Is the Indian Secret State Assassinating Its Enemies?

I found this concerning story on Ethan Winstanley’s channel on YouTube. Winstanley is, shall we say, a very staunch opponent of non-White immigration and multiculturalism. His videos generally consist of non-Whites behaving badly coupled with sneers about future engineers and doctors and cultural enrichment. Some of the clips shown are of serious, criminal acts, like people robbing and looting. Others are so trivial they reek of desperation of something to put up. Like the videos he made of Black passengers having left dirty marks on bus or train seats by resting their feet on them. It’s hardly a major offence, and there are any number of Whites who have done it, so it hardly seems worth posting a video to complain about it.

But this video was a little different. It was about the suspicious death of a Sikh radical, Hardeep Nijjar, who was found dead from a gunshot wound in his car in Canada. Nijjar was a nationalist, demanding a separate, independent Sikh homeland, Khalistan. He was wanted for the murder of a Hindu priest, though he denied the charge and the Indian government had placed a bounty on his head. He was the third Sikh radical to have been killed in similar circumstances.

The Sikh independence movement can be violent, using terrorism to promote its ends. One Sikh terrorist was wanted by the FBI for the bombing of an airliner. But this incidents suggests that the Indian secret services are joining those of other countries in sending ‘health alteration squads’, as the CIA used to call them, after their enemies. Colonel Gaddafy had no qualms about arranging the assassination of rival African politicians. In the 1980s the Iranians assassinated a Kurdish separatist group in a restaurant in Germany. And the Israelis seems to assassinate their enemies with gay abandon. A couple of years ago they assassinated an Arab politician in a lift. And I can remember how, back in the 1980s, a group of Israeli spies were arrested for a bungled kidnapping in Sweden. They were a snatch squad trying to abduct a Palestinian activist. They decided they needed to cut the electricity in his flat, but took out the whole supply to the apartment complex instead, plunging it into darkness. Then the cops turned up and arrested them. And in Britain the Chinese state has established secret police bases, which monitor political dissidents and whose cadres have snatched protesters from off the streets to beat them. There have also been very suspicious incidents where it seems that Arab dissidents in Britain have been murdered and abducted by supposedly friendly states.

We’re most used to such antics from western intelligence agencies, particularly the Americans and the CIA. But other countries are also using assassination as an instrument of state policy, including in western countries. And it looks like Modi’s nationalist India is joining them.

Why Do Right-Wing Men Support Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson?

One of the great commenters on this channel asked me this yesterday. I must say that I really don’t know much about Andrew Tate at all. He seems to be some kind of cult figure on the right, and there were a number of videos put up on YouTube by right-wingers shocked at his conversion to Islam, wondering if it was genuine. I gather also that he’s anti-feminist, but the only other thing I really know about him is that the Romanian police arrested him on charges of enslavement and people trafficking after he got into some kind of spat on Twitter with Greta Thunberg. The right-wing American activist and YouTuber Matt Walsh coincidentally put up a video about this question, ‘Why do young men support Andrew Tate’ on YouTube yesterday. I haven’t watched it, so really don’t know why some men do. My guess is that, to them, he represents traditional masculinity and conservative values against the woke left.

In the case of Tommy Robinson, I think the short answer is that the people that support him are thugs. Robinson used to be a BNP stormtrooper before founding the English Defence League and Pegida UK. He’s got convictions for assault, and his house is actually in his wife’s name because of another conviction for mortgage fraud. There’s a video up on YouTube showing what he’s really like. It’s of him punching and beating someone at a sports match. His method of dealing with critics is to dox them, telling his supporters not to bother that person, and then later taking the video down, so that it doesn’t look like he’s encouraging people to go round and harass them He’s also done this personally to his critics and their families. He turned up at the house of the parents of one of his critics in Cumbria with his horrible mate Avi Yemeni, demanding a word in the early hours of the morning. He also went round banging on the windows and doors of Australian anti-racist and teacher Mike Stuchbery, as well as slandering him as a paedophile. It ended with Stuchbery leaving his job to go to Germany. He also got hit with a heavy legal case after he libelled a Syrian immigrant kid who’d suffered racist bullying at school. Robinson claimed the lad was the bully while interviewing one of the boys responsible for the attack. Robinson got sued for libel, lost, and was ordered to pay substantial damages.

A fair number of his supporters seem to be football hooligans. A few years ago when he was running the English Defence League, their supporters included football casuals, so called because they wore casual clothing looted from the stores they trashed. When he turned up in Bristol, he was supported by the Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance, who might be genuine football fans, but I suspect otherwise. As for respectable Conservative support, I’m not so sure. The Lotus Eaters support him, but talk about him in coded language as ‘the bad man’ in case they get a YouTube ban for doing so. I don’t know if other right-wing web sites support him. I haven’t seen him interviewed by the New Culture Forum, even though they have interviewed History Debunked’s Simon Webb. Possibly this lack of obvious support is because of his violence and criminality, just as many Tories in the 1970s stopped supporting the NF because of it.

Unfortunately, the long official coverup of the grooming gangs has given him ammunition. He’s made a number of videos about them and spoken to their victims, in contrast to some of the police and local authorities that have tried to silence them. He’s thus able to present himself as a lone voice standing against official complicity in these terrible crimes.

I’ve covered Robinson and his wretched followers in a number of blog posts, and the anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation, Hope Not Hate, have published a book exposing him and his crimes. My guess is that some men support him for the same reason they support Tate, and that Robinson also represents to them traditional Britain against the Muslim threat. But how much support he has beyond his own milieu I really don’t know.

Black Computer Programmer Wants More Black Men in Maths, Computing and Medicine

This is a short from Isaac Smith’s YouTube channel. It’s simply him watching a Black computer programmer, Kwanza Kanju, go through the stats showing that Black boys would stand more chance of a job if they switched their ambitions from basketball to a career in the STEM subjects. He begins by saying that there are a million Blacks wanting to play in the NBA. He goes through the decreasing number that qualify for the sport at each succeeding level, until he shows that there are only seven places available in the NBA that these million aspiring kids are chasing.

On the other hand, there were 100,000 jobs going last year in maths, computing and medicine. He states that if you practise hard and study enough, you become what you want to be. If you spend your time playing basketball from 3 to 6 pm, you’ll be a very good basketball player. If you spend the same amount of time in libraries, you’ll be a brilliant scholar. And he knows that Black people will make excellent mathematicians and medical specialists, as the first doctor wasn’t Hippocrates but Imhotep.

He’s right, and basically saying what Black conservative writer Jason Riley says. Black people can excel academically if they spend the same time and effort on these subjects as they do on sport and music, where they already excel.

I wanted to put this up as a piece of positive, optimistic advice that a Black STEM expert was giving to aspiring Blacks after all the negative stories this week about Black looting gangs, the violence at the Notting Hill Carnival and so on.

Talk Radio Viewers Vote that Wokeness Prevents Proper Policing

As right-wing and terrible as it is, Talk TV appears even more dire and right-wing than GB News. GB News is the station that had Neil Oliver platform Peter Sweden, a Holocaust denier who has, according to an article by Zelo Street, also said nice, admiring things about Hitler and the Nazis, and thinks LGBTQ people should be put in concentration camps. He also believes that the Nazi camps contained theatres, swimming pools and cinemas.

I think Sweden, real name Imanuelsen, has been taken in by Nazi propaganda. During the War the Nazis masked the Holocaust by declaring that the Jews were merely being evacuated to the east. The lie was that the Jews were being given homes and land away from the rest of the German population. The Nazis even made a propaganda movie showing the happy, contented, well-fed evacuees were shown working on the allotments in the village the Nazis had so generously given them. When the camera had stopped, however, the troops moved in and forced them off to the death camps. That was the reality. But Goebbels and the rest of the horrors had manufactured these propaganda films, and their post-War successors have embroidered them with malicious lies about cinemas and so on, and pratts like Sweden have been taken in and are repeating them. And no-one should invite someone who believes and spreads such malignant nonsense on to their programme.

But most of GB News’ presenters at least make an attempt not to appear that malign and bonkers. They also seem to have a variety of presenters and panellists, even if their top one is Nigel Farage. Talk TV has Julia Hartley-Brewer, Times columnist and, if memory serves me right, former editor of the Depress. She’s another one who presents herself as immensely well-informed, especially on the subject of the EU, which she is firmly against. The reality is that she’s profoundly ignorant. Mike’s put up several articles pointing out how little she actually knows about the European Union on his site after she’s appeared on various programmes spouting her nonsense.

This week one of the major issues taxing her mighty intellect, and those of so many other right-wingers, was the breakdown of law ‘n’ order in Britain and the cops’ failure to deal with it. last week a gang of Black youths broke into an American candy store in London with nary a cop to be seen. Then there was the disturbances at the Notting Hill Carnival. A Bristol rapper had been stabbed, 209 people arrested for various crimes, including assault and theft, and 74 policemen had been injured. A policewoman had also been sexually assaulted with a gang of men grinding themselves against her. There was also footage of a group of young people dancing on the roof of a bus stop, which promptly crashes down, bring them down on top of the people underneath. On top of this were statistics showing that the police weren’t actually solving ordinary crimes like robberies.

This was contrasted with the woke attitude of the cops. Instead of going out and protecting people and their property, Britain’s finest were joining in with Pride parades. There was footage of a group of four cops doing the macarena at Lincoln Pride, to the dismay and disgust of various right-wing YouTube pundits. This was in addition to previous Pride and pro-gay events the cops had attended. As the Conservative critics showed footage of the Lincolnshire cops doing the macarena, they also shared the strange gay bumblebee costume one copper had worn at another event to stress the force’s pro-gay credentials, various policewomen waving the LGBTQ flag, a police car painted with the gay rainbow. There was also a very odd picture of a police dog handler posing with two gay fetishists dressed in leather dog masks, sitting at the coppers’ feet and wearing leashes. This was an example of the kind of kink seen at Pride events which make some people believe, not unreasonably, that it’s no longer suitable for children.

Talk TV, and to be fair, a number of other right-wingers, including, I think, GB News, showed these pictures as an example of the cops being ‘woke’ and therefore unable to do their jobs properly. Talk TV followed this up with a short questionnaire. Were the police prevented from properly doing their job due to ‘wokeness’ ? Or was it because of the cut to their numbers of 20,000 officers?

Now I don’t think that ‘wokeness’ has helped improve policing, though I well understand the cops’ desire to show the gay community that they’re on their side. As for the Notting Hill carnival, for as long as I can remember there have been murders and other crimes there. Some of it is, I think, simply because of the huge size of the crowd. There were about 2 million people there, or so I heard, and part of the problem was that gangs turned up from other parts of London in the hope of settling scores. There was footage from someone’s window shown, and it looked like a scene from the massively overpopulated future in the Charlton Heston SF flick, Soylent Green, based on the novel Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison. I would imagine that a crowd of that size and density would be difficult to police anywhere.

But to me the real problem is simply the shortage of cops and the budget needed to support them. And so I voted in Talk TV’s wretched poll. I appear to have been in the minority: only about 4 per cent or so of the people who responded thought as I did. The other 96 per cent thought it was down to ‘wokeness’.

Which shows you exactly how right-wing Talk TV’s viewers are, how they’re refusing to accept the fact that cuts in manpower and budget have affected policing, even before the cops made such obvious gestures of solidarity with minority groups.

And so they’ll accept and applaud even more cuts to the force, just so long as the remaining cops don’t go to Pride in uniform.

Rioting and Looting Hurts Black People and their Businesses

It shouldn’t need to be said that rioting and looting hurts people, regardless of their colour. But the point that it also harms Blacks as well as Whites seems to have been lost on some people over the other side of the Pond. So far in Britain the Black Lives Matter protests seem to have been largely peaceful with the exception of those at the weekend at Downing Street, where there seem to have been attacks on the police. I say ‘seem’, because although the footage of the attacks look convincing, like many other people I remember the way the Beeb reversed the footage of the attack on the miners by the police at Orgreave colliery during the miner’s strike in order to make it look like the miners were attacking them. The reality was that it was the other way round. I hope this hasn’t happened this time, but the Beeb is so riddled with Tory bias and the blatant falsification of the news that you can’t be sure.

In America it’s been rather different. Some of the protests over there have descended into riots and people’s businesses have been trashed and looted. And they have included those belonging to Black people. ‘Young Rippa’ is a Black American Conservative, who has a channel on YouTube. The other day he put up a long video of about 20 minutes fiercely attacking the looting and rioting. His piece included a short video posted by a middle-aged Black lady. She was part-owner of a small business, working alongside seven other people. As he points out, that’s not unusual for small businesses. It had been broken into and trashed. She was there standing in some of the broken glass and other wreckage with what looked like her employees and co-workers. She angrily asked the viewer the rhetorical question ‘Do you think that’s got anything to do with Black Lives Matter?’ It’s a good question. It doesn’t seem to have absolutely anything to do with saving Black lives, or protesting poverty and despair to me. It looks far more like opportunistic criminals helping themselves at the expense of the law-abiding.

But weirdly some people have got it into their head that looters are some kind of anti-racist heroes. ‘Mr H Reviews’ is another YouTube channel, which reviews SF, Fantasy and Horror films and television shows. Again, it seems to come from a broadly conservative perspective, but that doesn’t disqualify it from being worth watching. Nearly a week ago, on June 3rd, ‘Mr H’ put up a piece about the X-Men actor Evan Peters being accused of racism and forced to make an apology after he had a tweeted his approval of a piece of footage of the LA police arresting a suspected looter. This was another case of the ‘cancel culture’ in which extreme left-wing activists to try to stop their opponents being heard. I am very much aware that same cancel culture exists on the right, and that Conservative activists and media monitoring groups are also doing their level best to make sure that only Conservative voices are heard. But on this occasion, assuming that the situation was as Mr H describes, he’s right to attack it.

Rioters and looters don’t help Black people, and it is not racist to condemn them.

I was talking to a Black friend a few years ago, whose business was also trashed during riots. He had had a small business near the centre of Bristol. But it had been hit and looted during the 2012 riots. As a result, he packed up and moved out. Now those riots weren’t about race, but the effect was the same: a Black entrepreneur trying to better himself had his livelihood trashed and destroyed. I don’t know if he employed anyone, but small businesses obviously help the economy and wider community. When they make a profit, it allows them to employ other people and purchase others’ goods and services. Moreover, the small grocers, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers and so on are actually better for the community than the big supermarkets. They’re less efficient, but employ more people. Which means that those people have work, money, and so are able to buy others’ goods and services. And so everyone in the community benefits from small, local businesses.

The Black Lives Matter protests are all about improving Black people’s lives. It’s not just about police violence, but also about the racism that are holding Black people back and achieving equality.

But they can’t do this if criminals smash and destroy their businesses and livelihoods.

Let’s support peaceful protest, and condemn any violence and looting, regardless of the colour of those doing it.

Here are the two videos I mentioned. I haven’t watched Young Rippa’s all the way through as it’s long and a bit repetitive, and so can’t comment on all of it. I don’t share his political Conservatism, but absolutely support his condemnation of those just trying to stop ordinary Black people making a decent living for themselves and their families.

 

Bristol Police Were Right Not To Stop Colston Statue Being Toppled

The police were present at the Black Lives Matter demo on Sunday at which the statue of the slaver, Edward Colston, was pulled down, hauled to the harbour and thrown in. They did not try stop it, and are now being questioned and taken to task about their refusal to interfere. ITN interviewed their chief on the 6 O’clock news last night. I can’t remember what he said exactly, but it was that the demonstration was peaceful and non-violent. Zelo Street has reported that ITN weren’t the only people, who wanted a word with the rozzers about that. According to the Times, Home Secretary Priti Patel has called in the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset Police, Andy Marsh, to demand and explanation. She has also said that she wants those responsible to face prosecution.

There are several aspects to this. Zelo Street quotes the Secret Barrister, who makes the point that Patel has no business telling anyone whom the state should prosecute. That’s the role of the Crown Prosecution Service. She is interfering with the independent prosecutorial process. Which is yet more proof that she doesn’t understand and respect the independent of the judicial system and is unfit to be Home Secretary.

Zelo Street also argues that the story is another piece of misdirection on the part of the Tory media. Patel has imposed a fortnight’s quarantine period for those entering the country. But the Metro today claimed that this wouldn’t do anything to stop the spread of Covid-19 but would just harm business. So the Times tries getting people to look the other way at what she’s doing about all those dreadful protesters.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/06/priti-patel-says-look-over-there.html

I actually think Marsh was quite right for the police not to try to stop the demonstrators attacking the statue. The statue is extremely controversial and people have been campaigning for its removal for years. Unlike some of the protests elsewhere, there doesn’t appear to have been any attacks on the police themselves. No-one appears to have been hurt, and no shops or businesses were attacked and looted. As for the statue, it is only a statue. Obviously it’s going to cost the council taxpayer for the authorities to haul it out of the harbour, but it isn’t a person or someone’s home or business.

That could so easily have changed if the police had got involved. The crowd would have resisted or tried to fight back. What was a peaceful demonstration would have become a riot. People could have been killed or injured, and the businesses around the Centre attacked and trashed. And also it wouldn’t look good for the police themselves. The cops everywhere have got a reputation for racism. Having them defend the statue of a slaver would have added to it. I can image it causing more angry denunciations of the police and more protests about police brutality and Bristolian racism.

Any attempt to interfere on the cops’ part would have led to violence and further unrest. The police were right to try to preserve order and the safety of people and their livelihoods by stopping the attack on the statue. Patel is wrong to tell them that they should.

ISIS Destruction of Antiquities and Respect for Archaeology in Iran

Map of Nimrud drawn in 1856 by Felix Jones

The Independent reported today that ISIS had released a video of themselves destroying the ancient Babylonian city of Nimrud. Its destruction was reported back in March, but this is the first time footage has been shown of it. The video shows the terrorists attacking the city and its antiquities with pneumatic drills, anglegrinders and sledgehammers. They then laid explosives, and blew the site up.

Irinia Bokova, the director general of UNESCO, the section of the UN that oversees the world’s cultural heritage, denounced the destruction, saying that the “deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime”.

I couldn’t agree more.

The Indie’s article can be read at: http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/isis-video-shows-complete-destruction-of-ancient-city-of-nimrud-in-iraq/ar-AAaTuAG?ocid=OIE9HP

I’ve already blogged about ISIS’ destruction of Nimrud, and the other cultural treasures of Mosul, and the Christian and Muslim shrines to the patriarch Seth, revered by Moslems as the prophet Sheth, St. George and others. ISIS have claimed that they are destroying these antiquities because they are somehow blasphemous or un-Islamic. In fact, they are attacking them purely because these monuments don’t conform to their own, extremely narrow religious views. They’re a deliberate, calculated assault on the cultural heritage and identity of Iraq’s people. ISIS fear them because they present an alternative, secular national and religious pluralist identity to the absolute conformity ISIS wish to foist on them.

It’s also been suggested that more worldly, venal motives were involved in Nimrud’s destruction. ISIS may have been looting the site to raise money to buy more arms by selling the antiquities illegally. They levelled the city to disguise what they’d done. So their claim that they were destroying the city for religious reasons may have been just a load of lies to disguise what they really are: a bunch of thieves and grave robbers.

Archaeology in Iran

ISIS’ contempt for the region’s heritage contrasts with Iran, where, with some qualifications, archaeology is still valued. John Simpson in one of his books described the way an angry mob was ready to destroy the depictions of the Persian shahs at Naqsh-i-Rustem in the 1979 revolution, but were prevented from doing so by the carvings’ guard. He stopped them by telling them that they were instead depictions of Hassan and Hussein, the two sons of the Imam Ali, the founder of Shi’ism.

In the 1990s there was a minimal Western archaeological presence in Iran, though I believe it has been expanded since then. I once bumped into one of the lecturers in the archaeological department at Uni nearly ten years ago, who had just returned from excavating an early Islamic city in Iran.

And a few years ago the British Museum loaned the Cyrus Cylinder, shown below, to the Islamic Republic.

The Cyrus Cylinder records the conquest of Babylonia by the great Persian king Cyrus, or Kourash, as he is known in Persian. After the conquest, he issued an edict permitting the peoples exiled in Babylon to return to their homelands, returned their gods, and assisted in the reconstruction of their temples. These included the Jews, who returned to Israel, for which the Persians are praised in the Bible.

I was taught at College that Islam similarly regarded Zoroastrians as ‘Peoples of the Book’, who, like Jews and Christians, worshipped the one God, and whose worship was therefore protected.

British Museum’s loan of the Cylinder to Iran was of major diplomatic and cultural significance. Firstly, it was party of a general thaw in relations between Britain and the Islamic Republic. Secondly, it also showed the confidence that the Museum in the Cylinder’s safety. The repatriation of cultural artefacts looted by Western scholars from the other cultures around the world is a major issue in archaeology and the heritage sector. Many nations and ethnic groups are rightly angered at the appropriation of valuable or important religious items from their cultures, including human remains. A few years ago, for example, BBC 2 screened a series looking behind the scenes at the British Museum. Amongst the Museum’s other work, it showed the delicate negotiations surrounding the repatriation of the remains of Aboriginal Tasmanians to their descendants.

Other items remain, and their retention is immensely controversial. The Elgin Marbles is a case in point.

The Museum has, however, a policy of not returning antiquities to countries where their safety can’t be guaranteed. The looting and destruction of ancient monuments and archaeological finds is a real problem, particularly in the developing world. And it isn’t unknown here either. There have been digs in Britain, that have been wrecked and the finds looted by Nighthawks. There have also been a number of curators and museum directors, who have been caught illegally selling off objects from the very collections they were supposed to be maintaining.

The loan of the Cyrus Cylinder to Iran, by contrast, showed that the British authorities had every confidence that their fellows in Iran would respect and value it, and that Britain and Iran could have good relations in the exploration of that nation’s ancient past and its treasures.

This is another excellent reason why the Repugs are stupid to want another war with Iran. Apart from destabilising yet another nation and brutalising its people, purely for the profit of the oil and arms industries, it could result in the same destruction of antiquities as in Iraq.

And as in Iraq, the world would again be much the poorer.