianity are fighting for the soul of Africa.

If you right now click on Google, and "News," the first item to come up will bear this headline:  World rallies around Palestinians amid Gaza offensive. This is at CNN.com. The sole evidence offered for this bizarre statement is that, in various countries, Arabs and Muslims have put  on demonstrations. They haven't been particularly large demonstrations, and they are perfectly predictable, and here and there, Arabs and other Muslims have held demonstrations in the West, with the odd (very odd) local leftist collaborators to support them.
 

But surely what is of note is how very little sympathy or interest -- compared to, say, the early months of Arafat's "Intifada," the Gazan Arabs are receiving, and how obviously right and proper has been Israel's goal, stated and well understood, which is simply to end the power of Hamas to harm Israel, and to make it, by force of arms (there is no other way) to stop its ceaseless firing of rockets into as much of Israel's territory that Hamas has the power to reach, while at the same time demanding, whining, complaining, that Israel has to do more and still more, to supply electricity and access to Israeli hospitals, and all the rest, while Hamas continues to try to kill any Israelis, men, women, and children, its rockets happen to hit.

No, it is not true, though someone at CNN.com decided to say it was true, that the "world rallies around Palestinians." The Arabs and Muslims, ineffectually and not very enthusiastically, have had some demonstrations. But they always have these demonstrations, when Israel, or America, or Great Britain, or Denmark, or The Netherlands, or any country at all, somehow manages to offend Muslims by standing up for itself. And these demonstrations will always go on, and should be dismissed. 

The Dog Barks. The Caravan Moves On. 

Along with many others, I participated in an Israel Project news conference today with the international media advisor to Israel's Prime Minister, Mark Regev, on an array of topics arising from the IDF "Operation Cast Lead" in Gaza against Hamas.  A recording of the news conference and a transcript will be posted shortly on their website. See here.  There were more than 600 journalists and bloggers on the call, with many questions from British publications and even  from China Radio. Some of the more challenging questions came from American participants.

Regev is basically communicating the following on behalf of Prime Minister Olmert, who leaves office after a Knesset general election on February 10th.

• Hamas started the violence on Christmas with the crescendo of rocket, missile and mortar attacks on the South of Israel and Western Negev which left Israel no choice under international law, other than to defend itself and protect more than 250,000 of its citizens;
• Hamas "tore up" the understandings negotiated with Egypt with  rocket attacks that demonstrated clearly that the 'hudna' (period of calm) or cease-fire was over;
• The people of Gaza are not the enemy, but rather the extremist Hamas leadership seeking to replace the civil order with a Taliban-like tyranny;
• Israel security services briefings to the cabinet have indicated that Gazans do not understand the logic of Hamas leadership in fostering the violence;
• The Arab world is divided and the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Saudis do not understand the objectives of Hamas in continuing this eruption of violence and they are concerned that both Hamas and Hezbollah have become allies, as they are now both proxies of Iran; 
• Providing open border crossings and delivery of food and other humanitarian aid demonstrates that Israel does not target Gaza civilians;
• Hamas's media strategy is to focus on 'spin' that the IDF operations in Gaza is killing 9 civilians for each Hamas security cadre killed in the IDF operations there. However, there is no way of independently verifying the information given Hamas media control;
• Israel's media strategy is to focus on Hamas's abrogation of the 'understandings', that Israel is targeting extremist Hamas leadership and its military machine and in the process creating a new reality, one of security for Israeli citizens in the South so that they will not have to live with the daily fear of loss of life;
• The IDF attacks over the past three days have demonstrated Israel's ability to effectively target, degrade  and weaken the Hamas command and control net, military machine and security apparatus;
• Iran's 'fingerprints' are all over the longer range missiles and mortars and other weaponry; and,
• Hamas has copied Hezbollah in its fortification of tunnels for weapons and goods smuggling on the  border with Egypt, tunnels that were hit hard yesterday by the IAF.

Obama's adviser Axelrod describes plans for increased spending by the Obama administration and offers a view of its view of education, a view no different, unsurprisingly,from that of the Republicans: 

"investing in energy and health-care projects, and refurbishing the nation's classrooms and labs and libraries so our kids can compete...."

Yes, that's what education is. It's giving "our kids" what they need so "our kids can compete." Education As Vocational Training. That education should, for most people, end up being vocational training is clear. But before that? Is there no other conceivable aim of education, especially for the most intelligent, than arranging things so "our kids can compete"? 

And is that what education will then be reduced to in Western Europe, Russia, China, a "process" that ensures that "our kids can compete"? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzbC0TC24DM&feature=related

GAZA, Dec. 29 (UPI) -- A U.N. observer says Israel's aerial assault is creating panic in Gaza, and that the city's residents are fighting among themselves as a result.

"It's very bad -- people are running in all directions because of the bombings that are happening everywhere," Karen AbuZayd, a humanitarian spokeswoman for the United Nations, told CNN from Gaza. "People are very agitated because the bombings are now concentrating on individual houses and individual families, apparently."

Karen AbuZayd, who is the current top U.N. official in Gaza, part of that head by-now almost entirely Arab-staffed, save for a non-Arab figurehead at the top,  UNRWA support system that allows "Palestinians" to keep heedlessly having 8, 10, 12 children, which children are then promptly registered for the Infidel-taxpayer dole, and stay on it forever (and almost no one ever dies, and anyone who has ever signed onto UNRWA, as so many local Arabs have done in Lebanon and Syria and elsewhere, appear to never be removed from the UNRWA rolls), attempts in her comment above to win sympathy. 

But in fact she reveals something quite different: "the bombings are now concentrating on individual houses and individual families." Yes, that's exactly right -- after carefully attacking Hamas headquarters, and leaving intact buildings even ten or twenty meters away (from which  Arabs blandly watched, secure in the knowledge  that the Israelis would be careful in their aim), the Israelis are now, with equal care, targetting the homes of Hamas officials -- "concentrating on individual houses and individual families."

Not carpet bombing. Not indiscriminate bombing. Targeting "individual houses" and "individual families" -- but not, of course, before mass phoning to warn people to get out of any area where weapons are stored, giving them plenty of time to leave. 

You heard about Israel's carefully-targetted bombing, but not only from the Israelis. You heard it, inadvertently, from Karen AbuZayd.  

Why We Fight: The Nazis

Watch, and ponder the parallels.

Thanks to Jeffrey Imm for this article:

A WELSH MP yesterday called on the UK Government to either deport or arrest all British residents who appear on a United Nations list which names members and associates of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Monmouth Conservative MP David Davies, the only Welsh member of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, said he was shocked to see 15 British residents on the list. All but three are apparently free.

Mr Davies said: “This is not a speculative list – the UN is not known to exaggerate or make unfounded claims. These people have been named as involved with Al-Qaeda and I don’t think they should be walking the streets of this country. Either they should be deported or locked up.

“It is little consolation that none of those named are said to be living in Wales. I hope at the very least they are all under constant surveillance. If they do the slightest thing, they should be locked up for a very long time. Al-Qaeda, as we all know, is a very dangerous terrorist organisation responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. I intend to raise this matter in Parliament in the New Year.”

The 15 British residents on the list, which can be seen online at www.un.org/sc/committees/1267/consolidatedlist.htm, are all named as associates of terror group Al-Qaeda...

Their names and known cities of residence are also listed in the article.

The Iranian clerics are not goose-stepping. They're Doing The Lambeth Walk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHtEKSg-ycQ&feature=related
 

In memory of Harold Pinter, who authored some plays and poems, I propose a two minute silence. Followed by a pause.