I cannot imagine a more diabolic act than removing a newborn from its mother. Any woman who has given birth knows that after the awful ordeal, (normal) women crave one thing: to be with the child. Being apart from it is like losing a limb.
About such craven cruelty, Myron Pauli writes: “Expect this sort of egregious authoritarian behavior in America if we go to socialized medicine. I would have lost Anna (who is not genetically disposed to obesity whatsoever and is perfectly normal) because I was obese. What comes next – sterilizing adults with genetic defects?
An obese couple’s seven children are all to be taken into care after their newborn daughter was removed over fears she would become dangerously overweight.
Three children had already been removed by social services before the infant was taken from her mother within hours of her birth.
Now her ‘heartbroken’ parents have learned that their three other children will be taken away from them too.
They say the children of the so-called ‘fat family’ are being removed over fears they would also become clinically obese.
The brilliant Sean Gabb, academic, broadcaster, Director of the Libertarian Alliance in England, and a friend (who is not too good at keeping in touch), says what Daniel Hannan (scroll down) ought to have articulated about the British National Party (BNP), instead of disgorging the fascist epithet. The column you want to read in its entirety is “The British State and the BNP—The Post-Modern Tyranny of ‘Human Rights.'” Here are excerpts:
“We in Britain are endlessly told nowadays that freedom of speech does not involve the right to preach hatred and ‘intolerance.’ But it does. Freedom of speech means the right to say anything at all on any public issue, and to make any recommendation on what the law should be.”
“I was born into a Britain where this understanding was broadly accepted. I live now in a country where it is not. Thus Simon Woolley of Operation Black Vote dismisses freedom of speech as an ‘almost sacred cow.’ He even appeals for support to the majesty of the British Constitution:
Over centuries our unwritten constitution has given us a framework for our democracy. From Magna Carta to the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, our democracy has evolved to reflect our changing times. This framework gives us a democracy which, for all its limitations, seeks to balance individual freedoms with fairness and tolerance.
“In the technical sense, Woolley may be right. Being unwritten, the British Constitution is whatever the authorities decide it to be.
But his claim is irrelevant. A constitution does not legitimise oppression. Rather, it is legitimate so far as it protects rights. If the British Constitution no longer guarantees freedom of speech, so much the worse for the Constitution.
* Second, as said, the authorities are frightened to make a direct attack on freedom of speech. Instead, they are relying on laws that abolish freedom of association.
But this is barely less important within the liberal tradition than freedom of speech. The two rights complement each other. Freedom of speech is the right to say anything. Freedom of association involves the right to propagate what is said. It means the right of people to come together for any purpose that does not involve aggression against others. …
I am not frightened that the BNP is a party of national socialists, and that its leaders are counting the days till they can rip off their business suits, to show the black and red uniforms beneath. Under its present leader, Nick Griffin, the BNP has become a white nationalist party. The party believes in the expulsion of illegal immigrants, an in some voluntary repatriation of non-whites who are legally here, and in dismantling the Equal Opportunities police state from which people like Mr Wadham benefit. Other than this, a BNP Government might easily show more respect for the forms of a liberal constitution than have the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown—after all, this would not be difficult.
The problem is that the BNP and much of its leading personnel used to be national socialists. There are too many published statements in praise of Hitler or denouncing the Jews.” …
To condemn or not to condemn a “man [who is] behaving … just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six-year-old girl Aisha”—that is the question. An NIS News Bulletin, Via Jihad Watch, reports that the heroic Dutchman Geert Wilders—one of the few political leaders in the West to reject dhimmitude— “has compared the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.” What prompted the fearless leader of the ascendant Party for Freedom (PVV) to pipe up recently?
Geert Wilders has seized on a news report from Saudi Arabia for peppery [sic] written questions to the cabinet. In these, he compares the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.
Wilders has requested clarification from Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen on a marriage in Saudi Arabia between an 80-year-old man and a 10-year-old child. The child had run away from her elderly husband, but was brought back to him by her father, the English-language website Arab News reports based on a Saudi newspaper.
Wilders asks the minister if he shares the view that “this man is behaving like a pig, just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six year old girl Aisha.” The PVV leader wants Verhagen to summon the Saudi Arabian ambassador to express his repugnance.
[T]his puts those who will condemn Wilders in a peculiar position. If they take issue with his characterization of Muhammad, they will either be excusing the Muslim prophet’s marriage to a six-year-old and declining to condemn those Muslims who imitate their prophet by taking child brides, or, if they say that Muhammad didn’t actually marry a child, they’re in the position of denying evidence that is in the sources Muslims consider most reliable. Yet as this incident with the 80-year-old and his 10-year-old bride demonstrates ( “my marriage is not against Shariah,” said the codger), many Muslims take that evidence quite seriously.
Update I (August 31): JP writes: Jamie, you cannot try an Arab in his homeland based on Western Laws.
This is a point well taken and worth making. It is clear to me that unlike, say, an America leader, whose admonitions to the Arab world may carry the threat of an invasion, Wilders is merely being provocative. His intention and consistent modus operandi are to expose the West’s self-immolating left-liberalism. I believe the same is the case here. Where are the Hildebeest-type feminists on this?
My mention of Daniel Hannan, the new-found darling of American conservatives and libertarians, in this context, is only tangentially related. Nevertheless, I’ve been meaning to bring Hanna up. Here’s what he had to say about Wilders:
It’s true that Geert Wilders is a controversialist, who takes pleasure in causing offence. He needs 24-hour protection, so serious are the death-threats he has attracted from jihadis. He revels in offending liberals as well as Muslims: his call for the Koran to be banned struck me as rather inconsistent with his stated commitment to civic freedoms. I wouldn’t vote for him if I were Dutch.
My Netherlands-based family are proud supporters of the heroic Wilders, the only man to understand the stakes. Hannan here is very much in the sneering mode of Mark Steyn, who lauds the manner in which America has dealt with fractious immigrant populations, and distinguishes between the American and European melting pots. I don’t know if he is one, but neoconservatives of the deepest dye do not allow for the questioning of immigration policy with respect to the future of western liberal societies.
“When America’s news cartel woke up to one of 2005’s biggest stories—Muslims running riot across France—the response from many a neoconservative was to gloat.
The Schadenfreude was tinged with a sense of American superiority. It’s not happening here because we’re better. And why are we superior? To listen to their accounts, it’s because we’ve submerged or erased aspects of the American identity. …
Perhaps the threat to both homelands is overplayed. I sincerely hope so—for the French and for us. But even if France isn’t the proverbial canary in the coal mine, shouldn’t Americans be rooting for this once-magnificent European country?
Not according to some prominent neoconservatives, for whom the destruction of 8,400 vehicles, dozens of buildings, and at least one life by the Muslim community of France has served to focus attentions on… the ‘bigoted’ French.” …
Undeniably “exceptionally intelligent,” the man speaks a superb English, something that seduced me initially too. However, I soon discerned that even Hannan’s pronunciations about American liberties sundered under Obama were somewhat shallow, or strategically tailored to his role as a star among Republican TV hosts.
Yes, he knows well and repeats often the principles of dispersion and decentralization of power inherent in the American system. But, like so many neocons, he conveys the false idea that up until recently those principles had been respected. Hogwash. Obama is continuing on the path of his predecessor, and Bush built on the wrecking Clinton did. And before that… well you know the story.
Update II: Via Jamie. It would appear that Hannan does subscribe to the neoconservative concept of a propositional nation. Accordingly, and to quote from my upcoming book, a nation is nothing but a notion (the last is Buchanan’s turn of phrase), “a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.”
Not in the saga of the Lockerbie mass murderer released into the loving arms of his countrymen and coreligionists. According to the neoconservatives, Bush’s deft diplomacy had won Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi over to the West, but you know better. By welcoming Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi home as a hero, Libyans and their leaders were showing their true hue to the West. Cry baby victims and their leaders demand sensitivity to their plight; the Arab world gives them a macho display of antagonism. Frankly, I can respect the latter more than the demands from the West that Gaddafi be more like Oprah.
Al-Megrahi was convicted of bringing down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, and killing 270 people—259 people on the plane and another 11 who died on the ground.
The Boeing 747 blew up at 31,000ft, approximately 38 minutes after taking off from London’s Heathrow airport bound for JFK in New York.
Large parts of the aircraft fell on Lockerbie, devastating parts of the Scottish borders town and setting in train the UK’s biggest mass murder inquiry.
The contemptible parties in this fracas are the Scottish authorities, responsible for releasing the man on compassionate grounds citing the certitude of their moral values and Al-Megrahi’s impending death from cancer. A befitting description for the values of Kenny MacAskill, Scotland’s Justice Secretary, are the words deployed by family members: “Perfidious, repulsive and sickening”—that pretty much sums up the quality of Scottish justice.
