David Cameron’s attempts to style himself as the latest incarnation of a long tradition of ‘British values’ of tolerance, democracy and the rule of law is belied by both British history and his own policies. It also plays right into the hands of ISIS.
For the second time in just a month, a British academic institution has been intimidated by an orchestrated Zionist lobby.
Yesterday we learned that Southampton University has decided to withdraw its permission to hold the academic conference on International Law and the State of Israel. The decision was taken on the grounds of “health and safety” with the university claiming it did not have enough resources to mitigate the “risks.”
On March 18, a student in Pine Bush High School near New York City recited the American Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic. This was done as part of the school’s Foreign Language Week, which was conducted to celebrate the “many races, cultures and religions that make up [the US and the Pine Bush] School District.”
In Saudi Arabia, the Mutaween are 3,500 public officials and thousands of volunteers who work for the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. They are responsible for enforcing strict religious laws. Among the many laws are those that require all women to wear head scarves and black gowns when in public.
The “Morality Police” also exist in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and several fundamentalist Arab countries.
It isn’t only in Arab countries that morals are regimented and institutionalized.
It lies in the ambiguity of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 10, the provision that provides for the protection of free speech, can hardly be said to be the broad creature it purports to be. Restrictions will be tolerated, as long as they be “in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society”.
There are several machine gunners in front of the Charlie Hebdo building in Paris. These are cops, wearing bulletproof vests, carrying powerful weapons. They stare at occasional pedestrians in their special, revolting and highly intimidating way. Charlie Hedbo editors are well protected, some of them postmortem.
On Wednesday, February 25, the Wisconsin Senate passed a so-called “right-to-work” bill, which will almost certainly be approved by the Republican-dominated state Assembly next week and signed by Governor Scott Walker. As debate began, I was arrested and dragged away by at least six police officers along with my brother. We were standing in a hallway outside the Senate chamber; the police deemed that we as Wisconsin citizens had no right to be there, in our own house of government. I was processed and held at the county jail, and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Elie Wiesel has jumped on his horse to once again topple the enemies of the Jewish state. Wiesel identifies Iran as such an enemy, although it seems rather that it is Israel that has made itself the enemy of Iran.
My answer is simple: the issues surrounding the horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo disappeared so fast because the general Western reaction was ill-considered/phony and therefore unsustainable.
But there is actually still quite a lot to be discussed.
Secondly, European politicians and media chose – quite uniformly for a professed pluralist society – to not discuss the possible causes. The more convenient interpretation was that the perpetrators were just madmen and people like that should be hunted down and eliminated (like IS in Syria and Iraq).
Last May, the Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced to ten years in prison, 190,000 Euro fine and 1,000 lashes. The latter should be enforced, spread across 20 Fridays, that is: Every Friday 50 lashes over a period of almost five months. 2008, Badawi founded the website “Free Saudi liberals”.
