From a UPI article titled Gallic Intifada:-

Turf conscious bloggers in Paris’ rundown, mostly Muslim, suburban immigrant housing estates rival in violent messages that threaten to beat senseless and even kill any intruder caught in “our ghetto.” Almost every word is misspelled, in both argot slang and pidgin French. And these are not empty threats. An average of 14 policemen a day are injured in bloody clashes with jobless youngsters.

France’s Interior Ministry said 2,500 police officers had been “wounded” this year. The head of the hard-line trade union “Action Police” Michel Thooris wrote to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to describe conditions in housing developments turned slums as “intifada.” Police cruisers are pelted daily with stones and “Molotov cocktails” (gasoline-filled bottles with burning wicks that explode on impact) and Thooris said cops assigned to what was rapidly degenerating into “free fire zones” should be protected in armored vehicles. Entire tall buildings empty into the streets to chase policemen and free an arrested comrade.

“We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,” Thooris told journalists.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph has finally pondered these last two weeks of ministerial interventions in the veil row, and in this morning’s leader come up with ... the deeply obvious: Labour loses faith in multi-culturalism.

At his press briefing yesterday, the Prime Minister made it clear his Government’s approach to cultural diversity had changed. He may have couched his position in careful language, but the conclusion was inescapable: integration, rather than multi-cultural separatism, is now official policy. By saying that he “fully supported” the decision of Kirklees council to suspend the Muslim teaching assistant who had refused to remove her veil at work, and then reinforcing this point with the observation that the veil was a “mark of separation”, Mr Blair removed any doubt about the Government’s position.

He was, in effect, affirming that the contentious views expressed over recent weeks by Jack Straw, Ruth Kelly and John Reid were not maverick individual opinions, but part of a larger, concerted revision of the Cabinet’s stand.

READ MORE...

I was sent a petition this morning.  It concerns a cross-party anti-illegal immigration march that the authorities may disallow.  Not being a Russian speaker myself, I can’t advise when and where (presumably Moscow) the March is planned to take place.  But it is a repeat of one organised like year, images of which can be seen here.  It is claimed that 5,000 marched peacefully and out of love of Mother Russia.  A website for the March itself can be viewed - and read by Russian speakers - here.

The petition is calling for our signatures to demonstrate support for the marchers, and to help convince those who have the power to ban their protest that the anti-illegal immigration cause is a just and important one.

You can, if you wish, add your signature here.

This afternoon my OE Inbox mysteriously received Martin Hutchinson’s latest Bear’s Lair piece.  This one considers the prospects for the globalising economy.  I am very pleased to publish it here.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, is well deserved. While imperfect, his invention of micro-lending is an important tool to make the free market system work better for the world’s poor. Nevertheless, the vision that Grameen represents, of a peaceful integrated “globalized” world in which can all prosper, is increasingly coming under threat. In 1996, with Communism defeated, Bill Clinton in the White House and the Internet rising to prominence, a globalized “Washington Consensus” world seemed the inevitable future. However, it’s not 1996 any more.

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Doctor (of?) Anthony Edkins is not English.  He is, however, headmaster of the very English Harrop Fold School in Worsley, Manchester.  He is really rather keen on anti-racism, and appears to have taken to himself and his staff the task of instilling this charming philosophy in his lucky pupils.

The result is that Harrop Fold is rapidly becoming the most heavy-handed, notoriously white-hating school in the country.  Last April, a 10-year old boy who, allegedly, had called an 11-year-old mixed-race pupil a ‘Paki’, ‘Bin Laden’ and ‘nigger’ during a playground argument was charged with “a racially aggravated public order offence”.  When the case came before the court, District Judge Jonathan Finestein remarked, “This is how stupid the whole system is getting.  I was repeatedly called fat at school.  Does this amount to a criminal offence?  It’s crazy.” (For this opinion, let it be said, he received the due amount of contumely from the educrats).

It is a law of liberal life, though, that extremists, left unchecked, will unfailingly push their luck too far.  The brown-skinned Edkins, who inevitably describes his school as “vibrant”, has succeeded in this mighty ambition.  It’s surely all downhill for neo-Marxist fanaticism at Harrop Fold from here:-

Schoolgirl arrested for refusing to study with non-English pupils

A teenage schoolgirl was arrested by police for racism after refusing to sit with a group of Asian students because some of them did not speak English.

Codie Stott’s family claim she was forced to spend three-and-a-half hours in a police cell after she was reported by her teachers.

The 14-year-old - who was released without charge - said it had been a simple matter of commonsense and accused the school and police of an over-the-top reaction.

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Arizona Central reports that:

Thirty illegal entrants were found in a vehicle that had been made up to look like a U.S. Border Patrol transport van, authorities said.

The vehicle was seized Wednesday near San Miguel on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation about 70 miles southwest of Tucson.

Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, only just ennobled, not yet detached from his political roots, not yet one of the great and good:-

It is a great honour and nice to be associated with a part of Kent where I live and where the countryside and traditional villages are so wonderfully and uniquely Kentish.  I will be fighting Kent’s corner in the Lords.  Of course, to all my friends, colleagues and people in Kent I hope I remain just Sandy.

Now, it happens that Kent’s corner includes an impressive clutch of selective Grammar Schools that have been fighting for their existence for forty years.

So, surely the new Conservative peer must want to see Kent’s precious senior schools protected from the egalitarians and social engineers?  He must be a believer in the good Conservative principle of rewarding ability?  And that of parental choice.

But here’s Lord Bruce Lockhart after a few months of exposure to the ermine and altruism:-

Proactive admissions policies could be used to establish a better ethnic balance in schools.  In towns where the totality of the minority ethnic population is 15 per cent of the whole, we should consider the use of numbers in admissions policies.

We have to get to a situation where people regard the total ethnicity of a town as being represented in schools, otherwise we are never going to be properly integrated.

Children start off being colour-blind and this is a wonderful thing.  But if you have schools where the children are being educated in different ethnic groups you are going to lose that and you are simply not going to have integration.

If we are to have stable communities and to prevent the rise of the far Right, our job now is to put all these issues on the table and open a public debate.

The first question I would ask is precisely how “just Sandy”, the Conservative councillor and all round good guy, metamorphosed into a MultiCult leftist.

WOAI News reports that:

More than fifty immigrants were taken into custody Wednesday after a raid at a west side home. Police were called to the home on Senisa Street after they received a tip about stolen cars. When they arrived, they saw four people running from the house. They looked inside the “stash house” and found 51 illegal immigrants - 38 men, 12 women and a teenage girl – all crammed into three bedrooms.

How dare the racist police raid people who are demonstrating their character by making the most out of their living space, working for less than minimum wage and support higher rents to their landlords?  Yes yes, we’ve heard from the hate groups about so-called “social externalities”... but just let them keep in mind that they may soon be imprisoned for hate speech—in prisons where “sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening” quoting the government’s study of so-called “prisoner rape”.

The London Review of Books held a greatly over-subscribed debate at the end of last month on the Walt & Mearsheimer paper.  Its title was “Israel Lobby: Too much influence on US foreign policy?”  It took place in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union. The panellists were Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, John Mearsheimer and Dennis Ross, and the moderator was Anne-Marie Slaughter.

Click here to see the video.