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Father God, thank you for the love of the truth you have given me. Please bless me with the wisdom, knowledge and discernment needed to always present the truth in an attitude of grace and love. Use this blog and Northwoods Ministries for your glory. Help us all to read and to study Your Word without preconceived notions, but rather, let scripture interpret scripture in the presence of the Holy Spirit. All praise to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

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Showing posts with label Britain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Britain. Show all posts

Thursday, June 18, 2026

Politics Downunder > Is Pauline Hanson Australia's smartest politician?

 

‘We must be monocultural’: Hanson demands end to multiculturalism, calls climate change a hoax

Updated ,first published




Pauline Hanson’s first speech at the National Press Club has outlined her plans to clamp down on Muslim migration, end multiculturalism and axe the government’s climate change department, as the One Nation leader claimed four of Australia’s closest allies were “absolute s-holes”.

Hanson began her no-apologies speech on Wednesday by identifying immigration and housing affordability as two of the most pressing issues facing the country, insisting Australia “cannot be a multicultural society”.


“We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural,” she said while attacking the assembled media for continuing to “repeat the lie that we are a racist party”.

Supported by her fellow One Nation senators Malcolm Roberts, Sean Bell and Tyron Whitten and star defector Barnaby Joyce, Hanson approached her question-and-answer session with Canberra press gallery journalists with defiance and sometimes direct hostility, saying they had been part of the problem, along with incompetent government ministers and a lazy and bloated public service.

The speech, Hanson’s first address to the press club in 30 years in politics, came as polling found primary vote support for One Nation has surged past Labor and the Coalition, and after Hanson was named preferred prime minister in the latest Resolve Political Monitor.

The speech was interrupted briefly by a stunt banner unfurled behind the leader as she spoke, planted by activist group GetUp. The press club has referred footage of the incident to the federal police and issued an apology to Hanson, who paused briefly to look at the banner before continuing on with her speech.

Asked if Australia was in danger of being swamped by Muslim migrants – as she had claimed was happening with Asian immigration during the 1990s – Hanson said, “Not if I’ve got any say in it.

“Radical Islam is my grave concern ... I think we’ve got 18,000 people on ASIO watch lists at the moment, and probably 220 very serious [cases], in a country like this? What about … what happened in Bondi, which I have expressed. We can’t keep up with the personnel to keep an eye on these people. I’m not apologising for anything, and I’ve seen too much footage on our TVs from what’s happening in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, they’re all just absolute … s-holes.”


It is not clear what the source is for Hanson’s claim about the watch list. ASIO has previously indicated it does not have a watch-list tally.

Hanson vowed to shut down multicultural broadcaster SBS and make the ABC subscription-only in capital cities. She also promised to shut down government departments including “the climate change department, the Aboriginal department” and parts of the education and health departments.

She told the club that any money saved from scrapping these services would go into consolidated revenue.

“We’re all treated as Australians, equally, on an individual needs basis, not based on race, and with that, yes, that money will go into consolidated revenue, where any Australian can get that help if they need help.”

Hanson also railed against “the hoax of global warming”, which she blamed for rising energy costs, and said she would scrap all subsidies for renewable energy projects.

On nuclear power, she said the Coalition made a mistake committing to seven power plants, and she would build them only as needed. Barnaby Joyce was a big promoter of nuclear power when he was with the Nationals.

“No more wind turbines to be put in; that will be scrapped,” Hanson said. “No more solar panels on agricultural land – gone. Put it up on your roofs. I don’t care. Coal-fired power stations, yes. We need to have that one in South Australia, one in Queensland, to deliver the power that we need. And then from there we move forward and put in a reactor. Start with one. It all comes down to if you can afford it.”

United Nations science body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said human-induced greenhouse emissions are the dominant cause of global warming, which is raising the atmospheric temperature and increasing extreme weather. Its findings are subject to more than 2000 independent scientific reviewers.

While the Coalition has scrapped its support for a net zero target, the other major parties still agree that man-made climate change is real.

Hanson said the childcare system and the industrial relations system should be completely overhauled and repeated her opposition to pay rises for workers, arguing that businesses tell her that employees are lazy and too difficult to sack.

“You need to look at the other side of the ledger. Can businesses afford and pay that? I understand there is a struggle that is happening in people being able to afford and pay their bills, but there has to be a balance,” she said.

“Industrial relations, I can assure you, needs a complete overhaul because it’s not working.”

Asked about her stance on abortion, Hanson said, “I’m not against people and circumstances, women that need to have an abortion for medical reasons, for some circumstance. I’d rather educate women to use contraceptives than to go through an abortion; too many abortions in this country, anyway”.

Asked earlier in the day if One Nation was fit to govern, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the party was “opposed to all of the cost-of-living measures that my government has put in place” and noted he had watched an interview “from the One Nation leader where she was talking about making it easier to sack people and concerned about the minimum wage increases”.

Greens leader Larissa Waters described Hanson’s speech as “incoherent hatred”.

“Pauline Hanson’s incoherent hatred today offered nothing more than the same tired Islamophobia, transphobia, racism and protection racket for fossil fuels we’ve heard from her for decades.

“Pauline Hanson wants Australians angry, divided and scared of our neighbours. It’s an ugly and racist distraction from her servitude of the same billionaires and corporate superprofits as the major parties.”

Does she really want the country divided and scared, or does she just want them to wake up to the needless dangers around and among them?

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor also asked if Hanson was fit to govern when interviewed on Darwin radio station Mix 104.

“Are they fit to govern? Have they got a credible plan for the country? And we’ve got a member of One Nation we see today saying that the United States is the ‘worst terrorist organisation in the world’. I mean, seriously?”

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Friday, February 6, 2026

The West's Pragmatic Fallacy > or, Why Iran will blow up in America's face

 

The West’s pragmatic fallacy


Qatar is the Jeffrey Epstein of world politics

Jeffrey Epstein meets with Qatari prince Sheikh Jabor bin Khalid al Thani, president of the Qatar Racing Club

When people are called pragmatic, it’s meant to imply reasonableness, the ability to compromise, occupying the sensible middle ground.

That compliment may often be justified. However, as the obverse of principle, pragmatism has also been the West’s progressive undoing.

US President Donald Trump is an arch pragmatist. His “art of the deal” is based on beating down the other side through negotiations in which he plays a superior hand.

This approach characterises his foreign policy. Over both Iran and Gaza, however, it’s currently threatening to derail his intention to restore respect for American power — not to mention his much-desired legacy as the world’s principal peacemaker.

At time of writing, a negotiation process still seems to be under way between the United States and the Iranian regime as an alternative to war. Trump’s terms include the regime giving up its nuclear programme, ballistic missiles and sponsorship of terrorism — a demand for nothing less than surrender, to which the regime will never agree.

If Trump attacks Iran, we’ll finally know he realises that deal-making among nations has its limits. But the fact that he keeps being persuaded to continue with these talks, however reluctantly, has created fears that he’s being played by the world’s supreme masters of tactical concessions, delay and manipulation.

In Gaza, where Trump prevented Israel from finishing off Hamas and forced the Israelis into a negotiated ceasefire, Hamas has regrouped and strengthened, daily breaking the ceasefire by attacking Israeli troops.

Although Hamas refuses to demilitarise, Trump is moving ahead with the second stage of his Gaza peace plan which he originally said was dependent on total demilitarisation. The concession is another example of choosing pragmatism over principle.

This reveals a fallacy that Trump shares with his liberal universalist foes, who form the majority of mainstream diplomats and for whom “conflict resolution” rather than war is an article of faith.

This is based on the iron belief in the efficacy of negotiation and compromise, which relies in turn on the fallacy that everyone in the world, like the West, is governed by short-termism and self-interest.

To such pragmatists, the idea that Islamists believe they are doing divine work in murdering and conquering unbelievers is too absurd to be taken seriously.

They therefore fail disastrously to realise that Tehran’s agenda is totally and irrevocably non-negotiable. They also fail to grasp that Hamas similarly view negotiated concessions as a sign of weakness, which galvanises them to redouble their infernal efforts.

Last week, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, told the president that Hamas will demilitarise “because they have no choice.” “They’re going to give it up. They’re going to give up the AK-47s,” he said. Why? What incentive do they have?

Moreover, Britain’s Telegraph reported last month that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, had been “hammering the phone” with Witkoff and other officials pushing for Hamas to be allowed to retain AK-47s and other personal weapons.

To break the deadlock, Powell was suggesting, just abandon the demand for demilitarisation. Simple!

The sinuous Powell, who is highly influential in Washington, DC, has a long record of pragmatic engagement with terrorists. His connections with IRA leaders during Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence in the 1980s and 1990s led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and 28 years of peace in the province.

The British are constantly thrusting this agreement down the throats of the Americans as a genius strategy to end world conflicts.

Last year, Robert Ford, a former US ambassador to Syria, revealed that in 2023 Powell’s NGO Inter Mediate, which provides a bridge between diplomats and terrorists, had introduced Ford to the al Qaeda terrorist Mohammed al Jolani, now known as Ahmed al Sharaa and, since last January, Syria’s president.

Powell was thus instrumental in prompting Ford to help transform al Jolani into a “moderate” statesman who said he had renounced his earlier extremism. Yet last month, after having slaughtered Alawites, Druze and Christians, al Sharaa’s army smashed the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces and captured swathes of Kurdish territory, inflicting atrocities in Rojava.

A ceasefire deal brokered by the Americans delivered the Kurds into al Sharaa’s control. This has caused the Kurds to feel bitterly betrayed by the West, having previously acted as its invaluable allies against Islamic State, the terrorist group to which al Sharaa once belonged.

Using the Good Friday Agreement as a global “conflict resolution” template is a category error. The IRA merely wanted a united Ireland, a reasonable if contested aspiration.

Islamists, however — with their fanatical, absolute and non-negotiable agendas to destroy Israel, the Jews and the West — don’t suddenly become convinced of the benefits of pragmatism. Instead, they become convinced of the endless gullibility or amoral cynicism of Western diplomats bent upon making concessions which these implacable foes rightly perceive as weakness.

Pragmatism involves dismissing or even denying the importance of virtue and its opposite, evil. This is the hallmark of today’s Western world.

That’s why Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier whose copious files were dumped into the public arena this past week — revealing the staggering scale and depth of his depraved influence — was not an aberration but the monstrous apotheosis of the culture.

He was a spider spinning an enormous global web of financial, sexual and political corruption. People were drawn into it in huge numbers because he was a passport to money, sexual licence and political influence.

That was because all the West’s normative moral rules had broken down.

Hyper-individualism had made licentiousness the order of the day. Absolutes such as truth or objectivity were abolished in favuor of subjective opinions and the primacy of feelings and emotion.

The nuclear family was smashed. Sexual morality gave way to a lifestyle free-for-all. Non-judgmentalism was mandatory. Young people now learn codes of sexual behaviour from pornography.

For the West’s elites to be clutching their pearls over Epstein piles hypocrisy upon moral collapse.

In Britain, the Epstein scandal is threatening to bring down Starmer, who in 2024 appointed Lord Mandelson as ambassador to the United States. It’s now been revealed that Mandelson appears to have received money from Epstein while sending him, while he was Britain’s business secretary, market-sensitive, secret information about the government’s responses to the financial crash in 2008.

Starmer has been forced to admit that, when he sent Mandelson to Washington, he was aware that his new ambassador had continued his friendship with Epstein after the financier’s conviction in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

Starmer appears to have taken the pragmatic view that Mandelson’s stellar political abilities made it worth the gamble. With the gamble now blowing up in Starmer’s face, it turns out that pragmatism was a losing bet.

Pragmatism is fine within the guardrails of normative morality. But if it tears out those guardrails and throws them into the trash, then it goes belly-up.

Pragmatism has corrupted the West and exposed it to grave danger in one particularly graphic example. Qatar, an Islamist Muslim Brotherhood state, works to destabilise and ultimately conquer the West for Islam.

Accordingly, over the decades it has insinuated itself into America and Britain, turning their universities into Islamic propaganda factories and buying up countless individuals in politics and the media.

As a result, instead of viewing Qatar as an enemy, America has treated it as a valuable ally. It used Qatar — the sponsor of Hamas — as an honest broker in the Israeli hostage negotiations, which is why they dragged on at the cost of countless hostages’ and Israeli soldiers’ lives.

And now, Qatar has pride of place on Trump’s Board of Peace — and is using all its influence to stop Trump from destroying the Iranian regime.

You might say that Qatar is the Jeffrey Epstein of world politics.

Dealing with the devil never ends well. Abandon principle for pragmatism, and everything goes smash. It’s a lesson the West clearly has yet to learn.

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Friday, September 5, 2025

Migrants on the Move, or not > Home Sec no hurry to send migrants packing

 

UK Home Secretary walks back ‘guarantee’ that illegal migrants will ‘definitely’ be deported this month


The influx of mostly Muslim migrants into Britain is coming from France, which is an open-door, globalist country under its President Emmanuel Macron, so France has only itself to blame for its migration problems. Both leftist France and Britain have been doing nothing about English Channel illegals. In July 2021, French warships were caught escorting illegal, mostly Muslim migrants to British shores. Then in November 2022,  it was discovered that UK government vessels and French Navy ships were colluding to bring illegal migrants into Britain.

Meanwhile, the UK’s ruling Labour party has been tanking in popularity polls, consistently and over a considerable period of time. Labour is now polling at 20%, while Reform UK leads with 28%. Another notable characteristic of the Labour party is that it tries to boost its popularity by consistently making promises about managing the invasion of illegals via the English Channel. But then Labour reliably reneges on these promises. The government is stringing British citizens along in the hope that no one will wake up and realize that they are in favor of open-door migration, despite the multilayered costs to their own people.

The history of the Labour Party speaks for itself; far-left governments are invariably supportive of open-door migration.  A decade ago, the Guardian wrote this about Labour:

It is easy to forget just how much immigration and asylum haunted Downing Street throughout New Labour’s time in office. Between 1997 and 2010, net annual immigration quadrupled, and the UK population was boosted by more than 2.2 million immigrants, more than twice the population of Birmingham. In Labour’s last term in government, 2005-2010, net migration reached on average 247,000 a year.

Nothing has really changed with the Labour party, except that Britons are waking up to its wiles and rebelling via the Operation Raise the Flag campaign. Yet Labour, by all indications, intends to keep on lying to the British people and telling them what they want to hear, in order to hold on to power.


Home Secretary fails to guarantee France migrant returns will happen this month

by David Lynch, Independent, September 2, 2025:

Yvette Cooper has declined to guarantee that migrants will definitely be sent back across the Channel in September as part of a returns agreement with France.

The first returns are “expected” this month, the Home Secretary has said, but she was cautious not to promise deportations will go ahead during September when speaking to broadcasters.

Ministers are confident they can speed up efforts to empty asylum hotels before their self-imposed deadline of the end of the Parliament, Ms Cooper also signalled.

Ms Cooper said the first deportations under the “one in, one out” pilot scheme with France were expected to take place this month as she addressed MPs on their return to Parliament.

The deal will see the UK send back migrants to France who crossed the Channel, in exchange for those who apply and are approved to come to the UK.

The Home Secretary was asked by Sky News whether she could guarantee returns would begin amid reports the French government may falter on the deal.

She insisted the UK would “continue to work” with France.

Pressed for a guarantee, she replied: “We expect the first returns to take place this month. But I’ve always said from the very beginning on this, it’s a pilot scheme and it needs to build up over time.”

She contrasted her “practical and sensible” approach with that of the previous Conservative government on Rwanda, which “spent £700 million and sent four volunteers after running it for two years”…..

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