We Hate Ukip: Turning Britain into a Roche Motel

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You can trust someone who always tells the truth. But you can also trust someone who always lies. Mainstream British politics falls into the latter category. We have a Conservative party that hates tradition, a Labour party that hates the working class and a Liberal Democrat party that hates democracy. You can trust these three to lie endlessly in service of the rich businessmen who fund them.

Accordingly, if you want to know whether something is bad for Britain, just ask: do the Big Three say it’s good for Britain? If they do, they’re lying, so it must be bad. Which brings me to Ukip, the UK Independence Party that wants to leave the European Union and drastically cut mass immigration. The Big Three and their media allies have long worked to smear Ukip as racist and xenophobic. And now, as Ukip looks set to win the up-coming European elections, they’re working even harder:

The first cross-party campaign to condemn Nigel Farage’s party as racist is to be launched this week amid fresh polls showing Ukip may come first across England in the European elections in May.

The campaign is led by the former Labour immigration minister Barbara Roche, who claimed: “Ukip’s campaign needs to be exposed for what it is, a racist campaign. The party is practising what is in effect a form of ‘Euracism’. They are deploying the same language and tactics used by openly racist parties like the BNP, but instead of targeting migrants from Africa and Asia they are targeting migrants from within the EU.”

Labour and Tory jitters over the rise of Ukip — which led European election opinion polls for the first time over the weekend — are manifesting in an increasingly public debate in both parties about whether to attack it or oppose its anti-immigration policies. (Ukip condemned by cross-party group for running ‘racist’ campaign, The Guardian, 28th April 2014)

Featherstone and Roche2

Barbara Roche (right foreground) and Lynne Featherstone

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Nick Clegg welcomes the Jewish Manifesto

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“As Happy as God in France”: The state of French Jewish elites, Part 2

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Part 1

Raymond Aron on Jewish ethnocentrism

It is effectively illegal in France to suggest that over-represented Jewish elites are ethnocentric, have dual-loyalty problems with regard to Israel, and that this has an influence on the way power is wielded in the country. Two men who do so, the nationalist essayist Alain Soral and the Franco-Cameroonian comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, have paid a hefty price for it, although their struggle has earned them a certain notoriety and place in history in compensation.

I will therefore not say anything of the community, but quote Raymond Aron, a universally-respected liberal-conservative French patriot of Jewish origin, who died in 1983. Towards the end of his life he increasingly, in his ever-diplomatic, reasoned and understated way, criticized the rise of Western Jewish elites’ ethnocentrism and uncritical support for Israel, worrying that these would contribute to anti-Semitism.

In a text sent to the 28 January 1980 World Jewish Congress, Aron said:

In the United States, the American Jewish Community, almost always if not always, supports the diplomatic positions adopted by the Israeli government. The French Jews who publish Jewish reviews and are active in Jewish organizations do the same. Whatever is the Israeli party (or coalition) in power, the official representatives of the community support the arguments of the Israeli government. This situation does not strike me as healthy.[1]

These elites have typically paired their uncritical support for Israeli nationalism with hysterical opposition to any flicker of French nationalism. Read more

Britain baffled by Muslims being Muslims

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One of Britain’s most senior woman police officers has been on television explaining why she wants to help young British lads from going off the rails. “This is not about criminalising people.” said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Helen Ball. “It is about preventing tragedies.”

And what is the nature of the delinquency that these young men are in danger of falling into? Drugs? Downloading internet porn?

None of that. These young “British” men are Muslims running off to Syria to take part in the savage civil war there.

About 400 young British Muslims have joined the Jihad to Syria and police say the number of “Syria-related arrests” has increased substantially this year, to 40 between January and March, compared with 25 in the whole of 2013. Some 20 have turned up dead, some get arrested at British airports and some turn up voicing the terrorist videos that are so much part of Islamic warfare.

None of this should have caused any surprise. These young Muslims are doing no more than following the precepts of a religion which encourages adherents to go on Jihad for the glory of the Prophet. But the discovery that Muslims act like Muslims has however, taken the British authorities entirely by surprise. So they have hurriedly formulated a strategy for dealing with this entirely unexpected and baffling phenomenon. Read more

“As Happy as God in France”: The state of French Jewish elites, Part 1

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Valls BHL

Then-interior minister and current Prime Minister, Manuel Valls tells a Jewish audience (including the Jewish Defense League) on 19 March 2014: “The Jews of France are more than ever at the vanguard of the Republic!” Bernard-Henri Lévy watches over him.

The Jewish community in France, as in most Western countries at least since the Second World War, has been remarkably successful. This very success however has brought on backlash as other groups — Whites, Blacks and Arabs — feel their interests and honor are not as well-respected by the French politico-media system.

There are an estimated 600,000 Jews in France, or just under 1% of the population. Almost half are Ashkenazim (a mix of people living in France for centuries, especially from the eastern parts of the country, and immigrants from Germany, Poland, etc.), while the rest are Sephardim, most of whom came to France from North Africa in the wake of decolonization in the 1960s.

According to the francophone Jewish-Israeli nationalist website “Terre Promise,” Jews are massively over-represented among the 500 richest Frenchmen: three out of the top 20 (15%), nine of the top 50 (18%), 23 out of the top 50 (18%), 23 of the top 200 (11.5%) and 44 out of the top 500 (8.8%). This is the same order of magnitude of over-representation (1000–2000%) that one finds in the United States. Ashkenazim and Sephardim are equally-well represented among this elite, showing the remarkable social mobility of the new arrivals from North Africa.[1] Read more

What the Donald Sterling Flap Brought Up for Me

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At this writing—April 28th, 2014—there is an enormous flap over what were deemed the racist remarks of Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers professional basketball team, in a telephone conversation with his girlfriend that has gone public.  No less than the President of the United States has weighed in on the matter:  President Obama called Sterling’s comments “ignorant” and “incredibly offensive” and “an example of how the United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation.”  The media are in an uproar, and there have been calls for a boycott of the Clippers’ games and drumming Sterling out of the National Basketball Association.

I’m interested in the place of organized sports in American life, and there hasn’t been a bigger sports story in my memory.  I was eager to listen to the actual recording of the phone call, which is online.  I was struck by the contrast between what I heard on the tape and what I had gotten from media reports and from people I talked to.  The audio left me with the impression that while Sterling, for sure, is no saint, the depiction of him as the devil incarnate based on this audio tape goes way beyond what reality warrants, and that it reflects a unfortunate pattern all too prevalent in our time.

Based on this nine minute recording of a private phone conversation with his girlfriend, who is of mixed race (the word is that there are hours of tape not yet made public—I’m only writing here about the audio that is thus far available), Sterling is labeled by nearly everyone as an anachronistic, despicable racist, period. No qualifications. Stone him.  There is no exploration of what was said and intended by both parties on the tape—including suggestions that we hear from Sterling about what, from his side, he was up to—that I can find in the public discourse, nor any attempts to put it in the context of anything good Sterling might have done in his life as a human being and businessman, just posturing and self-righteous moralizing and unrestrained condemnation and musings about possible ways to rain blows on him.

Everything Sterling is doing and has ever done in his life, or what he has to say for himself, is now immaterial; this chat on the phone trumps everything.  He heads a very successful sport exhibition business — the Clippers regularly sell out; he hired a black coach this year and all but two of his players are black, and he pays them salaries the rest of us would relish; he’s donated large sums of money to minority causes and gotten awards for his civil rights activity—all beside the point of the simple generalization chiseled in stone: he’s ignorance and malevolence personified, beyond the pale of enlightened and decent society. Read more

The gloves come off in England

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The arrest of Paul Weston, an anti-immigration campaigner in England, for repeating Winston Churchill’s unflattering observations about Islam in a public speech has been reported around the world with headlines from the US to Russia to Japan. Weston, who leads a small party called LibertyGB, was bundled into a police van outside the Guildhall in the town of Winchester, after being  arrested for suspected racial harassment.

It is a shocking event because to many people overseas, Britain is still a country where there is freedom of speech. But the Weston arrest is only the latest in a series of incidents that show that the British state’s gloves are coming off and police are coming down hard on anti-immigration campaigners — and they are not being too scrupulous about how they go about it, as the shocking arrests in of Clive Jefferson and Dawn Charlton in Cumbria last summer showed.

The two British National Party activists were both standing for local council elections in the town of Maryport and looked like giving the local Labour Party a run for their money, as both had been elected before and were popular figures.  But Labour were playing dirty and when the BNP pair discovered evidence of vote tampering in Allerdale Council they filed a 22-page dossier to the police. Read more