International Day against the Death Penalty

I was just going to take another pop at some local nonsense today. Then I got an e-mail which put things into perspective, so I'm telling you about that instead.
Today, as I doubt any 'proper' newspaper will find time to tell us, is International Day against the Death Penalty.
International Campaign Against Executions, a group run by various refugees from Islamic 'justice' and their friends, today issued a statement. I print it verbatim, as, even with the imperfect English, it is a challenge to secularists everywhere to act.

'We must build a world free from crimes against humanity and executions.
'Killing people and taking away the right to live from human is one of the degradation phenomenons of human society. Men are born only once and may live once only! Life, which is origin of all creativity, talents, prosperity and happiness in the human being society. Taking human life with any reason, excuse or justification is virtually killing creative and talented force of human being and depriving the society from benefiting from these talents in improving living conditions. Aggression to human life is the most heinous behavior of the rulers of society to human rights. Crime against humanity and execution is one of the most savage human behaviors in history of human life, and laws that allow execution legitimately are criminal laws. Judicial systems that intentionally take human life are criminal systems and will produce crime in much broader dimensions.
'Execution is the most important tool of states to bring calmness to society and to stabilize state’s base, tools to intimidate people against the government. Government advocate of deceit execution say; execution is being used as a society security tool from crime and murder. They hide behind victim’s anger and pretend they are performing justice to victims. But the reality is, by taking guilty people’s life; society will not obtain security and comfort. And during history, amount of crimes committed by governments are thousand times more than murders committed by people.
'Today, especially in the age of technology and the peak of power and human’s ability in building a free and human world, human more than ever is in need to remove crime against humanity and execution from society and build a world without any crime against humanity and execution.
'International day against execution must become a day to protest against this wildest and barbaric human act, must become a day to value and cherish human life throughout the world. The day that people with clear voice shout over their rulers to let them know; they do not need the murder of human beings, will not tolerate the intention murders, and do not obey laws which has been built based on crime.
'International Day against execution is the day to protest against all countries that are the biggest and most professional murderer and have committed the most brutal crimes. A day to protest against judicial systems, in which there is neither justice nor respect to human dignity, systems that are the largest producers of crimes in society.
'International Day against execution is a day to protest against Islamic Republic as the capital and record holder of execution in the world. A government that executes any opponents, murders Juvenile, shockingly and tragically stones men and women. A government, which in threshold of international day against execution put about 8 Juvenile to death row by hanging and a woman to row of stoning.
'Let’s gather from every city and country around the world on October 10th, and raise our voice and defend the movement of life and human rights to the entire world. 'International committee against execution is calling upon all humanitarian and honorable people in the world to gather on October 10th, and on International Day against execution show the power of human rights defenders and right to live and audibly shout; world doesn’t need execution. Stop all executions.

There are links on the sidebar to various groups alerting us to this barbarity. Have a look, then maybe sign up to get alerts to e-mail campaigns and petitions which try to prevent more such atrocities.
For example, two Iranian men are due to be executed on 11th and 19th October respectively for acts committed when they were 17. Iran, as I'm getting tired of reminding people, several years ago signed an international convention against capital punishment for minors.
Along with the USA they continue to break the spirit of the convention by ensuring minors aren't tried or sentenced to death until they reach 18. They then carry out the executions quietly, when world attention is elsewhere, and in many cases without even informing the lawyers or relatives of those executed.
You can turn a blind eye, shrug your shoulders, or try and stop it. I can't take that choice for you.

No Manx justice, just this mess

At long last someone is taking a proper look at our rotten island prison. Sadly, still not the Department of Home Affairs.
Positive Action Group brought over a speaker from the Howard League recently. Predictably he wasn’t impressed at a set-up which involved handing far too much public money over to a bunch of cowboy contractors for a jerry-built slum. He was even less impressed at a justice system which fills 40% of said overpriced slum with folk who haven’t even been to court yet – and that’s only judging from official figures!
You can read about that at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Paying-a-high-price-for.5700108.jp. And then one of the few local advocates interested in justice had his say at http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=39310.
All in all, not very impressive, and that isn’t even half the story. For example, can anyone explain why the only folk arrested to get bail are those prepared to sit through a daily prayer meeting at the island’s only bail hostel? In short, if you’re of any religious persuasion except an evangelical Christian one, or have no interest in the supernatural, bail is not available. Neither is a balanced probation report when or if you finally get to court.
And it gets worse. At some point a story will appear in the local press, probably under a byline, which suggests our youth justice system has impressed the experts.
It hasn’t, and if you want the untainted original DHA press release (written by a moonlighting Johnston Press hack if their previous stuff is any guide) you can find it at http://www.gov.im/fsc/ViewNews.gov?page=lib/news/dha/probation/workofyouthjusti.xml&menuid=11570.
Cut through the gloss and spin at the beginning and go straight to the bad news tucked away ‘incidentally’ towards the end.
What the inspectors actually said was that our youth justice system is run by a bunch of unco-ordinated amateurs and doesn’t work. In effect, what they were saying is it’s time the island actually got a youth justice system.

Bibles wreck your teeth

The young ‘un’s just come home from school with a funny story that’s made our day.
Most of the lunchtime clubs have a steady flow of kids, based on no more than teachers outlining the choices and times in the first week. Gladdens your heart – so much for today’s kids being lazy or lacking interest in learning stuff that won’t fit into the regular curriculum.
But one is failing so miserably that it has to bribe the kids with sweets. That one being the Bible Club. So, not just mind rot, tooth rot too.
Sad bunch of deluded kiddy-fiddlers. High time some teacher showed them the door for public health reasons.

Once upon a time in the Western Isles

Guess what, our non-existent night life is an indirect cause of religious conflict up in the Western Isles.
On the other hand, one of the other consequences is that two of the most obnoxious fundamentalist fuckwits in the British Isles are at war with each other.
The war began when George Hargreaves, founder of the Christian Party and now (somewhat confusingly) running an outfit called the Scottish Christian Party from London, decided to run for office as the Western Isles MP. He’s using the dubious matter of Sunday ferry sailings as an excuse.
By doing so he’s upset the Western Isles resident religious bigot, Daily Mail journo John MacLeod, who presumably thinks only he has the right to profit from non-issues turned into religious controversy.
You can read and laugh at the whole sad story at http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/politics/holy-war-in-the-islands-as-religious-rivals-refuse-to-turn-the-other-cheek-over-christian-mp-1.923857.
But why has Manx night life got anything to do with all this, you ask?
The thing is, Hargreaves moved over here some years back on the profits of So Macho. Unsurprisingly, a producer of gay disco anthems who was also black fitted in like…............ well, he didn’t!
At the time most people either left the island to find life after dusk or ended up listening to dipso white flighters whinge at the golf club bar every night. For Hargreaves it got so bad he fell in with local pentecostalists.
Give the man credit though, he saw a market, got some correspondence course qualification as a clergyman and has never looked back. Thinking about it, it’s almost funny – a black man with a dog collar is the worst nightmare for all those South African losers the Manx government enticed here when apartheid fell apart!
Hargreaves has failed miserably as a Scottish political candidate once, being trounced in a Glasgow constituency by Patrick Harvie (green, gay and an NSS member too – how embarrassing).
MacLeod has an even longer record of mean-minded Calvinist shite-peddling. If I’m not mistaken, he features a few times in Sexual Fascism, Gary Otton’s excellent account of Section 28 skullduggery up in Scotland, and fairly certainly in a few of Gary’s postings at Scottish Media Monitor (see sidebar).
Frankly, this pair deserve each other, but the rest of the world deserves neither. The more each is confined to slagging off the other, the less we have to worry about the pair of them.

Mann, Muslims and counter-terrorism

There’s a report over at Matblog of some excellent advice coming from what is (if only for lack of another label) a British Muslim thinktank. Even more amazingly, it was being given at a Labour party fringe meeting.
In a debate entitled: How should the left engage with British Muslims?, one presentation was by Ed Husain, Co-Director of the Quilliam Foundation.
His reported advice is summarised as follows:

‘- What the left should not do:

* Adopt the attitude of ‘take us to your leader’, and only engage with Muslim communities through self-appointed male middle-aged leaders.
* Seek representation of British Muslims as a monolithic community.
* Turn only to religion to address British Muslims. Besides mosque structures, there are junctures where Muslims interact with wider society: football supporters, college students, pensioners, for example. We must speak to them as ordinary humans and British citizens, and not just talk to them through the prism of religion.

- What the left should do:

* Engage with Muslims as citizens like everyone else. The British Muslim representative model doesn’t work for a whole host of reasons.
* The left — and the Labour Party in particular — should be the grassroots movement of British politics that young Muslims/Asians/Brits are looking for. The Labour Party has failed to galvanize on people’s genuine concerns.
* The left should not shy away from confronting far-right Islamist extremism. Fascism is not only a white-European problem. The left sees minority communities as those that should be protected and not criticised. This liberal paralysis ends up in doing a disservice to minority communities. Instead, the left must confront attitudes in these communities that are anti-women, anti-secular etc.
- Overall, then, the answer is that the left should not engage with Muslims as Muslims per se, but as British citizens and ordinary humans.
- After 12 years of Labour, the government has done many things right, but it is also worth asking where it went wrong and why Blackburn and other northern cities remain so dangerously divided along ethnic and religious lines.’

Excellent stuff, and isn’t it a line secularists should be putting on ‘minority faiths’ to prevent a dying church, desperate to retain privilege, claiming common cause with those it once strove to put out of business?
It also begs another question; why is it us ‘ex-Christians’ (again for lack of an adequate label) are less successful at dealing with the culture we’re from and our families still ‘officially’ belong to than, say, secular Jews or the ex-Muslim movement?
You can see more on the debate and presentations at http://meanwhileatthebar.org/blog/?p=486 .
Incidentally, off-island readers may wonder why I have such interest in the Quilliam Foundation, while on-island readers will recognise Quilliam as a Manx name but may not know the foundation, so here’s a brief explanation.
The Quilliam Foundation is a thinktank involving several ex-members of extreme Muslim groups, set up specifically to try and aid counter-terrorist policy making - and in particular ways to draw disgruntled, disenfranchised young working class British Muslims away from such lunacy and into more productive community or political thinking.
The Quilliam from whom it takes a name was a 19th century Liverpool solicitor, Abdullah Quilliam, who founded the first British Muslim mosque and was something of an intermediary between the British Empire (which he was no fan of) and the Arabic world. He, in turn, was a descendant of John Quilliam, an unflappable Manxman who commanded Nelson’s gun crews. When asked by Nelson how ‘we’ were doing at the battle of Trafalgar, Quilliam reportedly replied “middling”, then calmly walked off as bits of ship’s equipment and crew flew furiously around him.
Sadly, though Abdullah Quilliam had Manx links and even kept a house here, what passes for Manx historical accounts of him are little more than racist whimsy and folk tales. For some sense of what he was really about Wikipedia is a good enough start, and for more on the Quilliam Foundation see the link on the sidebar.
Both the foundation and the inspiration, I'd argue, are worthy of more Manx attention.

Godbotherers 1, Decency 1 at the UN

ARTICLE 19, the international free speech body, gives a cautious welcome to the Resolution on the Right to Freedom of Expression adopted by consensus today at the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). But they also warn that: “Unfortunately, the resolution does contain two viruses. It will be incumbent upon member states of the HRC and civil society to ensure that these viruses are not allowed to flourish, multiply and gangrene the text and commitments. Instead, they shall be contained, by and through international human rights standards and principles, so that the resolution can best function and offer the maximum protection to freedom of expression.”
So, you ask, what’s the problem.
Well, the final draft version proposed by Egypt & the USA had a few, actually.
For a start, it entirely deleted a paragraph which stated that the Human Rights Council: “Encourages consultations among media professionals .... with the assistance of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, with a view to exchanging views on this subject and sharing best practices, taking into account the independence of the media and international human rights law”.
But in particular, Article 19 was particularly concerned about a passage which stated that the Human Rights Council: “expresses its concern that ... negative racial and religious stereotyping continue to rise around the world”.
The previous resolution referred to “negative stereotyping of religions and racial groups around the world”, so while the word “religions” was omitted the phrase “negative racial and religious stereotyping” was no better.
As Article 19 said yesterday, “stereotyping” was too ambiguous and is easily interpreted to encompass religions, religious ideas and religious symbols, none of which are not protected by international law. Their view was that the words “negative racial and religious stereotyping” should be replaced with “negative stereotyping of individuals and groups on the basis of their religion or race”, which at least conforms with international human rights law. They also regretted that their recommendation to strengthen the protection of freedom of expression were not incorporated in the final text.
As it happened, the final agreed text still referred to “religious stereotyping”, which Article 19 today deemed: “a vague and difficult concept which suggests that religions, religious ideas and religious symbols (rather than believers) may be protected by international human rights law.”
The new Resolution also still makes specific reference to another resolution against which human rights advocates around the world have advocated.
HRC Resolution 7/36, said Article 19: “unnecessarily diluted the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression.”
Secularists might remember that the UN Special Raporteur has been the last line of defence a few times before when the uglier, more powerful theocracies have tried to sway the UN.
Nevertheless, Dr Agnes Callamard, ARTICLE 19 Executive Director, concluded that: “The adoption of the Resolution by consensus is a breakthrough. Especially so given the tensions and conflicts that have accompanied recent discussions on freedom of expression within the Human Rights Council and its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights.”
So, swings and roundabouts, but if the theofascists had got things all their own way it could have been much worse.

Unwanted, unloved, and an unbelievable waste of public funds

My old mate George Broadhead, Manx born secretary of the Pink Triangle Trust, is not happy about the visit of a certain homophobic boy nazi to the UK next year, especially as it’s at public expense.
In a PTT press release a few days ago he said:
“This pope has shown himself to be paranoid about homosexuality. His opposition to LGBT rights knows no bounds. In his Christmas message last year he declared that saving humanity from homosexual behaviour was as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. This must be the most outrageous and bizarre claim yet made by someone who has already got a well-deserved reputation as one of the most viciously homophobic world leaders on a par with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
“The Vatican reinforced its anti-gay reputation by strongly opposing a UN declaration calling for an end to discrimination against gays and the Pope’s Christmas message provided clear evidence of an obsession about homosexuality which is tantamount to paranoia.
“It is imperative that the strongest possible protest be made when he visits the UK next year. This is not without precedent. During the last papal visit to the UK by John Paul II in 1982, a protest called POPE (People Opposing Papal Edicts) was instigated by the Gay Humanist Group of which I was a founder member.
“It had the support of other gay and secular organisations, including the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and the National Secular Society. On the occasion of the next papal visit, we must pull out all the stops to demonstrate our opposition.”
And no sooner had Gorgeous George planted that thought in a few minds than the fun began. For example, another PTT member has a freeedom of information request in to the Home Office for a breakdown of the likely costs, including accommodation for Ratzo and his entourage, public functions, other entertainment, policing and other security, publicity, transport, diversions, etc.
Now there’s a petition up on the Number Ten website too (see http://petitions.number10.gov.uk:80/PopeBan/).
The thinking is, if Geert Wilders isn’t fit to enter the UK and speak to a group of mature politicos, why isn’t a humanity-hating, bare-faced lying scrote with previous as long as your arm on the ‘banned’ list too?
Go on, sign up.
We saw off Hitler. Why go soft on his disciples?