Does Monty Python run the British Government?

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has a new plan to fight violent Islamic extremism: instead of prison, sentence the offenders to therapy and counseling!

The Home Office is to announce an extra £12.5 million to support new initiatives to try to stop extremism spreading.

The central element of the Home Office plan is a new national "deradicalisation" programme that would persuade converts to violent and extremist causes to change their views.

Controversially, the new plan makes clear that people who fall under the influence of violent organisations will not automatically face prosecution.

Instead, the presumption should be that some such individuals would face therapy and counselling from community groups instead of criminal charges.

What Ms. Smith forgets is that therapy only works if the person wants to be "healed." But why should "extremists" want help? After all, their faith promises them Paradise for fighting the unbeliever in Allah’s cause. How can an hour with a local counselor compete with that? The "extremist" will just tell the therapist what he wants to hear and then be on his merry jihadi way.

What’s next? The comfy chair?

 

(hat tip: Weekly Standard)

LINKS: More at Contentions.

Technorati tags: Jacqui Smith, therapy, counseling, Islamists, farce, Monty Python, Home Office, Spanish Inquisition

But what do you really think of me?

First there was columnist Ellen Goodman, who equated global warming skeptics with Holocaust deniers. Now we have the suffragan Bishop of Stafford in the UK, the Right Reverend Gordon Mursell, who compared skeptics to Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who repeatedly raped his daughter, fathered nine children through her, and kept them all locked in a cellar. Of course, he denies that’s what he intended, but it’s sure what he said:

A Church of England bishop has been criticised after he compared climate change sceptics to the Austrian child abuser Josef Fritzl.

The Bishop of Stafford, the Right Reverend Gordon Mursell, said it was hard to imagine a more disgusting crime than Fritzl’s, who sealed his daughter in a cellar for 24 years.

But Dr Mursell added: ‘You could argue that, by our refusal to face the truth about climate change, we are as guilty as he is.

Monika Fritzl was born in the cellar where Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter

‘We are in effect locking our children and grandchildren into a world with no future and throwing away the key.’

His comments, which were made in a pastoral letter addressed to churchgoers, have been widely attacked.

One critic accused the Church of England of elevating global warming to be a new religion.

Too late, the Goracle and his acolytes in the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming have already done that:

 

Question the evidence, and you’re a denier. Present evidence to the contrary, and you become a demon in their eyes. A heretic fit only for burning.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve had conversations with reasonable advocates of the reality of AGW who are willing to listen to evidence to the contrary, who agree there’s a lot more investigative work to be done. We may in the end agree to disagree, but the discussion is civil.

But fools like Bishop Mursell are a positive hindrance, sheep following their Green Shepherd to a promised Ecological Paradise. By shouting down dissenting views and demanding we accept the "consensus," they become the very antithesis of the scientific method, and their proposed solutions could do real harm in the real world.

Argh.

Technorati tags: climate change, Right Reverend Gordon Mursell, Al Gore, Goracle, junk science, Josef Fritzl, anthropogenic global warming