Saudi Arabia's old regime grows older!

Saudi Arabia's old regime grows older!

The death of Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz al-Saud highlights the decrepit nature of the Saudi leadership.

Mai Yamani Last Modified: 26 Oct 2011 12:13

The body of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Sultan is carried during his funeral in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia [REUTERS]

The contrast between the deaths, within two days of each other, of Libya's Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi and Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz is one of terminal buffoonery versus decadent gerontocracy. And their demise is likely to lead to very different outcomes: liberation for the Libyans and stagnation for the Saudis.

But the death of Sultan, at 86, marks the beginning of a critical period of domestic and foreign uncertainty for the Kingdom. After all, Sultan's half-brother, King Abdullah, 87, is still hospitalised in Riyadh, following a major operation last month. The regime is ageing and ailing, and is perceived by the population as being on life support.
 
Meanwhile, the succession is still being argued. Sultan's death is the first time that the burial of a Saudi royal has been delayed to give the ruling family time to decide on the next in line - a sign of internal discord (and concord on the continuation of dynastic rule).

Who will be next in line?

The Saudi regime's stability now depends on its ability to maintain unity and establish clarity in its system of succession. With the Crown Prince's death, schisms are particularly threatening to the Kingdom's stability (and that of oil exports), because the ruling Al Saud have swelled to 22,000 members, which has given rise to factional clashes among increasingly numerous claimants to power.

Sultan had already been dead - politically, that is - for the last three years; indeed, since June 2011, when he left for New York for medical treatment, young Saudis speculated on numerous websites that this was also literally the case.

Abdullah's octogenarian line of successors recalls the final years of the Soviet Union, when one infirm leader after another succeeded to power for a brief period of inert rule. Many Saudi subjects feel the same pattern of continuous uncertainty and torpor.

Making matters worse, the rule of succession is ambiguous. After Abdullah succeeded his brother Fahd, who ruled for 23 years until his death in 2005, he created an Allegiance Council, an ambiguous and mysterious family body that resembled the Vatican's College of Cardinals. But here, restrictions are not based entirely on age, but on family bloodlines. The Council included the surviving royal princes of the 43 sons of Ibn Saud, the Kingdom's founder, and the sons of their deceased brothers - for example, the late King Faisal's brood.

But, as Sultan's health deteriorated, Abdullah bypassed his own creation and appointed Prince Naif, the interior minister, as a second deputy. In other words, Naif will be anointed Crown Prince. But, befitting this increasingly exsanguinous imperium, Naif, 82, is known to suffer from leukaemia.

Sultan's fortune is estimated at $270bn, which he distributed between his sons prior to his death in order to shore up their political position in the competitive princely arena. The reality is that every senior prince has placed his favorite sons in important positions in the Kingdom. Sultan secured the defence ministry for his son Khaled, and brought back Khaled's notorious brother, Bandar, to head the Intelligence Security Council. Abdullah guaranteed his son Mitaeb's position as head of the National Guard. The new Crown Prince-in-waiting, Naif, has established his son Mohammed as the next interior minister.

Injection of young blood needed

In short, despite Abdullah's innovations in the succession process, it is an open secret that nothing guarantees a transition to a younger generation of leaders - or that an effective ruler will emerge. The story of the Al Saud's succession struggle is no longer whispered behind closed doors. The internet has opened a window on all of the royal family's plots, ambitions and double-dealings.

The Al Saud resembles a family business, established in 1932. Ibn Saud managed to conquer and unite the vast territory of the Arabian Peninsula, give it his family name, and alienate, divide, and control his cousins and brothers in order to establish a clear and undisputed line of succession through his sons. After Ibn Saud's death, his sons, though never entirely united, maintained enough coherence to keep the store running. That is no longer true of the thousands of princes that they produced. As the older generation dies off, the new generation has fallen to fighting in front of the customers.

Indeed, with the ratio of royals to commoners now at one to a thousand (compared to one to five million in the United Kingdom), the challenge of managing princely privileges, salaries, and demand for jobs has never been more intense. Royal perks include lifetime sinecures and domination of the civil service, which enable the princes to award contracts and receive commissions on top of their salaries.

So the Saudi regime is divided, its legitimacy is questioned, and sectarian tensions are growing. Moreover, while oil-export revenue is booming, the neighborhood is in revolutionary flames.

In the short term, the iron-fisted Naif, as Crown Prince, will push the Kingdom into greater repression, in part by strengthening the hardline Wahhabi clerics' place in the country's power nexus. Magnificent sums of money, backed by Wahhabi dogma, will be deployed to ensure popular submission and silence. Whereas Abdullah at least talked about reform (though with no real consequences), Naif can barely bring himself to utter the word.

Denial remains the Saudi rulers' dominant mindset. The royals believe that custodianship of Islam's holy places gives them a special status in the Arab world, and that no revolution can touch them. And, if anyone tries, they will follow Naif's counsel: “What we took by the sword we will hold by the sword.”

Throughout the region, newly mobilised (and thus empowered) Arab youth are trying to move their countries towards reform and liberalisation. Saudi Arabia, unfortunately, is moving in the opposite direction.

Mai Yamani's most recent book is Cradle of Islam.

A version of this article first appeared on Project Syndicate.

WHY the Wall Street protests ?

WHY  the Wall Street protests ?

Immunity and impunity in elite America

 
The top one per cent of US society is enjoying a two-tiered system of justice and politics.

 
Glenn Greenwald Last Modified: 27 Oct 2011 16:08

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American foundation - indeed, an integral part of it.

Income inequality has worsened over the past several years and is at its highest level since the Great Depression. This is not, however, a new trend. Income inequality has been growing at rapid rates for three decades.
As journalist Tim Noah described the process: "During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth - the ‘seven fat years’ and the ‘long boom’. Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 per cent of total increase in Americans' income went to the top one per cent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts [the first decade of the new century], but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 per cent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads."
The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated the trend, but not radically: the top one per cent of earners in the US have been feeding ever more greedily at the trough for decades.
 

Inferiors and superiors

In addition, substantial wealth inequality is so embedded in US political culture that, standing alone, it would not be sufficient to trigger citizen rage of the type we are finally witnessing. The American founders were clear that they viewed inequality in wealth, power, and prestige as not merely inevitable, but desirable and, for some, even divinely ordained. Jefferson praised "the natural aristocracy" as "the most precious gift of nature" for the "government of society". John Adams concurred: "It already appears, that there must be in every society of men superiors and inferiors, because God has laid in the… course of nature the foundation of the distinction."
 

Not only have the overwhelming majority of those in the US long acquiesced to vast income and wealth disparities, but some of those most oppressed by these outcomes have cheered it loudly. Americans have been inculcated not only to accept, but to revere those who are the greatest beneficiaries of this inequality.
In the 1980s, this paradox - whereby even those most trampled upon come to cheer those responsible for their state - became more firmly entrenched. That's because it found a folksy, friendly face. Ronald Reagan, adept at feeding the populace a slew of Orwellian clichés that induced them to defend the interests of the wealthiest. "A rising tide," as one former US president put it, "lifts all boats". 

The sum of his wisdom being: It is in your interest when the rich get richer.
Implicit in this framework was the claim that inequality was justified and legitimate. The core propagandistic premise was that the rich were rich because they deserved to be. They innovated in industry, invented technologies, discovered cures, created jobs, took risks, and boldly found ways to improve our lives. In other words, they deserved to be enriched. Indeed, it was in our common interest to allow them to fly as high as possible, because that would increase their motivation to produce more, bestowing on us ever greater life-improving gifts.

Gratefulness for the leadership

We should not, so the thinking went, begrudge the multimillionaire living behind his 15-foot walls for his success; we should admire him. Corporate bosses deserved not our resentment but our gratitude. It was in our own interest not to demand more in taxes from the wealthiest but less, as their enhanced wealth - their pocket change - would trickle down in various ways to all of us.
This is the mentality that enabled massive growth in income and wealth inequality over the past several decades without much at all in the way of citizen protest. And yet something has indeed changed. It’s not that Americans suddenly woke up one day and decided that substantial income and wealth inequality are themselves unfair or intolerable. What changed was the perception of how that wealth was gotten and so of the ensuing inequality as legitimate.
 

Many Americans who once accepted or even cheered such inequality now see the gains of the richest as ill-gotten, as undeserved, as cheating. Most of all, the legal system that once served as the legitimising anchor for outcome inequality, the rule of law - that most basic of American ideals, that a common set of rules are equally applied to all - has now become irrevocably corrupted and is seen as such.
While the founders accepted outcome inequality, they emphasised - over and over - that its legitimacy hinged on subjecting everyone to the law’s mandates on an equal basis. Jefferson wrote that the essence of America would be that "the poorest labourer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favoured one whenever their rights seem to jar". Benjamin Franklin warned that creating a privileged legal class would produce "total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections" between the rulers and those they ruled. Tom Paine repeatedly railed against "counterfeit nobles", those whose superior status was grounded not in merit but in unearned legal privilege.

Definition of tyranny

After all, one of their principal grievances against the British king was his power to exempt his cronies from legal obligations. Almost every founder repeatedly warned that a failure to apply the law equally to the politically powerful and the rich would ensure a warped and unjust society. In many ways, that was their definition of tyranny.
Americans understand this implicitly. If you watch a competition among sprinters, you can accept that whoever crosses the finish line first is the superior runner. But only if all the competitors are bound by the same rules: everyone begins at the same starting line, is penalised for invading the lane of another runner, is barred from making physical contact or using performance-enhancing substances, and so on.
If some of the runners start ahead of others and have relationships with the judges that enable them to receive dispensation for violating the rules as they wish, then viewers understand that the outcome can no longer be considered legitimate. Once the process is seen as not only unfair but utterly corrupted, once it’s obvious that a common set of rules no longer binds all the competitors, the winner will be resented, not heralded.

That catches the mood of the US in 2011. It may not explain the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it helps explain why it has spread like wildfire and why so many Americans seem instantly to accept and support it. As was not true in recent decades, the American relationship with wealth inequality is in a state of rapid transformation.

It is now clearly understood that, rather than apply the law equally to all, Wall Street tycoons have engaged in egregious criminality - acts which destroyed the economic security of millions of people around the world - without experiencing the slightest legal repercussions. Giant financial institutions were caught red-handed engaging in massive, systematic fraud to foreclose on people’s homes and the reaction of the political class, led by the Obama administration, was to shield them from meaningful consequences. Rather than submit on an equal basis to the rules, through an oligarchical, democracy-subverting control of the political process, they now control the process of writing those rules and how they are applied.

Writing laws

Today, it is glaringly obvious to a wide range of those in the US that the wealth of the top one per cent is the byproduct not of risk-taking entrepreneurship, but of corrupted control of our legal and political systems. Thanks to this control, they can write laws that have no purpose than to abolish the few limits that still constrain them, as happened during the Wall Street deregulation orgy of the 1990s. They can retroactively immunise themselves for crimes they deliberately committed for profit, as happened when the 2008 Congress shielded the nation’s telecom giants for their role in Bush’s domestic warrantless eavesdropping programme.

It is equally obvious that they are using that power not to lift the boats of ordinary Americans, but to sink them. In short, Americans are now well aware of what the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Illinois’s Dick Durbin, blurted out in 2009 about the body in which he serves: the banks "frankly own the place".

If you were to assess the state of the union in 2011, you might sum it up this way: rather than being subjected to the rule of law, the nation’s most powerful oligarchs control the law and are so exempt from it; and increasing numbers of Americans understand that and are outraged. At exactly the same time that the nation’s elites enjoy legal immunity even for egregious crimes, ordinary Americans are being subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest penal states, under which they are unable to secure competent legal counsel and are harshly punished with lengthy prison terms for even trivial infractions. 

‘Two-tiered justice system’

In lieu of the rule of law - the equal application of rules to everyone - what we have now is a two-tiered justice system in which the powerful are immunised, while the powerless are punished with increasing mercilessness. As a guarantor of outcomes, the law has, by now, been so completely perverted that it is an incomparably potent weapon for entrenching inequality further, controlling the powerless, and ensuring corrupted outcomes.

The tide that was supposed to lift all ships has, in fact, left startling numbers of Americans underwater. In the process, we lost any sense that a common set of rules applies to everyone, and so there is no longer a legitimising anchor for the vast income and wealth inequalities that plague the nation.

That is what has changed, and a growing recognition of what it means is fuelling rising citizen anger and protest. The inequality under which so many suffer is not only vast, but illegitimate, rooted as it is in lawlessness and corruption. Obscuring that fact has long been the linchpin for inducing Americans to accept vast and growing inequalities. That fact is now too glaring to obscure any longer.
 ---------------

Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator and a current contributing writer at Salon.com. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books on the Bush administration's executive power and foreign policy abuses. His just-released book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful (Metropolitan Books), is a scathing indictment of America's two-tiered system of justice.  He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.
A version of this article previously appeared on TomDispatch.com.

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Europe to destroy traditional family and sexual identity

10.10.2011 18:17

Traditional words 'father' and 'mother' will be replaced with official terms Parent 1 and Parent 2 in Britain. The terms will be used in official documents. The authorities decided to make such a "politically correct" move to accommodate same-sex couples. Experts are sure, though, that the matter is not about the requirements of certain social groups. The decision is another step towards the destruction of traditional families.

The words 'father' and 'mother' will be removed from British passport applications before December 2011. This became an achievement of Stonewall group, which defends the rights of sex minorities. The US State Department tried to do the same before, but it was eventually decided not to remove the two words from US passport applications.

The subject about novelties in the field of gender relations has been getting more and more popular recently. Not so long ago, Pravda.Ru wrote about the kindergarten in Sweden, which became world-famous after its administration decided to simply abolish the use of 'he' and 'she' pronouns.

Last year, the European Parliament published the brochure, which recommended not to use the words 'Missus' and 'Miss', 'Mademoiselle', 'Seniora' and 'Seniorita'.  From the point of view of the European parliament, the use of such words was discriminating against women because they directly indicated their sexual identity.

One does not have to be an expert to realize that such novelties in various countries are not just a coincidence. It is a trend, the goal of which is to change the public perception of the role of the sexes in the society.

Pavel Parfentyev, the chairman of the inter-regional public organization "For Family Rights" also shares this point of view.

"Indeed, this is a serious international trend. It started back in the seventies and the eighties as a powerful movement to defend the rights of sexual minorities. There were organizations that tried to defend even the rights of pedophiles, who, as they believed, also had the rights for their own sexual preferences.

"The organizations publicly said that their goal was to destroy family. Afterwards, under the pressure of public opinion, many activists decided to refuse from the openly sexual bias in their activities. They proceeded towards the protection of human rights. This is how they approach children's rights today. They think that children must be protected from the despotism of their parents - from any forms of traditional upbringing, that is to say. In order to accomplish that, one has to destroy the traditional family first and to make the family become a form that enslaves and binds children," the expert said.

In order to be more efficient, representatives of such movements began to cooperate with large international organizations such as the UN and the Council of Europe. This led to the creation of a small, albeit a very strong lobby for the protection of the rights of sexual minorities on the international level, Pavel Parfentyev believes. The lobby intends to distort the perception of traditional family in the modern society.

As a result, European officials already try to avoid the use of the word 'family' in top-level international documents. Instead, they use "family in all of its forms" expression, which implies all forms of cohabitation. As a matter of fact, they deliberately erode and expand the notion of family. The family as we know it has virtually disappeared from the new term.

"The lobby prefers to move in small steps. At first they say that one should not discriminate human beings on their gender rights and sexual orientation. It is hard to argue with this indeed. In Russia, there is no discrimination of real human rights on the base of sexual preferences. At the same time, they create special, previously unseen "rights" and preferences for homosexuals on the international level. As a result, they attach special importance to sexual orientation, which distinguishes a person and makes them stand higher than others," Pavel Parfentyev said.

The words indicating the sexual identity of people gradually disappear from official speech and documents. If they abolish 'he', 'she', 'father' and 'mother' they will not be able to abolish the gender per se. However, it can be possible to undermine the traditional perception of gender.

"A family is much more than a marital union of two people. It is a reproduction mechanism for the whole society. The movements for the protection of rights of sexual minorities are trying to undermine the traditional or natural family, as we call it. They want to take it beyond the scope of public values. More importantly, they want to separate the process of procreation and childcare from marriage and family. According to them, children and parents are two different things that must exist separately from each other. They cast doubts on the special role of parents in raising children," the expert added.

Many people in Britain claimed that the above-mentioned novelties undermine family grounds in the country.

Svetlana Smetanina

 

Muslim immigrants want Switzerland to change national flag

12.10.2011 10:33

A group of Muslim immigrants wants to force Switzerland to abandon the current flag - a white cross on the red background. They say that it violates the rights of the representatives of non-Christian confessions. They seem to have been hurt by the recent ban on minarets construction. However, their proposal is unlikely to be welcomed by the native Swiss and will only increase the number of votes in favor of the treasury of the local far-right People's Party.
   

The first suggestion to remove the cross from the Swiss flag was made not by a Muslim, but (judging by the name) an ethnic Croat and Catholic vice-president of the association of immigrants Secondos Plus Ivica Petrushich. "The cross does not fit today's multicultural Switzerland," he said. The organization of the Turkish, Albanian and other immigrants from Muslim countries followed with a similar initiative. Instead, they suggested using a green-yellow-red flag of Helvetic Republic that existed at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. It has no cross on it.

It is hardly coincidental that the issue of replacing the flag was raised by the representatives of immigrant organizations. Today, over 20 percent of seven million-strong Swiss population is immigrants. Naturally, the Muslims will be more than others insistent on replacing the flag. There are nearly 400,000 of them (more than five percent of the population). The largest "ethnic Muslim" community is Albanian, followed by the Turkish one. Arabs and Bosnian Muslims also reside in Switzerland. Many of them certainly do not like the cross.

The vast majority of Swiss Muslims virtually broke off with the religion of their ancestors. No more than 50 thousand of the faithful pray five times a day. However, women in headscarves have become an integral part of the cityscape of Zurich or Geneva. Furthermore, the birthrate in religious Muslim families is much higher than among the other population. Finally, all Swiss followers of Islam are not natives, but immigrants and their descendants. Their support of changing the appearance of the flag is, to say the least, ambiguous.


Apparently, this circumstance was taken into account by the head of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Switzerland Mayzar Hisham, who called the idea of ​​changing the flag "counterproductive." He said that they did not demand anyone to change the ancient traditions of their countries. It is hard not to agree with his words. The relations of the indigenous Swiss and immigrants have already passed a difficult strength test. The desire to change the flag will only add fuel to the fire.
Two years ago the Muslim community wanted to attach minarets to the existing mosques. However, Switzerland is different from all other countries in a way that each more or less relevant issue is solved by holding a referendum. Negotiations with the government officials were not sufficient, and they had to ask the opinion of the population. This opinion was not in favor of the Muslim immigrants.

The initiator of the referendum two years ago was the ultra-right Swiss People's Party that called to stop the "creeping Islamization". A deputy of the Swiss Parliament Ulrich Shlyuer said that minarets were a political symbol of the implementation of Islam. Step by step, Sharia was conquering Switzerland, acting in parallel with the Swiss law. Statistics show that the degree of religiosity of the local Muslim population is exaggerated, but for the ordinary Swiss even a hint of a violation of their habitual way of living was sufficient.

The results of voting on November 29, 2009 shocked Europe. 57.5 percent of the Swiss population was in favor of a ban on construction of minarets. At the same time kosher and halal slaughter of animals was banned (because of cruelty). Islamic organizations, human rights activists, and many European politicians expressed their outrage. However, the law came into force. The EU could not influence Switzerland as it is not its member.
 
Many of those dissatisfied with the verdict (including indigenous Europeans who had departed from the religion) were eager for revenge, and eventually decided to strike from the other side. They inquired why the flag of the Swiss Confederation had a Christian cross on it if construction of minarets was banned. Allegedly, it violated the rights of not only Muslims but also non-believers. That is why the red-green-yellow flag of the Helvetic Republic would be better.

Would the majority of the Swiss agree with this point of view?

Unlike neighboring France and Germany, the Swiss society is rather conservative. While there is no case of absolute religiousness of the Swiss society, the number of believers in Switzerland is higher than in the neighboring countries. This can be partially explained by a high proportion of rural population scattered along numerous mountain valleys in 20 cantons and six half-cantons of the country. Approximately half of the indigenous Swiss are Catholics; a little fewer are Protestant Calvinists. The cross on the flag is something that unites the country, and does not divide it.

As for the flag, the current symbol was first used in Switzerland in 1339, when the union of separate cantons just started to take shape. It achieved its official status in 1848, when the last standoff on this land ended, crowned with a robust Swiss Confederation. To some extent, it is a symbol of freedom and peace, a path to which took many centuries and numerous wars. 
The Helvetic Republic, whose flag is offered instead of the current one, is not particularly respected by the Swiss. It was created by Napoleon who occupied the country and decided to build entities supervised by the French on its territory. For the free-spirited Swiss this flag is a symbol of oppression.

Not to mention the fact that the combination of green, red and yellow colors is characteristic mainly of African countries. In Europe, only Lithuania has a similar flag.
 
Do the immigrants have a right to teach the Swiss tolerance? For over 160 years there has been no bloodshed on this territory. This is all the more surprising considering that the country is multinational. Nearly three-quarters of the indigenous Swiss speak German, one-fifth speaks French, five or six percent speak Italian, and a little less than one percent - the Romansh language. All these languages ​​have the official status, but there is one dominant language group in each canton (with rare exceptions). They managed to combine small mono-national "houses" with a multinational one. The country is not threated by a collapse.
 
Encroaching on the foundation of the state, immigrants cause a reaction from the German Swiss, French Swiss and Italian Swiss.  

Ultra People's Party is gaining popularity among all of them. Its symbol is three white sheep (the number of the top three language groups), kicking the fourth, black one. This is a clear hint to what should be done with immigrants. Four years ago, the party secured 29 percent of the Swiss votes, and it was a shock to Europe. In the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 23, the result may be even higher.



As is evident from the story with the restrictions on ritual slaughter of animals and minarets construction, the Swiss are not afraid to challenge the infamous political correctness. A ban on wearing the veil is to follow. The more you attempt to encroach on the foundation of the Swiss state, the stronger will be the response. It took Switzerland and its people too long to achieve stability and peace of mind to just give up on their values.


Vadim Trukhachev


GENOCIDE IN JAPAN! - Professor Chris Busby

Water situation in Palestine is "catastrophic"

Conference told that water situation in Palestine is "catastrophic"

Middle East Monitor

September 12, 2011 A conference in Jericho and the Jordan Valley has been told that the water situation in Palestine is "catastrophic". Delegates at the "Water is a Human Right" conference include Palestinian and international organisations, individuals and activists.  They heard the head of the Palestinian Water Authority accuse the Israelis of destroying wells and water conduits which have supplied Palestinians since the Roman era, citing in particular three wells in Nasseriya and Jiftlik at the Jordan Valley.  "This is a violation of all conventions to preserve our heritage," said Shaddad Atilli. "Where is UNESCO?". He called on European activists to let the public across the EU know about this "tragic situation". The conference has been organised by the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee in collaboration with the Italian NGO Caravan Water. The governor of Jericho and the Jordan Valley said that the region suffers from a shortage of artesian wells because the Israeli occupation authorities ban the restoration and digging of Palestinian wells used to irrigate crops. At one time, said the governor, the region had 170 artesian wells, but only 50 remain. "Water is a right for all of the people in the region," he said. Speaking on behalf of Caravan Water, a spokesman said that international reports illustrate that Israel uses 80% of water sources in the occupied West Bank, leaving the Palestinians just 20%. "On average," he added, "a Palestinian consumes 70 litres of water while an Israeli uses 300 litres." The 450,000 illegal settlers use more water than the 2.3 million indigenous Palestinians. "The situation," he claimed, "is even worse in Gaza."

The number of Christians in CHINA multiplies.

Christians in China: Is the country in spiritual crisis?

By Tim Gardam Radio 4's God in China
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14838749 

 

More people go to church on Sunday in China than in the whole of Europe.

Many of China's churches are overflowing, as the number of Christians in the country multiplies. In the past, repression drove people to convert - is the cause now rampant capitalism?

It is impossible to say how many Christians there are in China today, but no-one denies the numbers are exploding.

The government says 25 million, 18 million Protestants and six million Catholics. Independent estimates all agree this is a vast underestimate. A conservative figure is 60 million. There are already more Chinese at church on a Sunday than in the whole of Europe.

The new converts can be found from peasants in the remote rural villages to the sophisticated young middle class in the booming cities.

Driven underground

There is a complexity in the structures of Chinese Christianity which is little understood in the West. To start with, Catholicism and Protestantism are designated by the state as two separate religions.

 

The Haidian Christian Church in Beijing was completely re-built to cope with rising numbers

 

Throughout the 20th Century, Christianity was associated with Western imperialism. After the Communist victory in 1949, the missionaries were expelled, but Christianity was permitted in state-sanctioned churches, so long as they gave their primary allegiance to the Communist Party.

Mao, on the other hand, described religion as "poison", and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s attempted to eradicate it. Driven underground, Christianity not only survived, but with its own Chinese martyrs, it grew in strength.

Since the 1980s, when religious belief was again permitted, the official Churches have gradually created more space for themselves.

They report to the State Administration for Religious Affairs. They are forbidden to take part in any religious activity outside their places of worship and sign up to the slogan, "Love the country - love your religion."

In return the Party promotes atheism in schools but undertakes "to protect and respect religion until such time as religion itself will disappear".

House Churches

Protestants and Catholics are both divided into official and unofficial Churches.

“Start Quote

The old have seen the old certainties of Marxism-Leninism transmute into the most visceral capitalist society on earth”

The officially sanctioned Catholic Patriotic Association appoints its own bishops and is not allowed to have any dealings with the Vatican, though Catholics are allowed to recognise the spiritual authority of the Pope.

There is a larger Catholic underground church, supported by the Vatican. Inch by inch, the Vatican and the government have been moving towards accommodation. Most bishops are now recognised by both, with neither side admitting the greater sovereignty of the other.

Yet in the past few months, the Chinese government has again turned tough, ordaining its bishops in the teeth of opposition from the Vatican which has in turn excommunicated one of them.

Even so, it would be wrong simply to dismiss the official church as a sham.

In the mountains West of Beijing, I visited the village of Hou Sangyu where a Catholic Church has stood since the 14th Century. 

• Tim Gardam is the Principal of St Anne's College, Oxford.
• He is pictured here with the Catholic Sisters of Sangyu.
• God in China, Christianity and Catholicism will be on BBC Radio 4 at 8pm on Monday 12 September.

The tough faith of these old people had withstood the Japanese invasion and the Cultural Revolution. The village clinic was run by nuns, one from Inner Mongolia, a Catholic stronghold.

It is from such villages that the Catholic Church recruits its young ordinands, to undertake training for the priesthood.

The official Protestant Church is growing faster than Catholicism.

On Easter morning, in downtown Beijing, I watched five services, each packed with over 1,500 worshippers. Sunday school was spilling on to the street.

However, these numbers are dwarfed by the unofficial "house churches", spreading across the country, at odds with the official Church which fears the house churches' fervour may provoke a backlash.

What the authorities consider non-negotiable is the house churches' refusal to acknowledge any official authority over their organisation.

The State fears the influence of zealous American evangelism and some of the House Church theology has those characteristics, but, in many other respects, it seems to be an indigenous Chinese movement - charismatic, energetic and young.

An educated young Christian described her church to me: "We have 50 young professionals in this church. Everyone is so busy working, you don't have time socialising, and even if you are socialising, you are putting on a fake face.

"But in church people feel warm, they feel welcome… they feel people really love them so they really want to join the community, a lot of people come for this."

Alpha marriage course

A Chinese academic close to the government told me that the government would prefer to ignore the house churches, as unlike the Falun Gong they are not seen as a threat. But where a church oversteps the line, as happened in Beijing this year, taking its worship on to the streets, then the authorities will crack down.

“Start Quote

The worship of Mammon… has become many people's life purpose”

Professor He Guanghu Renmin University, Beijing

 

In some areas the state has sought to enlist Christianity into its "big idea" of a "harmonious society" - the slogan that dominates Chinese public life. There has been official interest in the Western evangelical Alpha Marriage Course, because of alarm at the escalating divorce rate among young Chinese.

What must unsettle the authorities most is the reason why so many are turning to the churches.

I heard people talking again and again of a "spiritual crisis" in China - a phrase that has even been used by the Premier Wen Jiao Bao. The old have seen the old certainties of Marxism-Leninism transmute into the most visceral capitalist society on earth.

For the young, in the stampede to get rich, trust in institutions, between individuals, between the generations, is breaking down.

As one of China's most eminent philosophers of religion - Professor He Guanghu, at Renmin University in Beijing put it to me: "The worship of Mammon… has become many people's life purpose.

"I think it is very natural that many other people will not be satisfied... will seek some meaning for their lives so that when Christianity falls into their lives, they will seize it very tightly."

The Israeli system

It isn’t Bibi - it's the system, stupid

08/18/2011 14:11   By ALON PINKAS

Misguided coalitionists hail the system as being the only one that can accommodate Israel’s diversity and heterogeneity. They fail to comprehend that it is also a breeding ground for governmental dysfunction and paralysis.

Photo by: Marc Israel Sellem

You would think that in 2000 years of forced Diaspora and life among the nations, Jews would have had ample time to invest their intellectual energies into devising the best possible political system.

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Welfare states and socialism are about as dead as Elvis

You would think that 2000 years of exposure to all conceivable political systems would prepare Jews for the day they regain independence and reclaim sovereignty.

You'd be wrong.

You might also be tempted to think that Jews had drawn lessons from life under the Catholic Church, Turkish Sultanate, England’s Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Spring of Nations, the Bolshevik Revolution, and a host of other garden-variety systems like fascism, monarchies and totalitarianism.

You would expect Jewish political thinkers, Zionist leaders and the founding fathers of the State of Israel to have come up with the Ten Commandments of a modern, functioning, governability-enabling electoral system.

That Israel is a democracy - and a vibrant one at that, is not to be taken for granted. After all, the Zionists responsible for converting the dream of Zionism into political praxis came from patently non-democratic European societies.

These zealous Zionists then set to bring home their long lost brothers and sisters from Arab countries - again, not exactly bastions of free constitutional republics. In this respect Israel is perhaps an "illiberal democracy," but a democracy nonetheless.

Yet Israel’s democratic origins were shaped by mitigating circumstances from within and without: The confluence of the pre-state Yishuv political institutions and political schisms, the impending end of the British Mandate, and the threat of war lurking ominously on the horizon. This resulted in an urgency to quickly construct a working political model.

So the inherently heterogeneous Israel of circa 1948 (exponentially more heterogeneous in 2011) gave birth to a mutant electoral system, or what political scientists fondly refer to as "proportional representation."  It is a rare, unique and peculiar system.

It is, in essence, the only functioning dysfunctional system known to mankind. At least, that is, to your average homo democraticus. It kind of works, but not really. It represents, but not exactly. It is a distortion, but at least it reflects a real mosaic. It makes governability impossible and paralyzes decision-making, but then so too—if not more so—the American system.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is Israel’s premier by virtue of 24% of the popular vote. That would be impossible in, say, Britain, Germany, Canada and other parliamentary democracies with different electoral systems. Mr. Netanyahu is where he is fair and square. Although he didn’t strictly "win" the 2009 elections, he also did not usurp power. Constitutionally he holds all the powers of a prime minister and until recently was judged by commentators to be a stable (whatever that means) leader.

Yet at the same time, he has no real mandate to do anything autonomously. What he does have—as with many of his predecessors—is a binding, paralyzing and ever-threatening coalition.

Purists in Israel are often heard making the following claim: Stop grumbling about the political system because any other would be unrepresentative and divisive. This country is essentially divided into 6 or 7 tribes with irreconcilable differences; it is heterogeneous beyond a common narrative that is above the lowest common denominator; it is sectorial and sub-sectorial in a way that defies definition. We are still nation-building. Thus, the coalition acts as an adhesive between Israel’s disparate factions and implementing electoral changes would be an exercise in futility at best. In fact, say these proponents, there is no better system that can truly prevent exclusion or resentment while capturing the country’s diversity. As such, in any other systems, the lack of representation would mean that major policies and decisions would be rendered illegitimate.

This attitude may be conducive to countries like Canada, Denmark, Uruguay, Italy, Thailand or anywhere else that doesn't require the decisions that an Israeli government needs to make.

Diversity is not a synonym for dysfunctional politics and heterogeneity should not be an excuse for governance paralysis. For these coalition-condoners, preserving the current model has become the prime objective. Yet they fail to realize that by its very nature, it is a system that nurtures inaction which in turn breeds incompetence; perpetuating politics as nothing more than a reality game of survival.

Keeping this in mind, if we steer the discourse towards the ongoing protest movement the only logical advice to the prime minister is not to change his policies. Netanyahu was not elected as a proponent of the welfare state. Neither is he a social-democrat. Rather, he is more akin to a Thatcherite/Republican conservative who believes in the infinite wisdom of the market and small government.

Netanyahu thinks that redistributive policy and government is a travesty, and that social justice can only be determined by solid economic life and not by legislation or intervention through policy. He never concealed his disdain with the idea of Palestinian statehood and neither does he truly believe in the feasibility of the two-state model.

So why are his detractors still trying to force the leopard prime minister to change his spots? Quite simply, they are in denial about Netanyahu’s real source of power: The system itself.
Consider that 76% of Israelis did not actually vote for Mr. Netanyahu in the 2009 elections! And yet despite this, the system itself—our country’s expression of its bountiful heterogeneity—catapulted him to the very top.

So stop asking Netanyahu to transmogrify into something he never was. You want to change priorities? You demand social justice? You want what you think is a peace process? Then change the system.

The writer is a diplomat who recently served as consul-general in New York.

Massacre in Norway: Israel Strikes Back

Joe Quinn  |  JoeQuinn.net
July 26, 2011

As a rule, Israel (”that shitty little country” according to a former French diplomat), only wages conventional war as a last resort, and even then, unlike the US of A, it lacks the manpower to invade and occupy foreign nations and must limit itself to blunt force bombing runs (or attacking Palestinian fishermen with gunboats). But the fact is that Israel doesn’t need to expend vast resources on conventional war, because there is another, equally (or perhaps more) effective way for such a pathologically-driven apartheid state to achieve its twisted objectives – deception.
Yep, that’s right, ‘by way of deception’, or the ‘horse’s head in your bed’ school of diplomacy. To say that the Israelis are rather adept at this particular ‘art’ form is something of an understatement. Over the last 60 years, the Israeli elite have done more than any other group to successfully portray (to white Westerners) every single Muslim as potential ’suicide bomber’. Their chosen method to achieve this screwed up state of affairs has been to manufacture ’suicide bombings’ and then conveniently allow (or help) the blame to fall on some Muslim group. Of course, they’re also experts at covert assassination of innocent people, like Iranian scientists.
Basically, while the Americans’ chosen form of coercion is bombs, the Israelis believe that inducing psychological terror is the best way to achieve an objective. Israeli efforts at manipulating public perception involve the use of violence of course, but it is violence wrapped in a lie so insidious that even the victims are hoodwinked as to the identity of their aggressors.
Which brings me to Oslo. I’ll go out on a limb here and assume that you’re not naive enough to buy the ‘lone nut’ explanation and just move on to the evidence for an Israeli signature all over the attacks a few days ago.
The bomb in Oslo targeted the Norwegian oil ministry building. Less than a year ago, the Norwegian government announced that it would no longer be using Norway’s massive oil income (the Norwegian people’s money) to invest in Israeli companies involved in building Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
Coincidence?

Teenagers holding a ‘boycott Israel’ sign on Utoya Island with the Norwegian foreign minister two days before many of them were murdered.

Over the past few years, the ruling Norwegian Labour party has been taking an increasingly vocal stand against Israeli aggression against Palestinians. For example, as far back as 2006 the then Norwegian finance minister was backing a planned consumer boycott of Israeli goods. Which provoked Condi Rice to threaten Norway with “serious political consequences”.
The teenagers who were camping on Utoya island were members of the AUF (Norwegian Labour party’s youth movement). Two days before Anders Behring Breivik would run amok and kill many of the teenagers in cold blood, they met with Foreign Minister Gahr Stoere and demanded he recognise Palestine. On the same day the AUF’s leader Eskil Pedersen gave an interview to the Dagbladet, Norway’s second largest tabloid newspaper. The newspaper described the AUF in this way:

“The AUF has long been a supporter of an international boycott of Israel, but the decision at the last congress, demands that Norway imposes a unilateral economic embargo on the country and it must be stricter than before.”

The AUF leader is quoted as saying:

“The [Middle East] peace process goes nowhere, and though the whole world expects Israel to comply, they do not. We in Labour Youth will have a unilateral economic embargo of Israel from the Norwegian side. I acknowledge that this is a drastic measure, but I think it gives a clear indication that we are tired of Israel’s behaviour, quite simply”.

Norway is not alone in toying with the idea of a consumer boycott of Israel, nor is it alone in its support of Palestinian statehood (several other Nordic nations have followed suit in recent months) but Norway does stand alone (in the Western world) in the fact that it has vast oil reserves and appears to have been toying with the much more threatening (to Israel) idea of what amounts to an oil boycott of Israel.

The second alleged gunman being arrested and then ‘disappeared’.

As for the mass murderer Breivik, all the evidence suggests that he is indeed a ‘crazy person’, but that in no way explains how he could have pulled off these highly coordinated attacks alone. What it does suggest is that he fits the profile of a ‘mind programmed patsy’ who had lots of help from people with a lot of resources and a thinly veiled agenda to send a strong (if covert) message to the Norwegian government and people.
The judge hearing the case against Breivik said that Breivik wanted to create “the greatest loss possible to Norway’s governing Labour Party”, which he accused of failing the country on immigration and opening the door to the “Muslim colonization” of Norway and all of Europe. We’ve already established that Israel has a serious beef with Norway’s governing Labour party, and who, pray tell, has been at the forefront of, and has most to gain from, the claims of an Islamic take-over of Europe? Who has the most to gain from the demonization of Muslims? Who has the most to gain from delivering an extremely traumatic message to the Norwegian Labour party and the Norwegian people, both of whom were growing increasingly anti-Israel?
There is also the interesting fact that initial reports claimed there were at least two shooters and that one of them had been arrested. All such reports have since disappeared from the mainstream media. Breivik was also wearing police uniform. Where did he get it? And why has no one linked the shooting two days later of a 27 year old man in his home in Sandnes, Norway by two masked men in military uniform?
I could go on about how, immediately after the attacks, the mainstream media zombie pundits blathered on about ‘al-Qaeda’ being the culprits, or how some Mossad agent accepted responsibility for the attacks in the name of ‘Helpers of the global jihad’, but I trust you all already know that the ‘al-qaeda’ business is just so much bullshit.
BUT! In case that isn’t enough circumstantial evidence to convict, here’s another (admittedly more tenuous) piece of data. The attacks in Oslo and Utoya island came 65 years, to the day, after the original Zionist terror group Irgun, bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. While all the other details strongly suggest an Israeli hand behind this particular act of inhumanity, perhaps the timing is the real Israeli ’signature’. The bombing of the Kind David hotel was an attempt by Zionist terrorists to prevent foreign intervention in their plans for covert global domination. The attacks in Oslo and Utoya island fit the same profile.
So yeah, enough said. In fact, I’ve probably said too much, and could have just summed it all up by borrowing the words of a friend who opined on the topic:

“Something about this whole thing doesn’t make sense.

Let me put it like this: you are a citizen of country A and you deeply hate and resent the citizens of countries B, C and D for ‘destroying’ your country. Your whole political discourse is based around defending Country A from B, C and D. So in what universe does it making ANY sense to go on a shooting spree against the citizens of country A??

This is like a white supremacist going off his rocker and then shooting white people. Or a Jew who hates Palestinians going postal in a Synagogue!

You may say ‘the guy was mad, he didn’t know what he was doing, don’t look for sense in this’ but such politically motivated fanatical madmen have at least one basic and obvious method to their madness: they attack the object of their hate and not everything else apart from the object of hate…

It sounds to me like Breivik was most probably a ‘patient’ of ‘Dr. Greenbaum’ but one that ‘went off’ at the wrong time or in the wrong way to such an extent that the ‘excuses’ the PTB are coming up with don’t even make basic sense.”

http://www.wariscrime.com/2011/07/27/news/massacre-in-norway-israel-strikes-back/

London riots-Seven out of ten Britons are against immigration

Seven out of ten Britons are against immigration

The vast majority of Britons think there are too many immigrants in the UK, that immigrants place too much pressure on public services and that high immigration affects job prospects, an IPSOS Mori poll has revealed.
Seventy-one percent of respondents said there are ‘too many immigrants in this country’. The poll surveyed citizens of 23 countries around the world, and only Russia (77 percent) and Belgium (72 percent) were more concerned about immigration.

Seventy-six percent stated immigration places too much pressure on public services, such as health, transport and education – the highest percentage of all countries asked – and 62 percent said immigration has made it more difficult for them to find employment.
Just 27 percent believed immigration is good for the economy, and only 33 percent thought immigrants ‘make Britain a more interesting place to live in’ – proving public opinion flies in the face of those oft-repeated racist lies of the left.
All questionnaires were purposefully ‘weighted’ to ensure demographics were ‘balanced’ and that ‘the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to the most recent country Census data’, suggesting the actual amount of indigenous Britons against immigration is far higher.
The results of this latest poll represent a continuation of the high level of opposition to immigration in Britain and across the West.

In December 2010, 73 percent of those surveyed said they would be ‘unhappy’ if Britain were to become a majority-non-white nation, proving public antipathy towards immigration is not just a matter of numbers, but of race.

In January 2011, 78 percent said they want immigration cut back, and in May this year, up to 92 percent of respondents said they wanted immigration levels drastically slashed.

Nick Griffin-How we’d restore order

 Nick Griffin

How we’d restore order

Nick Griffin warns of the dangers of government and police weakness and spells out how the British National Party would bring peace back to our streets.

“Bring in the Army now to save lives.” That’s one of five core demands put forward by British National Party leader Nick Griffin in response to the wave of black mob violence sweeping England.

The party’s North West of England MEP has also called for the use of water cannons and plastic baton rounds, the setting up of emergency courts to hand down immediate five-year prison sentences to rioters and looters, and the subsequent expulsion of immigrant rioters and their dependants from Britain.


“The authorities have only hours, or at most a couple of days, to get the mayhem under control, or it is liable to spill out into inter-community violence on a truly devastating scale,” Mr. Griffin has told our News Team.

“The media are doing their best to cover up the extent to which innocent white and Asian people are being targeted simply because they are not black. Most strikingly, the Daily Mail censored its own website once a higher-level editor spotted the power of the picture they were running of a white woman who had been forced to strip naked by rioters in an act of calculated racist humiliation.

“From grass-roots reports we’re getting from all over London and from Birmingham, the few photos and passing mentions of the issue that have been carried by the media are only the tip of an iceberg. The truth appears to be that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people have been brutally mugged, or had their bikes, cars, shops and even homes attacked because they are ethnically British, East European or Asian.

“This is why, unless the authorities stop this now, it is inevitable that the self-defence organisation already seen in the Turkish community will spread, turning what is still at present primarily a giant exercise in shopping with violence into a far more ugly set of racial clashes and full-scale conflict between different ethnic and religious groups.”

Act now to save lives

“The ConDem government are literally playing with fire in believing that the police can get a grip on the situation without the help of proper anti-riot equipment and the army,” warns Mr. Griffin. The liberal Tories now running the country believe that it’s too Politically Incorrect to treat black rioters with the same tough measures as are routinely used against young Republican and Loyalist rioters in Northern Ireland.

But this pathetic squeamishness could all too easily lead to people being killed.
“I urge the government and police to stop pussyfooting around and get tough. I urge members of our community, and the significant number of decent and settled members of ethnic minorities who recognise that we speak for the Silent Majority, to stay calm and to stay off the streets unless failure by the authorities leaves them absolutely no choice but to take action to defend their homes, families and neighbours.

“And I urge British National Party activists and new supporters to download, print and distribute the leaflets that we will be putting on this site as events unfold. People out there are angry and frightened. They want and deserve answers and hope. It is clear that they will find neither from the political elite or the sensationalist but Politically Correct mass media. They will find both in the British National Party.”

London Burning after three days of race riots

London Burning after three days of race riots

 Adam Walker

The weekend’s devastating riots in Tottenham have shocked many. However, the crimes are just the latest in a series of tragic events that would never have happened if the left had not decided to subject the people of this country to ‘multiculturalism’.

Saturday night’s violence saw 26 police officers injured – with eight admitted to hospital – when 300 people attacked police in north London on Saturday night and into the early hours of Sunday.

Shops were looted, police cars and a double-decker bus set alight, and petrol bombs thrown at officers.

Although the news channels are hard at work portraying the perpetrators of these crimes as the victims, wheeling out black ‘community representatives’ who blame the ‘racist’ white police for black violence, the truth is that this is just the latest battle in the immigrant-on-indigenous war forced upon this country by those who aid and abet mass immigration.
The area that witnessed last night’s horrific scenes was very close to that of one of Britain’s most notorious riots, just over 25 years ago. In 1985, PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death by men with knives and machetes on a rundown housing estate in Tottenham when around 500 mainly black youths rampaged through the streets, attacking police, looting and setting fires.
Both Tottenham riots are just two in a series of such events in Britain over the last 30 years.

Thirty years of hate: Britain's worst race riots

1981: More than 300 people are injured, including 279 police officers, as black men hurl petrol bombs in Brixton, south London. The two-day clash causes £6.5m damage. Later in the year there is another riot in Brixton, as well as riots in Manchester, Southall and Toxteth, Liverpool, where a man is killed.
1985: Trouble flares up again in Handsworth, Birmingham. Black rioting leaves two people dead and dozens of buildings gutted by firebombs. More than 50 cars are set alight and two shops gutted.
1985: Broadwater Farm. White PC Keith Blakelock is hacked to death in a racist murder by men with knives and machetes.
1995: A policeman is almost kicked to death after being pulled off his motorcycle during a second immigrant riot in Brixton.
1995: Three nights of fighting causes more than £1m worth of damage after gangs of Asian youths run wild in Manningham, Bradford.
1998: A group of 100 youths throw bottles, cans and stones at police as the five suspects of the murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence arrive at the inquiry.
2001: Bradford, Oldham, Leeds, Burnley. Muslim Asian youths fight on the streets of northern towns, hurling petrol bombs and stones. Eighty police officers are injured in Bradford alone.
2005: ‘Black British’ and ‘black Asians’ riot for two consecutive nights, with both groups committing a string of violent crimes against each other, including two murders.
2011: The race war has entered its most dangerous phase yet with gangs attacking hospitals and looting in broad daylight in scenes that look more like a US disaster zone every day.

 

 

Police attacked as rioting spreads

As fire hoses continue pumping water onto smouldering buildings in Tottenham, emergency services have been dealing with disturbances across London after fresh bouts of rioting and looting broke out.
Police officers were being deployed to respond to "copycat criminal activity" across the city.
Disturbances erupted on Sunday in several boroughs in north, south and east London, with reports of trouble in Brixton, Enfield, Walthamstow and Islington.
Three officers were taken to hospital after being hit by a fast-moving vehicle at 12.45 a.m. on Monday, a Metropolitan Police spokesman said. The officers had been in the process of making arrests in Chingford Mount, Waltham Forest, after a shop was looted by youths.
Meanwhile, a fight broke out when rival gangs attended King's College Hospital after two victims of minor stabbings were admitted, police said. The hospital has brought in extra security for the rest of the night, and officers remain on scene dealing with the initial stabbings.
Six fire engines were dispatched to deal with a blaze at a Foot Locker shop in Brixton, south London, and witnesses saw riot police clash with looters at a Currys store nearby. A photographer on the scene said:
"A couple of hundred youths were rioting and looting. Riot police went in to get them out and there was a big fight in the street. Youths were throwing rocks and bottles and there was a bin on fire. They used a fire extinguisher to push the police back so they could get back into Currys and continue taking things out."

Elsewhere, more than 30 youths, many in masks, vandalised and looted shops in Walthamstow Central, including BHS. "Officers attended the area, and the situation is currently under control. Groups of youths are continuing to target shops in Waltham Forest, and officers are on scene," a spokesman commented.
Police Commander Christine Jones said: "Officers responding to sporadic disorder in a number of boroughs made more than 100 arrests throughout last night and early this morning. This is in addition to the 61 arrests made on Saturday night and Sunday morning."
She went on: "Officers are shocked at the outrageous level of violence directed against them. At least nine officers were injured overnight in addition to the 26 injured on Saturday night. We will not tolerate this disgraceful violence. The investigation continues to bring these criminals to justice.

Steve Squire at the scene in Enfield said: “You get what you vote for! It’s time the people of London woke up to the reality of living in this tinderbox. We have a serious situation building here, and our only hope is to stop this madness politically – and time is fast running out, as scenes this week have shown us.”

London riots-The black ‘community leader’ interview that went wrong

The black ‘community leader’ interview that went wrong

The BBC was forced to cut short an interview about the UK riots with former black panther member and convicted criminal Darcus Howe on Tuesday morning when he viciously turned on the interviewer.


Trinidad and Tobago-born Howe said the wanton destruction of Britain witnessed in the last two days was not a riot but an ‘insurrection’.
Howe is just one of many ‘black representatives’ who has been wheeled out by the anti-white mass media since the riots began in order to disseminate platitudes about ‘police racism’ and to play down the blatantly obvious fact that the vast majority of the rioters are black. But unfortunately for the BBC, this propaganda exercise did not go to plan.
Howe said: ‘They have been stopping and searching young blacks for no reason at all. I have a grandson; he’s an angel.’
When the interviewer put it to Mr Howe that any alleged actions by the police were not justification for mass rioting, he replied, ‘Where were you in 1981 in Brixton?
‘I don’t call it rioting. I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it has happening in Liverpool, it is happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad.’
He then angrily told the interviewer to ‘have some respect for an old West Indian negro’ and to stop accusing him of being a rioter. He uttered an unintelligible insult, and the interview was promptly cut short, to much embarrassment in the pro-multicultural newsroom.
In the 1970s, Howe was a member of the British Black Panther Movement. He was arrested for riot, affray and assault and imprisoned for three months for assaulting a police officer, yet he has been rewarded by British TV stations with a lucrative career in broadcasting.

Michael McCarthy-No shame, no limits

No shame, no limits: Has the behaviour of the mob destroyed the idea of British civility for ever?

On Monday night rioters across the capital showed that authority held no sway over them. The Independent’s commentators discuss the riots that have shaken a nation.

By Michael McCarthy

Wednesday, 10 August 2011

The battle for Britain: rioters in Hackney, east London on Monday

Twitter is a remarkable medium through which to follow a major event like violent disorder, especially when the micro-blogging service has been embraced by thousands of people. It makes possible a panoramic view of events and an equally wide view of people's reactions at the same time. I spent until the early hours of yesterday morning observing the rioting in London via thousands of tweets, from the comfort and safety of my desk, while my younger colleagues were out risking their necks to report it.

But the advantage of being an armchair observer via Twitter is that you not only get news of events long before the news agencies have broadcast them, you get a very real sense of the public mood and its shifts. And late on Monday evening, as the violence spread across London, the mood of the citizenry noticeably changed, shifting from anger and outrage to fear.

What began to terrify people, especially in areas where the police were absent, was the seemingly limitless nature of what the rioters would do. It had gone far beyond a barney with the coppers and the looting, in particular, it went past all previous bounds; the rioters would loot everything, everywhere; they would attack and rob anyone they came across; they began to break into private houses.

I think people were so frightened because something had been loosed and was on display, which was new to many people – and that was the sight of very large numbers of people, mainly young men, who were no longer constrained by our culture. The role of culture in making British society what it is, and in giving it its remarkable strengths, is not often remarked upon, but it is enormous. We are, or we have been, a culture-bound society: we have been governed largely by informal constraints on our behaviour.

This is in sharp contrast to a society like that of the United States, for example, which is largely a rule-bound society. To give just a single instance: drinking alcohol in the street used to be rare in Britain, because it was frowned upon – but in the US there are local laws specifically forbidding it. The rule-bound society, which is the reason for the vast proliferation of lawyers in the US, arose in America because the founding fathers created a new nation from scratch, starting with a written Constitution that set out the first principles and then writing down and proscribing everything else about people's behaviour.

Britain, whose governing process evolved slowly and organically, does not even have a written constitution, merely a set of understandings about how things ought to be done.

But these understandings have, in the past, been widespread and very powerful. The bus queue and the idea of queuing generally is an example that persists; I remember my shock and spluttering resentment when I first went skiing, years ago, and stood patiently with the other Brits in the queue for the chairlift and watched as the little French and Italian kids skied to the front and forced their way in. (An example that has fallen by the wayside is giving up your seat to a woman on public transport. When I was a boy, no woman on a bus or a train would be standing if a man had a seat to offer her; now the man who gets up is the exception.)

These may seem like relatively trivial instances, but cultural norms exercise much deeper and more important influences. I once sat down to try to work out what was the single most valuable thing about British society and I concluded that it was our relatively incorrupt civil service. In the past, if you wanted a new driving licence, say, you filled in the application form and posted it to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea (now you do it online), and back your licence came. You did not include a £20 note in the envelope; you did not ring up the guy in the department who was your wife's second cousin and ask him to speed it up. Yet in many parts of the world, that is how things are routinely done.

The reason people in Britain behaved differently was the culture, the culture of shame, if you like; it would be shameful to do otherwise. We can probably locate the origins of this in two factors: mid-Victorian religious morality and the nature of the British national psyche. Victorian morality spanned society, with Methodism and the other free churches strongly influencing the working class and the upper classes in their Anglican public schools being animated by Dr Thomas Arnold's ideal of the education of a Christian gentleman. The two streams came together in a general national understanding, across the classes, that behaviour should be civilised. It is one of the reasons why revolutionary Marxism never took root here and the Labour Party embraced parliamentary democracy instead.

The British psyche was the fertile soil in which this understanding flowered: we are not an aggressive or violent people. The idea of the British bulldog is a myth and never more clearly shown than by the tribulations of the citizen army that landed in France on D-Day in 1944. Max Hastings' gripping account of the subsequent Normandy campaign, Overlord, makes very uncomfortable reading, for it demonstrates in detail how the British Army was outfought by the Germans until overwhelming firepower eventually beat the Nazi war machine down. When the odds were equal, Hastings said, the Germans always prevailed. This is not to minimise by one jot the courage and self-sacrifice of the British forces, it is simply that we were not naturally good at fighting. We were brave and stoical but not imaginatively aggressive, which is a different thing – and what the Germans were.

This combination of a peaceful national character and an accepted moral outlook on how we ought to behave produced (especially after the Second World War, when people had got used to being told what to do) a society of social cohesion and stability: the low point for crime in British history was 1953. This is the society into which, as a baby boomer, I was born. And it was one of the many dazzling advantages we enjoyed, along with plenty to eat, free health, free education, freedom of speech and ever-rising expectations.

As the Fifties became the Sixties, society became liberated and far less docile and there were rumbles, there was industrial unrest: Mods and Rockers fought on the beach at Brighton; students demonstrated against the Vietnam war. But somehow, although it provoked indignation from retired colonels, none of this really stepped outside the bounds of the culture.

I can remember when I first saw the cultural norms transgressed; it was on a Sunday evening in August 1976, at the end of the Notting Hill Carnival, which I had been covering as a young reporter for the Daily Mirror. The event ended in rioting. I had covered riots before, in Northern Ireland, but that evening I saw something new. It wasn't just people throwing rocks at the police. There were groups of young men on the street, openly brandishing knives and openly looking to rob. It was chilling. It took me some time to work out why it was different, but eventually I realised that it was the openness of their behaviour which was so startling. To anyone of my generation, it was unthinkable that you would behave so shamelessly, that you might strut about in the street with a knife. And it was clear that those people rioting had been socialised in a different way, so that the informal constraints on behaviour which had been such a key part of our culture had no effect on them whatsoever.

So with the looting on Monday night. This was a multi-racial phenomenon. There were plenty of black rioters and plenty of white rioters, too. But what united them was the abandonment of all restraint and that the cultural norms which had once been so powerful in British society were irrelevant to them, with perhaps the most egregious example of all being the young man who was robbed even while he was injured. People were still stunned yesterday by what had they had witnessed; here's a tweet from anIndependent contributor, picked from many similar ones: "Am still thinking about what I saw last night. It was like watching packs of wild dogs bring down antelopes."

We have plenty of rules and plenty of laws like every other nation, but what has held British society together, given its relative stability and unique values, has been culture. It is clear that there is a growing section of young men and women who have been so socialised that this culture means nothing to them and this will have to be recognised. This is probably not something that policy can deal with; it cannot be ameliorated, it can only be confronted.

It does not mean that we cannot have civil governance, but it will increasingly have to be based on rules which are enforced, rather than on universally accepted norms of behaviour. Those norms were the best thing about British society and long after the burnt-out streets of Hackney and Croydon and Ealing have been rebuilt, their loss will be resonating with us still.