The Telegraph finally reaches the conclusion which has been obvious to many Americans all along: Gun control laws impact only law-abiding citizens. The criminal, who has already decided to commit robbery or murder, will hardly shrink from the footling addition of an additional charge of illegal gun possession.

For James Andre Smartt-Ford, 16, Michael Dosunmu, 15, and Billy Cox, 15, the hand-wringing by police and politicians over the escalation of gun crime comes a little late: all three have been shot dead in south London over the past 10 days…

We have… the toughest gun control laws in the world. They have actually proved strikingly ineffectual.

Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns – either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe – with ease. With no dedicated frontier police, our borders remain hopelessly porous. The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.

… what a price we are paying.

Amazing!

Hat tip to José Guardia.

The Guardian reports that a British Channel 4 investigative report demonstrates that preaching of jihad, Wahabi extremism, and Islamic supremacism is still going on today in prominent mosques all over Britain. Is anyone really surprised?

An undercover investigation has revealed disturbing evidence of Islamic extremism at a number of Britain’s leading mosques and Muslim institutions, including an organisation praised by the Prime Minister.

Secret video footage reveals Muslim preachers exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the hijab, and to create a ‘state within a state’. Many of the preachers are linked to the Wahhabi strain of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which funds a number of Britain’s leading Islamic institutions.

A forthcoming Channel 4 Dispatches programme paints an alarming picture of how preachers in some of Britain’s most moderate mosques are urging followers to reject British laws in favour of those of Islam. Leaders of the mosques have expressed concern at the preachers’ activities, saying they were unaware such views were being disseminated.
At the Sparkbrook mosque, run by UK Islamic Mission (UKIM), an organisation that maintains 45 mosques in Britain and which Tony Blair has said ‘is extremely valued by the government for its multi-faith and multicultural activities’, a preacher is captured on film praising the Taliban. In response to the news that a British Muslim solider was killed fighting the Taliban, the speaker declares: ‘The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.’

Another speaker says Muslims cannot accept the rule of non-Muslims. ‘You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir [non-Muslim],’ a preacher, Dr Ijaz Mian, tells a meeting held within the mosque. ‘We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.’

The 12-month investigation also recorded a deputy headmaster of an Islamic high school in Birmingham telling a conference at the Sparkbrook mosque that he disagrees with using the word democracy. ‘They should call it … kuffrocracy, that’s their plan. It’s the hidden cancerous aim of these people.’ The Darul Uloom school said it no longer employed the teacher and that one of the reasons he resigned ‘was the incompatibility of many of his opinions with the policies of the school’.

Philip Howard, late of the Black Watch, in today’s Wall Street Journal, editorializes about Britain’s Labour Government’s cheese-paring over minor and trivial expenses attendant upon keeping up the traditions of Britain’s fighting Highland regiments.

The British Army has (created) a shortage of kilts for its Highland Regiment. It has ordered only 320 ceremonial kilts for 5,000 Jocks, so they are having to share, which is not a comfortable business for the buttock-swinging, elite warriors…

This dire deficiency of the kilt has arisen because last August the British Army, in its infinite wisdom, decided to amalgamate its remaining Scottish regiments. No doubt there were sound strategic and logistic reasons for this, on the ground that bigger is cheaper to administer. But it destroyed the ancient traditions and symbols of tribal families…

The Royal Scots were the First of Foot and Right of the Line. They claim to be the oldest regiment in the British Army, nicknamed Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard. The legend goes that Pilate’s Roman legionary dad married a Highland lass from Fortingal in Perthshire. The Royal Scots wore trews (tight tartan breeks) rather than the kilt, because they were a Lowland Regiment. When they were in French service as “Le Régiment de Douglas”, a dispute arose with the “Régiment de Picardie” as to which was the senior. The French Colonel claimed that his regiment was on duty on the night of the Crucifixion. To which the Colonel of the Royal Scots replied: “Had it been our shift that night, we wouldna hae slept at our post.”

Read the whole thing.

St. George, patron saint of England

The Telegraph reports that, in 2006, there were born in England and Wales 2,833 babies called Mohammed and 1,422 called Muhammad for a total of 4255, versus only 3386 named George.

The Church of Our Dear Lady in Dendermonde, Flanders (Belgium) features a late 17th century pulpit, sculpted in wood by Mattheus van Beveren, upheld by angels who are treading underfoot the false prophet Mohammed, who is leaning on the Al-Koran.

The Guardian reports that Britain’s clueless Conservative Party is contemplating trying to outflank Labour… to the left!

One of David Cameron’s key policy advisers will urge the party today to abandon its Churchillian and “out of date” ideas about the welfare state, the Guardian has learned. Greg Clark, who is overhauling the party’s approach to poverty at the Tory leader’s request, will urge Conservatives to look to the (leftwing) Guardian commentator Polly Toynbee rather than the wartime leader.

His proposals are likely to infuriate many in the grassroots – and in the Tory press – but they suggest the party is seeking to outflank the government in surprising areas, as they have already done by campaigning as champions of the NHS.

Mr Clark, a shadow minister and confidant of the Tory leader who has been working on the party’s comprehensive policy review, argues that the Tories must attack inequality.

In a paper being published today, he writes: “The traditional Conservative vision of welfare as a safety net encompasses another outdated Tory nostrum – that poverty is absolute, not relative. Churchill’s safety net is at the bottom: holding people at subsistence level, just above the abyss of hunger and homelessness. It is the social commentator Polly Toynbee who supplies imagery that is more appropriate for Conservative social policy in the twenty first century.”

What Britain needs is a return to red-blooded Thatcherism, not a cowardly revival of 19th century Bismarckian-style efforts to compete with leftism in bribery of the canaille.

The Evening Standard has news of Britain’s Labour Government’s latest crime fighting initiative.

Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said.

Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children’s future and the state must put them right, Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes said.

Their children’s well-being is at risk ‘unless we act’, she declared.

And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new ‘parenting workforce’ to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and ‘supported’.

The call for state intervention in the minute details of family life followed a series of Labour efforts to reduce anti-social behaviour and improve educational standards by imposing rigorous controls on the lives of the youngest children.

Mrs Hughes has established a national curriculum to set down how babies are taught to speak in childcare from the age of three months.

Her efforts have gone alongside a push by other ministers to determine exactly how parents treat their children down to how they should brush their teeth…

This autumn is likely to see an extension of parenting orders that can force parents to attend parenting classes so that they can be used on the say so of local councils against parents.

For the first time, parenting orders are likely to be directed against parents whose children have committed no criminal offence.

The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair’s ‘national parenting academy’, a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the ‘parenting workforce’.

We’ve all heard of “the nanny-state,” but really!

British Police warned a jeweller not to distribute to neigboring jewellers pictures of a thief captured on the shop’s video camera, because doing so would infringe the woman’s human rights.

It seems to me that I’ve already linked and quoted, or at the very least already read, Michael Bywater’s jeremiad, in today’s Telegraph, about the infantilization of modern Britons, but I know people who will like it, so here it is again.

My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn’t have a lifestyle. He didn’t need one: he had a life.

He had a hat and a car and a wife and two sons and a housekeeper and a maid and a nanny for the children, and the housekeeper had a dog and the dog had a canker and lived in a kennel.

My grandfather read Charles Dickens mostly. Sometimes they went on holiday. His house was furnished with furniture…

Dr Chand didn’t have a lifestyle either. Nobody had a lifestyle then, because there was nobody to tell them to, and anyway they were too busy having lives.

They were grown-ups. They went about their business. In my grandfather’s case, it was seeing patients and making them better, where possible…

I suspect that my grandfather’s life was real in a sense that my father’s life hasn’t quite been, and my life is not at all.

A 14-year-old British schoolgirl, who had been in the hospital the previous day, was denounced for racism by her teacher, who proceeded to file a police complaint. The young girl was ultimately arrested, fingerprinted, and placed in a jail cell for three and a half hours.

Her offense? She had complained of being placed in a study group with five Urdu-speakers with whom she could not communicate, and asked to change groups.

Her teacher at Harrop Fold High School in Worsley, Greater Manchester, reportedly shouted and screamed at her: “It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police.”

The girl was placed in isolation, and a complaint of committing a section five racial public order offence was lodged against her by her teacher via the full-time police officer stationed in her school. A week later, the bobbies arrived to take the young lady into custody.

She was ultimately released without charges, and permitted to transfer to a different science class.

The Daily Mail reports:

Headteacher Dr Antony Edkins said: “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark by one student towards a group of Asian students new to the school and new to the country.”

“We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards people and pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form.”

Reuters reports that a British Art Gallery is eliminating some nudes from a surrealist exhibition in order to avoid offending Muslims.

For years now, the liberal elites have been explaining that it was essential that the grossest obscenities be not only exhibited but governmentally subsidized, or the freedom of artistic expression would be fatally compromised. The crucifix, regardless of any possible offense to Christians, immersed in urine; the Virgin Mary depicted in elephant dung, constituted artistic statements which had to be accorded public space and defended.

It seems perfectly clear at this point that believing Christians, and people serious about aesthetic values, just needed to threaten to slap some of these phoney bastards around, and then it would have been: Good bye, Andres Serrano! Adieu, Chris Ofili!

A London gallery has decided not to show some works of art because it fears they would upset Muslims, a curator said on Friday, a week after a German opera house canned a Mozart production for the same reason.

The director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery decided to remove works by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from an exhibition the day before it was due to open, one of the museum’s curators, Agnes de la Beaumelle, told Reuters.

“The motive was simply to not shock the population of the Whitechapel neighbourhood, which is partly Muslim,” she said.

The Whitechapel area in east London is home to many ethnic minorities including a large Bangladeshi community.

The gallery issued a statement saying that some works were not included in the exhibition because of space constraints but declined to comment specifically on what Beaumelle said….

Bellmer’s work includes dolls of naked young girls.

The Telegraph reports that a Muslim visitor has been invading wards containing British soldiers wounded in Afghanistan, threatening and haranguing injured men who are in no position to defend themselves.

A paratrooper wounded in Afghanistan was threatened by a Muslim visitor to the British hospital where he is recovering.

Seriously wounded soldiers have complained that they are worried about their safety after being left on wards that are open to the public at Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham.

On one occasion a member of the Parachute Regiment, still dressed in his combat uniform after being evacuated from Afghanistan, was accosted by a Muslim over the British involvement in the country.

“You have been killing my Muslim brothers in Afghanistan,” the man said during a tirade.

Because the soldier was badly injured and could not defend himself, he was very worried for his safety, sources told The Daily Telegraph.

A relative of the Para said the man had twice walked on to the ward where two other soldiers and four civilians were being treated without once being challenged by staff.

“It’s not the best way to treat our returning men,” he said. “They are nervous that these guys might attack them and, despite being paratroopers, they cannot defend themselves because of their injuries.”