Polarised Britain

The Home Secretary is in troubles. Worse, Britain is in crisis. And this time it is not the Muslims giving him a headache. When John Reid met his European counterparts to discuss anti-terrorism measures Germany, France, Spain and Italy had been joined by Poland, enlarging the original G5 group of leading European nations to a newly named G6, currently chaired by the UK. Poland is becoming a major player in Europe and is doing so literally at the expense of the Britain.

One of the home secretary's major concerns is immigration. During the talks the topic of illegal immigration was on the agenda, but it is legal immigration from Eastern Europe which has proven to be a much bigger problem. Hence, the British government wants to bring in measures to restrict the incoming flow of skilled and unskilled workers from the new EU accession countries Romania and Bulgaria. This, however, now looks increasingly like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Estimates for the economic migrants who have come to Britain from Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia, the countries who joined the European Union in 2004 and thus gained access to European labour markets, range from 300,000 to 600,000. This is the largest wave of immigration Britain has ever seen, prompting the Daily Mail to claim while ago that there are now more Poles in Britain than in Warsaw.

All these new arrivals are entirely legal. They may annoy locals who find that Poles willing to work for low wages are pricing them out of a job and are making housing and other resources scarce, but unlike the Muslims who timidly allow themselves to be derided and lectured to by the home secretary, the Poles will simply ignore him. They are here by right, they are Europeans, and they can't even be asked to learn English. Meanwhile, they are entitled to the full range of services on offer to residents in Britain, including the provision of translators to help them access those services.

The Polish influx dwarfs the alleged problem of non-genuine asylum seekers, and it is likely that both this issue and that of Islamic terrorism are the focus of the British government by way diverting public attention and anger away from the real threat of Britain becoming exploited by its distant European neighbours to the perceived threat of fifth column Muslims within her midst. It has only been two years since Polish is heard at every street corner in Britain. As the years go by, Brits might reminisce about the good old times when Muslim immigrants from Commonwealth countries did mainly as they were told and the occasional conversation in Urdu, Bengali or Punjabi might sound like music to their ears.

France, Armenia and Jewish-perpetrated genocide

When the French parliament voted to make illegal the denial of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks they were not only being hypocritical, since their own involvement in the more recent Rwandan genocide continues to be hushed up, but also historically inaccurate. A jail sentence and a hefty fine now await anyone under French law who denies that the Turks tried to systematically eliminate Armenians, the same penalty currently used to prevent revisionists from questioning aspects of the Jewish holocaust at the hands of the Nazis.

The move has since been criticised by the EU commissioner as preventing dialogue and debate necessary for reconciliation. Turkish MPs have already vowed that they will lobby for a similar law to be passed in Turkey about the massacres perpetrated by the French during the Algerian war of independence. This tit-for-tat would, of course, further delay or ultimately prevent Turkish entry into the EU. This is seen by many as the real motivation for the new French law.

For the Jewish holocaust industry it will be a double-edged sword. On the one hand they have always jealously guarded their holocaust as the only genocide worth remembering, on the other hand the ensuing debate about what really happened between Turkey and Armenia might put them on the spot as perpetrators, not victims, of genocide.

Unacknowledged by French legislators, the onslaught on Armenians was not so much the work of the dying Ottoman Empire but the Young Turks who were to replace it. These in turn were anything but Turkish in origin. They were a movement created in Greek Salonika by crypto-Jews, the Sabbateans or Donme. Whilst this is very much a matter of record, little is found in history books about the interrelation of this movement with Masonic lodges under the protection of European diplomacy. Through these channels the French and British engineered the downfall of the Turkish Islamic Caliphate, and the Armenian massacres were part of this grand geopolitical plan.

One could argue that the followers of Shabbetai Tzevi were not really Jews but members of a cult as far removed from traditional Judaism as the Donme were removed from Islam after their conversion of convenience. However, the founder of the Young Turks, Emmanuel Carasso, was an Italian Jewish lawyer and official of B'nai B'rith, described on Wikipedia as "the oldest continually-operating Jewish service organization in the world", so this is about as Jewish as it gets.

Once we probe further into what happened into Armenia, we might also be tempted to revisit the history between the two world wars and find that the Bolshevik revolution had a disproportionate number of Jewish financers and executive members. They had as little respect for the Orthodox White Russians as the crypto-Jewish Young Turks had for the Orthodox Christian Armenians. We might want to declare the Stalinist purges an undeniable genocide, another holocaust which according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of the Gulag Archipelago and once hero of Western anti-communism, was more Jewish than Russian.

The French may have set the wheel of historical review in motion with their hasty vote on the Armenian massacres. In the process we might learn that the myth of eternal Jewish victimhood does just not bear out. Likewise, they expelled the indigenous Palestinian population in order to establish their Zionist state in their promised land by perpetrating numerous massacres and atrocities, for example Sabra and Shatila. Any criticism was usually deflected by a reference to anti-Semitism and Europe's collective guilt. Yet, injustice does not last forever. A hundred years on the Armenians have not forgotten what happened to them. Nor will the Lebanese and Palestinians.

The giant camel of Thamud

I read with interest that Swiss scientists had discovered an ancient giant camel or dromedary in Syria. Professor Jean-Marie Le Tensorer of the University of Basel said the camel's shoulders stood three meters high and it was around four meters tall, as big as a giraffe or an elephant, adding "nobody knew that such a species had existed." standing a good three metres tall. They also found bones of early humans who appeared to be somewhere between the categorisations of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. The researchers suggested that their find indicated that a group of humans killed the large animal when it was drinking from a spring. Could this be the she-camel of the people of Thamud referred to in the Qur'an?

The Thamud are an ancient Arab people thought to be the descendants of the Arab tribe of 'Ad. They had an impressive civilisation, carving houses out of rocks, some of which can still be seen in the region to the North of the Arabian peninsula and today's Syria. Their prophet Salih gave them a she-camel as a sign which he instructed they had to share their drinking space with and forbade them from harming her. Instead they hamstrung her and brought upon themselves the doom of total annihilation. The land once known for its abundance of water returned to being a desert, exactly as the researchers from Basel describe it.

According to Islamic folklore the camel was created by the prophet as a sign from a rock and was so huge that grazing sheep fled from it in fright and even cattle would keep their distance. As a one-off miracle it would be unique rather than a remnant of an extinct species. Further analysis should prove most interesting if the results will be shared with the public. We are still waiting for the results of the exploration of Noah's ark on mount Judi in the Ararat range in Eastern Turkey which once excited archaeologists but has gone strangely quiet over the years.

Straw in your face

Let me first make it clear that this is one of the few occasions where I agree with Jack Straw. The face-covering veil (niqab) is an unnecessary and unnatural attire which can make interlocutors feel uncomfortable. And there is nothing Islamic about it. When Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula into the Byzantine empire the Muslims picked it up from the Christians. Church teaching in those days was that since Eve was the temptress who made Adam loose paradise, women were soul-less and evil and must be veiled from men in order to protect them from temptation. Since veiling was impractical for women working the fields, only upper class ladies covered their faces. When the Muslim women saw them they considered it a status symbol and imitated the practice. Thankfully it did not become the norm since Islam only mandates a head cover which leaves the face unveiled. When the Saudis tried to insist that women entering the Kaaba during the Hajj pilgrimage should cover their faces, this move was universally rejected as unsound and unfounded in Islamic jurisprudence. Sadly, the Saudis have developed an obsession with the alleged temptation emanating from women not unlike that of the early Byzantines, probably because it excuses men when straying from the path.

However, I doubt Jack Straw's motives. He's never been one for making a principled stance. He has always been a career politician. It seems that to position oneself in the Labour party after Blair one has to show that one is tough on Muslim aspirations to assert their identity. John Reid earned brownie points by telling Muslim parents to guard their children from the evil influence of radicalisation and terrorism. Jack Straw does not want to be seen as weak and dependent on the large Muslim populace amongst his constituents. He is throwing his hat in the ring of the current debate on multiculturalism and community relationships, calculating that his comment will only offend a few Muslims and not the mainstream.

By doing so, however, he is guilty of what Muslim men were always being accused of: telling women how to dress. In an interview on Radio 4 he clearly stated that the veiled women he talked to dressed in this fashion not because their husbands asked them to, but because they themselves wanted to do so. There is a big difference between voicing an opinion on whether a certain pattern of dress seems appropriate and actually asking people to change their attire. An MP might not be too charmed by a young lad with a studded face coming to him for advice, but to ask him to remove that ring from his eyebrow before listening to him would be considered patronising and unacceptable. That an MP feels justified in asking Muslim women to remove their veil indicates that British society today is no longer defining itself independently by its own values, but negatively by what it perceives to be unacceptable in the other. Just as the Muslims adopting the veil from Byzantine Christian women compromised their own theology by doing so, secular Western society by its obsession with providing an antithesis to Islam is beginning to dismantle its own system of beliefs. The very society that still argues about freedom and choice has become restrictive and prescriptive.

British police answerable to Israel?

It sounds like a typical storm in a tea cup, but this latest over-reaction has more serious undertones: Metropolitan Police Sir Ian Blair has ordered an urgent inquiry into why a Muslim police officer and member of the diplomatic protection group, PC Alexander Omar Basha, whose wife is Lebanese, had been allowed his request not to be on duty at the Israeli embassy during the brutal Israeli onslaught on Lebanon. We do not know the full details of the request yet, but his superiors who approved the temporary reassignment must have agreed with his concern of feeling uncomfortable and unsafe.

Requests of this nature are nothing unusual. Of course, a police officer is expected to put his duty before his personal convictions. However, an officer might feel that being posted in a confrontational role in a neighbourhood where he has relatives might lead to reprisals on his family or he might ask not to have to deal with certain situations after a personal trauma of a similar nature, for example the death of one of his own children. It is honourable of an officer to state conflicts of interest, and the service is usually flexible enough to respond to them. Decisions of this kind are taken regularly within the force and are not usually questioned. A call for an inquiry by the top echelon of the force indicates political pressure behind the scenes.

There has been no inquiry into the July 7 bombings in London yet. There has been no inquiry into the bungled up Forest Gate raid, although we have since learnt that two million pounds were spent in pursuing a false lead. There would be no calls for an inquiry had a Jewish officer asked not to be posted guarding a mosque or an Arab embassy nor if a Muslim officer had asked to be excused from carrying out a raid on a mosque. But throw the name Israel into the ring and everybody will jump to attention. Britain is at risk of yielding to the Israeli lobby and becoming its lackey just like America.

When Charles de Menezes was executed by anti-terrorist police on an underground train we learnt that the new shoot-to-kill policy adopted under operation Kratos was modelled on training the elite SO19 firearms officers received from Israel. Until the fatal incident the public had been kept in the dark about the police training link between the two countries and the change in policy. These are worrying trends. With the new powers given to the police by the government on the basis of a hyped up terror threat to Britain, the country is gradually turning into a police state. With its sensitivity towards everything Muslim it is not too far-fetched to imagine that the police itself is coming under Israeli occupation, no longer answerable to the people it was intended to serve, but to outside interests.