ALERT

After several years in development, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has launched a web sit on counter-terrorism and militant Islam whose intended readership is law enforcement, government agencies, Congress, the media and the general public.

Founded in 1995 by Steven Emerson–prominent investigative journalist and a member of the ALERT Advisory Board–The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) is a non-profit research group recognized as the world’s most comprehensive data center on radical Islamic terrorist groups.

This blog intends to draw frequently on the information provided by the IPT site and expect that our readers will bookmark it for frequent reference.

A friend called us, upset after a teachers’ meeting in a rural area at which a police officer spoke about the school district’s plans for a lockdown in case of a Columbine or Virginia Tech. The officer was brutally honest.

“Most of these incidents are over in about fifteen minutes so by the time we get there it will be to pick up the pieces.”

He was saying that by the time law enforcement arrived, a crazed gunman(s) could have as much as a quarter of an hour in which to freely massacre children.

During the question period following the officer’s talk, our friend asked whether a suggestion that was spoken of in the national media following the Virginia Tech massacre had been considered locally: to permit administrators and faculty who have had military and/or law enforcement experience to bring a weapon into the school.

The officer said that the laws of the state in which our friend lives do not permit even a person with a permit to carry a concealed weapon to bring it into any school. He said this is a political issue and that any changes could only be made at the legislative level, but that law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. are discussing it. The officer tried to stay neutral as he was there to discuss lockdown procedures, not to take a stand with political connotations. From an aside he made, though, it was clear that he would like to see qualified school personnel be permitted to carry firearms into school buildings.

Virginia Tech was a turning point for many of us throughout the nation who were saying: if, after all these years and years of trying, we still can’t keep guns out of the hands of the criminals and the crazed, then let’s arm the responsible.

This issue illustrates for us the stalemate at which our country has arrived. The gun-control faction cannot break the power of the gun lobby, but continues to advocate controls; the result is that gunmen are armed and everyone else permitted only a victim’s role.

The New York Sun reports that the group preserving the memory of the peaceful Christian Lebanese-American poet who opposed religious oppression has objected to the use of his name for an Arabic-themed school, Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn.

We were wondering about that, having had a hard time reconciling the gentle message of universal love in Gibran’s poetry, which so sweetly resonated through the Sixties counterculture, with a school whose intended principal, Dhabah “Debbie” Almontaser, could not, in the words of The Sun “credibly distance herself from organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has not, in our view, played a constructive role in New York; she refused to answer questions from this newspaper as to whether she viewed Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.”

The Sun article goes on to question if this issue warrants the attention it has received. We think it does. We are curious to know how it was decided to link a name so revered in the minds of those who were young and idealistic in the Sixties–some of whom now are in positions of influence, particularly on college campuses–with a school whose initially appointed principal justified T-shirts reading Intifada NYC.

A veteran teacher has been tapped to temporarily head the city’s first Arabic-language public school, following the resignation of the school’s original principal just weeks before opening.Danielle Salzberg will temporarily head the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. The veteran teacher replaces Debbie Almontaser, who resigned from her post last week.

Salzberg is currently a senior program officer at New Visions for Public Schools. Salzberg is helping teachers prepare their curriculum for the first day of school, which is September 4th.

Salzberg is an Orthodox Jew who speaks no Arabic. As this bizarre scenario plays itself out in New York’s feistiest borough, the city is divided along the same lines as is the rest of the nation: the skeptics who contend that in the current international environment, in the words of Daniel Pipes Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage; and the enthusiasts who support the school in the name of a fuzzy concept of “diversity.”

Vocal members of New York’s Jewish community are to found on both sides of this debate on whose ultimate outcome may rest the survival of Western civilization. Yes, the tiger is again at the gates, and, again, many Jews aren’t getting it. Let’s do everything we can to wake them up before, again, time runs out.

Pipes chronicles the successful efforts of the Coalition to Stop the Madrassa. The blog of this organization dedicated to Protecting Our Public Schools from Islamist Curricula makes informative-and encouraging reading.

Seattle Washington - FBI Searching For Suspicious Ferry Passengers

By Homeland Security NTARC News | August 20, 2007

The FBI is asking for the public’s help to identify two men who have been seen acting strangely aboard Washington State ferries recently.

According to federal agents, passengers have seen the men on several occasions exhibiting unusual behavior. The FBI did not say precisely what that unusual behavior entailed.

FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs said the men have been reported by by passengers on several ferry runs and, while the behavior may have been innocuous, investigators would like to talk to the men.

Burroughs said the men appeared to be taking an unusual interest in the workings of the boat, but she would not elaborate.

Passengers and crew members on different runs on separate dates reported the men to authorities.

Anyone who knows the men or there whereabouts are asked to call the FBI at (206) 622-0460.

Additional
———-
Earlier this month, Washington state ferry employees were told to watch for suspicious passengers after an incident in which someone took some out-of-the-ordinary photos.

Washington State Patrol spokesman Bob Calkins in Olympia said the incident took place last month and he can’t disclose details because it’s still under investigation. He says it led to an internal memo to ferry employees asking them to be more alert.

Calkins says the photo-takers drew attention because they were behaving a little differently than commuters or tourists. He says no officer was available at the time to check them out, so the memo was sent. He says it’s not a warning.

Calkins says the patrol and Coast Guard already provide security for state ferries because they could be a target for terrorism.

More
————
The Seattle PI decided not to publish pictures of the two men the FBI is looking for. Here is an excerpt from the editor explaining why.

“What’s an editor to do?

Ferry security is hugely important.

So are civil liberties and privacy.

The P-I last year reported that according to a Justice Department inspector general’s assessment, Puget Sound’s ferries were the nation’s No. 1 target for maritime terrorism.

This may well be a case of alert citizens spotting a very real threat.

But running a photograph of two men who may as easily be tourists from Texas as terrorists from the Mideast with a story that makes them out to be persons of interest in a terrorism investigation seems problematic, to say the least.

The P-I ran a story about the FBI’s alert, but did not run the photographs, because we didn’t have enough information to warrant it. I hope that today we are able to get more information on this story, if it exists, from the FBI that would give us a clearer idea of the background behind their request.

Based on what we have, it seemed newsworthy that the FBI was trying to find these guys but it did not seem appropriate to run their photographs.

The Seattle Times ran neither the photographs nor a story”.

————————————————————————————————————

(follow-up story in Seattle Times on Muslim resentment of FBI actions)
By Lornet Turnbull, Janet Tu and Mike Carter

Seattle Times staff reporters

For Arabs and Muslims across the Puget Sound area, a rise in the nation’s threat level or a bombing halfway around the world often can mark a period of unease.In the years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, leaders in that community say incidents of profiling and harassment have ebbed and flowed - increasing when Muslims are linked to news of the day.

Now the FBI’s release of photographs of two men of unknown origin, who the agency says were observed acting suspiciously aboard as many as six different Washington ferry routes in recent weeks, is creating new worries in the community.

Muslim- and Arab-American leaders are upset that the FBI didn’t consult them - as it has done in other instances - before releasing the photos on the Internet and to news organizations. They worry that the action may fracture the relationship the agency and the community have carefully built.

The FBI has stressed that the release of the photos is a rare move, taken only after it had exhausted other efforts to identify the men. The agency also has said the men’s actions could be innocuous, but it needs to question them.

The photos were snapped by a ferry captain last month after crew members alerted him to suspicious activity. The men seemed inordinately interested in the operation of the vessel, took photographs of the interiors of the boats and went into areas tourists and commuters don’t normally go, the FBI has said. The agency has received many tips but has not yet found the men.

Dozens of Muslims and Arabs have complained to community leaders about the photographs. The fallout has led to a meeting planned today between Muslim- and Arab-American community leaders and law-enforcement officials.

“We need to get some type of apology from them and figure out how to get back to where we were,” said Rita Zawaideh, head of the Arab-American Community Coalition.

Community leaders also expect to raise questions about another recent incident. On Aug. 12, leaders say half a dozen men of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent were stopped and questioned for up to six hours as they left a ferry in Seattle following a trip to the Olympic Peninsula. Those men contacted Zawaideh to report the incident as profiling.

David Gomez, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Seattle office, said he was aware of an incident in which five or six ferry passengers were questioned, but wasn’t clear whether it was the same one.

Zawaideh said she met with FBI officials about the August incident three days before the agency released the photos of the two men. But the FBI didn’t bring up that subject.

“Why not ask us then and we would have had a way to ask people in the community,” she said.

Gomez said the agency needs to address certain sensitive issues, but “people in those communities have to get over this sensitivity toward feeling victimized.”

Many passengers have been stopped and questioned recently, as the ferry system has stepped up security once the FBI concluded the men might be watching the system. The stops are based on activities, not skin color, Gomez said.

Two days ago, a Seattle Times photographer, who is white, was stopped and questioned after taking photographs near the Mukilteo ferry terminal.

The FBI didn’t take the photos of the two men to the Arab- and Muslim-American community because the agency doesn’t know if the men are Middle Eastern, Gomez added.

“That seems potentially prejudicial to me, and in some ways worse than simply putting [the photos] out the way we did,” Gomez said. “It is not us saying these guys look Middle Eastern.”

Zawaideh countered: “They’re not saying these men are Arabs, but insinuating they are.”

This all comes at a time when some local Muslim and Arab-American leaders say they’ve seen a new spike in discrimination complaints.

The concerns over profiling following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had begun to ease about three years ago, they say. But with each new incident tied to Muslims or Arabs - bombings in the London subway or a raising of the terror alert - has come a rash of new complaints.

Both Zawaideh and S. Arsalan Bukhari, president of the Seattle chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), say their organizations have been receiving more reports lately involving allegations of discrimination.

Bukhari said he’s heard of delays at the border, as well as cases of people being asked questions at the airport and searched so thoroughly they missed their flights.

Aziz Junejo, who hosts a cable TV show on Islam and who writes a column from the Islamic perspective for The Seattle Times, said a group of Muslim kids who were planning a trip to the Olympic Mountains this weekend phoned to ask if he thought they should take the trip.

“I said: ‘I would stay off the ferry if I were you.’ “

FUTURE AMERICA?

You awake each day to the Muslim muezzin call to prayer from the neighborhood mosque - as millions of Europeans already do.

Liberals espouse “diversity is our strength” as Islamic enforcers cruise the cities in their quest to shutter, or harass any establishment that is contrary to Islamic “sharia” Law. Guns are confiscated and stiff penalties are dished out to citizens who defy the new anti-gun laws. Women are told to cover their hair and face when in public.

You are cautious about attending public events or being part of any large crowd as these are the favorite targets of suicide bombers in their quest to exhibit violence against non-Muslims who resist conversion or surrender. Dissent has been stifled since the Fairness Doctrine was reinstated.

A new Senator is sworn in, one of several Senators that have recently converted to the Muslim faith. Muslim populated districts are increasingly changing the political landscape by sending more electees to Congress.

A recent ruling from the Supreme Court states sharia law does not violate the “separation of church and state.” This ruling paves the way for Islamic controlled municipalities to govern every aspect of religious, political, and personal life of the local populace– [amounting to a form of totalitarianism analogous to Communism].

The Hollywood Left gives up gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.

As Mark Steyn [author of the New York Times bestseller "America Alone"] puts it, “The future belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the West — wedded to a multiculturalism that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it to oblivion — is looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization.”

If you think this can’t happen, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in Europe and the UK. Europe is almost certainly a goner, as Mark Steyn laments in his book, but America can still survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the world’s last best hope.

The Muslims have a twenty year goal to conquer the West. They have only a short 13 years remaining until victory, as their quest started in 2000.

Wake up America before it is too late!

By Omar El Akkad
The Globe and Mail | 8/23/2007

Welcome to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia - pivotal battleground in the global jihad.

The town of 7,000 doesn’t look the part. Its quietly beautiful downtown lives and dies by tourists. The coastline puts postcards to shame. The New York Islanders have held their training camp here for the past two years. But unwittingly, Yarmouth has become an example of the sort of unassuming places that are serving as relay stations in a virtual war.

The town is home to a branch of Register.com, one of its largest employers and one of the most popular Internet domain-name registration services in the world. For a fee, the company allows users to register website names - the .com, .net or .org addresses you type into your web browser to surf the Internet. Normally, when anyone signs up new domains, they have to provide a name, address and contact information, all of which become publicly available to anyone who’s even remotely net-savvy. (The information is copied to one of the central databases that form the backbone of the Internet, to ensure there are no conflicts, such as two separate entities owning the same domain.) But for a few extra dollars, Register.com also offers an anonymous registration service: Try to find out who registered any one of these websites, and you’ll be handed the same address and phone number in Yarmouth.

This service is hugely popular: Civil-liberties advocates and anyone else who values their privacy flock to it. But it’s also very useful to another group of people, halfway around the globe: On one of the world’s largest pro-Hamas websites, viewers can download martyrdom videos that feature the diatribes of masked men shortly before they launch deadly attacks. Look up the registration info for that site, and you’ll get that Yarmouth address and phone number.

Our previous post presenting a disquieting portrait of Britain losing its identity prompted the following response from Elaine Sandler, discerning member of the Aspen Jewish community and valued friend of ALERT. Ms. Sandler relates how the issue was ignored in a program to whose concerns it should have been pivotal. That the setting for this telling omission was a celebrated gathering of intellect and influence is significant–and alarming.

I took a tutorial at the Aspen Ideas Festival in July titled “The Future of the European Union,” in which the issue of their open Muslim immigration and the profound ramifications of said policy was not raised. It simply never came up. I was shocked but realized that the attitude of the Non-Muslim lily-white-European-panelists (Ambassador John Bruton, Princess Mabel van Oranje-Nassau, Ambassador David Manning, Barry Eichengreen and Clive Crook) reflects that to which George Walden refers–a conspiracy of silence stifling all debate on this crucial issue that threatens, and will alter, Europe as we know it.

Silence is their policy in a grandiose act of denial perpetrated on its people by their leadership. I experienced the same insular denial at the tutorial session, and noted that not one audience member brought it up. They, too, conspired in the silence. The tutorial concluded with a question period in which because so many audience members with questions lined up, I was not given the opportunity to raise the issue. The subject remained for me conspicuous in its absence.

When I ran into one of the panelists the following morning, I asked him why the issue did not come up:

“How can you discuss the future of Europe without discussing the serious problems you have with the Muslim population? The demographics alone raise dire concerns.”

He replied, “Gee, it just did not come up.”

I said, “It did not come up because Europeans choose to ignore it: this will have profound consequences for your children. Aren’t you concerned?”

I had apparently gone too far. He gave me a dismissive look encompassing the essence of what denial signifies, and I moved on. This was the real message I took from that tutorial.

I cheer George Walden for having the courage to bring up a subject obscured in silence, and serialize it.

We value all responses from our readers, from the detailed account above to a few sentences hastily jotted down. To give us your views, it is not necessary to utilize the site’s Comments function; simply go to the top of this page and click on the tab labeled Contact Us.

Danger: Fear of antagonising the Muslim community has put the country’s security at risk from Islamic terrorists

Last year, former Tory minister George Walden wrote a book about the future of life in Britain and why record numbers were emigrating. Taking the form of a letter from a father to his son, it provoked a massive, positive response from readers when it was serialised in the Daily Mail.

In the book, Guy and Catherine despaired at having to bring up their two children in an area that had been dramatically changed by mass immigration, where their children had become a minority in school and teachers struggled to deal with so many pupils who did not speak English.

The country - where 57 per cent of births in the capital are now to mothers who were born abroad - seemed to be failing them on multiple fronts, not just on education but also on security and health care.

Since then, the couple have given up the battle and moved abroad to Canada. And they are not alone in their decision. As Walden pointed out in the first serialisation, a total of 350,000 people left Britain in 2004 - equivalent to a third of the population of Birmingham.

Walden observes that despite all the changes mass immigration has brought in Britain, there remains a conspiracy of silence that has stifled debate on one of the most important issues of our age.

Now, in this thought-provoking followup, Walden examines Guy and Catherine’s new quality of life, using it as a mirror to reflect the dreadful state of Britain today.

Walden, who served as higher education minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, has been married to Sarah for 38 years and they have three grown-up children. The son to whom his letters are addressed is fictional, but the incidents affecting him and his wife are based on fact.

Dear Son,

It’s getting on for ten months now since you and Catherine left for a new life in Canada. And we didn’t get the impression, when we came to see you, that you’ve regretted your decision for a moment.

Still, I’d better avoid saying anything excessively encouraging about the state of the nation you’ve left behind. Not difficult, as it happens.

In fact, it looks as though you got out just in time. Driving close to your old place in West London the other day, I saw a police notice asking for information about a young man who’d brandished a gun at an officer.

The people who bought your house at a ludicrously high price are unlikely to be thrilled. I don’t suppose there’s another city in the world where people have to pay that kind of money for the privilege of living in an area where hoodlums go round flashing guns.

There is an atmosphere of suppressed - or outright - violence and disorder that makes me worry for the next generation.

Often, it’s the little incidents that are telling. Yesterday, your mother was on a bus when three girls aged between 16 and 18 tried to board in Ladbroke Grove. They were Brazilians, she thinks, but so completely anglicised that they’d got themselves roaring - or rather squealing - drunk.

Toting bottles of vodka and plastic cups, they pressed on to the platform, but the Bangladeshi driver stalwartly refused to allow them to board. The bus was held up for 20 minutes while the girls blocked the doors, laughing and screaming obscenities in their newly-acquired Essex accents.

The point is that during all this little drama, not a single one of the weary rush-hour passengers said a word. The great British public held hostage by a trio of sozzled teenage girls!

Toronto sounds safer, though it seems a hell of a way to go for a little peace of mind.

Back from our visit to you, we did a sort of audit of your new life. We loved your old brick house with wooden trimmings in the Riverdale area of Toronto - bigger than your London one and, at £220,000, less than half the cost.

Not to speak of your country place at Muskoka: a simple cottage but with the swimming, boating and fishing on all those lakes, a cut above Ruislip Lido.

And it’s good to hear that the children look set to get into the nearest state secondary. A citycentre school with no problem of drugs or knives and one that teaches Latin!

We were relieved that you picked up an academic job so quickly, paying rather more than you got in the UK. With taxes and the cost of living lower, you should feel more relaxed financially.

The very fact that Canada has half our population (30 million) in a land many times bigger is good for the spirit - not to speak of car-parking.

The ethnic population, I see, is higher than here, but then Canada is much more selective. The points system they operate seems pretty rigorous, and it was only your impressive chemistry qualifications, I suspect, that got you in so smartly.

Also, the ethnic pattern is different, with the Chinese the largest element, followed by Indians, and fewer ghettos. As Catherine said, a strong secondary state education system is a key to integration.

Here, the country is not so much disintegrating as disaggregating. The Balkanisation of our lives is happening on a national scale.

Scotland’s falling off the top, self-sealing ethnic communities are proliferating in the Midlands, and London’s got its own thing going at the bottom.

We boast of our prosperity, but it’s fragile and concentrated in the South East - an island within our island. Perhaps we’ll have to get used to thinking of London and its environs as a kind of Hong Kong or an Italian city state.

Here, the most obvious disconnection is between the rich and the rest. An old story, but the difference today is that the fate of those at the top is divorced from those lower down.

When the housing ramp collapses, most of the falling masonry will hit the little guys in the middle and at the bottom. The top London prices helped drive up the entire market, but are less likely to fall when it all comes down. There’s no feeling that we’re all in this together.

The divisions run from earliest youth to grim old age. More boys at Eton get five good GCSEs, I hear, than in the entire borough of Hackney.

And now there’s another divide growing up: between those who have a decent pension to look forward to and those for whom longevity has become more a threat than a promise.

Then there’s the widening gap between the married and unmarried, or rather those with children and those without.

Large areas of our towns are now such havens of hedonism for the money-flashing singles that they’re pretty much out of bounds for the poor bloody infantry who keep procreation going and cannot afford such leisures.

Everything’s geared to the needs of the drinker and consumer, and little to the couple with the buggy. On top of all this is the growing disconnection between politics and the people.

And the more fractured we become, the greater our pretence of togetherness to cover it up. That’s why the Government bangs on about ‘community’ and has tried so hard to ignore the problems caused by immigration.

Imagine my astonishment when the Minister responsible, Liam Byrne, actually admitted recently that large-scale immigration has profoundly unsettled the country - and that it’s the poorest communities that have suffered the most. The influx was overwhelming public services, schools, the NHS and housing, he said.

If Labour failed to address public concern, he concluded, it could lose the next election.

I couldn’t have put what Byrne was plucky enough to say better myself. But what is extraordinary is the lack of reaction to his words. Where are the columns and editorials and BBC programmes saying that the Government has gone racist?

On the principle that a sinner who repenteth deserves the greatest praise, Byrne is something of a saint. He’ll certainly have the majority of immigrants on his side.

According to a speech by the former chairman of the race relations commission, Trevor Phillips, 54 per cent of them think there’s been enough immigration.

Hardly surprising, since they and their children are among those who stand to suffer most from overcrowding, poor schooling, racial tensions and discrimination.

To complete this outburst of honesty, Byrne should have acknowledged that it’s the rich who stand to gain from the profits of low-paid labour. But it would have raised the cry: “So why in God’s name have you done it - and why are you letting more in?”

The evidence that the whole country benefits has shrunk to vanishing point.

The Governor of the Bank of England recently told MPs it was getting increasingly hard to manage the economy without knowing how many people were in the country. But everyone seems to have missed the implications of this: if the Bank doesn’t know the true population, neither can the Treasury.

And now local councils are up in arms, saying the Office of National Statistics (ONS) does not have a clue about the number of people - for whom local services are required - who are entering the country.

How can anyone assess the profit and cost of migration, and claim that the balance is positive, if nobody knows the figures?

Meanwhile, the Government continues to pour billions into the NHS. That’s supposed to be another success story, but nobody can really explain where all the money’s going, let alone why it’s so hard to keep our hospitals clean.

Let me tell you what happened to me recently. As you know, for years I’ve suffered from that irritating condition Dupuytren’s contracture (named after a Frenchman) - or claw-hand in its less distinguished appellation, because the fingers contract until they look like one.

There’s no pain - it’s just a bloody nuisance, not least because after you’ve had an operation for one finger, the next one starts to contract.

I’ve had two fingers treated, one on the NHS and the other private - because I didn’t fancy going into hospital for a minor operation, catching MRSA and coming out dead, as thousands are now doing.

Anyway, another damned finger began curling last year, so I went to my NHS doctor and - after a wait - saw a consultant who told me to come back in six months to see how it was progressing.

Meanwhile, I read that the French had developed a cure. So thanks to them and none at all to the NHS, 30 years of aggravation was fixed while we were in Paris in a single afternoon by injection, for the sum of about £60 - with no pain, no anaesthetic, no hospital operation and no maddening sling.

It’s a strange society we’re building. You can’t avoid the conclusion that the way to avoid all the inequities and social fractiousness is simple: be rich.

Then you can flash those beneath you a benign, ingratiating smile - and have as little as possible to do with them.

There’s a new brand of social selfishness about, a kind of “Sod you Jack, I’m all right” attitude.

For those doing well out of New Britain PLC, I don’t see how things can change. The problem is that for those lower down - the middleclass majority - I don’t see how they can change either.

I can’t report much joy on the security front, though: the mood is still one of evasion.

In the case of Islamic terrorism, we’re so afraid of antagonising the Muslim community that we turn our anger on our defenders rather than the killers. If the security services slip up - as occasionally they’re bound to - they’re branded as criminally incompetent on Newsnight.

The most likely reason is that they’re overwhelmed. Yet if MI5 were expanded as much as it should be, its operations beefed up and surveillance increased, watch out for Newsnight programmes proclaiming the beginning of the end of our human rights and warning that picking on Muslims will alienate the community further.

It’s all part of our loss of any sense of balance. We may not go in for revolutions, but Britain has become a society of extremes.

Look at public policies. It’s lunacy to go on promising free medical treatment for all- comers, but we do. It’s against every tenet of common sense to have mixed-ability classes, but in the delirium of our classconsciousness, we persist.

Doing away with most of our manufacturing base is reckless economic behaviour, but the moderate British have done that, too. The income gap, house prices and mass immigration - they’re all examples of national excess.

Wherever you look, crazy systems have replaced our old prudent-minded approach.

Look at families. Instead of beginning with the self-evident proposition that two parents are better than one, we start at the other end.

The result is that we insist on individual rights to the exclusion of everyone else’s interests, including the child’s. As a result, we have more single parents, more teenage pregnancies, more adolescent misfits and more destitute families than anyone in Europe.

Not bad for the country of balance and moderation.

Meanwhile, debt is at a dangerous high and millions of us are living beyond our means. Actually, the more I look at the economic outlook, the wiser your decision to take a break from Britain begins to seem.

Everything seems to be unreal - whether it’s the bonuses in the City, the purchasing power of the pound on shopping trips to America, or the money you sold your house for before emigrating.

If the economy falters - and the signs are beginning to show - the social consequences of unemployment don’t bear thinking about. And, this time, people who are laid off won’t be able to retire early because Gordon Brown has blocked that avenue of escape by b*****ing up their pensions.

Even now, with the economy still riding high, a record number of people are leaving the country to start again elsewhere. Think what will happen to emigration figures if the economic bubble is pricked.

Whether it is or not, we can certainly expect the splits and cracks in society to grow. Which leaves people your age with three choices: resign themselves to a life in a perilously fragmented community, get rich or do as you have done and get out.

Politics or parenting, schools or Scotland, wherever you look, very little seems to be holding things together. People live side by side yet separately, in mental isolation, with their eyes fixed warily on one another.

When communities, races, classes and families become segregated to the degree they have, feelings of social solidarity erode.

Society ends up like a shattered windscreen: holding together by the grace of God, even though it’s all cracked to hell, so no one can see ahead or have any idea where they are going.

Love to all, Dad

Adapted from Time to Emigrate? Letters From A Father by George Walden, published by Gibson Square, £6.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870.

The battle of the Dearborn Footbaths rages on with the ACLU sidestepping the issue and CAIR crying “Islmaphobia!” at objections to the installation of the devices awash in controversy. Below is the WSJ’s balanced take on a fast-flowing debate.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Cleansing the ACLU
Michigan and the case of Muslim footbaths.

Sunday, August 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

The latest battle of religion in the public square is unfolding in Dearborn, Michigan, a city with one of the highest Muslim populations in the country. At the University of Michigan’s local campus, administrators have recently refitted several school bathrooms to include small footbaths in the corner–an accommodation for Muslim students who must perform ritual washing as part of their daily observance. The issue has more than a few of the usual suspects trying to explain their way out of their usual positions on the separation of church and state.

The Detroit chapter of the ACLU has scrambled to find a way to recuse itself from the matter, claiming that the footbaths qualify as secular since they could be used by non-Muslims, and therefore don’t cross the group’s usual bright church-state line. Further, the ACLU explains, the university’s decision to take on the $25,000 expense was motivated primarily “by health and safety” because some students didn’t like washing their hands in the sinks after others students had washed their feet. If that hadn’t been the case, the group says this religious accommodation would surely have merited greater investigation and criticism.

Uh-huh. This is the same ACLU chapter that in 2005 objected to a high-school wrestling coach saying a prayer with his team before meets, calling the action “inherently coercive.” And the ACLU of Michigan is already on the defensive for its non-action this time. In a letter explaining its silence regarding university footbaths, the ACLU notes that it “has often come to the defense of other religions when the state has attempted to interfere with their religious expression.” The letter even includes a list of cases in which the group has defended Christian clients. Too bad none of the examples prove much of a parallel to the current recusal over state recognition of a religious practice.

Truer to form was the Council on American Islamic Relations, which immediately hollered that objections were all a case of Islamaphobia, and fear that the university was going to become “Islamified.” But that’s a hard assertion to prove in an America that frequently goes 10 rounds over the sight of a Christmas crèche in the public square. CAIR’s invocation of American bigotry has become so reflexive that we wonder if its spinners even bother to rewrite their press releases.

For our part, we see no reason to object to University of Michigan’s gesture to some of its Muslim students. Freedom of religion has never meant freedom from religion, and making it easier for people of different backgrounds to practice their faiths is a perfectly American thing to do. Many schools have chapels on campus, a fact that bothers very few. And few places object to kosher offerings in school cafeterias–an accommodation for Jewish students causing no inconvenience to others.

A university is entitled to some discretion in how it serves its student body. Let’s hope the ACLU takes this case as an opportunity to cleanse itself of inconsistencies.