Friday, January 12, 2007

UK: Clerics urge Muslims to ignore British law

Post lifted from Jihad Watch

Tony Blair and other British authorities have endlessly dinned into our ears the proposition that the vast majority of British mosques were completely loyal to the British state. The evidence for this has always been sketchy, but the penalties high for questioning it: anyone who has done so has been ostracised by the mainstream as a "racist," a "bigot," an "Islamophobe." But here are some of Blair's chickens coming home to roost: one organization he has praised is caught out by the undercover reporters here. And this is from The Guardian, which doesn't hesitate to allow itself to be used as a platform by dupes, dhimmis and fellow travelers like Karen Armstrong and Brian Whitaker.

"Revealed: preachers' messages of hate: Muslim worshippers are being urged by radical clerics to ignore British law," by Jamie Doward in The Guardian, with thanks to all who sent this in:

An undercover investigation has revealed disturbing evidence of Islamic extremism at a number of Britain's leading mosques and Muslim institutions, including an organisation praised by the Prime Minister.

Secret video footage reveals Muslim preachers exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the hijab, and to create a 'state within a state'. Many of the preachers are linked to the Wahhabi strain of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which funds a number of Britain's leading Islamic institutions.

A forthcoming Channel 4 Dispatches programme paints an alarming picture of how preachers in some of Britain's most moderate mosques are urging followers to reject British laws in favour of those of Islam. Leaders of the mosques have expressed concern at the preachers' activities, saying they were unaware such views were being disseminated.

At the Sparkbrook mosque, run by UK Islamic Mission (UKIM), an organisation that maintains 45 mosques in Britain and which Tony Blair has said 'is extremely valued by the government for its multi-faith and multicultural activities', a preacher is captured on film praising the Taliban. In response to the news that a British Muslim solider was killed fighting the Taliban, the speaker declares: 'The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.'

Another speaker says Muslims cannot accept the rule of non-Muslims. 'You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir [non-Muslim],' a preacher, Dr Ijaz Mian, tells a meeting held within the mosque. 'We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.'


Read it all.



GUILTY Until Proven Innocent

Post lifted from La Shawn

Reade Seligmann, one of the Duke lacrosse players indicted for “raping” a stripper, is going through what countless others have gone through. Falsely accused of a heinous crime, he’s had to face the possibility of prison, see the disappointment and worry in his family’s faces, and endure negative media attention, all because an egomaniac race-baited his way against a brick wall.

Seligmann didn’t rape, assault, or kidnap the stripper-accuser, and he has the paper trail to prove it. But for almost a year he’s lived under the curse of a rogue prosecutor intent on making an example of him.

Seligmann spoke to Newsweek about what the past year has been like for him and his family. An excerpt:

Seligmann now awaited a call from the prosecutor that would tell him if he was one of the players she’d singled out. He felt certain he would be cleared. The call came. Reade, 20, was being indicted for first-degree rape, kidnapping and sexual offense. He had a strong alibi-cell-phone records would show he was busy calling his girlfriend at the time the alleged crime was taking place-but the D.A. declined to hear it. As he heard the news, Reade looked at his dad. It was the first time he’d ever seen his father cry. Then it hit him: how was he going to tell his mom? Kathy Seligmann was home in New Jersey with her three other boys. He dialed her number. “Mom,” he said, “she picked me.”

Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans are learning a hard lesson. Actions have consequences. For future reference, I advise them to avoid the kind of women who strip and slut themselves out for a living. They will be exonerated because Mike Nifong does not have a case against them. He’ll succumb, eventually, to professional pressure to drop the case and resign from office. Until then, the families must remain confident that justice will prevail.

Media Awakens, Cover-Up Revealed, Backlash Ensues

Mainstream media (MSM) have turned against Mike Nifong. It’s funny how they “reported” his version of events as though it were gospel in the beginning. Never have I seen left-leaning journalists parroting a district attorney and cops the way they’ve done in this case. They weren’t simply reporting facts. They wanted to believe three white men gang-raped a black woman. Compared to how they covered the “Duke rape,” MSM virtually ignore black-on-white rapes and intraracial crimes in general. Deathly dull.

Who among them could resist incessantly reporting on and editorializing about an “oppressed” black woman being brutalized by “rich” white men? Nifong played the race card to the hilt, even going so far as to speak at the black college the stripper-accuser attended. One pea-brained black student said the men should be prosecuted whether they committed the crime or not. “It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”

For those who cover the crime beat in the Durham area, it must have been like striking gold: a black victim stripping for a living “to feed her kids,” loud, rude, and drunk white athletes, race and class divisions, town-and-gown issues.

But it couldn’t last because Nifong doesn’t have a case; he never had a case. At first he was confident that the woman was raped, saying, “There won’t be any arrests before next week. I have decided not to make arrests until DNA evidence is back.” Nifong intended to arrest lacrosse players all along, so he pulled a CYA maneuver before the results came back. Even if there were no match, he said, it wouldn’t necessarily exonerate anyone. “The attackers could have used condoms or might not have been team members.” (Source)

The problem is that the stripper-accuser said no condoms were used, and Nifong knew or should have known what his own witness told doctors and nurses. But as I said, he intended to arrest and indict someone who attended that party, and we’ll probably never know why he risked his career and his freedom to do it.

Once that first round of DNA tests came back negative, those who branded the men guilty waited for Nifong’s assurances that a gang-rape indeed happened at the party. They were bolstered by the second round, which was “inconclusive.” It turns out that David Evans’s DNA was found on top of one of the stripper-accuser’s fake fingernails (retrieved from the bathroom trashcan), not underneath, where you’d expect to find it if she had been fighting off an attacker. Considering that Evans lived in the house and used the bathroom, Nifong’s new “evidence” was just as weak as his character.

By this time, people who still wanted to believe Nifong had a case assumed that he had “something up his sleeve,” a smoking gun he’d dramatically reveal. But in real life, it doesn’t work that way. Prosecutors are required to turn over evidence in a timely manner, and if Nifong had anything dramatic at that point — helpful or harmful to the defense — he was obligated to reveal it.

But we all know he didn’t have anything against the lacrosse players, not one shred of evidence linking them to any gang-rape. Determined to find some kind of DNA match between his lying witness and the men he indicted, Nifong sent the DNA to Brian Meehan’s laboratory for more stringent testing. Nifong was gonged again. No match between the players and the stripper-accuser.

But there was a match between several men and the stripper-accuser, and Nifong withheld this information from the defense. Under cross examination, Meehan confessed: Nifong and I agreed not to report it.

That’s when the leftist national media woke up from its man-bites-dog trance. Nifong had no choice but to drop the rape charge. The Washington Post went on record: It’s time to drop all charges. The Los Angeles: Ditto. [Update: Yesterday, the Ashville Citizen-Times apologized for its biased coverage.]

Nifong’s colleagues filed charges against him and asked him to recuse himself from the case. Still shameless, he’s holding on. After his swearing-in last week, he had the nerve to say this: “I don’t feel that I’m part of the problem. I feel that I have assisted in revealing the problem. Durham has some healing to do. And I need to be part of that healing process, and I need to have something to do with how we move forward.” (Source)

What does one say about such a man? Nifong obviously is the problem. Armed with the sharp edge of race and class division and his own issues with Duke University and lacrosse players, Nifong sliced through innocent lives and re-opened wounds of existing racial tensions. He appealed to the depraved part of the human heart that wants to see others fall, whether guilty or not, out of envy, jealousy, resentment, and anger.

The consequences of Mike Nifong’s abuse of power will reverberate throughout Durham for years to come. And the people who voted the scoundrel back in office will deserve every bit of the fallout when he’s finally forced to resign in disgrace.





SIMPLETON POLITICS RETURN

By Jeff Jacoby

The 110th Congress convened under new management last week, and in the House of Representatives, the rush was one. Led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrats got ready to plow through an ambitious pile of legislation in their first 100 hours. Among the items on their punch list: increasing the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, expanding publicly funded embryonic stem cell research, cutting the interest rate on student loans, and imposing price controls on Medicare prescription drugs.

A more liberal policy agenda isn't all that will be moving into the spotlight. There will be a heightened focus on liberal *arguments* as well -- which means we'll be hearing more about good intentions and less about good results. Political discourse will dwell even more than it already does on "fairness" and "compassion" and "unmet needs" -- and even less on factual evidence and the historical record.

The minimum-wage issue illustrates the pattern well. Proponents of this quintessentially liberal prescription emphasize the difficulties faced by those trying to make a living and support a family while working a minimum-wage job. They point out how inflation has eroded the value of the wage. They contrast the soaring paychecks of CEOs at the top of the economic ladder with the pittance earned by those at the bottom. They frame the question as one of decency and sympathy: Don't you want to help the working poor? Don't they deserve a raise too?

"In the last nine years, Congress has voted itself seven pay increases," says Senator Edward M. Kennedy. "If a pay raise is important enough for members of Congress, then it is essential for the lowest-paid workers in this country."

Opponents, by contrast, point to data and economics. They note, for example, that most minimum-wage workers are neither poor nor family breadwinners, but singles in their teens or early 20s, often students working part-time while living with Mom and Dad. They argue that while a minimum-wage increase helps some people, it hurts others: If the cost of employing low-skill workers goes up, fewer low-skill workers will be employed. They invoke history, which shows that jobs are destroyed by minimum-wage hikes.

"The enactment of the first federal minimum wage law in 1933," writes economist Thomas Sowell, "raised the average wage rate in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent -- and half a million blacks nationwide lost their jobs."

What is true of the minimum-wage debate is true of so many others. Affirmative action, sex education, energy policy, family law, criminal procedure -- on issue after issue, people on the left are more likely to stress virtuous motives, while those on the right accentuate real-world outcomes.

Should income-tax rates be cut? Liberals say no, repelled by the apparent selfishness of enriching the well-to-do, when it is the poor who need more money. Conservatives say yes, knowing that tax relief spurs economic growth from which everyone benefits. Is bilingual education desirable? Yes, argues the left, concerned about the self-esteem of non-English-speaking children. No, insists the right, recognizing that children master English more quickly when they aren't shunted off into linguistic ghettos. Time and again, the pattern is clear: Liberals are galvanized by idealistic motives; conservatives find reality more persuasive.

This helps explain why the left is so often infatuated with the idea of its own benevolence -- and why liberals are so quick to accuse their opponents of being not just wrong, but wicked. Asked about political bias in the news media, UPI's veteran reported Helen Thomas once replied: "A liberal bias? I don't know what a liberal bias is. Do you mean we care about the poor, the sick, and the maimed? Do we care whether people are being shot every day on the streets of America? If that's liberal, so be it. I think it's everything that's good in life -- that we do care." Of course, if liberals are good people who care -- why, that must mean that nonliberals are bad people who don't care. Just ask Thomas:

"You have rolled back health and safety and environmental measures," she scolded President Bush at a press conference in 2001. "This has been widely interpreted as a payback time to your corporate donors. Are they more important than the American people's health and safety?" Those convinced that their own motives are pure are more likely to assume that their opponents' motives are tainted.

Obviously these are only generalizations. Republicans are not always immune to the self-justifying halo of a policy's noble goals. Democrats are not always blind to outcomes. Just look, some might say, at the Republican-led war in Iraq. And there are certainly cynics in both camps who are more interested in power and self-aggrandizement than anything else.

But as a broad rule, intentions are the currency of the left, while results matter most to the right. That is why Bill Clinton made a point of feeling our pain, while Ronald Reagan insisted that facts were stubborn things.

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