Some interesting reaction to this latest PC idea.

From The Times 

Police sniffer dogs will have to wear bootees when searching the homes of Muslims so as not to cause offence.

Guidelines being drawn up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) urge awareness of religious sensitivities when using dogs to search for drugs and explosives. The guidelines, to be published this year, were designed to cover mosques but have been extended to include other buildings.

Islamic injunctions warn Muslims against contact with dogs, which are regarded as “unclean”.

Police dogs at present are issued with footwear only at scenes of explosions to prevent them injuring their paws on broken glass.  The welfare of the dog must be paramount. I know some sniffer dogs socially and they couldn’t be nicer animals were they cats.

Ibrahim Mogra, one of Britain’s leading imams, said the measures were unnecessary: “In Islamic law the dog is not regarded as impure, only its saliva is. Most Islamic schools of law agree on that. If security measures require to send a dog into a house, then it has to be done. I think Acpo needs to consult better and more widely.

“I know in the Muslim community there is a hang-up against dogs, but this is cultural. Also, we know the British like dogs; we Muslims should do our bit to change our attitudes.”  Some sense.

John Midgley, co-founder of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, said: “The police are in effect being overly sensitive to potential criminals and not being sensitive enough to the public at large who need to be protected. These sort of things have a counter-productive effect because they cause huge friction between different communities.”

Here is a good example of the phenomenon of secular Christianity which follows the modern tendancy to locate evil in the outer world and reduces religion to a social movement. From the Boston Globe:

Barack Obama called "active faith" an obligation of religious Americans and a chief agent of societal change in a speech yesterday at the national meeting of a black church group.

Stopping for about two hours in St. Louis, the Democratic presidential nominee implored thousands of members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the nation's largest and most politically active black denominations, to help fix national and local ills.

He preached individual responsibility, saying he knew he risked criticism for "blaming the victim" by talking about the need for parents to help children with homework and turn off the television to pass on a healthy self-image to daughters, and teach boys both to respect women and "realize that responsibility does not end at conception."

But Obama's main message was the government's duty to address what he said are "moral problems" - such as war, poverty, joblessness, homelessness, violent streets, and crumbling schools - and to employ religious institutions to do it.

"As long as we're not doing everything in our individual and collective power to solve the challenges we face, the conscience of our nation cannot rest," he said...

"Solve the challenges we face..."
--Barack Obama quoted in the article linked below

One "solves" problems. One "meets" challenges. The belief that this or that world-shaking matter -- the menace of Islam, the now-unavoidable climate disruption -- very soon, it will no longer be possible to continue to deny either one-- -- is a "problem" leads to the belief or hope that there is a "solution." But many things are not susceptible of "solution." They can be dealt with, however, made less rather than more threatening, the size of the threat, the likely consequences of the threat, diminished.

Obama's self-assured carelessness in his choice of verb endows the word "challenge" with the sense of a "problem" to which a "solution" can be found.  Better to have said  "to meet the challenge" but better still would have been to have avoided the word "challenge" altogether. In modern American English, it's a pious word, a Commencement Speech word, often yoked alliteratively to "change": the "challenge of change" and so on.

He ought to have used an older, homelier, roll-up-your-sleeves-no-nonsense word.

That word is "task."

As in: the task, or tasks, at hand. Not a "task" that ever ends, not a task one finishes, but a task that one undertakes, and continues to work on, world -- one crosses one's fingers and  hopes -- without end.  

Yes, it was done without Saudi money. Yes, the Ahmadiyya are required in Pakistan to not identify themselves as Muslims. But nonetheless, the Ahmaidyya think of themselves as Muslims, and as missionaries in Africa, have helped spread Islam -- first in their version, and then, when the Saudis uninvited move in with money and mosques and imams, those who start with Ahmadiyya Islam can end up with the unexpurgated version, and that's the problem that won't go away. The opening of a gigantic, skyline-dominating mosque in Calgary is not something to celebrate or to attend. It is to deplore, at the very least by staying away.

That's not what Canadian officials did. They came to celebrate. They are not thinking, or perhaps they just do not know enough, and don't want to know.  That includes the Prime Minister, a supposedly hard-headed fellow when it comes to Islam.

Here's the news item:

"Hailing it as an "architectural treasure," Prime Minister Stephen Harper joined hundreds of guests as the biggest mosque ever built in Canada opened its doors on Saturday.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim mosque in Calgary took two years to build and cost $15 million. (CBC)

The $15-million Baitan Nur mosque in northeast Calgary covers 4,500 square metres, or 48,000 square feet, and was constructed largely through donations from the city's small but rapidly growing Ahmadiyya Muslim community.

"I don't suppose I will be the first to observe it isn't exactly the little mosque on the prairie," Harper said. "Quite the opposite. It is Canada's largest mosque complex."

Harper was joined at the opening by several federal and provincial politicians, including Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion.

The Ahmadiyya movement of Islam was founded 100 years ago, originating with the teachings of Indian villager Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and is renowned today for promoting a peaceful coexistence with people of all faiths and cultures.

"This community knows first-hand what it is to experience persecution and discrimination based on your religious beliefs," Harper said following a tour of the sprawling mosque complex.

"So you understand at a profound level that promoting religious freedom is an essential building block for peace and stability here and throughout the world."

Members of the community say the stunning architectural landmark will serve as a symbol of peace.

"We are inviting people of other religions to come to us and talk," spokesman Safeer Kahn said during a media tour on Friday.

"We don't want to isolate ourselves. We want other people to come and tell us about their teachings and their [religious] scripts ... and they will listen to our positive views," he told CBC News on Saturday.

Worshippers gather for prayers Friday inside the mosque. (CBC)

The mosque is a sprawling but spartan building, designed to allow women and men to worship equally.

"Whatever is available to men is available to women," Kahn told reporters.

"In this hall, we made many skylights," he pointed out during the tour. "The name of the mosque is Baitun Nur, which means house of divine light."

A few hundred people from the city's Ahmadiyya Muslim community of roughly 1,500 raised $8 million for the mosque's construction.

One of the contributors, taxi driver Ijaz Ahmad, said he sold his house and moved his family into a basement apartment in order to donate $100,000.

"Children broke their piggy banks, people sold their houses, they donated the money and moved to basements, some people obtained second mortgages," Khan said at Friday's dedication ceremony.

His Holiness Hadhrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, spiritual head of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim community, delivered the opening sermon, broadcast Friday to 170 countries via Muslim Television Ahmadiyya (MTA) satellite service.

He said such mosques should not only enhance the local landscape but promote mutual peace, love and harmony in society."

More evidence that many immigrants are coming to America, not to become full-fledged, loyal Americans, adopting American values and mores, but rather to exploit economic opportunites while retaining the customs of their country of origin. Muslims especially are not prepared to abandon the view that their daughters are their property.  From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (with thanks to Tina):

A Clayton County man faces murder charges in the strangling death of his 25-year-old daughter early Sunday over her desire to end an arranged marriage.

Chaudhry Rashad, 54, apparently got mad during an argument in which the victim, Sandela Kanwal, told him she wanted out of the marriage, Clayton police officer Timothy Owens said.

Sunday. Kanwal lived with her father when she was not with her husband, who is in Chicago, Owens said. She hadn't seen the husband in three months, he said.

Both Rashad and Kanwal are of Pakistani descent.

Rashad had a seizure shortly after the strangling and was taken to a local hospital for treatment, Owens said. He was in custody Sunday at the Clayton County jail and could make an initial court appearance Monday...

This makes the third honor killing in America we know about.

From the Washington Post (hat tip: Refugee Resettlement Watch)

In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.

There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.

The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.

"I found the number stunning," said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security. "It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States."

The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world's largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond "known or suspected" terrorists.

As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said.

"Frankly I was surprised that we were getting those kind of hits at all," recalled Townsend, who left government in January. They identified "a potential vulnerability" to national security the government had not fully appreciated, she said.

The people being fingerprinted had come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. They were mostly in their 20s, Shannon recalled. "One of the things we learned is we were dealing with relatively young guys who were very committed and what they would openly tell you is that when they got out they were going back to jihad," he said. "They'd already made this commitment." ...

I’ve posted bits about the destruction of our heritage before (here, here and here) and I daresay I will be inveighing about it until the day I die. This article from The Phnom Penh Post is just more of the same, but more depressing than usual for it’s been going on for so long.

The illicit trade in Khmer antiquities has led to the creation of the Red List by an international arts organization as a tool to help customs officials, police officers, art dealers and collectors recognize artifacts unlawfully smuggled out of Cambodia.

            [...]

It offers sufficient identifying features that "if a customs officer opens a package and sees something similar, they can contact local officials to authenticate it," said Jennifer Thevenot, the ICOM officer in charge of the project.

"It's difficult to say if the looting situation in Cambodia has gotten better. It's still dramatic," said Thevenot. "I can say this from wandering through Paris auction houses."

She noted that "cultural tourism is a main source of income for Cambodia, so robbing artifacts is robbing the country of income."

            [...]

“Even eBay and other internet trading sites were beginning to monitor the sale of antiquities using the lists”, she said.

            [...]

A major legal issue for Cambodia, she explained, was that Thailand and Singapore, both popular transit points for the illegal trade in Khmer antiquities, were not signatories of the 1970 UN resolution on the trafficking of cultural heritage which obligated countries to monitor the traffic of antiquities across their borders.

"This could be an opportunity to hold a press conference in Thailand where we could make a pitch for them to become a signatory," said Thevenot.

            [...]

"Looting of Angkor-era relics has been going on for so long that there isn't much left to take, so now the looting of prehistoric items is a bigger issue," said Dougald O'Reilly, head of Heritage Watch.

So, these dishonourable people who believe that they have a right to steal from us all have now finished stealing everything they can from Angkor and will start to steal anything else that they can from this poor country. They are robbing the poor, and us, to satisfy their own private greed – and the governments of Thailand and Singapore couldn’t care less, or so it seems!

It isn’t just that these artefacts end up in private collections where we will never be able to see them, it’s also about the damage done when they are stolen. They are ripped out of context using the crudest of methods – sometimes explosives are used – which often ends up with a whole archaeological site being destroyed and vast amounts of knowledge about our past thereby being rendered impossible to decipher. There is also an economic impact, as Ms. Thevenot (ICOM) pointed out, which is equally as important, for we must not forget that our tourist pounds and dollars are vital to developing countries such as Cambodia – but please remember to be good and polite guests.

You can find Heritage Watch here.

You can find maps of Angkor Wat here, including, if you scroll down, an interactive one.

You can find a Photo Gallery of Angkor Wat here.

You can find The Phnom Penh Post here.

It’s not just about the loss of our heritage, as I have recently railed about here, here, here and here, but also about how this filthy trade finances and supports our enemies, as well as destroying our past and robbing all of us of our connections to it. Over at Heritage Watch there is this important article.

Today, trafficking of stolen Iraqi antiquities is helping to finance al-Qaida in Iraq and Shiite militias, according to the U.S. investigator who led the probe into the looting of the National Museum.

U.S. Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos, a New York assistant district attorney called up to duty shortly after 9/11, said that while kidnappings and extortion remain insurgents' main source of funds, the link between terrorism and antiquities smuggling has become "undeniable."

"The Taliban are using opium to finance their activities in Afghanistan," Bogdanos told The Associated Press in an interview. "Well, they don't have opium in Iraq. What they have is an almost limitless supply of is antiquities. And so they're using antiquities."

            [...]

The murky world of antiquities trafficking extends across the globe and is immensely lucrative "private collectors can pay tens of millions of dollars for the most valuable artifacts”.

            [...]

Bogdanos described the route for smuggled Iraqi antiquities as follows: From illegal excavations or plundered museums, they are driven overland either west to Jordan or north to Syria; they are then usually sent to one of three cities "Beirut, Dubai or Geneva" in order to obtain papers and "surface"; they can then be sold on to private collectors or even well-known auction houses.

Remember the point Ms. Thevenot made about Paris auction houses in my post here.

Bogdanos said the complex routes for the trade in plundered antiquities appear to have generated an underground tariff system. "According to my sources, (Lebanese) Hezbollah is now taxing antiquities," he said.

                [...]

"Unauthorized excavations are proliferating throughout the world, especially in conflict zones," Francoise Riviere, the assistant director-general of UNESCO's cultural branch, said [...]

She said UNESCO was deeply concerned about the "decimation" of Iraq's cultural heritage.

"The damage inflicted on the National Museum in Baghdad, the increasingly precarious state and the systematic pillage of sites, are alarming facts which are a great challenge to the international community," Riviere said.

Bahaa Mayah, an adviser to Iraq's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities who attended the conference in Athens, says looters sometimes use heavy machinery to dig up artifacts "and destroy the site while they loot.”

Remember my point, about the destruction of valuable sites, here.

"We are facing now, especially in Europe, tremendous difficulties in recovering our objects that are seized," he said.

Shame on us in Europe!

Bogdanos said smuggling networks did not appear with or after the war. "It's a pre-existing infrastructure ... looting's been going on forever."

But it was in the days after the fall of Baghdad in March 2003 that the National Museum was looted. The U.S. came under intense criticism for not protecting the museum "a treasure trove of antiquities from the stone age and Babylon to the Assyrians and Islamic art.”

Bogdanos said that according to the latest inventories, a total of about 15,000 artifacts were stolen. Of those, about 4,000 have been returned to the museum, and a total of about 6,000 have been recovered.

            [...]

Much of the museum's looting was carried out by insiders and senior government officials of the time, said Bogdanos, who co-authored a book about the investigation, "Thieves of Baghdad," with William Patrick. Royalties from the book are donated to the museum.

Bogdanos said not enough is being done by organizations such as UNESCO to protect Iraq's heritage. "There's no other way to say it. There's a vacuum at the top," he said.

“A vacuum at the top.”  Quelle surprise! Anyone want a ‘blood’ diamond necklace? Anyone? No, I thought not, but an antiquity of doubtful provenance – now where’s the harm in that!

You can find Heritage Watch here.

You can find Thieves of Baghdad here.