Assault with a deadly Welly

From here:

More than 40,000 people have signed up to a Facebook campaign supporting Royal Marine Sergeant Mark Leader, who was sacked after assaulting an Afghan prisoner with a Wellington boot.

The group, which calls for his reinstatement, was launched after The Mail on Sunday highlighted 34-year-old Sgt Leader’s story last week.

A court martial dismissed him and Captain Jody Wheelhouse for causing actual bodily harm to a suspect arrested for allegedly planting a roadside bomb.

Under the title Justice For Royal Marine Commando Mark Leader, 42,550 supporters, many of them servicemen and women, have been signing up to the campaign at the rate of one every 12 seconds.

They are also asked to sign a petition calling for his reinstatement and the return of his pension rights.

Brought to you by the British Army who also happened to produce this self-defense course:

Intolerance of Christianity

Prejudice against Christians seems to be at a fever pitch. I was chatting to an Anglican priest today who told me that he was with a group of non-Christians who, when asked what a clerical collar meant to them, said they associated it with paedophilia.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are paying a lawyer in an attempt to have the Pope arrested when he visits the UK in September – not, I am sure, to satisfy even their own fanciful and provincial sense of atheistic justice, but to discredit and preferably destroy the Catholic Church.

Christians in the workplace are being singled out and made examples of by what Archbishop George Carey believes are biased judges:

The Church and the judiciary are two of the most venerable pillars of the establishment.

But in an explosive development, war has been declared between them over one of the most fundamental aspects of our society – freedom of religious conscience.

In an unprecedented move, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, and other church leaders are calling upon the Master of the Rolls and other senior judges to stand down from future Court of Appeal hearings involving cases of religious discrimination because of the judges’ perceived bias against Christianity.

Christian hoteliers, although they won their case for the supposed hate crime of calling Mohammed a warlord and expressing the opinion that Muslim women are oppressed, are still losing their business:

The two Christian hoteliers cleared last year of insulting a Muslim guest are being forced to sell up because their business has collapsed.

Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang are putting their nine-bedroom hotel up for auction in May because they can no longer pay the mortgage.

Despite donations sent to them by Christian supporters from around the world, they still have debts of well over £400,000.

Meanwhile, although a Christian woman is not allowed to wear a cross for fear that it might scratch a patient, Muslim women are allowed unhygienic long sleeves for “religious reasons”:

Muslim doctors and nurses are to be allowed to wear long sleeves for religious reasons – despite the risk of spreading deadly superbugs.

The Department of Health will allow female Muslim staff to opt out of a strict NHS dress code to cover their arms and protect their modesty.

But campaigners warn that the NHS is putting lives at risk because guidance that all staff should be ‘bare below the elbow’ was introduced after long sleeves were blamed for spreading MRSA.

So long Western Civilisation, it was nice while it lasted.

Suicide of the West

The luminous Theodore Dalrymple:

The secularization of Europe is hardly a secret. Religion’s long, melancholy, withdrawing roar, as Matthew Arnold put it, is a roar no longer, and hardly even a murmur. In France, the oldest daughter of the Church, fewer than 5 percent of the population attend Mass regularly. The English national church has long been an object of derision, and the current Archbishop of Canterbury succeeds in uniting the substance and appearance of foolishness and unworldliness not with sanctity, but with sanctimony. In Wales, where nonconformist Christianity was the dominant cultural influence, most of the chapels have been converted into residences by interior decorators. Vast outpourings of pietistic writings molder on the shelves of secondhand booksellers, which themselves are closing down daily. In the Netherlands, some elements of the religious pillarization of the state remain: state-funded television channels are still allotted to Protestants and Catholics respectively. But while the shell exists, the substance is gone.

Perhaps it is Ireland that offers the most startling example of secularization because it was a late starter. Late starters, however, are often apt pupils; they catch up fast and even surpass their mentors. When I first went to Ireland, the priest was a god among men; people stood aside to let him pass. No respectable family did not count a nun among its members. As for the Archbishop of Dublin, his word was law; the politicians might propose, but he disposed.

In the historical bat of an eyelid, all that has gone, beyond any hope (or fear) of restoration. It would hardly be too much to say that the Church is now reviled in Ireland. I suspect that if you performed a word-association test using the word “priest,” it would more often than not evoke a response of “pedophile,” “child abuser,” or (at best) “hypocrite.”

The whole article is well worth reading, but I highlighted the above because it provides an outsider’s assessment – Dalrymple is an agnostic – of the state of the institutional church. This is not mere Dawkinesque arrogance and bluster, but considered insight from one of our culture’s keenest observers.

To the outsider, the Anglican church is the home of buffoonery with a leader to suit, and the Catholic church, the home of pederasty. Is it any wonder that neither one can garner much respect amongst unbelievers.

Air force now using broomsticks

Harry Potter Harriers:

Witches, Druids and pagans rejoice! The Air Force Academy in Colorado is about to recognize its first Wiccan prayer circle, a Stonehenge on the Rockies that will serve as an outdoor place of worship for the academy’s neo-pagans.

Wiccan cadets and officers on the Colorado Springs base have been convening for over a decade, but the school will officially dedicate a newly built circle of stones on about March 10, putting the outdoor sanctuary on an equal footing with the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Buddhist chapels on the base.

“When I first arrived here, Earth-centered cadets didn’t have anywhere to call home,” said Sgt. Robert Longcrier, the lay leader of the neo-pagan groups on base.

“Now, they meet every Monday night, they get to go on retreats, and they have a stone circle.”

Much as I hate to be non-inclusive: what the hell are Earth-centered cadets doing in the air force?

Our main concern is not terrorism, but “ugly words”

That is what a UK counter-terrorism expert thinks:

Police should not focus on skin colour or religion when profiling for stop-and-searches as there is ‘no single terrorist profile’, a senior counter-terrorism officer said today.

John Yates, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations, said police need to take a ‘flexible and dynamic’ approach to profiling in order to stop suspected terrorists

He warned that al Qaida regularly changed tactics to keep a step ahead and called for security staff to use their experience to apply stop-and-search powers ‘sensitively’.

He said the failed Detroit plane plot at Christmas had reopened the debate on ‘profiling’, which he labelled an ‘ugly’ word.

Yates goes on to recommend a quota system for airport searches: for every bearded Muslim questioned, three white little old ladies must be strip-searched. In this way, the world will be kept safe from the horror of ugly words.

Don’t Panic, DHS Is In Charge

The only inaccurate part is the unfortunate use of Vivaldi to represent the Dutch:

Setting fire to a mosque vs. setting fire to a church

Mosque (that didn’t actually catch fire): Firebombed! The whole building could have caught fire! Could have been very serious! Hate Crimes Unit springs into action! Here:

A mosque in Hamilton was firebombed early Monday, prompting an investigation by the police force’s hate crimes unit.

A rock was thrown through a window at an Islamic school at the Hamilton Mosque sometime after midnight, police said.

A Molotov cocktail was then either thrown or placed inside the window, causing a blaze that petered out without causing significant damage, police said.

“It could have been very serious,” said Zakir Patel, the principal at the Islamic School of Hamilton.

“The whole building could have [caught] fire.”

Staff discovered the damage when they entered the building on 1545 Stone Church Road E.

The Hamilton police hate crimes and arson units are investigating the incident.

Church (destroyed by fire): Fire is “suspicious”. Gasoline canister found – one can speculate; there could be a connection. Maybe the gas can was empty. Arson suspected – oh well, one less church. Hate Crimes Unit conspicuously absent. Here:

Arson suspected at historic Whitby church.
Police called the fire “suspicious” and are treating the area as a crime scene. They are asking any witnesses to come forward to help with their investigation.

Police confirmed a gasoline canister was found outside the church. “At this point, we haven’t made an actual determination that that has something to do with the fire,” said Jamie Grant, a Durham police spokesman.

“One can speculate … there may be some connection.”

It is not immediately clear whether the canister was empty or full.

How to teach children: Islam vs. Christendom

In Muslim countries children are beaten at school for not having sufficient enthusiasm for learning the Koran.

Child abuse during Koran lessons investigated in The Hague

The Hague – The Hague has filed charges in 49 cases of corporal punishment of children during Koran lessons, the newspaper de Volkskrant reported Wednesday. Signs of bodily abuse, including bruises and welts, were discovered by the state health service in an unusually large number of 10-year-olds taking the Koran lessons.

Nearly half of the cases involved students at the el-Islam mosque in The Hague. The imam of the mosque denied the accusations and demanded proof to back them up.

The de Volkskrant newspaper reported further that unnamed “sources in the Moroccan community” had confirmed that children are often “beaten hard” during Koran instruction. It was hard to prove the abuse since parents mostly wouldn’t dare to speak out against it, the sources said.

In a Christian country a child at school is not allowed to read the Bible:

A third grader was told by a teacher at her New Jersey elementary school that the Bible was not appropriate reading material for quiet time, MyFoxNY.com reported.

The teacher at Madison Park Elementary School in Old Bridge, N.J., ordered the girl, Mariah, to put away her Bible.

Michelle Jordat, Mariah’s mother, said her daughter was upset and confused by the incident, MyFoxNY.com reported.

But children are encouraged to read gay pornography (not to be read on a full stomach) with the intent of alerting them to its delights.

Islam beats children to make believers out of them; Christendom, intent on self destruction, schools its young in rejecting the foundations of what makes it work and opts instead for this:

What a mess.

Fear of flying

Five British sailors taken hostage in Iran

From the Daily Mail:

Five British sailors are being held hostage after their racing yacht may have inadvertently strayed into Iranian waters.

Foreign Office officials “immediately contacted the Iranian authorities in London and in Tehran on the evening of 25 November, both to seek clarification and to try and resolve the matter swiftly,” Foreign Secretary David Miliband said today.

And beg for their return.

However, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official said he was not aware of reports a British yacht had been stopped. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry official mysteriously disappeared shortly after making this statement.

Fears were growing that the detention of the British sailors will dramatically increase tensions between Iran and the West.

Surely not.

The country has come under increasing pressure in response to its plans to build 10 new nuclear fuel plants.

Why don’t we offer to build them for Ahmadinejad in exchange for the return of the hostages?

In March 2007 HMS Cornwall made headlines around the world in March when seven Royal Marines and eight sailors were arrested at gunpoint.

The humiliation was compounded as the Iranians gleefully exploited the propaganda opportunities in the following days, broadcasting footage of the hostages apologising for straying into Iranian waters, and warmly thanking president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for releasing them.

After thanking Ahmadinejad for letting us build his nuclear plants we should accessorise them with a few intercontinental ballistic missiles. Perhaps he’d start to like us then.

Dirty and loving it

One of my favourite pastimes when very young was digging up road tar with a lollipop stick, aided by my curly-haired friend Anne from across the street; we probably licked the tar. When not profitably occupied with this, I used to play “alleys” in the gutter – rolling marbles to hit an opponent’s marble, thereby acquiring it. As I recall, the streets were quite dirty by today’s standards: dogs wandered free, no-one stooped and scooped and the gutters were replete with assorted detritus discarded by the less than fastidious inhabitants of Canton, Cardiff. I enjoyed my childhood, including the dirt; now I look askance at my children as they scrub the germs off my grandchildren with smelly antiseptic “wipes”. “A little dirt won’t hurt them”, I say, thinking to myself that they are being deprived of one of childhood’s pleasures – filth.

As an aside, it’s hard not to notice that as we become more obsessively hygienic physically, so we are becoming more polluted spiritually. Hand sanitisers are in every doorway, yet we live in a culture pervaded by pornography, one that holds up homosexual copulation as an exemplary pastime and one which actively suppresses any expression of Christianity in its civil institutions.

It seems that today’s children are deprived in two ways: they are physically too clean for their own good:

Children should be allowed to play in the dirt, research suggests

Scientists have discovered that bacteria on the surface of the skin play an important role in combating inflammation when we get hurt.

The bugs dampen down overactive immune responses, which can lead to rashes or cause cuts and bruises to become swollen and painful.

The findings support previous research which suggests that exposure to germs during early childhood can prime the immune system to prevent allergies.

The so-called “hygiene hypothesis” has previously been used to explain why increasing numbers of children suffer allergies such as eczema and hay fever in more developed countries.

And are being exposed to pollution that won’t come off in the bath:

Children as young as five are simulating sex acts at school because they are exposed to pornography on satellite television and the internet, a senior MP has warned.

Taking Christ out of Christmas has a Nazi precedent

Something to think about before you wish someone a Happy Holidays:

Nazi Germany celebrated Christmas without Christ with the help of swastika tree baubles, ‘Germanic’ cookies and a host of manufactured traditions, a new exhibition has shown.

The way the celebration was gradually taken over and exploited for propaganda purposes by Hitler’s Nazis is detailed in a new exhibition.

Rita Breuer has spent years scouring flea markets for old German Christmas ornaments.

She and her daughter Judith developed a fascination with the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration.

‘Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis – after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child,’ Judith Breuer told the German newspaper Spiegel. ‘The most important celebration in the year didn’t fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian.’

Fort Hood Massacre

The impending extinction of Darwinians

From the BBC:

Europe is facing a population crisis because of attacks on religion by secular writers, Britain’s chief rabbi has said.

Lord Sacks blamed Europe’s falling birth rate on a culture of “consumerism and instant gratification”.

He said the continent was “dying” and accused its citizens of not being prepared for parenthood’s “sacrifices”.

He made his comments in a lecture for Christian think tank Theos in central London on Wednesday.

The 61-year-old, who took his seat in the Lords last week, said: “Wherever you turn today – Jewish, Christian or Muslim – the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.

“The major assault on religion today comes from the neo-Darwinians.”

There is a message here: secularists believe in evolution, so if evolution is true, it programs those who believe in it to stop reproducing; they have been naturally selected out and are not fit to survive.

If evolution is not true, those who believe in it are deluded. The delusion leads to the conclusion, as Richard Dawkins says, that the universe has “no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference”; this is sufficiently depressing to cause Darwinians to abort and birth-control themselves into extinction.

Either way, evolutionists lose.

Crucifixes banned in Italian schools

From the BBC:

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the use of crucifixes in classrooms in Italy.

It said the practice violated the right of parents to educate their children as they saw fit, and ran counter to the child’s right to freedom of religion.

The case was brought by an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, who wants to give her children a secular education.

If Soile Lautsi is so averse to her children seeing a crucifix in school, perhaps she should home-school them to ensure the expunging from their education of all vestiges of Christianity, even though it underpins the human rights to which she believes she is entitled.

Or she could move to an explicitly secular state like North Korea.