Sunday, June 30, 2013


More of Britain's multiculturalists



During her primary school years, Katie was considered academically gifted and dreamed of becoming a forensic scientist.

At home, her loving parents read her bedtime stories and would at times remind her to feed her giant African land snail.

But when she turned 12 her life changed forever. Sitting on some steps with a friend in Oxford, Katie was approached by two Pakistani brothers who befriended her with alcohol and cigarettes.

She was flattered by the attention they paid her, completely unaware she was being groomed for sexual exploitation until it was too late.

For almost three years she was violently and sexually abused by a gang and then sold for sex on hundreds of different occasions to a network of child abusers across Britain.

Shockingly, during her ordeal she told police and social services she was being abused, but nothing was done to help her.

As some of her abusers started long jail sentences yesterday, Katie spoke for the first time about her three-year nightmare.

She told the Daily Mail: ‘By all accounts I was a bit of a geek at school,’ she said.  ‘Then six months later I become somebody who went missing all the time, coming back days later, filthy and dirty.  'The sudden change is scary to think about, even now.’

Katie still struggles to comprehend how a girl with upstanding parents – her father is a civil engineer – could fall prey to such abuse.

‘At the start they made out like they wanted to be your friend.  Then the intensity crept up. They would put you off everybody. They would say your family was your enemy, your friends were your enemies.

‘By this point I thought my teenage friends wouldn’t like me any more. They would say if you go back to school no one is going to like you because you’re a slag.’

After several months, the Pakistani men began to ask her for sex, pretending to want a loving relationship with her.  But soon they were threatening violence if Katie refused to do what she was told.

‘It’s something I felt I had to do,’ she said. ‘Although I knew what sex was, there’s a difference between having sex as an adult and as a child. This was people taking advantage of a child.’

As her ordeal intensified, Katie was taken to rooms in guest houses and flats in the backstreets of east Oxford. ‘I was taken to parties,’ she recalled.

‘By party I mean everybody coming and having sex with me. If I said I didn’t want it, it would just happen anyway.’

Katie said: ‘They just thought they could do what they wanted with me, no matter how disgusting. It got to the point where I just went along with things.  'Mentally I shut down and just did it.’

Aged 14, and by now in a care home, she alerted her carer to the abuse but was ignored.

A month after her 15th birthday, she told police that one of her abusers, Akhtar Dogar, was forcing her to have sex with him and other men.  But instead of following up these allegations, she said officers threatened to arrest her for wasting police time.

‘My behaviour and appearance should have been sending alarm bells,’ she said.

Although Katie is now in a long-term relationship, memories of her past still haunt her.

She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder at the age of 15 and suffers from severe bouts of depression and OCD.

SOURCE






Politically correct British bureaucracy betrays foster mother

The foster mum who took in a 'vulnerable' boy of 16 - only to find he was a drunken asylum-seeking thug of 26

The aggression in the voice on the other side of my spare bedroom door was both startling and frightening — not least because it was supposed to be coming from a young boy.

I’d knocked respectfully before delivering clean washing to my foster son, Farood.  ‘Keep out,’ he snarled back in a deep, threatening baritone.

I was beginning to think this ‘poor, vulnerable, 16-year-old lad’, as he was described by social services, who had asked me to look after him, was not all he seemed.

Since his arrival 12 days earlier, Farood, an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan, had behaved disgracefully. He constantly reeked of alcohol and treated my house like a hostel rather than a home, coming and going as he pleased.

But it was his physical strength and raw aggression that I found the most frightening.

I’m a 60-year-old widow and retired school secretary, only 5ft tall, and I live on my own. This ‘boy’ on the other hand, was more than 6ft tall, stocky and had a demeanour and physical strength beyond his supposed years.

Where there should have been spots, there was stubble.

Where I’d expected a cowed and frightened child in need of love and a good meal, I found the arrogance and, quite frankly, terrifying swagger of a grown man.

Intimidated and frightened, I quickly stopped trying to enforce any house rules. I could almost see the aggression that bubbled off Farood, how could I match his brute physicality?

Even when I found condoms left casually on his bedside table and received a complaint from my neighbour about him leering at her teenage daughter over the garden fence while he smoked endless cigarettes, I felt powerless to act.

But when I tried to raise my concerns with my key worker — that Farood wasn’t the 16-year-old I’d been told he was — I was fobbed off.

‘Just hang on to him for a couple more days,’ I was told, with the assurance everything was being done to look into Farood’s background and find a more permanent placement.

Finally, after more than a week of sleepless nights wondering whether I was safe in my own bed, I begged, pleaded and insisted that Farood was rehomed — I watched him being driven away, racked with guilt and a sense of failure.

Weeks later, however, that guilt turned to anger when I discovered, to my horror, that all my suspicions about this ‘cuckoo’ in my nest were correct. I learned from my social workers that Farood was in fact 26, not 16.

Police had accessed criminal records in his home country that showed he’d previously been in trouble for theft and brawling. He was now in a detention centre while the Home Office considered his asylum application.

No one had even thought to assess all this before placing him under my roof a year ago. I still shudder when I think what could have happened. And no one has ever apologised to me for the danger I was placed in.

SOURCE






Anti-Islamic U.S. bloggers banned from entering the UK

Message to UK liberals: if you’re campaigning to bar two right-wing US bloggers from Britain, you’re no liberal

Something quite outrageous happened this week: the UK home secretary, Theresa May, banned two right-wing American bloggers from coming to Britain. Apparently their presence would not be ‘conducive to the public good’ because they do not accept what May calls our ‘shared values’. So they weren’t banned because they’d committed any crime, but because they’d committed a thoughtcrime - the thoughtcrime of thinking differently to May. This captures brilliantly the tyranny behind censorship: through stymieing clashes of opinions, it empowers an enlightened few to define what is a good value and what is an acceptable thought."

How it happened

Like, I’m sure, most of the British population, I hadn’t heard of Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer before their names appeared in the UK press at the weekend. Apparently, they are right-wing bloggers from America, who are planning to visit Britain to speak at a rally organised by the right-wing English Defence League (EDL). Cue much censorious fulminating from Britain’s misnamed liberal commentariat, who want the bloggers kept out.

Earlier this year, the UK anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate (HNH) adopted a refreshing new stance (commended by spiked): it declared that ‘No Platform’ - the practice of denying people on the far right a public platform to express themselves - was ‘outdated’. When it comes to combating far-right groups, said HNH, it’s better to do it through ‘argument’ and to ‘expose their ideas’.

Yet now, HNH has reverted to its earlier ‘No Platform’ stance: it has been at the forefront of a campaign calling on UK home secretary Theresa May to bar Geller and Spencer - who write the Atlas Shrugs and Jihad Watch blogs, and who were behind a New York subway ad campaign implying Muslims are ‘savages’ - from entering Britain. The pair are due to speak at an EDL rally in Woolwich, scene of the recent ‘jihadist’ knife attack, on Saturday.

In a petition to May, signed by 2,000 supporters in the first 24 hours alone, HNH writes a sentence that must surely be a shoo-in for Doublespeak of the Year: ‘We believe in freedom of speech and the rights of people to hold and express different views. However, in a democracy there have to be limits on people abusing these freedoms to incite hatred, and we believe that Geller and Spencer are seeking to do just that.’

In the strange minds of HNH campaigners, it seems you can believe in free speech yet lobby to ban individuals from entering your country to speak freely. You can believe in the right of people to hold and express different views, except views you personally dislike. And you can do all this in the name of democracy, presumably because the UK public itself, the demos, is so volatile and manipulable that it has to be sheltered from the poisonous views of Geller and Spencer.

The fear of the public becoming a big, ugly lynch mob seems to have led even Liberal Conspiracy blogger Sunny Hundal, who helped organise the Convention on Modern Liberty in 2009, to abandon any pretence at liberalism. He has uncritically plugged HNH’s censorious petition - at the cost of isolating his readership.

Under his HNH plug, a commenter cites a 2011 article in which Hundal defended a controversial Muslim preacher’s right to come to Britain regardless of what he planned to preach. ‘I’ve always been for having a consistent approach on this issue’, Hundal wrote in 2011. ‘Either you ban people who preach any form of hatred – from homophobia to religious segregation – or you only ban those that say things that would be illegal under our laws. I prefer the latter approach, because I believe that people should be allowed to make up their own minds on issues.’ Under this quotation, the commenter simply writes: ‘Hypocrite.’ Quite.

The only principles these censorious campaigners accept are those imposed by the EU. Anders Gravers, a leader of the group Stop the Islamisation of Europe, has also been invited to speak at the EDL rally, but he has not been named in the HNH petitions ‘because he is an EU citizen’ and therefore it seems must be allowed to travel freely throughout European Union counties. This rather gives the lie to the idea that these ‘incendiary’ speakers are genuinely a threat that must be stopped. If these various cranky bloggers and campaigners really were capable of causing moral mayhem in Britain, surely Gravers would be kept out, too? Perhaps HNH is only interested in keeping out vulgar American savages, in the same way right-wingers campaign to keep hot-headed Muslim preachers away from the UK.

May was following in the ban-happy footsteps of her New Labour predecessor Jacqui Smith, who at her height in 2008 was barring five people a month from entering Britain on the basis that their presence would not be ‘conducive to the public good’.

The EDL, of course, has no licence to play the free-speech card. It makes no bones about calling upon the state to outlaw the speech of ‘extreme’ Muslim preachers and it wants to ban poppy-burning protests. And neither can it plead an open-borders case for allowing its speakers to come to Britain: it routinely calls for the forced deportation of radical Islamists from the UK. But that is what you would expect from a nationalist organisation of the far right. Is it also now what we should expect from British liberals?

SOURCE





Abortion Rights Not Synonymous With Women's Health

When your grandmother gets some bad news, do you tell her: "Well, at least you have your abortion rights"?  Why not? Maybe it's because whatever you think of abortion, the right to have one is not synonymous with a woman's health.

But don't tell that to the liberal group Think Progress. On Twitter, it recently teased some shocking news: "Why 2013 is shaping up to be the worst year for woman's [sic] health in modern history."

When I followed to the linked story, there was nothing about a spike in cervical or breast cancer rates. Nothing about occupational safety for female workers and no mention of female life expectancy either. Instead, the story was about how the ACLU says anti-abortion laws are on the rise across the country.

Of course, this sort of thing is all over the place. Under the headline "Losing the Global Fight for Women's Health," Luisita Lopez Torregrosa, the "Female Factor" columnist for the international edition of the New York Times, writes of the allegedly horrific threat to women's health posed by restrictive abortion laws in places like Africa, Asia and Latin America. She makes no mention of the estimated 160 million women "missing" in Asia alone who were killed in gender-selective abortions.

Even the most ardent pro-life activist readily concedes that there are instances when an abortion is in the interest of the mother's health. But it is bizarre to suggest that women's health and abortion rights are interchangeable. The biggest killer of women is heart disease, followed by cancer, then stroke. I couldn't find "lack of a timely abortion" on the CDC list.

And yet, President Obama -- and nearly every other abortion-rights supporter -- blithely accuses Republicans of wanting to make women's "health care choices" for them.

"You've got a state legislature up here that sometimes acts like it knows better than women when it comes to women's own health care decisions," the president said at a rally in New Hampshire during the last campaign. "You know, my opponent's got the same approach."

How odd from the eponymous father of Obamacare, which will mandate that women (and men) pay for insurance coverage they don't need. It will cause many women (and men) to lose their existing health care plans. It will empower bureaucrats to decide what treatments for women (and men) the government will reimburse and which it won't. Under Obamacare, women who smoke or are overweight can be charged 30 percent to 50 percent more for their health insurance.

These features are defensible from a liberal or statist point of view, but not if you actually believe that women have a special and unique right to make "health care decisions" for themselves wholly unfettered by the government.

Which raises one irony to all this. By any objective measure, liberals are far more eager to use the government to make health care decisions for women, because liberals want to make health care decisions for all Americans -- slightly more than half of whom are female. It's Michelle Obama and Michael Bloomberg -- not Michele Bachmann and Mitch McConnell -- who want to tell women what they should eat and drink and how much they should exercise.

Conservatives want to leave it to women to make their own choices: about what to eat, whether to smoke, how fast they can drive, whether they can own a gun, etc. Many conservatives would also like to see women live long enough for the chance to make those decisions, rather than be snuffed out in utero.

Of course, this argument will be wholly unpersuasive to the folks shouting the loudest about "women's health decisions." Which raises an even greater irony. The basic conservative or pro-life view is that abortion is different than other health care decisions because there's a harmed party other than the mother. This fact, not sexism or traditionalism or theology, is what trumps the general conservative preference for individual freedom. You don't have an unfettered right to harm someone else.

But once you get beyond abortion, conservative public policies treat women like autonomous human beings capable of making their own choices -- about health care or anything else. It's the abortion-rights extremists who boil down the vast range of issues and choices raised by the term "women's health" to a single issue: sexual reproduction, as if women were nothing more than breeders. And yet conservatives are the ones who're called sexists.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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