From the TimesOnline:
LAWYERS are prepared to advise potential immigrants how to gain British citizenship by signing up for “gay marriages” even if they are heterosexual.Undercover reporters were told by six different firms of solicitors how to exploit a loophole in the civil partnership rules to get passports.
Immigrants face less rigorous tests if they seek to gain British citizenship through a civil partnership than through a heterosexual marriage.
Under laws that took effect last December, gay people have the same immigration rights as married people — and may secure a full passport after two years in the country.
However, while marriages have to be consummated to qualify there is no such requirement on couples in a civil partnership. It is thus not illegal for two heterosexual friends to form a civil partnership and then to “divorce” after two years once the foreigner has gained British citizenship.
Last week register offices in London, Essex and Leeds recorded 27 foreigners out of a total of 217 people who had declared their intention to form a civil partnership. Six out of 14 recorded at Bristol involve a foreigner who could be eligible for British citizenship.
Several firms of immigration lawyers advertise their services in gay publications and some solicitors explain on their websites the immigration benefits of civil partnerships...
Fraudulant bastards....
This is a loophole that needs to be tightened. Loose loopholes are a Bad Thing. However, I wonder how many of these gay marriages of convenience - how the late Joe Orton would have liked one of those - will be amongst Muslims. The cousin from the village would surely have a bad time of it. What is the Koranic penalty for pretending to be gay? Partial defenestration? Perhaps the English groom could drag up in a burkha for the wedding picture to be sent back home to the relatives in the village.
When the heterosexual couple "divorces" and each marry two women, how do they explain this? Usually men marry, then come out as gay, not the other way round. Perhaps they could claim that they only thought they were gay because they were interested in moisturiser and knew the difference between green and "eau de nil", but subsequently read "Iron John" and got in touch with their masculine side.
To be honest, I'm for ending Muslim immigration full stop, whether through marriage, civil partnership or any other means. I'd rather have boatloads of bisexual Buddhists, hundreds of homosexual Hassidim and thousands of transgendered Zoroastrians coming to live here than any more Muslims.
WHAT IS THE NEXUS OF THIS ARTICLE TO THE TOPIC AT HAND?
I suppose this is being posted to tell us how bad gays are. Or perhaps Rebecca posted it to show us how dreadful and Biblically/Koranically/Talmudically "sinful" we gays are, and thus, how undeserving we are of any more rights than Moslems would accord us; that we should be happy that Christianists are so wonderful – they don’t behead gays. Given Rebecca’s previous statements, her motivation for posting of this article on a Moslem oriented site is highly dubious. This same poster made it clear on this page previously that civil partnerships ought not be given to gays in the US since, at this “critical time things are moving very fast." Madam, I do not believe in a rapture. Those comments from Rebecca and her position on gay civil unions can be read here: http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/009788.php#comments
Maybe this article was posted to warn Americans that those crazy Europeans sanction relationships that Jerry Farwell stated led to 9/11. If it was posted to show a "dangerous" loophole in UK law; I think the argument is specious. Why not change the law to not allow any foreigners to be married by heteros? Whatever the reason for posting it, the fact remains that marriage fraud exists. If the standard in civil partnership (for foreigners) is too lenient, it can be changed easily.
A terrorist who poses as gay in this scenario, as well as the "gay" petitioner, are really doing the investigating intelligence service a service. Think about it. These would be Scotland Yard's favorite, most entertaining, and easiest cases. Have you ever been to a marriage fraud interview? In the gay context, it would be extraordinarily difficult to feign it.
Nonetheless the fact remains that JD/DW decided to post this article with no real connection to Islam. Robert Spencer attends meetings commemorating Pim Fortuyn’s death. Robert Spencer exalts Van Gogh, praises Hirsi Ali and still this website is Christianist and anti gay at its core as demonstrated by this post. Are Robert's celebrations of Pim's life for show or is it because he truly believes Pim was a great man? The articles chosen for publications, as well as the opinions expressed on this site by at least one poster, indicate a strong Christianist agenda. We know that Christinists are no different from Islamists when it comes to secular issues. Well let me rephrase that, I am lucky enough to keep my head with the former.
That's nonsense, K N. This post is highlighting a way of getting round immigration laws and therefore enabling more Muslims to enter the country. I believe it is not a serious issue, because, as you say, the fraudulent nature of the partnership would be easy to discover. Certainly the implications are not those of allowing wives of polygamous marriages into the country, for the latter would lead to huge increases in the dependent Muslim population.
We need tighter controls on immigration generally - we are a crowded island - and an outright ban on Muslim immigration. The numbers of gay partnerships of convenience will be far smaller than the number of heterosexual marriages of convenience designed to get someone into the country.
Mincing to Mecca for that next hadj?
There to paint the Ka'aba pink?
Why isn't Muslim immigration to the West simply stopped until we can assesss the mess that is already here?
There must be a dozen suckers' loopholes like this.
And those fixated on Shari'ah study love legalsitic nonsense to strangle the infidel dogs with their own lawyerly leashes.
No more n until we know where we already are.
Case closed.
Muslims will do anything and everything illegal to creep into the UK (Takkiya) and there are traitors amongst us who would be willing to help them do just that, at any cost. Its time every Muslim application be denied. Do we need any more of these Islamic deviants? We have enough of them already ,the weekly stupid marches show that they have no intention of peacefully integrating with the native population like all the other immigrants from various religious backgrounds.
Muslims want everything their way. Kick the savages out before its too late and do not allow any more into the UK.
"To be honest, I'm for ending Muslim immigration full stop, whether through marriage, civil partnership or any other means. I'd rather have boatloads of bisexual Buddhists, hundreds of homosexual Hassidim and thousands of transgendered Zoroastrians coming to live here than any more Muslims."
-Interested
That's a funny set of images I see in my head. But yes, immigration policy must be radically changed and we cannto stop with the UK. However, this particular instance is not going to be a serious means of Moslem immigration to the UK. Let's get serious eh.
Nothing homophobic about the story, Kafir Nonbeliever. It's both an immigration loophole (good thing we don't have a similar one here in Texas; the border is a big enough "loophole"), and laughably ironic, given the violent homophobia preached by the very same extremists who can take advantage of that loophole.
If anything, those who sincerely enter into such a partnership should be the most annoyed at the abuse of it.
Now, let's all sit back and enjoy the Immigration Loophole Pride Parade. ;)
KN, I think you're being unreasonably defensive about this article. It only points out yet another loophole that would grant asylum to otherwise unqualified immigrants.
There is nothing judgmental about this and it's not saying or implying that gays and lesbians aren't welcome. It is merely presenting one more example of how loopholes are exploited by greedy attorneys and dishonest muslims to get into Britain.
Gay muslims would probably present far less of a threat than their straight counterparts, but how many homosexual muslims have the courage to come out of the closet? It's not the gays who are being singled out, it is those who would would exploit the civil partnership loophole to get in the country, just like so many have exploited the marriage loophole.
SINCE DW/JW GOES OT, LETS GO DOWN TO THE BAYOU
Louisianans debate the cause of Katrina.
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekly/news/articlegate.pl?20060221b
Was it the terribly designed and poorly maintained levees? No. Was it the geography a city built at or below sea level in what was long reclaimed from marshes? No. Was it because a gargantuan hurricane came straight at the city? No, dear friends, it was gays with their sinful habits.
Amusingly, most gays live/visited the French Quarter, the same area that was largely unharmed and not submerged.
Gay Author sees growing Muslim enclaves hoping to rule Europe
While Europe Slept
How Radical Islam
Is Destroying the West From Within
By Bruce Bawer
Doubleday. 247 pp. $23.95
If the ongoing "Battle of Khartoon" (let's give it some historical resonance) proves anything, it's that many otherwise well-educated Westerners remain illiterate about Islam.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the editors of Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper didn't understand when they published their visual bombshells that some strains of Islam (but not all) oppose depiction of Muhammad. Consider that just one gap in knowledge that new books like Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept help close.
Indeed, thanks to Voltaire, the Enlightenment, and American freedom of expression, spring lists from prestigious publishers abound with scholarly tomes packed with information on Islam. Look, for instance, at Alan Jamieson's Faith and Sword: A Short History of Christian-Muslim Conflict (University of Chicago Press), or Efraim Karsh's Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale)
Such studies follow scores of volumes over the last few years that offer context for the current fury over Muhammad's cartoon portrayal as a source of terror. Read, for instance, Muhammad in Europe (NYU Press, 2001) by Minou Reeves, an Iranian scholar who examines traditional European images of Muhammad as a xenophobic warrior and argues that they misjudge him.
But such books, with their sedulous, unapologetic presentation of fact, also pose a challenge to Islamic insisters that Muhammad never be criticized. Did you know that Syria, Egypt, Palestine, North Africa, Iran and Iraq consisted of Christians, pagans, Jews and Zoroastrians until Arab Islamic warriors subdued them by force (eventually conquering the whole Byzantine and Sassanid Persian empires)? That the citizens of Mecca, now the holiest Muslim city, opposed Muhammad and his new creed until he showed up on their doorstep with an army in 629?
It may also surprise you to learn that three Jewish tribes on the run from Roman persecution - the Nadir, Quraiza and Qainuqa - partly founded Medina (then called Yathrib), the city where Muhammad moved to escape his Meccan enemies.
According to Karsh, Muhammad and his followers systematically eliminated Medina's Jews and seized their property. In 627, Medina's Muslims declared that the Quraiza were collaborators with Muhammad's Meccan enemies. They beheaded 600 to 800 men of the Quraiza, threw their bodies in trenches, and divided their wealth.
Karsh and Jamieson serve up further uncomfortable tidbits. The Christian philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, no draw-from-the-hip cartoonist, thought Islam incapable of the status of a true faith because he deemed it a religion of violence and war. (Aquinas overlooked massacres by Christian crusaders, which should remind us that Christians once arguably exceeded Muslims in violence.) The great English historian Edward Gibbon thought Arabic might have become the language of Oxford and Cambridge if Charles Martel's Frankish army hadn't stopped an expansionist Arab force at Poitiers in 732.
Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept, published this month, provides an extraordinarily timely and incisive complement to such works. His topic is far fresher, one rarely explained to Americans because of our shrinking coverage of Europe: the astounding growth of Muslim communities there over the last 30 years, and how they interact with traditionally Christian societies.
Bawer, a gay, neoconservative American literary critic from New York who has lived in Amsterdam (now more than half non-Dutch) and, since 1997, in Oslo, energetically reports here what happens between the terrorist incidents that prod mainstream American media to brief coverage: the everyday tensions of a Europe that, for the first time in many centuries, must face substantial Islamic populations and ambitions.
In Bawer's view, Western Europe is becoming a "house divided against itself." On the one hand, the educated European elite maintains an unshakable "belief in peace and reconciliation through dialogue," a faith (their only remaining faith) that every issue can be resolved without violence.
On the other hand, Europe's unassimilated Muslim communities are led in many cases, Bawer contends, by "fundamentalist Muslims" who seek "the establishment in Europe of a caliphate government according to sharia law." Such leaders, often imams and elders, see "Islamist terrorists as allies in a global jihad, or holy war, dedicated to that goal."
According to Bawer, liberals in Europe, even more than their American counterparts, want to believe that most Muslim immigrants share Western middle-class goals: a safe place to live, opportunities for their children, and the like. That accounts, Bawer argues, for the odd mix in their attitudes to Muslims: joy in the "multiculturalism" that makes their previously homogeneous societies more "colorful," and a nativist desire to keep Muslims in their place as exotica.
Bawer asserts that the reality - confirmed for him by the resistance of European Muslims to assimilation, and the marked presence in their communities of honor killings, homophobia, polygamy, marital rape, forced marriage, and intolerance of democracy and pluralism - is that European Muslim leaders, with demographics on their side, still harbor the millennial hope of taking power in Europe, and see the European attitude as both weak and hostile. It is "political correctness," Bawer writes, that has "gotten Europe into its current mess."
Accept his analysis or not, Bawer and his details startle, since American tourists rarely visit the Muslim communities that now ring many European cities, and American journalists rarely cover them. Apart from the heinous killings by angry Muslims of prominent Europeans such as Dutch professor and politician Pim Fortuyn (after publication of his book Against the Islamicization of Our Culture) and Dutch artist and filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who dared to question Islamic brutalization of women, Bawer describes a landscape of dysfunction.
Seventy percent of the inmates in French prisons, Bawer reports, are Muslim. Four out of five residents at Oslo's main women's shelter are non-Norwegian women seeking protection from male family members. In Denmark, "Muslims make up 5 percent of the population but receive 40 percent of welfare outlays." Ninety-four percent of asylum seekers who come to Norway arrive with no identification, a well-known subterfuge around Europe that virtually ensures asylum on humanitarian grounds.
Bawer's book also highlights the ironies of current global politics and immigration. Radical Islamists, for instance, focus their fury on the United States even though it, unlike Europe, experienced little antagonism with Islam until the creation of Israel, and in fact most resembles the traditional Islamic "umma" (universal Muslim community), in the generosity with which it welcomes foreign residents (though it differs in offering equality rather than second-class dhimmi citizenship).
Similarly, while Islamists explode with fury at the very idea that non-Muslims should occupy or live in Islamic countries, Bawer observes and amply documents that many employ every legal and illegal stratagem imaginable under the doctrine of "family reunification" to bring more relatives into their European countries. They then insist they have a right to be there and apply for the seemingly endless forms of European welfare: "unemployment benefits, relief payments, child benefits, disability, cash support, and rent allowance."
Bawer apportions blame for the "mess" he sees. Muslim immigrants insist on Islam's traditionally imperialist principles, which presume that no Muslim properly lives under the sovereignty of a non-Muslim state. Europeans maintain a "romantic view of Muslim immigrants" as "colorful" unfortunates worthy of assistance, but steadfastly resist their entry into elite professions and neighborhoods. Bawer beautifully capsulizes this European mind-set as "millions in aid, but not a penny in salary."
Ultimately, his book, like the cartoon controversy, raises profound challenges to standard ideas of democracy, authority, and free expression.
To whom does any country's physical territory belong? Those who have been there longest? A simple majority? The best-educated?
Must the cultural rules of longtime societies last forever? Or might it make perfect democratic sense for officially secular France to change should its Muslim population reach 50 percent, just as the English-speaking United States might need to accept Spanish as an equal language if Spanish speakers reach that mark?
Bawer's must-read book, in tandem with others, opens our eyes to an inescapable truth: Christians and Muslims fought wars for more than 1,000 years, with each at times conquering the other's territory by force. Non-Muslims need to know far more about Islam if they're going to take positions they can justify, whether that leads to cooperating with various Islamic world views or ultimately confronting them.
Islam, we're often reminded these days, means "submission" in Arabic. Enlightenment, we should equally remember, means replacing half-baked notions and myths with facts.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/books/13896555.htm
Kafir N,
I would like to remind you that I have posted Mr. Bawer's articles at Dhimmi Watch here:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/010248.php
and here:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/009039.php
I greatly admire this man and his work.
Sincerely, Rebecca
Terrorism, Gay Marriage, Abu Ghraib, Free Speech & UK govt policy - a perspective from Armando Iannucci
I knew it I called this one a year ago. I mentioned this to one of my gay friends and he took a bit of an offence. I was not commenting on gay marriage I just knew those scum bags would use it to get into the country. It is far easier to get a guy and pay him off then a woman.
Cheer up! Adds a new line to the cartoon classic:- "Stop, we're running out of virgins".
now its:-
"But wait. We're getting some cowboys.."
No immigration for muslims would solve that problem nicely.
KafirN.~ That was a nice story about your grandmother before by the way. You mistook my post below it to be directed at your story, it was not. I liked it.
Borg:
"No immigration for muslims would solve that problem nicely."
Not quite. the ones inside the gates are overbreeding on the overgenerous taxpayer dole from misguided wimpy welfare states.
Not just immigration stoppage but also welfare abuse stoppage to oversized muslime families should certainly help.
"No immigration for Muslims would solve that problem nicely."
I agree, but what if the person comes from a Moslem country or states that they are "non practicing"? It becomes a bit complicated.
About my grandmother:
Thanks Borg, you are now the third person to tell me they remember the story. Most recently, a friend at work who is nominally Moslem, that is, Moslem by birth told me the story was very powerful for him. He was raised Shiite and was told the Mahdi would return. He told me just a week ago that the more he thinks about the story I told me, the more he thinks she was right. He said he could imagine a Romanian Grandmother saying it, and pictured his own ethnic grandmother in her stead. He went on to say that he is starting to seriously think neither Jesus nor the Mahdi are coming, and laughed. He added that if a war with Iran started, and Iran waited for the Mahdi and no such savior arrives, Shiites would grow very disenchanted and many would leave Islam in droves. I responded that they would soon feel that emotion. Again, he laughed.