Quiet Eugenics Nearly Eliminates a Deadly Disease

Tay-Sachs is a inherited disease that causes the rapid degeneration of the central nervous system. It is always fatal. Children born with Tay-Sachs suffer terribly and rarely live beyond their fifth birthday. Like many other inherited diseases - i.e. sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis - Tay-Sachs is mostly confined to a specific ethnic group - in this case, Ashkenazi Jews. Tay-Sachs may also be the first genetic disorder almost totally eliminated by voluntary eugenics.

Some 1,000 years ago a Jew developed the genetic mutation which, it turned out, causes the fatal inherited disease. It has since been passed on among the Jewish people through the generations.

Tay-Sachs occurs when an individual does not produce an enzyme called hexosaminidase A (Hex-A), which prevents the build up of a lipid - GM2 ganglioside - inside cells. Unchecked accumulation of this lipid causes acute cellular damage, particularly in nerve cells. Hex-A production is controlled by a pair of genes located on chromosome 15. Tay-Sach results from a mutation which renders one of the pair of genes inactive. So long as one gene is active, Hex-A is produced and the person remains healthy. However, if two individuals carrying the Tay-Sachs mutation - one inactive Hex-A gene - produce a child, that child may inherit two inactive genes, in which case, the body will not produce Hex-A and the child will have Tay-Sachs disease.

The fact that two parents carry the inactive gene doesn't mean that all their offspring will have the disease, of course. In the mathematics of autosomal recessive genetics, such a couple has a 25 percent chance of giving birth to a child with Tay-Sachs, a 50 percent chance of producing a child who will carry the gene, but never suffer the disorder, and a 25 percent chance of producing a child who niether has the disease nor carries the mutated gene. This genetic lottery pertains to every child the couple produces.

However, modern science and rational decision-making may have brought an end to this nightmare.

"Last year not a single Jewish baby throughout North America was born with Tay-Sachs," says Prof. Robert Desnick of the Department of Human Genetics at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital. Prof. Desnick is in Israel as the guest of Jerusalem's Hadassah hospitals. He said yesterday that of the 10 babies born in North America in 2003 with Tay-Sachs, not a single one was Jewish.

Figures from Israel paint a similar picture. According to Prof. Joel Zlotogora, who heads the Health Ministry's Department of Community Genetics, just one baby was born with Tay-Sachs in Israel in 2003. Insofar as is known, not a single baby in Israel was born with Tay-Sachs last year, but as the disease takes some six months to manifest itself, the figures for 2004 are not final.

Desnick says that the data for the past two years may stem from a coincidental fluctuation in the incidence of the disease, and that isolated cases may appear this year or the next. He stresses, nevertheless, that whatever the case may be, the disease appears to have disappeared almost completely from among the Jewish nation.

How has this been accomplished? A simple answer: eugenics. A genetic test for the Tay-Sachs gene has been available for many years, able to determine conclusively whether a baby has the disease, and to warn adults that they carry the mutated gene. This permits the screening of couples planning to have children to determine if both carry the gene and thus risk having a child with Tay-Sachs.

Prof. Gideon Bach, who heads the Department of Genetics at Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem, says the eradication of Tay-Sachs can be attributed primarily to the fact that the general public in Israel is advised to carry out, at the expense of the state, genetic tests to diagnose the disease before the birth of the baby. In the event an unborn baby is diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, the pregnancy is usually terminated.

Another reason for the eradication of the disease, Bach says, is the work of the ultra-Orthodox association, Dor Yesharim. The association carries out tests on young individuals to check whether they are genetically "suitable." The results of these tests are passed on to the matchmaker. If there is a risk that a designated couple may give birth to children affected with Tay-Sachs, the matchmaker will report that the match is unsuitable.

Bach, who works with Dor Yesharim, says that numerous intended couples have been split up in the wake of genetic testing.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines eugenics as "the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding." Eugenics was a fairly popular subject in Europe and the US in the early 20th century. However, the monstrous crimes of Nazi Germany - including the systematic genocide of Jews and other "inferior" ethnic groups - justified by Hitler and his henchmen with psuedo-scientific nonsense dressed up in eugenic language so tarnished the concept that the word eugenics remains something of an epithet to this day. Opponents of the idea that behavior has a genetic basis used the Nazi fascination with eugenics to discredit the concept by equating it with Nazism, even though it had existed prior to the rise of Hitler and had been embraced by many of the nations and statesmen who fought and defeated Nazism. Oddly, central economic planning and state control of private property - also central ideas of the Nazi (National Socialist) state - were not disavowed by left-leaning Western intellectuals, though both concepts clearly made it possible for Hitler to perpetrate his crimes.

Despite the intellectuals' disaffection with genetics, mounting scientific evidence eventually turned the tide in favor of the genetic basis of human behavior. Eugenics has been slower to recover and is still viewed by many as a dangerous, or at least publiclly unmentionable, idea. And yet, eugenics - selective breeding - remains a simple idea whose effectiveness has been borne out by five thousand years of agriculture and animal husbandry. The fact that the Nazi misused a particular scientific idea doesn't vitiate its validity. Nazi scientist pioneered rocketry, and used the science to kill, but no one would call NASA (once led by "rehabilitated" Nazi Wernher von Braun) a Nazi program. In the case of Tay-Sachs, the effort to prevent carriers of the gene to marry and produce children has all but eliminated the birth of babies with Tay-Sachs amongst Jews. However those involved may choose to characterize their work, when they urge couples with the gene not to have children together, they are engaging in selective breeding - in other words, voluntary eugenics.

As noted in the article, some births of Tay-Sachs afflicted children continue amongst non-Jews, likely the result of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews at some point in the non-Jewish parents' family tree. Since Tay-Sachs genes continue to circulate in a tiny percentage of the non-Jewish population (due to intermarriage), a small number of Tay-Sachs children will continue to be born to non-Jewish parents who would not expect to carry the mutated gene and thus never been counseled or tested.

Of course, the article cited above indicates only that efforts within Israel and the broader international Jewish community are directed at preventing the birth of Tay-Sachs afflicted babies. This will eliminate the expression of the gene (the disease itself) and prevent a great deal of unnecessary suffering, but it does not excise the mutated gene itself from the Jewish gene pool. For that to happen, all carriers of the gene would have to be counseled not to have children - or to terminate embryos or fetuses found to be carrying a single copy of the inactive gene, not just those with two inactive genes. That would eliminate the inactive gene, and thus the disease, permanently.

The lesson here is that, despite the hysterics that even its mere mention causes, eugenics can be used for good and becomes dangerous only when the government begins to use physical coercion to force people to participate in eugenic programs.

Illegal Immigration as a Moral Problem

In a recent article, historian Victor David Hanson confronts the moral evasions that have characterized the debate - or lack thereof - over illegal immigration in the US. Mr. Hanson notes that with estimates of the number of aliens illegally residing in the US ranging from 8 to 20 million, the traditional mulitracialist (as opposed to current multiculturalist) view of assimiliation, which worked so well in the previous century has collapsed under the twin pressures of political correctness (and the leftist ideology behind it) and the sheer numbers of aliens streaming across the border.

Washington's failure to restrain this invasion has led Mexico to issue a guide to its citizens for safely crossing into the US - in open defiance of American law - and has offered an opportunity for terrorists bent on harming Americans to gain easy access to the American homeland. But Mr. Hanson dwells on the morality of allowing ordinary Americans to suffer under the burden of unchecked illegal immigration - a point rarely raised.

Is it moral for employers to count on illegal industrious workers, usually without English or education, to undercut the wages of American citizens - as if a laborer remains youthful and hale in perpetuity with no need of social entitlements when disabled or impoverished years later? No wonder employers claim that they are only providing a service to Mexico's poor.

Is it so liberal that governments must pay for those who ignore the law while citizens go without? In California, the money to incarcerate more than 14,000 felonious illegal aliens from Mexico - well over $400 million - would fund the start-up costs of 20 university campuses like the new University of California at Merced, at a time when Americans (including many first generation Mexican-Americans) who are eligible for higher education cannot find access of financial support.

Is it so fair to assume that the unemployed in our midst - over 10 percent of the work force in many counties of the American Southwest that are most affected by illegal immigration - cannot find entry level work? No wonder we insist that no one can discover a citizen to mow the lawn or cook his food - as if 30 years ago our yards were weedy and we did not eat out, as if states without illegal aliens have poor landscaping and empty restaurants. Picking an illegal worker up at the local lumber yard, paying him in cash for a day of digging, and then dumping himon the curb at twilight - "out of sight, out of mind" - is neither liberal nor humane even if done in Santa Cruz or Carmel.

And is it equitable that laws must be sacred for most, but not for some? Do we really want a bureaucratic system near collapse from fraudulent Social Security numbers, off-the-books wages, false names, cars without registration and insurance, even as millions abroad queue up to enter our shores lawfully? Are we to tell waiting Punjabis or Filipinos to certify they education, skills and method of support - even as we ask far less of those who break the law to cross the border from Mexico?

Precisely put. What morality is served by neutering our laws and destroying the livelihoods to lower and middle class Americans? What morality permits the use of Mexicans and other Latinos as barely-better-than-slave labor? Of course, the motives of those who wish to ignore the burgeoning crisis, or who promote unfettered immigration, have little to do with morality and everything to do with self interest - personal, financial, racial and ideological self interest. The article is well worth reading in full.

Babel on the Hudson

Just in time for President Bush's second inauguration comes an article in yesterday's New York Times [registration required], which charts the decline in spoken English in the nation's largest city. According to the Times, between 1990 and 2000, the number of adults in New York City who have "a problem speaking English" (read: barely or not at all) jumped by 30 percent to 1.5 million, out of a total city population of just under 8 million. Not surprisingly, immigrant groups with the largest numbers and birth rates comprise the majority of people who cannot speak English, especially Dominican, Mexican and Chinese immigrants, who tend to live in tight-knit communties surrounded by few others who speak English. The article failed to note that many of these communities are served by ethnic language news papers, radio and TV stations, that cater to those who cannot speak English (and thus lower any pressure for them to learn it).

In the migrations before 1965, most newcomers spoke European languages. But what is striking about the current generation of immigrants is the vast range of the tongues they use on the city's streets, adding difficulties in education, business and the minutiae of daily life and making the need for English as a common language all the more urgent.

"The earlier waves of Southern and Eastern Europeans taht dominated immigration at the turn of the 20th century spoke many languages, [Joseph Salvo, a New York City demographer] said. "But the level of language diversity today far surpasses anything we have seen in the city's history."

Of those who do not speak English, 51 percent speak Spanish at home, 13 percent speak Chinese, 8 percent Russian, 4 percent French including Creole, 3 percent Korean, 3 percent Italian and 2 percent Polish, with other langauges accounting for 16 percent - a range of 175 to 200 languages.

Anyone who has walked through New York's many neighborhoods in recent years can attest to this. In many places in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and even parts Manhattan itself, one can walk for many crowded blocks without hearing a word of English spoken.

Some of Mr. Salvo's most striking figures relate to the high immigrant share of the of the city's 121,000 births in 2000. The top three immigrant groups alone account for one out of every six births, he said: 8,940 births to women from the Dominican Republic, 6,140 births to women from Mexico, and 5,680 to women from China. In thes same groups, 70 percent, 76 percent and 75 percent respectively report that they speak English less than "very well," a response that means real difficulty with the language census studies show.

The article admitted that "many of the city's new immigrant parents are here illegally," which makes it difficult for them to receive education resources to train them in English, even though "city agencies try to maintain an environment of 'don't ask, don't tell'," in regard to immigration status.

The increasing inability of New Yorkers to communicate with each other is yet another consequence of America's failure to control its borders. Worse, New York's problem is hardly unique, as even a brief visit to Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit or Denver will readily show. Those who dismissed the idea that unbridled immigration represents a real problem, tend to sweep aside such evidence issuing the tired arguments that America has seen this before and that immigrants will assimilate and learn English, eventually.

But the conditions of the early 20th century are not the same that prevail in the early 21st. The larger that non-English speaking communities grow, the greater the inertia against learning English at all. If an immigrant can function within his ethnic neighborhoods without ever once speaking English, then why bother to learn it at all? Especially, if the broader society goes out of its way to see that he doesn't need to by issuing government forms in his languages, and if businesses conduct business in his language (ATMs, Web sites, phone systems, catalogs, etc.). Today, Spanish language only radio and TV stations claim an increasing proportion of listeners/viewers in most major US city markets. This situation will only worsen as the numbers of fresh immigrants grow, since the increased numbers will bring more political pressure to have services provided in their language, further erroding the need for them to learn English. Multilingual societies do not have a great track record of survival, nor do countries that lose control of their borders.

President Bush, busy donning his inaugural tuxedo, probably didn't see the New York Times article. But even if he did, he probably doesn't care. As governor of Texas, and as president, Mr. Bush has proudly displayed both his ability to speak Spanish and his own difficulties with English. Moreover, he has made it explicitly clear that no effort will be made to secure the borders and reduce illegal immigration on his watch. So expect this situation to worsen over the next four years, with increasinly tragic consequences for American culture.

British Taxpayer-Supported Imam Rallies for al-Qaeda

The radical Islamic cleric who has made Britain his home for the better part of two decades, living on public welfare as he spews his hatred for the West (see post below), has not only carried his bile onto the Internet, but has presided at secret rallies for al-Qaeda, the Times reports.

About 600 people, including women and children, punched the air and chanted Allahu akbar (God is greatest) as they were shown videos of hijacked airliners crashing into the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001. Omar Bakri Mohammed, the radical Syrian-born cleric, said that if the British Government did not relax its tough anti- terrorism laws, the response from Muslims would be “horrendous”. He added: “I declare we should ourselves join the global Islamic camp against the global crusade camp.” The event was held this month at The Friends Meeting House in Central London, the British headquarters of the Quaker movement. Mr Bakri Mohammed’s followers booked the hall for a health conference entitled Women’s Dawah UK and the Quakers were unaware that it was a political gathering.

Fortunately, two reporters were present at this wonderful example of the cultural "diversity" and provided a detailed account of the event. No doubt they will shortly be accused of "Islamophobia" by the UK's very vocal Muslim organizations, who will insist that all news accounts of this event be censored so as not to "inflame racist passions" against Muslims by ugly, racist Britons.

So how, you may wonder, did Mr. Bakri Mohammed come to reside in the West? And what does the UK government plan to do about him in light of his activties?

The Muslim cleric came to Britain in 1986 after being expelled from Saudi Arabia and was granted indefinite leave to remain here. Mr Clarke said that the Home Office would help him to leave Britain, as some reports have suggested he wishes. “I have asked my officials that they explore the truth or otherwise that he wishes to return to Syria or Lebanon, and after that exploration we will do all in our power to assist him to return.”

If he wishes? If he wishes? Let's get this right, a radical Islamist spends almost twenty years living in Britain on the taxpayer's bill, whilst he foments violence and terror against the very people who are sustaining his lifestyle and the best the British government can do is "assist him?" Can there be any wonder why the Islamists think the West weak? The first time Mr. Bakri Mohammed was caught inciting violence against Britain or its allies, he should have been hauled in front of a court and speedily deported (preferably the same day) to the first Islamic country that would take his worthless carcass. Of course, he should never have been admitted to Britain in the first place. He serves as yet another example of the asinine immigration and asylum policies that have so endangered the US and Europe.

The same should apply to the 600 people who attended this rally. All should be expelled from the UK immediately. Britain is a tolerant society but tolerance does not mandate suicide. Even the most tolerant society cannot tolerate indefinitely those who would destroy it once their rhetoric becomes incitement.

The British people - and their American cousins - had better wake up quickly and demand that their governments start acting in their interests and not that of the Islamists, or the mandarins of multiculturalism who have brought this danger into their towns and cities.

Islamic Education Too One-Sided for UK?

Bucking the trend of supine surrender in the name of "diversity" and "multiculturalism," which usually mean, any culture other than Western Civilization, David Bell, the UK's chief inspector of schools, challenged private Islamic religious schools operating in Britain for failing to acquaint their students with British culture.

"The growth in faith schools needs to be carefully but sensitively monitored by government to ensure that pupils at all schools receive an understanding of not only their own faith but of other faiths and the wider tenets of British society. We must not allow our recognition of diversity to become apathy in the face of any challenge to our coherence as a nation ... I would go further and say that an awareness of our common heritage as British citizens, eual under the law, should enable us to assert with confidence that we are intolerant of intolerance, illiberalism and attitudes that demean the place of certain sections of our community, be that women or people living in non-traditional relationships."

Mr. Bell added that "traditional Islamic education does not entirely fit pupils for their lives as Muslims in modern Britain." More perspicaciously, he warned that "diversity" should not be turned into segregation of separation. These are fairly strong words coming from a representative of the Blair government, which has tip-toed around the problem of British Muslims rather like a balerina on a minefield.

Of course, Mr. Bell was immediately assailed for defending the concept of British culture. Dr. Mohamed Mukadam, chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools, immediately denounced Mr. Bell for his "Islamophobia." Other Muslim "leaders" quickly piled on.

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: "The issue of community cohesion and coherence is of paramount importance for the whole nation but we consider it highly irresponsible to suggest that the growth of Muslim faith schools poses a threat to 'our coherence as a nation.' The issue around schools not adequately fulfilling their responsibility in preparing children for their wider responsibility is a generic issue affecting all poorly resourced schools." At present there are more than 100 Muslim schools, teaching the equivalent of about 3% of Muslim children, but only five percent of them receive state funding.

Islam is not a religion native to Britain. Islamic culture differs greatly from British culture. Around the world, and within Britain, Muslims have repeatedly and violently demonstrated their hatred of, and opposition to, Western Civilization. Within the Muslim world, schools - known as madrasas - have been shown to be the inculcators of fanatical Islamist ideology in Muslim children (see here, here and here). Given these facts, is it really so unreasonable for the British government and people to raise concerns about Islamic schools operating in Britain? Why is it acceptable for Muslims to demand that British (or European, or American) society and institutions adapt to their beliefs and customs, but not acceptable for the reverse? How far can a society go in promoting diversity before it diversifies core culture out of existence?

Witness Intimidation by Gangs Rises

Inner city gangs in Boston and Baltimore have ratched up tactics meant to strike fear into anyone who might be tempted to testify against their members in court, according to a front page article in Sunday's New York Times [registration required].

"Witness intimidation has become so pervasive that it is ruining the public's faith in the criminal justice system to protect them, said Judge John M. Glynn of Baltimore City Circuit Court. "We are not much better off than the legal system in Mexico or Columbia or some other sad places."

This of course comes at a time when the US has been subjected to massive illegal immigration from exactly such "sad places." At least, the new immigrants should feel right at home. The Times notes that while the overall US crime rate has remained stable for the last four years, "juvenile gang homicides have jumped 25 percent since 2000," likely in response to a dramatic increase in gang activity during the same period, which has seen gangs spread from traditional large cities into the suburbs and even rural areas.

The problem has grown so severe that the FBI has taken the lead in combatting the growth of violent street gangs, comparing them to mafia-like criminal organizations. According to the Times, the federal government has created a task force to deal with street gangs and federal prosecutors will use federal racketeering laws (originally designed to stamp out organized crime syndicates) to pursue gang members.

Police chiefs and prosecutors call the effort welcome. William Bratton, the Los Angeles police chief, said street gang killings made up more than half of the 515 homicides in the city last year, including a number of witnesses. Mr. Bratton said that over the past year he had had a number of talks with Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the FBI, urging him to make street gangs the bureau's top priority. "In this country street gangs are a national problem and are taking more lives than all the civilians lost to Al Qaeda last year," Mr. Bratton said.

One of the obstacles to combating the Mafia, and to defeating youth gangs, is the "code of silence" they encourage, often by intimidating witnesses, Mr. Swecker said. One advantage the FBI will have is that by bringing federal charges against street gang members, witnesses can be placed in the federal witness protection program and given new identities.

The need to protect witnesses is critical. Daniel Conley, district attorney for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, told the Times that 90 percent of cases involving gangs or serious violence had seen some form of witness intimidation. According to Baltimore City prosecutor Wesley Adams, in 2003 "when he tried nine homicides, 23 of the 35 witnesses he managed to get to the stand either recanted or lied, and that was not counting the many others who were too scared and simply disappeared." The Times reported that witness disappearances had become so common, that Baltimore had assigned two full-time detectives just to locate missing witnesses. The article said, the two detectives "are currently looking for 77 people."

Thanks to the vigorous efforts of defense attorneys, liberal politicians and the ACLU, however, street criminals have enjoyed the leeway granted to them by the legal obstructions that limit the power of police and prosecutors that they have become giddily emboldened. So much so that they feel safe to mock the court, the victims and the witnesses in plain sight. The Times reported that at a December 2004 Boston "trial of two gang members accused of killing a 10 year old girl, some spectators came to the courtroom wearing T-shirts that said "Stop Snitching." Other prosecutors told the Times that some gangs send members into courtrooms so that they can use their cellphones to text message the names of witnessess and their testimony.

Last month, the Baltimore police found that a two-hour DVD titled "Stop Snitching" was being sold on the street. It features young men smoking marijuana, flashing wads of $100 bills, waving guns and making violent threats, some against specific witnesses. "He's a rat, a snitch," one man sings, continuing with obscenities. "He's dead because I don't believe he's from the hood."

The maker of the DVD has said he was only documenting the attitudes and concerns of people in West Baltimore.

The DVD has drawn particular attention because of the appearance on it of Carmelo Anthony, 20, a National Basketball Association star with the Denver Nuggets who grew up in Baltimore. Mr. Anthony does not make any threats in the DVD.

Mr. Anthony's agent vigorously denied that the NBA player knew that he was being filmed for the DVD. The agent told the Times that Mr. Anthony had been "just hanging out with some guys from the neighborhood who had a video camera," and that Mr. Anthony does not "condone the message of intimidation." A smaller article in the Times, featured alongside the main article, noted that whilst on the DVD, Mr. Anthony:

... does little on the video: He smiles, he doubles over with laughter, and mostly just paces, even when another man, in a direct rant to the camera says he will "put a hole" in the head of people who cooperate with the police.

And the NBA wonders why it has an image problem? No consequence will come to Mr. Anthony for his appearance in this video. Several decades ago, it would such an incident would have cost him his career. But today no standards of civilized behavior are expected from athletes or anyone else, and no one - certainly not the NBA - will punish such behavior. Which is why American culture is rapidly becoming a sewer.

British Taxpayers Fund Jihad Online

A British imam, banned from preaching in some London mosques because of his extremist views, has turned to the Internet to spread his hate of the West.

The Times monitored Mr Bakri Mohammed’s nightly webcasts in which he declared that the “covenant of security” under which Muslims live peacefully in the UK had been “violated” by the Government’s tough anti-terrorist legislation, The Syrian-born radical said: “I believe the whole of Britain has become Dar ul-Harb (land of war). In such a state, he added, “the kuffar (non-believer) has no sanctity for their own life or property.”

In his broadcasts, conducted through an internet chatroom, Mr Bakri Mohammed stopped short of calling for terrorist attacks in Britain. But he said that Muslims should join the jihad “wherever you are” and told one woman that she was permitted to become a suicide bomber.

Mr. Bakri Mohammed has resided in Britain for 18 years, the article notes, living "on social security benefits." Let's pause and consider the implications of that last statement. A radical Islamist "imam" has been living in Britain, whose culture and society he wishes to destroy, for almost two decades, at the expense of the British taxpayers, who are forced by their government - through its generous welfare system - to subsidize his efforts to incite the murder of as many of them as possible and destruction their society.

Last Monday he told his listeners: “Al-Qaeda and all its branches and organisations of the world, that is the victorious group and they have the emir and you are obliged to join. There is no need . . . to mess about.” Two nights later he said that the voices of dead Mujahidin were calling young Britons to fight. “These people are calling you and shouting to you from far distant places: al jihad, al jihad. They say to you my dear Muslim brothers, ‘Where is your weapon, where is your weapon?’ Come on to the jihad,” he said.

The cleric is regarded as a fringe extremist by mainstream Muslims and is banned from preaching at many mosques. But every night he is using internet forums to reach an audience of between 60 and 70 committed listeners, most of whom are under 30.

Young people under 30 - prime recruits for suicide bombings, a favored Islamist tactic. Of course, when questioned by the Times, Mr. Bakri Mohammed claimed that he did not endorse violence and that any allusions to violence he may have made were "theoretical." Naturally. British officials, informed of Mr. Bakri Mohammed's Internet broadcasts said that he may have violated anti-terrorist laws and that he would be investigated. Which should leave Britons to ask, why has he been allowed to remain in the UK this long? Is it not a reasonable requirement that those living on public assistance not be calling for the destruction of the nation at the same time? Or is that "Islamophobic"?

As for Mr. Bakri Mohammed, he sees no conflict of interest:

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“If I am living under a system, Islam allows me to take the benefit that system offers.”

Indeed. Perhaps the time has come for the system to change - in the name of self-preservation.