Daniel Finkelstein of The Times notes ‘Rushdie has become a symbol of free speech’ and suggests it is extraordinary that some people are arguing whether Shalimar the Clown is a good novel or whatever, instead of seeing what is at stake - pointing to disturbing news this morning from Iran.  He has started a Downing Street petition to show support of Salman Rushdie’s knighthood. If you are a UK citizen, you can sign it here. If you’re not, you can leave a comment here.  Standing by the decision to honour him, despite protests by Pakistan and Iran John Reid: "We have a right to express opinions and a tolerance of other people’s point of view, and we don’t apologise for that"

Rushdie on Islamic Reformation

"What is needed is a move beyond tradition — nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air"

"It would be good to see governments and community leaders inside the Muslim world as well as outside it throwing their weight behind this idea, because creating and sustaining such a reform movement will require above all a new educational impetus whose results may take a generation to be felt, a new scholarship to replace the literalist diktats and narrow dogmatisms that plague present-day Muslim thinking".

"It should be a matter of intense interest to all Muslims that Islam is the only religion whose origins were recorded historically and thus are grounded not in legend but in fact".

(the debate)

Rushdie On The Veil

"Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there’s not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted wearing the veil. I think the battle against the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I’m completely on [Straw's] side. He (Jack Straw) was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women".

On The Issues

"If the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, for example, were to be miraculously solved from one day to the next, I believe we wouldn’t see any fewer attacks".

"If this isn’t about Islam why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda?"

"Lenin once described terrorism as bourgeois adventurism. I think there, for once, he got things right: That’s exactly it. One must not negate the basic tenet of all morality — that individuals are themselves responsible for their actions".

"Terror is glamour — not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there’s something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers. Many are influenced by the misdirected image of a kind of magic that is inherent in these insane acts. The suicide bomber’s imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other peoples lives"

Freedom of Speech

"I’ve always been strictly against blasphemy laws, which are supposed to protect religions against alleged defamation. It’s perfectly all right for Muslims to enjoy religious freedom like everyone else in a free society. It’s perfectly all right for them to protest against discrimination, whenever and wherever they are faced with it. And undoubtedly there are often reflexive reactions in the West, which lead to premature, anti-Islamic suspicions. What is not at all in order, on the other hand, is for Islamic leaders in our countries to demand that their faith be protected against criticism, disrespect, ridicule and disparagement. Even malicious criticism, even insulting caricatures — these are part of our freedom of speech, of pluralism, of our basic values, which they have got to bow down to if they want to live with us".

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Tony Blair resigns as M.P.!!!!!

About Bloody time!!!!!

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A new essay from the writer and social commentator Paul Weston.

The press are in frenzy because there are so many aspects to this story deemed irresistible to the media driven modern Britain in which we are so fortunate to live today. Mr Sarwar has the dubious honour of being both Britain’s first Muslim MP, and Britain’s first MP to be driven from office upon pain of death.

When he was elected, to a fanfare of media coverage, Mr Sarwar managed yet another first; he refused to swear allegiance to the Queen, preferring instead the ancient British tradition of swearing his oath upon the Koran, the copy of which, incidentally, was placed inside an envelope lest it “be touched by one not of the faith.” This, unsurprisingly, drew the ire of the racist Right and Mr Sarwar was subsequently threatened by an assortment of organisations, including Combat 18 and the National Front.

This of course is manna to heaven for the British media. The BBC have led the way, camping outside Mr Sarwar’s constituency home, interviewing local Pakistanis who feel “threatened and uncomfortable” and conducting an undercover infiltration of the BNP in order to track down the perpetrators behind the violent threats that have forced a standing British MP to go into hiding for the first time in our modern history.

If you possess a powerful telescope, and train it carefully upon Glasgow, you may well be able to view the events unfolding. Be sure though, to point it at Glasgow, Planet Fantasy, Milky Way 1. If you do not, you will see very little, because this story exists only in the Britain of a parallel universe. Back here on planet reality it is a non-story, indeed almost a non-event. A by-line here, a by-line there, but virtually unreported on television news stations.

The reason for this media blackout is very simple. It is not the National Front, Combat 18 or the BNP who have issued the recent death threats, it is local Muslims themselves, incensed by what they see as his treacherous behaviour in relation to the murder of Kriss Donald, a white Glaswegian, in 2004.

Those of you familiar with the case, or those of a sensitive disposition, need not read the next paragraph. I note the details only because they have a relevance which I will come to later.

Kriss Donald, a slightly built, 15-year-old schoolboy was abducted from the streets of Pollockshields, Glasgow, on March 14, 2004. His kidnappers were five British Muslims of Pakistani descent, intent on exacting retribution on a white male – any white male would do – following a fight in a night club the previous weekend. Kriss was driven around for several hours whilst he was held down and tortured in the back of the car. He was eventually taken to an area of waste ground where he was finished off. Before he died, it is alleged that he was castrated, burned with cigarettes; his eyes were gouged out and he was stabbed repeatedly. Once on the waste ground he was doused with gasoline and set alight whilst still alive. He crawled a few metres and then, mercifully, died. A walker who discovered his body the following morning was unaware that it was even human, remarking, that at first, he thought it was the carcass of an animal.

Two men were subsequently arrested, but the other three; aware the police knew their identities, fled to Pakistan. The Foreign Office at that time was involved in delicate negotiations with Pakistan over the extradition rights concerning full-blown terrorists, so an unimportant little murder such as Kriss Donald’s was simply a fly in the ointment they did not need. As a result, they did their best to frustrate attempts by the British police to retrieve their suspects.

Enter Mr Mohammad Sarwar, a man with a clearer sense of right and wrong, and a political position with which to do something about it. Mr Sarwar was instrumental in forcing the British government to press ahead with the extradition of the three men, and thus, in the eyes of some British Muslims, committed a crime of such magnitude that only his death could adequately compensate for his treachery.

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I apologise for detailing the gory details of Kriss Donald’s torture and murder, but its relevance is shown in the following quotes from Mr Sarwar, printed in the Daily Telegraph:

“Life is not the same since I brought them back…I received threats to my life, to murder my sons, to murder my grandchildren…I was told they wanted to punish my family and make a horrible example of my son… they would do to him what they did to Kriss Donald.”

There were other firsts in the story that should have interested the media. Daamish Zahid, one of the five killers, was the first person in Scotland to be convicted of racially motivated murder, whilst the sheer brutality of the murder itself was unprecedented in Britain. An issue all too predictably rectified a year later by six black British men who gang raped, tortured and murdered 16-year-old schoolgirl Mary Ann Leneghan.

But I digress. To recap, Britain’s first Muslim MP is also Britain’s first ever politician to stand down in the face of death threats; threats uttered by followers of the Religion Of Peace who sympathise with the Islamic savages involved in the most horrific racial murder in Britain’s recent history, one of whom, to boot, was also the first “Scotsman” to be convicted of racially aggravated murder.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but surely there’s a story in there somewhere? I know it is now a tired old cliché, but imagine if Mr Paul Boateng, Britain’s first black MP, had been driven from office by a bunch of white, right wing Christian fundamentalists, enraged that he had succeeded in bringing the white killers of the black Stephen Lawrence to justice?

A foolish hypothesis I admit, one could discard the telescope, whilst an investment in blinkers and earmuffs would be necessary to avoid the media hysteria. We are used to the double standards utilised by the media with regard to racial murder, but this time it is different. This is not any old murder, not any old death threats, and Mr Sarwar is not any old person.

When Britain, a first world country, loses a democratically elected politician because he fears for his life, we are entering a wholly new era. Britain is now an Iraq, a Zimbabwe, we are becoming, in political terms, a genuine third world country, and our BBC led media, showing a total disregard for impartiality, has veered from mere bias to dangerous censorship, with all the disturbing implications this portends for our democratic future.

Many political commentators believe that Britain is dead, Lawrence Auster in particular, but he also thinks it can be resurrected. If this is to happen it must happen soon. Our national heart has ceased to beat, our national soul is hovering indecisively above the operating table, the crash team have been called but the politically inclined hospital switchboard have told them there is no problem, that everything is under control. The life support boys have heard otherwise, they are hurrying to get there but other hospital staff members have switched the signage to the operating theatre and killed the lights. It is a big hospital, they only have minutes to get there, they are lost, confused, misinformed, and the clock is relentlessly ticking, and ticking, and ticking…..

So, as all part of the carefully choreographed sequence leading up to our dear Leader’s stepping down from the role of Prime Minister of the UK tomorrow,  a specially-funded professorship is to be created "in his honour" at the University of Liverpool. The £5m "Blair Chair" has been created and funded by the Irish government. It will be established at the university’s Institute of Irish Studies. Irish PMh Bertie Ahern said: "It is a fitting way to mark Blair’s immense and historic contribution in helping bring peace to Ireland."

Yes, a fitting tribute to the man who has helped elevate terror, demonise democracy and create a mutant government. A very blur chair indeed.

All civilised people will agree that to murder of a member of your family in pursuance of ANY religious teaching is absolutely abhorrent. But for some of those who follow Islam, it’s seen as a matter of honour to kill in the name of Allah. So then I was reading that the Crown Prosecution Service has been suggesting that there are links between some cases of "honour" violence in Britain and extremist groups abroad. This may well be true, and it is utterly revolting that such practises occur in our country. But surely the CPS is ducking the real issue – namely that far too many of those who live here in Britain and who follow the ROP DO believe in the merits of such barbarism, despite the bleating of the Muslim Council of Britain.(An organisation that should be banned BTW) Honour killings (rather like suicide-bombings) are the products of a depraved mind and a festering faith and ANYONE who is found guilty of such should be put away for life in the absence of the death penalty.

Whoops! Don’t blame rising levels of carbon dioxide (C02) for whatever global warming is now taking place; put the blame on "old sol" — the sun may be getting ready to put the world into the deep freezer!

So say a growing number of scientists who have studied the effect of the sun on the earth’s climate and concluded that the only thing scientists understand about climate change is that it is always changing. "Climate stability has never been a feature of planet earth,” explains R. Timothy Patterson professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University in an article in the Financial Post. "The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3 C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thousand-year-long ‘Younger Dryas’ cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6 C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s.”

You don’t say? And there was me thinking that the issue was "settled"  – that the debate "was over" and that scientists had "proven" beyond any doubt that mankind was responsible for the climate change.

And get this…

"Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the little ice age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, a prolific researcher and one of Israel’s top young scientists who was cited by Patterson, no longer accepts the logic of man-made global warming. "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming,” Shariv wrote. "But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media."

I don’t know about you but I feel that John Prescott is a grotesque incompetent lying bully whose role as Deputy PM during the Blair era was almost surreal since he could hardly talk. (though he could punch.)  

This ageing lumbering brute has become a perfect symbol for the degrading affect of Labour in power, but there were we thinking that after tomorrow, when he steps down from office, he would be gone from the body politic. Not so. 

Jabba surprised Labour MPs last night by announcing that he is standing for the Council of Europe after he steps down tomorrow as Deputy Prime Minister. He is hoping to fill a vacancy created by the promotion of Terry Davis, a former Labour MP, who has become secretary general of the council. Prescott will have to be elected by fellow MPs to the post, but it is unlikely that he will face a contest. It does not mean that Mr Prescott will immediately have to give up his seat for Hull East at Westminster, although he is not expected to fight the next election. The Council of Europe represents 47 countries, going far beyond the EU, and has a parliamentary assembly in Strasbourg with 636 members. Its aims include….AHEM…. protecting human rights, and it recently produced a hard-hitting report on the use of "extraordinary rendition" by the United States.

You can just imagine how pleasant a place this feathered nest will be for Jabba Prescott – brimming with anti-Americanism, seeped in dhimmitude, and out to remove our liberties in the name of protecting them. 

Listening to the reports of the possible flood damage resulting from the damage to this reservoir in Yorkshire. The person interviewed had been knocked up at 03.00 a.m. by the police, and advised to evacuate immediately, He was speaking from a school hall some five miles from his village, and the interviewer asked if there had been anything which really stuck in his memory.

The resident replied that he had lived thirty-six years in the village, and this was the first time anything out-of-the-ordinary had happened; BUT I THOUGHT HE WAS ABOUT TO SAY THAT WAS THE FIRST TIME HE’S SEE THE POLICE IN ALL OF THAT TIME!!

So, just as he prepares to terminate his time as UK PM with a photo-op with the Terminator in Downing Street, it is about to be announced that Tony Blair will be confirmed as international envoy in the Middle East. As the BBC puts it, he will be focusing on bringing peace to the “Occupied” Palestinian territories.

Mmmm…”Occupied.”  An interesting choice of words, bristling with media bias.

But then again…. Yes, I suppose “Occupied” is right. Occupied by murderous Jihadists, in Hamas and Fatah. Occupied by lowlife scum who vote for Islamic Jihadists in their droves. Occupied by Jew-haters who seek the destruction of Israel. Occupied by American haters who danced for joy on 9/11.

And now Tony is going over to bring peace.

Look out Israel – Tony’s idea of bringing peace, modelled on his enormous ”success” in Northern Ireland, will be to further appease the Jihadists, pressurise the democrats in Israel, and dress it all up in the faux rhetoric of “peace”. 

Justifiably offended by Muslim attempts to silence Western free speech,  courageous Danes fight back  –   expressing themselves in a language even  a 7th century islamist  living in 2007 can understand. They burn an effigy! ….an effigy of the cartoon Mohammed.

The Danes…God bless ‘em….they just refuse to be dhimmified.  See it on youtube.