Review Article: ‘A New Inquisition: religious persecution in Britain today’, Jon Gower Davies, Civitas, London, 2010.

The writing of this slim volume was prompted by the trial of Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang, two Liverpool hoteliers who although exonerated of the charge brought against them by a malign Muslim convert, had their business ruined and their lives turned upside down. The zeal with which the case was taken up and prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is illustrative not only of the British state’s desire to generate and prosecute thought criminals, but also of its abandonment of any pretext of treating its citizens as equal before the law. Some citizens - Muslim ones in particular - have become more equal than others.

Davies, a retired senior academic from the University of Newcastle, uses the misfortunes of the Vogelenzangs to highlight how the official writ of multiculturalism has come to pervert our justice system and to undermine the traditional free and easy public discussion of religion and irreligion. Where once lively debate and scurrilous humour were the rule, now a cold deadening silence and sense of unease has descended thanks to the combined impact of a new category of religious ‘hate’ crimes created by the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act; the ‘Religious Hatred’ section of the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, and a vociferous and threatening Muslim lobby. People have become apprehensive about debating or poking fun at one particular religion – Islam – both because of the special legal status that it and its followers have been accorded, and because of the willingness of a significant minority of Muslims to either threaten critics with violence or bring the force of ‘hate’ legislation to bear upon freethinkers and the followers of other religions.

Who would have thought only 30 or 40 years ago that it would have been possible for the Vogelenzangs to have suffered as they did (and still do) simply because they ventured to hold a conversation with a Muslim guest in which the latter claimed to have been ‘offended’ by what they said? Much of the Vogelenzangs’ business was provided by offering accommodation to a local hospital, and once the case had been brought the latter promptly cancelled its block bookings at the Bounty House Hotel. The merest hint of the hoteliers being associated with a ‘hate’ crime was sufficient for them to be punished, and for a primary source of their livelihood to vanish. To compound their hurt, the Vogelenzangs received hate mail and were pilloried by some commentators in the national press as Christian ‘nutters’. This was of course, completely unfair and unwarrented.

Davies himself draws attention to the testimony of another Muslim guest – a doctor – who unlike the zealous and brittle convert Mrs Tazi was able to see the Vogelenzangs for what they are: fundamentally decent people. Davies quotes the nameless doctor (his request for anonymity is in itself a sad indictment of our absence of freedom owing to fear of attack from Islamists and the politically correct establishment) as saying:

I am a Muslim and I know they are devout Christians but . . . I have never found them to be at all judgemental. They were as friendly with me as with any other guest. (Quoted in Davies, 2010: p. 17).

So, why were they brought to trial?

The answer to this last question lies in the corrosive influence of the Macpherson Report which has destroyed the notion of impartial justice, freedom of thought and expression and thereby liberty itself. The Vogelenzangs, concludes Davies, are victims of the UK’s equivalent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a politically correct revolution in which transgressors of the diversity code must be prosecuted and made public examples of. Its differential application means that white Britons such are prosecuted for ‘hate’ crimes upon the flimsiest of grounds, whereas a Muslim is able to say the most inflammatory things in public before an audience whilst the police stand idly by, as in the case of one individual addressing a Muslim mob when Geert Wilders visited Parliament for a screening of Fitna:

The punishment in Islam for insulting the prophet is capital punishment. . . He [Wilders] should take a lesson from Theo van Gogh who took the punishment. . . We are here to teach this dog a lesson. (Quoted in Davies, 2010: p. 20).

To me, this sounds like an incitement to murder.

Another reason underpinning the differential application of the law and the manufacture of ‘hate’ crimes is the fact that the CPS sets itself a target of increasing the number of such crimes that it brings to court. Furthermore, the legal establishment is compromised by the existence of specific ethnic and confessional lobby groups which undermine its neutrality. Thus we have the National Black Crown Prosecution Association (NBCPA) and the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) which pursue sectarian agendas specifically aimed at undermining the commonweal and at furthering the ‘interests’ of legally privileged minorities (i.e. those designated as collective ethnic and religious victims).

Davies’s short book is refreshing in its objective and analytical approach to the problems generated by the manufacture of a new category of ‘hate’ crime – religious ‘hate’ crime – which is a symptom of the irrational thought that lies at the heart of policy making and the political and media establishments in the UK today. Sadly, owing to the ascendancy of the Cameroons and their coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats, we are unlikely to see either the repeal of such laws or the removal of the deeply flawed thinking which has underpinned their development and introduction. ‘A New Inquisition: religious persecution in Britain today’ can be purchased from Civitas at http://www.civitas.org.uk/books/whatsnew.php

Muslim Defence League confront EDL

What follows is video footage of the uneven encounter last Saturday between an isolated small group of EDL supporters and the MDL accompanied by members of the local Muslim population of Dudley. As you can see, the police attempted to keep the two apart. If the MDL had broken through the police line the EDL would have been in serious trouble. For some context see previous articles and a recent post at Atlas Shrugs for in-depth eyewitness accounts.

Underhand Police Tactics at Dudley EDL Protest?

New eyewitness reports from last Saturday’s posted at the Atlas Shrugs blog provide more insight into what occurred and reveal a situation in which it appears that the police deliberately sought to break up the mass of EDL demonstrators by preventing a number of coaches from reaching the rendezvous point. Furthermore, at least one of these coaches and its passengers was sent to an area where circa 200 Muslims lay in wait. Subsequently, a small group of EDL men were set upon. This is alarming enough, but the fact that they are reported to have had wives, girlfriends and children with them makes this police redirection of the coach reckless at best.

Another eyewitness account published at Atlas Shrugs discusses an unprovoked police baton attack upon a protestor which left him with a head wound. Also, rather sinisterly, the riot police penning in the main body of EDL demonstrators were said not to have been wearing identification numbers. Similar tactics are said to have been employed in the Miners’ Strike back in the 80s.

This provides some context for the later anger of the protestors and their breakout from the compound. Atlas has suggested that these reports are indicative of a deliberate police effort to manufacture a situation in which the EDL could be readily and brutally dealt with whilst simultaneously portraying it as an aggressive force. Our new masters in Whitehall have already made their thoughts on Islam and the EDL abundantly clear: Islam good; EDL bad, therefore they will be looking for ways of stigmatising and banning the EDL. We need to ensure that an alternative narrative to that provided by the authorities and the official media is preserved. If any EDL members who were present in Dudley on Saturday wish to leave their accounts of the day in the comments section, please do so as they’d be welcome.

Grenoble Riots: Street Jihad?

Friday night bore witness to rioting in the French city of Grenoble, where Muslim ‘youths’ torched cars and shot at the police. It is also reported that the following night also witnessed unrest. The death of the armed robber Karim Boudoudha in a gun battle with the police 24 hours earlier served as the catalyst for the violence. His unknown accomplice in the robbery of the Uriage-les-Bains casino escaped with more than 20,000 euros. Boudoudha was no innocent, having received three previous convictions for armed robbery, and yet certain elements within Grenoble’s young Muslim population appear to have regarded him as some sort of hero and thus decided to go on the rampage in a petulant display of anger with the French authorities.

Grenoble residents therefore had to suffer as dozens of cars were torched and the sound of unrest filled the night air as an armed mob roamed the city, shooting at the police and threatening members of the public. It is reported that a tram was held up in the city’s Villeneuve district and its passengers forced to disembark by a mob of 30 carrying baseball bats and iron bars. Two men have been arrested.

Video Footage of Grenoble Riots

In general, mainstream reporting of the event has not focused upon the obvious Islamic aspect of this unrest, but has instead deployed the standard narrative of this being a product of socio-economic deprivation and referring to its perpetrators simply as ‘youths’. Although one expects this sort of approach from the BBC which strenuously seeks to avoid mention of Islam if at all possible when reporting such matters, even the Daily Telegraph employs this approach in this instance:

These high-rise neighbourhoods, built in the 1950s and 1960s to house a growing population of industrial workers and immigrants, have become near-ghettos where unemployment is high, public services are poor, and resentment boils.

During the 2005 riots, some 300 buildings and 10,000 cars were burned, while 130 police and rioters were hurt. Since then, unrest has flared often after residents have run ins with the police.

Police and government officials have a lingering fear that the poor suburbs could explode again because the underlying causes – high unemployment, few opportunities, drug trafficking and a sense of exclusion from society – have changed little.

Police unions have raised concerns about a rise in violent crime spurred by the recession and a resurgence of drug trafficking in some areas.

The Telegraph avoids mentioning the faith background of the perpetrators and their ethnicity, but the people conducting this violence, as everyone knows, are not French ‘youths’: they are Muslim immigrants or those descended from the Muslim immigrant population. It is probable that this outburst of violence in Grenoble was also a sign of discontent connected to the National Assembly’s decision this week to ban various types of Islamic veil such as the burqa and niqab, but we won’t see mainstream media outlets joining the dots to reveal an all-too apparent and obvious picture of seething Islamist resentment in France.

Prior to Nicolas Sarkozy’s election as President, many amongst the French electorate had been given the impression that he would deal with such rioters in a suitably condign fashion, having referred to those who participated in the 2005 riots as “canailles” and “racailles”, but he has not. Moreover, he has shown considerable accommodation towards Islam, which is not something that ordinary French voters would desire, particularly those who have the misfortune to live cheek by jowl with Muslim populations.

As in the UK, the French mass media is predisposed towards citing “socio-economic” causative factors for such violence, mistakenly attributing it to relative economic deprivation and ‘racism’. However, only a certain type of youthful malcontent is prone towards such wanton acts of hatred and destruction: the doctrinaire Muslim male. The roots of this violence are ideological, and the only effective way in which it can be prevented is through removing an ideology which commands its adherents to look upon all non-adherents as innately inferior.

When resident in a non-Muslim majority society, the doctrinaire Muslim male looks around himself and thinks not only that he is superior, but also that it is his divinely ordained duty to lord it over the kuffar. It is felt to be his ‘duty’ to use any means necessary to either change that society so that it conforms to his ideology, or to physically attack it and its symbols should its people refuse to submit. This latter course of action is only undertaken once a critical demographic mass has been reached so that there is a secure and supportive Islamic refuge out of which such people can operate. That threshold has now been reached in France.

There is no positive connection between the host society and the doctrinaire Muslim population, for the latter exists within the former as a parasite, drawing economic sustenance from the wider society and weakening its vitality and ability to resist. Although I will not be popular with mainstream opinion for choosing to characterise the problem of Islamisation in a metaphorical manner that in a bygone age would have been non-contentious, it is appropriate to treat it as an infection of the body politic of the host society. The bearers and replicators of the lethal virus (those who embody and propagate its meme-complex – doctrinaire Muslims) need to be either rendered harmless through apostasy/conversion or removed to return the societal body to a state of normalcy and health. At best, our mainstream politicians seek to administer palliative care to the patient, and thus seek to provide society with anodynes such as banning veils and minarets, which although dealing with some of the external symptoms of Islamisation, allow the virus to rage unchecked and grow stronger.

Geert Wilders is the only ‘doctor’ to have diagnosed the cure for the ailing patients of Europe: a purging of the body politic from doctrinaire Islam and establishing a cordon sanitaire to prevent further infection. I hope that France is not beset by further violence, and that her politicians finally face up to the task of confronting Islamisation head-on, for anything less is a betrayal of the French people. Vive la France!

EDL Arrests in Dudley Protest

According to Sky News, twenty people have been arrest at today’s EDL demo in Dudley. It stated:

Members of the 500-strong demo reportedly threw cans and bricks at officers. 

Part of the town had already been sealed off ahead of the demonstration, that was due to take place on the same day as a Unite Against Fascism rally.

Sky correspondent Darren Little said trouble erupted after when EDL members tore down metal barriers.

However, ITN has reported that the number of EDL members arrested stands at twelve. It is possible that members of UAF or the newly formed Muslim Defence League were also arrested, as they were present to confront the EDL and many UAF supporters have been arrested for violent offences at other demonstrations. We shall have to await further details before drawing any firm conclusions.

Any violence is regrettable, and anyone deliberately committing violent offences should suffer the consequences. The EDL in turn has criticised the police for not allowing the demonstrators to march through Dudley as they did in Newcastle recently, which is reported to have passed off peacefully. However, an EDL eyewitness account recently posted at the Gates of Vienna blog states that the incident in which six demonstrators were knocked over by a car appears to have arisen as a consequence of a number of EDL members throwing bricks at cars, and drivers understandably panicking. This is a tragic incident which highlights the need for all involved in these demonstrations not to engage in mindless behaviour such as this.

Naturally I feel sympathy for the shopkeepers in the area who felt that they were unable to trade today as well as for Dudley residents who now have another costly policing bill to foot. However, it is the negligence of our political leaders and their unwillingness to recognise let alone tackle the problem of Islamisation that has led to this situation. I hope to see the day when it is no longer necessary for people in the UK to demonstrate against Islamism because the authorities will finally have realised that their job is to look after their citizens instead of pandering to the wishes of those who wish to destroy our liberties and way of life by using our indulgence and tolerance against us. Our country has never been part of the Muslim world, and never will be. Any attempt to force Islam upon us is an act of aggression and should be treated as such.

Injured EDL Demonstrator 

Videos from Today's EDL Dudley Demonstration

Video footage from today's EDL demo in Dudley has now been posted. As can be seen from the first instalment below, it would seem that demonstrators were initially penned in by metal fencing.



The subsequent two videos indicate that the main body of the EDL demonstration continued to be confined in this penned area. Numbers are lower than at previous demonstrations, but there were EDL Facebook reports claiming that some coaches full of supporters were being prevented from reaching their destination. As can be seen, there is no sign of violence in any of the videos posted here. However, that is not the case in a series of excellent photographs taken by Jonathan Walker. These feature both EDL supporters and local Muslim counter-demonstrators. As can be seen, there is one individual with the EDL crowd who deserves a stiff sentence for throwing a section of drainpipe at the police. Resident young Muslims can also be seen squaring up to the police. Such 'youths' are not a problem for Dudley alone however, for they went on the rampage in Grenoble on Friday and Saturday night.

EDL under attack in Dudley?

According to a recent Tweet from the EDL Facebook page and other reports republished at the Gates of Vienna blog, things appear to have turned very nasty in Dudley today. The picture is fragmentary but the EDL claim to have come under attack from the police as well as Muslim gangs:

EDL Media EDL being subjected to assualts by the police, Injuries have been caused and there is rioting in Dudley...gangs of Muslims attacking people...MEDIA IS NOT REPORTING ANY OF THESE EVENTS...

A flavour of the reports at the Gates of Vienna can be gleaned from the following:

Source 1 again: Eight coaches didn’t get through — riots taking off. Demonstrators are throwing iron fences at the police. [Source is] safe on the coach watching events — riot police. People are walking past covered in blood. I wouldn’t be surprised if our first casualty comes from today. Police split the EDL into groups all over the town, and Muslims hunting in packs.

The most recent reports hint that the violence is even worse than initially anticipated. EDL media report:

We have eye witness accounts coming in of Muslims using cars to drive down English protesters in Dudley. One report of incident where 4 people that were driven into left them seriously injured and one woman dead. We are waiting for confirmation of this incident and an air ambulance has landed to assist the injured.

Furthermore:

EDL coach driver has been attacked with a machette.. will keep updating .. also can everyone post as much infomation as you get it

As expected, today's demo in Dudley saw the first outing for the Muslim Defence League (MDL) and perhaps something of the nature of the police operation can be gleaned from this comment by an MDL member left on their Facebook page:

Shakira Isit Everyone thank west midlands police for way they handled the dudley protest.

The MDL is also claiming that a Hindu temple has come under attack. Hopefully, this is just a rumour. Unsurprisingly perhaps, I have not been able to locate any report of today's events in Dudley on the BBC website. Further news and hopefully footage will be posted as it becomes available.

What is clear is that if the process of Islamisation is not halted and thrown into reverse in the years ahead we will see an escalation of what is currently emerging as a low-level civil conflict. Our politicians need to wake up and act now, rather than continue to stumble towards disaster steadfastly refusing to remove their multiculturalist politically correct blinkers. If they do not, then something akin to the scenario depicted in the video below could be our unwished for fate within the next twenty years or so:

The Muslim Defence League: the Birth of Leftist/Islamist Squadrismo

A neglected garden soon yields itself to vigorous weeds, and that good fruit which we might have hoped to harvest and savour is strangled by creepers and couch. Thus it is with our society today, for our Government has neglected to devote itself to the cultivation and preservation of our sweet and fragile liberties, and through inattention has allowed them to be overshadowed by a more vigorous, robust and demanding growth, which has caused them to shrink for want of light. Islam is the ideological equivalent of Japanese knotweed: invasive, fast growing, difficult to control and prone to crowd out the natives. Alas, unlike Japanese knotweed, the Government does not recognise that Islam too needs to be strictly controlled and eradicated from our islands.

In recent months we have seen the proliferation of Islamist groupings in the UK: Shariah4UK; Muslims against the Crusades and Ummah Rise. Now we witness the birth of something new and potentially much larger named the Muslim Defence League (MDL), presumably in anti-homage to the English Defence League. The MDL has provided a formal opportunity for leftist Islamist collaborators to link with the Islamists in an anti-English axis. That such a crystallisation of these disparate forces united by their hatred of Western liberties should occur comes as no surprise, for the two have long been working together, their alliance having been cemented by the creation of the EDL in 2009. The most striking demonstration of this convergence and the morphing of the UAF into an Islamist vehicle was provided by the joining of a UAF contingent chanting “Allahu akbar” with Muslims against the Crusades demonstrating against the One Law for All protest in Whitehall last month.

Presumably, we are likely to see the MDL take to the streets in an attempt to attack the EDL. At the time of writing, its Facebook group was listed as having 1,392 members. An EDL member had earlier managed to successfully hack into the site and delete links with many supporters, so this number is likely to rise significantly in the near future. The EDL will be protesting in Dudley again tomorrow – Saturday 17 July 2010 – so I anticipate that this will give us our first initial sight of the MDL.

The lines have been drawn and the opposing parties are forming up. Our politicians still refuse to recognise the problem of Islamisation and are actually contributing to its furtherance. It is therefore very much in the hands of ordinary people to express their opposition to this process, and at the moment we have the EDL, SIOE and the One Law for All campaign all giving voice to a variety of concerns connected to Islamisation. Hopefully these positive forces should soon be supplemented by whatever national sub-division emerges from Geert Wilders’s multinational anti-Islamist coalition. As can be seen from examples of the MDL’s imagery below, together with the name of “Chechnyan Wolf” (a British Beslan anyone?), we can quite safely conclude that it is not intended to be a peaceable organisation. We should therefore expect it to behave in the manner of a band of squadristi. I fear that tomorrow we will witness the MDL venting its rage upon the police. All being well, its members will not manage to break through and clash with the EDL.

Geert Wilders announces International Freedom Alliance

Geert Wilders has announced that he will be launching a new international organisation to fight Islamisation named the International Freedom Alliance in the UK, Canada, France, Germany and the USA. Sky News reports Wilders as announcing to the Dutch parliament that "The message: 'Stop Islam, defend freedom', is a message that's not only important for the Netherlands but for the whole free Western world."

Wilders has once again demonstrated his integrity and willingness to stand up to Islamisation whilst most politicians are too spineless to even name the process let alone stand up against it. He has my full support in this endeavour which I hope will be a great success across the five nations in which it initially launches. Wilders is correct in his analysis and millions of us know it to be true and support him. Geert, you are the Free World’s hope, and we know that you will be true to the cause.

Reporting of Wilders’s bold and necessary initiative has typically been couched in the deliberately misleading and stigmatising language that one has come to expect as routine from the mass media: Sky described him as “far-right”, whereas the Daily Mail this time settled for a mere “controversial”. The comments beneath the article in the Mail demonstrate that he has hit a chord with readers of the paper. Prepare to stand with Geert when the International Freedom Alliance is launched. In the interview below he expands on his thinking underlying his decision to create the IFA. Count me in!

Veil Ban passes first Stage in French National Assembly

Today the French National Assembly took a step towards outlawing the burqa, niqab and other Islamic face coverings. A total or 335 deputies cast their votes in favour of the bill with only one voting against. However, there is a further hurdle to leap before it becomes ratified and enters into French law, for it must also be approved by the French Senate where it will be discussed in September.

This is a positive move towards making illegal one of the most overt manifestations of militant Islam in France. As we all know, many women wear such coverings owing to their fanatical commitment to Islamism, whereas those who are compelled to wear such garb by their brutish menfolk will now find that the law comes to their aid by imposing a suitable punishment upon the latter. It seems fitting to me that the French are seeking to impose the rather modest penalties of a 150 euro fine for any woman caught breaking the proposed law, whereas any Muslim husband compelling his wife to wear a burqa can look forward to a 30,000 euro fine and one-year gaol term. Personally, I’d make such crimes punishable by state sequestration and liquidation of all familial assets followed by the deportation of all members of the family concerned.

Naturally, in its radio reporting of this positive move the BBC has exhibited a somewhat muted and crestfallen mood, and I fully expect that in the BBC’s future references to the ersatz conception of British nationality that it espouses it will feature the championing of the ‘right’ to wear Islamo-fascist uniform as a defining trait of contemporary ‘Britishness’ (I’m already feeling sick just contemplating that hoity-toity patronising English hater Sarah Montague enunciating this on the Today Programme).

Getting rid of these most overt displays of Islamist allegiance is a symbolic first step, but only once the French have outlawed the proselytisation of Islam and the immigration of Muslims will the liberty of French citizens and their way of life be guaranteed. Tomorrow is Bastille Day, so we shall see how opponents of this measure respond.

Not a French Woman, but a hostile Colonist

A real French Woman (Ooh la la!)

Muslim Child Abuse: English Boy Converts on Camera for Islam Channel

Hat tip to Holger Danske for posting the following video which will turn your stomach. The man in the glasses should be thrown out of our country for good. Getting this English boy to recite the Shahada is a deliberately malicious act tantamount to child abuse. Does the boy know that he will now face the death penalty if he ever tries to renounce Islam?

SIOA: Cab Campaign against Islamic ‘Honour’ Violence

Stop the Islamization of America have just started a campaign to raise people’s awareness of Islamic honour killings by running ads on Chicago taxis. Each ad features a picture of a young woman who was murdered by her family for ‘offending’ the Muslim concept of honour. As well as raising people’s awareness of the tragic deaths of these young women and of the fundamental Muslim misogyny which leads to such murders, the ads also publicise a website named LeaveIslamSafely.com which seeks to offer support to people seeking to escape from the religion. A separate campaign will start shortly in another American city, this time using buses, which will focus on promoting this website.

 

Unlike the recent risible Inspired by Muhammad Campaign which sought to gull the British public with lies about Islam, SIOA are doing excellent work in promoting a true understanding of Islam and helping people to escape from it. The hatred of women that lies at the heart of Islam is truly bloodcurdling. Pamela Geller notes on her Atlas Shrugs blog that 91% of honour killings across the globe are committed by Muslims, and that 84% of such crimes recorded in the US were also carried out by Muslims. As in the recent Apero geant protest in Paris, these two campaigns in the US represent innovative and, in my opinion, effective ways of helping to spread the anti-Islamisation message. It would be excellent if we could see similar campaigns run here in the UK, but given the religious persuasion of many of our taxi drivers and our so-called religious ‘hatred’ legislation, it would run the risk of starting a riot if those who sought to run such a campaign managed to escape prosecution for ‘incitement to religious hatred.’ Still, I shall follow the results of SIOA’s campaigns with interest. Good luck! For more pictures visit Atlas Shrugs and SIOA.