The British Leftist government helps Muslim extremists

The FCO is Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, handling Britain's relations with other countries. It is a powerful and elite Department but one of its insiders was shocked at how it and its government were abetting Islamofascists -- so he has done his best to tell the world about it

The FCO was not and is not standing up to the totalitarian ideas of the Islamist extreme Right, as it stood up to the totalitarianism of the socialist extreme Left in the second half of the 20th century. On the contrary, the establishment has appeased political Islamism abroad and interfered in the domestic affairs of its own country by mounting a covert operation to aid and abet it at home.

Pasquill betrayed the institutions of liberal democracy by standing up for liberal democracy. He defended it from its enemies, who were not only in far-away countries but closeted in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street and the offices of Whitehall. As striking a difference between Pasquill and the establishment renegades of the 20th century (indeed, from every other whistleblower I have known) is that he wanted to be caught. He wanted the police to take him to the cells and arraign him at the Old Bailey for breaking the Official Secrets Act. He did not regard jail as a punishment he hoped to avoid, but sought out the risk of imprisonment the better to highlight the scandal. When the police came to his Pimlico home, he admitted everything. In truth, they did not have a hard job finding him. By the end, he was sending documents from his work email to his home computer and the dullest copper in England could have collared him.

"The Observer and the New Statesman were printing my revelations," he told me, "but they were not having an effect. I thought that being caught would be useful because the FCO would have to prosecute. That was part of my strategy, to get publicity in open court; to make people realise how bad it had got. What is so maddening about our attitude to radical Islam is that it is a classic example of group-think. Cognitive dissonance is stopping serious engagement. Leaking documents was my attempt to break the dissonance, my form of engagement."

I am sure you can understand why he so frightens the FCO. The normal threats an employer can make against an employee — the loss of home, salary, position and, in Pasquill's case, liberty — could not intimidate him. He was a man with the inner freedom the Stoics so valued. He had trained himself to be indifferent to the threats and blandishments of official society. Even though governments around the world read his revelations with varying degrees of horror, the FCO dropped the prosecution. Legally, its case was watertight. Pasquill had admitted leaking official secrets with pride. But Whitehall knew all too well that he would use the dock as a platform to appeal to the jury and the wider public.

Now Pasquill is bringing what to my unqualified eyes looks like a hopeless claim of unfair dismissal. On the face of it, a civil servant who passed a filing cabinet full of official secrets to the press cannot seriously claim that the state exceeded its powers by firing him. Yet if you look at his revelations, his claim makes more sense.

As his affidavit to the employment tribunal dryly remarks, "The documents that I disclosed showed that the FCO and other UK government departments were continuing to work with and assist organisations that promote extreme Islamist politics. My concern was that this policy would have the effect of legitimising and supporting groups with extreme Islamist politics and that such an effect was entirely contradictory to FCO and UK government policy of attempting to prevent the radicalisation of young British Muslims. Furthermore, I believe that the FCO and other government departments pursue a policy of portraying these organisations as mainstream and moderate."

Who is the traitor and who the patriot in these circumstances: the dissident civil servant or the two-faced government? Who, to be blunt, is more deserving of summary dismissal? ...

The FCO seconded him to its "Engaging with the Islamic World" unit. From the moment he arrived, everything felt wrong. He was standing in for Mockbul Ali, an allegedly non-political civil servant. Yet, with official approval, Ali had taken time off to help Labour fight the 2005 general election campaign. Specifically, he was trying to persuade Muslim leaders to support Labour, when many of them were in no mood to do so after the second Iraq war. There has always been a Tammany Hall streak in Labour. Many an aspiring politician has found that buying off ethnic block votes by dropping a few principles is a small price to pay for his advancement in inner-city politics. A refusal to condemn the Ayatollah Khomeini's death threat against Salman Rushdie, for instance, saved several cowards' seats.

Pasquill found something more than ordinary compromises, however. Ali was hardly a loner. The entire FCO hierarchy from Jack Straw, then the Foreign Secretary, downwards was supporting a policy of encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies.

The usual gap between rhetoric and reality had become a dizzying gulf. On the one hand, Labour pretended that it was upholding the 1997 mission statement Robin Cook gave the FCO "to spread the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy which we demand for ourselves". On the other, it was bending over backwards to appease movements which believed in the subjugation of women, the racist conspiracy theories of the Okhrana and the SS, the murder of homosexuals and apostates, the denial of democracy and the dismissal of human rights as an imperialist imposition on the godly.

Before moving into the unit, Pasquill decided to research the Muslim Brotherhood in the British Library. A small step, perhaps, but as he investigated its totalitarian ambitions it proved to be a decisive one, not because of what he found but because of how he found it. When he left the FCO for the library's reading rooms, he left the received wisdom of his hierarchy behind and returned to work ready to think for himself.

As he went through the files Ali had left in his desk, he realised that the FCO under a left-of-centre government was classifying an organisation founded by the admirers of European fascism and sustained by the adherents of a brutish theocracy as "moderate". The result was a policy at once sinister and naïve. The decayed autocracies of the Middle East were producing an Islamist rather than a liberal opposition, the FCO argued, which Britain must "engage" with at any price. The FCO did not ask how Arab liberals and democrats would feel if Britain embraced men who would happily kill them. Nor did it sigh and say with regret that religious reaction was a deplorable reality Britain had to learn to live with. Instead, it actively sought to promote and fund extremism. As an official argued, "Given that Islamist groups are often less corrupt than the generality of the societies in which they operate, consideration might be given to channelling aid resources through them, so long as sufficient transparency is achievable." In its enthusiasm for appeasement, the FCO did not know or want to know that theocracy is inherently corrupt. By soaking society in piety, it can present its demands for money as the demands of God. As the examples of Saudi Arabia and Iran show, the more Islamist a country is, the more corrupt it becomes.

As his superiors betrayed the liberal Muslims of the Middle East, Mockbul Ali worked to marginalise their counterparts in Britain. Although the domestic affairs of our country are not any of the FCO's business, it sponsored a road show, which purported to be representative of British Muslim voices but was in reality a Muslim Brotherhood front. Ali followed up by lobbying the Home Office to allow extremists into Britain. Eric Taylor, of the India-Pakistan Relations Desk, was one of the few officials to protest. He pointed out that a gruesome Bangladeshi politician Ali was recommending had provoked riots on his last visit and, according to a report from a Bangladeshi human rights organisation, Drishtipat, had compared Bangladeshi Hindus to excrement, while appearing to defend attacks on the country's persecuted Ahmadiyya Muslim community, regarded as apostates by the Islamists.

The more Pasquill read, the more driven he became. He roamed the FCO's corridors picking up Ali's files, first taking them to Soho to copy and post, then just emailing them home and printing them out. I won't say that his leaks had no effect. The story went round the world. In Britain, Hazel Blears, Ruth Kelly and Jacqui Smith — all women, significantly, who were appalled by the official endorsement of misogyny — read Bright's reports and tried to save what was left of the honour of the British Left by fighting back. But I cannot pretend that their stand was anything other than an isolated example. Pasquill's revelations had no impact on a wider liberal society. It did not want to see how hypocritical it had become or to survey the damage it had wrought. The achievement of political Islam in Britain has been to suborn the liberal Left and cut off the most promising escape route for dissidents in the process. An abused woman, a young man fighting religious authoritarianism, an Iranian exile seeking to gain support for the campaign against the Archbishop of Canterbury's and Lord Chief Justice's endorsement of Sharia law or a British Bangladeshi trying to bring the Islamist criminals who massacred civilians in the war of independence to justice, would once have looked left for succour. If they do so now, they will find that progressives take their cue from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, rather than the best of the liberal Left's traditions, and dismiss Muslims who fight for values they profess to hold as being at best irrelevances and at worst stool-pigeons for imperialism.

Do not make the mistake of believing that such attitudes are confined to the FCO. Only recently, the supposedly left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research was trumpeting "non-violent" Islamism as "the best organised and most popular opposition to existing authoritarian regimes in the Middle East". What "non-violent" Islamists would do to Arab liberals when they achieved power was not a question that detained the British leftists of the IPPR for a second.

As his illusions about the benign nature of the FCO crumbled, Pasquill tried a thought experiment. He asked himself, "Is the Foreign Office a Muslim Brotherhood front organisation?" Obviously, it was not, he replied, although looked at in a certain light, it might as well have been. The light metaphor stayed with him until "one day I was looking at the ivy growing in my garden and it struck me that it was phototropic — growing in the direction of the sun. I realised that the FCO is Islamotropic: it grows towards Islamic extremism, always searching for reasons to excuse it." At the age of 50, Derek Pasquill is now on the dole with no pension, no savings and no prospects. The FCO responded to his revelations by promoting Mockbul Ali. Like ivy on a wall, the liberal establishment still creeps towards the reactionary forces that despise it, entwining itself with its enemies and leaving its friends to wilt in the dark.

More HERE. Another comment on the decline of the FCO here

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Why Liberal Journalists are Joining the Obama Administration’s Attack on Fox News

While the Obama administration continues its war against its media critics, well-known liberal journalists — instead of defending freedom of the press — are joining the attack on a news network they despise as much as does the administration. Gone is any seeming concern for the right of commentators to voice their own opinion, because mainstream liberal editorial writers are sure their opponents are both extremists and wrong.

Take, as our first example, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of The Slate Group. Writing in last week’s Newsweek, Weisberg explained at the start that anyone who watches Fox News knows immediately that Anita Dunn’s charge that Fox has a “right-wing bias” is correct, since Fox always confirms “it with its coverage.” Referring to Fox’s own reporting on the administration’s attacks on the network, he notes that Fox showed what he calls a “textbook example of a biased journalism.” If it is true, it is hardly surprising, since the very network under attack might be expected to come to its own defense.

Next, he refers to its commentators as “platinum pundettes and anchor androids.” He offers no names. Could he be referring to Chris Wallace, whose weekly Sunday broadcast is widely acclaimed as one of TV’s best weekend programs, and who publicly complained that never in his decades of broadcasting has he come across more of a bunch of “whiners” than he has seen in the Obama administration? Is he referring to Megan Kelly, who did a yeoman’s job questioning ACORN founder Wade Rathke in a long and exclusive interview? Wouldn’t he want a defender of ACORN to speak on the one network that reported on its scandals? Is he upset, perhaps, that Kelly came off better than Rathke did?

He thinks it is a silly comparison to their charge that the war on Fox is similar to Nixon’s enemies list. Of course, he gives no reason why the analogy is false — perhaps because to most observers, it isn’t.

Next, he attributes the success of the many “tea parties” as due to Fox’s sponsorship of them — ignoring the fact that it was an internet created phenomenon that Fox alone chose to cover when others ignored them. Evidently, Weisberg can’t distinguish between paying attention to events it finds newsworthy and sponsoring them. [I acknowledge that Glenn Beck anchored his show’s special coverage of the Washington DC tea party, which he supported.] Weisberg’s fear is that now “ideologically distorted news” drives ratings up, and that others will soon imitate them in order to gain more viewers.

Not one word by Weisberg about MSNBC’s equally tilted drift to the precincts of the far left. Chris “thrill up my leg” Matthews is an unabashed liberal whose brand of politics stands at the left end of the Democratic spectrum, and its mainstays in prime time, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, are as far Left as O’Reilly, Hannity and Beck are on the right end of the conservative spectrum. If Fox reports critically about ACORN, for example, one can count on Maddow and Olbermann to offer unabashed defenses of the group presented as accurate news analysis.....

Finally, writing in The New Yorker in the Nov.2nd issue, the brilliant academic literary intellectual Louis Menand argues that Fox has cornered “the market on anti-Administration animus,” and he is concerned that the administration’s opposition “is not likely to put a dent in the ratings.” Indeed, as recent polls have showed, it has done just the opposite. CNN is losing its viewers at a rapid pace, MSNBC is way behind them, and Fox alone stands far ahead of all the other news outlets.

Menand argues that when Fox people charge that they have filled the administration “with Nazis, Maoists, anarchists and Marxist revolutionaries,” they are revealing that they are only “the voice of the fringe.” Look at Menand’s language. We all know that in fact, no one at Fox has made such an argument. When and where has anyone said that they are filling the administration with Nazis, for example? They reported that Anita Dunn told school children that she looked to Mao as an example. No one claimed that she was herself a Maoist. Can Menand name one person at Fox who has said that? Of course not. What he is trying to do with ridicule and made-up claims is to discredit Fox, since it successfully and accurately pointed to appointees who indeed do have a radical pedigree, and forced the most prominent of them, Van Jones, to resign....

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Comment from Les Bates: "How a Progressive can turn into a Fascist in three easy steps. 1. Take a bath or shower. 2. Get a haircut. 3. Put on a clean party uniform. That's it. That's all it takes."

Socialism Kills: "What would have happened in India if that country had liberalized its economy ten years earlier than it did? Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar does a commendable job supplying a plausible, if gruesome, answer. He finds that with earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line. The delay in economic reform represents an enormous social tragedy. It drives home the point that India’s socialist era, which claimed it would deliver growth with social justice, delivered neither."

A real RINO: "House Republican leader John Boehner said Sunday that the GOP wants moderates in the party and that the special election for a New York congressional seat in which the party’s candidate dropped out — and threw her support behind the Democrat— is an unusual situation. Dierdre Scozzafava, the Republican nominee in the Upstate New York district, stopped campaigning Saturday, days ahead of the Tuesday election. On Sunday, she endorsed the Democrat in the race, not the Conservative Party candidate favored by fellow Republicans. Scozzafava, a state legislator, had been losing support to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, a former Republican. Hoffman drew endorsements from former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and other prominent Republicans.”

But will they collect? "“A U.S. District Court judge in San Jose has awarded Facebook $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case the social-networking giant filed against online marketer Sanford Wallace, who is known as the ‘Spam King.’ The Palo Alto company claimed Wallace and two associates registered as Facebook members in November 2008 to start a spam and phishing scheme. According to court documents, the firm said Wallace sent numerous Facebook members a link to a Web site that tricked them into revealing their login information. Some messages sent the Facebook user to other sites that paid Wallace for that traffic.”

Using the criminal justice system to reward political support : "Last Wednesday, President Obama signed a bill into law which adds acts of violence against the disabled, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender folks to the list of federal hate crimes. This increases coverage of the federal hate crimes protections which previously only included race, religion, and national origin. In typical Obama euphoria, activist instantaneously proclaimed the measure to be the most important since the civil rights acts empowering blacks were passed in the 1960s. Of course, those of us with clearer, less emotional heads on our shoulders know that hate crime legislation is nothing more than politicians pandering to their base of support by providing them with a special interest perk in an effort to energize that base for widespread support at the next election.”

The welfare state corrupts absolutely: "Let’s begin at the beginning. Medical care is not a free good found in nature. Of course, no one really thinks it is. But that doesn’t keep most people from wanting to pretend otherwise, and the current institutional setting makes that possible. After a while, one forgets one is pretending. Yet medical care goes on being a collection of produced goods and services — subject to the laws of supply and demand, and requiring resources and labor that come with opportunity costs. Therein lies the problem.”

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc. He has a lot to say this time about the appearance of the British National Party on BBC TV.

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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