Joe Demanuele, a well-respected journalist with this newspaper sent me this picture.

The place is a small village in Iran. It is of a hungry little boy aged eight who is about to have his arm run over by a car as a public punishment for stealing bread from the market. This barbaric act will not only cause him unbelievable pain but will deprive him of the use of his right arm for the rest of his life. The punishment is meted out in the name of Islam.

I permanently bemoan the lack of child discipline that causes so much violence, crime, drug abuse, unhappiness and grief in Britain and the rest of Europe. But surely this is not the answer. The evil men who have hijacked Islam in so many places around the world will one day come face to face with their maker and in the name of Allah, Mohammed, God or Jesus Christ they will have to answer for their appalling actions.

In the meantime, good men of every religion, or even none, must stand up and be counted in the damning of such obscene inhumane cruelty. We don’t seem to have a problem with condemning Hitler, Stalin or other evil men such as the cruel bunch of thugs who run Myanmar (aka Burma) and often force parents to watch their children being executed as a sadistic form of punishment. So why are we so reluctant to condemn such hideous acts undertaken in the name of God?

Could it just be that the terrorism of jihad and car bombs is working? Hitler, Stalin and their friends can’t hurt us from the grave and it is extremely unlikely that either the Burmese government or some tin pot dictator like Robert Mugabe will bother to come looking for us. However, criticize the cruel beasts who cause so much pain and misery in the name of Islam and you just have to wait for a fatwa to be issued against you – just ask Sir Salman Rushdie.

So if next week I’m found at the bottom of the Mdina bastion there’ll be no need to ask why.

* * *

Britain is battered and boozed

Since the New Labour government introduced 24-hour drinking in Britain just over a year ago, the once respected nation has become even more battered by booze violence. Drunks were involved in more than a million assaults as an adult was attacked every 12 seconds, a statistic which was only beaten by the 10 seconds taken between vandalism attacks on private property.

Moreover, such violence is no longer a male preserve with drunken girls gouging eyes and hair pulling as they roll over in the gutter, ripping each other’s clothes off much to the amusement of the gathering drunken crowd who usually make no effort to stop such entertainment. That’s left until the over-stretched police arrive.

This is a far cry from the crime free café style culture that former Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell promised when she declared that the new Licensing Act was a “serious piece of legislation intended to improve the quality of life and curb crime”. Personally, I would think twice about allowing this woman to run the police station in Mdina but obviously Britain’s new Fat Controller and Premier Gordon Brown, has other ideas as she is now in charge of the already amazingly over budget 2112 Olympics. Surprised?

Well you shouldn’t be as she belongs to a government where half the Cabinet has already admitted to having dabbled with drugs while others have obvious drink problems, which is more than evident as one sees them almost permanently propping up one of the many bars in the House of Commons.

Paceville may have its own share of drunken sleaze too, but happily it has more in common with a monastery than a British town, and perhaps the Maltese government compares favourably to its former colonial masters as well. Churchill must be spinning in his grave.

* * *

Could we really be on the verge of world peace?

In this world where the poor get poorer while the rich get richer and cultural and religious doctrines seriously divide the east from the west, could there be any hope of avoiding eventual global destruction? Can the fat, lazy, lawless and thoroughly immoral “free world” and the religious zealots of a hijacked Islam be prevented from eventually tearing each other apart and ending the world just as St Paul predicted in Timothy 3: 1-4?

Well, if the self-opinionated and widely admired feminist columnists from just about every publication across Europe and the USA are to be believed the answer could be yes. For the last 30 years these self-righteous hack hags have been universally boasting that a world run by women would be free from war and violence; that men come from Mars, women from Venus and that women with their multi-tasking brains and compassionate hearts would soon put the world to rights.

Well we may just be about to find out. Mrs Hillary Clinton, known affectionately as “the Witch of Whitewater” in Washington, just might become the next President of the United States; Benazir Bhutto could easily be re-instated as Prime Minister of Pakistan this year; Harriet Harman is the new Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the UK; India chose the 72-year-old Pratibha Patil to be its first woman president recently; while in France Rachida Dati is the new justice minister and of course Germany already has a lady as its chancellor in Angela Merkel. So girl power is really on the increase. Of course, it’s not in a majority across the world yet but India, Pakistan, Germany, and the USA in particular, will play very significant roles in raising the future prospects of a lasting peace for a world so obviously hell-bent on self-destruction.

So girls over to you as none of us can wait to see harmony and happiness bursting out all over. However, given the performance of Condoleezza Rice for the Bush administration and those of Tessa Jowell, Ruth Kelly, Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman and other “Blair Babes” in Britain, my advice to the rest of you is – don’t hold your breath.

Frankly, the only girl I would trust with world power is the lady who runs the café by Howard Gardens up in Mdina. She can kill with a stare from 20 yards and would tolerate no nonsense from the Taliban and the like – just ask some of her clients.

* * * Crazy world in brief

Police in New York report that an ice cream van selling ice cream in front of a junior high school was also offering cocaine and marijuana for sale. The school is now to be referred to as a junior high, high and even higher school.

The Taliban offered to hold talks with South Korean officials in Afghan territory regarding 21 Korean hostages they hold provided that the UN gives a guarantee that nobody kidnaps their representatives. Perhaps a tad hypocritical wouldn’t you agree?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez struts the world telling the great and the good how to run their countries while presiding over a nation of drug addicts, violent criminals and murderers – but still George Dubya haters from Hollywood queue up to meet him. A weekend as a guest in a Venezuelan jail may just make liberal nuts like Sean Penn see some sense.

In Kolkata, India, dozens of bananas failed to help a thief pass a valuable necklace he had swallowed when cornered by police. In the end a good dish of chicken, rice and local bread did the trick and Mr Mohsin was eventually caught in possession of stolen goods and now faces three years in prison following a visit to the local doctor for haemorrhoids.

And finally, in Mdina a tradesman was walking back to his van with a parking permit in his hand only to see a warden giving him a ticket. He showed the warden the permit but was told that it should have been on the windscreen so he was still issued with a ticket.

You couldn’t make up stuff like that could you?

* * *

Schoolboy hero set to take Russia on at its own game

You may recall that a fortnight ago I made reference to Russia’s increasingly hard-line attitude at home and abroad, and how that was setting it on a collision cause with Nato and perhaps even a return to the Cold War. In particular, the flea-ridden old beast has been involved in a nasty little spat with the UK over the London murder of Alexander Litvinenko and the attempted murder there of Putin critic Boris Berezovsky.

However, I can now report the once great empire nation is not in the mood to be bullied by the beast from the frozen north. The Fat Controller from Scotland Gordon Brown has decided to take his own hard line and appoint schoolboy David Milliband Minor, aged 14½, as his new British Foreign Secretary. The fresh-faced boy wonder resigned as Captain of the Harrow cricket team in order to concentrate on his new role while still studying for his GCSEs. He is the youngest Foreign Secretary to hold office since Charles II’s bastard son, Little Lord Zizzi, held the post in 1663 aged 27 months.

On taking up his post, “Shortie”, as he is known to his family, immediately announced that if Putin and his KGB mates were to expel any more British diplomats for being cunning spies, when everybody knows, even his dog knew, that Britain only has rather silly public schoolboy spies, he would be left with no alternative but to send in James Bond, Harry Potter and Heather Mills McCartney to sort out the Kremlin. The latter in particular should have little Putin shaking in his boots.

Men have run away to join the French Foreign Legion rather than be stuck with her – just ask world heritage treasure and national saint Sir Paul McCartney.