Who is Charlie?

January 13, 2015

JE SUIS CHARLIE

Omslaget på tidningen Charlie Hebdos nya nummer, Charlie Hebdo och tidningen Liberations redaktioner. Foto: TT/AP och Charlie Hebdo.

The cover of the new issue of Charlie Hebdo, Charlie Hebdo and the newspaper Liberation editors. Photo: TT / AP and Charlie Hebdo (via Swedish Radio)

 PEGIDA ALSO CLAIMS TO BE CHARLIE 

A protestor holds a poster showing German Chancellor Angela Merkel wearing a head scarf in front of the Reichtstags building with a crescent on top and the writing "Mrs Merkel here is the people" during a rally of the group Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA, in Dresden, Germany, Monday, Jan. 12, 2015.

A record 25,000 attended the Pegida demonstration in Dresden on 12th January 2015 BBC/AP

 BUT, HE IS NOT CHARLIE

Right-wing Polish MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke

Right-wing Polish MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke at the European Parliament 12th January 2015 BBC/Reuters

Nigel Farage the UKIP leader, who is a clown in many ways and on many issues, does have a point regarding integration (not immigration). It is not mass immigration – as he believes – but the blind worship of a soppy, separatist, “multi-culturism” which has removed the incentive and need for immigrants to integrate. The grooming rings of Pakistani immigrants and the attempted take-over of Birmingham schools have certainly been enabled – perhaps only partly – by the cowardly worship of “multi-culturism”. Like it or not, Europe is and will continue to be multiethnic. That requires the separate cultures to be subordinated to a single over-riding culture, which in turn has to be something new which evolves from the various new inputs. Immigration inevitably gives multi-ethnicity but it is the blind worship of multi-culturism which hinders integration. No doubt prejudice and racism also hinder integration but even here, the separatist nature of multi-culturism entrenches racism.

I love the fact that in the UK, chicken tikka massala has gone mainstream and I can get it at M&S and at the pub. But I am equally glad that the pub remains a pub and has not been converted into a dhaba. When I want channa – bhatura my favourite dhaba is in Handsworth, but thankfully that dhaba will never be a pub. There is a place for the dhaba to exist, but it is the pub serving the chicken tikka massala which is integration in motion.

(I shall leave my ranting about all organised religions for another time and another post).

It is not immigration but integration which is the real issue.

BBC: Mr Farage, leader of the anti-EU UK Independence Party, said mass immigration had “made it frankly impossible for many new communities to integrate”.

“We do have, I’m afraid, I’m sad to say, a fifth column that is living within our own countries, that is utterly opposed to our values,” he said.

He is quite correct that in Europe, the supporters of radical Islam are self-confessed fifth-columnists (defined as any group of people organised to undermine a larger group).

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Numerical gibberish from a Professor of Meteorology at Florida State

January 12, 2015

There is a strange article in the Tallahassee Democrat by a Peter Ray, a Professor of Meteorology at Florida State University. This is not exactly Nature and the TD’s fact checking processes are not to be compared to a proper peer review, yet they allowed this nonsense to be published:

-TLHBrd_12-28-2014_Democrat_1_A003~~2014~12~27~IMG_-TLHBrd_11-16-2014_D_1_1_.jpg

Peter Ray – image Tallahassee Democrat photo Craig Litten

The population doubles every 40 years. In 100 years there will be 100 times as many people living on the earth. All will suffer the lack of food and water. Many will die and wars will be over resources.

Never mind that the UN projections show a world population of 7 billion today reaching a peak of about 10-11 billion by 2100. Never mind that global fertility is declining fast. Never mind that a doubling every 40 years would need some 265 years to reach a factor of 100. Never mind that in 100 years the growth would be by a factor of 6.6. Peter Ray seems to be calculating by his strange mathematics a population of 700 billion in 100 years (though quite how he calculates this is a mystery). The rest of the article is conventional gloom and doom gibberish but masochists can find it here.

Prof. Peter S Ray, Florida State University

However I thought it odd that somebody so numerically illiterate – in a public article – could be a Professor of Meteorology, which led me to the Florida State University page of a Professor Peter S Ray which in turn led me to his homepage and then on to his cv. He is the only Peter Ray listed. The pictures – if all of the same person – seem a little anachronistic. Presumably the Tallahassee Democrat picture was chosen as being the most flattering but I would guess it is from 20 years ago. Personally I would prefer the later picture.

The “back to the future” theme appears also in his cv where his PhD (Meteorology) is from 1973 but his MS (Meteorology) is from 2013. It is not inconceivable that a Masters degree could follow a PhD, but in the same field?

I get worried when Professors start spouting about matters outside their own narrow fields. They are imbued with an authority they do not have and – more often than not – are misguided and misinformed. We could call it the Newton’s Alchemy Syndrome (NAS). Professor Peter Ray should probably avoid demographics.

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“Ghost” armies of Iraq and Afghanistan continue a long tradition

January 12, 2015

There have been recent reports about large numbers of “ghost” employees in the military and police forces of Iraq and Afghanistan, who exist on paper to extract (or account for) large amounts of external funding.

The Iraqi Army was recently revealed to have 50,000 “ghost” soldiers who conducted “ghost” exercises with “ghost” ammunition. But these soldiers were not like Aragorn’s Army of the Dead who swept aside the forces of Mordor. Instead, they melted away into their nothingness when faced by the ISIS fighters in Mosul in June last year.

 

The Unz Review: The Iraqi army includes 50,000 “ghost soldiers” who do not exist, but their officers receive their salaries fraudulently according to the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. “The Prime Minister revealed the existence of 50,000 fictitious names,” said a statement after a thorough headcount during the latest salary payments. 

The Iraqi army has long been notorious for being wholly corrupt with officers invariably paying for their jobs in order to make money either through drawing the salaries of non-existent soldiers or through various other scams. One Iraqi politician told The Independent a year ago that Iraqi officers “are not soldiers, they are investors”. In the years before the defeat of the army in Mosul in June by a much smaller force from Isis, Iraqi units never conducted training exercises. At the time of Isis’s Mosul offensive, government forces in Mosul were meant to total 60,000 soldiers and federal police but the real figure was probably closer to 20,000. …..

….. Another source of earnings for officers are checkpoints on the roads which act like customs barriers on national frontiers. All goods being transported have to pay a tariff and this will again go into the pockets of the officer corps. These will have paid highly for promotion, with the bribe for becoming a colonel $200,000 (£127,000) and a divisional commander $2m. This money would usually be borrowed and paid back out earnings.

There have been similar scams in Afghanistan.

The Guardian: Each year, foreign donors pay hundreds of millions of dollars to fund salaries for members of the Afghan national police. According to a US government watchdog, however, there is little proof of where the money ends up.

In a report released on Monday, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar) writes that much of that money may in fact be bankrolling “ghost workers” – fictional employees created to enrich police chiefs.

Business Insider: The U.S. may be unwittingly doling out checks to “ghost workers” of the Afghan National Police who don’t even exist, according to an alert letter sent from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The letter alleges payment of salaries to non-existent members of the police force, and comes as just the latest in a string of fraud, waste, and abuse exposed by SIGAR under the leadership of John Sopko. …… The letter follows a previous report from SIGAR that found $6.3 million in payments going to Afghan police to fix broken vehicles, many of which had been out of service for over a year or had even been destroyed. …….. Previous reports found the Pentagon paid $12.8 million for equipment that went completely unused, records being shredded of $201 million in fuel purchases for the Afghan National Army, and millions from the U.S. military actually ending up in the hands of the Taliban, among many others.

But the use of these “virtual” employees is nothing new. It was probably first invented by the construction industry and construction probably became an industry as early as in the construction of the pyramids in Egypt and the temples of Babylon some 4 -5,000 years ago. (It is perhaps fitting since Old Babylon lay close to present day Baghdad).

The construction industry uses “ghost” workers primarily for the following reasons:

  1. to milk funds for publicly funded projects – especially for job creation projects,
  2. to avoid minimum wage laws,
  3. to avoid taxes or compulsory employee contributions

Construction sites with their large numbers of transient workers are notoriously difficult to check. Even “ghost” sites with “ghost” workers are not unknown. Very often these construction workers are paid daily and in cash. The use of ghost workers then allows the conversion of project funds into untraceable cash, accumulated in slush funds, for various nefarious purposes.

In recent times the growth of the NGO’s acting as contractors, who often get their funding from charities or public monies, has led to the padding of employee numbers and fictitious payrolls.  Even during the Ebola outbreak, local politicians were busy milking the funds available in Sierra Leone with over 6,000 “ghost” workers. So much so that the British government refused to channel its funds through local organisations.

According to report, this is the first time that the British Government has openly condemned the Sierra Leone Government publicly for alleged misuse of the former’s support to the latter. This development, according to report, took place on Monday 8thDecember, 2014. On the same day, the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) issued a news release expressing massive corruption and fraud in the National Ebola Response Center (NERC). The Association expressed worries over the widespread of corruption in the handling of the Ebola Funds by authorities in charge. SLAJ was particularly concerned about the disclosures of the NERC’s CEO’s revelation that some 6,000 ghost names were have been discovered in the weekly payment voucher for healthcare workers in the frontline, and the strikes by healthcare workers negatively impacting on the fight against the Ebola.

I first heard about “ghost” locums in the NHS in the UK as a student in the 1960s. In Japan it was obligatory to use local construction crews for the construction and erection of power plant equipment and we were required to hire the entire crew. My best estimates were that the crews – on paper – contained about 20% more names than ever appeared on site. In the US I found that “unionised” power plant sites always needed between 10- 20% more construction workers than non-unionised sites (always through contractors of course). It was a similar story on sites in India and Africa. Through the 1990s it was a lucrative business to start an NGO with funding from abroad (and probably still is). Often the funding was based on covering all “approved” (but ghostly) personnel costs and covering external purchases for approved projects. But here the “head” of the NGO was essentially the owner of an “enterprise”.

“Ghosts” are not going away anytime soon.

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Mathematical images by Yeganeh

January 11, 2015
Yeganeh bird in flight

Yeganeh bird in flight

Hamid Naderi Yeganeh, “A Bird in Flight” (November 2014)

This image is like a bird in flight. It shows 2000 line segments. For each i=1, 2, 3, … , 2000 the endpoints of the i-th line segment are:
(3(sin(2πi/2000)^3), -cos(8πi/2000))
and
((3/2)(sin(2πi/2000)^3), (-1/2)cos(6πi/2000)).

See his gallery of images here.

Hamid Naderi Yeganeh is a Bachelor student of mathematics at the University of Qom. He won gold medal at the 38th Iranian Mathematical Society’s Competition (2014).

A Generalization of Wallis Product by Mahdi Ahmadinia and Hamid Naderi Yeganeh

PlusMaths writes:

…but it’s actually a collection of points in the plane given by a mathematical formula. To be precise, it’s a subset of the complex plane consisting of points of the form

  \[ \lambda A(t)+(1-\lambda )B(t), \]    

where

  \[ A(t)= 3(\sin (t))^{3}- \frac{3i}{4}\cos (4t) \]    

and

  \[ B(t)= \frac{3}{2}(\sin (t))^{5} - \frac{i}{2}\cos (3t) \]    

for $0\leq t \leq 2\pi $ and $0\leq \lambda \leq 1.$

The image was created by Hamid Naderi Yeganeh.

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The Ukrainian pilot who shot down MH17?

January 11, 2015

The MH17 shooting down “mystery” may not remain a mystery for ever.

Further details are emerging (from the Russian side of the divide) about the shooting down of MH17 by a Ukrainian Air Force Su-25 attack aircraft piloted by Captain Vladislav Valerjevych Voloshin as narrated by a “secret” witness.

Captain Vladislav Valerjevych Voloshin image Komsomolskaya Pravda

The Russian sources are not, in themselves, entirely trustworthy but what adds to their credibility is the lack of any pushback from NATO, the Dutch prosecutor or the Malaysians. There is denial from the Ukrainians of course but the following seem to be established (with varying degrees of reliability):

  1. Captain Voloshin is a pilot in the Ukrainian Air Force
  2. He did fly a mission that day at that time
  3. He took off in his Su-25 combat jet on 17th July 2014 from Dnipropetrovsk air base
  4. His plane carried 2 air-to-air missiles on take-off
  5. His plane returned without the missiles,
  6. A passenger on MH17 was wearing an oxygen mask which had had time to deploy,
  7. The MH17 fuselage was riddled with many very regularly spaced holes of a diameter consistent with cannon fire.

The missiles were probably R-60 air-to-air missiles.

The full interview with the mystery witness is translated by Kristina Rus for FortRuss.blogspot.com from the article in  Komsomolskaya Pravda

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Monkeys can learn how to use a mirror

January 11, 2015

Self-awareness is surely more than just passing a “mirror test”. There would seem to be a continuum between the two discrete states of “not being self-aware” (a stone) to being “fully self-aware” (higher primates and humans), though I am not entirely sure if even higher levels of self-awareness are conceivable. I take self-awareness to be on a higher plane than self-consciousness. Self-awareness is the recognition of a tree as “being in a forest” whereas self-consciousness is just being the “tree”. Empirically, sentience is an even higher cognitive capability where sentience requires self-awareness which in turn requires self-consciousness.

Most mammals are conscious of self or at least of self-interest. Even a tree for that matter could be said to exhibit self-interest. Passing the mirror test seems to be a fairly conclusive evidence of well-developed, self-awareness but that is not to say that some degree of self-awareness is not possible even when the mirror test is not passed. Whales, dolphins and some elephants have passed the mirror test along with most of the higher primates (gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos). The magpie is the only bird known which has passed the test. Monkeys (rhesus monkeys, macaques) do not pass the test but are clearly self-conscious.

Now, new research has shown that rhesus monkeys can be taught to make use of a mirror such that they could pass the mirror test. Can awareness therefore be taught?

Liangtang Chang, Gin Fang, Shikun Zhang, Mu-Ming Poo, Neng Gong. Mirror-Induced Self-Directed Behaviors in Rhesus Monkeys after Visual-Somatosensory Training. Current Biology, January 2015 DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2014.11.016

EurekAlert: Unlike humans and great apes, rhesus monkeys don’t realize when they look in a mirror that it is their own face looking back at them. But, according to a report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on January 8, that doesn’t mean they can’t learn. What’s more, once rhesus monkeys in the study developed mirror self-recognition, they continued to use mirrors spontaneously to explore parts of their bodies they normally don’t see. …

“Our findings suggest that the monkey brain has the basic ‘hardware’ [for mirror self-recognition], but they need appropriate training to acquire the ‘software’ to achieve self-recognition,” says Neng Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In earlier studies, scientists had offered monkeys mirrors of different sizes and shapes for years, even beginning at a young age, Gong explains. While the monkeys could learn to use the mirrors as tools for observing other objects, they never showed any signs of self-recognition. When researchers marked the monkeys’ faces and presented them with mirrors, they didn’t touch or examine the spot or show any other self-directed behaviors in front of those mirrors in the way that even a very young person would do.

In the new study, Gong and his colleagues tried something else. They sat the monkeys in front of a mirror and shined a mildly irritating laser light on the monkeys’ faces. After 2 to 5 weeks of the training, those monkeys had learned to touch face areas marked by a spot they couldn’t feel in front of a mirror. They also noticed virtual face marks in mirroring video images on a screen. They had learned to pass the standard mark test for mirror self-recognition.

Most of the trained monkeys–five out of seven–showed typical mirror-induced self-directed behaviors, such as touching the mark on the face or ear and then looking and/or smelling at their fingers as if they were thinking something like, “Hey, what’s that there on my face?” They also used the mirrors in other ways that were unprompted by the researchers, to inspect other body parts. …… 

I note that Gordon Gallup Jr. who developed the mark test is not convinced:

Gordon Gallup Jr., an evolutionary psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany, who was not involved with the research, developed the “mark test,” which is essentially the gold standard for measuring whether an animal possesses self-recognition. [8 Humanlike Behaviors of Primates] ….

Gallup, who developed the mark test, called the study “fundamentally flawed,” because it merely demonstrated that the animals could be trained to do something, not that they understood what they were doing.

“I bet I could train a pigeon to pick the correct answers to the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE),” Gallup told Live Science. “If the pigeon got [the maximum GRE score], would it be qualified for Harvard University?”

Perhaps, given self-consciousness, much of what we call awareness can be taught. Maybe that is how babies develop; an inbuilt self-consciousness which then becomes self-aware as learning (mainly self-taught) occurs. Learning requires memory and maybe that is why this self-taught awareness is what also deteriorates with the memory loss that accompanies the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

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In Norway, more sun correlates to reduced inherited fertlity and greater infant mortality

January 10, 2015

There is a new intriguing paper from The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU):

G. R. Skjaervo, F. Fossoy, E. Roskaft. Solar activity at birth predicted infant survival and women’s fertility in historical Norway. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2015; 282 (1801): 20142032 DOI:10.1098/rspb.2014.2032

Researchers studied Norwegian church records of 9,000 people from the period 1750-1900 and looked at life history variables and compared them with environmental factors including solar activity.

NTNU Press Release: Skjærvø and her colleagues found that children born in the years with lots of solar activity had a higher probability of dying compared to children who were born in the years with less solar activity.

On average, the lifespan of children born in years that had a great deal of solar activity was 5.2 years shorter than other children. The largest difference was in the probability of dying during the first two years of life.

Children who were born in years with lots of sunshine and who survived were also more likely to have fewer children, who in turn gave birth to fewer children than others. This finding shows that increased UV radiation during years of high solar activity had an effect across generations.

Skjærvø used information on the number of sunspots as an indication of the amount of UV radiation in a given year. The number of sunspots reaches a maximum every 11 years on average, which results in more UV radiation on Earth during years with high sunspot and solar activity.

UV radiation can have positive effects on human vitamin D levels, but it can also result in a reduction of vitamin B9 (folate). It is known that low folate levels during pregnancy are linked to higher child mortality.

The NTNU study showed that families from the lowest socio-economic groups were most affected by UV radiation. This is probably related to the time period Skjærvø studied, which was a time of clear class distinctions in Norway, especially in rural areas. Women who worked in the fields were more exposed to the sun than other women. In many cases they also had a poorer diet.

If the primary mechanism for such connections is through UV radiation, then it presumably does not have the same impact on those with darker skin. But I suppose that the records from tropical or equatorial regions are not as comprehensive or reliable as old Norwegian church records.

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Winter storm gives a day with no deaths by fighting in Syria

January 9, 2015

And even while the Paris atrocities seem to be coming to a final resolution, there is always hope. Roll on another ice age.

From Reuters:

A day without death in Syria

 Nobody was reported killed by fighting in Syria on Wednesday, January 7, 2015, the first day without casualties in three years, after a fierce winter storm quelled violence, a group that monitors the war said.

A boy walks past a snowman along a road covered with snow in the Duma neighborhood of Damascus, January 7, 2015. REUTERS/Badra Mamet

 

Men walk along a street during snow fall in the Duma neighborhood of Damascus, January 7, 2015. Nobody was reported killed by fighting in Syria on Wednesday, the first day without casualties in three years, after a fierce winter storm quelled violence, a group that monitors the war said. REUTERS/Badra Mamet

 

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Why do all mighty gods need to be defended against blasphemy?

January 8, 2015

The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran and has yet to be withdrawn

Broadcast on Iranian radio, the judgement read:

“We are from Allah and to Allah we shall return. I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah Willing. Meanwhile if someone has access to the author of the book but is incapable of carrying out the execution, he should inform the people so that [Rushdie] is punished for his actions. Rouhollah al-Mousavi al-Khomeini.”

That was the first time I ever felt it necessary to think about blasphemy and wondered why it is considered by some to be a crime. Sol Invictus is no longer considered a god. But the power of the Sun is such that what humans may say has no impact on its behaviour or its power. It is not necessary to criminalise or be outraged by blasphemy against the Sun. Clearly no all mighty, all knowing god would have any need – or any use – for puny humans to defend the divine reputation. Unless of course, he/she/it was a fiction, in which case “blasphemy” would be seen as threatening by the creators or the supporters of the fiction. Unless the gods had been created in the image of men. The greater the fiction the greater the perceived threat. The greater the outrage against an alleged blasphemy, the weaker the god must be.

All organised religions dislike blasphemy, apostasy and heresy – but it is all about the threat perceived by the members of the organisation. The weaker the foundations of the organisation the greater is the threat perceived. The outrage against The Satanic Verses (usually without even reading the book) and the violent reactions to the Mohammed cartoons were fanned by “priests” of one kind or another. We would be well rid of these organised religions and their troublesome priests.

Voltaire addressed the idiocy of blasphemy under “B” in his Philosophical Dictionary of 1764.

….. Is it not to the purpose here to remark that what has been blasphemy in one country has often been piety in another? ….. 

In our own times it is unfortunate that what is blasphemy at Rome, at our Lady of Loretto, and within the walls of San Gennaro, is piety in London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin, Copenhagen, Berne, Basel, and Hamburg. It is yet more unfortunate that even in the same country, in the same town, in the same street, people treat one another as blasphemers.

Nay, of the ten thousand Jews living at Rome there is not one who does not regard the pope as the chief of the blasphemers, while the hundred thousand Christians who inhabit Rome, in place of two millions of Jovians who filled it in Trajan’s time, firmly believe that the Jews meet in their synagogues on Saturday for the purpose of blaspheming.

A Cordelier has no hesitation in applying the epithet of blasphemer to a Dominican who says that the Holy Virgin was born in original sin, notwithstanding that the Dominicans have a bull from the pope which permits them to teach the maculate conception in their convents, and that, besides this bull, they have in their forum the express declaration of St. Thomas Aquinas.

But the concept of blasphemy has now extended to being “offending the sensibilities” of one section of a community by another. Unfortunately “not giving offense” has become the new norm. Communities compete to see who can be more outraged. Publishers run scared in India of printing anything criticising Hinduism or Islam for fear of “offending sensibilities”. All over Europe the truth about the behaviour of some groups is suppressed to “avoid giving offense”. It is actions being subordinated to fears. It is the cowardice of “political correctness”

Kenan Malik in The Hindu

The “never give offence” brigade imagines that a more plural society requires a greater imposition of censorship. In fact it is precisely because we do live in plural societies that we need the fullest extension possible of free speech. In such societies, it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. It is inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable; and we should deal with those clashes openly and robustly rather than suppress them. It is important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities. Or to put it another way: “You can’t say that!” is all too often the response of those in power to having their power challenged. To accept that certain things cannot be said is to accept that certain forms of power cannot be challenged.

Of course any society must itself decide where its limits of “free speech” are to be set. What constitutes “hate speech” or “incitement to violence” or “libel” or “slander” and should be banned is up to each society to decide. But no society needs to protect any gods – supposed to be all powerful – against blasphemy.

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If Islam is not to be represented by its rabid killers ……..

January 7, 2015

The Paris killers are identified but still at large. But the wanton and savage attack upsets me and I cannot avoid that this post has become a bit of a rant.

It is a short step from a rational detestation of barbarous, young, bigoted and intolerant killers of any kind becoming Islampohobia, when the killers are all, once again, self-confessed followers of radical Islam. The radicalisation of young Muslims in Europe nearly always includes three factors:

  1. A rabid, supposedly religious, imam or mullah or self-anointed preacher, and
  2. an impressionable, immature young person (usually male), and
  3. a failure of parenting

Right now there are radical preachers revelling in the Paris attacks and congratulating the killers. These radicalised young Muslims in Europe are not poverty-stricken. Very often they come from fairly prosperous families. They are not uneducated or unintelligent but they are warped and twisted and brain-washed. When they are unemployed it is because they wish to be unemployed. (They differ from some of the right-wing fanatics of Europe who are often unemployable).

But if Islam is not to be represented by its killers then it is first the Islamic communities of Europe which have to drive out the rabid preachers and improve their own parenting to stop the conversion of their children into these murderous, hate-filled, savages. Merely wringing their hands and condemning these actions after the event is not enough. It is behaviour that counts.

The face of Islam today is the very real behaviour of ISIS, Al Shabab, Boko Haram, the Taliban and a host of similar jihadists together with the absence of actions (not just voices) from the Islamic community to prevent or eradicate the disease. It is high time that the moderate Islamic community realised that – like it or not – they are being defined by their most extreme, warped, fanatics. The demonisation of Islam will not stop as long as Islam does not rid itself of its demons.

Is it any wonder that Pegida is gaining strength in Germany?

I don’t care for any organised religions where preachers take it upon themselves to tell others what they are to believe.  But right now I find organised Islam (Shia and Sunni and Sufi and every jihadist faction) the easiest to despise.

BBC:

Caroline Wyatt, BBC Religious affairs correspondent has just posted this:

The killings at Charlie Hebdo are a deeply unwelcome reminder to the west that for some, mainly young radicalised men, their fundamentalist interpretation of their religion matters enough to kill those who offend it.

As a result, across western Europe, liberally-minded societies are beginning to divide over how best to deal with radical Islamism and its impact on their countries, while governments agonise over the potential for a backlash against Muslims living in Europe.

Today, mainstream Muslim organisations in the UK and France have unequivocally condemned the killings, saying that terrorism is an affront to Islam.

But the potential backlash, including support for far right parties and groups, may well hurt ordinary Muslims more than anyone else, leaving the authorities and religious leaders in western Europe wondering how to confront violence in the name of religion without victimizing minorities or being accused of “Islamophobia”.

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