Eklemeddin İhsanoğlu, the OIC Secretary-General, stressed in a statement Monday that “human rights and man’s dignity are an integral part of Islam and core components of Islamic culture and heritage.”
[…]
“An OIC human rights commission would promote tolerance, and fundamental freedoms, good governance, the rule of law, accountability, openness, dialogue with other religions and civilizations, the rejection of extremism and fanaticism, and the strengthening of the sense of pride in the Islamic identity,” he said.

In view of the following, it’s impossible to take any of that seriously.

[O]f the 57 [OIC member states], only six – Benin, Guyana, Indonesia, Mali, Senegal and Suriname – are deemed “free” according to Freedom House assessment. The democracy watchdog scores all nations annually for political rights and civil liberties, classifying them as either “free,” “partly free” or “not free.”

More reasons not to trust the OIC when it comes to human rights:

• Muslim women around the world face crisis over violence
• Afghan Christians worship in secret
• Two imprisoned Iranian Christians in poor health
• Systematic persecution campaign against Palestinian Christians
• Sabatina James at centre of conflict between Islam and human rights
• Regulation of Muslim marriages needed to protect women
• Ladies, cover your entire body, except one eye: Saudi cleric
• Easter for secret believers

Every spring since 2001, Gaston Soucy of Hartlen Point, Nova Scotia, has been cleaning up wind-blown litter from a vacant lot near his home.  About ten days ago, he did his annual chore, bagged the trash, and placed it at the curb for pick-up.  The next garbage pick-up wasn’t for almost two weeks, however, so Halifax Regional Municipality threatened him with a $200 fine and clean-up charges.

Sunday, March 29, was a beautiful day. Mr. Soucy headed out to get rid of the winter’s collection of rubbish [on the vacant lot]. When he finished, he placed a couple of garbage bags and a couple of fish bins full of trash at the curb even though it was nearly two weeks before his regular HRM garbage pickup.

A day or two later he found a note from the municipality on his door warning him that he had a day to move the trash or he would be fined.

He called the city.

“Not one bit of that garbage was ours,” he said he told a city bylaw officer.

It turns out it was.

“Once you touch that garbage, it becomes your property,” Mr. Soucy said he was told.

Once you touch it, it’s yours.  The pompous bureaucrat makes it up as he goes along.

Another petty tyrant official told a reporter that no one is permitted to place anyone else’s trash at the curb.

Renowned political philosopher Kenneth Minogue remarks on a paradox at the heart of contemporary British society. For many years, government policies and public institutions have been based on compassion, empathy, and concern; yet, increasingly, the result is a society manifesting the opposite qualities—indifference, lawlessness, and violence.

Young offenders are given counselling rather than punishment. Our troops are sent overseas, not to fight, but to ‘win hearts and minds’.

In large swathes of the public sector, the fashionable concept of ‘emotional intelligence’ has replaced efficiency as the central goal of the workforce.

Yet in the face of this sweeping tide of officially sanctioned benevolence, Britain is increasingly violent and degraded.

‘The gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked characteristic,’ George Orwell once wrote. How hollow those words sound today, as the shadows of aggression and disorder loom over our society. Almost any British town centre on a Friday or Saturday night is a maelstrom of drunken fury.
[...]
The state’s focus on compassion, it would appear, is being met by mounting viciousness. Officialdom’s supposed kindness is matched by deepening social nastiness.

But this is not a contradiction. It is precisely the Government’s imposition of the creed of politicised sympathy, what might be called ‘the tyranny of niceness’, which has created the culture of disorder in our midst.

Prof Minogue believes that official niceness is seen as weakness and apathy. The state effectively does not care how citizens behave. There is no penalty for evil or malicious behaviour and no incentive for civic virtue. Indeed, attempts to promote the common good or social order are seen as judgmental, oppressive, and contrary to human rights. Thus has social cohesion been undermined in Great Britain.

Read the whole thing.

Now several more Church of England bishops have done the same.

The Bishop of Bradford, the Rt Rev David James, said: “There is a certain political correctness which tends to target Christians especially and forbid Christian expression.

“Often people claim to be doing this in the interest of other faiths, but they welcome Christians being upfront on their beliefes [sic].

“I think in part it arises out of a secular agenda which wants to restrict religion to the private sphere. But all our faiths impact on the way we live in the public domain.

“I think the secularists have to get real and accept the fact that Christianity, like other religions, isn’t something that happens between consenting adults in private.”

London Telegraph correspondent Martin Beckford has a question:

First they came for the Christians?
[…]
[R]ecent cases give the distinct impression that what is under attack is not evangelism, nor even Christianity, but freedom of speech itself.

White Christian women are obviously an easy target, but as I pointed out last week in discussing the NHS guidelines on religion, what they are really aimed at is getting all believers to keep quiet unless they are within a designated private prayer space.

New Labour says it wants “equality”, but that apparently means that Christians must not mention any differences at all.

[A] friend of the girl claimed yesterday:

‘Her dad is a very strict Muslim who could get violent. One time he hit her with a belt just because she chatted with a couple of boys.

‘Another time he beat her over and over and said he would take her to Pakistan and make her marry.

‘She really didn’t want that. She was very frightened. Her dad would shout and swear at her and told her that she’d shamed the family.

‘Her mother didn’t really do anything to protect her.’

The girl told social workers that she was interested in converting to Christianity and wanted to go to church. Why should her foster mother be punished because the girl exercised her freedom of religion? Or is that no longer recognised by certain local councils?

If the friend’s story is true, the girl’s father should be investigated. Forced marriage is illegal in Great Britain.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW6PRABq4HM[/youtube]

Dutch MP banned from Britain

Labour minister praises Muslims because “secular commentators are afraid to criticise them.”

“Freedom go to hell” and other choice slogans.

When the original screening was cancelled Lord Ahmed told the Pakistani press it was “a victory for the Muslim community”.

Fitna the movie

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION IN SUPPORT OF GEERT WILDERS
http://www.petitiononline.com/wilders/petition.html

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION AND SUPPORT THE GLOBAL CAMPAIGN AGAINST SHARIA LAW
http://www.onelawforall.org/
http://www.shariapetition.com/

You can download an audio version of this video at http://patcondell.libsyn.com/

[T]he point of Steyn’s testimony to the hearing — echoing the sentiments of great thinkers throughout history including Voltaire, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky and Thomas Jefferson, just for a start — is so simple, and yet so in need of repeating in Canada, in Ontario, in Toronto today. The right to free expression is the most fundamental of all rights in a democracy — it is in fact the one right that allows the very existence of democracy.

Another frequently repeated truth is that if you don’t believe in free speech for the most offensive, hateful, moronic people you can imagine, you simply do not believe in free speech at all. It’s so self-evidently true that one would think it wouldn’t even bear saying. And yet it is a point constantly missed by a shocking number of people wielding influence in Canada today.

Among those missing that point, besides “human rights” commissioners, are the little Stalins running student unions and universities across Canada. Pro-life opinion is being stifled and suppressed at Saint Mary’s, Carleton, Calgary, Guelph, Lakehead, York, and elsewhere. Why are they so unwilling to defend their views with rational argument? One can’t help thinking it’s because they can’t.

If only the powerful people who disagreed with him [Steyn] — and with pro-lifers and whoever else — spent less time trying to shut him up and more time trying to argue with him, maybe we’d get somewhere.

Amen to that.

h/t: Mark Steyn

It was her response to Steyn’s criticism of OHRC’s silence on honour killings that shocked me.

“There are thousands of things that happen in the province of Ontario on a daily basis and we don’t comment on all of them,” she said.

But, I spluttered, women are being murdered.

“As I said, we are a small commission.

“There are many problematic things that happen in our community and we have to make choices because we can’t respond to everything,” Hall said.

So honour killings are merely “problematic”?

It’s a question of priorities. The OHRC hasn’t got time to worry about women getting killed for disrespecting a male relative. Barbara Hall has bigger fish to fry, like sitting in judgment of every word published by Canadian newspapers, magazines, and websites.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission is calling for Parliament to force all Canadian magazines, newspapers and “media services” Web sites to join a national press council with the power to adjudicate breaches of professional standards and complaints of discrimination.

For Barbara Hall and the OHRC, some things are simply more important than human rights.

h/t: Kathy Shaidle and Ezra Levant

Kindos was about to pay the fine and post obligatory signs saying, “We accommodate medicinal marijuana smokers,” when a different government agency told him he could lose his liquor licence. Serving anybody possessing a controlled substance – prescribed or not – is against the law.

It also transpires that Mr Gibson is not exactly a poster boy for human rights.

“People didn’t like the way I smell,” the smoker, Steve Gibson, acknowledged of one complaint against him from fellow patrons.

“But I don’t like a lot of smells either,” he said. “I can’t bare to stand near some chicks, they’ve got so much perfume on, let alone some ethnics that I don’t like the smell of that much.”

Yeah, no one could have seen that coming.

h/t: Edward Michael George

A council in the north of England has removed a Christian woman from the roster of approved foster parents after a 16-year-old Muslim girl in her care converted to Christianity. The woman has taken care of more than 80 children in ten years as a foster parent.

The girl was interested in Christianity before she entered the woman’s care, and the woman initially discouraged her from going to church.

She told council officials that she was very happy to support the girl in her religion and culture.

‘We had a multicultural household and I had no problems helping the young person maintain her faith of birth,’ she said. ‘I have always prided myself in being very professional in what I do. If something works for a young person, whether I agree with it or not, I am happy to support them in that.’
[...]
‘I offered her alternatives. I offered to find places for her to practise her own religion. I offered to take her to friends or family. But she said to me from the word go, “I am interested and I want to come.” She sort of burst in.’

Social workers were told of the girl’s plan to be baptised and raised no objection. After the baptism occurred in January 2008, local authorities changed their tune.

Three months later, however, senior officials complained that they had not been fully informed of the girl’s intentions to become a Christian.

They said that she should have undergone counselling to ensure that she understood the implications, especially as such conversions are dealt with harshly in some Muslim countries.

A local council presumes to demand counselling for a religious convert!  What possible information could a public official offer that could be of any assistance in such a decision? It sounds like a veiled attempt to manipulate and intimidate.

And what is the relevance to Britons of how “offences” are treated in foreign lands? Does the British government advise citizens against drinking alcohol at home because Saudi Arabia treats that as a crime?

So, what action has the council taken to “protect” the girl from Christianity?

The girl is understood to be back with members of her family, who have not been told of her conversion.

She was placed in foster care in the first place because she had been assaulted by a family member! That proves that the council is motivated, not by any regard for the girl’s well-being, but by anti-Christian animus. As Archbishop Cranmer puts it:

It beggars belief that the council considers the house in which this girl suffered physical abuse to be a safer place than the home in which she discovered that Jesus was the way, the truth and the life.

As far as this council is concerned, being a victim of domestic violence is better than choosing to follow Christ.

The woman is planning to take legal action against the council. May justice prevail.

h/t: The Christian Institute

His ordeal is finally over. Mr Kempling has resigned from the College, and the College has withdrawn the misconduct citation. He is presently teaching at an independent Catholic school.

Kempling, a former public school teacher with impeccable credentials, was suspended by the province’s College of Teachers and disciplined by the Quesnel School District following a series of letters to the editor of a local newspaper critical of the way homosexuality was being presented within the local school board’s curriculum. The case ushered in a flurry of appeals and court challenges, graduating to the Supreme Court of British Columbia and British Columbia Court of Appeal. An attempt to appeal the provincial Court of Appeal ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada was denied in January 2006. Kempling resigned from the College of Teachers in December 2008 in protest of his unfair treatment, leading to the current withdrawal of the citation of misconduct by the College.

In a letter posted at No Apologies, Kempling says, “I am done with the public school system”.

Imagine a country where the government regularly checks the waistlines of citizens over age 40. Anyone deemed too fat would be required to undergo diet counseling. Those who fail to lose sufficient weight could face further “reeducation” and their communities subject to stiff fines.

Is this some nightmarish dystopia?

No, this is contemporary Japan.

In a system of taxpayer-funded health care, those with “unhealthy” lifestyles and habits can become costly “burdens” on the public purse.  Looking only to the bottom line, the nanny state renders citizens incompetent to take care of themselves.

h/t: The Beacon, blog of the Independent Institute

For objecting to having their grandchildren adopted by homosexuals, the grandparents were insulted and blackmailed. Is this what the nanny state has become?

Next, the grandparents are informed that the children are to be put into the care of a homosexual couple. And – this is the crucial moment – they are warned in the most terrifying terms that if they object to this arrangement they will never see their grandchildren again.

Leave aside the rest of it. It is this demand, that they mouth approval of the new regime like the defendants at some show trial, which is the bit that ought to make your flesh creep.

This is the action of a tyranny in operation, especially the use of children to blackmail their parents and grandparents. People who can do this can do anything.

A perfect illustration of Lord Acton’s famous maxim: ”Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Give a social worker the absolute power to take children away from family, and a contemptible little Stalin emerges.

Thankfully, the grandparents and the children finally have some good news.

A multi-millionaire is funding a legal challenge to halt the controversial adoption of two young children by a gay couple.

In a move brokered by the Catholic Church in Scotland, the businessman has agreed to help meet the legal costs of a court bid to block plans to hand the brother and sister to two men.
[…]
Last night a spokesman for the Church said: ‘As well as the moral issue there is also a legal question, which needs to be explored. Lawyers will be taking this forward with the family.

‘Allowing two men to adopt children against the wishes of their grandparents who want to care for them is positively wicked.’

Got that right.

“My view of Conservatism is that it’s not for us to tell you [what to do through] the tax system – my wife didn’t put up with me because I was getting £150 by way of tax allowance. This is social engineering for God’s sake and when I joined the party we weren’t in favour of it.”

Mr Clarke got rid of the married couple’s allowances when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1993-1997.

His claim that the Conservative Party opposed “social engineering” once upon a time is nonsense.  He is, of course, right that tax breaks for married couples is “social engineering”, but equally so is eliminating such tax breaks.  Virtually everything the government does encourages or discourages particular behaviours—from corporate investment spending to criminal activity.

Given that governments cannot avoid social engineering, they should at least be aware of what behaviours are being engineered.  Mr Cameron is right to want to use tax policy to counter Britain’s evident social breakdown, for there is ample empirical evidence that marriage is good for parents, children, and society as a whole.

Speaking of social engineering in the UK, British authorities have ordered two young children to be taken away from their grandparents and given to a homosexual couple for adoption.  The children’s mother is a recovering heroin addict and her parents, aged 46 and 59, are “too old”.  The distraught grandparents have been told to shut about it if they ever want to see the kids again.

Melanie Phillips calls it what it is: “a sickening assault on family life”.  (Emphasis added.)

When homosexuality was legalised back in 1967 did anyone dream that some four decades on a British grandmother and grandfather wanting to adopt their own grandchildren would be refused permission and the children adopted instead by two gay men?

The case in Edinburgh reported today, where precisely this grotesque development has occurred, illustrates the sickening way in which what started out as a decent attempt to be tolerant towards a minority lifestyle has turned into a totalitarian assault upon family life and human rights.

This is indeed utterly revolting, completely unjust, and contrary to any semblance of social sanity.  How did such petty imbeciles get the power to ruin everything that decent, caring people hold dear?

Truly, social engineering at its worst.

Moscow police detained 25 people on Wednesday who had been planning to stage a protest to demand the removal of a mausoleum containing the embalmed body of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin from Red Square.
[…]
The group had intended to dress up as mummies and demonstrate outside the mausoleum with a cardboard coffin. Media reports described the group as Orthodox monarchists who want Lenin buried as an ordinary person.

The mummies (young people wrapped from head to toe in white bandages) had hoped simply to join the solemn train of true believers trudging past Lenin’s body.

“There will be no crowd standing and chanting slogans… The mummies will join the procession of communists,” a spokesman for the organization said, promising that “the mummies will be quiet, just the way mummies should be.”
[…]
An opinion poll has shown that two thirds of Russians believe that the embalmed body of the architect of the 1917 Russian Revolution should be removed from its mausoleum on Red Square and buried.

Lenin’s bloody brainchild, the Soviet Union, died in 1991. Isn’t it time to bury the old totalitarian yet?

h/t: Eternal Remont

Ezra Levant has read the court’s “eye-scratchingly stupid” ruling. Here are a few snippets from his lengthy post on“Holland’s national suicide note”.

[T]he prosecutors — whose job it is, as in Canada, to determine which prosecutions have merit and which don’t — were overruled by the court… because there were “a number of complaints”. Is that all it took? Bitch enough and you can coax the cowardly Dutch courts to prosecute a political enemy?
[…]
You’ll notice, never does the court claim that Wilders’ facts are wrong; never do they claim that his opinions are unfair. They only claim that he is radical and opinionated.
[…]
Here you have it again: Wilders isn’t wrong. He’s just “insulting”. He harms the “esteem” of radical Muslims — who, apparently, are looking to Wilders for their religious validation. (Do these judges have even a simpleton’s grasp of Islam? Is any Muslim’s “religious esteem” hanging on what a Dutch MP says?)

Ezra’s complete analysis is well worth reading.

Wall Street Journal editorialists also oppose the court decision.

Silencing Islam’s Critics
A Dutch court imports Saudi blasphemy norms to Europe
[…]
There are of course limits to free speech, such as calls for violence. But one doesn’t need to agree with Mr. Wilders to acknowledge that he hasn’t crossed that line. Some Muslims say they are outraged by his statements. But if freedom of speech means anything, it means the freedom of controversial speech. Consensus views need no protection.

Archbishop Cranmer has a fittingly sarcastic and outraged blog post:

Cranmer thought the age of Inquisition was long gone. But it seems that one uncompromising pursuit of God’s will for Europe has simply been supplanted by another.

A Dutch court has ordered the prosecution of Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders for ‘inciting hatred and discrimination’ against Muslims. The charges relate to Fitna, a film (censored in the UK) he made last year in which he compared the Qur’an to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and drew a direct link between Islam and violence. The film juxtaposed images of the September 11th attacks with quotations from the Qur’an. This, apparently, is not acceptable, notwithstanding that the perpetrators of this evil were professing Muslims and justified their atrocity with appeals to the Qur’an, and flew into the Twin Towers with ‘Allahu Akhbar’ on their lips.

May one not state this as a matter of historical fact?

Not according to some Dutch judges.

A petition in support of Geert Wilders can be signed here.

His offense: publishing an article about the effects of the country’s sharp economic downturn on Ulyanovsk, a Volga city some 900 kilometers east of Moscow.

Bragin’s article was posted on December 29 on the website of the Russian Popular Democratic Union, an opposition party led by former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, whose regional Ulyanovsk branch is headed by Bragin.

Yelena Dikun, a Kasyanov aide, told RFE/RL’s Russian Service that law enforcement agencies are accusing Bragin of tarnishing the region’s image.

Ms Dikun also says the party has “no intention” of acceding to the Interior Ministry’s demand that the article be taken down.  None of the facts in the article has been disputed, let alone refuted.  Mr Bragin is being punished for telling the truth about the effects of the recession.

Another sign that Russian authorities are intent on turning back to the back old days of authoritarian rule: In the final hours of 2008, President Dmitry Medvedev quietly signed a law eliminating jury trials for defendants charged with crimes against the state.

The law does away with jury trials for a variety of offenses, leaving people accused of treason, revolt, sabotage, espionage or terrorism at the mercy of three judges rather than a panel of peers. Critics say the law is dangerous because judges in Russia are vulnerable to manipulation and intimidation by the government.

Josh Calder, writing for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, lists many reasons why Russia’s future does not look as rosy as it has in the recent past.  Perhaps the most important factor is demography.

Finally, what is the real greatest threat to Russia? The country is losing nearly 1 million people a year as death rates exceed birthrates by a wide margin. No foreign power is likely to do Russia as much harm as its dire demographic decline.

Russians — especially men — are dying at younger and younger ages of heart disease and other complications of drinking and smoking, as well as of diseases like tuberculosis that have been virtually eradicated in the West. Economically strapped young people are having few or no children.

A nation with an aging and shrinking population cannot remain a powerful nation.  Russia’s population is presently half that of the United States; if projections prove correct, it could fall to one-third by 2030.

Stalin, the brutal Soviet dictator responsible for the deaths of millions of his citizens, has been undergoing a makeover of sorts in recent years. Russian authorities have reshaped the Georgia-born dictator’s image into that of a misunderstood, demonized leader who did what he had to do to mold the Soviet Union into the superpower it became.

In Russian classrooms, history teachers are guided by a new, government-approved textbook, Alexander Filippov’s “Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006,” which hails Stalin as an efficient manager who had to resort to extreme measures to modernize the lumbering Soviet agrarian economy.

There were, writes Filippov, “rational reasons behind the use of violence in order to ensure maximum efficiency.”

Vladimir Putin did his bit to sugarcoat Stalin’s legacy by telling history teachers in 2007 that, while Russian history has its “problematic pages”, other nations also have blots in their histories.

“We have fewer of them than other countries, and they were less terrible than in other nations,” Putin continued. “We can’t allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt on us.”

In related news, a Russian spy agency official has scoffed at Ukraine’s call for recognition of the 1930s famine as genocide.

“The Holodomor is a Ukrainian invention,” General Vasily Khristoforov, head of registration and archives department at the Federal Security Service (FSB), told the Interfax news agency.

“Ukraine is trying to prove that the 1930s famine was an act of genocide the Stalinist leadership committed against Ukrainians.

The Stalin icon posted above appeared on Robert Amsterdam’s blog with this caption:

Picture taken on November 29, 2008 shows a Russian Orthodox icon that includes a depiction of Soviet-era leader Josef Stalin at a St. Olga’s Church outside St. Petersburg in Strelna. Father Yevstafy Zhakov, the benficiary of St. Olga’s Church, recently put up the icon showing Stalin standing before the Blessed Matrona of Moscow, a 20th-century saint. Father Yevstafy commented that, according to legend, Stalin would frequently talk to the woman and that she gave him advice on how to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II.

The purpose of my complaint was to test the objectivity of the Commission. My complaint relates to the imam’s book L’Islam ou l’Intégrisme ? À la lumière du Qor’an et de la Sounnah (Islam or Fundamentalism ? In light of the Qor’an and the Sunna), (2006/2007), 3rd edition corrected. Imam Abou H., who is fluent in Arabic, attended universities in Saudi Arabia where he studied Islam and the science of Hadiths. His teachings can therefore be perceived as authoritative with respect to Islam.

My complaint under section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (the “Act”) claims that the writings of the imam are supremacist and expose persons belonging to the following groups to hatred or contempt : homosexuals, Infidels (non-Muslims), women, Jews, Quebecois (as an ethnic group and national minority).

The results of the objectivity test are in: The CHRC flunks.

On December 5, I received a letter fom [sic] Stéphane Brisson of the Commission informing me that they will not proceed to investigate my complaint. In the opinion of the Commission, the writings of the imam are not likely to expose persons from identifiable groups to hatred or contempt.

“Not likely to expose persons from identifiable groups to hatred or contempt”? Did they even read the book? Check out these colourful remarks from Imam al-Hayiti:

• Homosexuals and lesbians should be “exterminated in this life”
• “Homosexuals caught performing sodomy are beheaded”
• Most Infidels “live like animals”
• “they [infidels] are evil people, they love perversity”, and “they are our enemies”
• “men are superior to women and better than them”. In general, “men have a more complete intellect and memory than women”
• “It is because of this religion of lies [Christianity], which goes against human nature, that the West is now full of perversity, corruption and adultery”
• Jews “spread corruption and chaos on earth”

All of the above quotations were translated into English by Marc Lebuis. See his post for many more odious examples.

Christian pastor Stephen Boissoin said far less offensive things about homosexuals and was ordered not to say another word about them for the rest of his life.

Why does the CHRC give hatred a free pass when it’s uttered by a Muslim?

h/t: Kathy Shaidle