First a few Muslim taxi drivers at an American airport refuse to drive non-Muslims carrying alcohol. Now this:
A Muslim police officer has been excused from guarding London’s Israeli Embassy after he objected to the duty on ‘moral grounds’.
PC Alexander Omar Basha - a member of the Metropolitan Police’s Diplomatic Protection Group - refused to be posted there because he objected to Israeli bombings in Lebanon and the resulting civilian casualties of fellow Muslims.
UPDATE. Meanwhile, back in the US:
An attorney for a Hispanic man who was allegedly knocked to the ground and kicked by a police officer is seeking over $1 million dollars for his client, arguing that the city’s failure to teach law enforcement officers “fundamental Spanish” is the reason excessive force was used.
11 comments:
Lovely tribute by Jim Schembri to Terri Irwin - and Channel Nine’s interview with her.
Excerpt:
The process was, in essence, a heightened version of how people best cope with such tragedies. You don’t shut yourself off, you talk it through, you communicate, you connect with the people who have been part of your life. For Terri Irwin that circle included several hundred million people. And that’s what she did. Superbly.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/a_public_grieving/
Petro Georgiou gets it arse-about in his attack on the Howard Government’s plan to insist new citizens at least speak English:
Yet it is those people most proficient in English who are least likely to take out citizenship. The reality is that take-up rates of citizenship are lowest among those who are English speakers — immigrants from Britain, the United States and New Zealand.
Georgiou, who gave his speech in English, fails to see that the Government’s plan isn’t to get immigrants to become citizens but to get immigrants to speak English. No English tends to mean little assimilation.
Second, he fails to see that the Government’s plan - if it’s going to work - can only work if the situation is exactly as Georgiou describes, with immigrants with less English being more likely to take out citizenship than tose who speak it like a native.
If, instead, only fluent Engish speakers were becoming citizens and the English-challenged weren’t, then the Goverment’s proposed English test would indeed be useless. Why test English immigrants for English?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/petros_argument_is_greek_to_me/
Paul Austin says Victoria’s Labor Government is winning praise from an unusual quarter:
(David) Hayward, dean of Swinburne University’s faculty of business and enterprise, is one of the most astute academic commentators on Victorian politics. He has also been one of Bracks’ most vocal and telling critics — from a leftist perspective.
What’s more unusual than the praise is that the head of a university business and enterprise faculty is generally to the Left of even a Labor premier.
Well, maybe not that unusual, sadly.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/can_socialists_teach_capitalists1/
This should, of course, be welcomed as good news:
New figures reveal Victorian workers are becoming less likely to report discrimination, sexual harassment and racial and religious vilification.
But Victoria’s Equal Opportunity Commission is officially “concerned”. Convinced as always that we are much more evil than every reputable indicator suggests, it concludes (on no evidence) that the Federal Government’s industrial relations changes must be making more oppressed people too scared to squeak up.
Says chairwoman Fiona Smith:
We are concerned that people may be fearful or confused about their rights about discrimination.
Question: if Smith’s EOC is “concerned” when complaints fall, would it be “delighted” if they rose?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/workers_happy_discrimination_bosses_unhappy/
Miranda Devine praises John Howard’s Quadrant speech, in which he lashed the Left’s history of flirting with totalitarians, and she observes:
Unusually for the Prime Minister, he did not speak off the cuff but read a prepared speech typed on 15 cream-coloured A4 pages, with paragraphs scratched out and typos corrected with his own black pen. He wrote the first draft, which was then polished by his economics adviser and speechwriter, John Kunkel, whom Howard says “has a good pen”.
Actually, Howard - who has long prided himself on being able to wing it - has been reading more of his speeches for the past year, and the well-read and thoughtful Kunkel has been writing them. Result: more memorable speeches which are making more of cultural impact. Howard, as I’ve said before, is taking more seriously the intellectual war for our civilisaton. Expect more of it.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/howard_gets_serious/
France thought the European Union’s giant new Airbus would show those dumb Americans that Europe was the future.
French President Jacques Chirac declared, “It is a technological feat and a great European success….When it takes to the skies it will carry the colors of our continent, and our technological ambitions to even greater heights."
But if you want something big, expensive and important done, it’s probably a mistake to think Old Europe will do it better - using state subsidies - than wll the Americans usng brute capitalism:
EUROPEAN aircraft builder Airbus has admitted it faces huge losses and demands to pay its airline customers a fortune in compensation over the latest production delay afflicting its A380 super jumbo.
The Franco-German consortium admitted yesterday the latest delivery setback - the third in 16 months - would carve 4.8 billion ($A8.21 billion) from income over the next four years.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_pride_of_europe_cant_get_flying/
What kind of (largely daughterless?) people could make such an irresponsible decision - a gift to pedophiles and other predators:
A RAUNCHY Lee jeans “Lolita-style” advertisement portraying a young woman in a sexually explicit pose has been ruled inoffensive.
The Advertising Standards Board yesterday dismissed complaints about the advertisement – seen on billboards and in magazines – saying while it had sexual overtones, it was not inappropriate.
Judge for yourself.
They include John Brown, the former Labor minister famous for having sex on his office desk; Emma Tom, a bong-tossing competitor of the 2002 Nimbin Cannabis Cup and former writer for Penthouse and Lesbians On The Loose; media studies lecturer Catherine Lumby, author of Why Feminists Need Porn; rock band manager Joanna Cohen; artist John Bokor; Left-wing author Tom Keneally and more.
Feel that community standards are being protected? Or sold out?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/when_barbarians_are_your_guardians/
The Daily Telegraph reports:
A YOUTH claimed to be a proud Aussie as he apologised to RSL Diggers for burning the Australian flag - then admitted having no idea what the RSL stood for.
The report makes clear that the boy, of Lebanese descent, was sorry for the damage he’d done. It doesn’t say if education authorities are sorry for the damage they’d done, too.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/no_history_no_respect/
What is Khalil Eideh’s “total loyalty” worth?
Victorian Labor backed this Syrian-Australian millionaire to be its candidate for a safe seat even though it knew he’d written to the dictator of Syria promising to work for his interests here, crying: “Loyalty, total loyalty to your wise and brave leadership, and we promise to remain faithful soldiers behind your victorious leadership.”
Now this “totally loyal” follower of the Syrian leader is sending out electioneering letters to Labor members that he’s stamped like a true patriot with a national flag.
But guess which one?
Check with Andrew Landeryou for the evidence in pictures.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/flag_of_convenience/
PRIME Minister John Howard laughingly claimed to have “succumbed to Peter Garrett’s advice” to address the arts community after a surfeit of sport last weekend when he addressed Quadrant magazine’s 50th anniversary dinner Tuesday but if Garrett thinks it was a win for his side of politics he should think again.
The remarks delivered by the prime minister constituted nothing less than the intellectual manifesto his government will take to next year’s election and Garrett would have found little joy in his no-nonsense commentary.
Quadrant, a highly-respected magazine of ideas and debate, was founded in the grim days of the Cold War and through the darkest years sustained the ideals of intellectual freedom and liberal democracy now taken for granted.
Howard is not going to let those who lacked his and Quadrant’s commitments to those ideals forget where they stood.
In 1956, when the first issue of the magazine was published, the Soviet Union had just brutally suppressed the Hungarian uprising. Though Europe was even further from Australia then than it is now, the spirit of those whose country had been crushed was very evident at the Melbourne Olympics when a water polo match between the two nations developed into a bloody brawl.
Those who don’t follow the cultural struggle or who aren’t familiar with our universities might be unaware that the Communism had its staunch defenders here, fellow travellers who were given fantasy tours of the workers paradises of the Soviet Union and Red China, and returned to proclaim they had seen the future.
Howard reminded his audience of some of the “philo-communism” that was once quite common in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, citing Manning Clark’s book Meeting Soviet Man where he likened the ideals of Vladimir Lenin to those of Jesus Christ; John Burton, the former head of the External Affairs Department, arguing that Mao’s China provided a model for the ‘transformation’ of Australia; and “all those who did not simply oppose Australia’s commitment in Vietnam but who actively supported the other side and fed the delusion that Ho Chi Minh was some sort of Jeffersonian Democrat intent on spreading liberty in Asia.”
To peals of laughter, he quoted George Orwell: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool’.
Howard said there was a view that the pro-Communist Left in Australia in decades past was “no more than a bunch of naive idealists, rather than what they were - ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests.”
He praised Quadrant’s editors and contributors, saying they were not only right in practice but “they were right in principle and part of a noble and moral cause.”
With the wane of the pro-communist left in Australian cultural circles after Hungary and Kruschev’s secret speech in 1956 and further still after the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, there developed a New Left counter-culture which redefined the Cold War as a struggle of ‘moral equivalence’ - where the Soviet bloc and the American-led West were equally to blame, each possessing their own dominating ideologies.
“It became the height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship,” Howard said. That nonsense was punctured by the moral clarity of three remarkable individuals - Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.
Praising Quadrant for providing the platform for the counterforce to the black armband view of Australian history, Howard said until recently it had become “almost de rigueur in intellectual circles to regard Australian history as little more than a litany of sexism, racism and class warfare.”
But the brave voices of a few individuals, Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle, among them had stood against the posses of political correctness. “Nowhere were the fangs of the left so visibly on display in a campaign based on character assassination and intellectual dishonesty than in their efforts to trash the name and reputation of Geoffrey Blainey,” he said.
He warned however that despite a more diverse and livelier intellectual environment in Australia, the degree to which the soft-left still holds sway, especially in Australia’s universities, by virtue of its long march through the institutions, should not be underestimated and he reiterated his government’s commitment to teaching students traditional history.
He also described the new threat to free and open societies, the tyranny of Islamist terrorism, as one with at least a family resemblance to the forces of totalitarianism in the past.
Repeating the refrain, “this is not a struggle against Islam. It is a struggle against a perverted interpretation of Islam,” he said, “we see on a daily basis, it is the terrorists and suicide bombers who eagerly set out to spread terror and to kill innocent Muslim civilians. Countries with their sons and daughters serving in Iraq and Afghanistan today would like nothing more than to see them complete their job and return home.”
“To those who want to portray the West as anti-Muslim I would say that it was not the Arab League who went to war in the 1990s on behalf of Muslim minorities in the Balkans. It was the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and their NATO allies.
“Let me also remind people who now talk as if Iraq was some island of pro-Islamic tranquillity before 2003 that the person who probably killed more Muslims in history is Saddam Hussein.”
Acknowledging there were those who legitimately opposed the original action to oust Saddam Hussein, he said if countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia simply abandoned the people of Iraq, it would be an enormous victory for the forces of terror and extremism around the world.
The nation has been put on notice, the global struggle will be every bit as crucial as the long campaign of the Cold War years - and key to the government’s re-election strategy.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/fighting_terrorism/
Thank you for this posting.
Professional code of conduct prevents me from providing experience proofs that endorse this post.
I tire of the barracking the left do in favor of poor governance.
I’m curious, which historian was it that listed the top five prime ministers of Australia .. ignoring Menzies (prior to Howard)?
Fact is following fiction with the FBI expressing concern about a real-life threat explored in a story-line in the latest series of the Sopranos. In the television series, two apparent Middle Eastern terrorists try to do business with Tony Soprano, negotiating to buy weapons. In real life, the FBI has revealed it is “aggressively” looking for such links between organised crime and terrorism.
The reality of mobsters and terrorists linking up will be the focus of a trial due to start later this month involving an alleged plot by an organised crime group to smuggle weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles and rocket propelled grenades, into the US from Armenia. The plot was foiled by an FBI sting operation last year in which an informant claiming to be buying arms for Al-Qaeda negotiated with the crime group operating across three US states.
Eighteen members of the network were arrested during the operation.
“We are continuing to look for a nexus (between organised crime and terrorists),” Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI’s top counter-terrorism official told the Associated Press this week. “We are looking at this very aggressively.”
According to the FBI, organised crime has much to offer terrorists – access to weapons and explosives, money laundering expertise, established smuggling routes and experience in identity fraud and forged documents to name but a few. And there is little doubt that despite the fictional Tony Soprano’s code of honour, real life mobsters wouldn’t hesitate to do business with terrorists.
“They will deal with anybody, if they can make a buck,” says Matt Heron, head of New York FBI’s organized crime unit. “They will sell to a terrorist just as easily as they would sell to an order of Franciscan monks. It’s a business relationship to them. If the mob has explosives and a terrorist wants them and they have the money, they could become instant friends.”
A confidential FBI analysis prepared for the Pentagon and recently leaked to the Associated Press wire service warned the potential for co-operation between organised crime and terrorists was increasing.
“Although terrorism and organized crime are different phenomena, the important fact is that terrorist and criminal networks overlap and cooperate in some enterprises,” the study said. “The phenomenon of the synergy of terrorism and organized crime is growing because similar conditions give rise to both and because terrorists and organized criminals use similar approaches to promote their operations.”
But it is not necessarily Tony Soprano’s Italian mafia that the FBI is so worried about. The decline of the mafia’s power in recent years has seen the growth of other rival organised crime groups, such as Russian and Asian networks. But of particular concern are Albanian crime gangs, now firmly established in New York and other east coast US cities. The Albanian groups have drawn membership from the influx of migrants from countries such as Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro. They have a reputation for violence and some members have worked as enforcers for the traditional Italian mafia families.
According to FBI assistant director Chris Swecker, the Albanians are “a hardened group, operating with reckless abandon”.
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/crime/index.php/news/comments/osama_and_the_mob/
I think what some will find offensive is the link that must now exist between recreational drugs and terrorism.
I think it highlights why some get upset when convicted criminals have their assets siezed .. assets that may have been used to fund huggers, like Osama Bin Ladin.
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