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Piracy in the Straits of Malacca has been a serious problem for many years now and shipping companies have grown tired of waiting for governments in the region to do something effective to stamp it out.  So they are hiring private companies to do it instead. Sounds like an exciting line of work. July 31st, 2005 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Attempts to use the Kelo ’eminent domain’ ruling to take property in New Hampshire from US Supreme Court Justice David Souter have now been extended to trying to do the same to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. This is splendid but maybe it would be good to extend this to Senators and Congressmen and particularly much lower level local politicians who collude with property developers. Some of these people often have property outside the jurisdiction they live in (and thus maybe be vulnerable to politically or personally motivated grudges from other elected representatives). The important thing is to make as many members of the political class uneasy that they could be targeted. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. July 31st, 2005 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Forgive me if I am not breaking out the champagne just yet at the announcement that the ethnic collectivists of the IRA have declared their ‘armed campaign is over’. Of course the fact their ‘decommissioning’ of arms will take place in private, in marked contrast to the indecent haste with which the UK government has started very publicly ripping down its fortifications, just conforms my view that Blair is a credulous fool. Contrary to the woolly impression some of the media’s dafter talking heads are giving (I really must stop watching early morning TV, bad for the blood pressure), the IRA is not disbanding and unless I see large piles of semtex being burned in front of Stormont, I very much doubt anything more than a token number of already unserviceable weapons and expired explosives will be put beyond their reach as an organisation. I may not be a huge fan of the ethnic collectivists of the DUP either, but they are the ones who seem to me to be exhibiting the most appropriate amount of continuing distain for Sinn Fein/IRA and so are offering only highly contingent acknowledgement of this latest ‘breakthrough’. My guess is there is a lot less to this that meets the eye. Like the song says: “Don’t believe the hype.” July 30th, 2005 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Police have now arrested all four of the would-be suicide bombers who attempted a second round of terrorist mass murders in London on the 21st July. This is splendid news. Kudos also to Italian police who picked up one of the targets in Rome. July 29th, 2005 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people Oh I am soooo up for this… July 29th, 2005 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Peak Talk has the perfect summation of the tragic affair of the murder of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic. July 28th, 2005 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
Although they have come late to this story, The Times has also noted Scott Burgess’ TKO of the Guardian regarding their employment of an Islamic extremists and subsequent firing of him once the story came to light. It is a pity The Times did not also pick up on the bad grace in which The Guardian took their lumps, what with their snarky no-by-line remarks about how “Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian”, recalling the “guys in pyjamas” sneer made by someone at CBS following a similar humiliating mauling they received at the hands of the blogosphere. If ever you need a clear indication you have landed a painful blow against a MSM target, you have but to look for a petulant ad hominim response. Moreover, it is fascinating how The Guardian inaccurately (follow first link to Media Guardian) attributes this incident breaking into the mainstream media down to “rightwing US bloggers” when the truth is that whilst Scott Burgess (an American living in London) sounded the charge, he was rapidly followed by Labour supporting British blog Harry’s Place and ourselves (no great fans of the Tory party either), to name but two of many largely UK based blogs. The Guardian’s take on this is therefore either shoddy reporting or a case of seeing what you choose to see. Still, nice to see that the broadsheet newspapers do not feel any need to close ranks over this story. July 25th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
To run from armed police who are shouting at you (rather than shooting at you) at any time is an extremely bad idea… to do so at a time like this in London is utter madness. Anyone running from armed cops who have challenged them first in London today should expect to get shot dead given the clear and present danger we are in… but that does not makes this any less of a horror. If Jean Charles de Menezes just reacted idiotically to the situation he found himself in, that does not mean we should feel distain for him. We really need to know exactly what happened and why, but shooting a man dead who is suspected of being a suicide bomber and who is running away and trying to board a train(!) when being called on to stop is not the incorrect response. It was a tragedy of execution (in ever sense of the word) but not an incorrect policy. July 24th, 2005 | 128 comments - (Comments are closed)
It appears that the ‘bomber’ who was shot by the police yesterday was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is horrendous news. July 23rd, 2005 | 67 comments - (Comments are closed)
Let us listen to what Dr. Azzam Tamimi of the Muslim Association of Britain is saying:
People reading this blog may or may not share my enthusiasm for the war in Iraq, but even if you were an ‘anti’, make no mistake, what these ‘senior Muslims’ are demanding is nothing less that capitulation to terrorism. Dr. Tamimi is quite unequivocal: change your foreign policy or these people will continue to blow you up. And when Massoud Shadjareh, chairman the Islamic Human Rights Commission, says:
He had better think deeply before making such statements again or an increasing number of British people may start concluding that the ‘underlying factor’ that needs the most urgent action is the existence of his community in Britain. I look forward to the large body of ‘moderate’ Muslim leaders that is allegedly out there to unequivocally damn Al Qaeda and all their works (and that means not a single use of the word ‘but…’). It is becoming increasingly urgent that this occurs soon and over a sustained period. Until that happens, I suspect the majority of British people who do not live in Islington will see people like Azzam Tamimi and Massoud Shadjareh as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. July 22nd, 2005 | 97 comments - (Comments are closed)
British police shot dead a man strongly suspected to have been one of yesterday’s would-be suicide bombers as he tried to board a train full of people at Stockwell Tube station. It has also been reported that British Muslims are worried there is a ‘shoot to kill’ policy in force. However contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, anytime a policeman shoots someone, they are prepared to kill them (the usual policy is to shoot at the ‘centre of mass’). Technically they are ‘shooting to incapacitate’ and that often means killing the target. If a person who has been shot and incapacitated subsequently survives, that is a bonus. However in the case of a suspected suicide bomber, once the decision to shoot has been made, taking the extra step of a bullet through the brain of a fallen suspect who under other circumstances would not be shot again may well be justified, given that the ability to so much as touch a button makes them a continued threat. This is particularly true if they have gone down near a number of civilians as was indeed the case this morning. I am only surprised it has taken Al Qaeda this long to get around to attacking us here in London, given that they thought nothing of slaughtering hundreds of African civilians in Kenya and Tanzania and dozens of Australian civilians in Bali over the last few years since 9/11. We are in a war against an implacable enemy and although we have every right to demand our security services only use appropriate force in our defence, unless the facts turn out to be quite different than so far reported, this looks like it was a ‘clean shoot’. July 22nd, 2005 | 96 comments - (Comments are closed)
A commenter in an earlier article here responded to someone arguing that Muslim immigrants should never have been treated as ‘immigrants’ in Britain but as ‘guest workers’ the way the Germany treat Turks in their country, making them much easier to deport when the powers-that-be decide it is time for them to go. His reply was:
Quite so. Moreover it seems obvious to me that a significant number of Muslims in Britain have successfully integrated into British society just fine and I see no reason to pretend otherwise. Yet clearly we do have a major problem with an equally significant number of Muslims who have not assimilated, show no sign of doing so and are manifestly a source of recruits for Al Qaeda. Endlessly blathering on about how “Islam is a religion of peace” or alternatively to call for expelling ‘Muslims’, simply because they are Muslims, is the sort of wilful blindness and one size fits all collectivism of a sort I would rather leave to socialists of both left and right. Anyone who values western liberal civilisation needs to think a little harder than that, avoiding both atavistic collectivism and a head-in-the-sand refusal to see we have a serious problem that will not go away on its own. If what we are trying to defend is a pluralistic tolerant society, then we have to make sure that the message is not just “throw the wogs out!” but rather “You are welcome here if you are willing to assimilate to a sufficient degree.” But how does one define what that ‘degree’ is exactly? I am not talking a Norman Tebbit style “cricket test” but rather a willingness to tolerate ‘otherness’. We do not need Muslims to approve of alcohol or women in short skirts or figurative art or bells or pork or pornography or homosexuality or (particularly) apostasy. We have no right to demand that at all and obviously not all Anglicans approve of some of those things, so why require that Muslims must? No, what we do have the right to demand (and that is not too strong a word) is that they tolerate those things, which is to say they will not countenance the use of force to oppose those things even though they disapprove of them. In fact it is not just Muslims from whom we must demand such tolerance. If we can get them to agree to tolerate those things, then it does not matter if Muslim women wear burquas because as long as they are not subject to force, a woman may elect to say “Sod this for a game of soldiers!” and cast off that symbol of misogynistic repression… and if she does not do so, well that is her choice then… but she must have a choice. They do not have to look like us (I do not hear calls for Chinatown to be razed to the ground), they do not have to share our religion(s), or lack thereof, but they do have to tolerate our varied ways and if by their actions or words they show they do not, we have every right to regard them as our enemies and take action to defend ourselves. For decades the supporters of multiculturalism have used tax money and government regulations to actively discourage assimilation of immigrants into the broader society, preferring to see communities develop which favour ‘identity politics’ better suited and more amenable to their own collectivist world views. And now we are paying the price for that. We will not be able to defend ourselves physically or preserve our liberal society unless we stop tolerating intolerance, and that includes not just fundamentalist Islam but also the anti-western bigotry of the multiculturalists. July 22nd, 2005 | 97 comments - (Comments are closed)
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