Huge congratulations to Shakespeare-quoting Royal Marine Alexander Blackman on the news that he's about to be released

There was nothing - literally nothing - in the Alexander Blackman case to justify the grotesque 10-year sentence handed down to him by a British court for dispatching a Taliban fighter on the battlefield in Afghanistan. As far as I can see, the British government, its minions, and the Army indulged in a sordid vendetta to cover their own sorry arses. Some sort of sanction was evidently required - but a ten-year prison sentence? Ridiculous. Anyway, he'll be out in a couple of weeks, thanks to his splendid "lioness" wife, Claire, the author Freddie Forsyth, who brought this dreadful miscarriage of justice to the attention of Jonathan Goldberg QC (who I want defending me if I ever get into trouble), and everyone else - including those newspapers and fellow marines -  who fought to get the soldier released. Well done, all of them.  I want to make just a few points:

The Spirit of the Blitz is alive, thanks to Phillip Schofield

There were several acts of genuine heroism in and around Westminster on Wednesday, but, obviously...

The BBC asks a question the whole of Britain has been wrestling with...

I'm not sure where I stand on this, to be honest. Sometimes I think it should be...

Immigrant trouble in multiculti Sweden? Move along, please - nothing to see here - it's all good.

Swedish culture being enriched last night:

Apparently, 50 to 60 young men in Rinkeby, a Stockholm suburb with a 75% immigrant...

I'm getting mighty tired of the "don't change your behaviour - that's what the terrorists want" line.

I'm extremely impressed by the way left-wing compassion-mongers always know exactly what Islamic terrorists want. Apparently, "they" want us to secure our borders, instigate rigorous checks on Muslims trying to enter European countries, hunt down would-be or actual jihadists, force Muslims to accept and live by Western values (i.e. tolerance, democracy, and not killing everyone who doesn't agree with you), ban the burqa, cut off the cash supply provided by welfare payments, stop islamist indoctrination in our schools, stop child marriages, punish the systematic sexual abuse of European boys and girls by gangs of rapefugees, and imprison those who condone and carry out female genital mutilation on pre-pubescent girls. Because, you see, if we did all that stuff, it would prove that we're horrible racists, and that would incite the hordes of unemployable, sexually frustrated young Muslim men who hate the West - and whom our governments have invited into our midst - to rise up and destroy the infidel...

866 average British households funded the 5.2m in "aid" paid to develop an Ethiopian "Spice Girls" group

Read it and weep (Daily Telegraph) :

An all-female pop group dubbed Ethiopia’s Spice Girls has received another £5.2 million in British foreign aid despite previous criticism of the funding.

Yegna received the taxpayer money through a contract to develop their 'branded media platform', which includes a radio drama and music.

The revelation comes despite outcry in 2013 when it was revealed the group had been given £4 million via Girl Hub, a UK-funded project...

The Department for International Development (DFID) has given £5.2 million towards building Yegna’s brand through Girl Hub, now re-branded as Girl Effect. It was part of a £16 million package given to the project.

Let's stick with the £5.2m figure. It's not a lot...

Ah! Poor little Syrian orphans of war - what was advertised, and what actually arrived in the post

Heart-rending, right? What sort of monster could possibly object to Britain taking in poor, vulnerable little mites like these? Not even me!

But when the courier knocked at the door this morning, this is what the package contained:

The Swedish cop Beck was battling anti-gay "Terrorists for God" on on the BBC last night - guess which religion they represented

I enjoy Beck. The detective show is based on characters created by two communist writers, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, in a series of ten very readable crime novels published between 1965 and 1975.  Martin Beck, the main character, is a tediously compassionate, achingly decent, somewhat dithery, procedure-following, middle-aged liberal wet, who is far less interesting than his younger assistant, Gunvald Larsson, a tall, super-fit, snazzily-dressed, blue-eyed upper-class cop who has a tendency to menace suspects, cut corners, and beat people up a lot - Larsson is the true hero of the series. In real-life, Larsson would, of course, be a right-winger, but, as this is a Swedish cop show, he's as left-wing as everyone else: in Swedish drama, everybody, apart from criminals, is left-wing. (The same is, of course, true for practically every TV cop drama being shown on TV anywhere right now - the second most right-wing profession in the world, after soldiering, is now seemingly entirely populated by Guardian-reading compassionistas, only with muscles and anger-management issues.)

British Muslims are not in danger of a white racist backlash - and many more black Americans are killed by blacks than by whites. Stop telling racist lies.

According to today's Daily Express item, the hate-preacher - who fought tooth and nail for eight long years to stay in the UK before finally being extradited to Jordan in 2013 - now feels that the West is simply too dangerous for Muslims. he told his 58,000 Twitter followers "Muslims living in the West will lose. Sedition and spread of bloodshed will devour them."

Huh?

What the BBC's Home Editor said about Anjem Choudary in a news report in May 2015

“It's one thing to ban someone for inciting hatred or violence, but quite another to pass a law that silences anyone who challenges established values.

“I was in Parliament Square today – a statue of Gandhi looking down at me who was jailed for being extremist; Mandela who was jailed for being an extremist.

“History tells us that extreme views are sometimes needed to challenge a very established values that people at the time hold so dear.”

Oh really, Mark Easton? And what "established values" that people "hold so dear" (you can hear the sneering contempt in those phrases) was...

Every political journalist, right now...

via GIPHY

Meanwhile an intellectually distinguished Conservative Brexiteer spends nine minutes trying to speak truth to a spectacularly stupid, ill-mannered and ill-informed left-wing female CNN "journalist" - or, more accurately, to a biased, bigoted political activist masquerading as a television news journalist who has already decided that all Leave voters are (wait for it)... WAYCISTS!!!!!!!!:

What a shame Sadiq Kahn ran out space to put the word "Islamic" in front of "bigotry and hate"

Ah, this photograph explains the otherwise puzzling omission:

Owen Jones's Sky News meltdown - what happens to lefties when the hierarchy of victimhood means they have to lie

Denial might not be a river in Egypt - but it does seem to run like a river through mainstream Islam. I was watching coverage of the slaughter of 50 gay Orlando nightclubbers on Fox News a little earlier (they were discussing Trump's proposal to halt Muslim immigration, while agreeing that that wouldn't have prevented what happened in Florida) when they cut to one of their unbearably endless station ident sequences. So I switched over to the BBC, where everyone was jolly upset that unofficial Leave campaigners had posted a tweet suggesting that the Orlando outrage could happen here if we stay in the EU (the moral preeners seemed to have forgotten about the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo attacks, despite no doubt bravely posting jesusiswhatever messages on social media in their immediate aftermath). Then it was time for a live interview with someone in Orlando. I was expecting some sort of reporter update - but no, a Muslim in Muslim garb representing a Muslim organisation appeared on screen. I groaned.

Eurofanatics fed Norwegians exactly the same lies before their 1994 referendum as the ones Remainers are trying to frighten us with

George Osborne accused Leavers of being "quitters" during his TV grilling by Andrew Neil earlier this week. Which is a bit like the senior British officer at Colditz accusing escapees of being quitters. Presumably, Osborne would have accused...

BBC Radio 5 Live host: Muslim rape gangs didn't rape white girls in Rotherham, and to suggest otherwise is "offensive"

I wrote recently that listening to the BBC (and to EU officials) is often like hearing broadcasts from a parallel universe where the facts are the same as in ours, but the conclusions drawn are the diametric opposite (here). Now, though, it seems that even the facts are different. In the following clip from Up All Night the caller appears to live in our world, while the presenter, Dotun Adeboyo, appears to inhabit a universe with a different history, because in the land where Otun dwells, rape gangs comprised of Pakistani Muslims didn't sexually abuse white girls in Rotherham, and to suggest that they did gets you thrown off his show:

The BBC - yet more sucking up to incomers: prepare for the wail of the Muezzin on TV, infidels!

There was an article in today's Daily Telegraph, entitled "BBC is 'too Christian' and 'could broadcast Muslim prayers' to reflect growing multi-culturalism". I wonder if the corporation is also considering broadcasting non-judgmental programmes about honour killing, female genital mutilation, the joys of Jihad, the need to execute homosexuals and the case for stoning adulterous women? After all, shouldn't we reflect the cherished cultural practices of all the members of our immigrant communities, not just those propounded by the cuddly, "safe", smiley-face front men (not that they're particularly smiley, come to think of it)? Enough of this half-hearted, Laodicean attitude towards inclusivity - let's go the whole hog (or shouldn't we mention pigs, because, after all, they're haram?) I mean, we wouldn't want to, you know, offend anybody, would we?  Here's the start of the Telegraph article:

Your handy, cut-out-and-keep "Am I an Anti-Semite" test...

Just about nails it, I think...

True European integration: thanks to Angela Merkel, Germans and Britons agree about migrants

"UK and Germany have very different attitudes towards immigration" announced The Guardian in November 2014, basing its views on an "exclusive" Ipsos Mori poll suggesting that 53% of Germans believed that immigration was necessary for their labour market, compared to a mere 27% ten years earlier.

Who is encouraging police zealotry against piffling anti-Muslim "hate" crimes? And can we fire them?

Fortunately - and quite out of character - the CPS has stepped in. This was  posted on the Metropolitan Police website an hour ago:

Cameron's critics are right - the Calais migrants look less like a bunch, and more like a rabble or a gang