A few stories from England’s Daily Mail, all showing that the country is not in the best of health.  Each of these stories highlights, not the horrible things individuals can do, because those crimes transcend national boundaries, but the way in which England has rendered itself unable to react in any way to the insults occurring within its borders.

1.  An Eritrean national who helped plot an attempted jihad-inspired mass murder in England is not only free after serving just half his sentence, but the Brits cannot deport him for fear of violating his human rights.  Interestingly, concern about human rights didn’t seem to impinge on his activities when he helped the would-be bombers.

2.  Somehow England’s best, brightest and Leftest minds were unable to figure out that open immigration would depress wages.  This is what years of Leftist higher education will do to you — make you stupid.

3.  As a child, I remember reading that Soviet hospitals had something in common with medieval hospitals:  if your relatives weren’t there to take care of you, you died.  Turns out that you don’t have to be in a hardcore Communist nation or a medieval time warp for that to open.  Just go to England.  Soft socialism will do exactly the same bad job for you.

4.  Human rights don’t stop with Jihadists.  True blue axe-murdering Brits get their day in the sun too, as was the case with an axe murder with three notches on his blade who was nevertheless allowed out of prison to attend a course in chopping down trees.  Once an axe lover, always an axe lover, I guess.

UPDATE:  Sadie just sent me the worst article of all, one explaining better than anything else could, how Britain has arrived at this state:

From the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz to Meg, the good witch from the Meg and Mog children’s books, witches have always dressed in black.

But their traditional attire has now come in for criticism from equality experts who claim it could send a negative message to toddlers in nursery and lead to racism.

Instead, teachers should censor the toy box and replace the pointy black hat with a pink one, while dressing fairies, generally resplendent in pale pastels, in darker shades.

Another staple of the classroom – white paper – has also been questioned by Anne O’Connor, an early years consultant who advises local authorities on equality and diversity.

Children should be provided with paper other than white to drawn on and paints and crayons should come in “the full range of flesh tones”, reflecting the diversity of the human race, according to the former teacher.

Read the rest here.

And one more from Sadie:  police ban cafe owner from displaying Christian literature (including the Bible) and images, as they are an offense to public order.  The next thing, presumably, will be a raid on Buckingham Palace.  I’ve heard there’s an old woman living there who actually claims to be the head of a Christian church in England.  (I feel a satirical post coming on, if I can just keep my comic mojo going.)

If there was ever an example of misguided compassion, this story out of Britain must rank at the top of the list:

A psychopathic Satanist, given a ‘life means life’ sentence for strangling his cellmate whilst already serving life for murder, has had that cut to 20 years on appeal in order ‘to give him light at the end of the tunnel’.

The move came despite the admission that double killer Clement McNally described the murder as ‘better than sex’ and revealed he would kill again if the opportunity arose.

Father-of-one Anthony Hesketh, of Eastham Way, Worsley, who was in custody for a driving offence and facing drugs charges, was strangled with a T-shirt in September 2003. He was found dead on the floor of the Strangeways cell he shared with McNally.

McNally, 34 – a devil worshipper who decorated his cell with satanic symbols and suffers from ‘psychopathic, narcissistic, paranoid and obsessive-compulsive disorders, all mixed together’ – was serving a mandatory life term for stabbing to death his friend, Arthur Skelly, outside a party in Ashton-under-Lyne in July 2002.

He was given a life term, with a whole life tariff, for the second killing, after pleading guilty to manslaughter by way of diminished responsibility at Manchester Crown Court on July 12 2004.

But now the minimum term on his life sentence has been slashed to 20 years by Lord Justice Hughes, at London’s Criminal Appeal Court. The judge said it was not right that McNally should be denied a light at the end of the tunnel and never have a chance of release.

[snip]

Lord Justice Hughes, sitting with Mr Justice MacKay and Mr Justice Davis, said of Mr Hesketh’s killing: ‘McNally had no particular grievance against his victim – he simply suffered an urge to kill him.

‘He said it was exciting – better than sex. He said Satan told him to do things and it was his job to do as he was told.

‘He said he was not in the least bit sorry for what he had done, but had derived a great deal of pleasure from subsequently thinking about it.

‘He suffers from compulsive homicidal urges and poses an exceptional risk to other prisoners. He made it perfectly clear that he would kill again if the opportunity arose and the urge to kill was of sufficient intensity.’

However the judge said it was wrong not to give McNally the chance of being freed if, at some point in the future, his mental state stabilises to the extent that the authorities no longer consider him a danger to society.

He told the court: ‘The life sentence was plainly correct as he was likely to represent a danger of the gravest kind, for a period which could not be determined.

‘However the imposition of a whole life tariff was a mistaken application of the process of sentencing.

‘The life sentence itself is designed to cater for a prisoner in whom it cannot be seen when, or if ever, they will cease to be a danger to the public.

It’s amazing how the judge doesn’t seem to realize that, for a man who murdered two people in cold blood, maybe a life without “a light at the end of the tunnel” is just the right prescription.

Maybe this is just the pendulum swinging.  England used to hang children for stealing a loaf of bread.  Now it freely contemplates giving a second start to an unusually cold-blooded killer.  I would suggest, though, that the fact that England was disproportionately punitive 200 years ago doesn’t mean it needs to be disproportionately . . . well, compassion isn’t the right word, because some innocent always gets hurt . . . but disproportionately stupid now.

Conservatives have spent years railing at the liberal propensity to by-pass the legislative process and head straight for the courts.  It turns out, though, that there are situations in which liberals prefer to avoid the court all together — and will take legislative action to try to avoid it.  Those situations arise when a decades old murder trial might implicate some of the President’s friends.

The background here is a bit complicated, so stick with me.  In 1970, a bomb exploded at the Park Police Station in Francisco, wounding several people and killing one police officer, Brian McDonnell.  The most likely suspects were members of the Weather Underground.  If that name seems familiar to you, it should.  The Weather Underground was, of course, Bill Ayers’ and Bernadine Dohrn’s domestic terrorism creation.

In 1971, another police officer, Sgt. John Young, got killed in an attack on the Ingleside Police station.  That murder remained unsolved until 2007.  In that year, things suddenly changed:

Interest in the incident was reignited in 2007 after federal prosecutors charged a group of alleged former Black Liberation Army members in the 1971 murder of San Francisco police Sgt. John Young at the Ingleside Station in San Francisco.

The grand jury that investigated the Ingleside case also looked at the Park Station bombing. But the results of the probe were not released. No one has ever been charged with McDonnell’s death.

Although Ayers denied any connection between the two bombings, an informant claims that there is indeed a connection:

But Larry Grathwohl, a former FBI informant, who infiltrated the Weather Underground in the 1970s rejected Mr. Ayers characterization of nonlethal bombings of buildings and police stations.

“That’s simply not true,” he said during Thursday’s press conference. He claimed that the [1970] bombing was allegedly done by Bill Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn.

Mr. Ayers has repeatedly denied any involvement in the bombing. He has called Mr. Grathwohl a “paid dishonest person” in a newspaper interview.

But Mr. Gratwohl insists that Ms. Dorn was involved and said he has testified under oath to this. He said in early 1970, Mr. Ayers visited him and other operatives in Buffalo, N.Y., and said Mr. Dohrn had been forced to plant the bomb at Park Station because others were not active enough in committing violence. Mr. Ayers also knew the composition of the bomb and where it had been set.

The possible connection between the two cases — two Left wing groups bombing two police stations in two consecutive years — means there is a chance that, during a trial against the BLA members for the 1971 murder, something might come out implicating the Weather Underground and Bill Ayers in the 1970 murder.  And it’s a really, really bad thing when the President’s good buddy, the man in whose living room he started his political career, turns out to be at the center of a cop killing.

All of which gets us to today’s story.  This coming Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Stupidvisors is going to vote on a resolution calling for the Feds to drop the case against the seven members of the “San Francisco 8″ for the 1971 murder of Sgt. John Young:

The full Board of Supervisors will vote Tuesday on a controversial resolution calling on the state to drop charges against seven men accused of murder in the death of a San Francisco police sergeant in 1971 — a measure that has angered current and former police officers to no end.

The resolution, authored by Supervisor Eric Mar and co-sponsored by supervisors Ross Mirkarimi, Sophie Maxwell and Chris Daly, urges Attorney General Jerry Brown questions how evidence was obtained and urges Brown too drop the case entirely.  [Sic]  The resolution contends that the only evidence in Sgt. John Young’s murder case was obtained through torture, and that “the case was reopened based on questionable claims of ‘new’ evidence.”

As you can imagine, San Francisco’s police department is very upset about the Stupidvisor’s proposal. Some San Franciscan’s are upset too.  Here are excerpts from just a few of the reader comments:

Hey…BOS [Board of Stupidvisors] and Mar, Mirkarimi, Maxwell and Daly in particular…WHAT do you think you are doing? If there is any “wrong doing” or “ill-gotten” evidence in this case, it WILL come out in a court of law.

***

It is not the job of the BoS to acquit someone of murder charges or to make public proclamations that they should be acquitted based on ignorance of the evidence. If my supervisor comes to my house and I throw him in my trash, will I get fined because he’s compostable?

***

It is not the job of the BoS to acquit someone of murder charges or to make public proclamations that they should be acquitted based on ignorance of the evidence. If my supervisor comes to my house and I throw him in my trash, will I get fined because he’s compostable?

Most of the 29 comments left (so far) are in the same vein.

Many of the comments attribute the Stupidvisor’s attitude to the kneejerk Progressive hatred for cops and its passion for politically motivated cop killers.  (Does the name Mumia Abu-Jamal ring any bells?) As I said at the beginning of this post, though, I think this one goes deeper.  While liberals generally kind of fancy politically Left murderers (“Tookie” Williams, anyone?), I don’t recall the Board of Stupidvisors ever before getting between a defendant and someone charged with murdering a police officer.

The difference here is that the trial has dangerous implications for President Obama.  Much as liberals adore having the courts make public policy, they fear the fallout when criminal courts are charged with finding facts.  And so you have the unedifying spectacle of a local legislative body trying to short circuit a criminal trial against men against of murdering a police officer, just because there is the faint possibility that the trial could prove embarrassing to the President of the United States.

The Left is tremendously excited about what they see as the hypocrisy behind the pro-Life movement because one of their own murdered George Tiller, a late-term abortion provider.  Their excitement isn’t surprising, since they seem incapable of separating a crazed individual from the vast majority of pro-Lifers, all of whom routinely condemn violence generally and have strongly condemned this particular murder.

With the focus on Tiller’s murderer, of course, nobody in the MSM is thinking about what Tiller stood for.  In the blogosphere, though, there are more thoughtful people, one of whom is Melissa Clouthier.  She writes an impassioned post about the fact that something can be legal (late term abortions) and still be completely immoral (late term abortions).  She doesn’t condone vigilantism, but she does remind us what kind of a man Tiller was.

When she emailed a link to her post to one of my email groups, someone commented that the moral person, when he sees a truly great crime committed (such as murder) must take all means possible to prevent it.  The fact that people are just letting late term abortions happen while awaiting a change in the law suggests that they don’t see late term abortion as a truly great crime (such as murder).  I’m not sure that’s true.  I think we do see it as murder, but most people are law abiding and will not themselves commit a cold-blooded murder.

In  other words, the problem for the babies, but the good thing for Americans, is that we are a nation of laws.  People do not take the law into their own hands and, for the most part, that’s a very good thing.  Absent that respect for law, you end up with violent anarchy, which is quickly replaced by the strong brutally oppressing the weak.

As a law-abiding American, if you don’t like the laws, you have three choices:  leave the country; work to change the laws; or engage in acts of civil disobedience.

The first choice — or voting with your feet — is a problem because it’s very hard to find a place today in which abortion is not routinely performed.

The second choice is what all pro-lifers work towards.  If numbers mean anything, the pro-lifers are starting to make a difference.  People are leaning away from the Democratic obsession with infant death.  (And I do think sonograms have an enormous role in that change.)

As for the third choice, civil disobedience, that’s the most interesting one.  That’s what my email correspondent would say good citizens should do.  But at least since the time of Thoreau, people who actually think about civil disobedience think of the actor’s role as a very public one.  You don’t just shoot and run, you shoot and then turn yourself into jail, and make impassioned polemic speeches about the evil you were fighting.  You become a martyr for your cause, not an ugly whacked out fugitive.  A few years ago, in the wake of Gavin Newsom’s unilateral decision to ignore law and allow gay marriages, I wrote I post on civil disobedience, some of which I’ll quote here:

Although civil disobedience has always been around — that is, at all places, at all times, people have been willing to risk their lives, safety or comfort for their beliefs — it was Henry David Thoreau, in the mid-19th Century, who best articulated the “official” definition of that doctrine.

Thoreau objected to a poll tax because he felt the money was being improperly spent to support slavery and the war with Mexico. Rather than paying the tax, he took a principled stand, refused to pay the tax, and went to prison. His single night in jail inspired him to write an essay about a citizen’s obligation to strike out against unjust laws — and to demonstrate the law’s invalidity through the citizen’s personal martyrdom.

In his essay, Thoreau ruminated about irritating laws versus unjust laws, and about the vehicles available for protesting the latter. These protests include voting or, if that won’t work, doing such things as refusing to comply with an unjust law, or refusing to pay a tax that supports something unjust. Significantly, Thoreau felt that, if voting was not an option, the other actions gained weight from an attendant sacrifice — which, in America, is usually imprisonment:

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her–the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

The notion of civil disobedience gained great currency on the liberal side in the 20th Century because of two men who put it to its highest and best use. Ghandi and Martin Luther King. Had each not been willing to accept imprisonment, thereby demonstrating the manifest unfairness and immorality of the laws against which each struggled, neither would have even appeared as a footnote in the history books.

Nowadays, though, whether in the fictitious world of The West Wing, or in real life, people break laws with impunity and to applause. I was most strongly reminded of this when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, in February 2004, suddenly announced that he was going to ignore California’s laws against same sex marriage, and have the City issue marriage licenses to all gay couples desiring them. Newsom was a fifteen minute wonder. The Press oooh’ed and aaah’ed about his bravery. But, really, what was so brave? Newsom wasn’t running any risks politically in San Francisco, where a critical mass of voters approve his step. He wasn’t running any risk of humilitiation or ostracism, because he became the media’s darling. No one even mentioned prosecuting him for breaking the law, or impeaching him for violating his official obligations. It was a media stunt, but it wasn’t civil disobedience, because we didn’t get the spectacle of a righteous man felled by an unjust government.

In other words, unless Tiller’s killer takes a principled, public, martyr-like stand on the matter, he’s just a regular old murder, and a domestic terrorist, and is no better than the man he killed.

Palestinians and Hezbollah are wildly celebrating the release of a great Lebanese hero, Samir Kuntar, from Israeli prison.  Their excitement matches that felt in South Africa when Nelson Mandela was finally released.  Nelson Mandela, of course, was a principled man who spoke up against apartheid and was imprisoned for exercising his freedom of speech against that terrible regime.

If you’d like to know what Kuntar did to earn his countrymen’s adulation, here’s the story, as described by an eyewitness, Smadar Haran Kaiser:

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border.

Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer.

As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat.

They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her. (Emphasis mine.)

You can tell a lot about a culture by its choice of heroes, can’t you?  I’m suddenly less embarrassed by the American propensity to elevate to hero status basketball players and rock stars.  At least they don’t have children’s blood on their hands.

As for the caption for this post, it comes from the way in which the New York Times, reporting on Kuntar’s release, decided to educate its readers about the crime that resulted in his imprisonment:

Perhaps Israel’s most reviled prisoner, Samir Kuntar, will return to a hero’s welcome when he crosses into Lebanon this week, 29 years after he left its shores in a rubber dinghy to kidnap Israelis from the coastal town of Nahariya.

That raid went horribly wrong, leaving five people dead, a community terrorized and a nation traumatized. Two Israeli children and their father were among those killed.

I hope you appreciate the way in which the Times used passive voice there.  It was just a dreadful coincidence that, without any human intervention, two kids and their dad were dead.  In Times-land, the raiders have no moral connection to the fact that a 4-year old’s father was shot in front of her and then her head was smashed against a rock.  While the Times can spare endless space to report on the horrors of kids accidentally killed because the Palestinians encourage them to play on rocket launchers, it suddenly finds itself incapable of explaining to its readers just why the average Israeli might be a tad distraught about the Olmert government’s latest decision.

I guess you can also tell a lot about a country, or at least a political ideology, based on the way its free media spins a story.  And this does embarrass me.

Hat tip: Best of the Web

UPDATE:  And all that Israel got in exchange was two bodies.

I should add here that, insofar as I have an extremely limited knowledge of Jewish tradition, the body is very important.  Religious Jews don’t cremate their dead because an inviolate corpse is the preferred condition for the end of the world.

A friend once explained to me that this prohibition against any violation of the body was a reaction to the pagan practice of sacrificial deaths and corpse desecration.  (In the same way, the Jewish practice of speedy burial was both an attempt to protect Jewish bodies from pagans and a practical response to a hot climate.)  This prosaic origin, however, morphed into a spiritually significant practice.

Despite the religious importance Jews impart to an intact body, though, I still have a problem with a nation doing what Israel did for the sake of those two bodies.  After all, I have great faith that, at the end of days, God will be able to sort things out, and that those two poor boys will be given their due in the afterlife.  In that same vein, I have no doubt that the souls of those who were incinerated in Auschwitz will readily find their way to God.  Perhaps some things are better left to God, and the Israeli government would have done better to leave this one alone, family anguish notwithstanding.

The alternative title for this post would have been:  You’re in prison, not a hotel.  From Best of the Web Today:

He Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly
Henry Boateng is an inmate in a Massachusetts State prison. He went to court arguing that his rights were being violated. Yesterday, a federal judge agreed:

Boateng, who has changed his name to Daniel Yeboah-Sefah and identifies himself as a Buddhist, has won a significant legal victory: A federal judge found that the state prison system violated his civil rights by denying him a vegan diet.US Chief District Judge Mark L. Wolf concluded that the system violated a 2000 federal statute that protects religious freedom in prison. In a judgment entered Tuesday, Wolf ordered the head of the system, beginning Friday, to provide the inmate at the Old Colony Correctional Center at Bridgewater with a vegan diet that hews to his religious beliefs.Although the prison system had offered Yeboah-Sefah a standard vegetarian diet, he has spent nearly a decade unsuccessfully seeking a vegan diet that excludes all animal products, including eggs and milk products.

In 1992, Boateng fathered a son, Jameel Moore. Like his dad, Jameel does not eat animal products. That’s because Boateng beat him to death when he was five weeks old.