316.
Continuing the anti-scapegoating rant of yesterday. We are all losing our liberties in this populist driven 'War on Terrorism'. Imprisonment without trial, house arrest, identity cards (they really helped in Madrid!) and Government ministers, in the run up to a general election, justifying the scapegoating of an entire community because of their religion (now where and when did that happen before, I wonder?).

'Scapegoating is a hostile social-psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group. It is also a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others. The target feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, blame and criticism; he is likely to suffer rejection from those who the perpetrator seeks to influence. Scapegoating has a wide range of focus: from "approved" enemies of very large groups of people down to the scapegoating of individuals by other individuals. Distortion is always a feature.' (The Scapegoat Society)

'UK Muslims should accept that people of Islamic appearance [sic] are more likely to be stopped and searched by police, a Home Office minister has said. Hazel Blears said innocent Muslims would be targeted because of the search for Islamic extremists. Qualifications for religious leaders to enter the UK could also be made tougher, she told a Commons inquiry... Figures showed that, for 2003/4, Asians were 1.9 times more likely to be stopped and searched, compared with 1.7 times more likely in the previous year. Separate figures on police searches in England and Wales carried out under the Terrorism Act 2000 showed that ethnic minorities were more likely to be targeted. Muslim groups have repeatedly claimed that their communities are being victimised under terror laws. In 2003/4, 12.5 per cent of searches under the laws were on Asian people, even though they make up 4.7 per cent of the population. Last July, the police were accused of Islamophobia by Muslim groups after stop and search figures showed the numbers of Asians targeted had risen by 300 per cent since the introduction of anti-terror laws.' (BBC News)

'Whether we consider questions of general justice or cankers of economic life, symptoms of cultural decline or processes of political degeneration, questions of faulty schooling or the bad influence exerted on grown-ups by the press, etc, everywhere and always it is fundamentally the disregard of the racial needs of our own people or failure to see a foreign racial menace.' Adolf Hitler.