Abandon Skip

May 2007

Currently there are 12,000,000 to 20,000,000 illegal aliens present in the United States (nothing to do with lesbians).

More: Youtube, Michelle Malkin

Video by Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, May 2007

Robert examines the recent Pew poll that revealed substantial support for suicide bombings among Muslims in the US:

See the HotAir archives for more videos ...

More: HotAir, JihadWatch, HotAir Archives

April, 2007

From UK television, a horrifying look at the rising Islamic supremacism in Pakistan, as extremist, jihad-promoting madrassas flourish despite Pervez Musharraf’s many pledges to crack down on them.

More: Youtube, HotAir, LGF

Daily Telegraph, May 2007

Australian jobs at risk, union says
Government 'doesn't trust' local banks
Calls for Treasurer to intervene

A DECISION to give a foreign bank management of the $51 billion future fund will cost Australia $30 million in fees and put thousands of local jobs at risk, a union has warned.

The future fund - set up by the Federal Government last year to cover public service superannuation liabilities - will be run by the Chicago-based Northern Trust using its regional base in Singapore.

Finance Sector Union (FSU) national secretary Paul Schroder today said the decision was an "insult" to the entire local financial services industry.

He said the decision would put 50 jobs at risk immediately "with thousands more to follow" if other government agencies followed the Future fund's lead.

He also accused the Government of "sponsoring the export of high-level jobs to Singapore".

Mr Schroder said the future fund was the largest pool of money ever created in Australia, and moving its management offshore gave the impression the Government didn't trust Australian funds to manage the nation's future ...

Mr Costello said ... "Those banking services were awarded after an independent tender, which came in with the best service at the lower price.

"What they provide in partner with an Australian bank is banking services. They don't manage it, the guardians manage it.

Mr Costello said he was comfortable with an international bank being awarded the tender.

"If they give the best service for the best price and partnered with the best Australian bank, and the tender has been done with all due process, which I believe it to be, and they give the best value for money, of course it is the right decision," he said ...

More: Telegraph

Michael Pascoe, Crikey, May 2007

"We’ll decide who comes to Australia -- lots and lots of people in ever-increasing record numbers," John Howard didn’t say yesterday amidst all the reporting on wages inflation remaining tame.

... the big elephant in the livingroom is the record and rising supply of labour from overseas.

John Howard won’t be campaigning as Australia’s greatest champion of immigration and multiculturalism despite overseeing the importation of nearly 300,000 people in the 2006-07 financial year. Such irony.

Instead, the Government is downplaying migration numbers. Minister Kevin Andrew’s Budget media release announced an increase of 5000 in the skilled migrant category to give a migration program total of 152,800. Overlooked in that release was the 13,000-strong humanitarian migration category. Along with another few hundred in the "special eligibility" category, the total is about 166,000 ...

Anecdotally , there’s certainly no slowing in the growth of 457s, which would mean we should crack the 100,000 next year ...

Also not counted as part of the official migration figures are citizens of New Zealand ... Let’s assume the stronger Australian economy continues to attract them at that rate and round the number to 24,000.

... Also tucked away in the Budget was a new visa category for foreign students who have completed professional training here. It will allow them to work for 18 months while they gain professional experience in their field of study and improve their English.

It’s considered a "transitional" visa -- neither temporary or permanent -- but looks like being given to many who previously would have gone straight for the "skilled migration" permanent category. Could there be 10,000 of them? I don’t know -- but it would round out the numbers to a neat 300K ...

More: crikey, online opinion

Ross Gittins, Sydney Morning Herald, February 2006

An abiding and unshakeable belief of Australian business is that immigration is good for the economy and we need a lot more of it than we're getting.

But is the belief soundly based? According to a Productivity Commission paper on Economic Impacts of Migration and Population Growth, not really. The economic benefits are "very small".

The first point to make is that, if you use immigration to add to our population, then obviously you make our economy bigger. After all, every extra person has to be fed, clothed and housed, and this adds to economic activity.

I guess if you're from, say, the housing industry, that's all you care about. Immigration adds to the demand for houses.

But we're not running the economy for the benefit of the housing industry, or any other industry. We're running it for the benefit of the people, not the producers.

So the real test of whether immigration is good for the economy is not whether it makes the economy bigger but whether it makes the people in the economy better off. By the same token, we're not running an immigration program for the benefit of the immigrants, but for the benefit of the people already here.

And the test of whether the existing population is better off - in narrow material terms, anyway - is whether immigration leads to an increase in income per person (that is, gross domestic product divided by the population).

In other words, whether it increases our material standard of living. And, as a matter of arithmetic, this requires that, on average, the immigrants make an above-average contribution to income per person. They have to add enough for themselves, plus a bit more for the rest of us ...

At the most fundamental level, the main thing immigration does is add to the demand for labour (because of the additional demand for food, clothing, shelter and all the rest), but also add to the supply of labour (by those immigrants of working age who want to work).

It follows that the more skilled the immigrants are who add to the supply of labour, the more immigration is likely to add to GDP per person. Which is why the experiment the Productivity Commission performed in its study was giving immigration every chance to get a good result ...

It found that, by 2024-25, this would cause annual real GDP to be 3.5 per cent greater than otherwise. But get this: by then, real GDP per person would be only $335 a year (or 0.6 per cent) higher than otherwise.

In the report's words, such a result is "neutral to mildly positive". Translation: chicken feed.

... it's clear increased immigration is a long way from the main game.

More: SMH

Tom Gosling, Online Opinion, February 2006

... Even if Greenhouse is the culprit, its impact so far has been tiny compared to a huge, dramatic change that is as obvious and hard to argue with, as that good old elephant sitting in the middle of your loungeroom - the number of people.

As Bill Clinton might have said “It’s the population, stupid” ... Today our population is 20.4 million and still growing at another million every four years. That’s where the water problem lies. Not with lack of water, but with the huge growth in the number of people who are demanding it.

What should we be doing about it? We should immediately stop growing our population. The only reason Australia should ever grow its population is to make life better for the people who are here now. A growing population is terrific if you are a property developer worth $300 million and are intent on becoming a property developer worth $500 million. But for the average person, water “shortages” are just one of the many signs of life getting WORSE with population growth.

Those who stand to benefit from population growth are investment bankers, real estate agents, property developers, and construction companies. They profit from building ever higher-density apartment blocks and the schools, roads, bridges, hospitals, sewerage systems, shopping malls and office complexes - and, of course, water supplies - needed to cater for ever-sprawling suburbs of new "McMansions".

They are the same people who give generously to support the re-election of the Howard Government and buy influence with the Opposition parties and the State Labor governments, in return for “nod-nod, wink-wink” agreement that Australia’s record high immigration intake will continue, and that pro-growth policies will prevail at state level.

Why immigration? Because, despite admonitions from the treasurer for Australians to patriotically have “one baby for your husband, one for your wife, and one for the country”, Australia’s natural increase is only adding 125,000 people a year to the population. While that is enough to keep the population growing for the next 15-20 years, it is not enough to sustain a really hot property market. So, population growth has to be turbo-charged for easy economic growth - developing properties is so much easier than coming up with clever new products, like Finland and its Nokia mobile phones.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 128,740 settlers arrived at our airports in 2005, 10 per cent more than in 2004 and the third year in a row of double-digit growth in arrivals. This number, however, greatly understates the true inflow. Under a dramatic change to immigration laws, foreign students at Australian universities can now settle here if they can organise a job after graduating. Figures for calendar 2005 are not yet available, but in the 12 months to June, 43,895 people living here were granted permanent residence. That number has been steadily rising, suggesting the number of new migrants last year was about 175,000, twice as many as in the early Howard years.

This blow-out has been one of the most successful two-card tricks ever played in Australian politics: because it talks tough and acts tough on boat people, the public is convinced that the Howard Government is tough on immigration, while in reality it has opened the floodgates to the highest continuous rates of immigration the country has ever seen ...

So what’s in population growth for the average Australian? Nothing, except higher house prices and rents, more congested roads and transport, more pollution and waste, more apartment blocks, more crowds everywhere, more pressure on our parks and nature reserves - AND, of course, less water per capita.

If you don’t believe me, check out the Productivity Commission’s report of January 17, 2006, which showed Australians’ per capita income would be only 0.06 per cent higher if we had 50 per cent higher skilled immigration over the next 20 years.

Not only would there be negligible economic gain, but the Productivity Commission said there would obviously be environmental costs ...

More: Online Opinion

Expatica News, May 2007

One in three people in Belgium is bothered by women wearing headscarves in public places. Just over half even would prefer that they be banned in certain places. Intolerance and racism are at the root of these negative views on headscarves.

This was the conclusion drawn by the religious faculty's centre for psychology at the Catholic University of Louvain-La-Neuve after two studies into the Belgians' attitude towards headscarves.

Some 69 percent of those asked see the headscarf as a sign of oppression and 53.3 percent thinks wearing one goes entirely against modern western values. Some 44.6 percent are disturbed by someone wearing a headscarf at school.

The researchers said that this study is evidence that society still has a long way to go in the fight against racism and intolerance.

More: LGF, Winds of Jihad

My thoughts ...

This "long way to go in the fight against racism" is never going to happen. Integration is, first and foremost, visual. All foreign appearance hits the subconscious with microshocks. It causes a startle response and nausea. We are herd animals. Within their own kind, the headscarf is normal and beautiful - but to others it is visual assault.

Only the hardy or insane "celebrate" microshocks. It is the elderly and sick who are the first to withdraw from public spaces in diverse towns. In a day and age where accessibility-for-all is a benchmark for a civil society, diversity has the opposite effect - the turtle effect. Vulnerable people are denied access to public transport, shopping centres, parks, swimming pools, libraries, etc. - because they don't have the stomach for diversity.

Visual diversity is the first stage of separation, which only escalates with other forms of diversity. Ban headscarfs.

Fjordman, Sept 2005

A Danish language researcher has spent over three years analyzing the original texts of ten different religions, and concludes that the Islamic texts stand out by encouraging terror and violence to a larger degree than other religions do ...

Islamic texts encourage terror and fighting to a far larger degree than the original texts of other religions, concludes Tina Magaard. She has a PhD in Textual Analysis and Intercultural Communication from the Sorbonne in Paris, and has spent three years on a research project comparing the original texts of ten religions.

“The texts in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious beliefs to a larger degree. There are also straightforward calls for terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is a fact that we need to deal with," says Tina Magaard.

Moreover, there are hundreds of calls in the Koran for fighting against people of other faiths.

“If it is correct that many Muslims view the Koran as the literal words of God, which cannot be interpreted or rephrased, then we have a problem. It is indisputable that the texts encourage terror and violence. Consequently, it must be reasonable to ask Muslims themselves how they relate to the text, if they read it as it is," says Tina Magaard.

More: Fjordman

Sydney Morning Herald, May 2006

AUSTRALIA'S most influential Catholic has said the Koran is riddled with "invocations to violence" and the central challenge of Islam lies in the struggle between moderate and extremist forces as the faith spreads into a "childless Europe" ...

He had tried to reconcile claims that Islam was a faith of peace with those that suggested the Koran legitimised the killings of non-Muslims.

While there was room for optimism in fruitful dialogue between faiths and the common human desire for peace, a pessimistic response began "with the Koran itself".

Errors of facts, inconsistencies, anachronisms and other defects were not unknown to scholars but difficult for Muslims to debate openly, he said.

"In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages."

Last year, Dr Pell courted controversy when he drew a link between Islam and communism ...

Claims of Muslim tolerance of Christian and Jewish minorities were largely mythical and he wondered about the possibility of theological development in Islam when the Koran was said to come directly from God.

"Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its capacity for far-reaching renovation is severely limited," he said.

More: SMH, Aus Islamist Monitor

Turkish feeling over the headscarf runs deep ...

Dr. Muhammad Megalommatis, The American Chronicle, May 2007

In an unprecedented case of provocative misinformation, the Economist misdirects its readership, diffuses Islamic Terrorists’ propaganda by trying to present the Islamic Headscarf as a personal choice that can possibly be that of a moderate, tolerant and democratic person.

In a disreputable and subversive publication that surpasses the best hopes and boldest dreams of criminals like Ossama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahri, and their likes, the Economist tries to analyze for its readers “The Meaning of Freedom” ...

The author focuses his diatribe on the hypothesis that a headscarf is just a piece of fabric. By so erratically pretending so, the author attempts to convince his victims to possibly accept that it is normal for Muslim women to wear headscarf, and that there is nothing wrong with it!

This leads to straight and vicious alteration of the truth, as the Islamic headscarf consists in the premier symbol of inhuman barbarism and murderous behaviour.

Islamic headscarf means obligatory excision.

Islamic headscarf means extrajudicial killing in the streets of Riyadh, Jeddah, Madina and Mekka of any woman does not wear this otherwise innocent and democratic piece of fabric.

Islamic headscarf means stoning and dismemberment of women unjustly and falsely accused in the streets of Damascus and Amman for adultery.

Islamic headscraf signifies immediate transformation of women to almost subhuman beings that have no rights and no status.

I challenge the criminal author of the Economist in public conference and debate concerning the aforementioned ...

The article features a ridiculous picture of the Turkish Foreign Minister’s covered wife standing in front of Queen Beatrix of Holland, who laughs at her (the Hayrunisa Gul woman), without her understanding ...

The article starts with the hypothetical the Hayrunisa woman supposedly asks her compatriots:

“IS THIS all because of me? At once bemused and indignant, the potential first lady of Turkey demands that her compatriots stop judging her, and her spouse, on the basis of her appearance. “My scarf covers my head, not my brain,” insists Hayrunisa Gul, whose husband Abdullah is foreign minister and aspires to be president”.

The answer is very simple and very well known to Turks and Muslims; simply it is unknown to British, Americans and Europeans because of their ignorance about Islam and the Orient in general and because of the misinformation precisely based on this ignorance ...

The answer to the hypothetical question is as follows:

“Yes, it is all because of you and your ideas that are reflected in your headscarf. Drop the filthy piece of un-Islamic fabric, and your husband will have a chance of becoming President ... But of course, you do not dare drop the filthy headscarf because then the myth you build and the propaganda you diffuse among your followers would immediately collapse. You build on subversively and progressively; when you get one thing done, then you unveil the next! So, because we – progressive Turks – who have nothing to do with the barbarism of societies and cities like Riyadh, Amman, and Kuwait, reject in our majority to have a First Lady that helps promote a subversion plan to turn Turkey form the realm of the world’s leading nations, and make of it a copy of Egypt, Pakistan and Nigeria. Plus, the headscarf was never Islamic” ...

From a 2nd Chronicle article by Dr Megalommatis ...

In a previous article ... We rebuked the erroneous assumption that the Islamic headscarf is just an innocent piece of fabric that makes no problem in the proper function of a democratic society.

As we had long explained the incompatibility of that antihuman piece of fabric with Democracy, we re-published excerpts from an authoritative book describing daily life at the times of Harun al Rashid in Baghdad; this shows that authentic, historical, Islam was comfortable with tolerance towards free sexual life, appreciation of material pleasures, involving debauchery, cabarets, dance, concerts, excessive drinking of wine and other alcoholic drinks, etc – isolating then elements that prevailed throughout Islam over the past few centuries, and became the epicenter of a new, ahistorical Islam over the past decades.

Islamic Extremism and Terrorism is precisely the rejection of historical Islam in favour of a-historical falsified Islam that Western colonial powers have always tried to support and diffuse within Islam, ever since they interfered in the Islamic World (starting with Napoleon), as this consists in the best way of besotting people and preparing idiotic and therefore easily manipulative politicians and ‘statesmen’. That is why we suggested the demented columnist to consider placing a headscarf on Queen Elizabeth’s head.

In the present article, we intend to continue the refutation of the Economist’s overt misinformation.

Headscarf = Swastika

... Mr. Gul’s candidacy “sparks emotions” not because of the headscarf of that Hayrunisa woman, the Turkish foreign minister’s quasi-illiterate and vulgar wife, but because the headscarf is the symbol of those who, altering Islam, want to impose excision on all the women of the country.

The simple answer to the Economist’s columnist is this:

Turkish women reject excision as both, anti-Islamic and anti-human. And they reject the headscarf that symbolizes an excised woman, a shockingly wounded creature able enough to be submitted to a man as the lowest type of domestic slaves ...

Since the Economist columnist speaks of a “piece of fabric” that “sparks emotions”, and seems not to consider the ‘emotions’ and the fears as absolutely justified, we should ask his opinion why the emotions and the fears were justified when Prince Harry wore a “non innocent piece of fabric” the design of which was a swastika ...

It is quite revelatory that the Hayrunisa lewd woman does not criticize for a moment the Afghani and the Saudi societies. This shows the clear degradation of the situation, which is not acceptable to any democratic Turk and to any democratic person allover the world. In 1997, the wife of the Turkish foreign minister would describe these societies as sinister, appalling and inhuman. Today, the Hayrunisa woman finds them just not up to her taste! In ten years, if the situation is left like that, another Turkish Foreign Minister’s wife will find them normal and acceptable! And possible to imitate! ...

If the English do not react to this blasphemous, anti-Western, anti-English, anti-Christian forgery of the Economist, they will prove that Excision is all that a Queen of England deserves.

More: The American Chronicle(article 1, article 2), The Economist

More background on the Turkey crisis ...

Newsweek, June 2006

The scene was sadly familiar, especially in the strife-torn Middle East. In the shadow of a great mosque, a crowd of 40,000 gathered to bury a victim of political violence—and vent their rage at the authorities. But this was not Iraq or the Palestinian territories. It was downtown Ankara. Nor were the demonstrators angry Islamist fanatics. They were judges, bureaucrats and businessmen, staunch secularists shouting out their loyalty to the state—and denouncing a government they say is taking Turkey down a dangerously Islamic path. "Turkey is secular and will remain secular," they chanted. "Turkey will not become an Iran."

The occasion was the funeral of Judge Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, killed by a 28-year-old lawyer who opened fire recently inside Turkey's High Court. The gunman's motives are not yet clear, but the presumption of most in the crowd was that he was a militant Islamist getting revenge for a court ruling last November that upheld restrictions on the wearing of headscarves in and around public schools. "This is an attack on the secular republic," declared President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, who accused Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, of seeking to "destroy the regime" by undermining the country's strict division between mosque and state ...

Ever since he came to power in a landslide victory in 2002, Erdogan has been trying to roll back Turkey's brand of draconian secularism. His party has appointed religiously minded bureaucrats to senior positions in the Education Ministry; last year it tried (unsuccessfully) to criminalize adultery. The AKP has steadily campaigned to lift the ban on headscarves in schools, universities and government offices, though so far Turkish courts (and even the European Court of Human Rights) have rejected their plea. Most controversially, last month Bulent Arinc, the AKP speaker of Parliament, suggested the time had come to "reconsider the concept of secularism as it is practiced in Turkey"—triggering a storm of protest. Erdogan's Islamism may be mild by Middle Eastern standards, but this month's demonstrations are a clear sign that he may have gone too far. "The so-far silent secularists have now raised their voice," says Professor Nilufer Narli of Istanbul's Bahcesehir University. "This is a massive movement of people from all walks of life."

The government also tried to downplay the more overtly Islamist elements of its program. The headscarf issue is "a problem perhaps for only one and a half percent of the people," according to Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin, who insists that the government's priority is unemployment and the economy.

... other reforms—chiefly new laws liberalizing the country's antiquated justice system and granting new rights of free speech and religious tolerance to Turkish minorities, including his own Islamist backers ...

In a clumsy attempt to put an AKP loyalist at the helm of one of Turkey's few independent institutions, Erdogan tried to appoint the former head of a Saudi-owned Islamic bank to the post. Eventually the job went to Durmus Yilmaz, an old hand at the Central Bank. But the affair shook businessmen's confidence, and the economy's recent troubles have eroded that trust even more. "The government is paying more attention to installing its own people and following its own religious agenda," complains Mehmet Ali Ince, an importer of copying equipment in Istanbul whose business has been hit by the falling lira ...

Critics of the ruling party fear that if Erdogan were indeed to take the job, the AKP would be emboldened to push through exactly the Islamic policies they're shying away from today—such as scrapping the headscarf ban and ending government control over religious appointments and even the content of sermons.

More: Newsweek

A background story on why tensions are rising in Turkey between Islamists and secularists ...

Guardian Unlimited, UK, May 2006

A Turkish lawyer shouting: "I am a soldier of Allah," opened fire in the country's top administrative court yesterday, killing one judge and injuring four others. Witnesses described how the gunman shouted, "Allahu Akbar" (God is most great) as he fired a handgun in the court's second chamber.

The assailant, a lawyer accredited with the Istanbul bar association, later told police he carried out the attack because the court had stopped a woman becoming a headteacher on the grounds that she wore a headscarf. One of the judges, Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, was shot in the head and died later in hospital, Anatolia news agency reported.

Four of the judges, including Mr Ozbilgin, had voted in February against the promotion of an elementary school teacher who wore a headscarf outside of work. The fifth had voted in favour. The judges' photographs were published by the pro-Islamist Vakit newspaper. The court's decision was criticised by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, whose AK party has roots in political Islam. Mr Erdogan condemned yesterday's shooting.

The attack was the most dramatic sign yet that religious-minded Turks are becoming frustrated in the predominantly Muslim, but strictly secular, country.

Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the president, who has voiced fears over the country's creeping Islamisation, described it as a "black mark in the republic's history", adding that "pressure and threats will not intimidate the Turkish judiciary, which will continue its constitutional duties bound to the secular and democratic republic." The opposition leader, Deniz Baykal, said the shooting showed Turkey was "being dragged towards a very dangerous place".

Mr Erdogan, whose wife, Emine, is banned from attending official presidential functions because she wears a headscarf, has called for the ban to be lifted.

Todays Zaman, Turkey, May 2006

According to public polls, the large majority of the Turkish population is not against the wearing of headscarves in public buildings. A political party which would like to soften the bans against headscarves has been in power in Ankara now for four years. The near future does not, however, appear to hold any prospect of liberalization on this matter. The careful efforts by the government to start solving this problem were interrupted from the very beginning by the opposition’s rejection of calls by the ruling adminsitration to work together to soften the headscarf ban, and by the resisitance of the military and a large part of the Turkish media. When in May 2006 a judge was killed most likely as a result of a decision he had made against a headscarved student’s case, the emotions on this matter rose to even greater heights across Turkey. This murder spawned a giant march in Ankara in support of secularity, and many people were reminded of the atmosphere of spring 1997 by the tension in the air. Since that time then, there have been no calm or reasonable debates in Turkey over the headscarf.

More: Guardian Unlimited, BBC News, Todays Zaman

My Thoughts ...

That explains why the millions that rallied recently included chants about keeping headscarves out of public life, particularly as the wife of the would-be president wears a headscarf. They are divisive marks of separation, visual reinforcement of the march of Islam, a symbol of power, a sign of the regressive forces that often follow it, and a comfort zone from which radicals flourish.

Sydney Morning Herald, & ABC TV, May 2007

For Australian television audiences accustomed to comfortable Sunday evenings spent watching genial English dons strolling through ruined castles speculating about the sex life of 16th-century monarchs, Richard Dawkins will have come as one hell of a shock. So, too, will his message, which strikes at the very things they hold most dear ...

Dawkins is unapologetic. "The time has come for people of reason to say: enough is enough. Religious faith discourages independent thought. It's divisive and it's dangerous." ...

"There are would-be murderers all around the world ... They want to kill you and me and themselves. They are motivated by what they think is the highest ideal." ...

Religion, says Dawkins, is the big issue that can no longer be ignored or respectfully tolerated. Rather, it is the decaying carcass that must be confronted and cast out if civilisation is to be saved. His attack is trained not solely on Muslim fundamentalism and its Western religious counterpart ... He has benign "mainstream" churches in his sights, too ...

Religion, he argues is superstition. It is the enemy of rational thought, the ever-present threat to civilisation, the fuel of war, the bastion of bigotry, the rulebook for systematic human rights abuse, the virus with which parents infect their children. In the home, and in church schools.

Religion, he says, is the root of all evil ... Dawkins, whose best-selling books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion have confirmed his leadership of a swelling band of militant atheists ...

There has been a rush of other books espousing atheism ... Of monotheism, Hitchens writes with trademark floridity, it is "a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few non-events" ...

So, wild, unsubstantiated, indiscriminate scaremongering? Or fair warning for a world fast going to hell in a holy handcart?

Australia - which has a strong church school tradition but, according to the most recent census, also boasts more Jedi warriors than atheists - now has an opportunity to make up its own mind.

Part 2 of this documentary will be screened on ABC TV, Sunday 27th May, 9:30pm.

Watch the documentary intro ...

More: Sydney Morning Herald, RichardDawkins.net, Google Video

My thoughts ...

Dawkins is stating the obvious by saying that humans are more cultural than rational. Cult-ure is what binds us, the highest human drive - it deserves both respect for the connectedness it brings, and fear for the blind herd mentality. I hope Dawkins uses his brain to go further than just stating the problem, to find some solutions.

Religion of Peace? - Robert Spencer
The Al-Qaeda Reader - Raymond Ibrahim
The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism - Andrew Bostom
Serge Trifkovic - the Sword of the Prophet, Defeating Jihad
Lawrence Auster - the Path to National Suicide
George Walden
Melanie Phillips - Londonistan
Mark Steyn - America Alone
Pat Buchanan - the Death of the West
Peter Brimelow - Alien Nation
Philip Atkinson

Calum's Road

Fitna - by Geert Wilders, 2008
Islam: What the West Needs to Know (full-length documentary online)

Religion of Peace: Christianity v. Islam - Pt 1 - R. Spencer, Aug 2007
Religion of Peace: Christianity v. Islam - Pt 2 - R. Spencer, Aug 2007
I don't believe there is moderate Muslim - Wafa Sultan, Oct 2007
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Interviewed On Swedish Television - May 2006
The Al Qaeder Reader - Raymond Ibrahim
Girls of the Red Mosque - Pakistan, June 2007
Radical Pakistani Madrassas Flourish
White flight in Dublin - October, 2007
Mark Steyn - interview with Michelle Malkin
Jihad Watch Archive - Hotair
Turning Muslim in Texas

James Baker on YouTube - Qld Senate Candidate 2007
Faith Freedom - many videos
Turning Muslim in Australia
The Mufti Muzzler - the Chaser

News Videos

Content warning: websites may contain graphic images ...

Below is a custom search of most of the above sites, including this blog (note, the search fails to pick up all entries in each website for some reason) ...

The Australian, May 2007

THE Government of Saudi Arabia is continuing to fund extremists within the Australian Muslim community. It does this partly through the Saudi embassy in Canberra. It ought to stop. Saudi Arabia is a theocratic monarchy that recognises no distinction within its rule between politics and religion. It adheres to an extremely conservative and paranoid version of Islam known as Wahabism, which it tries to promote throughout the world.

It also has a history of funding terrorists. It was the chief bankroller of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1970s and ‘80s at the height of the PLO’s involvement in global terror. But it would be true to say that, worldwide, the Saudis tend to fund the precursors to terror rather than terror itself. Since the 9/11 attacks in the US, in which the majority of hijackers were Saudis, the Saudi Government, under intense US pressure, has tried to exercise greater care and control over where Saudi money goes.

... tens of millions of dollars of Saudi money had also come into Australia. In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, this was fairly open. The Saudis funded mosques, Islamic schools and various special courses. They promoted Wahabi literature widely. All of this material promoted an extreme version of Islam, but in those pre-9/11 days nobody worried.

... in 2004, Saudi officials came to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade with their own proposal. They would in future notify the Australian Government of any Saudi funds coming to Australia. DFAT naturally agreed. This agreement is what allows the Saudi embassy occasionally to claim that its activities in Australia are approved by the Australian Government.

But there is every reason to believe this agreement has been almost wholly ineffective. First, it only covers new Saudi money, it doesn’t cover any existing pre-agreement payments the Saudis might be making. Thus, due to the outstanding reporting of Richard Kerbaj in this newspaper, we now know that the Saudi embassy has been paying an annual stipend, alleged to be about $US30,000 ($36,000), to the imam of Canberra’s Abu Bakr Mosque, one Imran Mohammed Swaiti. Kerbaj has also written that Swaiti has preached sermons in Arabic calling for victory to the mujaheddin, including, but not limited to, victory in Iraq and Afghanistan ...

However, the agreement is not working, as the Swaiti case demonstrates. Not only is there the giant loophole of not covering existing arrangements, the agreement also specifically does not cover private donations from Saudis, which they consider to be part of their religious duties.

More: the Australian, Wahhabism

Pat Condell about Islam ...

More: Classical Values, YouTube

Video by Robert Spencer, May 2007

Click on image to watch video at HotAir ...

Quote from video ... Onur Oymen of the secularist Republican People’s Party recently denied that the secularist ralliers represented “moderate Islam.” He declared: “You can’t have democracy without secularism. The notion of moderate Islam to check radical Islam is nonsense. This idea being promoted by certain countries should be abandoned.”

More: HotAir, FrontPage Transcript

Frontpage Interview with Bill Warner, the director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam ...

Our resistance so far has been the first stage: to know the enemy and to develop a strategy. We are now coming to the end of it. Since 9/11 we have had intellectual warriors who have studied Political Islam, built websites, blogged and written books.

We now know the entire scope of Islamic doctrine and the biggest elements of a repressed and denied history of the dhimmitude, and annihilation of cultures

To repeat, we now know the doctrine and history of Political Islam at a strategic level. We now know the enemy and this is a mark of our success ...

Our strategy must be the salvation of our precious civilization. We must save our very selves.

All of this cannot be accomplished without the Mind of War. There is a psychology of war that puts everything in a different perspective. We are rich, fat, dumb and happy living in the land that everyone wants to emigrate to. It is easy to turn on the Super Bowl, plan the bar mitzvah, work for a promotion and just let Political Islam have its way. The Mind of War sees that all of what we have is an illusion, that the cancer has started to metastasize. Until we develop the Mind of War, we are doomed. We must have that emergency reserve that war brings out.

Without this state of mind, we will lose all we have. The great civilization of Coptic Egypt of the Pharaohs that lasted 5000 years is gone, a corpse buried beneath Political Islam. Liberal democracy is only 200 years old. Political Islam is 1400 years old and exploding in power. Without the Mind of War, our civilization will become extinct under the impact of the civilization of duality.

More: FrontPageMag, Fortress Australia

The Objective Standard, October 2006
Dr John Lewis

Our military capacities are not in doubt today. It is our moral self-confidence
that is in question. What was it that stopped us from confronting Iran in 1979,
except a lack of confidence in our own rightness, and an unwillingness to defend
ourselves for our own sakes? Had we removed the Iranian regime in 1979,
thousands of Americans would have been saved, and children across the world
would not have grown up with sword verses rising in their minds as they give
their lives to jihad. Consider the Japanese—and ask whether it would have been
in our interest to have left the regime of 1945 in power, to continue preaching
religious militarism and training kamikaze. The best thing Americans did for
themselves (and, incidentally, the kindest thing for the Japanese) was to burn
that regime to the ground. So it is today. The Islamic State—Totalitarian
Islam—must go. And it is the moral responsibility of every American to demand
it.

More: The Objective Standard, Jihad Watch

Muslim

Swedes Reach Muslim Breaking Point - Malmo
Is the Islamic takeover of Europe inevitable? - Lawrence Auster

General

Europe: measuring national suicide - October, 2007
European's flight from Europe - Washingon Times
UN predicts huge migration to rich countries - March 2006

Swiss

Italy

Brutal sex attack forces laws to kick out migrants - Nov 2007

Denmark

Danish identity under threat from Muslim immigrants - Nov 2007

Sweden

Video: immigration out of control - Jan 2008
Immigrant Rape Wave - Dec 2005

Netherlands

Muslim Councillor Tells Rotterdammer: 'Shut Up, Minority' - Jan 2008

UK - Muslim

Jack Straw calls for 70m Turks to join EU - Nov 2007
Critical Mass - Immigration and Terrorism - Wester Survival

UK - General

Stop mass immigration - Melanie Phillips, Mar 2008
Immigration: a terminal addiction - Gerard Baker, Nov 2007
Immigration row hurting Brown in polls - Nov, 2007
Labour veteran slates 'open door' immigration - October, 2007
Immigration placing huge strain on Britain - Daily Mail, October, 2007
Vanishing England - Cal Thomas
Too late to speak the truth about immigration - Minette Marrin, sept 07
Dear Son, ... what immigration has done to this country ... - George Waldon
Immigraton threat to Britain as a single nation - Telegraph
Immigrants say 'we have too many immigrants' - Minette Marrin, june 07
The new goths are coming - TimesOnline
Mass Immigration Watch - Fulham Reactionary

Ireland

We don't want Muslim immigrants - Ireland Independent
White flight in Dublin - video, Oct 2007

Muslim

Separationism - Lawrence Auster
What President Bush should say to us - Diana West

Mexican

Hispanics make great fodder for unbalanced journalists - Jan 2008
Immigration splits 2008 White House hopefuls - Nov 2007
It's not like Irving asked for immigration mess - Texas, Nov 2007
Grass Roots Roared and Immigration Plan Collapsed - NY Times

General

The return of ethnic nationalism - Pat Buchanan, Feb 2008
Buried in citizenship applications - Nov 07
San Francisco to give illegal aliens ID cards - Nov 07
Gorilla warfare against open borders WSJ - Michelle Malkin video
Noonan calls for immigration pause - Peggy Noonan
Let's take a break from immigration - Nicholas von Hoffman
How I rethought immigration - David Frum

Muslim Immigration

Rental crisis leaves family out in the cold - July 08
When you are in a hole, stop digging - John Stone
Limit Muslim migration, Australia warned - Professor Raphael Israeli
Ban Muslim immigration for 10 years - James Baker, Aug 07
Suspend further Muslim immigration - John Miller, Aug 05
Nile wants to stop Muslim immigrants - Fred Nile
Hanson slams door on Muslims - Pauline Hanson
Peter Faris QC: deport Muslims - Oct 2006
Muslim immigration likened to bird flu - Paul Green, Aug 07
10-year moratorium on Muslim immigration - Elaine Nile, Sept 07
457 visa truck drivers ahead - union warns of terror

African Immigration

Rudd wants more African immigration - Mar 08
Door 'shut but not locked' to Africans - Oct 07
No, this is not multiculturalism - it's madness - Jan 07
Exhausted by influx of African refugees - Oct 07
Africans unwelcome: Hanson - Oct 07

Asian Immigration

50,000 Filipino workers for SA - July 08

Sri Lankan Immigration

Nauruan 'raped' by asylum-seekers - Sept 07

South Pacific Immigration

Open gates to Pacific migrants - Word Bank chief

Overseas Students

Bogus references help students win residency - July 08

General Immigration

Sheehan: a reality check on Rudd's rhetoric - July 08
Brumby warns of dangers in growing too fast - July 08
Go nuclear, halt immigration and ignore Garnaut - July 08
Melbourne protests mass population growth - July 08
Senator predicts Aussie BNP - May 08
Migrants add to skills crisis - May 08
Record-breaking immigration for next 3 years - May 08
Without immigration, we're rooned - Phillip O'Neill, March 08
An inconvenient truth about rising immigration - Gittins, March 08
Sir Harry Gibbs: discriminate on immigration - Jan 2002
It's Life, But Certainly Not As We Want It - Dr Clive Hamilton
Populate and Our Environment Will Perish - Paul Collins
Water: It's the population stupid! - Tom Gosling
Higher immigration not an economic magic bullet - Ross Gittins
300,000 migrants next year - Michael Pascoe
Immigration may cost Howard his seat - Oz Conservative
Email virus contains immigration truth serum - Jan 2008
Is it 'populate and perish' now? - Rosemary Milsom
Cities hit by migrant crush - John Masanauskas, oct 07

Illegal Immigration

Pakistani immigration officer charged on visa bribe - aug 07
200 Indians in alleged $22.7m VISA fraud - Nov 07

457 Work Visas

Foreign truck drivers "downright dangerous" - sep 07

White Immigration

Bega Valley Shire's new citizens - Nov 2007

The Courier Mail, May 2007

A GROUP of right-wing politicians is gathering signatures to try to force a national vote on banning the construction of minarets in Switzerland.

The planned building of minarets, the towers attached to mosques from which the Islamic call for prayer is issued, in small Swiss towns has sparked local protests.

A group of politicians from the Swiss National Party and Federal Democratic Union are seeking to prevent the construction of minarets in national law, saying they are a symbol of power and threaten law and order in Switzerland.

The campaign has to gather 100,000 signatures by November 2008 to force a national vote on the initiative which, if it gains a majority vote, would then be written into law.

And here are some Australian minarets ...

Auburn Gallipoli Mosque, Sydney

Preston Mosque, Victoria

More: Courier Mail, Winds of Jihad

The Australian, May 2007

MUSLIM leaders in the nation's capital will take out a restraining order against a hardline cleric who is accused of inciting violence and "anti-Western" sentiment among his followers.
The move by the Islamic society of ACT to ban Sheik Mohammed Swaiti from Canberra's Abu Bakr Mosque comes after a Muslim leader was bashed by a group of the cleric's supporters.

The council's secretary, Kurt Kennedy, yesterday told The Australian he was set upon by nine men aged in their 20s, including Palestinian-born Sheik Swaiti's son, at the mosque's front entrance last Friday.

The bashing followed the council's decision to remove the imam from his position as the mosque's spiritual head. Mr Kennedy had announced Sheik Swaiti would no longer deliver Friday sermons.

Shortly after the announcement Sheik Swaiti stood in front of his worshippers and screamed "I am the imam of the mosque, I will be here until the day I die", Islamic Society of ACT vice-president Mohammed Berjaoui said yesterday.

Mr Kennedy, 35, who was pushed and threatened by Sheik Swaiti's followers inside the mosque following his announcement, was beaten up while waiting for a lift home. He was treated for cuts on his face and head at Canberra Hospital ...

The Islamic council's push to replace Sheik Swaiti with a full-time moderate Turkish-born imam, Yahya Atay, came after The Weekend Australian reported last month that Sheik Swaiti praised mujahideen (Muslim holy warriors) in his sermon ...

Mr Berjaoui accused Sheik Swaiti of preventing Canberra's Muslim community from integrating into the mainstream ...

The tax office, which refused to comment on its inquiry into Sheik Swaiti, is investigating allegations that he failed to declare clerical allowances of up to $US30,000 ($36,000) a year, allegedly paid to him by the Saudi Government's Dawah (donations) Office ...

More: the Australian, Winds of Jihad, Happy Antipodean

For anyone living under a rock ...

More: probably.

More Kleenex ...

More: I hope not.

Grab a box of tissues ...

More: no thanks!

UK Telegraph, March 2007

Immigration may be threatening Britain's status as a country, it has been claimed.

A pamphlet by social policy think-tank Civitas said the UK may already have reached a "tipping point" where it can no longer be regarded as a single nation.

David Conway, the author, said that if Britain has become a "nation of immigrants" it could lead to political disintegration.

The 100-page booklet said: "Those for whom this country has been a model of tolerance and freedom cannot but have cause for deep concern about the seemingly reckless pace and scale on which immigration has recently been allowed to proceed.

"As a result of it, the country may possibly have reached a tipping point beyond which it can no longer be said to contain a single nation. Should that point have been reached, then, ironically in the course of Britain having become a nation of immigrants, it would have ceased to be a nation.

"Once such a point is reached, political disintegration may be predicted to be not long in following." ...

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "This report suggests that the Government's inability to get a grip on immigration or put a limit on numbers entering the UK is destabilising British society. We know that unchecked immigration is putting pressure on housing and local services. Now this report shows that its effects are potentially even more serious."

More: Telegraph, Debate & Relate

Vanity Fair magazine, May 2007
by Christopher Hitchens

The London neighborhood of the author's youth, Finsbury Park, is now one of the breeding grounds for a new phenomenon: the British jihadist. How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?

Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as "magnificent" and proclaimed that "Britain belongs to Allah." When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari'a, he replied: "Who says you own Britain anyway?" A question that will have to be answered one way or another.

More: Vanity Fair, Winds of Jihad

UK Channel 4, January 2007

A Dispatches reporter attends mosques run by organisations whose public faces are presented as moderate and finds preachers condemning integration into British society, condemning democracy and praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers …

More: Parts 1 - 6 , YouTube

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