Qohel

Make a Difference

Year: 2011 (Page 6 of 17)

The Episcopal Church – Casting Swine Before Pearls

August 20, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Reason number 12934618 to get the heck out of the Epsicopal church, if not the entire gluey mess that is worldwide Anglicanism.

Episcopalians will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with a three day memorial including readings from the Koran.

Robert Spencer has selected some verses which might be appropriate:

Qur’an 98:4-6: “Nor did the People of the Book make schisms, until after there came to them Clear Evidence. And they have been commanded no more than this: To worship Allah, offering Him sincere devotion, being true (in faith); to establish regular prayer; and to practise regular charity; and that is the Religion Right and Straight. Those who reject (Truth), among the People of the Book and among the Polytheists, will be in Hell-Fire, to dwell therein (for aye). They are the worst of creatures.”

Qur’an 5:14: “From those, too, who call themselves Christians, We did take a covenant, but they forgot a good part of the message that was sent them: so we estranged them, with enmity and hatred between the one and the other, to the day of judgment. And soon will Allah show them what it is they have done.”

Qur’an 9:29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

In words as slippery as fish oil, presiding ‘bishop’ Katherine Jefferts Schori said: “The anniversary is an opportunity for reflection” adding that the Episcopal Church “continues to work for healing and reconciliation. The greatest memorial to those who died 10 years ago will be a world more inclined toward peace.”

Well, yes. Except that peace and reconciliation have their foundation in truth, something the Epsicopal church seems to have lost track of completely.

Let’s Overlook Obama’s Failures – Mariela Castro

August 20, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Yep, Obama gets a ringing endorsement from the pampered niece of Fidel Castro.

“Let’s overlook President Obama​’s failures during his first term,” advised Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela to Congresspersons Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey and Sam Farr recently in Havana. “We must support him for a second term so that he can have a better opportunity to accomplish better things.”

While being feted by a Stalinist regime that shoots and imprisons labor leaders, outlaws strikes and burns Orwell’s “Animal Farm” as “seditious,” the three smitten U.S. legislators were acting as honored plenipotentiaries of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

While delighting in the company of a regime that jailed and tortured the longest suffering black political prisoners in modern history, that to this day jails and tortures Cuban blacks for the crime of quoting Martin Luther King, Jr​., and whose co-founder (Che Guevara​) declared, “The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and drink, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent,” — while swooning in this august company, California Rep. Barbara Lee also acted as plenipotentiary of the Congressional Black Caucus.

This Congressional delegation’s respectful visit to the Stalinist regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s, murdered them at a higher rate than pre-war Hitler’s and bans elections under penalty of torture chambers and firing squads, was sponsored by the California-based Center for Democracy in the Americas.

Mariela Castro, 49, serves as head of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education, which is dedicated “to enlightening people against  traditional sexual prejudices,” and is run by the only regime in the modern history of the Western hemisphere to herd gays into forced labor camps for the crime of being gay, and to herd HIV sufferers into isolation camps until they died.

More on the economic and human disaster that is communist Cuba at The American Spectator.

Dim witted leftists who gush over Castro’s ‘achievements’ are in the same category as the useful idiots who came back from Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia with glowing reports about new industries and a workers’ paradise.

Dead Polar Bear

August 20, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I was on my way to work yesterday when I saw this dead polar bear on the side of the road.

Dead Polar Bear on Kangaroo Island

It is tragic that melting ice forced this magnificent creature to leave its home and swim all the way across the Pacific and around the coast of Australia, only to be killed by a careless motorist.

At least, it looked like a polar bear. And I was a lot closer than this guy:

According to a recent report by Human Events, special investigators from the US government’s Interior Department (ID) have found that a scientific paper published in a 2006 issue of the journal Polar Biology is filled with baseless assumptions about four specific polar bear deaths — and this eventually became the foundational argument for the fight against global warming. But in reality, the deaths may have had nothing to do with melting ice caps, and everything to do with a simple windstorm.

It all stems from an unusual air observation of what appeared to be four dead polar bears floating in the sea. From 1,500 feet (457 meters) in the air, observers reported to study author and biologist Charles Monnett, as well as contributor Jeffrey Gleason, that dead polar bears had been observed, which the duo later used to make various statements, including that “drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open-water periods continues.”

Pornography and Terrorism

August 18, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Jennifer S Bryson notes the high proportion of captured terrorists who have had large amounts of pornography in their possession.

Pornography makes women and men masturbation aids. The actors cease to be human. Their only purpose is to provide physical stimulation. If they don’t do their job, they disappear – the page is turned, the next website clicked.

Pornography de-humanises both actors and users.

If we want to understand the inner workings of terrorists and would-be terrorists, we must seek to understand their entire person, including the relationship—or inconsistencies—between their words and actions. In the case of the 9/11 hijackers who visited strip clubs, and in the case of Abdo and among what seems like an increasing number of terrorists, actions include sexual perversions and pornography use that cannot be squared with what these ideological terrorists and their supporters espouse.

Terrorist acts rely on the ability to dehumanise planned victims. Victims are less than real, less than people. They are to be blotted out.

Bryson asks:

Are there security costs to the free-flow of pornography? If so, what are they? Are we as a society putting ourselves at risk by turning a blind eye to pornography proliferation?
 
I wonder further: Could it be that pornography drives some users to a desperate search for some sort of radical “purification” from the pornographic decay in their soul? Could it be that the greater the wedge pornography use drives between an individual’s religious aspirations and the individual’s actions, the more the desperation escalates, culminating in increasingly horrific public violence, even terrorism?

What Does the Australian Labor Party Stand For?

August 18, 2011 / / 0 Comments

It can no longer claim to stand for Australian workers.

If it did, it would have come down on Craig Thomson like a ton of batts.

This guy (allegedly) stole from health services workers to give himself cash bonuses and $2000 sessions at a brothel.

Then he lied about it.

Instead of standing up for the workers, the Labor Party paid Thomson’s legal bills, lent him another $50,000, and told everyone else to shut up.

Gillard and Labor will no longer be able to form a government if Thomson has to stand down, so it is understandable that they don’t want that to happen.

But they seem to have no comprehension that by acting as they have, Gillard, Swan, etc, have confirmed what is now the standard public view – that they are in this for themselves and cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of ordinary Australians.

The Labor Party will win people’s trust again, and their votes, when it acts in a trustworthy way.

Kicking Our Allies

August 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

A few days ago communist China launched its first (albeit recycled) aircraft carrier. Whatever else this is, it is an attempt to project Chinese authority over the Western Pacific.

A renewed reason to demonstrate and affirm moral and material support to our non-communist allies in Asia.

But virtually simultaneously, the news that the US has bowed to pressure from communist China, and will not supply F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan as expected.

China has called the sale a “red line.” A recent editorial in the state-controlled People’s Daily called for the use of a “financial weapon” against the U.S. if new F-16s were released.

The U.S. decision comes as a blow to the self-ruled island’s effort to counter China’s growing military, whose first aircraft carrier began sea trials last week, and therefore to its independence.

There are fears that losing Taiwan could spell the end of U.S. power projection in the region. Losing Taiwan would “change everything from the operational arch perspective to the posture of Japan and the U.S.” in the region, said Raytheon’s Asia president, Walter Doran, a retired admiral who once commanded the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

An ordinary level of commonsense financial management would not have left the West so vulnerable to the pressure of a threatened ‘financial weapon.’

A set of balls in the White House would also help.

Saying Goodbye to Torchwood

August 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I have been ambivalent about Torchwood from the beginning. The constant ‘gay is cool’ theme was annoying. Captain Jack is cool, and he has casual gay sex, which he ‘needs.’

But gay is not cool. Indulging in homosexual acts is vastly more dangerous to one’s health than smoking or obesity. Let’s see the White House or the Australian Federal Government issue health warnings on that, and then I’ll start to listen to Michelle’s food advice.

Despite that, the stories were often compelling, and raised some worthwhile issues. At the end of Children of Earth, Jack sacrifices his gransdon, and his relationship with his daughter, to save millions of others.

In Miracle Day, the gay sex has become gay porn. And the story is so agenda driven that it is tiresome.

A ‘small town mayor trying to make a name for herself’ the ‘darling of the Tea Party,’ is presented as an even more grotesquely unattractive character than a pedophile murderer.

She calls for those who should be dead but aren’t to be placed in concentration camps.

Of course, for the last century it has been left wingers who have put put people in concentration camps, from Hitler’s National Socialists, to Stalin and Mao. Those same central planning leftists are the ones who have said that lives of certain classes of people, the handicapped, the mentally deficient, children in the womb, have no value.

The Tea Party is made up of people who value individual dignity and freedom, and the right to life of every human person.

So inventing a Hitleresque petty villain and trying to convince viewers she is somehow like Sarah Palin is as far from saying anything truthful as it is possible to get. And truth is important, especially in fiction.

And you could have guessed the plotters behind the scenes of Miracle Day are a huge pharmaceutical company which is only interested in profits, and is prepared to destroy millions of lives to get them.

It’s dreary and predictable. Goodbye Torchwood.

Craig Thomson – Time to Call the Police

August 16, 2011 / / 1 Comment

For last four months allegations have been made that Federal Labor MP and former Federal Secretary of the Health Services Union Craig Thomson had used his union credit card to make make unauthorised cash advances, and to pay for prostitutes.

He has denied those allegations, claiming the cash withdrawals were made by someone else, or if made by him, were appropriate and properly accounted for, and that the signatures appearing to be his on credit card vouchers for ‘escort services’ are forgeries.

Forensic handwriting expert Paul Westwood has examined the vouchers and says there is no evidence of this, and that he ‘would be very surprised if the signature was a forgery.’

The signatures on the license and credit card slip look identical to me:

Craig Thomson - Signature a Forgery?

Radio station 2Ue’s Michael Smith points out that in either case, a crime has been committed, and the police need to be called:

One – Mr Thomson did it. 

Two – Someone knocked off his card, then knocked off his licence, then forged his signature.   They also knocked off his phone, and used his phone from the area where he lives up the Pacific Highway, then used the phone coming down the highway to Sydney and used that phone to call the same escort agency where the knocked off credit card, forged signature and knocked off licence were presented.   Then his card, his licence and his phone were returned to him without him even noticing they were missing.

Then when that $2,745 bill came in as a result of scenario two he just authorised it for payment.   Didn’t ask what it was about.   Didn’t investigate.   It’s just $2,475 anyway.

The NSW Police must be involved in this investigation in either case.   In either scenario one or two it is a clear case of fraud.

And the victims here are the poor buggers who go to work every day cleaning hospitals.   It’s their union dues.   And Craig Thomson was the man who signed off on the way the money was spent.

….

I just rang the number that appears on Craig Thomson’s mobile phone records on the night that the $2,475 was paid to Keywed Pty Ltd, trading as Sydney Room Service escort agency.

The phone was answered “Sydney Room Service.”

I said “I’m Michael Smith, I’m from 2UE and we’re doing a story on the use of credit cards for escort services.   Can you tell if your clients need to show any further ID if they pay for your services with a credit card?”

The lady who didn’t want her name used said, “Yeah, if you pay with a credit card you must produce photographic ID.   That’s a standard practice throughout the industry.”

I said, “Are your staff instructed to check the photographic ID against the face of the person in front of them, the person who signs the credit card voucher?”

She said, “Yes, absolutely.   They know that if that’s not done they don’t get paid.   It happens 100% of the time.”

The Labor Party has so far paid some $40,000 defending Mr Thomson from these allegations. If he has to resign, this will force a by-election, which Labor will lose. If Labor loses one seat, they lose government.

I’m also a bit curious – what on earth would you get for $2475 at Keywed Restaurant aka Sydney Outcalls Network?

Don’t Mention the War

August 16, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Or in this case, don’t say anything about who Muhammed really was and the things he did.

The radio presenter Michael Smith is being investigated by the media watchdog over his assertion that the prophet Muhammad ”married a nine-year-old and consummated it when she was 11”.

Actually Michael was wrong. Muhammed married a six year old and had sex with her when  she was nine. He was fifty-three at the time.

In an article called Rationalizing Pedophilia in Islam Raymond Ibrahim quotes a Muslim cleric talking about Muhammed’s nine year old wife Aisha:

“So you see, she was playing with her fellow playmates even though her day of consummation was that very same day—and all that they did was to fix her up for the prophet so he could have sex with her.

Now what do we see when the prophet married Aisha? Did he go to her and say “Okay that’s it, you’re married, you’re now a grown up, you’re supposed to be mature, you need to do this and that; you need to forget about your toys and your little friends; you are now a wife of a man, you have to see to my needs” and that’s it?

No. The prophet allowed her to continue playing with her toy dolls—indeed, the prophet even sometimes gave her such things to play with. [This hadith has more details, including how Aisha’s little girl friends would “hide themselves” whenever the prophet came to her until he called them out.]”

It should be noted that the cleric recounted the above with much awe and amazement—as if to say, “Look how indulgent and open-minded our prophet was!”

For Mulsims, Muhammed is ‘a perfect example of conduct’ not just in his own time, but for all time. Nothing he did can be considered wrong, anywhere, or in any time or culture.

One result of this, as Ibrahim points out, is that Sharia can never condemn the ‘marriage’ of young girls to older men:

Earlier this month we saw—or rather, were once again reminded—that Islam permits pedophilia in the guise of “marriage”: Top Saudi cleric, Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, issued a fatwa asserting that there is no minimum age for girls to marry, “even if they are in the cradle,” and that the only criterion is that “they are capable of being placed beneath and bearing the weight of the men.”

Kathy Shaidle suggests the key difference between Jesus and Muhammed was that Jesus raised a little girl from the dead, while Muhammed had sex with one.

I can think of a few more.

Jesus went to his death praying for those who tortured and killed him. Muhammed instructed his followers to ‘kill any Jew who falls into your power,’ attacked and murdered caravan drivers from Mecca because their city had rejected his message, and ordered the murder of an entire Jewish village. Consequently, Sharia declares that anyone who insults the prophet should be executed.

Jesus had genuine and respectful friendships with women. He listened to them and protected them from violence. Muhammed taught that women were unclean – on the same level as dogs – and took and raped whom he wished of women captured in his raids.

No doubt hearing this will be insulting to some Muslims. But if you don’t want comparisons made between Jesus and Muhammed, don’t ask people to make them.

Asking people to make that comparison is exactly what the ‘Jesus, a prophet of Islam’ billboards in Sydney do.

Anglican Bishop Rob Forsyth has no objection to Muslims buying billboard space to say whatever they like, but notes that billboards advertising Christianity would not be allowed in Saudi Arabia, or any Muslim country.

I dont object either. But Muslim leaders should be prepared for the fact that if they take advantage of freedom of speech in democratic societies to say what they like, they may hear what they don’t.

Facts on CO2 and Climate Change

August 16, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Facts have defeated the climate alarmist juggernaut. It still lumbers on like a gigantic zombie looking for brains to devour. Poor thing. It does most of its lumbering in universities and Labor Party gatherings, where brains are in short supply.

This is part of a speech to be given by Perth geologist David Archibald at the no carbon tax  rally in Canberra today:

My first duty to you today is tell you what is happening to the climate.  What is happening is cooling.  The oceans started cooling in 2003, and the atmosphere is following.  There has been no warming since 1998.

In fact, the temperature of planet today is almost the same as it was when satellites first started measuring it in 1979.  No one under the age of 32 has experienced global warming.  Some of us predate that and remember the heavy frosts of the nineteen seventies.  Those frosts are returning, and worse.  Solar activity is weakening, and will remain weak for another 22 years.

We in this blessed country will be spared the worst of it, but a large portion of the grain belt in the northern hemisphere will have crop failures due to longer winters and early frosts.  Canada will go from being a large exporter of grain to becoming a frequent importer.  As long as Australia remains a net food exporter, we will benefit from the shorter Northern Hemisphere growing season.

For us, climate is a non-problem.  Carbon dioxide’s heating effect is real, but minuscule.  The one hundred parts per million that we have added to the atmosphere in the last one hundred years has heated the planet by one tenth of a degree.  We will add another hundred parts per million over the next fifty years.  The total of two tenths of a degree will be very welcome by mid-century.

In fact, the more carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere, the better.  During the ice ages of the last three million years, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere got as low as one hundred and seventy-two parts per million.  Plant growth shuts down at one hundred and fifty parts per million.  Life above sea level was almost snuffed out due to a lack of carbon dioxide.  We were only twenty-two parts per million from extinction …

Click here to download David Archibald’s Speech in MS Word format.

Sauce for the Turkey

August 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Stop Islamisation of Europe has issued the following advisory to the government of Turkey:

The organizations “Stop Islamisation of Europe” and “Stop the Islamization of Georgia,” report that they are going to hold a rally of humanitarian assistance in support of ethnic minorities living in Turkey.

Both organisations note the Turkish government permits flotillas sailing to Israel to embark from ports in Turkey with no interference., In this regard, we ask the Turkish government not to interfere in the promotion of the convoy.

SIOE pre-states that among the passengers and volunteers will be well-known personalities: journalists and members of legislative bodies of both Georgia and other European countries.

The column of cars and trucks is for peaceful purposes and called “Rights and Freedom.”

We are purely a humanitarian and an information group acting to expose to the world the status of national minorities living in Turkey and to provide assistance to such minorities.

The date for moving “Rights and Freedom” convoys will be stated later.

Cool! Can’t wait to see how Turkey responds.

The Good Samaritan Did Not Use a Government Credit Card

August 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Those dastardly right-wing Christians are at it again.

This time they are claiming that we serve the poor best by being financially responsibile:

… we do not need to “protect programs for the poor.” We need to protect the poor themselves. Indeed, sometimes we need to protect them from the very programs that ostensibly serve the poor, but actually demean the poor, undermine their family structures and trap them in poverty, dependency and despair for generations. Such programs are unwise, uncompassionate, and unjust.

The group calls itself Christians for a Sustainable Economy. Here is a bit more of their letter to President Obama:

All Americans – especially the poor – are best served by sustainable economic policies for a free and flourishing society. When creativity and entrepreneurship are rewarded, the yield is an increase of productivity and generosity.
 
Compassion and charity for “the least of these” is an essential expression of our faith, flowing from a heart inclined towards God. And just as the love of God frees us for a more abundant life, so our charity must go beyond mere material provision to meet the deeper needs of the poor. To suggest that Matthew 25 – or any commandment concerning Christian charity – can be met through wealth redistribution is to obscure these truths. We encourage you to consider the whole counsel of scripture, which urges not only compassion and provision for the poor but also the perils of debt and the importance of wise stewardship.

Amen.

Get Real!

August 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Wow! Language warning. Courage warning. Un-PC warning.

And on reaping what we sow, by the fierce Theodore Dalrymple:

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

Race and Riots

August 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

The ever interesting Katharine Birbalsingh says the riots in England are about race, and nothing will be resolved until authorities are willing to face this fact:

Some of the black kids I used to teach will tell you that the riots are absolutely justified. A number of adults would agree with them. Everywhere I read that the protest was understandable because “people are very angry”. …

At school I remember watching a presentation given to the kids by Trident, the Metropolitan Police Service unit set up to investigate and inform communities of gun crime in London’s black community. I didn’t know what Trident was then, and it struck me that all of the photos of people shot (the idea was to scare the kids) were black. So at the end, I approached one of the policemen and asked him what percentage of those involved in gun crime were black. I kid you not, but my question made this thirty-something white man who was, after all, trained to deal with the black community and its issues, turn pink.
 
He explained that about 80 per cent of gun crime took place in the black community. I smiled uncomfortably. But no, he said, it was worse than that. Then he told me that 80 per cent was black on black gun crime, and that of the remaining 20 per cent about 75 per cent involved at least one black person: black shooting white, or white shooting black. I pushed to know more. While he kept saying his stats were crude and he didn’t have scientific numbers, on the whole the whites who were involved in these shootings tended to be from Eastern Europe.
 
Was any of this ever mentioned in their presentation? Of course not. Just like the news about the Tottenham riots doesn’t mention race either.
 
Problems cannot be addressed unless people are willing to tell the truth. As with so many other things in this country, we stick our heads in the sand and refuse to speak out about it.

The death of petty criminal and gangster Mark Duggan in a shootout with police was not part of a ‘context of oppression’ that explains why young black people are so angry. Nor is planned reduction in social welfare services. These are simply handy excuses to destroy property and steal.

Brendan O’Neill writes in The Australian that the riots are nothing like a political rebellion. They are an expression of the toddler-like rage of a molly-coddled mob.

One of the most disappointing things about these conflicts is the police warning against ‘vigilante justice.’ You have got to be joking.

Vigilantism is when something bad has been done and people try to catch the wrongdoers and punish them without due process under law. Sikhs, Kurds and others who have had the courage to stand and defend their properties and families are not vigilantes. They are trying to prevent crime. They are doing the job the police should be doing.

I don’t mean to be critical of individual police officers. Most of them are people of courage and integrity who really do want to make a difference in their communities. Most of them do not accept the ‘we police with the consent of the communities we serve’ platitudes. They police because they are sworn to uphold and enforce the law, regardless of locality, race or creed.

They are hampered (perhaps betrayed would be a better word) by a politically driven management class of senior officers, many of whom have very little enforcement and operational experience. Christine Nixon, recent and unlamented Commissioner of Police in Victoria, is a perfect example.

The riots in England, and the attempts to excuse them by reference to the down-trodden lives of the rioters and the uncaring attitude of government, remind me of the Palm Island riots in Australia in 2004.

‘Respected local man’ and petty criminal Cameron Doomadgee died in police custody. The circumstances are still unclear. The habitually drunk and violent Doomadgee allegedly attacked the police, who defended themselves and responded with sufficient force to subdue him, including punches to the abdomen. He suffered internal injuries which were not noticed, and died a few hours later.

This was the pretext for riots on the island in which the courthouse, police station and police barracks were burned down. Local police (eighteen police for a population of 2000) and their families were threatened. Fearing for their lives, they barricaded themselves in the small hospital until another eighty police arrived from the mainland.

There seemed to be an infinite supply of social workers and government officials ready to describe the islanders as ‘justly outraged’ and expressing the anger of accumulated years of mistreatment. Police involved were demonised in the press, and the usual intellectuals offered the usual claims about institutionalised racism.

What hogwash.

I have worked with police in remote locations with high aboriginal populations. Overwhelmingly they are men and women who care for their communities enough to put themselves in danger when things go wrong. Those who work in remote communities can find themselves alone in threatening circumstances, under great pressure and with little time to make decisions about appropriate words or actions.

The 1999 Guiness Book of World records said that, apart from war zones, Palm Island was the most violent place in the world to live. Criminologist Paul Wilson has confirmed the island has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. The homicide rate is 94 per 100,000 people per year, compared with 6 per 100,000 per year for the rest of Australia. Serious assaults are 930 per 100,000, compared with 46 per 100,000 per year for the rest of Australia. Almost every female between the ages of 13 and 16 has at least one sexually transmitted infection. Wilson claimed this horrifyingly destructive behaviour was the fault of repression and colonial mismanagement.

No it is not. Do we really have so little regard for the young people of Tottenham and the aboriginal people of Palm Island that we have no expectation of any ability to control themselves, to take reponsibility for their actions? Do we have so so little respect for them that they don’t even have to make up their own excuses any more, because there is an army of Mrs Jellybys with baskets full of excuses suitable for any occasion?

Even in the poorest parts of London there are still parents who are responsible, honest, work hard, and teach their children to do the same, and to respect other people and their belongings:

In his coffee shop in Stoke Newington, Karagoz tried to explain another feature of these riots – why Turkish and Kurdish youths had generally not joined the looting.

“We have businesses and work hard for what we have. As parents we want our children to work, earn money and be able to buy what they want, not steal it. Our young people know we would be ashamed of them if they were doing this.”

Thanks Karagoz. And all the parents like him.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Qohel