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Italy Travel Ideas

Thursday 10 July 2014

Hobby Lobby: A Lesson from America

The Hobby Lobby company


Not many people in Britain have followed the Hobby Lobby case, named after the American company that won an important battle for religious freedom against the bullying of the totalitarians - in this episode feminazis and supporters of state intervention in personal affairs.

In this area the United States seems more progressive in the true, not socialist, sense, and less prepared to submit to cultural Marxism's oppressive demands.

Hobby Lobby is a company owned by Christians. At issue was whether, according to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare, "closely held companies like Hobby Lobby could be forced by the government to provide abortifacient coverage to its employees, in defiance of its owners’ deeply held religious beliefs".

"In a 5-4 ruling written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby and other closely held companies do not have to provide contraceptive coverage that conflicts with the religious beliefs of the companies’ owners."

Non-profit companies already enjoy this dispensation, and now the government must provide religious accommodations to “closely-held” for-profit companies too. “Closely-held” means for example, as in this case, owned and controlled by members of a single family, as opposed to impersonal, publicly-held corporations.
One of the main reasons the Obama administration’s arguments failed to convince five justices is that the federal government did not necessarily need to mandate employer-provided contraceptive coverage in order to ensure access to contraceptive coverage. For example, rather than mandating employer coverage, the government could have easily established its own program to provide or pay for contraceptive coverage.
Like the the employees of non-profit companies that hold religious beliefs, the employees of for-profit companies with similar religious objections will still have access to insurance coverage without cost sharing for FDA-approved contraceptives; Hobby Lobby's objections concerned only abortifacient drugs, namely substances that induce abortion.

This is a very reasonable, well-though-out decision.

The way many (anything but) "liberals" reacted showed very clearly how the average IQ of Lefties is so much lower than that of conservatives and Right-wingers, very likely because it requires brains to oppose the dominant ideological orthodoxy, whereas any idiot can just unthinkingly follow the easy, lazy, non-intellectual path of going along with it.

A criticism of the Supreme Court’s decision from our politically-correct geniuses was that it denies women access to birth control, as if not being able to force someone to pay for something were the same as not having access to that something. In fact, bosses, by paying their employees a salary, enable them to pay for whatever they wish to buy.

Another "argument" was that the court ruling discriminated against women. In reality, the opposite is true, as "the only contraception-related discrimination baked into law by Obamacare was against men. After all, male contraception like condoms or vasectomies was never covered by the law".

The scream "It's not about abortion, but birth control!" showed the inability of some people to understand the difference between substances that prevent conception and substances that intervene after conception and destroy a fertilized egg. This case concerned only 4 types of contraception that can result in the destruction of a fertilized egg, while Hobby Lobby paid for 16 different types of non-abortive contraceptive coverage for its employees.

Some "pro-choice" brainboxes compared a human embryo to a fingernail: let's hope they don't choose medicine as their career.

"If you're going to argue human life doesn't begin at conception, the burden is on you to create human life in its absence" tweeted in reply Sean Davis of The Federalist.

But those contorted views do not represent the majority.

A Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely US voters found that they approve of the Supreme Court’s decision by a 10-point margin. 49% of them agreed that business owners should have the option of exempting themselves from ObamaCare’s HHS contraceptive mandate if it violates their religious beliefs. Only 39% opposed the Hobby Lobby court ruling, while 12% were undecided.
In addition, the poll found that 58 percent of voters say a company’s level of contraceptive coverage is not an important part of their decision to work there, compared to 38 percent who say it is at least somewhat important to their decision of where to work.

While 43 percent of voters think businesses should be required by law to provide health insurance that covers all government-approved contraceptives for women without copayment or other charges, 47 percent say companies should not be required to comply with the contraception mandate.

The same poll found that 48 percent of voters believe the government is a threat to Americans’ religious rights, while only 30 percent of voters believe the government protects those rights.

Intrusive Emergency Laws "To Stop ISIS Terrorists"

Aseel Muthana and older brother Nasser went fo fight in Syria. Aseel Muthana said: 'Jihad is obligatory.'


Predictably, having so many terrorists in our midst - in addition to the danger - will have the consequence of more intrusion in our personal lives and more state power. From The Telegraph, "Emergency laws to monitor phone and internet records 'to stop terrorists'":
Emergency laws will be brought in next week to force phone and internet companies to hold records of customers’ calls, texts and visits to websites.

The fast-track measures are necessary to defend national security against the terrorist threat from Iraq and Syria, David Cameron said.

The consequences of not acting are “grave”, the Prime Minister said.

The measures are a response to a ruling by the European Court of Justice which struck down regulations that enabled communications companies from retaining data for police use for a year.

Internet and phone companies will soon start deleting it – a move that will have “serious consequences” for police and counter-terror investigations, Downing Street said.

The emergency laws will also create a “clearer legal framework”, at the demand of companies, for when police and intelligence agencies want to intercept terrorist and criminal communications.

The need for new laws is “urgent”, Downing Street said. There is cross-party agreement.

“It is the first duty of government to protect our national security and to act quickly when that security is compromised,” David Cameron said.
Except that the only really effective security measure, not letting these would-be terrorists back into the country, is what this government is not prepared to enact.
“As events in Iraq and Syria demonstrate, now is not the time to be scaling back on our ability to keep our people safe. The ability to access information about communications and intercept the communications of dangerous individuals is essential to fight the threat from criminals and terrorists targeting the UK.

“No government introduces fast track legislation lightly. But the consequences of not acting are grave.

“I want to be very clear that we are not introducing new powers or capabilities – that is not for this Parliament. This is about restoring two vital measures ensuring that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies maintain the right tools to keep us all safe.”

Wednesday 9 July 2014

Protect Our Borders from Syria and Iraq Jihadists

A Musim man waves the black flag of Islam in Iraq


Why should people who take a bus or Tube train in London be in fear for their lives from a bomb attack? Is it right that air passengers should be afraid of terror threats when they board a plane and also be subjected to continuous disruptions for the same reason?

Every day we hear news of more young Muslims – often born and bread in the UK but not “British” in any true sense of the word – travelling to Iraq and Syria to join groups fighting in a jihad (Islamic holy war) to establish an Islamic state over there. These Muslims also promise to come back to Britain and create a climate of terror over here.

Their threats have to be taken with the utmost seriousness: we have seen from media reports and internet videos how ruthless these fighters are with the lives of others and how determined they are to ethnically cleanse the Middle East of Christians.

Despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s empty reassurances that Britain will not ignore this security threat, former MI6 director of global counter-terrorism Richard Barrett has said the numbers are too high and the security services won’t be able to monitor all the jihadists returning to the UK. It is "out of the question", he added.

Top counter-terrorism expert Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police's assistant commissioner and head of specialist operations, has warned that Britain will live with the consequences of Syria and the rise of Islamic extremism within its own borders “for many, many years to come”.

The jihadists returning from Syria, due to its relative vicinity to Europe, are considered “the biggest threat to Britain's security” and a “greater threat than al-Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan”. The British Home Office identifies Syria as “the most significant development in global terrorism.”

Charles Farr - the Home Office’s terror chief - and others warned that the Syrian war is stoking the biggest terror threat to the West since September 11, and this problem is predicted to persist for as long as the hostilities will continue.


It is simply foolish to believe that the threat is minimal or behind us. So far we’ve just been lucky


Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee - which oversees the UK’s intelligence agencies -, wrote that new measures increasing security checks at airports are “unavoidable” because jihadists are deploying "devilish technical skill" to create ever more sophisticated devices to evade existing security measures.

He wrote that he had encountered a level of complacency among some elements of the public which he found "seriously disturbing", adding:
It is simply foolish to believe that the threat is either minimal or now behind us. We have, indeed, been fortunate but, sadly, this has not been because the terrorists have, since 2005, given up trying to do us harm. As Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, has made clear, each year there have been serious plots which if they had not been identified and disrupted would have led to the deaths and mutilation of many British citizens.

The police and the security services have been very successful but we must not underestimate the devilish technical skill of those terrorists who design ever more sophisticated means of concealing explosives in mobile devices, in clothing and in otherwise innocent objects. They have been hard at work over the last year.
Only last week Britain's airports were put on a new terror alert following intelligence warnings that al Qaeda's chief bomb maker - Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who is now said to have sworn allegiance to ISIS - had linked up with jihadists in Syria to pass on his skills.

It couldn’t be clearer that these people mean business. Some “British” Syria fighters have admitted preparing to carry out terrorist acts.

Possible links have also been found between three Muslims based in Cardiff, Wales - Isis militants who were present in a propaganda video filmed by the group - and two other men from the same part of the city, who are in prison for having planned to blow up London's Stock Exchange.


Black flag of Islam over Downing Street


A “British” jihadist has warned of the “black flag of Islam” flying over Downing Street and Buckingham Palace.

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the “Caliph” of the Islamic State spreading between Iraq and Syria, has promised support to “oppressed” Muslims everywhere and told his soldiers: “You will conquer Rome and own the world”. Islam supporters hacked a Facebook page dedicated to Pope Francis and filled it with vulgar and offensive words and images: just a warning about things to come.

There is no doubt that militant Islam is on the rise in the world, and we’ll ignore it at our own peril.


We must protect our borders from these would-be terrorists


We must protect our own borders. It’s suicidal to allow would-be terrorists who have already shown their allegiance to violent jihad and acted on it to return to Britain, when top intelligent and security experts have made it clear that we cannot accurately monitor this threat once inside the country.

The party Liberty GB has among its party policies the only measure that would guarantee a greater safety for British people:

“Stop from returning to the UK anyone, including British citizens, who has left the country to fight alongside or support Muslim militias or jihadist groups abroad.”

Tuesday 1 July 2014

Italy Is One of the EU Largest Net Contributors

Net receipts from the EU budget, based on 2009 budget data (negative amounts show net contributions)
Member state Per capita

(in euros)
Percentage

(of national GDP)
Total amount

(in million euros)
Austria −59.7 −0.18 −499
Belgium 90.0 0.29 968
Bulgaria 77.4 1.76 589
Cyprus −34.0 −0.18 −27
Czech Republic 150.4 1.11 1,575
Germany −107.3 −0.37 −8,797
Denmark −211.0 −0.53 −1,163
Estonia 416.2 4.02 558
Finland −113.8 −0.36 −606
France −100.4 −0.34 −6,461
Greece 267.2 1.30 3,009
Hungary 265.1 2.68 2,660
Ireland −35.0 −0.09 −156
Italy −100.7 −0.41 −6,046
Lithuania 438.2 5.33 1,468
Luxembourg 2364.5 3.05 1,167
Latvia 218.8 2.62 495
Malta 17.4 0.13 7
Netherlands −90.2 −0.26 −1,488
Poland 160.5 1.66 6,119
Portugal 196.4 1.25 2,087
Romania 74.8 1.24 1,609
Spain 9.7 0.04 444
Sweden −43.6 −0.13 −404
Slovenia 92.8 0.55 189
Slovakia 88.8 0.78 481
United Kingdom −62.7 −0.24 −3,865


One William Gruff left this comment to my post The Looting of Italy:
Italy is not and has never been a nett contributor to the EU. Not a nett contributor means not a contributor at all in precisely the way that being a public sector worker means not a tax payer. In the same way, Scotland makes no contribution to the 'U'K, despite partisan claims to the contrary.
This sums up the kind of widespread ignorance and prejudice about Italy, largely due to media distortions, that my Italian journalist friend Alessandra Nucci laments in her article, "The Looting of Italy", that attracted that comment.

The comment requires a documented reply.

Above is a table for the year 2009 reproduced from Wikipedia, based on research by Deutsche Bank Research. The net contributors are shown in blue.

Wikipedia says:
The four largest net contributors in absolute terms are Germany, France, Italy, UK.
The four largest net contributors in per capita terms are Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy.
The four largest net contributors as a proportion of GDP are Denmark, Italy, Germany, Finland.
Only Italy and Germany are among the four largest net contributors in all categories. It's also easy to see from the table that in absolute terms Italy contributes almost double the net receipts from the UK, the country from which our commenter friend William Gruff hails.

As you can see, in total amount Italy is third, little behind France, which Italy, though, overtakes in terms of per capita contributions. As a proportion of GDP Italy comes before both Germany and France, and is second only to Denmark, an economic lightweight compared to Italy.

Also observe how Italy is usually placed by the international media together with Spain, Portugal and Greece, which are among the largest net recipients - along with Luxembourg and some Eastern-European countries -, therefore at the other end of the spectrum.

A table showing member states' net contributions to the EU’s annual budget for the period from 2000 to 2011, compiled by the European Commission, can be found here. Again, somewhat counterintuitively, if the figure is negative it means that the country has received fewer payments from the EU than it should and is therefore a net contributor to the EU’s budget.

This table shows again that, except in 2000, Italy has been a large net contributor all these years.

Even the German news magazine Der Spiegel wrote at the end of 2012, accompanying the article with a clear graph:
Italy is the country that most contributes to the European budget...

Compared to the 2011 Gross Domestic Product, no other country has contribuited so much to the European budget as Italy...

...but, despite its strong debt, [Italy] has not yet received a cent from the various European "parachutes".

Friday 27 June 2014

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world's oldest bank still in existence, operating continuously since 1472


This is the fourth and final part of the article by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci. Here are the first three parts:

The Looting of Italy

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy


Also read Italy Invented Banks by Enza Ferreri


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The Attack Begins In Earnest

2011 is when they began in earnest to train their guns on us, with the military aggression that started with the Nato attack on Libya culminating in half-truths calculated to stampede investors away from Italy in the direction of presumably safe bonds. And what bonds can be safer than Germany’s?

After the attack on Libya pulverized the country’s infrastructure, mainly built by Italy, as well as the many giant Italian industries that lined the coast, the banksters sprang into action. In July, Germany’s heavily-leveraged Deutsche Bank - which a month later was revealed to be one of the prime recipients of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s tremendous secret bailout, to the tune of $354 billion - dumped over 7 billion euros’ worth of Italian bonds onto the market in one swoop, loudly trumpeting this fact to the press and then just as dramatically buying up unnecessary swap options that bet on Italy’s going bust.

This of course signalled to all investors to follow suit, lest they remain saddled with bonds that might never be paid back! After which the panic inevitably spread to the shareholders’ market, driving the price of wealthy banks and huge joint-stock companies down to levels of craziness where one could buy a mega-multinational concern at the cost of maybe a single one of its properties.

Der Spiegel may have let the cat out of the bag when it wrote that documents in its possession showed that the reason Angela Merkel was holding out against the Euro-bonds - which would guarantee the debt of all the euro-zone countries - was that in exchange for relenting she planned to demand privileges for foreign buyers of choice property in Southern Europe.

This may or may not be. What is certain is that they have had this on their minds for a long time. In one sole day, in July 2011, Germany’s Deutsche Bank dumped billions of euros’ worth of perfectly good Italian sovereign bonds onto the market, trumpeting the move as the markets were still open – something that is NEVER done – and then dramatically buying swaps that would make a profit if Italy went bankrupt. By stampeding investors away from Italy they managed not only to distract the press from their own banks’ toxic assets, which they were busy dumping onto other countries’ debit accounts, but also to attract the money thereby freed up to – where else? Germany of course.

This kind of situation is a problem even in normal free markets. But in the euro-zone, where the spigot of money creation has been clamped off in the name of thrift (“austerity” they call it) - and, thanks to Maastricht and other assorted treaties, cannot be turned back on except by fiat of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt - it becomes a matter of mors tua vita mea. It’s like when you tilt a glass of water letting it all flow to one side, leaving the rest high and dry. If there is a fixed amount of money and it is all made to flow to one corner of the continent, the rest is left high and dry, with no way for people to exchange the fruits of their respective labour to procure the rest of the things they need to live. Money has no value in itself. The value lies in goods and manpower. But barter became impossible a long long time ago. Even in the bronze age there were products of human invention that needed some instrument to fraction their worth with respect to whatever needed interchange. Can a piano manufacturer barter his goods in exchange for his daily bread? Or must he grow his own produce if he wants to eat? Without money, markets are not free but paralyzed. Such is the situation of the captive countries of the euro-zone.

Hence, from July 2011 on, Germany’s vested interest in the collapse of other countries, and particularly of Italy’s rival economy, has been obvious to all who cared to see. Nevertheless, no-one could possibly have imagined that two months later, and a fortnight before the financial putsch in Italy, the Deutsche Bank would go so far as to secretly request the Troika [European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund] to impose a “massive and profound decommissioning of the system of social welfare and of services to the public, to the tune of hundreds of billions of euros, for France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Ireland” (the so-called “PIIGS” countries, plus France), according to a report which we only discovered the following year.

Unsurprisingly, the insultingly-named “PIIGS” countries are all non-Protestant. As attested in several editorials, since the euro no longer evokes wealth and stability but unemployment, poverty and decline, there has been a return of anti-Catholic prejudice in Northern Europe, where many consider the “PIIGS” countries to be doing badly because of Catholic sin. The whore of Babylon all over again.


Mario Monti's Government of Technocrats

Enter Mario Monti, the unelected Prime Minister, self-proclaimed Catholic and supposed conservative economics professor who went to visit the Pope eight times in little over a year while impoverishing the country and instigating the suicide of dozens of industrialists.

Under his watch billions were siphoned out of the economy, while the vast majority of Parliament remained inert, the conservatives mostly looking on in passive and silent dejection and the leftists simply waiting for election time to reinstall them in power. All of them, left and right, were as if traumatized at the display of power in what amounted to a coup d’etat by President Napolitano, and even more frightened at witnessing each other's silence. One MP, an ex-socialist friend of mine who had joined Berlusconi's centrist party Forza Italia, wrote a piece early on which ended saying that we were in the midst of a tragedy which risked changing forever the face of the country. When I called to compliment him for his perspicacity, he cut me short replying “Yes but nobody else is speaking up.” In a matter of weeks he had eaten his words and climbed aboard Mario Monti’s brand-new political party.

I think that a sequence of events of this kind – plus the court actions which have devastated and closed down one major industry after another on charges usually involving either environmental disaster, health hazards or corruption, increasing unemployment by the thousands - are probably what is routinely done to countries when there is a leftist takeover. I hold that they could purposely be using the power to legislate money away, isolate the country from investors so as to tear the system down for good and render the people powerless to recreate it. This is the only explanation I can find to the inexplicable way the technocrats have been sending money abroad as if there were no need for it at home: 5 million to Albania to buy equipment for doctors’ offices, 3 million to Bolivia to help protect its biodiversity, 1.3 billion to help Ethiopians guard against a new drought, 400,000 for a school for tour operators in Mozambique... it goes on and on.

Is it any wonder that Monti’s supposedly un-political, technocratic administration was actually made up of 99 % left-wing ministers? Why else would our ex(?)-communist President Giorgio Napolitano - whom The NYT enthused about dubbing him “King Giorgio” - install Monti in the Premier’s office the minute the stock markets’ plunge finally managed to dislodge the entrenched incumbent, overriding all constitution-mandated Parliamentary prerogative? The international press immediately recorded this unprecedented power grab as the virtual coup d’etat it was, but this soon became an embarrassing detail that it is impolite to even mention any more.

Because Italy's politics was purposely programmed by our post-war Constitution - largely dictated by the powerful Communist Party - to be unmanageable and incomprehensible, hardly anyone in the international press bothers to delve into anything that regards Italy. Journalists have us conveniently shelved under the categories of fashion, pizza, the mafia, the Leaning Tower and the Pope. Investors care only about what the herd will do next in order to follow suit and try and turn a profit on the stock exchange. As a result, no-one ever writes about Italy except if there is a sex scandal, a mafia crime, or talk of corruption. Or, today, if the press says that Italy is being bailed out.

All of the good things, the 95 percent of hard-working, honest Italians, who are not corrupt but actually the first victims of corruption, the mafia, etc, are invariably ignored.

Ironically, despite the country's having had as Prime Minister a media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, whose supposed expertise in manipulating media coverage might have served Italy in good stead, the international spotlight has remained firmly projected onto the unfavourable clichés and the sole unfavourable numbers of Italy’s external debt. Our erstwhile Premier’s ludicrous private lechery deservedly made him the butt of worldwide ridicule, and dragged Italy down with him. However, I can’t help remembering that Bill Clinton was President of the United States when his sex-capades in the White House were made public. Has this ever made a laughing stock of the entire American populace for having elected him? Hardly.

I believe that in this globalized world, relying solely on the mainstream media for news about other countries is a mistake that can prevent a needed comprehension of what is going on. Because, the globalist players being a tight-knit clique, the blueprint they follow can eventually come round to harass other countries in their turn.

Wednesday 25 June 2014

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy

Immigrants arriving on the island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily


This is the third part of the article by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci. Here are the first two parts:

The Looting of Italy

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


A Never-ending Flow of Illegal Immigrants Overburdens Italian Welfare

Very little is ever said about the immigration load, which together with bureaucracy is largely responsible for the burgeoning debt. It is routinely downplayed, while Italy gets lectured to for supposedly not living up to impossible standards that are provably not expected of any other country. The Italian Coastguard and Carabinieri have saved countless lives and generous Italian welfare, including old-age pensions, is doled out not only to illegal immigrants but, incredibly, to their relatives back home. Nonetheless Amnesty International feels free to scold us on the subject, and periodically issues press releases condemning the heartlessness of Italy alone, never anyone else, even though Spain has been known to shoot against boats approaching its shores and Malta routinely turns away boats heading in its direction, instructing them to come to Italy and France, and literally closed its borders after having prompted the renewed stowaway immigration by instigating the attack on Libya.

In order to de-industrialize an economy as big as Italy’s, money has to be pried away from millions of hard-working Italians. Which explains the sudden deluge of illegal immigrants which has been literally tossed onto our shores by the shiploads, starting in 1993.

That first time, Italy flew them right back from where they came from, like any other sovereign country would. But in 1997 they were back, with Romano Prodi, the leader of leftist Catholics, as Prime Minister. He hedged and hawed and eventually ...refused to send them back.

The flooding continued, to the self-righteous glee of Italy’s powerful leftists, until it was stopped by a costly “friendship” treaty with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (who was not friends with Italy alone. His friendly relationships with the leaders of France and Britain, as well as with Nelson Mandela, are well documented on the Internet, and it is rumoured that he financed the election campaign of Sarkozy, his prime assailer of 2011, in which case Sarkozy would have had good reasons for preferring him dead rather than imprisoned and eventually allowed to talk; same goes for his sons).

Which leads us to when the West suddenly discovered the pressing need to get rid of Gaddafi, and Sarkozy led the way in Nato’s …humanitarian bombing.

It has been proven that the attack on Libya was based on a flagrant lie. There were no mass graves and Gaddafi was demonstrably not killing his own people. (Just like with Syria’s Assad today).

But the testimony of the Archbishop of Tripoli and other witnesses went unheeded, the forgery of the mass grave pictures was brushed aside, and the “humanitarian” bombing began. (Again, just like with Assad.)

The no-fly zone, which immediately turned into a viciously destructive bombing (like Nato’s intervention in Kosovo, which went on even after Serbia had surrendered), was not just about Gaddafi. It was all about Italy; it was a frontal attack on

1) Italy’s major companies, which all had legitimate business with Libya and costly infrastructure built up through years of work on the Libyan coast,

2) the treaty that had put a stop to the wholesale invasion of Italy by impoverished immigrants, who happened to come prevalently from Muslim countries.


Consequences of the Libyan War for Italy

Both of these were enormous blows to Italy, but the second one was made particularly odious by the double standards that were flagrantly applied: with Italy being required to take in any and all who come by boat to our shores, or are dumped almost anywhere in the Mediterranean between here and Libya, while France - whose raids had started it all - literally closed its borders. When refugees from Tunisia (a former French colony) showed up expecting to get into France, they were shoved back into Italy! This incredible behaviour revealed to public scrutiny for the first time the existence of a Treaty signed in Dublin and dating back to the beginning of the 1990s, by which all illegal immigrants to the EU are to be registered and dealt with by the country where they first set foot. Italy being a stone’s throw away from Africa means that the boat people obviously come here as their first “choice”, and the Treaty makes sure they go no further than here.

This incredible burden notwithstanding, our rulers in Brussels, perhaps savouring the day in the not-too-distant future when the Vatican (considered the Book of Revelation’s “whore of Babylon” ) will inevitably be surrounded by a predominantly Muslim population - armed and financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and incited by Quran precepts to conquer the world for Allah and his prophet - ignored our legitimate pleas for help. Not only that: there were dark intimations here and there in the press about Italy needing to face up to its responsibilities. Whoever googled "Italy+colonialism" would come up with a lengthy Wikipedia list of Italian colonies, which actually correspond to the ancient Roman empire, plus charts of what amounts to dictator Mussolini’s 1930s colonial …wish list!

Now, the illegal immigration forced on Italy is a large part of what has caused our huge national debt. Yet, whenever Italy is concerned, the EU applies a sort of right of anyone in the world to come and live here, with his family, and be supported by us as well. In early 2012 the European Court of Human Rights even fined Italy for repatriating 24 illegal immigrants from Eritrea and Somalia, who had tried to enter the country three years earlier, 2009, on board a boat that was setting sail from Libya. These people were not harmed in any way, they were merely prevented from setting sail.

This was in accordance with the Treaty between Italy and the then-existent Libya, which allowed the Italian Coastguard to halt the massive illegal immigration that had been bringing immigrants to our shores in uncounted multitudes. Many drowned in the attempt.

Today, particularly after Pope Francis - in the aftermath of the October 2013 shipwreck of a shipload of 300+ Africans - amazingly went to Lampedusa to lament a generically wretched treatment of migrants, the situation is that Italy’s Navy is perennially fishing unlimited numbers out of the sea, ferrying them and towing their boats into Italian ports by the thousands. Daily. From the beginning of 2014 to Easter, over 20,000 were saved and brought into Italy, after Easter the rate of intake has been on average over a thousand a day, with no end in sight. Secretary of State Angelino Alfano has made it known that an estimated 800,000 people are assembled in Northern Africa, waiting their turn to be ferried into Italy. He has said that Italy cannot shoulder this burden by itself. But the Italian government dares take no action to stop them, knowing full well that the newscasts and daily press would immediately be filled with statements of moral outrage.

In sum: Italy has one of the highest population densities in the world, an economy saddled with the notorious public debt, yet we are high-handedly expected to take in unlimited masses of people who come here with their families, empty handed, expecting to be supported for the rest of their lives. In 2013 Australia, a continent with the lowest population density of the world, let it be known that boat people demanding asylum by landing on Christmas island – their Lampedusa – were denied entry and immediately deported to detention centers in Papua New Guinea or the island of Naum instead. Where was the international outcry?


Read the fourth and final part of the article:

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

Iraq Jihadists in the UK

Three British Muslims, two from Cardiff and one from Aberdeen, in an Isis video to recruit jihadists in Iraq and Syria


First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


It's always been obvious that the problem of "British" jihadists coming back from Syria - and now Iraq too - to become terrorists here is not going to go away. The UK government, with its phobia of "Islamophobia", cannot possibly solve it.

From "Iraq crisis: ISIS militants threaten UK, says Cameron":
David Cameron has warned of the threat to the UK if an "extreme Islamist regime" is created in central Iraq.

He said Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) fighters threatening the government in Baghdad were also plotting terror attacks on the UK.

And Britain could not ignore the security threat the UK now faced from jihadists in Iraq and Syria.
Britain may not ignore it, but it's not going to do very much about it.

A BBC reporter said Monday on the TV that this problem is the same all over the world. He should have added - but didn't - "wherever there are Muslims". Muslim-free countries don't experience this problem at all.

The BBC report was about what the government can and cannot do in order to protect British people from this threat, and in general to avoid the "radicalisation" of UK Muslims.

Despite the fact that 9 years have passed without another 7/7, the government measures to fight Muslim radicalisation in this country have been a failure, the journalist went on to say.

What a surprise! The only reason why there are not more terrorist attacks in the UK, I would say, is the constant surveillance of the "Muslim community" by police and intelligence services - with huge expenses for a gravely cash-strapped Britain -, which is now necessary to increase.

Nevertheless, former MI6 director Richard Barrett explained that the security services will not be able to monitor all the "British" jihadists who return to the UK after fighting in Syria.

The implications for UK security of the Iraq and Syrian conflicts due to the "Britons" fighting there is a topic dominating the national newspapers.

"Terror fallout from British jihadists fighting in Syria will be felt for years to come in Britain", headlines The Daily Mail.

This warning came from the top counter-terrorism expert Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police's assistant commissioner and head of specialist operations, who said that Britain will feel the repercussions of Syria and the rise of Islamic extremism within its own borders for "for many, many, many years to come".

She added that young "British" Muslims who have gone to fight in Syria might commit violence and terrorist acts when they return.

Possible links have been found between three Muslims based in Cardiff, Wales, Isis militants who were present in a propaganda video filmed by the group, and two other men from the same part of the city, who are in prison for having planned to blow up London's Stock Exchange.

Shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan warned that radicalisation in prisons was a big problem. Indeed, this corresponds to the dire predictions of Dr. Peter Hammond in his book Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) .

The book says that, when the Muslim population reaches 2% to 5% of a country, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from jails and among street gangs.

According to the the United Kingdom Census 2011, in that year Muslims were 2.7 million, 4.8% of the country's total population.

Hammond's book, which was first published in 2005 and then in a second edition in 2009, says that, when Muslims are above 5%, they exercise an influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. They will push for the introduction of halal food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims, and will increase pressure on supermarket chains to sell halal, with threats for failure to comply. They will also try to get the government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia law within their ghettos.

Rings a bell? This is the stage which Britain has already reached. The only prediction that hasn't materialised are Muslim threats to supermarkets, only because they are redundant as those companies are all too eager to oblige.

And now look at the next stage: when Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of protest, example of which are the car-burnings in Paris (and we can now add Sweden), and uprisings and threats for any action which offends Islam, namely any non-Muslim action. The greater the proportion of Muslim population the more frequent these tensions will be, until they become daily occurrences.

How can British people not have noticed that, over the years, their country's Muslims - whose number has steadily increased - have indeed become more vociferous, oppressive, demanding, aggressive and dangerous?