Brit Muslims Effectively Ban Christians From Their Towns

Last month an Asian priest from the Church of England became the target of a lot of hate speech when he said Muslims in Britain have effectively created no-go zones where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims -- especially overt Christians -- to enter.

It turns out (Big surprise! not) he was right, and that the PC-crazed British establishment is as much behind this deplorable situation as jihad-crazed mullahs:

A police community support officer ordered two Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham.

The evangelists say they were threatened with arrest for committing a "hate crime" and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. The incident will fuel fears that "no-go areas" for Christians are emerging in British towns and cities, as the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, claimed in The Sunday Telegraph this year. (source)

One of the evangelicals said of the police officer:

"He said we were in a Muslim area and were not allowed to spread our Christian message. He said we were committing a hate crime by telling the youths to leave Islam and said that he was going to take us to the police station."

The pastors are pursuing legal action, which could make things worse, the way things are going in England.

Here's a swell idea that just needs one brave British cop: Arrest some Muslims in a non-Muslim neighborhood, charging them with the hate crime of making nice non-jihadist folks nervous.

Cleaning Ken's House

Boris Johnson's first act as mayor of London was canceling the taxpayer-paid subscription former mayor Ken Livingstone had for The Morning Star, London's socialist newspaper.

Make that canceling Livingstone's 40 subscriptions to the Star. Brit blogger Iain Dale writes:

When Boris sat down at his desk on Monday morning he was presented with a huge press cuttings file, which included loads of articles from the Morning Star. 'Why on earth are you including these?' he asked one of his staff. 'Well,' said the staff member, 'Mayor Livingstone was keen to support the Morning Star'. 'In what way?' asked Boris.

It transpired that the GLA Building had a subscription of forty - yes, forty - copies of the Morning Star delivered every day. Boris's first action as Mayor was to cancel all forty subscriptions to the lefty rag, thereby halving its circulation with one stroke of the mayoral pen. That's what I call the mark of a real Conservative - annoy the leftists and save the taxpayer £10,000 a year at the same time.

And what an irritating rag it is that Ken and his paid pinkos read every day! Today's Morning Star leads off with a feature on Israel's 60th birthday with the catchy title 60 Years of Oppression, focusing on the corrupt, baby-bombing, victimites in Palestine. There's also Medvedev Hits Out at US War Policies and Hezbollah Threatens US-Backed Lebanon.

I'd give you links but this is a Socialist rag -- so you have to pay up before you can read a story. Workers of the world, subscribe!

Boris, Ken, Barack And Hillary

There's another election going on that we in America aren't too aware of: Boris Johnson (right) is running against one of the great men we love to hate ("great" addresses "love to hate," not "men"), London mayor Ken Livingstone (left).

You'd think this would be a race about issues. After all, Livingstone has made himself into a symbol for post-modern, hard-left thinking, as Anne Appelbaum points out today in Slate:

His need to attract attention manifests itself in other ways: the expensive celebration he had planned to commemorate 50 years of Fidel Castro's dictatorial rule, for example, or his public embrace of a Muslim cleric who defends suicide bombing and advocates the death penalty for homosexuals. ... He called the U.S. ambassador to Britain a "chiseling little crook" and told a Jewish journalist he was behaving "like a concentration camp guard."

Eech. Less familiar to most of us is Johnson, but he's every bit as much a character:

Though he's been more staid than usual during the mayoral campaign, Boris is a man who can't stop telling jokes, whether at the expense of the aforementioned mistress or the people of Portsmouth (a city of "drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs").

Adjectives like mop-haired, blustering, and old Etonian appear in just about every profile of him ever written. So does his most famous quotation—"Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3"—though that line is misleading since his sense of humor is usually far more self-deprecating. "Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon," he once remarked, "there lurks a blithering buffoon."

Of course we'll track this election (election day is May 1) because it could spell the end of Livingstone's horrific reign, but Applebaum says it's more than a clash of two very different belief systems:

But it's nevertheless worth watching because this campaign could well be a blueprint for the elections of the future since it is postmodern and post-ideological in the deepest sense: In a world in which "issues" are not the issue and ... there's nothing left to talk about except who said what to whom and whose tongue was sharper while doing so.

Sound like our Dem primary? More than a bit. But this is, in effect, a general election, not a primary.

Let's hope this is another way America keeps itself cut off from its European roots.

hat-tip: RCP