Keith's Journal

Night closes in
Thursday, 12th March 2009



I have written about this looming threat before, but the UN proposal to criminalise ‘defamation of religion’ is an unconscionable threat to freedom of speech. As UN Watch reports, a resolution circulated yesterday by Islamic states would define any questioning of Islamic dogma as a human rights violation, intimidate dissenting voices, and encourage the forced imposition of Sharia law:

While non-binding, the resolution constitutes a dangerous threat to free speech everywhere. It would ban any perceived offense to Islamic sensitivities as a ‘serious affront to human dignity’ and a violation of religious freedom, and would pressure U.N. member states -- at the ‘local, national, regional and international levels’ -- to erode free speech guarantees in their ‘legal and constitutional systems.’ It’s an Orwellian text that distorts the meaning of human rights, free speech, and religious freedom, and marks a giant step backwards for liberty and democracy worldwide.

The first to suffer will be moderate Muslims in the countries that are behind this resolution, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, who seek international legitimacy for state-sanctioned blasphemy laws that stifle religious freedom and outlaw conversions from Islam to other faiths. Next to suffer from this U.N.-sanctioned McCarthyism will be writers and journalists in the democratic West, with the resolution targeting the media for the ‘deliberate stereotyping of religions, their adherents and sacred persons.’

Ultimately, it is the very notion of individual human rights at stake, because the sponsors of this resolution seek not to protect individuals from harm, but rather to shield a specific set of beliefs from any question, debate, or critical inquiry.

Since the Islamic states dominate the UN Human Rights Council there is little chance that this resolution will not pass. Another demonstration of the fact that the UN, which to the progressive western mind is the custodian of human rights, is actually their nemesis.

Britain capitulates to terror
Wednesday, 11th February 2009



If anyone had doubted the extent to which Britain has capitulated to Islamic terror, the banning of Geert Wilders a few hours ago should surely open their eyes. Wilders, the Dutch member of parliament who had made an uncompromising stand against the Koranic sources of Islamist extremism and violence, was due to give a screening of Fitna, his film on this subject, at the House of Lords on Thursday. This meeting had been postponed after Lord Ahmed had previously threatened the House of Lords authorities that he would bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the Lords if Wilders was allowed to speak. To their credit, the Lords authorities had stood firm and said extra police would be drafted in to meet this threat and the Wilders meeting should go ahead.

But now the government has announced that it is banning Wilders from the country. A letter from the Home Secretary’s office to Wilders, delivered via the British embassy in the Hague, said:

...the Secretary of State is of the view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.

So let’s get this straight. The British government allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the west from religious fascism.

It is he, not them, who is considered a ‘serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society’. Why? Because the result of this stand for life and liberty against those who would destroy them might be an attack by violent thugs. The response is not to face down such a threat of violence but to capitulate to it instead.

It was the same reasoning that led the police on those pro-Hamas marches to confiscate the Israeli flag, on the grounds that it would provoke violence, while those screaming support for genocide and incitement against the Jews were allowed to do so. The reasoning was that the Israeli flag might provoke thuggery while the genocidal incitement would not. So those actually promoting aggression were allowed to do so while those who threatened no-one at all were repressed. And now a Dutch politician who doesn’t threaten anyone is banned for telling unpalatable truths about those who do; while those who threaten life and liberty find that the more they do so, the more the British government will do exactly what they want, in the interests of ‘community harmony’.

Wilders is a controversial politician, to be sure. But this is another fateful and defining issue for Britain’s governing class as it continues to sleepwalk into cultural suicide. If British MPs do not raise hell about this banning order, if they go along with this spinelessness, if they fail to stand up for the principle that the British Parliament of all places must be free to hear what a fellow democratically elected politician has to say about one of the most difficult and urgent issues of our time, if they fail to hold the line against the threat of violence but capitulate to it instead, they will be signalling that Britain is no longer the cradle of freedom and democracy but its graveyard.

1 hour of fighting worth 70 years in prayer: Terrorism trial documents



A Supreme Court jury has been shown extremist material that allegedly motivated five Sydney men to prepare for a terrorist attack in Australia.

Crown prosecutor Richard Maidment SC has begun the second day of his opening address in the trial of five men on terrorism-related offences.

Mr Maidment has taken the jury through dozens of pages of literature found in the homes of the accused. The material encourages Muslims to take part in violent Jihad to make Islam the dominant religion.

The jury was read one passage that stated that one hour of fighting for Allah was worth more than 70 years of prayer.

The Crown alleges the men were driven by their religious beliefs to obtain explosive chemicals and firearms in preparation for a terrorist attack.

Yesterday, Mr Maidment told the jury the accused were motivated by the perception that Australia's involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were acts of aggression against the wider Muslim community.

Muslim Home Buyers Forbidden by Their Religion to Pay Interest Turn to Christian Charity

From FOX News: The 54-year-old Eritrean immigrant with five children thought his only option was to save enough money to purchase a home outright, with cash earned from his job at a security company. Then he heard about Habitat for Humanity. For some Muslim immigrants like Nurhussien, the Christian homebuilding charity that offers zero-interest loans has become a real godsend. "The way Habitat deals fits exactly to our requirements," said Nurhussien, who bought a home earlier this year from the northern Virginia chapter of the group. "It's not free. It is no interest. It's good for me and whoever has the same belief."   Article

There can hardly be a more graphic illustration of Britain’s helter-skelter slide into dhimmitude that this story:

Two Christian preachers were stopped from handing out Bible extracts by police because they were in a Muslim area, it was claimed yesterday. They say they were told by a Muslim police community support officer that they could not preach there and that attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity was a hate crime.

The community officer is also said to have told the two men: 'You have been warned. If you come back here and get beat up, well, you have been warned.' A police constable who was present during the incident in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham is also alleged to have told the preachers not to return to the district.

The noteworthy point about this incident is that it was a Muslim police ancillary officer who was involved. He did not uphold the law of the land, which gives people the freedom to say in public whatever they want within the law. Instead he upheld the Islamist principle that this particular area of an English city was a Muslim area, within which it was not permissible to do anything contrary to Muslim principles such as preach Christianity.

When the Bishop of Rochester recently warned that Britain was developing Muslim no-go areas, he was denounced the length and breadth of the establishment, with government ministers and bishops falling over each other to declare that they did not recognise the country he was describing. ‘There are no no-go areas in Britain’ they all declared. Well, here it is, in glowing technicolour and flashing lights, in Alum Rock Birmingham. What are they all saying now, those government ministers and bishops of the Church of England, to a situation where in the heart of England a British police support officer, employed by the British state to enforce the law of England, aggressively prevents Christians from preaching the established faith of England on the grounds that this is now a ‘hate crime’?

This is not a one-off. Alert readers will note that it was the West Midlands police force which tried to prosecute the Dispatches TV programme for revealing the true ‘hate crime’ in Britain’s so-called moderate mosques which preach hatred of the west and sedition. This in turn is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Up and down the country, police forces led by politically correct imbeciles are recruiting large numbers of Muslims, mainly as police community support officers like the officer in Alum Rock, in order to ‘build bridges’ with the Muslim community, and with minimal or non-existent security vetting in case they upset or offend the said Muslim community. The result is, among other things, the development of Muslim no-go areas enforced by British police officers.
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