Global cooling

From a (mainly) physics blog, via Tim Blair:

despite the new El Nino that has been warming the Earth again for a couple of months at the end of 2006 and that will probably continue in 2007. Yes, right now it seems that 2006 will become the coldest year among the most recent five years, and it will belong to the colder half of the years in the last decade.

The number of hurricanes in 2006 was below the long-term average. The total number of Atlantic tropical storms was the second lowest number during the last 12 years, after 1997.

George Monbiot has expressed his relief and said we can relax, the whole global warming worry seems to be fading and he's going to roast an ox over an open pit fire to celebrate.

OK, I made up the last bit. But imagine his response if this curve were inverted. His inconsistency might have a reason... He has written about the vested interests that deny or minimise climate change fears. But as a co-editor of a book called Anti-capitalism: A Guide to the Movement he is no more dispassionate himself. Neutrals need to make an independent effort to review the scientific evidence. I'm going to try this myself over the holiday.

In denial

Via J. F. Beck, a piece in the LA Times by Aayan Hirsi Ali:

I heard horrifying accounts of some of the people who had survived the terror of Auschwitz and Sobibor. I told my half-sister all this and showed her the pictures in my history book. What she said was as awful as the information in my book.

With great conviction, my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."

She was not saying anything new. As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.
[...]
What's striking about Ahmadinejad's conference is the (silent) acquiescence of mainstream Muslims. I cannot help but wonder: Why is there no counter-conference in Riyadh, Cairo, Lahore, Khartoum or Jakarta condemning Ahmadinejad? Why are the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference silent on this?

Could the answer be as simple as it is horrifying: For generations, the leaders of these so-called Muslim countries have been spoon-feeding their populations a constant diet of propaganda similar to the one that generations of Germans (and other Europeans) were fed — that Jews are vermin and should be dealt with as such? In Europe, the logical conclusion was the Holocaust. If Ahmadinejad has his way, he shall not want for compliant Muslims ready to act on his wish.

The Arab Street

More from The Big Pharaoh, who has a standing comment about the reaction of the Arab street to killings of Muslims by other Muslims:

I don't give a rat's ass as long as the killer is Muslim. If he was a non-Muslim, we would be very very angry my friend.

Muslim Brotherhood Militia?

The Big Pharaoh reports.

Appeasement?

EUReferendum links to this Observer article with the words:

the language of appeasement. Weep you can, but it won't do any good.

The Observer piece reports:

Cabinet ministers have been told by the Foreign Office to drop the phrase 'war on terror' and other terms seen as liable to anger British Muslims and increase tensions more broadly in the Islamic world.

The shift marks a turning point in British political thinking about the strategy against extremism and underlines the growing gulf between the British and American approaches to the continuing problem of radical Islamic militancy. It comes amid increasingly evident disagreements between President George Bush and Tony Blair over policy in the Middle East.

Now, here's a thing. In a recent interview, Donald Rumsfeld was reported as saying this:

I don’t think I would have called it the war on terror. I don’t mean to be critical of those who have. Certainly, I have used the phrase frequently. Why do I say that? Because the word war conjures up World War II more than it does the Cold War. It creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. It isn’t going to happen that way. Furthermore, it is not a ‘war on terror.’ Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and, [through] a small group of clerics, impose their dark vision on all the people they can control. So ‘war on terror’ is a problem for me.

I’ve worked to reduce the extent to which that [label] is used and increased the extent to which we understand it more as a long war, or a struggle, or a conflict, not against terrorism but against a relatively small number of terribly dangerous and violent extremists. I say violent extremists because an extremist who goes off in a closet is extreme, but he’s not bothering people. An extremist who has those views and insists on imposing them on free people strikes at the heart of who free people are. There are people who want to be able to get up in the morning and go where they want, do what they want, and that is exactly the opposite of the vision of violent extremists.

Rumsfeld is right but his reasons are different from those of the Foreign Office, unsurprisingly. By implication, we should be talking more of a struggle against extremists.

While the Foreign Office is certainly guilty of appeasement or worse - directly employing Islamic extremists, for example - one does not have to be an appeaser to feel the phrase "War on Terror" is inappropriate. As Rumsfeld himself shows in the quotations above, it's difficult to avoid the word "war", but less so the word "terror".

We are at war with Al Quaeda and various other Islamist groups, some of whom are sheltered by or connected with specific overseas governments, some of whom live in countries that are our allies. We should say so, identify them, identify objectives and most important of all identify what we would consider a victory. If we don't, we face an unending intensification of erosions of civil liberties in the name of a civil emergency, appropriate only to time of war, but with no conceivable end in sight.

This state of perpetual war was envisaged by George Orwell in 1984 as a precondition for a state of permanent tyranny. Orwell could not have foreseen the threat we face today, but otherwise his prediction is correct. Terror cannot surrender; Al Quaeda can. Rumsfeld also remarked:

At any given moment during the Cold War, which lasted 50 years, you couldn’t say if you were winning or losing. The Civil War, as well. There aren’t straight and smooth paths. There are bumpy roads. It’s difficult. The enemy has a brain. They’re constantly making adjustments. Think of the faces of the Cold War when Euro-communism was in vogue, and people were demonstrating by the millions against the United States, not against the Soviet Union. And yet, over time, people found the will - both political parties and Western European countries - to persist in a way that ultimately led to victory.

The circumstance we are in today is more like that than it is like World War II. People are going to have to get more familiar with that idea. It’s not a happy prospect. There are people in the world who are determined to destabilize modern Muslim regimes and re-establish a caliphate across the globe, and anyone who wants to know about it can go on the Internet and read their own words and what their intent is. They’re deadly. They’re not going to surrender. They’re going to have to be captured or killed. They’re going to have to be dissuaded; people are going to have to be dissuaded from supporting them, from financing them and assisting in their recruitment, providing havens for them.

We’re in an environment where we have to fight and win a war where the enemy is in countries we are not at war with.

I disagree with him on one point, I am more optimistic. I think they will surrender. But first, we have to admit, openly, that we are at war with them, and not at war with an emotion or a tactic.

Wrong kind of leaves

Sorry for the long delays between posts - I'm very occupied with a project. More soon. Meanwhile, a few short ones to keep the pot simmering.

While we're at it

Another quote from the comments at Harry's place:

No one is pro any and every war. Most people are in favour of some wars. Some people were in favour of a war to remove Saddam. Others are in favour of the current war to overthrow the democratically elected Iraqi government. I understand the latter claim to be anti-war. They are no more anti-war than the former.

Reading

Via a comment from this thread at Harry's Place, this essay by George Pell, Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, is well worth a read. He summarises very well the pro- and con- views of Islam, in the West, and concludes, inter alia:

Every great nation and religion has shadows and indeed crimes in their histories. This is certainly true of Catholicism and of all Christian denominations. And it is legitimate to ask our Islamic partners in dialogue whether they believe that the peaceful suras of the Koran are abrogated by the verses of the sword. Is the program of military expansion to be resumed when possible? Do they believe that democratic majorities of Muslims in Europe would impose shari’a law? Can we discuss Islamic history and even the hermeneutical problems around the origins of the Koran without threats of violence?

ID cards

Via Iain Dale, the ACLU shows the joy of an ID society.

Oil billions busted

This'll show those Saudi financiers of Islamic violence:

Michael Gove: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what assets have been frozen in relation to those suspected or convicted of terrorist activity in each year since 1997. [103180]

Ed Balls: Nearly 200 accounts and around half a million pounds of suspected terrorist funds have been frozen in the UK since 2001 when the UN’s terrorist asset freezing regime was established. The Treasury does not publish a breakdown of frozen funds for each year, as that could potentially reveal information about individuals’ assets. Freezing action also prevents the flow of funds to listed individuals and entities. Asset freezing is part of the Government’s overall strategy to create a hostile environment for terrorism and safeguard financial systems. A value cannot easily be put on those wider effects.

Certainly not a meaningful value.

The price of a vote

David Aaronovitch:

How many deaths is the right to vote actually worth? None? A thousand? Or the right of women to education? Or the right to speak out? If the answer is “not many”, then let’s get cosy with the murderers . . . try to edge them towards civilised behaviour. Let’s agree that the process of arguing for the freedom of others, let alone acting on it, is likely to be counter-productive. But please let us not commit the hypocrisy of voicing support for the work of Amnesty International or expressing shock at the killing of Anna Politkovskaya. Eggs break

Evenin' All

I'm too busy to post, but I'm too angry not to post about this:

A judge yesterday sparked anger when he jailed a teenager for two-and-a-half years for killing a father who tried to stop a gang of youths terrorising his street.

What happened?

The court heard Chambers knocked Mr Barnes out with a single punch in July after the father confronted youths when his car window was smashed by gangs involved in street fighting in Tremorfa, Cardiff.

And:

Martin Kelly, prosecuting, said: "Police had received a number of calls saying groups of up to 20 were fighting in the streets.

"Rival gangs were throwing stones at cars. The 14-year-old was with a group of 30 other youths."

A nearby CCTV camera picked up the attack on Mr Barnes with a young voice heard shouting: "Fight him Rob".

Witnesses said 6ft tall Chambers, then 17, punched 5ft 1in Mr Barnes who fell to the pavement and hit his head with "a hollow noise".

Chambers shouted: "Get up and have some more. Get up you pussy. I knocked him clean out." Mr Barnes lost consciousness and was taken to hospital, where his family kept a vigil.

So I'm furious that this yob didn't get a longer sentence, right?

Wrong.

The court heard Chambers admitted his crime to his mother who took him to police. He told her: "I hit him, what's going to happen to me?" Chambers was driven to the police station by his mother where he handed himself in.

A 17 year old kid, running amok, hits a man once with horrible consequences.

A resident comes out and confronts the crowd of kids, and gets hit and killed. The culprit tells his Mum, who takes him to the police.

Where the fuck were the police? Where the fuck were the police when the kids were terrorising the street? WHY the fuck were kids allowed to terrorise a street. KIDS! Children, albeit big children. Why did the police absent themselves to the extent that a resident had to leave his home and confront a gang?

A couple of years ago, someone firebombed a car in the small village in Cambridgeshire where I lived. I went out and put out the fire. I called the police. Three days later, a policeman knocked on my door, holding a FUCKING clipboard. Irish travellers were holding drag races in the high street (village name was Cottenham - google it) on Sunday mornings, two abreast on a single carriageway road. No fucking Old Bill for miles.

Tony Martin lives a couple of dozen miles away. Local rumour has it that a year or two after he shot a burglar, another farmer heard sounds in his house and called the police. "No cars in you area," he was told. "Lock yourself in your bedroom".

He thought about it. Then he called back. "Don't worry," he said. "I've shot them." Two police cars - with armed officers - were there in ten minutes.

Two months ago, my girlfriend dropped a birthday cake off in Ely, at a restaurant. As we pulled off, we turned a corner. She was pulling the seat belt across her shoulder, but there was a police check point. We were flagged over. On the spot fine. The copper grinned horribly, enjoying it hugely, as he wrote the ticket out for an "offence" that any self-respecting man would have handled by saying "Put your seat belt on, love".

Where are the police? Preying on the law-abiding. Tax collecting. Ignoring crimes that shatter lives, destroy peace, and get fathers killed and children imprisoned for being stupid young men with testosterone coursing through their veins - but nothing wrong that a clip round the ear wouldn't fix.

Where are the fucking police? Ignoring the yobs, and sitting in a layby on the bypass by the town where I live, right now, with special camera equipment to check for invalid tax disks on passing cars.

And it kills fathers, it ruins lives and it makes us hate them. And we pay their fucking wages.

Meanwhile, a couple of overweight, soft "Community Support" officers walk through this small town from time to time, wearing fucking body armour, chatting to people as though this is going to relax them.

Give me a proper Old Bill any day. Over six feet tall. And ready to take a kid behind a shed and give him a hiding to save the kid's life, and that of a father.

Rain Check

Day job... Having replaced a failed drive and rebuilt a limping raid disk array on one box, and replaced a 4cm fan on another yesterday (amazing how little things matter), all system are go at my new data centre cluster. So I'm burning the early evening oil - and it looks like it's going to turn into the midnight variety.

No substantial posts until Tuesday, at this rate. No sleep either. Ho hum.

PFO

In artistic circles, and perhaps elsewhere, PFO is shorthand for a negative response to a job application. The "P" stands for "Please", and the "O" stands for "Off".

There's an argument for changing the "P" to stand for "Parliamentary":

[1.]Michael Gove: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what discussions he has had with the Government of Saudi Arabia on the financing of terrorist activity; and if he will make a statement. [103181]

Ed Balls: The Government maintain an intensive and on-going dialogue with its international partners, including Saudi Arabia, as part of global efforts to deter, detect and disrupt the financing of terrorism.

[2.]Michael Gove: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what representations he has received on the involvement of the charity Interpal in the financing of terrorism and related activities; and if he will make a statement. [103182]

Ed Balls: The Chancellor of the Exchequer and I regularly discuss terrorist finance issues with international partners and other relevant parties. However, we do not comment on any particular cases that may be raised in those discussions.

[3.]Michael Gove: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will list meetings between (a) ministers and (b) officials in his Department and representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain since 1997; and if he will make a statement. [103184]

John Healey: Treasury ministers and officials meet a wide range of individuals and organisations in the public and private sectors to discuss a variety of issues as part of the process of policy analysis and development. As was the case with previous administrations, it is not the Government's normal practice to provide details of all such meetings.

Let's just get these questions in perspective.

1. Saudi Arabia is the font et origo of Islamic terrorism today. Remove Saudi money (though not necessarily derived directly from the government of that country) from the equation, and the extremist madrassas fall, the triumphalist mosques won't get built, and people will continue to live who would otherwise be blown to pieces - not in the Middle East or South Asia, but right here. The government has an absolute duty to address this issues and to inform us of their actions and policies.

2. Interpal has been connected with a British M.P. - again, this is a question of vital national interest and particularly of Parliamentary interest.

3. The Muslim Council of Britain is an organisation with secretive accounting practices but that receives public money. The Exchequer has a duty of disclosure.

Thank you, Michael Gove, for indefatigably raising these issues.

We need an accountable executive. We also need legal redress against the current shambles.

Hit me

This blog has seen an extraordinary rise in traffic since I posted my piece about Polly T. By the way, welcome to all the readers from Canada, Australia and the U.S.A..

I'm going to refocus more on pieces like this, rather than links to or comments about news items, though they won't vanish completely. The next post, "Pulling up the ladder", will appear by Sunday.

It's hard to say how significant this is, especially when hits have been coming from a wide geographical area (hello, Cote d'Ivoire, China and Burkina Faso), but that particular post clearly struck a chord with thousands of people who feel disenfranchised and angry and whose strongest feelings are driven by compassion and despair at the sight of state-created poverty, and by the knowledge that this is the wholly unnecessary artifact of the self-interested machinations of a tax-funded class of functionaries and professional statists.

How do we fix this? It's going to be difficult, but we have to try - and we have to succeed.

Peaceful Purposes 3

From The Spirit of Man:

Islamic regime's Basij militia showing their anti-western sentiments by walking on Israeli and US flags in Tehran during Basij week ceremonies

Syria Blocks Blogspot

The Skeptic reports that Syrian ISPs are blocking blogspot.

The UN springs into action, states the obvious, waits for a report and has a discussion

UPI reports some searing insights into the Iraqi situation from senior United Nations officials.

The senseless violence in Iraq continues to create a climate of hate and sectarianism, the United Nations says.

Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said in a statement the situation in Iraq has left hundreds of civilians dead.

"These devastating attacks create a climate of hate and sectarianism," Matsuura said Monday.
[...]
Ashraf Qazi, the secretary-general's special representative in Iraq, attributed the violence in most parts of the country to a vicious cycle of sectarian revenge-motivated killings.

Qazi urged the government, political leadership and the people of Iraq to "demonstrate an urgent and sincere determination to save their country."

Concerted efforts by the international community and neighboring countries like Iran and Syria, Qazi said, would be necessary for the government and people of Iraq to address challenges of violence, mistrust and divisions which threaten their society.

Meanwhile, anticipation increases for the Iraq Study Group, led by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, which will be presenting results of its inquiry by year's end.

Annan was reported to have had a "discussion" Monday with members of the group.

Unable to wait for Syria and Iran to start their "concerted efforts", or for the Iraq Study Group to report, the blogger Iraq the Model describes life in Baghdad and in the process displays an English degree of understatement by titling his post Rough Days:

We had no choice but to rely on ourselves to protect our homes and neighborhood insurgents and militias alike. In our mixed block the elders met to assign duties and make plans in case things go wrong. They decided that people should all exchange cell-phone numbers as the fastest means to communicate at times of action, it was also decided that if someone calls to report an attack on his home, everyone else must go up to the roof and start shooting at the direction of the assailants.
More roadblocks were erected and older ones strengthened—streets and alleys were blocked in any possible way to prevent any attack with vehicles.
They also agreed that no one moves on the streets after a certain hour at night and any moving person would be dealt with as a threat.

Not in my name

From The Telegraph:

Conservationists have accused EU representatives of approving a “disastrous” plan likely to cause the collapse of the bluefin tuna, a species as endangered as the giant panda.
[...]
This year scientists had recommended slashing catch quotas by half and banning fishing in the most productive months of May, June and July to save Mediterranean stocks which they said were at “high risk of collapse”.

Representatives of the EU, speaking for all 25 member states including Britain, sided with the French and Italian tuna fishing industry and blocked the conservation plan backed by the United States and Norway.
[...]
A strong plan for East Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna was tabled early in the meeting by the US delegation - adhering closely to scientific advice - yet the EU refused to budge on its own weak proposal, according to conservationists.

They say the EU plan, finally adopted by ICCAT yesterday, is totally insufficient - with almost no reduction in total catch, and a seasonal closure which deliberately excludes the peak of spawning when most adult catches are taken.

EU fleets are responsible for the bulk of illegal catches of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean - as a WWF report published in July clearly demonstrated.

Dr Sergi Tudela, head of fisheries at WWF Mediterranean, said: “Today’s decision will go down in history as destroying the credibility of ICCAT as a regional fisheries management organisation. This is an unprecedented scandal, sounding the death knell for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean.”

“This is a collapse plan, not a recovery plan - and a mockery of the work of scientists.

“The EU has betrayed its obligation to sustainably manage fisheries - for the sake of the short-term interests of its own bluefin tuna industry.”

Ministers and officials at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in London are known to have been deeply uncomfortable about the position taken by the EU fisheries directorate at the ICCAT meeting but their opposition to the proposal was balanced out by the support for it from fishing nations in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.

Taxation without Security

Michael Gove, M.P., has continued to draw attention to issues of terrorism, extremism and finance. On his website, he carries part of a report of a debate from the 27th November 2006. I reproduce a large section below:

On 10 October, the Chancellor said that it was

“upon meeting and overcoming the challenge of global terrorism that all else we value depends”.

In his speech on that date he outlined the Treasury’s role as the lead Department for our security. He specifically mentioned that the Treasury would have two responsibilities—interdicting terrorist financing and tackling the forces that encourage the separatism, extremism and isolation on which terrorism thrives.

In his speech, the Chancellor congratulated himself on

“the most comprehensive and expeditious asset freeze the Treasury has ever undertaken”.

But what exactly has the Treasury been able to seize from those suspected of involvement in terrorist activity? The true figure, as revealed following patient detective work by my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon), amounts to only £476,000 since 2002. That figure compares with some $200 million frozen by the American authorities. The Treasury’s effort is tiny by comparison. Its dragnet has caught minnows, not sharks. It has also had significant holes in it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) pointed out, Abu Hamza—now, happily, convicted of terrorist offences—whose assets were supposed to have been frozen, was able to transfer ownership of his home to his son, allowing his family to play the property market. How could Abu Hamza do that? It was because of a loophole that the Government had failed to address. The initial order, introduced in 2001, froze only funds, not assets. No change was made in that order until last month, just as the news of Abu Hamza’s situation was breaking in the newspapers. The loophole existed for four years and allowed someone convicted of terrorist offences to play the property market with public money.

Another area of profound concern was reported in The Sunday Telegraph yesterday. The European Union has stepped in to prevent the details of bank transfers being released to the US authorities when they fear that those transfers may materially affect terrorist activity. The European Union has ruled that privacy must come before security, but it will allow those same bank transfers to be scrutinised for taxation purposes. The Chancellor, in his speech on 10 October, stressed that he and Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, would take proactive steps to ensure that no regulation came between us and our security. Why are those EU regulations still in place, despite the Chancellor’s brave words? In those three specific areas, the Treasury has not dealt effectively with terrorist financing, despite the Chancellor’s putting the subject at the centre of his pattern of activities for the year.

In his speech, the Chancellor raised other real concerns about the way in which terrorism thrives as a result of the activity of extremist organisations. In a speech to the Foreign Policy Centre earlier this year, the Prime Minister pointed out that the threat that we face is not just physical but ideological. That ideological threat is rooted in the particular twisting of Islam known as Islamism, which has been propagated by organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood. That organisation has a UK branch known as the Muslim Association of Britain, and it is the UK branch of the organisation known in the Palestinian territories as Hamas. However, there has been no effective scrutiny by the Government or the Treasury of the Muslim Association of Britain’s activities or funding.

Crucially, the Muslim Association of Britain and its most prominent spokesman, Dr. Azzam Tamimi, now run the Finsbury Park mosque for which Sheikh Abu Hamza was previously responsible. Abu Hamza may be behind bars, and his assets may, at last, have been effectively frozen, but the mosque from which he preached hatred is now under the control of a man who was responsible for praising suicide bombing, and who has said that the state of Israel will eventually be destroyed and replaced by an Islamic state. The Government allowed that to happen on their watch, and they also allowed the Muslim Association of Britain to play a key role in the Government’s own watchdog body for mosques, the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board. How can we accept the Government’s claims that they take terrorism seriously when they are putting foxes in charge of the chicken coop?

I mentioned Hamas. Following brave reporting by John Ware, the investigative reporter who works for “Panorama”, one charity in this country was identified as having direct links with Hamas and terrorist fundraising. That charity is Interpal, which had been investigated by the Charity Commission. However, John Ware’s report revealed new, troubling details, including the fact that one of Interpal’s trustees, Mr. Ibrahim Hewitt, was appointed by the Government to their “Preventing Extremism Together” taskforce. Mr. Ware and others have asked the Charity Commission to look again at Interpal’s operation, and the operation of other charities that are linked with terrorism.

We await a comprehensive report—the Chancellor has promised it three times, but he has still not delivered it—that assesses the way in which charities have been used as a shield to promote terrorist financing and fundraising. Will the Minister ensure that, when the report is eventually published, the Charity Commission is given new powers to investigate proactively groups that spread terror and proselytise for extremism, under the cloak of charitable activity?

To be fair to the Government, two charities have been interdicted following action by the Treasury: Sanabel and al-Haramain. Those two charities are significant, because both are Saudi-based. In the United States Senate, the senior senator for New York, the democrat Charles Schumer, pointed out that Saudi-sponsored activity was responsible for the hijacking of moderate Islam and the spread of fundamentalist doctrine in schools, mosques and prisons. In a submission to the US Senate, Steven Emerson has pointed out the way in which organisations use the cloak of charitable activity to proselytise for an extremist agenda. In many cases, they choose to work through the direct funding of mosques.

There are some 1,600 mosques in Britain, most of them exemplary houses of instruction that provide spiritual nourishment to our fellow citizens, and that teach them in a tradition that all of us would think admirable. However, there are mosques—some with direct relationships with Saudi Arabia—that do not cleave to the moderate mainstream path taken by the majority of British Muslims. I shall mention two of them. One subject of concern is the East London mosque, which is one of the largest in Britain. Its president, Dr. Muhammad Abdul Bari, is the chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, but the speaker invited to open the mosque, Sheikh al-Sudais, had preached sermons in his native Saudi Arabia in which he described Jewish people as pigs and monkeys. He has called Hindus idol-worshippers to whom it would be wrong to speak sweetly. That is an example of Saudi influence raising profound concerns.

An even more profound concern arises in connection with the plans, in east London, for the erection of the largest mosque—indeed, the largest house of worship—in the country. It is intended to accommodate between 40,000 and 70,000 worshippers, and it is estimated that it will cost between £100 million and £300 million. The mosque, which is being built by an organisation called Tablighi Jamaat, raises profound concerns, not least because that organisation has been described by French intelligence as an “antechamber of fundamentalism”. Two of the 7/7 bombers had direct links with the Tablighi Jamaat mosque in Dewsbury. Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber, had links with the organisation, as did John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. How can an organisation that, according to the Charity Commission, records an income of just £500,000 a year, afford to build a mosque that will cost anything between £100 million and £300 million?

It is my contention that we need a thorough and bipartisan investigation by the House into the foreign funding of extremism in this country. We can learn a lot from the United States, and the way in which the Senate used its investigative tools to work out exactly how a noble religion is being subverted by extremists. I am sure that the Chancellor is sincere in his determination to combat terrorism and root out the extremism that sustains it, but unless he shows a greater degree of urgency in dealing with the problem, and a greater attention to detail when matters are brought before Ministers, and unless he empowers the Charity Commission and other agencies to use proactive investigatory powers, I am afraid that we will always be on the back foot in one of the most vital battles of our time.

This all tends to speak for itself, but I have highlighted in bold one section that I find astonishing. The European Union does not allow the examination of suspicious bank transfers in the course of investigations of possible terrorist activity, but does allow scrutiny of the same transfers for taxation purposes. Actions speak louder than words, and no more dramatic illustration could be found for two salient points:

1. European governments are not serious about the fight against Islamic terrorist activity.

2. Taxation trumps all; our governments are so addicted to the wholesale confiscation of our money that they put this before people's lives and freedoms.