To Regent's Park where Anjem Choudary and his group Need  4 Khilafah were demonstrating, urging Muslims to rise up against the British anti-Muslim 'Crusade'. This was to be countered by the EDL. 

When I got to the Mosque things were already in full swing. Need  4 Khilafah were outside the main entrance to the mosque; the EDL and other patriots including Britain First were contained on the opposite side of the road.

As Friday Jummah was over worshippers were pouring out of the Mosque and many stopped to watch. This is what they saw. And heard.

Offensive at the best of times; not really what I wanted to see on Good Friday.

What was noticable that although we are told that 'ordinary Muslims' and 'moderate Muslims' dislike Choudary and his merry men, none of them were tackling the group. Some were shouting 'Nazis' at the EDL. Others were filming and calling to their friends to take a look. But when the chants of "EDL, go to Hell", and "EDL, you will pay, the Muslims are on our way", changed to the war chants of Allah Akbar, Takfee! etc, they all joined in. 
The small children on their father's shoulders were sweet, but some boys of about 10 will be a big problem within a year or 18 months. 

Young men gave out information sheets about the terrible British Crusade against them. Apparently it is our fault that the Muslim population in Prison is so high. I thought it was the jihad inspired crime wave. Silly me. We are also to blame for conspiring with our stooge Mustapha Kemal Ataturk and engineering the demise of the last Caliphate in 1924. 

"Whilst this crusade against Islam and Muslims takes place under our noses we cannot be passive bystanders".

Choudary's sidekick Abu Izzadeen (real name not so clever Trevor Brooks of Hackney) and a few henchmen managed to cross the road to get nearer to the EDL enclosure.

The police were managing to keep one lane of traffic moving at a time. The drivers held up by the protestors/bystanders (and some observers)  milling across the road were not happy.

I thought this was an excellent poster - it says it all!

The police decided to move the EDL and Britain First down Park Road away from the Mosque

Some of the masked henchmen (henchboys? That doesn't sound right, but they were not what I grew up thinking of as men) decided to follow the procession. I dislike seeing masked men and women walking the streets.

Paul Golding of Britain First and some companions were traveling by car. There was an altercation at the traffic lights, which turned into fisticuffs.

Which the police dealt with by tackling the miscreants, unmasking them, and I believe they were arrested. 

Nobody from the EDL was arrested and they dispursed into the underground system. 

I don't know what time Need 4 Khilipha went home to MAMA.

Phototgraphs E Weatherwax London April 2014

Travelogue, propaganda piece, but still somethingof Iraqi reality -- before Islam came back, with a vengeance -- comes through. The flight of Baghdad's Jews, who in the 1920s constituted one-third of the population of Baghdad (and far more of its professional and intellectual class), is not mentioned.

Here.

You're going to be hearing a lot about both.

And by god you should.

The self-satisfaction and self-delusion of our billionaires, including the bejeaned philosopher-kings of Silicon Valley, those through whose bucolic company-campuses the employees are encouraged to coast on roller-skates, must be pricked and the air let out.

Here.

You can sing along with the words:

While casting about to find something to write about apart from another lamentation over the weakness of most Western political leadership, the collapse of fiscal integrity in all but a few countries, the charade of Iranian nuclear discussions, and the decline and fall of practically everybody, my thoughts alit on Herbert the Raccoon, as my wife christened him, who has largely been living in a little half-moon balcony adjacent to my wife’s third-floor dressing room. In the cold snap in March, my wife put a heater up against the window and Herbert gratefully attached himself like a limpet to the window, turning about every hour to give the benefit of the heat to his other side. A young raccoon, Herbert was just big enough to reach the ledge on the balcony with his front paws and peer out over the view of several miles, his little pointy ears confidently breaking the horizon when we looked out the window from behind him, within the house. His dark, ringed eyes surveyed the scene with the worldly detachment of Jacques Cartier grasping the immense proportions of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence nearly 500 years ago, and famously concluding (rather negatively, as it turned out) that “it is the land God gave to Cain.”

This house is set on a relatively large urban property in Toronto, bordered along one side by a ravine, and we have an unusually high incidence of wildlife, including foxes, deer, skunks, possum, and feral cats. My wife’s two magnificent Hungarian Kuvaszok, white dogs of over 100 pounds that are devoted to their owners but skeptical about everyone else, generally keep the non-domestic animals at a distance, except for the skunks, of course, who go where they please. But last year, a feral kitten fell down a runoff pipe beside the house, and the constant meowing of the kitten, and its sibling at the top of the pipe, eventually alerted us to their presence. To the distant pleasure of their brave and resourceful mother, gardeners dug up the pipe, opened it, and the kittens were conveyed to the veterinarian like two matched Infants of Prague. They returned after a few days in cracking health and undiminished voice and rule the housekeeper’s attached home with the feline assurance of the MGM lion, princes of beasts, and are even deferred to by my wife’s dogs, who are very proprietary with everyone else.

We were somewhat complacently contemplating our status as helpers to nature’s tenacity of life, when the head of the work crew that has been repairing water damage under the copper roof on a pavilion of this house advised that a raccoon and her newborn cub were at the center of the work site, nestled snugly in the newly deployed insulation (cleverly adapted to the requirements of maternity). We all traipsed up the steps to take a view, and only a heart of stone would not have been touched by the sight: Herbert, it emerged, was Henrietta, and her cub was too little to walk or open its eyes, and its mother kept one paw on it at all times, stroking reassuringly. Once again, severe options were out of the question, and Google gave us a crash course on what to expect. As in the affair with the kittens, the local animal-rescue people were utterly hopeless. A year ago, they advised us to starve the kittens to death in the pipe; now, they told us that a mother and her cub could not be moved and there was nothing for it but to concede to the squatters and turn the work site into a veterinary maternity ward for up to eight weeks.

More ingenious heads, especially Henrietta’s, prevailed. As the housekeeper, the felines’ friend, arrived, with a cage trap in one hand and the familiar thick (dental-resistant) gloves in the other, Henrietta conducted an exploration prompted by the workmen’s use of the microwave. The foreman gently removed the cub to a warm, grassy place within an adjacent walled garden. This was the moment of truth, as there is apparently some chance of a mother raccoon’s abandoning a cub who has been handled at all at a young age by a human. But Henrietta, walking with authority despite her youth and fatigue after what must have been a very enervating act of birth, appeared and was seen by my wife scampering at speed with her cub in her mouth to the comparatively under-populated orchard. It too is fenced, as this entire property is zoned into areas so we can rotate the dogs and gardeners around without the dogs’ chasing the gardeners up the trees and forcing them to call for help with their cellphones. There are also the foibles of neighbors to be considered, as some of them are hostile to dogs and manifest this in unseemly ways designed, successfully, to rouse these essentially friendly if protective dogs to simulate the Hound of the Baskervilles and other legendarily terrifying canines. So other fenced areas can provide buffer zones, cordons sanitaires, with neighbors. Henrietta puzzled the system out with great acuity, and she moves between zones with her little passenger; she sometimes returns, when the coast is clear, to the two warmer places, in the roof and on the balcony, that, by her talents as an explorer, she discovered for herself. There have now been enough sightings for me tentatively to claim victory in this little drama for the party of life.

I cannot claim that the point to this mundane story is obvious, yet it all seems reassuring to me — reassuring because everyone, including the workmen, had the same instinct that we must help young life, even though raccoons are at times notoriously irritating animals. And reassuring also because after such a severe winter, the rites of spring have begun, and however challenged and apparently stifled, life always has what it must to go on. Despite the banality of the thought, we have all found it uplifting to see this small confirmation that despite every natural and human challenge and unkindness, life has waged a battle that it has never lost. I should probably apologize for this platitudinous little yarn, but I will not — I have reviewed what other columnists and bloggers have written in the last few days on the more frequent current political and economic personalities and subjects, and Henrietta and her cub are more interesting and more admirable. We would rather have them sheltering in or near our house than almost any contemporary political leader I can think of.

First published in National Review.

Gerrt Wilders, leader of the PVV Freedom Party

Geert Wilders" Freedom Party (PVV) leads in  Dutch polls next month's European Parliament elections.  According to a report in the Dutch publication,  Spitsnieuws:

A TNS NIPO poll published today predicts that the PVV, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders,  will become the biggest party in the European elections in the Netherlands.

According to the poll the PVV is going to win the European elections on 22 May with 18.1% of the votes, followed by the Liberal VVD of Prime Minister Mark Rutte with 16.2% and the liberal-democrat D66 party with 15.7%.

The losers of the European elections would be the Christian-Democrats and Labor.

In our April NER article, Geert Wilders Once Again Endures a Firestorm of Criticism, we noted how Dutch voters in the March 2014 municipal elections had voted their disapproval of the ruling coalition parties in the Hague Parliament, noting how they immediately tried to pin the blame on Geert  Wilders as an extremist.  Presciently in our conclusion we suggested that those same Dutch voters would ultimate vindicate him in the May european elections.  We wrote:

To paraphrase England’s Henry II regarding the fate of former boon companion, Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, the Dutch political and media establishment might say: “who will rid us of this upstart meddlesome blonde.” We hope that those Dutch folks who went to the polls on March 19^th and gave the PVV victories in several smaller municipalities may be joined by others in the majority, who didn’t vote. That might  provide the PVV with a victory in the May EU parliamentary elections. We have seen Wilders bounce back from previous episodes like a proverbial cat with nine lives. His Euro-skeptic alliance partners, especially Ms. Le Pen in France, would deem that a stunning and well deserved turnabout.

Republished from  Dr. Rich Swier eMagazine

Tuesday, a news conference held by New York Police Commissioner William Bratton announced the dismantling of the NYPD Muslim community surveillance program; The Demographic Unit, renamed the Zone Assessment Unit.   Department spokesperson Stephen Davis remarked:

Understanding certain local demographics can be a useful factor when assessing the threat information that comes into New York City virtually on a daily basis. In the future, we will gather that information, if necessary, through direct contact between the police precincts and the representatives of the communities they serve.

Democrat Mayor of New York, William Di Blasio called the move:

 a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve, so that our cops and our citizens can help one another go after the real bad guys.

CAIR New York Board Chairman, Ray Mahoney said:

CAIR-NY welcomes the closing of the NYPD Zone Assessment Unit. This is an important first step. However, the damage of unconstitutional mass spying on people solely on the basis of their religion has already been carried out and must be addressed. We need to hear from the mayor and NYPD officials that the policy itself has been ended and that the department will no longer apply mass surveillance or other forms of biased and predatory policing to any faith-based community.

Linda Sarsour of the Arab American Association of New York said: 

The Demographics Unit created psychological warfare in our community. Those documents, they showed where we live. That’s the cafe where I eat. That’s where I pray. That’s where I buy my groceries. They were able to see their entire lives on those maps. And it completely messed with the psyche of the community.

Thus ends a program developed in 2003 with the assistance  ex-CIA officer Lawrence Sanchez at the request of former Commissioner Ray Kelly. In the wake of 9/11 it was deemed important to try and identify extremists in New York and outlying targeted Muslim communities who might provide assistance in terrorist plots threatening the City of New York.  That meant identifying informants within the community, creating a veritable census of the community and its institutions including monitoring Mosques and their leaders for inflammatory ideology.

Given the failure within the federal intelligence community exposed in the Report of the 9/11 Commission to collect, analyze and disseminate counter terrorism intelligence, forming special units within  the NYPD to detect and prevent terrorist attacks made eminent sense to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.  The NYPD counterterrorism program had another component the International Liaison Program with officers located in 11 overseas cities. The combined NYPD counterterrorism effort  alleged to have stopped more than 16 terrorists plots including intercepting a perpetrator of a possible dirty bomb attack planned for the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan.  These programs have been pummeled with criticism that they were costly, and didn’t result in any arrests. New York Muslim community activitists and civil liberties groups point to a “pretrial examination before the US District Court for the Southern District of New York  in which  Commanding Officer of the Intelligence Division Thomas Galati admitted that the program had never generated a lead”.

With the arrival of   Mayor DiBlasio and Commissioner Bratton in 2014, the Muslim Community Mapping effort by the NYPD became subject to litigation by Muslim plaintiffs, in actions previously  filed in the Newark, New Jersey Federal District Court and in the Eastern District Court  in Brooklyn. Mayor DiBlasio during his electoral campaign had urged accommodation of New York Muslim community concerns. The Washington Post tagged Bratton, in December 2013 as   “healer in chief of a worried Muslim community”.

The first case was brought by Muslim plaintiffs in 2012 against the City of New York as a result of a 2011 Associated Press investigation of the New York Police Department (NYPD) surveillance of Muslim mosques in New Jersey.  The AP series:

Revealed that the NYPD dispatched undercover officers into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program.  Police also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there was no evidence of wrongdoing. Hundreds of mosques and Muslim student groups were investigated and dozens were infiltrated. Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit after 9/11.

The NYPD had also undertaken similar surveillance  of the Somali Muslim community in Buffalo, New York.  The Newark federal court ruling was immediately contested by Muslim community leaders and civil rights groups as abetting ‘spying’ and so-called community profiling. The New Jersey case harkens back to CAIR and other Muslim advocacy groups in New York contesting a 2007 NYPD Muslim profiling   manual.  There was also  a case brought by an ex- Muslim NYPD officer against a consultant to the NYPD counterterrorism unit. Ironically, former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, who set up the Muslim community surveillance program, received an award in 2012 from the Department’s Muslim Advisory Council.

On February 20, 2014, the first action brought by New Jersey Muslim Plaintiffs in the matter of Hassan v. City of New York, 2:12-CV-3401, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey (Newark) was dismissed by Federal District Judge William F. Martini who noted in his decision:

[T]he Plaintiffs in this case have not alleged facts from which it can be plausibly inferred that they were targeted solely because of their religion.  The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorists’ activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself. While this surveillance program may have had adverse effects upon the Muslim community after the AP published its articles; the motive for the program was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims.

In an interview with Brooke Goldstein of the Lawfare Project, we asked her about the NYPD surveillance program.  She said:

What I can say is that from my dealings with the NYPD, they were not targeting Muslims and engaging in discrimination based on race or religion.  What they were doing was targeting institutions that have a connection to terrorism and those groups happen to be Islamist.  ... Simply because of the fact they have a theological justification has now opened up the NYPD surveillance program to accusations of so-called Islamophobia which are absolutely baseless and ridiculous. 

In light of Tuesday’s announcement by NYPD Commissioner Bratton, could the Eastern District case brought by New York plaintiffs be mooted?   Or will the announcement spur further Lawfare litigation by New York Muslim plaintiffs?

The NYPD  abandonment of the Muslim community mapping programs  may  embolden Muslim Brotherhood influencers in the Obama Administration, especially Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary for policy and Mohamed Elibiary, a senior member of the US Department of Homeland Security’s  advisory council.  Alikhan, as deputy mayor of Los Angeles for public safety, worked to scuttle  a similar Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)  Muslim community ‘mapping’ program in 2007 when current NYPD Police Commissioner William Bratton was LAPD  Police Chief from 2002-2009.  Elibiary on the DHS Advisory panel had been actively involved in elimination of Islamic Jihad doctrine from DHS and other federal agencies’ counterterrorism training materials.  Perhaps NYPD Commissioner might turn to a community self policing proposal being promoted by MPAC, a Muslim Brotherhood front with influence in Washington,   called “Safe Spaces”.  According to a Wall Street Journal article,  “Mosques get a New Message”, Safe Spaces , is about  a voluntary program  by boards of  American  Mosques engaging in identifying and ‘converting’ extremists in their midst thereby co-opting local and national law enforcement profiling of their communities. 

With the end the NYPD Muslim community surveillance by order of Commissioner Bratton, New Yorkers must be concerned about who will monitor Islamist extremists and potential terror threats in the Big Apple.  As of Tuesday, Lawfare by Muslim Brotherhood interests reigns supreme in all five boroughs.

Count all the ways Rami Khouri, Defender of the Faith (though it's a faith I don't believe he shares -- I think he's an example of that well-known phenomenon, the Arab islamochristian, who wraps himself in protective 'Uruba solidarity, and attempts to fit into a Muslim sea mainly by being plus-royaliste-que-le-roi in his hostility toward Israel) manages to misrepresent and malign Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and compare his tone with hers, in her many interviews, articles, and two books. Whose is the quiet tone of reason, and whose that hysterical tone to which, by now, devotees of www.MEMRITV.org have all grown  inured?

Rami Khouri has made a fatal mistake. He's quoted Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And even though the remarks are plucked out of context, and no doubt the most uncompromisinig of her remarks, they still make sense. What he's quoted, in order, he thinks, to show her up, will have the opposite effect, will strike many readers -- especially Christians living in Lebanon and those Muslims-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims who have long agonized over what happens to minds on Islam, and especially today, as they look around the world, even in Muslim lands, must be in an agony of doubt and hidden apostasy  -- as piercingly true.

First published in the American Thinker.

Posted just today, the following employment ad from Brown University is the distilled expression of much that is wrong in university life. It used to be said tha tin a good poem not a word should  be changed (it's not true, but it points in the direction of a truth); in this announcement from Brown, every word needs changed. Some semblance of life-- not the "life of the mind" (ridiculous phrase) but of mind -- needs to be given to what now is dead and deadening. The nothing words and the nothing understandings that lie behind these nothing words -- well, nothing will come of nothing. Write again.

Associate Director, Middle East Studies

Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Brown University is seeking an Associate Director, Middle East Studies to provide critical leadership and direction in support of programmatic initiatives, strategic growth and curricular development.  Middle East Studies at Brown is in a transition period of rapid growth and the position offers an exciting opportunity for motivated and highly organized individuals to institutionalize an agenda-driven program grounded in Brown’s tradition of interdisciplinary, critical, and engaged scholarship.

Position Summary:

• The Associate Director provides critical leadership and direction in support of programmatic initiatives, strategic growth and curricular development of Middle East Studies, including an interdisciplinary undergraduate concentration and its related research and instructional activities. 
• In conjunction with the Faculty Director, the Associate Director will create, design, and oversee innovative and long-term development of the concentration, while also teaching one to two courses per year and serving as a Student Advisor. 
• This position will participate in the development of outreach initiatives, including advancement and fund raising opportunities, program events, grant writing, web design, supporting visiting professors and Post-Docs, and the creation of promotional materials. 
• The position of Associate Director will serve as a principle program liaison to faculty, students, and administrators across departments and offices within the University, and represent the program on University committees as appropriate.
• As the Associate Director, the incumbent will also cultivate and coordinate relations with similar programs and centers in other universities as well as with scholars and academic institutions on the national and international levels.

It was Robert Louis Stevenson who said: “Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone but principally by catchwords.” Refining our thoughts with qualifications can get tiring, so we recur to slogans to capture a reality that is almost always complex.

Alas, what should be the shorthand of thought often turns out to be the short-circuit of thought. When we think of Margaret Thatcher, for example, we think of free-market reforms—whether we are for such reforms or against them, whether we welcome or abominate them.

Is this right? Was Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy one of free markets, of laissez-faire? I am far from sure.

The question first came up when my late friend, the development economist, Peter Bauer (who was a formidable opponent of the orthodoxies of his time) said to me that he thought Mrs. Thatcher had talked a great deal but had actually done very little. In a way, he said, she had even set her own cause back because her strident language had convinced people that she had carried out her radical program, thus arousing the undying hatred of her intellectual opponents as if she had done so, while in fact she changed very little, at least as regards the fundamentals. She thus gave the ideas for which she stood a bad name without their ever having been put into practice.

This came up again recently when a think tank sent me an email circular with the title,Margaret Thatcher—A Free Market Legacy? Of course, the answer depends somewhat on what you consider a political legacy to be. Is all that happens after a politician leaves power his legacy, or only those parts of what is done that are either in accordance with or in conscious opposition to his precepts? Some reforms or changes are irreversible, others easily reversible. Does a legacy consist only of the former?

In the case of Britain and Mrs. Thatcher, I prefer to speak of her effect rather than her legacy. It seems to me that she subdued the political power of the unions, but that that power would have declined anyway—as it has done in France even without a Thatcher figure to lead the charge. That said, she handled the coal miners with skill and determination. After she defeated the Miners’ Union, no other union would lightly take her government on. And so far, at least, British unions have not recovered their extra-constitutional role as the fourth, and seemingly most powerful, branch of government. Even Peter Bauer acknowledged this as an achievement.

But did Mrs. Thatcher roll back the state, as it was her intention and indeed vocation to do? Here I think the answer must decisively be no. That is, at least if the question is about her long-term effect. It is true that she managed to reduce the public sector’s proportion of the Gross Domestic Product somewhat during her term in office. But 30 years after she entered office, it was higher than when she entered it. In 1979 it was 44.6 per cent; in 2009, 47.7 per cent. Her long-term effect (if 30 years counts as the long-term) on the size of the state was nil, despite her reputation as a prudent or even savage cutter of public services.

She did nothing to reduce dependence on the state as a source of primary income. On the contrary, during her period in office, spending on social security increased rather than decreased. (This was largely because unemployment rose so high; it was ethically, socially, and politically impossible to drive down the income of the unemployed to the value of their labor to employers, which in many cases would probably have been negative.) Government spending having declined as a proportion of GDP, social security increased proportionately even more. Mrs. Thatcher did not, because she could not, effect any fundamental change in the model of the welfare state. That model, in democracies at least, has a one-way ratchet.

Mrs Thatcher was loved and hated not so much because she changed things, but because she said she wanted to. Wilfred Owen notwithstanding, men always fight for flags because symbols are more powerful in their minds than reality.

Such measures as GDP are very crude when it comes to estimating the effect on a society of a politician of Mrs. Thatcher’s stature. Still, my impression is that her effect, where it was long-lasting, was predominantly negative.

Mrs. Thatcher gave the impression of being an economic determinist—a mirror-image Marxist if you will. Whether she really was in the inner fastnesses of her mind is beside the point. In politics, what people think you are is often more important than what you are. She gave the impression that if the economy were fixed, everything else desirable would follow as the night the day, and that the way to fix it was to let everyone follow his own narrow economic interest.

To be sure, it was very necessary in Britain at the time to try to undo the effect of many years of intellectual propaganda against all forms of commerce, which the intelligentsia then thought was intrinsically besmirching in a way that public service funded by taxation was not. The utopia peddled by the intellectuals was of a society in which everybody and everything was subsidized. (The ultimate source of the subsidies, of course, was of no interest or concern.)

Margaret Thatcher was, in effect, the Guizot of 20th century Britain: enrichissez vous was her message to the British people. Unfortunately, it was not only the people in the genuinely commercial sector who heard the message. Those in the public sector did, too. This sector never became small; and Mrs Thatcher, not able to reduce it, thought to tame it by introducing scientific management into it.

She believed in scientific management as scientologists believe in L. Ron Hubbard. Unfortunately, this meant that enichissez vous quickly became the watchword of the public administration, whose senior bureaucrats successfully argued that, as managers of vast enterprises such as public hospitals, which were now to be run as businesses, they could arrogate to themselves every perquisite enjoyed by the captains of industry and the kings of commerce. The result has been that employment in the public sector is more lucrative than in the private, and much less risky. There are many towns in Britain in which the middle class is composed almost solely of so-called public servants.

The supposedly scientific management that Mrs. Thatcher introduced into the public sector had, ironically enough, a strong Soviet flavor to it, complete with bogus benchmarks easily reached by means of organized lying and falsification, as well as the universal employment of a langue de bois all its own. As a professor in Bristol put it when the government suddenly introduced a new term, clinical governance, into its circulars without explaining what it meant: “clinical governance is a term untranslatable into any other language, including English.” The Iron Lady, the most anti-Soviet of all recent British Prime Ministers, immeasurably advanced the cause of Sovietism, regrettably, in her own country.

Her successor-but-one, Anthony Blair, with the cunning of the natural born swindler, seized his chance and created a loyal, corrupt, self-seeking nomenklatura class that remains extremely influential and easily able to outwit the blancmange-like David Cameron, who in any case so easily moulds himself to any shape going.

I concede, of course, that any historical interpretation is open to dispute and revision. Moreover, to blame a figure for not having done the impossible is not to damage her reputation in the slightest. There is (thank goodness) a limit to what one person can do in countries such as the United Kingdom. I liked Mrs. Thatcher personally and she was head and shoulders above the other political figures of her time. But that only shows that politics are the shadow on the cave wall.

First published in the Library of Law and Liberty. 

Today marked the first commemoration of the Boston Marathon Bombing that occurred at the Boylston Street finish line on April 15, 2013 in two devastating explosions at 2:49 PM triggered by homemade pressure cookers bombs packed with lethal shrapnel. The nation was riveted for five days by the pursuant of refugee Jihadists of Chechen origin, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarneav who planned and perpetrated the bombing. The elder Tamerlan dies in a hail of bullets, while his younger sibling Dzhokhar was captured cowering in a boat in the backyard of a Watertown neighborhood. Dzhokhar’s trial is scheduled in a Boston Federal Court in November 2014.  The Federal prosecutors are seeking a death penalty for his actions.

President Obama observed the Bombing in a private moment of silence. Vice President Biden journeyed to Boston to join in a memorial with Mayor Marty Walsh, former Mayor Thomas Menino, Massachusetts Governor Derval Patrick first responders and four survivors at a series of scheduled events at the Hynes Convention Center.

 Biden commended these survivors for their “pure courage”.  Further he said, “You have become the face of America’s resolve.” He completed his speech saying, "We are Boston. We are America. We respond, we endure, we overcome, and we own the finish line." 

Governor Patrick reflecting the Hub City’s community spirit said, “We are no strangers here.”

These remarks at today’s commemoration and memorial bolstered the imagery of Boston Strong defiant, yet grieving over the losses in both human and spiritual terms.  There is an exhibit at the Boston Public Library at the head of the Copley Square with a selection drawn from the City of Boston Archives of the global outpouring of sympathies.  There were blessings for runners who have signed up for the 2014 Marathon, re- scheduled for April 21^st, who will run in  the name of those killed and injured, many maimed for life with missing limbs. There will be panel discussions of the resilience of the Boston community and books to be published on the occasion of this commemoration.

Governor Patrick has contended that  security planning for this year’s Boston Marathon is has been “very thorough”,   preparing  for the legendary race’s 26 mile plus route from suburban Hopkington,Massachusetts to the finish line in Copley Square.

The devastation is reflected in the opening stanzas of our article on this tragic event in the May 2013 edition of the New English Review, Refugee Jihad Terror in Boston:

Those Boston Marathon blasts occurred less than 13 seconds apart at approximately 2:49 PM on Monday, April 15, 2013. They left a trail of deaths and destruction in what is now called the Boston Marathon Massacre involving three dead and more that 282 treated for injuries. Fourteen were severely maimed for life with missing limbs. The deaths caused by the Tsarnaev brothers include 8 year old Martin Richard, 29 year old Krystle Campbell and 23 year old Lu Lingzi, a Chinese national and Boston University graduate student. 26 year old MIT police officer Sean Collier was killed by the Tsarnaevs while in his patrol car in Cambridge. Richard Donahue, a 33 year old Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority police officer was also shot and critically wounded.

Notwithstanding, perhaps because of today’s commemorations in Boston there are lingering questions even before the trial of younger brother Dzhokhar begins later this year in Boston.

Questions remain regarding whether the Jihad attack could have been prevented given emerging evidence.

There is  evidence of Russian intercepts of telephone conversations between Tamerlan and his mother in Dagestan expressing jihadist ideology passed on to the FBI in 2011.  A recent Intelligence Inspector General report exonerated the FBI pointing a finger at the alleged failure of the Russian intelligence service to respond to follow up questions.  There are allegations  by Dzhokhar’s lawyers that the FBI tried to enlist elder brother Tamerlan as an informant.

Then there is a question raised in a recent Boston Magazine investigative article  “Murders before the Marathon” about the Middlesex County prosecutor and FBI investigations of the grisly 2011 murders of three men, two of them Jews,  in an alleged  bust drug deal in Waltham, Massachusetts on 9/11/2011.  The three murdered men “Brendan Mess, 25; Raphael Teken, 37; and Eric Weissman, 31, were found with their throats cut in September of 2011, and their bodies were covered with marijuana.” The author of the Boston Magazine article had met one of the victims Eric Weissman, a purveyor of designer marijuana in a casual deal as a college student and was able to interview the victim’s wife and the girl friend of one of the accomplices killed in an Orlando, Florida shooting by an FBI agent.

 According to the Boston Magazine article the information available to Middlesex County police and prosecutors might have led to indictment of the Tsarneavs thereby preventing implementation of their jihad at the Marathon finish line in 2013. Those investigations into the Waltham triple murders went cold for over 570 days, only reignited by the Tsarneav perpetration of the Marathon Bombing.  There was  both DNA evidence and corroboration of  the perpetrators by the wife of the one of those murdered linking the participation of Tsarneavs along with an accomplice,  fellow Chechen Refugee, Ibragim Todashev.

Todashev, according to Ann Corcoran at Refugee Resettlement Watch, was granted asylum by the US DOJ Executive Office of Immigration Review under false pretenses pointing to a threat to his life in Chechnya, despite the fact that his father was a Chechen official.  Todashev was killed in an alleged assault in his Orlando apartment nine months ago in a shooting by an FBI agent allegedly justified by a knife attack by Todaschev. That killing is still being investigated by independent Florida prosecutors. However, recently the FBI Agent’s actions were deemed “justified”.

There is also the matter of  whether the Mosque in Cambridge, affiliated with Muslim Brotherhood-backed Islamic Cultural Center of Boston (ISBCC) should have been subject to community policing akin to that of the NYPD.  We raise this because another Muslim Brotherhood front, MPAC with entre to the Obama White House, FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory council, has been promoting an initiative, “Safe Spaces”.  According to a Wall Street Journal article,  “Mosques get a New Message”, Safe Spaces , is about  a voluntary program  by boards of  American  Mosques engaging in identifying and ‘converting’ extremists in their midst thereby co-opting local and national law enforcement profiling of their communities.  The trigger for the MPAC initiative is an incident that occurred at the Cambridge Mosque involved Tamerlan in January 2013. The WSJ article noted the event and reactions of the ISBCC spokesperson to the MPAC Safe Spaces initiative:

In January 2013, months before the bombing, [Tamerlan] shouted at a speaker who compared Martin Luther King Jr. to Muhammad, calling him a "hypocrite."

Afterward, mosque leaders gave him an ultimatum, saying that if he ever interrupted Friday service again he would be expelled, said Yusufi Vali, a spokesman for the mosque.

The MPAC report said Mr. Tamerlan's outbursts "were more than enough cause for concern to warrant intervention from community leaders to help provide counseling" which "might have revealed other red flags that would generate greater concern" and eventually have alerted law enforcement.

Mr. Vali said he hadn't yet read the MPAC report, and declined to comment on it, "so I can't respond to adopting the initiative or whether that would have been a better approach."

This first commemoration is focused on the resilience of Boston honoring the memories of those who lost their lives at the hands of the Jihadists, the Tsarneav brothers. 

Tuesday evening, Boston Police detained a man for questioning about two unattended backpacks left at the Boylston Street Marathon finish line.  ABC news reported the bomb squad blew u p the backpacks. Police have cleared the area. Trains are bypassing the nearby Copley Square station. The police department has tweeted asking people to avoid the area.

Given the continuing investigations into the Bombing and these latest developments, are Boston and our nation prepared to prevent another jihadist attack in a public space?

News just to hand.   Background briefing: police were called to a report of a domestic viiolence incident.  Members of the Muslim family involved, assaulted police and were arrested.  Certain of the persons involved had just been formally charged when this second riot was started..right there in the court.

The Muslims are, of course, claiming they wuz "provoked!!!" and crying victim (I encourage readers to click on the links and look at photos of drama queen be-hijabbed mama and her menacing thuggish sons) but I would bet my bottom dollar that the court's CCTV footage, slowed down and viewed frame by frame if necessary, will show that the mohammedthug threw the first punch.

And so to our reports.

First, from the ABC.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-15/riot-squad-called-to-courtroom-brawl-in-sydney/5392260

"Riot squad called to courtroom brawl involving Sydney family charged with assaulting police".

"The riot squad has been called to a Sydney courtroom to deal with a brawl between police and members of a family (a Muslim family - CM) facing charges for assaulting police.

'Five members of the Mehanna family were facing Downing Centre Local Court in central Sydney over charges of Affray and assaulting police on New Year's Day in 2013 at their Bankstown home.

'Witnesses said that shortly after the lunch adjournment one of the Mehanna brothers struck a police officer, starting a courtroom brawl that involved more than 30 officers.

That's not a brawl. That's a riot. In a court.  It wasn't outside the court, either. It was inside the court.  I am not sure that Australian non-Muslims have ever pulled this kind of stunt in a court. Not even in our wildest colonial days. - CM

'But Ali Mehanna claims it was police who started the altercation.

Suuuure. And what do we know about Muslims? They lie, lie, lie, lie, lie; and they always, always, always cry victim, and cry "grievance!" and "we wuz pwovoked!!" and  claim that the other guy started it.  Ali Mehanna's screams of "victim" and "provocation" are totally and dismally predictable.  It will be fun to see what happens if - as I strongly suspect - the CCTV footage from the courtroom plus anything filmed on mobile phones, etc, by non-Muslim persons present in the court, shows decisively that the fight was started by the Muslim participants. - CM

"There was no need for more police. Officers were in court dealing with the situation. Tehre were six or seven other police officers outside of the courtroom", he said.

I see the massive reinforcement of the courtroom cops as a healthy sign that Australian police are learning to instantly deploy overwhelming force when violent Mohammedans begin causing Trouble. - CM

"As my brother and the family has left the court room, they provoked him.

You know what, Mr Mehanna?  I don't believe you. - CM

"They were pushing, shoving, and before you knew it he was getting hit and punched by the police officers.

Again, Mr Mehanna, I don't believe you. - CM

"And then while they were arresting him on the floor, they started kicking him, kneeing him..it was police brutality all over".

Wait for the CCTV footage to be analysed. It may well tell a story of an out-of-control run-amok mohammedthug having to be subdued by main force. - CM

'The original case against members of the Mehanna family was adjourned for sentencing until next month.

'Police say one officer was injured in the brawl, and at least one member of the Mehanna family has been taken into custody.

Observe.  The Muslim mobster, Ali Mehanna, claimed the police were beating up on his bruvva; yet there is no hint that either that bruvva (who started the fight) or anyone else in the Mob incurred any real injury; the only person injured was a police officer . -

And now to the Sydney Morning Herald version, from their court reporter Emma Partridge.

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/dozens-of-police-in-brawl-at-downing-centre-court-20140415-36p6c.html

"Dozens of police in brawl at Downing Centre court".

"Witnesses describe a brawl between police and a group of brothers who had just been convicted at Sydney's Downing Centre Courts on Tuesday.

"Dozens of police officers have been involved in a brawl inside a Sydney court with a family (that is: a Muslim family - CM) on trial for brawling with police.

'One officer was "smacked in the face" during the fight, witness and 2UE court reporter Leonie Ryan said.

Non-Muslim witness. Good.  - CM

'A number of police cars circled the Downing Centre at lunchtime on Tuesday.

'The fight broke out minutes after Adel, Hussain and Ali Mehanna were convicted of numerous offences, including affray, resisting arrest and assaulting police during a fight that broke out outside their Bankstown home on January 1 2013.

"Five Mehanna family members were facing police assault charges after the brawl.

'Ali Mehanna, who was allegedly involved in Tuesday's scrum (really? "scrum"?? - this was at least a brawl, and potentially a riot - CM) on level four, kept screaming "This is police brutality".

Suuuure. - CM

 'Ryan said Adel Mehanna was inside the dock of the courtroom when he started screaming: "I'm going to f***ing kill you".

Uttering threats to kill, right there in court. Not smart.  Ugly.  And Ali Mehanna wants to represent himself and his thuggish family as poor little innocent persecuted victims, attacked out of the blue by the eeevil police? - CM

'Officers then stormed in as Corrective Services attempted to take him away.

Sounds like he should have been in a straitjacket. - CM

"We walked out of court, we were standing outside the doors, and all of a sudden we just hear screaming.  We turned around and it was almost like a football match brawl", she said.

"There were punches being thrown everywhere. It was just fists flying everywhere and screaming.

'She said one police officer was punched in the face before a man was tackled to the ground and handcuffed.

Nota bene.  First the police officer was punched in the face - by the mohammedthug - and then the person who threw the punch was tackled and handcuffed (while, one may safely assume, continuing to violently resist arrest). - CM

'Ali Mehanna told reporters outside the court that his brother, who was arrested over the brawl, was the victim of an "unprovoked attack".

Turnspeak. Reversal of reality. Because the account I've just read, by the non-Muslim witness, indicates that his brother started the fight by assaulting a police officer. - CM

"They provoked my brother as he walked out, they found a reason and then 'bang' they jumped on him", Ali Mehanna said.

"There were officers outside of the courtroom, there was no need for officers to be outside of the courtroom (oh yes there was...because visible deployment of overwhelming force is the only way for Infidel law enforcement to deal with the ever-present possibility of the mohammedan insta-mob - CM), and then as we were leaving there was six or seven of them."

All necessary, so far as I can see.  If there had been few or no police present, what might have happened to the non-Muslim persons present in and around that court? - CM

'Family supported Hassan Anthony kept repeating the words "police brutality".

Nobody actually got hurt, except a police officer.  That tells me the police used just as much force as was necessary to subdue a dangerous and out-of-control person who represented a manifest threat.- CM

"They hit him (a family) to the face, they kneed him in the back", Mr Anthony said.

He wasn't taken away to hospital so I assume very little actual harm was done. - CM

"There was no mercy, all because they (police officers) are wearing the colour blue", he said.

???? What's the colour blue got to do with it? And.. no mercy?  His thuggish kinsman was subdued and arrested, as he required to be - and without sustaining, in the process, any injury serious enought to require medical attention. That's mercy, as far as I'm concerned.  - CM

The case continues.

Now to our third 'take' on this disgraceful incident; this time, from the Daily Telegraph's Lema Samandar, as reproduced by "The Australian".  

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/brawl-erupts-outside-court-rooms-as-three-members-from-the-same-family-were-convicted-of-assaulting-police/story-e6frg6n6-1226885070088

"Brawl erupts outside court rooms as three members from the same family were convicted of assaulting police".

That is: another member of the same family...assaulted police. In the court. - CM

'A Western Sydney family who were in court today over assaulting police began a brawl with officers outside a courtroom, saying they were provoked.

How, "provoked", given that they started the fight? This is bog-standard mohammedan turnspeak and reversal of reality.  But one must bear in mind that absolutely everything on earth seems to "provoke" or offend mohammedans.  The real "provocation" was probably the fact that members of the Allah Gang, the Ummah or Mohammedan Mob, were being publicly subjected to processes of Infidel law...Infidel law for which Muslims are taught to feel nothing but contempt. - CM

'Dozens of officers and riot squad police swarmed the Downing Centre Local Court moments after a fight broke out between members of the Mehanna family and police.

Probably that sentence should have ended, "moments after a member or members of the Mehanna family attacked police." - CM

'But outside court, Ali Mehanna said police crash-tackled his brother Hassan as he was walking out of court.

"After the court dismissed most (but not all - CM) of the charges (against) my mother, my father, my sister, m y brother - the cops aggravated the situation", Mr Mehanna said.

"As my brother left the courtroom they came, they provoked him

How? By looking at him funny? It seems clear, from the non-Muslim witness quoted in reports I've already considered, that nobody actually did anything to the mohammedthug until after he threw the punch. - CM

"and they rearrested him."

Mr Mehanna has omitted something.  In between the claim "they provoked him" which does seem to refer to any kind of physical or verbal attack, and "and they rearrested him", there is the punch thrown at the police officer. - CM

 "There's videos of the officer constantly hitting my brother, there was six, seven of them on top of him, they were hitting him."

But there will also be, I bet, video - and non-Muslim eyewitness testimony, too - of the mohammedthug throwing the first punch. - CM

'Up to six officers tried to restrain Hassan Mehanna, he screamed "help me, somebody help me".

That six officers were required to restrain him suggests that he was violently resisting arrest. And...the fact of six officers, and more arriving on the scene, is probably why other mohammedthugs present seem to have pulled in their horns, rather than proceeding to a full-scale riot. -  CM

'The brawl happened minutes after Magistrate Darryl Pearce convicted brothers Adel, Hussan ahd Ali Mehanna of numerous offences, including affray, resisting arrest, and assaulting police during a fight that broke out outside their Bankstown home on New Year's Day last year.

'And that, I suspect, is the real "provocation" that Mr Ali Mehanna is whining about; that a number of mohammedans are about to be punished under non-Muslim law. - CM

'As people left the court, Adel screamed out from the dock, "I'm going to kill you".

I observe that the Daily Telegraph has primly omitted his use of the F-bomb, but of course, what matters is the public expression of a threat to kill.   If the Australian authorities knew what they were doing, Adel Mehanna and his entire family would be looking down the barrel of deportation.  Unfortunately, we've not realized that yet; in the interim, I hope that Adel Mehanna after publicly uttering a threat to kill, is now firmly on the list of people to be watched, by the AFP and ASIO.  

And yet more, from Channel Nine, giving some idea of just why exactly so many police had to be deployed.  The violence and the feverish histrionics of the Muslim street, exploding inside a courtroom in Sydney. - CM

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/2014/04/15/12/58/brawl-erupts-outside-sydney-courtroom

'Brawl erupts outside Sydney Court.

"Moments after three brothers (three Muslim brothers - CM) were convicted over a brawl with police, there was screaming, punching and wailing as another altercation with officers erupted at a Sydney court.

'Dozens of officers and riot ssquad police swarmed over level four of Downing Central Local Court on Tuesday after brothers Adel, Hussain, and Ali Mehanna were convicted of numerous offences, including affray and resisting arrest.

'After the decision was handed down, Adel yelled out from the dock at people leaving the court, "I'm going to f***ing kill you".

'An altercation with police and one of the brothers then spilled out of the court into the foyer.

'As bewildered members of staff and the public stared on, six officers tried to restrain one of the brothers who lay writhing on the floor screaming, "Help me, somebody help me".

'His mother Rafah Mehannah wailed and screamed out, "No, no".  She was later taken from the court in an ambulance.

Drama queen. - CM

'The three brothers, as well as their mother, their father Mohammed and sister Zainab, had just faced charges in court over the altercation with police at their Bankstown home.

'The court heard police had been called to the property after reports of a domestic dispute in the early hours of New Year's Day last year.

'When two officers arrived, the three brothers were smoking on the front lawn.  

'Magistrate Darryl Pearce said Ali had sworn at them, calling one a "slut" (this indicates that, as per usual procedure when police go to a suspected domestic dispute, one of the attending officers was female - CM), and telling them it was a family matter.

'Despite police discovering there was no case of domestic violence, at least 10 more officers turned up.

Probably because Sydney police have learnt, the hard way, that in any dealings with members of the Mohammedan mob, it is as well to deploy force majeure. - CM

'The situation escalated (how, precisely? - CM), and a "brawl" broke out, with the brothers found to have assaulted a number of police and resisted arrest.

'However, Magistrate Pearce dismissed the charges against Mr and Mrs Mehanna and Zainab, saying that they had only acted in defence of their family.

?????  - CM

'He said the trio would have come out of the house to see one officer with a gun drawn, others holding tasers and others punching the three men.

Memo to cops engaged in any interaction at all with the mohammedan mob: make sure everything, from the beginning, is video and audio recorded, so that it  may be objectively clear who did what, when. - CM

'Speaking outside court, a supporter of the family alleged the Mehannas had again been attacked by police on Tuesday.  "If you don't believe us, you can believe the camera footage", he told reporters.

Suuuure.  Me, I suspect the camera footage will tell quite a different tale. - CM

'Hussain was taken into custody following Tuesday's ugly scenes while Adel (the one who yelled at people who were leavng the court, "I'm going to f-ing kill you! - CM) remains in custody. Ali was given bail. (I wonder if he'll try to flit? - CM).

"The matters will return to court next month."

And I suspect there will be an even bigger and more visible police presence, next time around. - CM

At least the division within Arab countries is now being noticed. But what is still verboten is the subject of rich, lightly-populated Arab sheikdoms, and the poverty of the Arabs -- and Muslims -- in Egypt, the rest of North Africa (excluding LIbya if it manages to start selling oil again), Yemen, and in Syria, and even Iraq. There is no discussion of what the fabulously rich members of the Umma ought to do to support other members of the Umma, outside their own countries. But it's clear from the tepid response to appeals to give aid to Syrians that the West is fed up having to shell out still more billions, while the rich Arabs, in such places as Qatar, with trillions to split among fewer than 200,00 Qataris, are not contributing, or contributing so little compared to what they could be doing.

The article, at Al Arabiya, here.

When articles about this appear in the West, written by Westerners, they are overheard in the Arab and Muslim lands. And that's good. It would  not take much to rouse fury among poorer Arabs and Muslims against the rich Arabs and Muslims. Why should people in Pakistan not resent the waddling emirs of the Gulf who, after all, are members of the same 'Umma and should be willing to share that wealth with fellow Muslimjs? That's part of  what belonging to that 'Umma is suppposed to mean. But the rich Arabs are not going to share more than a very tiny bit. And they have no intention of letting this world-wide caliphate business, or even the idea of  a single Arab state, go anywhere, for it would mean having to share that wealth.

Eventually the poorer Arabs are going to catch on..

The belief that everyone can be persuaded by argument to behave well is, I suppose, a corollary of the notion that no man does wrong knowingly. The task of the moralist, then, is to get people to understand the true nature of their conduct, to educate them; and once this is done, the reprehensible conduct will cease by itself.

This is an optimistic theory, and like all optimism is unfounded. Men not only do wrong knowingly, but often do wrong because they know it is wrong. Of course, every false theory is an employment opportunity for someone. The truth might set you free, but it will also sometimes make you unemployed. And unemployment is more to be feared than is freedom to be welcomed.

Recently I attended our annual town meeting. The senior policeman in charge of our area was there to take public questions. He was very smooth, and might just as well have been a mildly evangelical vicar as a policeman. One of the townspeople asked him about periodical nuisance in the town, namely the descent upon it of hundreds of motorcyclists who gather garbed in black leather at a disgusting café a few miles out of town, and arrive like a swarm of African killer bees, their machines making a sound like angry hymenopterans of Brobdingnagian size.

Was it an offence to make such a noise, asked the townsman?

'No,' replied the vicar-policeman.

If he had left it at that, we should all have been satisfied with the knowledge that in order to do something about it, if we felt sufficiently moved to do anything at all, we should have to lobby parliament. However, the vicar-policeman (presumably his boss was a canon-policeman, or even a bishop-policeman) continued:

'We are working with the bikers to educate them about the noise they make. We send an officer to the café on the weekends when they meet there.'

This infuriated me. Talk about wasting police time! It was grossly disparaging of us to imagine that we should be impressed by such evident absurdity, and condescending to the bikers themselves to suppose that they were unaware that the revving of their engines made a noise fit to bring down the walls of our town.

They did not make the noise because they were unaware of it, they made the noise because they liked it. The pretence that ignorance was the heart of the problem (the vicar-policeman was far from stupid) gave his force an excuse to engage on pseudowork, so much easier and less wearing to perform than real work.

First published in Salisbury Review.    

He has hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions. But he expects attractive Western girls (he's using the usual maquereaux at modelling and casting agencies), living in Europe, to take his herd of womenfolkin tow  (and, very likely,when the occasion warrants, to attend to his own needs, but for that, possibly, he intends to pay extra).

Read about the Dubai sheikh, looking for 60 "personal assistants," here.