Creeping overtake of UK Mosques by fanatics

Worryingly, according to the Times over 600 of the mosques in the UK are now run by a Moslem sect known as the Deobandi. That is around half of them.

The Deobandi sect is an ‘ultra-conservative’ movement. The Taleban in Afghanistan originated from it - So they are not known for being ‘moderate’ then.

The sect, has managed to gain a significant foothold on the Muslim Council of Britain.

Now it seems a chap who goes by the name of Riyadh ul Haq is poised to become it’s leader in the UK. He makes the BNP look like a bunch of particularly wet Polly Toynbee wannabes, by comparison.

He is fanatically against what he sees as ‘western’ values and has openly called upon Muslims to “shed blood” for Allah.

He loathes any Muslims who admit to any commitment to being British, believing that any friendship with a Jew, or a Christian, is “a mockery of Allah’s religion”.

Clearly pretty ‘moderate’ then ;-)

By all reports he is not someone you would want to see in charge of rounding up shopping trolleys, let alone armed with ‘spiritual’ authority, pouring his hatred into the unwary and volatile.

It seems he was programmed educated and trained at an Islamic seminary in the UK. So the Governments talk of wanting ‘home grown’ imams does not look, on reflection, like such a good idea after all, as things are.

Mr ul Haq is part of a whole new generation of UK Imams who share similar views and agendas.

It seems the Deobandis run Seventeen of Britain’s twenty six Islamic seminaries and are quiely churning out four, out of every five, of all UK trained Muslim clerics. In many cases blithely funded by local education authority grants.

Should we be concerned?

Just because they cloak their evil in religion does not make them any less sinister, any less dangerous or any less to be resisted than the black-shirts of the 20th century.

Support on the Left for Compulsory DNA Registration

In the Guardian's 'Comment is free', Conor Gearty, makes it clear that he thinks Judge Dread’s Sedley’s plans to force compulsory DNA collection and registration on every man woman and child who lives, or sets foot, however briefly, in the UK "deserve to be debated and not dismissed out of hand as heretical.".

He suggests, setting up a straw man, that supporters of civil liberties and the right not to be interfered with by the state are the sort that ” regularly break CCTV cameras and are affronted by being asked to stop smoking in public places.”

He goes onto say that this kind of libertarianism is “often quite reactionary and in its absolute form it is always being overridden - and rightly overridden - by government in the name of the public good.

So he sets up his ‘Straw’ Libertarians as ‘bad’.

Bad because ‘reactionary’ is ‘bad’, in his and many of his readers lexicon. Bad, because those libertarian civil liberties freaks - all, every one of them, smoke.
Bad because they are rude and anti social (because they smoke & won’t put their cigarettes out) and antisocial criminals (because they regularly destroy CCTV cameras put there by a beneficent Nu-Lab state for your protection).

So because they are so very very nasty, they and their antisocial so-called rights need to be stamped on by the (by comparison) ‘good’ state. It is virtually the state's duty to protect the populous from them.

Conor, seems to feel “that the exact extent of the damage we do to personal freedom has to be warranted by the goal we are seeking to achieve. Advances in technology are always throwing up fresh opportunities for public good via new invasions of this kind of liberty. Sedley's proposals fit within this tradition”

Public Good?

So, to roughly translate: The end justifies the means then. This guy is possibly even more scary than Sedley.

UK Police Chief demands Government Targets be scrapped

Chief Supt Ian Johnston of the Superintendents Association is to attack the whole concept of Government crime fighting targets and demand they be scrapped.

He has a point. Government and Nu-Lab in particular seems to have a sort of 'Midas touch' in reverse, where every thing it touches turns to crap – but without the redeeming possibility of it being composted and therefore of some use.

Government crime fighting targets are yet another example of where in the galloping pursuit of yet another sound-bite, or unexamined quick-fix policy, the full ramifications are not properly thought through and the law of unintended consequences bites NU-Lab on the backside yet again.

What actually happens is that the limited targets are concentrated on, often to the exclusion of actually doing the job properly.

In the case of the police that can mean, instead of responding to the needs of their local population, in a given area, they can end up arresting victims, as well as perpetrators to get extra ‘detections’.

End up arresting, or reporting people, that would be more effectively dealt with differently, or do not actually need dealing with in the first place.

Thus producing the ‘right’ figures becomes a ghastly parody of what the public actually wants and the police begin to loose the general support of the public.

Government needs to consider much of it’s policies and legislation very much more carefully than it does.

It is in far too much of a hurry to legislate and ‘reform’ to bother to make sure what it does is not seriously flawed. It has weakened scrutiny further by weakening/pulling the teeth of the House of Lords. Consequently much of what Nu-Lab have done since they came to power is flawed.

Some of the chickens are taking longer than others to come home to roost, but come home they inevitably will, sooner or later. As they do Nu-Lab tries to cover it with spin where they can.

There is of course little they, or any of us, can do about the increasingly large proportion of legislation and directives imposed on us by Europe and it’s court.

BBC pulls plug on ‘Planet Relief’ climate change TV special

The BBC have thankfully decided to abandon plans for a ‘Planet Relief’ climate change TV special. It was supposed to be an environmental equivalent to Live8.

The most likely reason it has been pulled is that viewers, both in the UK and abroad, seem to be taking a sharp dislike being lectured to and preached at by holier than though TV personalities. That is now thought to be the primary reason that July's Live Earth concert ratings ‘bombed’.

Climate activists such as Mark Lynas predictably attacked the decision. He said, "This decision shows a real poverty of understanding among senior BBC executives about the gravity of the situation we face,", thus demonstrating a certain puritanical poverty of understanding on his own part about viewing figures.

Audiences are not keen on being preached at by ‘believers’. They apparently prefer a documentary format, that at least pays lip service to the idea of scientific accuracy and objectivity.

One of the gimmicks the Planet Relief promoters were planning was to try to organise viewers to take part in a short mass ‘switch-off’ of electrical equipment, so they could say how much carbon had been saved.

It seems, if they had, then the item of electrical equipment most likely to have been switched off would have been the TV…

Senior UK appeal court judge advocates compulsory national DNA Database

According to the BBC a senior appeal court judge Lord Justice Stephen Sedley is advocating compulsory registration for all on Nu-Labs police DNA database. This would even include visitors to the country.

He conceded it was an authoritarian measure, but said he felt that the only way to go was to expand the database to cover the whole population and all visitors to the UK.

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody, guilty or innocent, should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

Good of him to acknowledge that it was authoritarian.

Frankly the question that now needs answering is that of his fitness to be a judge.

He went on to try to justify such a totalitarian move, because as things are: "It means where there is ethnic profiling going on disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities get onto the database.”

So his solution is that everyone should have to be on it.

How are disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities getting onto the database? Because they are being arrested in disproportionate numbers. What's more, if the whole population were forced to give samples, they would still be being arrested in disproportionate numbers - it would just be less visible. Very Nu-Lab.

This can surely not have been lost on the Judge and leads one to wonder why he felt it would be a good idea to disingenuously raise the issue of race to attempt to justify his authoritarianism.

He went on to complain "It also means that a great many people who are walking the streets and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free.".

The enlightened view would be “So what?” Some prices are too heavy to pay.

Good old Judge Sedley is clearly not a close follower of the English Jurist William Blackstone, who said; “Better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer”. Judge Sedley is apparently perfectly happy for the whole population to suffer the loss of one more liberty to ensure one or two less guilty persons escape.

The same arguments could probably have been used to attempt to attempt to justify compulsory fingerprinting of the entire population - but wasn’t was it?

Budding Stalins didn’t particularly complain about that. If system worked acceptably with finger prints, why can the same system with the same checks and balances not be used with DNA – including the removal from the system of innocent parties and those mistakenly, or wrongfully arrested.

Kids avoiding healthy School meals

The Fib Lib-Dems are saying the number of pupils eating school meals has dropped by 428,000 in the last two years and they are concerned.

They are complaining that that the healthy eating campaign has put kids off eating school dinners and are demanding Nu-Lab take fresh action to stop pupils stuffing themselves on fatty food until they explode.

When I was at school many of us would have happily gone hungry, rather than eat the school meals on offer, ‘School Dinners’, as they were known.

Unfortunately we did not have that option. We had little old ladies who had apparently been unable to secure posts as women prison guards, on the grounds that they were just too scary.

They had a gimlet eye and the infallible ability to detect untruth. They would not let us out of the dining hall until they were satisfied that we had eaten ‘enough’.

Perhaps David Laws, their schools spokesman, should suggest recruiting some scary old ladies, (preferably the kids own grannies) instead of complaining about ‘meltdowns’ and 'balls ups’. This lot would probably need ninja training first, as they did not go through ‘the war’.

Still he probably does have a point. Anything the Government has a hand in these days is bound to be a cock up of some sort, even something simple. As he said: “This is a classic example of a Government policy”

Trying to persuade a bunch of finicky kids to eat something decent, who have never seen ‘real’ food and whose parents’ culinary skills are limited to microwaving the virtually unidentifiable contents of a ‘value pack’ was never going to be easy.

Fifth series of Dr Who to be postponed 'til 2010

Shock Horror! It seems the fifth of the new series of DR Who is to be postponed until 2010.

The BBC were no doubt cunningly hoping to bury this nugget of appalling news amongst less important stuff like Gordon Brown reneging on NU-Lab’s commitment for a referendum on the EU Treaty. New Russian sabre rattling. Troop withdrawals in Basra, etc. etc.

All is not completely lost though. There will be a Christmas special this year starring David Tennant and (We should be so lucky) Kylie Minogue. There is the 4th series (still in production) to be screened in 2008.

The controller of BBC Fiction, Jane Tranter, indicates they are also planning three specials in 2009.

Taxes on effort and risk taking

This is a Samizdata quote of the day. I felt it needed repeating:

I believe taxes - of all kinds - should be kept as low as possible and that the pressure to get them down should be relentless... Taxes on income are taxes on effort, work and entrepreneurship. Taxes on capital are taxes on investment and risk taking. But it is effort, work, entrepreneurship, investment and risk taking that we need to continue to grow our economic base.

Charlie McCreevy, European Commissioner.

Hat Tip to samizdata.net

What is the point of Eurovision?

Saturday evening saw the inception of a new Eurovision contest. The bastard offspring of The Eurovision Song Contest and Strictly Ballroom.

The ruthless all pervading publicity machine for the ‘event’ ensured I discovered it was on by chance on Saturday evening.

Given that there was little else on that was worth bothering with the CFD household watched out of curiosity.

As it turned out Finland won in the end, with quite a reasonable effort. Though one suspects, given the overall voting patterns, that the results would not have been much different if Finland had entered Rolf Harris doing a three legged tap dance.

Yes it was clearly infected with the same old inherently dodgy Eurovision voting.

I expect it would be possible to devise a formula to calculate the likely votes:

A large percentage seems to be based on good old-fashioned ‘national’ prejudices, both for and against.

Then there is the matter of how close a neighbour it is.

Then there is the political factor the “who do they need to suck up to right now” - and "who do they need to trash" factor.

Then finally there is the “was the act actually any good?” factor. This can have some impact but only seems to come into effect after the other influences.

The questions that really need answering are why we bother at all, given proven experience and the inherently corrupt voting system? Also why we contribute so much towards bankrolling such a farce?

One Eurovision contest is getting a bit too much these days, let alone two.