Sim-O

Blasphemy.
My MP, Dr Evan Harris (who still hasn’t signed EDM 401, or asnwered my many emails) is introducing an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which is seeking to get the UKs’ blasphemy laws repealed.
read why from the horses mouth, in a letter in todays Telegraph:

Sir – In the light of the widespread outrage at the conviction of the British teacher for blasphemy in Sudan over the name of a teddy bear is it not time to repeal our own blasphemy law?

The ancient common law of blasphemous libel purports to protect beliefs rather than people or communities. Most religious commentators are of the view that the Almighty does not need the “protection” of such a law.

We are representatives of religious, secular, legal and artistic opinion in this country and share the view that the blasphemy offence serves no useful purpose. Yet it allows partisan organisations or well-funded individuals to try to censor broadcasters or intimidate small theatres, print media or publishers.

Far from protecting public order – for which other laws are more suited – it damages social cohesion.

It is discriminatory in that it only covers attacks on Christianity and Church of England tenets and thus engenders an expectation among other religions that their sensibilities should also be protected by the criminal law (as with the attempt to charge Salman Rushdie) and a sense of grievance among minority religions that they do not benefit from their own version of such a law.

As the Law Commission acknowledged in 1985, when it recommended repeal, it is uncertain in scope, but lack of intention is no defence, and the law is unlimited in penalty.

This, together with its chilling effect on free expression and its discriminatory impact, leaves it in clear breach of human rights law. In the end, no one is likely to be convicted under it.

The Church of England no longer opposes its abolition on principle and the Government has given no principled reason to defend its retention.

We call on MPs to support the amendment proposed by Evan Harris, Frank Dobson and David Wilshire tomorrow to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill and on the Government – which rightly criticises countries like Sudan for their blasphemy laws – to give it a fair wind.

Philip Pullman, Rt Rev Lord Harries of Pentregarth, Ricky Gervais, Nicholas Hytner, Shami Chakrabarti, Professor Richard Dawkins, Rt Rev Lord Carey of Clifton, Professor A.C. Grayling, Sir Jonathan Miller, David Starkey, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, Stewart Lee, Michael Cashman, Joan Smith, Lady D’Souza, Peter Tatchell, Lisa Appignanesi, Hanif Kureishi, Lord Desai, Roger Smith and Hari Kunzru

So, getting your emails out, write to your MP and get some support for this thing.

Via Dave Cross

Labels: Freedom of Speech

I’m not going to link to him, because I find his blog very offensive he’s a cunt. It’s all war talk, as if Britain is going to ‘fall’ to ‘the moslems’.

Innocent children and their families across Great Britain are relying on each of us to stand our ground in the face of this Islamic savagery that is being inflicted upon us, our children and our society.

For fucks sake, get to the psychiatrist and stop being so fucking paranoid.
Yes there is some Muslims that have extremist views, but nothing like the amount this fuckwit talks like.
Apparently he goes about getting Al-Queada (however the fuck you spell it) nicked in Luton and Dunstable for drug dealing. Fine, grand job, get the nasty dealers off the street. But how many of them are actually fucking terrorist and not just fucking dealers who are bigging themselves like the Lyrical Terrorist. Not fucking many, I’ll bet. Do you go after non-Asian/Muslim dealers?
Lionheart talks like our women and children can’t sleep safely in their beds with all those brown people with their funny language thinking about them all the time and what they want to do to them.

He’s a cunt. I am embarrassed and ashamed that he’s British. Fortunately, unlike all those ‘Moslems’*, us British aren’t all the same.
He’s going to be interviewed with regard to inciting hatred of some sort or another, religious or racial, because of the stuff on his blog.
There is stuff like:

This fight for my freedoms and liberty, is a fight for your freedoms and liberty also, and at the end of it, it is for those children of the next generation, because if we do not stand up for ourselves now and our way of life then who will?

which to me is a call to arms, but he doesn’t say explicitly to physically attack anyone, not that have seen with a cursory look at his site.
So. Do I stand in solidarity with him?
Reluctantly, yes. Only in the fight for freedom of speech. And he needs a good slap to bring him out of his hysteria.

Religion. Someones always got to take it too seriously and spoil the fun.
*Sarcasm

Labels: Freedom of Speech

The Times:

Amy Winehouse was arrested yesterday by police investigating an alleged bribery plot for which her husband is already in custody.

The singer is believed to have been questioned about an alleged attempt by Blake Fielder-Civil to halt a trial by offering a barman £200,000 to drop grievous bodily harm charges against him.

I don’t get it. There must be something subtle that I’ve missed.
What’s Amy done wrong? Surely, this is just ‘settling out of court’?

Also:

She was arrested but that is common practice for someone being interviewed by police.

Is it? I’ve only been arrested when I’ve ‘been helping the police with they’re enquiries’, never when I’ve just been helping police with they’re enquiries.
Didn’t a politician use that line recently?

Tip: PDF

Labels: Law/Legal

Ynet:

A report by the Yesh Din organization found that in 2006, more than 99.7% of those accused are found guilty, some 95% of the cases end with a plea bargain and the average hearing is just two minutes long.

Yesh Din, which said that its inquiry was the first of its kind, found major failings in the court’s due process: Hearings were held in Hebrew and the Arabic-speaking suspects often did not understand the charges brought against them, they were unable to present a full defense or have an effective counsel.

“Most are detained in Israel and their attorneys are not able to meet them,” said Michael Sfard, Yesh Din’s legal counsel. In addition, minors were often tried as adults and detained at length before being charged. Sfard said the 0.29% acquittal rating in 2006 (23 out of 9,123) was most jarring.

Labels: Israel

Al Jazeera:

Abu Muhammad, a Baghdad resident, found it difficult to let go of his daughter’s hand but he had already convinced himself that selling her to a family outside Iraq would provide her with a better future.

“The war disgraced my family. I lost relatives including my wife among thousands of victims of sectarian violence and was forced to sell my daughter to give my other children something to eat,” he told Al Jazeera.

In 2006, Abu Muhammad and his family were forced to leave their home in Adhamiya, a district of Baghdad, after militia fighting claimed the streets in his once tranquil neighbourhood.

They began living in a makeshift refugee camp on the outskirts of Baghdad, but he soon lost his job and the children, unable to make the daily trek, quit school.

Somehow, I can’t shake the feeling that we share a lot of the responsibility for this.

How are you getting on with your MP? They’re back at work tomorrow.

Labels: Iraq

BBC report (video)

The Japanese are whaling in the Antarctic. Greenpeace is out there trying to fond them so they can get between the whalers and the whales and hope that the Japanese do not go through them to get to the whales.
The Japanese say they are killing whales for scientific purposes.
What scientific purposes? What world changing discoveries has come from these studies of dead whales? Is it really necessary to kill these whale in this day and age?

Labels: Environment

Every one’s posting about this story.
I saw it last night and thought “tell me something I don’t know”.

Labels: Surveillance

Come on. Just die you fucker.

Labels: Israel

Ha’aretz:

There is no Israeli whose presence in the West Bank is neutral. Civilian or armed, soldier or woman settler, resident of a quality-of-life settlement or a nearby outpost, MahsomWatch activist or guest at a settlement, Bezek worker or client at a Palestinian garage. All of them, all of us, are in this Palestinian territory, in the West Bank, because our state occupied it in 1967.

The presence of every Israeli in the West Bank is based on a regime of privilege that developed out of that primary act of occupation. We have the privilege of hiking in Palestinian areas to our heart’s content, of buying subsidized housing for Jews only on the lands of Bethlehem, of raising cherries and grapes in the wadis of Hebron, of quarrying on the mountain slopes, of driving on roads whose land was expropriated from the indigenous inhabitants for public use.

The Palestinians, in contrast to us, not only are not allowed to move from Hebron to Tel Aviv, because they like the sea, for example; they are not even allowed to visit the lands and homes their family owned before 1948, nor are they allowed to tour Galilee and visit relatives. The regime of travel permits that has been in place since 1991 deprives all Palestinians of the right to freedom of movement in Israel while the system of roadblocks limits their movement in their own territories.
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The right to travel the land is a basic human right, and like any right, when it is not universal, it is a mutilated right, that is, it becomes a privilege. That is a fact, even if most Israelis repress or ignore it. Our presence in the Palestinian territories, which is based on military and political superiority, is therefore violent and arrogant by its very nature, even when it is expressed in pleasant ways, like cultivating gardens in settlements or taking a pre-Shabbat hike.

Read the rest

Labels: Israel, Palestine

Asia Times:

Sri Lanka’s long-dead ceasefire has been formally buried. The Lankan government announced its withdrawal from the 2002 ceasefire agreement on Wednesday, paving the way for a no-holds-barred fight between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
…
Over 5,000 people have died in the past two years of “ceasefire”, taking the death toll since the war erupted in 1983 to around 70,000. On the ground, the ceasefire had ceased to exist since end-2005. But it continued to hold on paper.
…
Sources in the Lankan government told Asia Times Online that the government’s decision to call off the ceasefire at this juncture was prompted by the series of victories that the Lankan military has scored against the LTTE in recent months. “Emboldened by these military successes, the government has decided to push for a fight to the finish,” a Defense Ministry official said. “Military defeat of the LTTE seems within reach and the government would like to go for it,” he said.
…
“The military seems to believe its own propaganda,” said a Tamil political analyst who did not want to be named. “The LTTE will slip into guerrilla warfare and bleed the government, as it has done in the past.”

Labels: Sri Lanka