Free Republic

The number of Jewish residents considering leaving London is increasing daily in response to targeted hostility, Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) warned Monday. The group has exposed a series of antisemitic attacks in the capital amid reports of increasing nervousness among Jewish people about their safety, the London Evening Standard reports. CAA chief executive Gideon Falter said an earlier opinion survey had already shown about half of Jewish people were considering moving abroad and the trend was growing because of continuing hostility from sections of the community. Three Attacked in Central London ‘For Being Jewish’ by Gang of Arabic-Speaking Men, Victims...

London Mayor Boris Johnson spoke the other day about the riots that devastated London and other English cities last summer: The biggest shock for me from the riots was the sheer sense of nihilism—perhaps I should not have been shocked, but in my view literacy and numeracy are the best places to start. In seven particular boroughs in London one in four children are leaving functionally illiterate. In a few schools it is nearer 50%. We have to intervene at an earlier stage, and I think the mayor can help. Here is a thing that The New York Times said...

The Pope will on Sunday launch a renewed attack on the "moral relativism" that he has blamed for Britain's summer riots.In a message for the 2012 World Peace Day of January 1, Pope Benedict said that neither peace nor justice was obtainable if the objective norms of morality expressed in the Ten Commandments continue to be rejected. His words represent another severe criticism of moral relativism, the humanistic creed that holds there can be no objective standard on which to base morality. They come just months after the Pope told Nigel Baker, Britain's Ambassador to the Holy See, that the...

Harry Potter star Jamie Waylett has been charged with being in possession of a petrol bomb during the London riots this summer and threatening unlawful violence. When police arrested the actor, 22, they also say they found 15 cannabis plants growing in his bedroom. He played Draco Malfoy's sidekick Vincent Crabbe in the Harry Potter films alongside Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint. He appeared in six of the movies about the boy wizard - but was not involved in the final film after his character was written out. Waylett is also accused of handling a bottle of champagne...

Unlike many of my comrades in the punditry game, I don't do a lot of TV. But I'm currently promoting my latest doom-mongering best-seller, so I'm spending more time than usual on the telly circuit. This week I was on the BBC's current affairs flagship "Newsnight." My moment in the spotlight followed a report on the recent riots in English cities, in the course of which an undercover reporter interviewed various rioters from Manchester who had a grand old time setting their city ablaze and expressed no remorse over it. There then followed a studio discussion, along the usual lines....

Last week on his blog, British subject-turned-Hollywood celebrity Russell Brand took a few moments to opine on the recent London riots. In an Aug. 11 post, Brand blamed former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for the civil unrest because the rioters have lost their “sense of community.” “These young people … have no stake in society because Cameron’s mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thing,” Brand wrote. That raised the ire of National Review columnist Mark Steyn, author of the new book “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.” On Hugh Hewitt’s syndicated radio show, Steyn said, “The guy...

MADISON, Ind. (BP) -- It seems that the societal ills that plague inner cities everywhere are no respecter of nations. Britain is presently being rocked with social unrest that is quite out of step with what was once viewed proudly as the stodgy national character. In any culture, revered traditions can only hold back disorder so long when young people are uneducated, impoverished and without opportunity. Prime Minister David Cameron has pointed out that Britain has created an atmosphere that is characterized by "children without fathers, schools without discipline, reward without effort, crime without punishment, rights without responsibilities [and] communities...

The riots that hit London and other English cities last week have the potential to spread beyond the British Isles. Class rage isn’t unique to England; in fact, it represents part of a growing global class chasm that threatens to undermine capitalism itself. The hardening of class divisions has been building for a generation, first in the West but increasingly in fast-developing countries such as China. The growing chasm between the classes has its roots in globalization, which has taken jobs from blue-collar and now even white-collar employees; technology, which has allowed the fleetest and richest companies and individuals to...

If these riots had taken place in America, the outcome would have been very different. America has the intellectual and emotional tools necessary to deal with this kind of social disaster: Britain doesn’t. The riots were caused, prolonged and misinterpreted by English bad manners. We don’t know how to talk to one another anymore. Our yin and our yang are out of chi. We brought this on ourselves and we need Oprah’s help out of this mess. Here’s what the Americans would have done different. 1. The public would have fought back more aggressively. America has a tradition of self-reliance...

A suspected looter in this week’s riots and his mother are being thrown out of their council home. In the first case of its kind, Daniel Sartain-Clarke, 18, and his mother have been served with an eviction notice as council bosses seek to turf them out of their £225,000 taxpayer-subsidised flat. Sartain-Clarke is charged with violent disorder and attempting to steal electronic goods from the Currys store at Clapham Junction, South London, on Monday night.

Well you could argue, I suppose, that it’s payback for the nauseating apologia for terrorism written by the Guardian’s resident Wykhamist Trot Seumas Milne the day after 9/11 (”They can’t see why they are hated”). But I surely can’t be the only Londoner for whom it sticks, ever so slightly, in the craw to be told by a Chicago-born professor of sociology and his Dutch sociologist wife in the New York Times is that the riots are kind of our fault because Britain has become such a hotbed of Tea Party values. The American right today is obsessed with cutting...

London Olympic organizing committee chairman Sebastian Coe said there are ''lessons to be learned'' from the recent rioting in the British capital. Coe spoke publicly Thursday about the riots for the first time since violence broke out in north London on Saturday. BRITAIN RIOTS •Sebastian Coe weighs in •Organizers go ahead with test events •Tottenham Hotspurs opener delayed •Concern for 2012 Games •Soccer matches called off ''There are lessons to be learned," Coe said, "and over the next year, we will continue our contingency plans. They will deal with all sorts of things including public disorder.'' The four days of...

America's most fearsome policeman has been appointed David Cameron's top adviser on gang warfare. Bill Bratton, who introduced zero-tolerance policing to New York and turned around crime-ridden Los Angeles, will help ministers draw up plans to tackle gang culture in Britain's cities. Yesterday the Prime Minister unveiled the first of his plans to tackle gang violence. He said injunctions which let courts ban gang members from gathering in certain places or at certain times of day, which currently apply only to adults, will be extended to children. Ministers were planning to roll out a pilot scheme covering 14 to 17-year-olds...

Wait, so liberalism isn't all tea and crumpets?

Mrs. MindBender and I keep a secure home; passive IR lights, alarm, long weapons in closet, hand guns close, planning, drills, etc. Due to worldwide "problems," we have gone to more lights on, long weapons next to bed, and taking the Glock 23s with extra mags with us whenever out of home 20. Anyone else?

Shortly after 9pm on Monday, as daylight bled from the sky, the police finally lost control of London. A gang of boys and girls, most no older than 15, and some apparently as young as eight, broke into a row of shops in Bethnal Green, in the East End. As they left carrying piles of clothes, a police car drove past. It did not stop. Forty minutes after the first 999 calls were made, two police vans arrived at the scene, already too late. On a night of untold destruction that left businesses and homes across the city in flames,...

When the rioters came to attack the premises of Kurdish and Turkish businesses in Hackney's Stoke Newington High Street and Kingsland Road on Monday night, the owners were waiting for them. "It was between about nine and 10 at night," said Yilmaz Karagoz, sitting in his coffee shop next to a jeweller's shop that has been shuttered since Sunday when the rioting began and a pharmacy that closed a day after. "There were a lot of them. We came out of our shops but the police asked us to do nothing. But the police did not do anything so, as...

I found the press release Obama issued to get Project Vote rolling, in the ACORN archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society. (Obama worked closely with ACORN on this campaign, his later denials notwithstanding.) The release quotes Obama explaining the need for Project Vote by pointing to the rioting in Los Angeles. Said Obama in 1992: “The Los Angeles riots reflect a deep distrust and disaffection with the existing power pattern in our society.” That’s Alinsky-speak for “We’ve got to use the power of the angry underclass to put capitalism in check.” Naturally, we’ll continue to disagree about whether Obama’s...

London rioters help a rioter up. Then swarm and rob him! Sure, it's about the rich and the police!

London riots: BBC criticised for branding thugs as 'protesters' The BBC was criticised for its political correctness last night after continually referring to the yobs rioting across London as “protesters”. By Tom Whitehead, and Andrew Hough 6:30AM BST 09 Aug 2011 Two days after a peaceful protest over the death of suspected gangster Mark Duggan in Tottenham ended, the corporation was still using the term to describe violent looters. That was despite the fact that hundreds of youths, with no connection to events in Tottenham, had since run riot across the capital. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, Boris Johnson, the...