Friday, June 27, 2008

Corrupting communities

Councils up and down the country are given substantial sums of money by central government to combat "Islamic extremism". The more Muslims a local council has, the more money it gets, suggesting that extremism must be something inherent in being Muslim and therefore increases proportional to their numbers. Cash-strapped councils will welcome the much needed cash, but of course they will also need to justify it and produce results. To show that they are proactive in combatting extremism, we can expect to see examples of extremism turning up where they never existed before.

It is not only local authorities who can be expected to engage in creative accounting. Some of the money (only some, a big junk is expected to cover the council's "administrative" expenses) will have to be given to Muslim groups or individuals. These, too, must prove that they can deliver the goods. What better way to do so then to denounce rival groups or unpopular individuals as being extremist?

All this has undertones of Stalinism. Schoolbook history is misleading about the "collapse" of the Soviet Republics. Capitalism and Communism have always been two sides of the same coin and both favour strong central governments. Effectively, communism was bought out and simply moved West since it is probably more convenient to bribe people into giving up their liberties than having to threaten and bully them. Where the carrot does not work, Western governments also have the stick, like the right to declare exclusion zones or holding people without charge, all in the name of fighting terrorism or extremism.

What both systems need to stay in power, however, is surveillance. Corrupt governments do not trust their subjects and need to keep an eye on them. Britain is leading the way in camera surveillance. Other countries in the ever enlarging European Union (run like the Soviet Union by unelected commissioners) lead the way in gathering and retaining computer-processable information about their citizens, recently complemented by biometrics. Yet, making sense of information is difficult from a distance, hence the desire to recruit informers. MI5 have been given a lot more resources as well to recruit from amongst Muslims, but the government is probably right in assuming that individuals would hesitate to join, or cooperate with the Secret Service, whereas they would quite happily compromise a little if offered a share in the money for a new community project and become, unwittingly, citizen informers. This method isn't new either. Files for East Germany after re-unification showed that there was a dossier almost on every citizen and almost everybody was informing on everybody else. It is doubtful that much of this information was very reliable, and a great deal of it was probably offered in order to settle old scores, to gain an advantage or due to holding a grudge. What better way, for example, to get custody for one's children in a divorce case than portraying the opposing party as a Muslim extremist likely to radicalise the children?

One thing seems apparent. The less money a government has to spend on education, healthcare or basic infrastructure, the more money it is likely to throw at ways and means to combat any potential disenchantment with and protest against the level of services provided. Those who happily agreed to an erosion of freedom in order to be protected from Islamic extremism will soon find out that those measures were really intended for them, not the extremists. There is something seriously wrong with a political system where a front bencher in parliament such as David Davis has to resign to draw attention to the overbearing control exercised by government. And it doesn't matter which party gains power in an election. As with capitalism and communism, they too are two sides of the same coin.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

The demise of secular dogma

"These people are so scared of public opinion they are willing to set in stone the right to ignore it. Freedom requires the governing elite to be held to account. They must be getting very worried if they are enacting such dictatorial powers for themselves." Thus comments Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party, on the European Parliaments attempts to prevent Euro-sceptic members from organising themselves and rightly calls the EU mindset arrogant and anti-democratic. What he fails to perceive in his criticism, however, is that this arrogance and intolerance was not invented by European bureaucrats or even Communist commissars before them. This arrogance is a key feature of secular dogma of which Muslims have been at the receiving end for decades due to practising and holding on to their beliefs more tightly than those who still call themselves Christians.

In Germany and France "enlightenment" sinks to the depth of judging a Muslim woman on the basis of whether she wears a piece of cloth on her head or not and denying her access to education or public office if she does. The showcase of secularism, however, is Turkey, where European powers conspired through the Masonic and crypto-Jewish Young Turk movement to unseat the Muslim caliphate and outlaw religious interference in politics. The movers behind the European super-state are as weary of Turkey as they are of the Euro-sceptics amongst their midst; neither can be trusted because of the "public opinion" factor. Euro-sceptics in many European countries are calling for the people to have a say through referendums on a proposed European constitution, common foreign policy, or joint armed forces, and whenever the people were given a democratic chance to voice their opinion they clearly rejected what their masters in Brussels had in mind for them. Hence, if the people are not mature enough to agree to what the unelected European Commission proposes, they must be denied the right to express their views altogether. In European double-speak this is called democracy in action.

In Turkey, likewise, the people never abandoned Islam and it keeps making a come-back. Over and over again those wanting to reform the fundamentalist secularism of Turkey into a proper democracy where Muslims, after all constituting the majority of the population, also can have their aspirations realised, are being outlawed. Whenever a party with Islamic leanings obtains a majority and enters government, the courts and the military try to declare it illegal and in violation of the secular constitution. In addition, they jail politicians who do not agree with them for their opinions. The Turkish constitutional court has just overturned a law passed by parliament which would have allowed Muslim girls to enter university wearing a scarf, and there is talk once more of banning the ruling AK party which only a year ago had won such a strong mandate during elections that European governments must be rightly worried, since their own popular support is forever diminishing.

In a similar show of desperation the secularists have passed a 3-year jail sentence on Adnan Oktar, known around the globe under his pen name Harun Yayha, for dearing to successfully demolish Darwin's theory of evolution as well as exposing Freemasonry. Likewise, European countries regularly jail "revisionists" who dear wanting to subject some of the "founding myths of Israeli politics" (Roger Garaudy), which tirelessly propagated through the official version of the "Jewish Holocaust", to a measure of scientific scrutiny. The "freedom of speech" argument regularly used when it comes to the right to insult what Muslims hold sacred (e.g. when defending Rushdie's or a Danish cartoonist's right to insult, see response in Satanic Voices Ancient and Modern), is conveniently forgotten whenever secular fundamentalist dogma is being attacked. After all, it is the nature of dogma that it must not be questioned. History, however, teaches us that a false dogma cannot be upheld by legislation and court sanctions. Ordaining the earth to be flat and punishing any expression of doubt that it might not be still does not make it so. This is why our rulers are "scared", as Farage put it. They know they are fighting a losing battle, for the truth will out.