Monday, January 26, 2009

Overwhelming Dutch Support For Geert Wilders

According to GeenStijl, the mainstream Dutch opinion poll firms are wrong: there is massive grassroots support for Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Here's a translation by our expatriate Dutch correspondent H. Numan:

As you can see in our poll on the right hand side of your screen, we also asked the Dutch for their opinion about the prosecution of Geert Wilders. Our results are spectacular. 85% of all Dutch said NO to a prosecution of Geert Wilders. That is substantially different from the results of the establishment pollsters.

According to millennium hoaxer Maurice de Hond of www.peil.nl exactly half of all Dutch would like to see Wilders prosecuted. According to competitor TNS NIPO that's even 53% of all NL: TNS NIPO was commissioned by RTL News. Remarkable results. GeenStijl Poll Service, the biggest independent pollster of the country decided to do it all over again. Only we do it the right way.

Simple question: "Should Wilders be prosecuted or not?" with clear answers: yes or no. Look and behold: a completely different result than the established *cough* pollsters show you.

You should know that TNS NIPO is up to their elbows in the left-wing program NOVA with www.politiekbarometer.nl. For each poll they look for the right respondents. You ask, they provide.

Competitor Maurice de Hond [expletive]s off twice daily over photos of Els Lucas and Ella Vogelaar, and keeps 150 red-head babe shots on file. Calling that representative. Yeah, sure. We simply don't trust those pollsters. The respondents are us.

SOURCE



Kingdom of the forgotten

Christians face forced ejection from refugee camps, death

Headlines blare genocide, persistent and systematically planned. The government stands on the sidelines, watching the unfolding horror while doing little to nothing. More than 70,000 are forced into horrific refugee camps and then ejected from them with no place to go. Returning home for this particular people may mean instant death or living the rest of their lives in constant fear and vigilance with the threat of forced religious conversion hanging over their heads.

Questions abound: Where is this happening? How long has this been going on? Families turned out of refugee centers with nowhere to go? Why is the government wordlessly condoning the terror afflicting its own people? Why isn't this story in the mainstream media? Shouldn't the mention of genocide call for world wide media attention?

The people featured in these articles are Christians from the state of Orissa in India. Christian news organizations, such as Voice of the Martyrs, Mission Network News, and Compass Direct have been following the events as far back as July 2007. The New York Times, on the other hand, had only two articles in September and October of 2008. The Los Angeles Times mentioned the violence in Orissa in one paragraph of an article about the Mumbai attacks on Thanksgiving. But VOM, MNN, and CD have 10 to over a dozen different articles each on the violence in Orissa. The blatant discrepancy in reporting raises questions beyond the news outlets' coverage of religious violence. What does it mean to represent and report well when it comes to something as personal as religion? What other stories concerning the abuse and mistreatment of Christians around the world has the mainstream media neglected to report? Who are the Christians being attacked and abused around the world, and who is covering their stories?

"Over 200 million Christians worldwide suffer interrogation, arrest, and even death for their faith in Jesus Christ, with another 200 to 400 million facing discrimination and alienation," according to Open Doors, a faith-based mission supporting persecuted Christian believers.

The Voice of the Martyrs, another such group, says "more Christians have died for their faith in Christ in the past 100 years than in all of history prior to that."

The Voice of the Martyrs is a Christian organization working to raise awareness and grant assistance to Christians who are persecuted and mistreated across the globe. Another is the Mission Network News, a "mission news service dedicated to keeping Christians informed about evangelical mission activity around the world." As Christians mistreated because of their faith are hard-pressed to be found in the United States, many times this kind of news coverage is the only way information gets out. VOM uses the phrase "It Didn't End At The Coliseum" in its posters, implying that a common misconception is that Christian persecution does not exist anymore in the 21st century.

Gary Lane, a senior reporter at the Christian Broadcasting Network and formerly with VOM, follows and reports on the persecuted church. He says most people think Christian persecution is limited to "the book of Acts and the Roman empire."

Todd Nettleton, director of media development and senior reporter at VOM, says there is a Christian and a secular perspective on how persecuted Christian groups, frequently referred to as the persecuted church, merit coverage. From the Christian perspective, he frames it as a "family issue," where the persecuted Christians are "brothers and sisters in the faith" and there is a "natural affinity" to know what's going on with them, as part of sharing the same faith in Christ. This would explain why most of the coverage on the persecution of Christians comes from Christians themselves, as they feel a deeper bond and sense of obligation to those they are covering than the average reporter would.

From the secular perspective, Nettleton says, these people are being denied basic human rights, something that is of importance to the concerns of the greater human society. He says that this is usually the only way a story on Christian persecution would be framed in the secular media. The "spiritual side" of the issue, which he considers the most compelling part of the story, is commonly overlooked.

Lane says Christian news reports on the persecuted church are often written in a way not only to connect the reader to the people in the story, but to "move to action, think beyond ourselves, and respond to the situation."

Critiquing the traditional value of fairness and balance in a journalistic story, Nettleton says that while the established media doesn't want to give more weight to one system of beliefs over another, they "did back flips" to maintain political correctness. His criticism recalls the New York Times article that first mentioned the religious violence perpetrated by Hindu extremists against Christians in India in the story, "Violence in India Is Fueled by Religious and Economic Divide." The article immediately identifies Christians as the victims of the premeditated attacks. However, it never says that the perpetrators of the violence are Hindus, but refers to them as "attackers" and "the mob." The lone phrase "All Hindus are brothers" shouted by the mob identifies their religious affiliation. Though the violence is "among the worst in decades against Christians in this Hindu-dominated nation," the story goes on to say that it appears to have been fueled by "discontent at a time when the gap between India's haves and have-nots is growing," citing economic turmoil as the reason for the violence.

The Times neatly sidesteps the issue of exploring the fundamental difference and tension between Christianity and Hinduism as the cause of the attacks, going so far as to say "it has nothing to do with any particular religion." But, Nettleton wonders, does the New York Times have trouble "calling a spade, a spade"?

The mainstream media outlets would do well to probe further into these issues. They would enrich not only the story, but the understanding of religious dynamics and tensions, and open the way for discussion about a topic that often has deep meaning and associations for people personally, but is never mentioned in depth in the public forum.

There are challenges, however, to following and finding these stories. Nettleton points out that one of the biggest difficulties in covering the persecuted church is "the mechanics of collecting the stories." Some countries give restricted access to journalists and closely tail their whereabouts until the moment they board a plane and leave. Another issue, Nettleton points out, is putting the victims in more danger by exposing their stories. He says VOM tries to engage in "accurately portraying while protecting," and stresses "not creating more problems" for the Christians because they spoke out about the injustices they were going through. According to Nettleton, this kind of exposure can potentially lead to "increased hostility from the government or group that is persecuting them." The punishment Christians can receive for sharing their information can be anything from a simple questioning session to imprisonment and torture. The need to frame Christian persecution in a way that is""comprehensible to the audience" to listen, pray and help, is also something Nettleton touched on. He says VOM chooses the stories it covers according to: the ones with the most impact, incidents from countries seldom reported on, and stories with direct VOM involvement, along with accounts that have accompanying photos and video.

Lane mentioned a similar list of criteria for the stories chosen for one of CBN's outlets, Christian World News. He also said that the affordability of a story, covering the costs of round-trip flights, (mostly for international stories), bringing in equipment, and engaging in relief work, are concerns as well.

Lane cited economics as an advantage that secular media sources had over the smaller, Christian organizations. The money and resources available to them would not only allow them further access to the people they want to cover, but it would also allow for more widespread coverage and potential mobilization to bring justice and aid for these people.

On the inconsistency of the media with regards to selective coverage, Lane recalled the recent attacks in Mumbai and noted that an attack involving five-star hotels and many expatriates and tourists received blow-by-blow coverage while in the same country, churches were being burned down, huge mobs were hunting down Christians, evicting them and slaughtering them in broad daylight, while they were forced to flee to forests to survive. If the media had devoted even a third of the attention they gave the Mumbai attacks to coverage of the persecution in Orissa, Lane believes the situation would have been different for these Christians.

Both Lane and Nettleton share a deep need to get the word out, knowing believers want to be informed and have a role to play in responding to the situation, and the responsibility that "when one part of the body suffers, the rest does as well."

Though Lane and Nettleton are informed by a Christian worldview, their words hold merit and interest even for those who are not Christians. The stories they cover are clearly gross violations of human rights. If we turn our faces away from the plight of these people, and as a result passively condone the atrocities being carried out, don't we suffer as well in not holding human rights to be universal?

So why isn't the mainstream media reporting on the persecution of Christians?

Lane points to the reporters who would be covering these stories. He notes that for someone who is not religious, it would be hard to "understand people who have faith, their motivations, and have sympathy for them." Additionally, he says, many people have had negative experiences with religion, be it in the form of overly-aggressive Bible thumpers or judgmental figures who abused their authority.

But Lane created an innovative project that helps to bridge the gap. Early in his career, he began pitching stories from a human rights angle and tying it to current news stories for non-Christian news organizations. Perhaps the mainstream media today can do the same by reciprocating Lane's actions. It would not just be something fresh and new to cover; they would also be initiating a long-overdue conversation and open forum on religion, how it turns people's minds and hearts towards a common unity and informs their world-view, as well as simultaneously marking off dividing lines that are becoming increasingly important today.

Lane's closing words are a reminder that it is not simply "our job to just report - God wants us to do something - as we all have a role to play" in the stories we cover. We have the "responsibility to get on our knees and pray for our brothers and sisters in faith," he said.

SOURCE



The sum of our fears

Question: What are these people doing in Europe? Who invited them? Who let them in? Who let them stay? What has allowed them to even dream about moving to Europe, let alone realizing a colonization plan? In Great Britain alone, intelligence agencies are tracking 200 terrorists plots among Pakistani Brits, of whom some 2,000 are under observation. More than 400,000 Pakistani citizens of Great Britain travel every year to Pakistan - a country of 12,000 madrassas and, as of mid-2005, 55 terrorist training camps. Why are there a million (1) Pakistanis in Great Britain? Just what has been going on in the brains of the British ruling elites these past 40 years? What has been going on in the brains of the ruled British people?

What are these people doing in the United States? We know how they came and who and what let them in, but why? The stock answer is: the left, to gain new voters; the right, to get cheap labor. But it's not the real answer, except if this be a society of madmen.

You have to be a moron, an ignoramus with no knowledge of history, religion, philosophy, social psychology, economics, geopolitics, strategy, statecraft, higher [and ipso facto Western (2)] culture not to be aware that you have seeded a future civil war, an economic calamity, a cultural wasteland, a major devaluation of social capital, a destruction of your own mother, your nation. Yet the people who have inflicted all this on us have very high IQs (3) and have all been educated at the very best universities.

Why is Christmas in Sweden greeted these days with flaming mayhem by imported Muslim barbarians, rather than with flaming gl”gg by Swedes? Why are there 2 millions irredeemably alien "refugees" (4) in Sweden, including 600,000 Muslims, when there are only 7 million Swedes proper?

There are answers to this too: the politicians and the mass media are foisting this madness on the people, and the people have no power and no voice. But it's a copout: the Swedish people do have the power and the voice - they just prefer not to use them.

All the answers are no answers. If we looked solely at the demographic folly of the West, the resultant fraying of the social fabric, the certainty of rapidly accelerating socio-political entropy, the inevitability of future internecine violence due to the infusion of 70 million Muslims (5) and growing, with many more to issue from those - that alone would qualify as the greatest catastrophe the West has inflicted upon itself since the Assembly of Athens, swayed by Alcibiades -- a glamorous fast-mouth of a type that entrances the demos of democracy to this day -- decided to send an enormous armada on its ill-fated mission to conquer distant Sicily in 415 BC.

For ours is not a disaster imposed from the outside, such as Hitler's Germany inflicted on the rest of Europe, or Muslim jihad on Christendom. What we are witnessing is a voluntary self-destruction carried out by democratically elected political leaders on acquiescing populations that, largely, refuse to see The Emperor's New Clothes even as his naked arse is at arm's length from their faces.

To the contrary, gross, transparent lies such as "Our Strength is in Diversity, "All Whites are racists," "Islam is a religion of peace" seem to have much traction with the general population, even though in the depth of their falsehood they equal the worst that the subjects of the Bolshevik Empire had to live under. The West has become an Orwellian tyranny of preferred lies, forcing the natural social preference for one's own people into the same inhuman mold as the Bolsheviks applied to the natural preference for one's family's material wellbeing.

But that is just one of many symptoms. Why is the culture of Aristotle and Kant, Cervantes and MoliŠre, Thomas Mann and Raymond Chandler, Mozart and Rachmaninoff, Velazquez and Bruegel, Charles Chaplin and Francis Coppola, Levi's and Valentino now almost the exclusive province of Amy Winehouse and Rage Against the Machine, Booty Pop Panties and designer-torn jeans with rhinestone skull patches, Reality TV celebrating real repulsive imbeciles, and illiterate hoodlums with diamond-encrusted gold chains prancing on MTV ? Why are pierced eyebrows, green hair and Che Guevara the hottest fashion statement of Western man and woman? Why is the idea of multiculturalism to not know any culture, least of all one's own, rather than to know one's culture plus at least one other? .....

The American justice system is broken too. 50,000 civil actions are filed daily. The more social capital and its array of norms and customs are broken through imported "diversity" and multiculti coddling, the more lawsuits multiply. Courts are now not interested in justice but, as a former-prosecutor friend puts it, "disposing of the backlog."

America's inspired Constitution has been made into a handy gourd that the Imperial Judiciary and its Jacobin theorists in the top law schools fill with any brackish water of "progressive" causes that happen to inflame their passions. So many new and unnecessary laws are enacted, and so many new "victim" classes created and new government privileges arrogated, that falling afoul of the law can be a random process that can harm anyone irrespective of innocence. Raising one's voice to a boorish flight attendant may result in a felony air terrorism conviction under the cannily named Patriot Act.

In Europe, alas, the picture is even uglier. While the American example shows the self-extinguishing nature of a populist democracy with a besotted and decadent demos, the European example is one of a bien-pensant oligarchy, driving the whole continent off the cliff while singing the praise of its own greatness, complete with a 2.4 billion euros PR - brainwashing budget.

Europe has been busy copying many of the worst features of the United States - from militant feminism, to Affirmative Action, to obsession with human rights rather than human obligations, to a toxic pop culture, to outsize greed and overleveraging of the main European banks. What is has not copied is what's still healthy and commendable in America - Freedom of Expression, Freedom to Bear Arms, Constitutional protections from the state's arbitrary power, strong Christian consciousness, ease in setting up and conducting a business, only moderately powerful labor unions, resistance to high taxes.

But America's still-healthy features may not remain so for long. With state socialism implemented by the last Republican government the U.S. will know for quite a while, and the biggest blanket ever of reality-averse liberalism about to be tied around a somnolent, dumb electorate, America is going to wake up after four or eight years of Obama administration and Nancy Pelosi Congress to find, in the words of James Delingpole, "its pockets empty, its savings gone, its property trashed to virtual worthlessness, its streets rife with crime and its traditional liberties circumscribed by nannying bureaucrats and pettifogging regulation." And- the most important topic that every "conservative" pundit tiptoes around carefully - a 33% Latino and African segment of the population that votes reflexively socialist and anti-white. That block will have been vastly augmented through a deliberate weakening of border security and endless `amnesty.'

Already, the Democrat machine is gearing up to squash freedom of expression through the "Fairness Doctrine," to enshrine the imposition of chaos by "minorities" through various pro-Muslim, pro-Mexican, pro-homosexual and anti-"discrimination" initiatives, and to gut the freedom of armed self-defense. The government's constant race-and-gender meddling in the workplace will escalate far beyond what even the most witless and liberal Republican administration in history has just wrought, and its labor union-coddling will reach levels not seen since before World War 2.

Hence the process we posited at the beginning of this series: the convergence and gelling of Europe and the United States as an oppressive, socialist, anti-white racist, redistributive and economically crumbling police state - Meccania. The recent disinvitation of Vlaams Belang by the American Embassy in Brussels, hours before Barack Obama's inauguration as President, shows where Obamerica's European sympathies will lie: with the unhinged Greens, the rioting Muslims, the Lefto-Jewhaters, and the S&M Social Dhimmicrats.

But America still has perhaps eight years to get there, while Europe's slide down the chute of unintended consequences is already a singular spectacle. In September 2008, Geert Wilders stated in a speech that Europe is in the final stages of Islamization, with America that will remain as the "Last Man Standing." Wilders cited multiple European cities that are already one-quarter Muslim, with the majority of the under-18 population that's Muslim. School curriculums have been distorted to accommodate Muslim sensibilities, and Western culture has receded before the Islamic one - from shop signs in Arabic script to sharia courts.

As per Wilders, 54 million Muslims now live in Europe and 25% of the population will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Muslims will have reached a European voting majority by the end of this century. In every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. "Clearly," said Wilders, "the rather obvious, and ominous, signal is: ®here WE rule¯; right 'in your face'."

The Euro ruling elites don't even try to disguise anymore that they deploy the immigration and naturalization of alien Muslim primitives, as a means to dilute and replace the vote of the autochthon population. "Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties," said Wilders. "Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as 'right-wing extremists' or 'racists'. The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals, Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam."

Mr. Wilders is now under an indictment of a Body Snatcher Inquisition Tribunal in Amsterdam, for his "hate speech." And one should not forget in this context the tax-funded plan to invite more than 50 million African workers into the European Union (hat tip, Tiberge), with a job recruiting center already opened in the African state of Mali. Those who speak out against it will share Geert Wilders' cell in prison or in the poorhouse.

The average European's reaction to such goings-on ranges from evasion to incredulity. But the ruling oligarchy is no longer a part of the people. It's a class of Body Snatchers (6) with an altered consciousness programmed on Destroy, except Destroy is mislabeled as Renewal. No Stop or Reverse buttons are incorporated into their synthetic carapaces. And so, a Nicolas Sarkozy, who happens to be the President of France, would retort to the question "What on Earth are you doing?" with a proclamation - pulled at random from his most recent "gems" -- that Arabic is "the language of the future, of science and of modernity that expresses great civilizational and spiritual values."

The West is now a brakeless bus rolling toward the abyss. It has already crashed the economic guardrail, and it will crash the other guardrails too before the g-force of reality launches it onto a parabolic course. There is a giant legume pod, a pre-programmed robotic alien, at the steering wheel. For the passengers to survive, the first step is to recognize and observe this situation with no blinders -- to become a reality-based community again.

The second step is to orient the conduct as per that observation, after which come the stages of decision and action (8). But most of us have already progressed to decision and action, without having done enough of the prerequisite observation and orienting. Therefore, conservatives are trying to convince the driver to turn the steering wheel, without recognizing that all they will get in response is more pedal to the metal. Or, they try to persuade the other passengers to vote the bus driver out of his seat. But most of the passengers are already Pods, snatched a long time ago and of one programmed will with the driver.

Yet a different group of conservatives tries standing athwart the road, yelling stop. But what worked for William Buckley in the 50s does not work anymore. For one, all of us are on the bus now, so how can anyone imagine he is standing on the road? In the 50s, Body Snatchers were only in the universities and among the intelligentsia. Now, hundreds of millions have been turned into Pods too, currently all in rapture, for Messiah hath returned. The Pods are now within our closest families.

Much more here



Tribunal: Homosexual rights trump Christianity

Counselor wins reinstatement, but on procedural grounds

A British employment tribunal has ruled that a Christian counselor was wrongfully dismissed after he expressed reservations about offering sexual advice to homosexuals, but the judges rejected his claim of religious discrimination.

The ruling by the Bristol Employment Tribunal in the United Kingdom on Gary McFarlane, a relationship counselor with the company Relate Avon, is a disorganized precedent that should be addressed, according to Andrea Minichiello Williams of the Christian Legal Center, which worked on McFarlane's case.

"The law is in a confused state; in the case of Lillian Ladele, the Islington registrar, the court held that Christian belief must give way to the rights of same sex couples; but in the case of Gary McFarlane there is a finding of wrongful dismissal," Williams said. "The courts and public are confused; we call on the government to recognize the legitimate expression of conscience by Christians in the area of sexual orientation and provide protection where necessary."

The legal center said McFarlane had worked at Relate since 2003 and had encountered "hostility" at the organization. "Although Mr.McFarlane had never had to provide sex therapy to a same-sex couple, he thought that if the situation did arise, he would be able to discuss his Christian views with his supervisors so that his position could be discussed and if necessary accommodated," according to the legal center report. Instead, after a letter circulated at Relate that accused McFarlane of being a "homophobe," he was suspended in January 2008 and dismissed two months later.

"If I were a Muslim, this would not have happened. But Christians seem to have fewer and fewer rights," McFarlane said.

The legal center cited a recent court opinion that found Muslims imprisoned for sex offenses may opt out of therapy. "It is important to note that Mr. McFarlane has never refused to counsel a same-sex couple; he merely raised the potential conflict between his Christian faith and homosexual conduct," Williams said. "It is deeply disturbing that the mere expression of religious belief with an inability to give unqualified support to sexual orientation issues means that a Christian can be dismissed with no attempt to provide suitable accommodation for his or her beliefs. The law preventing religious discrimination against Christians is in danger of becoming a dead letter," Williams said.

The tribunal, however, said, "The claimant was not treated as he was because of his Christian faith, but because (Relate) believed that he would not comply with its policies." Mike Judge of the Christian Institute said the conclusion means the laws "are not being applied equally." Relate had stated in support of its decision, "His religious faith is not relevant; it is the application of it to the equal opportunities policy."

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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