'President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become "President-for-Life" Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.'

This is part of an article apparently written in all seriousness by Philip Atkinson, author of A Study Of Our Decline. It was published on Family Security Matters, a site that nominally informs families about how to keep their homes secure from terrorists. As they say:

Our mission is to inform all Americans, men and women, about the issues surrounding national security; to address their fears about safety and security on a personal, family, community, national and international level; to highlight the connection between individual safety and a strong national defense; to increase civic participation and political responsibility; and to empower all Americans to become proactive defenders of our national security and community safety.

It's probably just a coincidence, then, that it is owned by right-wing think tank, the Centre for Security Policy...

Still, it's a worrying reminder of how often we here calls to sacrifice our principles because we are threatened by those who hate our principles. It is a theme often elaborated by President Bush, who claims that we are hated because we are free, and whose response to attacks is to remove those freedoms. We are told that 'there are no options that we should take off the table' from torture to pre-emptive nuclear strikes on a non-nuclear country. The example above is only notable because it follows these arguments to their logical conclusion. Democracy is weak, and slow, and often wrong, and full of checks and balances.

I happen to believe that our claim to be civilised is based exactly on what we are prepared to 'take off the table'; in saying that there are certain things that we will never do. If we're not prepared to behave differently than those whose behaviour we deplore, what separates us from them?

Burnley BNP Case - Sentencing | Blairwatch

Blairwatch has a nice piece here, comparing the relative sentences given to members of the BNP who are convicted of terrorism offences and Muslims who are convicted of offences which do not involve the possession of explosives...

Pickled Politics » Ex-BNP ‘terrorist’ gets jail

As a follow-up to a story I mentioned ages ago...

It occurs to me, when reading about the increasingly-bizarre case of Abdel Kareen
Nabil, whose father and brothers learned the whole Koran to show their devotion whilst abandoning their sibling, that one of the reasons many people around the world have less than total confidence in the War on Terror is its hugely selective imposition.

It is not a War on Terror. George Bush has no intention of invading the Basque region or Northern Ireland. It is a War on Certain Terrorists of a Religious Nature. However, the catch-all term does allow Vladimir Putin to gloss over the Chechnya problem, and his troops actions in Beslan as part of the War on Terror.

We claim that we support democracy in the Middle East, which is quite clearly an untruth. If you have the misfortune to be living in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, whose regimes provide us with lots of money and oil, our troops probably won't be riding in any time soon to secure your freedoms. Sorry. The same applies if you're living under military dictator Parvez Musharraf in Pakistan (who even got interviewed on the Daily Show, we like him so much). You're going to have to do it yourselves.

Also, our siding with Shia militants in Iraq, providing a base for Moqtada al Sadr and the Mahdi Army shows that we aren't even consistent in opposing violent religious fundamentalists. Not if they dislike the same people we dislike.

What Tony Blair and George Bush do not realise are that there are many people who opposed the war in Iraq who would support a general push for greater freedom for the peoples of the world. They just don't think their way is the best way of doing it.