The Brit papers are all over Sir Ian Blair’s eggregiously correct Met this morning, following the fun news that a Muslim member of the Diplomatic Protection Squad was re-assigned at his own request from guarding the Israeli Embassy in London.

Apparently, the officer concerned, one PC Alexander Omar Basha, suffered moral qualms at his presence on the steps of the Embassy while the occupants’ friends and family were bombing Lebanon.  The last Merkava 4 has rolled back across the border and PC Basha is working normally again.  But the damage is done.  And, it seems to me, in a couple of ways.

First, professionally.  The man who is quoted everywhere this morning is John O’Connor, a former Flying Squad commander.  He told the Sun:-

This is the beginning of the end for British policing.  When you join the police, you do so to provide a service to the public.  If you cannot perform those duties, you leave.

But if it was just a question of professionalism Sir Ian would not have reacted so jumpily in ordering an urgent review of the decision to grant PC Basha’s request.  No Commissioner has been more political than this one.  He has made politics paramount in his beloved creation, the Metrocultural Police Service.  But leftist idealism like his always justifies its little political crimes by the presumption of Good, and that presumption is glorious, hypocritical toast if a discomforted Muslim must be moved from any duty on grounds, basically, of faith or even evil race.  Sir Ian’s progressive, inclusive Met is stripped of all moral force.  It’s a joke, and I or anybody else can refuse to give a witness statement, for example, to any minority garbed in blue simply because that is the dictate of conscience.  Muslim, Hindu, black, queer, they’re all fair game.

As multicultural luck would have it, Sir Ian’s truest friends have very quickly worked this out and come forward with a possible answer.

The chairman of the Association of Muslim Police, Superintendent Dal Babu, insists that the Basha issue was not one of conscience:-

This is about the welfare of an individual and not about a moral issue,” he said.

“I think we are going down a very, very slippery road if we start having postings based on individual officers’ conscience.

Of course, it’s all just sophistry.  There are no clear dividing lines between conscience and welfare in the aims of Mr Babu’s association.  They intertwine and dissolve within the peculiar whole of Islam:-

The AMP is formally recognised by the Metropolitan Police Service.  It is active in pursuing faith-friendly policies and has been instrumental in ensuring the provision of many facilities to the benefit of Muslim staff, including Hijaab for female officers, ability to wear Islamic/cultural dress when not in uniform, provision of Halaal food and facilities for Salaah (Islamic Prayer).

People are not cyphers.  That’s the problem.  But neither is multiracialism remotely normal.  As long as there are a hundred and fifty varieties of humanity in my capital city we must all be equal under the law, and the law must be enforced by serving policemen with as complete an impartiality as humanly possible.  Cyphers the police must indeed be.

In contrast, however, Sir Ian truly, madly, deeply believes that the Met must look like those one hundred and fifty varieties of homo sapiens wandering the streets.  He is simply wrong.

The Daily Record - but seemingly not yet the BBC - is reporting proceedings in the Edinburgh High Court against the last three men accused of the race hate abduction and murder of Kriss Donald in March 2004.  The accused are Mohammed Mushtaq, 27, Imran Shahid, 29, and Zeeshan Shahid, 29.  All plead not guilty.  The trial commenced on 2nd October and is expected to last six weeks.

One man, shopkeeper Daanish Zahid, was found guilty of Kriss’s murder almost a year ago and sentenced to serve a minimum of 17 years.  Another, Zahid Mohammed, was jailed for five years (meaning 30 months) for the abduction.

A comparison of Google search results soon tells you the value of a white life: a search for “Kriss Donald” produces about 167,000 entries.  “Anthony Walker”, however, produces about 18,800,000, headed by a tribute site.  Anthony was killed by a single blow to the head on 30th July, 2005.  So it isn’t the passage of time and it isn’t the brutality of the crime that accounts for the disparity in coverage.

In what I can only presume to be a superb piece of irony, the Deputy Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality and Commisisoner for Scotland, Kay Hampton, offered the following statement after Zahid’s sentencing:-

This sentencing sends a clear sign that racism, wherever it comes from, is always deplorable. We recognise that all of those implicated in the murder have not yet been brought before the courts and our thoughts and sympathy remain with Kriss’s family at this time.

Glasgow’s communities have united since Kriss’s murder and we hope they will continue to stand together and guard against anyone who tries to exploit this tragic situation for political gain.

Of course, no political capital whatsoever was made of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, as we all know (Google search about 32,400,000).

Meanwhile, another appalling murder for which Asians are charged is receiving even less media attention than Kriss’s case.  Since March I have been able to find absolutely nothing on the fate of the two men accused in the ghoulish and peadophiliac killing of 14-year old Charlene Downes.  The trial of Iyad Albattikhi, 28, and Mohammed Raveshi, 49, was scheduled to begin in June of this year.  There are no recent reports in the electronic editions of the local Blackpool or Lancashire papers and, of course, not a mention of the case in the national media.  One hopes that that merely indicates a lengthy adjournment.

Charlene’s google search total is about 50,500.

The Guardian is running a piece by Matthew Taylor today titled Web of hate.  The hate in question is of Marxists, and belongs to the “far right” hard men of Redwatch.

Taylor explains:-

The site, which has links with the neo-Nazi organisation Combat 18 and a host of European fascist organisations, is hosted in the US but registered and run from the UK. It lists the personal details and shows the photographs of anti-racists - many taken during protests against the British National Party - alongside the slogan: “Remember places, traitors’ faces, they’ll all pay for their crimes.”

... Redwatch was launched in 2001 and takes its name from a Combat 18 newsletter produced in London in the 1990s. For the first few years it was just another online talking shop for hardline racists and fascists, offensive and unpleasant but apparently not dangerous. However, in April 2003, those behind the site signalled that Redwatch meant business. Leeds school teachers Sally Kincaid and Steve Johnson had been involved in local campaigns against the BNP and other far-right groups for years. Then their personal details appeared on Redwatch following a demonstration they had attended in the Pudsey area of the city. A couple of weeks later they suffered a fire-bomb attack at their home, which left their car burned out.

The incident was a turning point. Those featured on Redwatch were no longer being subjected to threats and harassment but to physical attacks.

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I don’t care to nurse my politics all day long.  Nope, once or twice in my day some opportunity comes along that lifts the spirit a little.  Here’s a prime example, courtesy of NASA and Nature.com.  Not that NASA isn’t political, you understand.  Sending minority equal-people into space is nothing if not political.

But none of that Shuttle stuff comes into play with the pure research goals of the Mars Rover programme ...

What’s the Opportunity rover up to now?

Opportunity has just finished an epic voyage to the edge of Victoria crater and is taking a good look over the side.

It has taken 21 months to make the 9-kilometre journey – breakneck speed, according to project scientist Bruce Banerdt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

What’s the Opportunity rover up to now?

Opportunity has just finished an epic voyage to the edge of Victoria crater and is taking a good look over the side.

It has taken 21 months to make the 9-kilometre journey – breakneck speed, according to project scientist Bruce Banerdt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“It was a gamble to go to Victoria,” he says. It was so far away that Opportunity was quite likely to run out of steam before it got there. “We decided to drive as fast as we could.”

Why is this crater worth such a dash?

It’s big. It’s deep (70 metres). It’s wide (800 metres). Other craters investigated by Opportunity have been small fry in comparison. The depth of the cliffs means that more layers of rock are exposed and so a longer geological history can be probed than before. The bottom is at least a billion years old, say researchers.

The rover has ventured out on to a rocky point on the crater’s rim and now has a panoramic view of the nearest cliff face.

What is Opportunity looking for, specifically?

The rover has a number of instruments on board: a thermal emission spectrometer will probe the rock layers to discover their composition, an alpha-particle spectrometer will give information about the elements, and a Mössbauer spectrometer will work out the abundance and composition of any iron-bearing minerals. Opportunity doesn’t have a way to age the rock, although the deeper it gets the older it will be.

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My thanks to Bo Sears for unearthing this piece by James Petras, published last week at AxisOfLogic.  It lists eighteen ways, no less, to counter the Jewish Lobby, and in its conclusion is pretty upbeat - a novel discovery for some of us - about the prospects for success.

I recommend you to read the article in its entirety.  But here are those 18 points of action:-

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I am posting Martin Hutchinson’s latest Bear’s Lair piece, which addresses what, currently, is the hottest European potato: the conflict between the grand ambition of EU enlargement and the practical difficulties it poses.  It is dated today, 2nd October, and is published on the Prudent Bear website.

GW

The EU Tuesday finally agreed to admit Bulgaria and Romania on January 1, 2007, but expressed deep concern about the level of corruption in both countries. Is this a problem that affects only the countries concerned, or might it affect the EU economy as a whole, bringing it new diseconomies from EU enlargement?

The political arguments for and against EU expansion are clear.  On the one hand, the EU wants to take in its poorer neighbors, to include them in a greater European federation that can pull its weight in world affairs and produce prosperity for its people.  On the other hand, as the EU goes further East and South, it comes to countries which are either exceedingly poor (hence possibly a burden on EU social funds and other programs) or culturally sufficiently different from the European majority (for example, primarily Moslem) that their assimilation might prove difficult.  There is no hard dividing line – Bosnia is a Moslem country that is historically well within the European heartland, while Armenia is a Christian country whose history has little connection with Western Europe. Nevertheless it’s clear that politically, while the absorption of culturally close entities such as East Germany and Hungary was supported by the great majority of EU citizens, expansion beyond the European heartland poses progressively more difficult problems.

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The following letter was addressed to the head of MediaNews, the corporation that owns the San Jose Mercury News, the monopoly paper for the 10th largest city in the USA.

Bo

Dear Mr. Singleton,

We emailed preliminary objections to you on 9/27/06 about the use of an undocumented and unsubstantiated “bloody bits” anecdote passed off as true in a Richard Cohen column that veered sharply from being opinion into being an assertion of fact, and printed in the San Jose Mercury News on 9/26/06. We have now had an opportunity to read all the reviews, related literature, and the entire 512-page book that contains the single-sourced bloody bits anecdote, The Lost, published in AD 2006.

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It’s worth repeating here the metanews of Newsweek’s most recent cover as it appears around the world: