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In this mailing:
by Soeren Kern
• February 3, 2015 at 5:00 am
"There's
things that I see when I'm driving around Birmingham that shouldn't be
happening. I only drive into these areas, never actually walk into these
areas, I just wouldn't. Just in case I did do something that...because of
their culture or their religion it was a threat or it was an insult or
something." — Resident of Birmingham.
"There
are some communities born under other skies who will not involve the
police at all... there are communities from other cultures who would
prefer to police themselves." — Sir Tom Winsor, chief inspector of
the police forces in England and Wales.
"We
are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are becoming strangers to
each other and leaving communities to be marooned outside the
mainstream." — Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Commission
for Racial Equality.
"One
of the results of [multiculturalism] has been to further alienate the
young from the nation in which they were growing up and also to turn
already separate communities into 'no-go' areas where adherence to this
ideology [of Islamic extremism] has become a mark of acceptability."
— Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester.
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Left, an example of the posters that have been put
up in Muslim enclaves in Britain. Right, British jihadists in Syria
encourage British Muslims to take up arms for the Islamic State, in a
recruitment video entitled "There is No Life Without Jihad".
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This is the second article in a multi-part series documenting
so-called no-go zones in Europe. The first article in this series
documents no-go zones in France. This second segment focuses on the
United Kingdom. It provides a brief compilation of references to British
no-go zones by academic, police, media and government sources.
An erroneous claim on American television that Birmingham, England,
is "totally Muslim" and off-limits to non-Muslims has ignited a
politically charged debate about the existence of no-go zones in Britain
and other European countries.
No-go zones can be defined as Muslim-dominated neighborhoods that
are de facto off limits to non-Muslims due to a number of factors,
including the lawlessness, insecurity or religious intimidation that
often pervades these areas.
by Stephen Blank and Peter
Huessy • February 3, 2015 at 4:00 am
To
begin with, NATO had never promised Russia that it would not
expand. Russia originally fabricated this bogus charge in the wake of its
disappointment over the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Countries
formerly in or near the Soviet Union did not trust Russia to refrain from
doing what it had done before, such as rolling tanks into Czechoslovakia
in 1968, or military aggression in Georgia in 2008. They were right.
At a
press conference in Yalta in 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin
conceded the right of former Soviet bloc members to join NATO.
Russian
military planning for its Crimean operation may actually have begun as
early as 2005 or 2008; not because of Kiev's alleged "mistreatment
of ethnic Russians" as Russia claimed rather later, in 2014.
It
was not NATO expansion that upset Putin, but apparently the fear that
Russia's own people might begin to demand a democracy like their
neighbors' in Ukraine.
Russia
"does not ask permission," Putin said in his latest "State
of the Nation" speech, asserting that moves such as holding onto
Crimea and undermining Ukraine are solely "defensive." One can
only imagine what kind of Russian "defensive" Europe and the
U.S. might face if Russia's aggression goes unpunished and its
myth-making is allowed to stand.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin gives his
"State of the Nation" address, December 4, 2014. (Image
source: RT video screenshot)
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In world politics and life, belief in myths invites disaster. One
currently prevailing myth propagated by Russia and its defenders in
America is that the cause of Moscow's ongoing aggression against Ukraine
is the result of the threat Russia feels from the enlargement of NATO and
its after-effects.[1]
Even for those who believe this Russian myth -- but who admit that
Russia is clearly committing aggression against Ukraine -- NATO
enlargement seems to be viewed as America's post-Cold War "original
sin."
As Moscow and its friends tell it, the West -- and especially the
United States -- went back on its promise not to expand NATO after 1989,
and then proceeded to enlarge NATO and isolate Russia from Europe.
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