The end of a 1000 years of history.
Sold out to Europe by generations of weak, lying leaders
The drive by the Eurocrats to impose the Lisbon Treaty has made a mockery of democracy. The Labour Government promised the British electorate a referendum but disgracefully reneged on that pledge. Hugh Gaitskell would have been outraged by Brown’s refusal to keep his word. In his great 1962 speech he said that British people had to be consulted about their future in Europe. The belief that the political élite knew best, he argued, “was an odious piece of hypocritical, supercilious, arrogant rubbish”.
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WE will lose any vestige of control over our borders, our justice system and our foreign policy
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Our national embassies will be soon be superseded by those of the EU, while our Army will be subsumed within the new European Defence Force. EU control of all environmental policy will mean sweeping new regulations on everything from bin collections to petrol prices.
For the first time the EU will have the power to raise its own taxes, bringing another heavy financial burden on the already oppressed British public.
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Already 80 per cent of our laws are dictated by the EU. Lisbon will make Westminster redundant as an institution, there will be a Europe-wide police force, complete with all the sinister intrusive powers of the modern surveillance state.
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We can be sure that the fashionable ideology of political correctness will be rigorously enforced by our European masters, crushing the rich heritage of our Christian civilisation in the name of diversity. It is no coincidence that on the very day that the Lisbon Treaty was finally ratified by all 27 member states, the European Court ruled that crucifixes had to be banned in Italian schools for fear of offending minorities.
The definition of dictatorship is the inability to remove from power those who govern us, no matter how corrupt or authoritarian they are. That is exactly what the post-Lisbon EU will be like, wielding unprecedented authority but accountable to none, insulated by privilege and riddled with abuses
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But now, without even a whimper, our politicians have thrown away our democratic liberties. What is even worse, the entire saga of our relationship with the EU has been based on the cynical deception of the public by the political establishment.
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"The demise of a once- great nation has arrived without a vote being cast or a bullet fired.
Phyllis Chesler on A Lesson Learned in Kabul
Once, long ago, I was held captive in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Yes, I went there of my own free will, but I was only 20 years old and in love with my college sweetheart
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If one survives such a grand and dangerous adventure, one learns some important lessons.
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Thus, at too young an age, I already understood that barbarism and hatred of the Other is indigenous to Islam; it is not caused by Western “evil.” Intra-tribal and religious-sect feuding is a permanent way of life in the wild, wild East.
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I could never get anyone in the American civil rights, anti-war, feminist, or post-colonialist movements to understand this. They needed to blame the Big Bad West for the world’s problems. They also needed to identify the developing world as intrinsically innocent, pure, victimized.
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My people: Western feminists, leftists, gay liberationists, progressives, absolutely refuse to stand up to Islam’s subordination and bestial persecution of women, dissidents, and homosexuals. The same activists who easily condemn Christianity and Judaism as “misogynists” are hushed about Islamic misogyny in practice.
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Now I and a handful of others are trying to tell the truth about Islamic gender apartheid. Those of us who are raising the alarm are being demonized as “Islamophobes,” “racists,” and “fascists.” Yet, in my opinion, western civilization, beginning with Europe, will be won or lost on the issue of women’s rights.
What happened in Britain that in that once great democracy, one-fifth of the electorate would consider voting for the BNP, a genuine fascist party?
Shannon Love on The Collapse of the British Liberal Order
liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.
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The major problem in resisting authoritarian orders is the simple fact that they usually work quite well in the short term. In the 1920s, Mussolini was widely admired across the political spectrum for saving Italy from imploding after years of red socialist strikes and violence had all but shut down the country. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression spectacularly. The communists did manage to rapidly industrialize peasant economies (albeit at a staggering cost in lives).
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The BNP could very well rise to power by quickly and easily fixing problems that many Britons see going unaddressed by the left.
Britain faces major problems with a permanent economic underclass, low economic mobility, illegal immigration and a large, vocal and often violent unassimilated Islamic subculture. The native working class in particular feels squeezed by economic competition from low-cost immigrants. More importantly, they have seen themselves relegated in social status to the bottom of the heap.
So who lost Britain? The Labour Party, once home to the working class.
Labour wanted mass immigration to make Britain more multicultural says former Labour advisor
The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
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He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".
Melanie Phillips writes The outrageous truth slips out: Labour cynically plotted to transform the entire make-up of Britain without telling us
There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.
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Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather's eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen - and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters.
David Pryce Jones on Nick Griffin, the BNP leader
Griffin is far from a Hitler or Mussolini, far even from suitably streamlined European fascists of today like Jorg Haidar or Jean-Marie Le Pen. Overweight, he waddles. His face seems designed to be incapable of smiling, and he has no humour, no powers of persuasion, no gift for repartee. This glum figure is undoubtedly a racist, an anti-Semite, an ignoramus, and a liar about the unsavory things he has done and said on his way towards the top of the BNP.
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Griffin has only one point to make, namely that immigration is out of control and British people no longer feel that this is their country.
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Nobody seems to have worked out that mass immigration and the welfare state are incompatible. British people see immigrants receiving benefits, housing, and the rest of it on a scale that is neither deserved nor available to them. Post-war governments, whether Conservative or Labour, have created this confusion and taken every measure to pretend either that it is not happening or that it doesn't matter.
Mike McNally on Britain's New Star on the Far, Far Right
The BNP speaks to the white working classes, a constituency which feels increasingly alienated, neglected, and abandoned by a “New” Labour party which once drew the bulk of its support from those same people. In broad terms, these are people who feel left behind by the pace of social and economic change. They are concerned about the erosion of what they see as their British identity under a government obsessed with promoting multiculturalism. More pressingly, they feel under pressure from mass immigration [3], angered by the continuing transfer of political power away from their elected leaders and into the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats of the European Union, concerned by rising crime, and alarmed by the spread of Islamic extremism.
Labour long ago lost the big battles of economic ideas to the Conservatives, but Britain’s cultural establishment has succeeded in making left-wing and “progressive” views on immigration, Europe, and crime the orthodoxy of the ruling classes, despite their unpopularity at the ballot box. (A former Labour advisor recently revealed how Tony Blair and his ministers encouraged mass immigration to socially engineer a “multicultural” Britain and “rub the right’s noses in diversity.”)
Be Afraid—Be Very Afraid by David P. Goldman
The horror-film genre is multiplying like one of its own monsters, showing six-fold growth over the past decade—turning what used to be a Hollywood curiosity into a mainstream product. Not only the volume of films but their cruelty has increased, with explicit torture now a screen staple.
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But there is a pattern to the highs and lows of the horror genre that may reflect something specific about Hollywood’s feeding of the mood of the United States—something about America’s encounter with truly horrible events, from the Second World War through Vietnam and down to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the lingering conflict in Iraq. Terror loiters in dark corners just off the public square.
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Subgenres such as erotic horror (mainly centered on vampires) and torture (the Saw series, for example) dig deep into the vulnerabilities of the adolescent psyche. Given the success of these films over the past ten years, the number of Americans traumatizing themselves voluntarily is larger by an order of magnitude than it has ever been before.
Daniel Johnson reviews Christopher Caldwell's new book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.
In June 2009, an incident took place at Conway Hall in London’s Red Lion Square, the hallowed venue of secular leftist gatherings since the 1930s. Anjem Choudary, a radical Muslim preacher and leader of the Islamist organization al-Muhajiroun, was ejected after his followers attempted to segregate male and female members of the audience for a public debate. Choudary told the assembled media in the street outside: “This country is rife with social and economic problems and only Islam has the answer. Muslims are multiplying at a rate eight times faster than the kaffir. In a couple of generations this will be a Muslim country, inshallah. We will dominate this country, my brothers, and implement the beauty and perfection of Islam.” Al--Muhajiroun members greeted the speech with cheers and cries of “God is great” and “Sharia for the UK.” The crowd included Simon Keeler, the first white British Muslim convert convicted of inciting terrorism.
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Caldwell’s revolution, on the other hand, does not look like the parent of a new settlement—unless it be the caliphate. He himself doubts whether Europe has the moral courage to win over its new immigrant populations in the contest for allegiance. He concludes on a pessimistic note: “For now, Islam is the stronger party in that contest, in an obvious demographic way and in a less obvious philosophical way. Words like ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ mean little when an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines. It is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”
From Dwight Garner's review, A Turning Ride in Europe as Islam Gains Ground of Christopher Caldwell's new book.
Through decades of mass immigration to Europe’s hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are “patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street.'
"Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West" (Christopher Caldwell)
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Muslim cultures “have historically been Europe’s enemies, its overlords, or its underlings,” he deposes. “Europe is wagering that attitudes handed down over the centuries, on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear. That is probably not a wise wager.”
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The problem, in Mr. Caldwell’s view, is less about sheer numbers than cultural divergence. What’s happening in Europe is not the creation of an American-style melting pot, he writes, because Muslims are not melting in. They are instead forming what he calls “a parallel society.” Newcomers to England now listen to Al Jazeera, not the BBC. They are hesitant to serve in their adopted country’s militaries. (As of 2007, Mr. Caldwell notes, there were only 330 Muslims in Britain’s armed forces.) Worse, these immigrants are bringing anti-Semitism back to Europe.
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The most chilling observation in Mr. Caldwell’s book may be that the debate over Muslim immigration in Europe is one that the continent can’t openly have, because anyone remotely critical of Islam is branded as Islamophobic. Europe’s citizens — as well as its leaders, its artists and, crucially, its satirists — are scared to speak because of a demonstrated willingness by Islam’s fanatics to commit violence against their perceived opponents. There exists, Mr. Caldwell writes, a kind of “standing fatwa” against Islam’s critics.
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It is hard to argue with his ultimate observation about Europe today: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture” (Europe’s) “meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines” (Islam’s), “it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”
After reading David Warren's latest column, I had to learn more about Tomas Masaryk the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, a statesman, philosopher and sociologist, who had a most remarkable and exemplary life.
Karl Popper, The Prague Lecture 1994
60 years ago, there lived in the Hradcany Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the great founder of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and its Liberator President. I deeply admire Masaryk. He was one of the most important pioneers of what I have called, one or two years after Masaryk's death, the Open Society. He was a pioneer of an open society, both in theory and in practice; indeed, the greatest of its pioneers between Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.
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Never was a new state – after all, the result of a revolution – so peaceful and so successful, and so much the creative achievement of one man. And all this was not due to the absence of great difficulties; it was the result of Masaryk, s philosophy, his wisdom and his personality in which personal courage, and truthfulness, and openness, played so conspicuous a role.
According to Wikipedia, his doctoral essay at the University of Vienna, was on the phenomenon of suicide which became a book, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization and that is what David Warren references in The killing fields.
That suicide is the ultimate subjective act, and thus, in effect, the final act of narcissism, was among the striking observations of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.
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It was Masaryk's thesis that suicide rates, already at historical highs, and climbing, in the more industrially advanced parts of Europe by the 1880s, would continue to rise through the decades ahead, with decreasing religiosity and increasing modernization.
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This was not so much a question of religious denomination, as of religious practice. There would be a rough, inverse correlation between church attendance and the suicide rate. Later statistical studies have borne this out, and Masaryk thus stands among the few sociologists whose work retains any empirical value.
Masaryk grasped the difference between depression and hopelessness, which we like to slur over today. Depression only makes one accident-prone; the real self-killer is the absence of hope for the future. This is a distinction that has been vindicated in psychiatric studies of the dying; it points directly to a dimension of human life that is irreducibly moral and religious.
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People kill themselves for all sorts of stated reasons, but what goads one man to suicide goads another to renewed life, and the only sound predictor is religious formation.
That's an astounding conclusion, "what goads one man to suicide goads another to renewed life" and the only sound predictor is religious formation. Without formation in and practice of a religion, one has no tools to battle despair, meaninglessness and hopelessness.
Warren himself concludes in a column whose main focus is euthanasia, the euphemism for murder.
The many symptoms of civilizational decay that lay partly concealed beneath the surface of society only recently came into full view, in the open pornography, the open nihilism, the despairing flippancy, visible throughout our contemporary public life. But the pond was long draining, and it is only now we see fish flopping in the mud.
Euthanasia is the final "life issue," the clincher for what the last pope called "the culture of death." Even when legalizing abortion, we agreed only to the slaughter of human beings we could not see. It was still possible to look away, to pretend we were not killing "real people," only "potential people." But when we embrace so-called "mercy killing," we embrace slaughter not only for the sick and old, but ultimately, the "option" of easy suicide for ourselves. It will be hard to go lower.
This is great news.
Dramatic discovery by Jewish-American scientists could change world; anti-radiation medication proves effective, safe in tests. Further experiments to be fast tracked, FDA approval possible within 1-2 years
The ground-breaking medication, developed by Professor Andrei Gudkov – Chief Scientific Officer at Cleveland BioLabs - may have far-reaching implications on the balance of power in the world, as states capable of providing their citizens with protection against radiation will enjoy a significant strategic advantage vis-à-vis their rivals.
For Israel, the discovery marks a particularly dramatic development that could deeply affect the main issue on the defense establishment's agenda: Protection against a nuclear attack by Iran or against "dirty bomb" attacks by terror groups.
Gudkov's discovery may also have immense implications for cancer patients by enabling doctors to better protect patients against radiation. Should the new medication enable cancer patients to be treated with more powerful radiation, our ability to fight the disease could greatly improve.
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'Stable, safe, and easy to inject'
The company's subcontractor in Europe is already prepared to embark on mass production. Meanwhile, emergency regulations in Israel allow the government to purchase drugs on short notice, even if they are still in the process of being approved. Notably, the medication in question is not a vaccine, but rather, a preventative drug administered via one or several shots.
The medication works by suppressing the "suicide mechanism" of cells hit by radiation, while enabling them to recover from the radiation-induced damages that prompted them to activate the suicide mechanism in the first plac
Thaddeus J. Kozinski calls the Pope A new St Benedict for the new Dark Ages
We tend to associate barbarism with images of primitive savages looting and pillaging villages, razing the walls of cities, and enslaving women and children. However, the Holy Father is suggesting here an entirely new kind of barbarism, one with a distinctly spiritual character. Civility is the quality of soul and society by which we recognize not only that other people exist, but also that they have the right to our courtesy, dignity, and respect. Civilization, then, as the opposite of barbarism, is founded upon the recognition of the dignity and rights of the other. Thus, a culture in which "the highest goals [are] one’s ego and one’s own desires" is the very definition of barbaric.
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Today’s barbarism is of a distinctly spiritual nature. It is not so much a physical as a philosophical barbarism that has overtaken Western culture, a barbarism of the soul that is camouflaged by a quite "civilized" bodily façade.
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The philosophical barbarian does not wish to have any external demands imposed upon him, for he desires all of reality to conform to his presuppositions, prejudices, and plans. He is unwilling to open his soul fully to the objects and entities around him, for he does not trust that any good will come to himself from such vulnerability. Instead of accepting the imposition of an objectively real world with infinite plenitude and profundity, he imposes upon it his paltry perspective, thereby rejecting a rich, resplendent reality for a scanty and superficial one. He reduces reality to the size of his shrunken soul. Since the less there is to know, the less there is to love, the end result of this barbaric state of soul, tantamount to staring at one’s spiritual navel, is perpetual, relentless boredom.
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Boredom is the telltale sign of the starving soul, and today’s barbarians are starving for the two staple soul-foods: knowledge and community. Modern secular culture feeds its denizens plenty of "knowledge" in the form of technological know-how, scientific facts, ephemeral trivia, and politically correct aphorisms, but this is paltry fare with little nutritional value compared to the sumptuous banquet of truth they could have if they only recognized their hunger for it: they desire "know-how" regarding their souls; they pine for the meaning of things, not just for facts; they yearn to partake in the complex and elegant conversation with "the best that has been thought and said" that we call the Great Books, not politicized and pre-digested cant.
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Most of all, these barbarians are starving for friendship, for intimacy, for communion. Growing up in dysfunctional families as orphans in their own homes, in neighborhoods where no one knows each other, in rootless communities in perpetual emigration, and in cities and suburbs where the empty blandishments of consumerism and mall shopping are what passes for festival; their desire for authentic friendship—to know and be known—has become rapacious.
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Caritas in Veritate, "Charity in Truth." Our new Benedict’s encyclical is out, and its essential message, the power of love in truth and truth in love, when practiced, is precisely what could convert us love-sick and truth-starved barbarians.
IN the years following his presidency, Thomas Jefferson had time to contemplate more deeply on freedom and reflect on the importance of education of the citizenry.
He wrote in 1810 in a letter to William Duane, "The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom."
Elsewhere he wrote in a letter to Charles Yancey in 1816, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
All of which makes even more alarming a recent survey of Arizona high school students who were asked basic questions of citizenship that are asked in the test given to candidates for U.S. citizenship. Only 3.5% of the public high school students passed!
• More than 70 percent of Arizona high school students were unable to identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
• 75 percent were unable to correctly identify the first 10 amendments to the Constitution as “The Bill or Rights".
• More than two-thirds of the students surveyed could not identify the two parts of the U.S. Congress.
• Half of the public school students surveyed could not identify the two political parties in the U.S.
• Eighty-five percent of students surveyed did not know the length of a term of office for a U.S. Senator.
• Only 26 percent of students correctly answered “the President” when asked who is in charge of the Executive Branch of government
• Only 26.5 percent of students identified the first President of the United States as George Washington.
God help us if our schools can not educate students in the most basic elements of our history or the responsibilities of citizenship. People are losing the true sense of freedom as a call to personal responsibility not escape from it.
When Pope Benedict visited the U.S. and spoke at the White House last year, he spoke of freedom in a fresh way.
"Freedom is not only a gift, but also a summons to personal responsibility. ...The preservation of freedom calls for the cultivation of virtue, self-discipline, sacrifice for the common good and a sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate. It also demands the courage to engage in civic life and to bring one's deepest beliefs and values to reasoned public debate. In a word, freedom is ever new. It is a challenge held out to each generation, and it must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Few have understood this as clearly as the late Pope John Paul II. In reflecting on the spiritual victory of freedom over totalitarianism in his native Poland and in eastern Europe, he reminded us that history shows, time and again, that "in a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation," and a democracy without values can lose its very soul. Those prophetic words in some sense echo the conviction of President Washington, expressed in his Farewell Address, that religion and morality represent "indispensable supports" of political prosperity. values can lose its very soul. Those prophetic words in some sense echo the conviction of President Washington, expressed in his Farewell Address, that religion and morality represent "indispensable supports" of political prosperity.
When it comes to personal behaviour we have now come to believe that there is no right and wrong. Instead, there are choices.
So writes Jonathan Sacks across the pond in Credo: Without a shared moral code there can be no freedom in our society.
What has been lost is trust — our trust in those we chose to look after our affairs — and trust is the basis of society. If we are to recover it, we must ask some deep questions.
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I believe we have lost our traditional sense of morality. I do not mean that we are less moral than our grandparents. We care about things they hardly thought about: world poverty, inequality, global warming and the loss of biodiversity. We are more tolerant than they were.
But note this: the things we care about are vast, distant, global, remote. They are problems that require the co-ordinated action of millions, perhaps billions of people. The difference we as individuals can make to any one of them is minimal. That does not mean they are not important: they are. But they are issues of politics, not of morality in the conventional sense.
When it comes to personal behaviour we have now come to believe that there is no right and wrong. Instead, there are choices. The market facilitates those choices. The State handles the consequences, picking up the pieces when they go wrong.
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Without conscience there can be no trust. Without a shared moral code there can be no free society. Either we recover the moral sense or we will find, too late, that in the name of liberty, we have lost our freedom.
Roger Scruton on Beauty and its corruptions
Kitsch is a mould that settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in. It is not only Christian civilisation that has undergone kitschification in recent times. Equally evident has been the kitschification of Hinduism and its culture. Massproduced Ganeshas have knocked the subtle temple sculpture from its aesthetic pedestal; in bunjee music the talas of Indian classical music are blown apart by tonal harmonies and rhythm machines; in literature the sutras and puranas have been detached from the sublime vision of Brahman and reissued as childish comic-strips.
Simply put, kitsch is a disease of faith. Kitsch begins in doctrine and ideology and spreads from there to infect the entire world of culture. The Disneyfication of art is simply one aspect of the Disneyfication of faith -and both involve a profanation of our highest values. Kitsch, the case of Disney reminds us, is not an excess of feeling but a deficiency. The world of kitsch is in a certain measure a heartless world, in which emotion is directed away from its proper target towards sugary stereotypes, permitting us to pay passing tribute to love and sorrow without the trouble of feeling them.
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The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies. Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.
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To point to this feature of our condition is not to issue an invitation to despair. It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only -- or even at all -- in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way. The art, literature and music of our civilisation remind them of this, and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial. And that, in a nutshell, is what beauty teaches us.
Fyodor Dostoevsky once made an enigmatic remark, "Beauty will save the world" about which Alexander Solzhenitsyn organized his Nobel Lecture on Literature in 1970
And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable,
unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.
And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy. After all, he was given the gift of seeing much, he was extraordinarily illumined.
And consequently perhaps art, literature, can in actual fact help the world of today.
The great holiday weekend of the summer approaches and everyone is making plans to celebrate the 4th of July.
But in Hawaii, there's a great deal of apprehension ever since reports emerged that North Korea may fire a long-range ballistic missile toward Hawaii in early July.
Now with a crazy madman in North Korea, Pakistan in turmoil and the security of its nuclear missiles uncertain, and Iran determined to go forward, despite all objections, to arm itself with nuclear weapons, it is clear that the nuclear threat is graver than it has ever been before. Some might argue that the Cold War was worse, but MAD or mutually assured destruction worked. The Soviets were rational; something that can not be said of Iran and North Korea.
The much-derided anti-missle defense technology, dubbed 'Star Wars', has proven in tests to be increasingly effective.
And in my mind, just in time. Of all the programs to cut then, why was missile defense chosen?
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said last week that U.S. would deploy ground and sea-based missile defense assets to protect Hawaii just in case.
But an editorial in the Washington Times says
new information suggests that the administration is bluffing and our defenses are inadequate to get the job done.
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The Obama administration also has cut funding for the European missile-defense shield, leaving our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic in the lurch after they took a major political risk to support the program
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The Obama administration's hostility to missile defense is inexplicable. The missile threat is growing, and defensive technology is increasingly effective, yet the Obama team has dug in stubbornly behind a losing strategy that emboldens our enemies and places us in greater danger. No wonder Hawaiians are nervous.
According to his own bio, Takuan Seiyo
was born in Communist Eastern Europe and socialized there and then in Switzerland, France and elsewhere. He received his university education and was naturalized in the United States, but interest in some aspects of the Japanese culture took him eventually to Japan, where he now lives. He describes himself as bi-racial, tri-national, quadri-degreed, quinti-lingual and sexto-ethnic.
Maybe that's why he is such an original voice and one of the strongest against the galloping lunacy all over the world.
He's not for everyone, but he's worth reading for his thoughts on why Western civilization is so imperiled and seemingly so helpless at the threats that aim to destroy it.
At the Brussels Journal is his multi-part series called From Meccania to Atlantis., Part 12 is called Swallowed by Leviathan.
His basic thesis is that "podism" is like a mental virus
programmed for white people’s (2) collective guilt and self-loathing, irrational and false assumptions about the superior virtue and moral deservedness of nonwhites, nondiscrimination as the highest value, ahistorical and utopian delusions, and the conviction that the road to universal peace and brotherhood hinges on the unilateral self-disablement of the West’s collective survival mechanism and the disablement of autochthon Westerners’ individual (3) survival mechanisms as well.
In more new-agey terms
Another way of putting it is that after decades of promoting yin (i.e. the cosmic female element) and suppressing yang (i.e. the cosmic male element), the West now suffers from yin toxemia. As per Chinese Taoist precepts, this produces an overabundance of the soft, wet, squishy, sweet, flabby, irrational, diffuse energy that characterizes yin, and a shortage of the hard, dry, salty, muscular, rational and compacting male (i.e. yang) energy that could rectify this imbalance.
The yin-soaked West rests on a foundation of feelings. It feels for the plight of the female trapped in a male body, the Somali who has never seen indoor plumbing, and the abandoned son of a Kenyan exchange student who made good. That all such feelings translate into actions that dismantle the West financially, demographically and culturally no longer registers, for reason no longer registers, nor does survival. This is the age of I feel, therefore I am. The essence of yin.
The West is no longer able to deal with the abundant yang characteristics of the nonwhite, male-dominated ethnic groups – acting as “minorities” on the inside, and rogue and semi-rogue nations on the outside.
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.... the Islamic movement has turned the civility of the Western peoples into a weapon against them. It has weaponized niceness, compassion and the fundamental decency of Western Civilization. “We have become too civilized to defeat our enemies, perhaps too civilized to survive.”
Given the state of the economy and the public debts we are incurring, much less the cost of Medicare and Social Security, I predict we are just beginning to see the intergenerational conflict and struggle that's headed our way.
Here's a taste from the Daily Mail. Baby boomer generation are 'retirement aristocracy' who will make younger generations pay.
The baby boomer generation are 'retirement aristocracy' as they hold lucrative pensions that will be paid for, but unavailable to, younger workers.
People who are more than 50 years old will walk away with the most valuable pensions as they benefited from gold-plated final salary schemes while their firms could still afford them.
But now these people, who are typically in white collar management roles, have 'pulled up the ladder' to younger workers to protect their huge pots.
Younger workers are also being forced to pay the cost of maintaining final salary pensions to the dwindling band of older workers in such schemes.
And they are having to accept far less attractive pension schemes which will barely support them in retirement.
In my mind, one of the reasons American newspapers dying is that they are boring and predictable. It's rare to read such lively and scathing opinion as you can find any day in the British press.
This week, voters go to the poll to elect members of the European parliament to which Gerald Warner writes Now is the time to leave the evil empire of Europe.
The European Union is an enclosed tyranny, addicted to micromanagement of its subjects' lives and devoid of any kind of cultural coherence. It is the worst example in world history of the arrogance and wastefulness of an untrammelled bureaucracy. The greatest single step Britain could take towards freedom and self-fulfilment would be to remove itself from the control of this behemoth.
The EU, like its partner in corruption the United Nations, is a totally artificial construct. It has no roots in any real society and exists only as a vehicle for the power-hungry and the greedy to indulge their unhealthy appetites. Guarantor of European peace? Get real: who seriously believes we would have spent any part of the past 40 years at war with Germany, but for the benevolent interposition of Brussels? Metternich's Concert of Europe it is not.
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The Capital of Eurabia is Rotterdam by Sandro Magister
Here entire neighborhoods look like the Middle East, women walk around veiled, the mayor is a Muslim, sharia law is applied in the courts and the theaters. An extensive report from the most Islamized city in Europe
George Packer on The View from a Roofer's Recession via Crunchy Con
“It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug”—he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down, moved from side to side, looking anywhere but at me—“and they go, ‘Ah, ah, um, um,’ and they just mumble. They can’t talk any more.” This inadequacy with physical space and direct interaction was an affliction of the educated, he said—“the more educated, the worse.” His poorer black customers in Bedford-Stuyvesant had no such problem, and he was much happier working on their roofs, but the recession had slowed things down there and these days he was forced to deal almost entirely with the cognitively damaged educated and professional classes.
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“They hire someone—this has happened several times—so they don’t have to talk to me,” he went on, growing more animated and reddening with amazement. “It’s like they’re afraid of me! So they hire a guy who’s more comfortable dealing with a masculine-type person. I stand there and talk to the customer, and the customer doesn’t talk to me or look at me, he talks to the intermediary, and the intermediary talks to me. It’s the yuppie buffer.”
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This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer’s world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions—had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger’s symptoms
Books Out of Reach at Never Yet Melted
The Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, where many a ruminative afternoon was spent by the likes of Gladstone and Attlee, Wilde and Shelly, and Hawking and Tim Berners-Lee, has made the books in its uppermost shelves out of bounds for students—or anyone else for that matter.
The reason: three-year-old British health and safety regulations that the library’s authorities happened to trip upon recently. Better late than never, the library has deemed the use of stepladders to be too risky for a scholar’s life and limb. The momentous decision has been arrived at irrespective of the fact that in the centuries of its existence, no untoward incident is on record to have occurred in the Bodleian owing to the use of ladders for reaching books in the higher rows.
Another idiotic submission to the nanny state, better expressed by the writer of the post, David Zincavage:
The Bodleian’s high shelf books are exactly like mankind’s history, tradition, and the experience of all our deceased predecessors: out of the reach of contemporary idiots.
Walter Williams on Law vs Moral Values
A civilized society's first line of defense is not the law, police and courts but customs, traditions and moral values. Behavioral norms, mostly transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. The failure to fully transmit values and traditions to subsequent generations represents one of the failings of the so-called greatest generation.
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During the 1940s, my family lived in North Philadelphia's Richard Allen housing project. Many families didn't lock doors until late at night, if ever. No one ever thought of installing bars on their windows. Hot, humid summer nights found many people sleeping outside on balconies or lawn chairs. Starting in the '60s and '70s, doing the same in some neighborhoods would have been tantamount to committing suicide. Keep in mind that the 1940s and '50s were a time of gross racial discrimination, high black poverty and few opportunities compared to today. The fact that black neighborhoods were far more civilized at that time should give pause to the excuses of today that blames today's pathology on poverty and discrimination.
Bruce Bawer in the Wall Street Journal on Western European voters' widespread reaction against social democracy.
The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The more significant one is that over the past three decades, social-democratic Europe's political, cultural, academic and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history.
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Yet instead of encouraging these immigrants to integrate and become part of their new societies, Western Europe's governments have allowed them to form self-segregating parallel societies run more or less according to Shariah. Many of the residents of these patriarchal enclaves subsist on government benefits, speak the language of their adopted country poorly or not at all, despise pluralistic democracy, look forward to Europe's incorporation into the House of Islam, and support—at least in spirit—terrorism against the West. A 2006 Sunday Telegraph poll, for example, showed that 40% of British Muslims wanted Shariah in Britain, 14% approved of attacks on Danish embassies in retribution for the famous Mohammed cartoons, 13% supported violence against those who insulted Islam, and 20% sympathized with the July 2005 London bombers.
Too often, such attitudes find their way into practice. Ubiquitous youth gangs, contemptuous of infidels, have made European cities increasingly dangerous for non-Muslims—especially women, Jews and gays.
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Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to Shariah as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn's freedom-loving heirs?
Wired has picked up the story that I wrote about Solar Superstorms calling it The Geomagnetic Apocalypse and tells us - And How to Stop It.
For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that's exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.
Entitled "Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts," it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth's magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States "$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year," concluded the panel, and "full recovery could take four to 10 years." That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.
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Worse yet, the next period of intense solar activity is expected in 2012, and coincides with the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield, meaning we'll have less protection than usual from the solar flares.
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Wired.com talked to Joseph and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech, about the possibility of geomagnetic apocalypse — and how to stop it.
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John Kappenman: We've got a big, interconnected grid that spans across the country. Over the years, higher and higher operating voltages have been added to it. This has escalated our vulnerability to geomagnetic storms. These are not a new thing. They've probably been occurring for as long as the sun has been around. It's just that we've been unknowingly building an infrastructure that's acting more and more like an antenna for geomagnetic storms.
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What we're proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers' ground onnections. The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid.
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In its simplest form, it's something that might be made out of cast iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine.
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If you're talking about the United States, there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. The Electromagnetic Pulse Commission recommended it in a report they sent to Congress last year. We're talking about $150 million or so. It's pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
Big power lines and substations can withstand all the other known environmental challenges. The problem with geomagnetic storms is that we never really understood them as a vulnerability, and had a design code that took them into account.
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Wired.com: Can it be done in time?
Kappenman: I'm not in the camp that's certain a big storm will occur in 2012. But given time, a big storm is certain to occur in the future. They have in the past, and they will again. They're about one-in-400-year events. That doesn't mean it will be 2012. It's just as likely that it could occur next week.
I continue to remain baffled about the anxieties over climate change since that is what climates do. Far more worrying to me than the hypothetical worries about global warming, far more immediate and far more dangerous to our way of life are solar superstorms.
This catastrophe is not some academic one-in-a-million chance scenario.
It is a very real threat which, according to a report in the latest issue of New Scientist, remains one of the most potent, yet least recognised, threats to the future of human civilisation.
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Daniel Baker, a space weather expert at the University of Colorado, prepared a report for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences last month, and the conclusions make grim reading.
'Every year, our human technology becomes more vulnerable,' he says.
A repeat of the 1859 Carrington event today would have far graver consequences than the frying of some telegraph wires.
The problem comes with our dependence on electricity and the way this electricity is generated and transmitted.
A huge solar storm would cause massive power surges, amounting to billions of unwanted watts surging through the grids.
Most critically, the transformers which convert the multi-thousand-volt current carried by the pylons into 240v domestic current would melt - thousands of them, in every country.
This would bring the world to its knees. With no electricity, we would not just be in the dark.
We are dependent, to a degree few of us perhaps appreciate, on a functioning grid for our survival. All our water and sewage plants run on electricity.
A couple of days after a solar superstorm, the taps would run dry.
Within a week, we would lose all heat and light as reserves ran out, the supermarket shelves would run empty and the complex supply and distribution networks upon which our society depends would have started to break down.
No telephones, no medicines, no manufacturing, no farming - and no food.
Global communications and travel would also collapse - a solar superstorm would probably destroy the network of GPS satellites upon which every airline depends.
So could this really happen? And why is 2012 a year to worry about? Well, we know that solar superstorm did happen, back in 1859.
And we know that 20 years ago a much smaller storm knocked out the power grid across much of eastern Canada, leaving nine million people without electricity.
We also know that the Sun's activity waxes and wanes in 11-year cycles.
Currently, the Sun is very quiet. But a solar maximum - a peak of activity - is predicted for 2012, and this is when a superstorm could strike, probably around either the spring or autumn equinox, when the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field to the Sun makes us very vulnerable.
The main point is that every solar maximum puts us more in danger as our growing population becomes ever more dependent on electricity.
I'm curious as to what the government is doing to harden the electrical infrastructure.
We learned earlier this month that the electricity grid in the U.S. has been penetrated by cyberspies.
The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.
The electrical grid is the soft underbelly of our economy. What is being done to harden it?
[T]he piecemeal persecution of Christians in Britain is even more damaging—and it has now become routine.
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Jeremy Vine is a highly visible BBC broadcaster and a practicing Anglican. In a recent interview, Vine explained how difficult it had become to speak of his faith on air. It is, he claimed, now “socially unacceptable” to mention one’s Christian faith in public. Society in Britain has become intolerant of the freedom to express the religious views that were “common currency thirty or forty years ago,” Vine added. “The parameters of what you might call ‘right thinking” are closing. Sadly, it is almost socially unacceptable to say you believe in God.” All of which is unsurprising, given that last year Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC and a practicing Catholic, issued an edict stating that the BBC should treat Islam “more sensitively” than Christianity.
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The problem is that the government and media of Great Britain have put in place over the last few decades a determined program to abolish the influence of Christianity. It’s a little late now for believers to pretend surprise that such a program exists and has consequences—to be shocked that a community nurse should be fired for offering to pray for a patient or astonished that a culture that set out to devalue its values should find itself awash in crime, sex, and social discord. We need, rather, to do as the archbishop of York, John Sentamu, insisted when he asked his congregants to “wake up” and defend their faith before it is further marginalized. “Christians should reclaim,” as the Anglican bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, recently demanded, their “place in the public square.”
If people who believe in the sanctity of life don't speak up or are afraid to speak in the public square, there will be no stopping such abominations such as the recently proposed directive from the EU. EU 'to put animals before embryos'
The European Union is to radically restrict laboratory testing on animals - by insisting human embryos are used by scientists for research instead.
Toxicology tests on animals will be permitted only after similar research on tissue taken from human embryos has proved fruitless, according to a proposed new directive from the European Commission (EC).
And no one to speak out against people like Patricia Hewitt, former Health Minister under Tony Blair, who wants to see suicide/euthanasia clinics set up across the country
The future of Europe without practicing Christianity is chilling. Theodore Dalrymple in Europe is a Riot
As if this were not enough, the government has done all in its power to ensure that there are no forms of social solidarity that do not pass through a government department—it went to the trouble of de facto nationalizing all the major charities well before it nationalized the banks. Forty-two percent of British children are now born illegitimate, and at least 25 percent can expect to live in a single-parent household, while many others live with serial step-parents, which is perhaps worse still. This is not a form of family life that can exist on a mass scale without state subvention, which if suddenly withdrawn or greatly reduced would plunge large numbers of people into real poverty. It conduces to common criminality, which is now rampant in Britain.
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Not long ago, I had occasion to stay for a few weeks in a once-industrial town in the north of England. The last steel mills had just closed down. I was surprised by the elegance of much of the early 19th-century architecture, now completely overwhelmed by the brutalism of the 1960s and ’70s. The prematurely middle-aged spent their time looking for secondhand clothes in charity shops. Pawnshops had also made a big comeback. Feral young men with an expression of urban predation on their faces stood around on street corners in nylon tracksuits and hoods, muttering f---ing this and f---ing that to one another. About half the people in the street were unemployed young immigrants, mainly of Middle Eastern origin, on the lookout for a bit of small-scale trafficking. Some took advantage of free Internet access in the public library—a concrete building aesthetically suitable as the headquarters of the Stasi—to look at inflammatory political sites or to search for women.
I have seen the future, and it’s riots
The only hopeful words I could find this weekend were those of Pope Benedict in Angola at a Mass for a Million
The words which Jesus speaks in today's Gospel are quite striking: He tells us that God's sentence has already been pronounced upon this world (cf. Jn 3:19ff). The light has already come into the world. Yet men preferred the darkness to the light, because their deeds were evil. How much darkness there is in so many parts of our world! Tragically, the clouds of evil have also overshadowed Africa, including this beloved nation of Angola. We think of the evil of war, the murderous fruits of tribalism and ethnic rivalry, the greed which corrupts men's hearts, enslaves the poor, and robs future generations of the resources they need to create a more equitable and just society -- a society truly and authentically African in its genius and values. And what of that insidious spirit of selfishness which closes individuals in upon themselves, breaks up families, and, by supplanting the great ideals of generosity and self-sacrifice, inevitably leads to hedonism, the escape into false utopias through drug use, sexual irresponsibility, the weakening of the marriage bond and the break-up of families, and the pressure to destroy innocent human life through abortion?
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Yet the word of God is a word of unbounded hope. "God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son ... so that through him, the world might be saved" (Jn 3:16-17). God does not give up on us! He continues to lift our eyes to a future of hope, and he promises us the strength to accomplish it. As Saint Paul tells us in today's second reading, God created us in Christ Jesus "to live the good life", a life of good deeds, in accordance with his will (cf. Eph 2:10). He gave us his commandments, not as a burden, but as a source of freedom: the freedom to become men and women of wisdom, teachers of justice and peace, people who believe in others and seek their authentic good. God created us to live in the light, and to be light for the world around us! This is what Jesus tells us in today's Gospel: "The man who lives by the truth comes out into the light, so that it may be plainly seen that what he does is done in God" (Jn 3:21).
In the New Criterion, The lingering stench: airing Stalin's archives by Gary Saul Morson unveils the horrors of the Soviet regime.
For those who think it's cool to hang posters of Lenin, read this
And despite the desperate strategy of throwing all blame on Stalin so as to excuse Lenin, The Unknown Lenin, which reproduces a selection from some six thousand Lenin documents never before released, reveals bloodthirstiness that surprised even anti-Communists. During a famine, Lenin ordered his followers not to alleviate but to take advantage of mass starvation:
It is precisely now and only now when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.
“an (and therefore must)”: Leninist and Soviet ideology held not just that the end justifies any means, but also that it was immoral not to use the utmost cruelty if that would help. And it was bound to help in at least one way—intimidating the population. From the beginning, terror was not just an expedient but a defining feature of Soviet Communism.
In Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky was simply voicing a Bolshevik truism when he rejected “the bourgeois theory of the sanctity of human life.” In fact, Soviet ethics utterly rejected human rights, universal justice, or even basic human decency, for all concepts that apply to everyone might lead one to show mercy to a class enemy. In Bolshevism, there is no abstract justice, only “proletarian justice,” as defined by the Party.
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Perhaps the most important lesson to come from the Stalin archives is that any ideology that does not admit the existence of human nature winds up destroying not only countless lives but also the human soul.
Seeing again how easy it is to be sub human, less than human, I am reminded again that human beings are the only creatures that can fail to achieve their true nature.
In today's Britain, a woman who was raped by her father and faced a forced marriage, fled her home, became a Christian and now fears for her life.
My imam father came after me with an axe.
We are all too familiar with the persecution of Christians in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet sitting in front of me is a British woman whose life has been threatened in this country solely because she is a Christian. Indeed, so real is the threat that the book she has written about her experiences has had to appear under an assumed name.
That assumed name is Hannah Shah and her book, The Imam's Daughter, was just published in the U.K. but not yet in the U.S.
The book is called The Imam’s Daughter because “Hannah Shah” is just that: the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father emigrated to this country from rural Pakistan some time in the 1960s and is, apparently, a highly respected local figure.
He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her.
Hannah Shah says her story is not unique – that there are many other girls in British Muslim families who are oppressed and married off against their will, or who have secretly become Christians but are too afraid to speak out. She wants their voices to be heard and for Britain, the land of her birth, to realise the hidden misery of these women....
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Hannah’s description in the book of the moment when her “community” discovered the “safe” home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: “Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We’re going to rip your throat out! We’ll burn you alive!”
Does she still believe they would have killed her? “Yes, without a doubt. They had hammers and knives and axes.”
Why didn’t you call the police after-wards? “First, I didn’t think the police would believe me. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen in this country – or that’s what they’d think. Second, I didn’t believe I would get help or protection from the authorities.”
When she finally confided in a teacher that she was being beaten, still too ashamed to confide about the sexual abuse, the teacher contacted social services who sent out a social worker from her own community.
He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: “It’s not right to betray your community.
Hannah blames what is sometimes called political correctness for this debacle: “My teachers had thought they were doing the right thing, they thought it showed ‘cultural sensitivity’ by bringing in someone from my own community to ‘help’, but it was the worst thing they could have done to me. This happens a lot.
Her conversion came about because the family who sheltered her were regular church-goers.
She began to go with them and, to put it at its most banal, she liked what she heard.
“It was the emphasis on love.
The Islam that I grew up knowing and reading about doesn’t offer me love. That’s the biggest thing that Christianity can and does offer. I sense that I belong and am accepted as I am – even when I do wrong there is forgiveness, a forgiveness which Islam does not offer.”
After being invited to the House of Lords to attend a showing of his 17 minute film Fitna, Geert Wilders was denied entry into Britain
On his flight to London, he told The London Times that the British Government was “the biggest bunch of cowards in Europe..."They (the British government) are more Chamberlain than Churchill."
Why? We know why. Still, it was news to me that the CIA warned Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the U.S.
A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.
One former intelligence officer who does contract work for the CIA dismissed Britain as a "swamp" of jihadis.
Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone does not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. "We don't have anything approaching comprehensive coverage," he said.
Mike McNally on Why Britain Should Never Have Banned Geert Wilders
For the last couple of years I’ve been holding out against those who claim the spread of Islamic extremism in Britain, the reluctance of the government to combat it forcefully for fear of offending Muslims, and the reluctance of the media, legal, and political establishments to even discuss the issue spell doom for the country. My argument was that while such appeasement and cultural self-loathing make it difficult for us to win the war against the extremists, we could never lose it.
Unfortunately, it looks like we just lost.
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Our long and proud tradition of tolerance and free speech is in tatters. It’s doubtful that many of the ministers and officials involved in the decision to ban Wilders have even seen Fitna, the Internet film that shot him to notoriety. Foreign Secretary David Miliband, wheeling out the trope that “the right to free speech doesn’t include the right to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater,” claimed the film contained “extreme anti-Muslim hate.” If Miliband has seen the film, then he’s lying; if he hasn’t seen it, he’s guessing. There’s extreme hate, for sure, but it’s all coming from Muslims. Fitna uses the words of Muslims themselves, in the form of verses from the Koran and video clips of extremist preachers, juxtaposed with footage of terrorist attacks.
Things are happening on the political scene in Britain which even a few short years ago would have been unthinkable.
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He is, Jacqui Smith's Home Office pretends, nothing less than a threat to "public security."
How so? Wilders was invited by a member of the House of Lords to show their lordships his film Fitna, all seventeen minutes of it. Among the meanings of this Arabic word in Wehr's Dictionary are "sedition, riot, discord, dissension, civil strife." The film is out to show that the Qur'an contains verses that encourage these bad outcomes, setting Muslims against themselves and others. This is a serious argument, even if clips of terror outrages make the film deliberately sensational, even lurid. Unfortunately, the acts of terror are real, and readings from the Qur'an bear upon them.
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Free speech has been a particularly English glory since Milton first argued that it was a principle of freedom itself. Dissidents, rebels, and freedom fighters from Karl Marx and Mazzini to Stalin and Salman Rushdie have had the opportunity to say what they wanted, whether or not anyone disapproved. Now thanks to one Jacqui Smith, so comfortably padded by the taxpayer, this principle of freedom is suspended.
Geert Wilders faces criminal prosecution in the Netherlands for "inciting hatred and discrimination: and "insulting Muslim worshippers" through his public statements and his 2008 film Fitna as a result of pressure put on European states by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) writes Bat Yeor on Geert Wilders and the Fight for Europe
The OIC is one of the largest intergovernmental organizations in the world. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents, it claims to speak in the name of the ummah (the universal Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion. The OIC’s mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah — the core of traditional Islamic civilization and values.
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The OIC is a unique organization — one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states. By contrast, the European Union represents half as many states and is a secular body only, and the Vatican — which speaks for the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics — is devoid of any political power. Many Muslims in the West resist the OIC’s tutelage and oppose its efforts to supplant Western law with sharia. But the OIC’s resources are formidable.
Invited to visit the British House of Lords, Geert Wilders, member of the Dutch parliament, found himself being told by the British ambassador to the Netherlands, that he was not welcome, reportedly because his visit would constitute a threat to the public order.
Mr Wilders responded to the decision in fighting mood, telling Dutch media that he still intended to travel to London:“I’ll see what happens at the border. Let them put me in handcuffs.”
This is an appalling decision I can only presume was approved at the highest levels of the British government.
Indeed, here is the letter given Mr. Wilders from the British embassy
The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the Secretary of State is of the view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.
Melanie Philips tells it like it is
So let’s get this straight. The British government allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the west from religious fascism.
It is he, not them, who is considered a ‘serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society’. Why? Because the result of this stand for life and liberty against those who would destroy them might be an attack by violent thugs. The response is not to face down such a threat of violence but to capitulate to it instead.
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Wilders is a controversial politician, to be sure. But this is another fateful and defining issue for Britain’s governing class as it continues to sleepwalk into cultural suicide. If British MPs do not raise hell about this banning order, if they go along with this spinelessness, if they fail to stand up for the principle that the British Parliament of all places must be free to hear what a fellow democratically elected politician has to say about one of the most difficult and urgent issues of our time, if they fail to hold the line against the threat of violence but capitulate to it instead, they will be signalling that Britain is no longer the cradle of freedom and democracy but its graveyard.
The effects of the world wide financial crisis are revealing deep strains on peaceful civil society. I am afraid this is just the beginning.
Muslim population 'rising 10 times faster than the rest of society'
The Muslim population in Britain has grown by more than 500,000 to 2.4 million in just four years, according to official research collated for The Times.
The population multiplied 10 times faster than the rest of society, the research by the Office for National Statistics reveals. In the same period the number of Christians in the country fell by more than 2 million.
David Coleman, Professor of Demography at Oxford University, said: “The implications are very substantial. Some of the Muslim population, by no means all of them, are the least socially and economically integrated of any in the United Kingdom ... and the one most associated with political dissatisfaction.
You can feel the testosterone and more in the air as Muslim youths, 'peace' protestors, shouting Allah Akbar chase London policemen down the street.
Video at Harry's place.
It's hard to make any sense of this - Nurse suspended for offering to pray for patient's recovery.
At last week's hour-long meeting, Mrs Petrie says she was told the patient had said she was not offended by the prayer offer but the woman argued that someone else might have been.
In too many places, the right not to be offended has trumped both freedoms of religion and speech. What results is 'thought police'.
Nat Hentoff points out what little notice was paid to the U.N. Resolution on December 18, 2008.
In an 83 to 53 vote, with 42 abstentions, the U.N. General Assembly urged nations to provide "adequate protections" in their laws or constitutions against "acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general."
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Only Islam and Muslims are specifically named in this resolution against religious defamation, sponsored by Uganda on behalf of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, and cosponsored by Belarus and Venezuela. Opponents included the United States, a majority of European countries, Japan and India.
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Floyd Abrams, the nation's leading protector of the First Amendment in the Supreme Court and in his writings. In his Dec. 9 lecture on global communications, issues at the United Nations itself in New York, he cited a recent study by the European Center for Law and Justice finding "that laws based on the concept of 'defamation of religion' actually help to create a climate of violence."
"Violators of these laws, as applied in most Muslim countries, are subject to the death penalty,
Last week we learned about the two grandparents who had cared for their 5-year-old grandson and 3-year-old granddaughter almost since birth because their mother was a drug addict were considered by social services 'too old' at 59 and 46 to care for them adequately. The children were removed and placed in foster care in preparation for adoption by a gay couple over the objections of their mother who wants their grandparents to raise them.
They were stripped of their carer's rights and informed they would be barred from seeing the children altogether unless they agreed to the same-sex adoption.
The distraught grandfather said: "It breaks my heart to think that our grandchildren are being forced to grow up in an environment without a mother-figure.
"We are not prejudiced, but I defy anyone to explain to us how this can be in their best interests. The ideal for any child is to have a loving father and a loving mother in their lives."
Peter Hitchens writes about how bad it is.
If I never again had to read or write a word about homosexuals, I would be very happy. I really don't want to know what other people do in their bedrooms. But these days they really, really want us all to know. And, more important, they insist that we approve. No longer are we allowed to keep our thoughts to ourselves, while being polite and kind.
We are forced to say that we think homosexuality is a good thing, that homosexual couples are equal in all ways to heterosexual married couples. Most emphatically, we are compelled to agree that homosexual couples are just as good at bringing up children as the children's own grandparents. Better, in fact.
Many people who believe nothing of the kind now know that their careers in politics, the media, the Armed Services, the police or schools will be ruined if they ever let their true opinions show. I am sure that many of them regularly lie about their views, to avoid such trouble.
We cringe to the new Thought Police, like the subjects of some insane, sex-obsessed Stalinist state, compelled to wave our little rainbow flags as the 'Gay Pride' parade passes by.
A brave speech by a brave man. Geert Wilders in New York last September on America as the last man standing
Wilders has been a member of the Dutch parliament since 1998. Trained as a lawyer, his first film Fitna, only 16 minutes long, became the subject of world-wide controversy before it was even seen.
Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, described Fitna thus
The main part of it features a series of quotations from the Qur’an, followed by scenes of violent acts committed by Muslims.
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The core objection to the film was that it linked Islam with violence.
And that points up the odd myopia of virtually all of the objections to Fitna. It was not Geert Wilders, but the many Muslims he shows in his film, who link Islam with violence. And that link has already been made innumerable times around the world — by Islamic jihad warriors, not by non-Muslim “Islamophobes.” Omar Bakri, once the leading jihadist in Britain but now in exile from the Sceptered Isle, even went so far as to say that with a few small edits, Fitna “could be a film by the Mujahideen.”
On January 21, 2009, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ordered the criminal prosecution of Geert Wilders for insulting Islam. Some say he went too far when he likened the Koran to Mein Kampf. For Americans, who enjoy an almost absolute freedom under the First Amendment, it's hard to conceive anyone being criminally charged for political speech, especially in a western democracy.
As someone remarked, Wilders is under 24 hour police protection because of threats on his life by violent Islamists, yet Wilders is criminally charged for expressing his opinion on violent Islam.
Bruce Bawer had this to say about the charge.
But Wilders—who for years now has lived under 24-hour armed guard—would not be gagged. Thus the disgraceful decision to put him on trial. In Dutch Muslim schools and mosques, incendiary rhetoric about the Netherlands, America, Jews, gays, democracy, and sexual equality is routine; a generation of Dutch Muslims are being brought up with toxic attitudes toward the society in which they live. And no one is ever prosecuted for any of this. Instead, a court in the Netherlands—a nation once famous for being an oasis of free speech—has now decided to prosecute a member of the national legislature for speaking his mind. By doing so, it proves exactly what Wilders has argued all along: that fear and “sensitivity” to a religion of submission are destroying Dutch freedom.
Here's what Geert Wilders said last September
I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The danger I see looming is the scenario of America as the last man standing. The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe. In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: who lost Europe?
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Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam, Marseille and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighbourhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities. In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims. In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can in many cases no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity. In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighbourhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves.
Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe’s children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.
This is not the first time our civilization is under threat. We have seen dangers before. We have been betrayed by our elites before. They have sided with our enemies before. And yet, then, freedom prevailed.
Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club brings more news of the craziness that has infected the British government.
WRAP your head around this. The Telegraph reports that “food champions” will literally be coming to homes in Britain to make sure they don’t throw away leftovers, eat spoiled groceries and do not otherwise harm the planet.
Home cooks will also be told what size portions to prepare, taught to understand “best before” dates and urged to make more use of their freezers.
The door-to-door campaign, which starts tomorrow, will be funded by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a Government agency charged with reducing household waste.
The officials will be called “food champions”. However, they were dismissed last night as “food police” by critics who called the scheme an example of “excessive government nannying”.
But it's not just the government.
some restaurants in Britain are using CCTV cameras to gather evidence against diners who complain about poor food and service in their establishments. One woman, sent a letter complaining of bad food, poor service and high prices said, “she was left astonished by the restaurant’s response. Simon Offen, the catering manager, emailed her to say he disputed her version of events after he had ‘watched and listened with interest to the video recording of her table’.” The British Hospitality Association believed the practice of recording the mastications of diners at their tables “odd”.
And now – metaphorically and literally – we may be losing it. Seen from the perspective of the non-westerner, this may be a good thing (though I doubt we are moving into a new era of opportunity for the wretched of the earth), but most of us will not like it. "Oh, lucky Granny and Grandpa!" our future grandchildren may say: "They were Elizabethans."
It was a golden Elizabethan Age - we won't see its like again
Another idiotic decision in England, this time by Oxford University Press.
Words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary.
Oxford University Press has removed words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire" and "monarch" from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like "blog", "broadband" and "celebrity". Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled.
The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.
But academics and head teachers said that the changes to the 10,000 word Junior Dictionary could mean that children lose touch with Britain's heritage.
"We have a certain Christian narrative which has given meaning to us over the last 2,000 years. To say it is all relative and replaceable is questionable," said Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment at Buckingham University. "The word selections are a very interesting reflection of the way childhood is going, moving away from our spiritual background and the natural world and towards the world that information technology creates for us."
Among the words taken out:
Carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe
Dwarf, elf, goblin
Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar
Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade
adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.
Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow.
Words put in:
Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue
Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro
Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph.
Hat tip: Tom Gross who calls it '"cultural suicide".
Pity the poor children deprived, even if curious, of learning about the British heritage. If they read any book written before 1950, they won't have a clue as to what the words mean and no way of finding out.
A remarkable essay by R.R. Reno, We Need Roots.
Life is better—richer, deeper, thicker—for our loyalties and loves.
I share this Chestertonian sensibility, which is why the new music from the English folk band, Show of Hands, gives me goose bumps.
“Redbrick cottage where I was born / Is the empty shell of a holiday home. / Most of year there’s no one there. / The village is dead and they don’t care.”
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“Country Life” is not a polemic against free markets or Thatcherism. It thrusts against the left as well. “No one marched to subsidize and save the country way of life,” they sing. We are reminded that so-called progressive politics long ago shifted its focus toward securing lifestyle freedoms for the new-economy winners (gay-pride marches, women’s rights marches), as well as toward movements to satisfy the refined moral palates of the educated elites (animal rights, nuclear disarmament, global warming). The local guy with a high-school education and ordinary expectations from life gets pushed to the side.
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The major premise of “Roots” is simple: “Without our stories or our songs / How will we know where we come from?” The minor premise is implied: England now encourages cultural forgetfulness rather than memory. The conclusion: an urgent imperative of cultural renewal that gives this song extraordinary emotional power.
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Social capital is not a fixed asset. It requires regular reinvestment, which we do by committing resources of memory, love, and loyalty. One of the signal features of our age is the belief that we can have everything for nothing. Our multicultural therapists imagine that we can discharge the batteries of national identity, reap gains in tolerance, and pay no costs. But there are costs. As the Show of Hands sings, “We’ve lost more than we’ll ever know.” We can’t stand forever at a distance with our critical doubts and moral reservations. Love rewards only those who venture her commitments.
This loss of "more than we'll ever know" echoes in Degeneration, the number one song in Quebec for by the band called Mes Aieux (My Ancestors)
HT Ron Dreher
Mark Steyn hits it out of the park again in this Thanksgiving note, Which history?
We've taken Cromwell's advice to his portraitist to paint him "warts and all", and show our kids all but solely the warts — spreading disease to Native Americans, enslaving blacks, interning the Japanese. Any non-wart stuff is mostly invented out of whole cloth: the US Constitution has its good points but they all come from the Iroquois, and the first Thanksgiving is some kind of proto-Communist celebration of collective farming.
A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, "Guess what we learned today?" I said: "Rosa Parks." He said: "How did you know that?" I said: "Because it's always Rosa Parks." And, if you don't learn it in the context of any broader historical narrative, it's just a story about municipal transit seating arrangements.
Teaching only the warts is a terrible thing to do to young children. At its extreme it leads to those British Taliban captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan: Subjects of the Crown who'd been raised in English schools and taught only that the country to which they owed their nominal allegiance was the source of all the racism, oppression, colonialism, and imperialism in the world. Why be surprised that a proportion of the alumni of such a system would look elsewhere for their sense of identity?
But, even in its more benign form, warts-only education leaves a big hole where one's cultural inheritance should be.
Separating Christianity from Europe's public life leads 'down a blind alley' Pope cautions.
Though our world and environment continue to change, Pope Benedict continued, “the final aim of all our daily efforts, both as individuals and as a community, remains unaltered: the search for the true well-being of the person and the creation of an open and welcoming society attentive to the real needs of everyone.”
"The values and laws, the shared spiritual 'alphabet,' that has made it possible for our peoples to write noble chapters of civil and religious history over the centuries, is a precious heritage that must not be squandered," the Pope added, but rather “augmented with the contribution of modern discoveries in the fields of science technology and communication, which must be placed at the service of the real good of mankind."
The Pontiff continued by emphasizing that if this rich heritage is separated from the public life, it would “mean starting down a blind alley.” He also stressed that “this is why it is necessary to redefine the meaning of secularism, a secularism that highlights the real difference and autonomy between the various elements of society but that also protects their specific competencies, in a context of shared responsibility.”
The phrase our 'shared spiritual alphabet' is especially apt since so many have become illiterate and ignorant of the roots of the civilization that has cradled them.
Take Oxford for example. No more Christmas lights for them. No indeed. Christmas is now banned in Oxford in favor of a 'Winter Light Festival'. Instead of the traditional Christmas lights, there will be a 25 meter high mobile in shape of the solar system.
Muslims and Jews want Christmas back.
Sabir Hussain Mirza, chairman of the Muslim Council of Oxford, said: 'I'm really upset. Christians, Muslims and other religions all look forward to Christmas.'
Rabbi Eli Bracknell of the Jewish Educational Centre said: ' Anything that waters down traditional culture and Christianity is not positive for the British identity. WinterLight includes all festivals but it also conceals them.'
Behind the Bluster, Russia is Collapsing
Putin's military is still in tatters, armed with rusting weaponry and staffed with indifferent recruits. Meanwhile, a declining population is robbing the military of a new generation of soldiers. Russia's economy is almost totally dependent on the price of oil. And, worst of all, it's facing a public health crisis that verges on the catastrophic.
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Something even larger is blocking Russia's march. Recent decades, most notably since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, have seen an appalling deterioration in the health of the Russian population, anchoring Russia not in the forefront of developed countries but among the most backward of nations.
This is a tragedy of huge proportions -- but not a particularly surprising one, at least to me. I followed population, health and environmental issues in the Soviet Union for decades, and more recently, I have reported on diseases such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic ravaging the Russian population. I've visited Russia more than 50 times over the years, so I can say from firsthand experience that this national calamity isn't happening suddenly. It's happening inexorably.
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...remember tuberculosis? In the United States, with a population of 303 million, 650 people died of the disease in 2007. In Russia, which has a total of 142 million people, an astonishing 24,000 of them died of tuberculosis in 2007. Can it possibly be coincidental that, according to Gennady Onishchenko, the country's chief public health physician, only 9 percent of Russian TB hospitals meet current hygienic standards, 21 percent lack either hot or cold running water, 11 percent lack a sewer system, and 20 percent have a shortage of TB drugs?
Can you imagine a hospital lacking running water or sewerage?
After the election where I was moved as always by the peaceful transition of power as well as by the notable achievement of Barack Obama, the new president-elect, I turned to more pressing personal matters which partially explains the lack of blogging.
I do want to point to this Time review Search for Civitas about a book written by Daniel Bell almost thirty years ago
"The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism: 20th Anniversary Edition" (Daniel Bell)
The more that Sociologist Daniel Bell peers into the future, the more he seems to respect the past. It would be hard to find anyone more at home in such a variety of contemporary disciplines—economics, politics, the arts, popular culture. Yet Bell is not happy with the trends in any of them. Something precious has gone out of life, he feels. The deficiency makes people harsher, more inward, more aggrandizing. Bell yearns for a restoration of civitas: "The spontaneous willingness to obey the law, to respect the rights of others, to forgo the temptations of private enrichment at the expense of the public weal—in short, to honor the 'city' of which one is a member."
Bell is no mere nostalgia peddler sighing for antique worlds. With acerbic but civil scholarship, he blames today's honorless condition on what he calls "modernism": the cultural movement that started in the latter half of the 19th century and has gathered momentum ever since. Modernism rejects the old, the traditional, the bourgeois in favor of the new, the sensational, the revolutionary. As such, it has dissolved many conventions, and discredited most institutions and values. Today, says Bell, its victory is complete. There is a perpetual, unwholesome rage for the new. Instead of affirming a "moral-philosophical tradition against which the new could be measured," contemporary culture has an "unprecedented mission: an official, ceaseless search for a new sensibility."
Under these conditions, an avant-garde can hardly be said to exist. The most outrageous or destructive idea or art form becomes accepted overnight. "In fact," writes Bell, the chief characteristic of the Establishment "is its eagerness to repudiate its own existence." The condition of art is echoed in politics and the economy. Capitalists have lost faith in their enterprise and are listless about defending it. Capitalism's very success has created a paradox: hard work, discipline and organization make capitalism successful. But the goods it abundantly produces encourage a mindless pursuit of hedonism. Capitalism is thus deprived of any "moral or transcendent ethic." There is a further paradox. The greater the economic growth under capitalism, the higher the expectations. People demand more government services and more protection against adversity. Inflation results, savings diminish, and capitalism is undermined. The only solution is a restraint on private appetite and a return to a public philosophy—a tall order, as Bell acknowledges, in these roiled times.
Usually we think of history as the product of either politics (the struggle for power) or economics (the production of wealth) George Weigel writes but history is better seen through culture in Is Europe Dying?
Europe began the twentieth century with bright expectations of new and unprecedented scientific, cultural, and political achievements. Yet within fifty years, Europe, the undisputed center of world civilization in 1900, produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War that threatened global holocaust, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, the Gulag, and Auschwitz. What happened? And, perhaps more to the point, why had what happened happened? Political and economic analyses do not offer satisfactory answers to those urgent questions. Cultural-which is to say spiritual, even theological-answers might help.
Weigel calls for a return to pietas, an ancient Roman virtue that teaches us reverence and gratitude for those on whose shoulders we stand, a fitting subject for this Veteran's Day.
To be patriotic is to acknowledge the patrimony, the legacy, we have been given and which we are duty bound to pass on to future generations. In America, it is not so much the land as the ideas of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. John Schaar explores The Case for Patriotism.
Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and niquely valuable among and to the other nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.
He quotes Abraham Lincoln in Philadelphia on the way to Washington for his first inauguration.
I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live... I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence...I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was.something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.
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Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can't be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle--I was about to I say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.
They are losing their minds in Britain.
No barbed wire...it might hurt the thieves, allotment holders told
So you can't protect the food you've grown or the tools you use.
In fact, Council advises homeowners to leave sheds open for thieves!
Tenants have been warned that padlocks can lead to thieves forcing their way through doors and windows of the council-owned sheds to steal garden equipment.
Bristol City Council claims its 'Don't Use a Padlock' initiative will save taxpayers' money because fewer sheds will have to be repaired or replaced.
From the Dutch politician Geert Wilders who producted the film Fitna on Wisdom and Courage
I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The danger I see looming is the scenario of America as the last man standing. The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe. In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: who lost Europe? Patriots from around Europe risk their lives every day to prevent precisely this scenario form becoming a reality.
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Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe’s children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.
In Holland a new political party called the Charity, Freedom and Diversity party or NVD has been registered in advance of elections next May.
It's platform?
• legalize child pornography
• legalize sex with animals
• reduce the age of consent to 12 from 16
• legalize hard and soft drugs
• free train travel for all
When the news is just too much, I can trust that Pope Benedict will inspire me. When I immerse myself in his words, I am curiously refreshed. I must have been a monk in another life.
A few days ago Pope Benedict was in Paris at the recently restored 13th century College des Bernardins, on the origins of western theology and roots of European culture. The college had been a residence of young monks until the French revolution. The Pope's visit was the official inauguration of what is now a meeting place for the dialogue between faith and culture.
The Vatican publishes the text.
The monasteries were the places where the treasures of ancient culture survived, and where at the same time a new culture slowly took shape out of the old"
That was not their intent. The monks sought the truth. They wanted to find God.
First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum. Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.
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it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path toward language. Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing out pathways to the word. It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up
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Quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times. A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.
Melanie Phillips in a Revolution You Can Believe In
The seditious role of the community organiser was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic party. Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society. In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.
His creed was set out in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra. And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organisations’.
Orson Scott Card is The Ornery American and writing about Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Nobody Was Listening.
Let me quote just one passage from Solzhenitsyn's speech: "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations.
"Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life."
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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died last week. For the last thirty years of his life he was almost unheard-of. He was dismissed by our media elite as a has-been, a grumpy old man who dared to criticize them as scathingly as he criticized the Communists. They declared him No Longer Interesting.
But he is as important as he ever was. He was mostly right about the Soviet Union; he was mostly right about us.
In the Soviet Union, he was seen as dangerous.
In America, he was rendered powerless by sheer inattention.
Battling the growing phenomenon of anti-Americanism, a British group has organized a website called America in the World. Good for them.
AmericaInTheWorld is a London-based international alliance opposed to anti-Americanism as well as American isolationism. Via our briefings, we aim to provide the number one factual resource for those who wish to hear the case against anti-Americanism. Our goal is to increase understanding of America, to debunk some of the leading myths about the United States, and to make a positive case for a continuing leading role for America in the world.
AmericaInTheWorld is launched and funded by supporters of America in London and around the world. AmericaInTheWorld receives no American government or corporate funding.
Here's a video A World Without The American Soldier
For their launch, they commissioned a poll of 2000 U.K. citizens to find that Large numbers of British citizens consistently and inaccurately think the worst of America.
The first part of our survey would suggest that large numbers of Britons think America is a land where polygamy is legal, where you don't get emergency medical care if you are poor and where there is more racism than in Europe. Britons also think that America provided Saddam Hussein with a large share of his weapons when, in reality, Russia, China and France were responsible for most of the arms exports to his Iraq. On all of these questions Britons are wrong.
Best of all, they are associated with no party and offer fact-filled briefings that can settle many arguments.
The worst place in the Western world to be a child is Britain reports UNICEF; Theodore Dalrymple calls it Childhood's End.
The British, never fond of children, have lost all knowledge or intuition about how to raise them; as a consequence, they now fear them, perhaps the most terrible augury possible for a society.
Dogs must wear booties.
The London Times
Police sniffer dogs will have to wear bootees when searching the homes of Muslims so as not to cause offence.
Toddlers who say 'Yuk" will be reported to local council for racism
London Times
Toddlers who say yuk to unfamiliar foods could be branded racist by government sponsored agency. The National Children's Bureau lists other types of toddler racism -name-calling, casual thoughtless comments and peer group relationships.
Such incidents should be reported to local council.
Plans to clear undergrowth from a notorious gay cruising spot branded discriminatory.
Telegraph
Bristol City Council wants to prune bushes and remove cover from an area known as the Downs to improve the landscape and encourage rare wildlife.
Work on the beauty spot has been temporarily delayed while talks with gay rights groups take place to try and break the deadlock.
English, non-Muslim schoolboys punished for refusing to kneel down and pray to Allah.
Daily Mail
Then two boys got detention and all the other children missed their refreshment break because of the teacher.
"Not only was it forced upon them, my daughter was told off for not doing it right.
"They'd never done it before and they were supposed to do it in another language
Why is this man so happy?
Al Qaeda's "ambassador to Europe', one of the world's most dangerous terrorists was released on bail from a high security prison because he could not be sent home to Jordan lest his human rights be breached. He was released on bail and returned to his £ 800,000 home where he and his family receive an estimated £50,000 a year in benefits
Betrayal of the Ghurkas
For 200 years Nepalese Ghurkas have fought in the British Army in both world wars, the Falklands, Afghanistan and Iraq. About 200,000 have fought and some 43,000 were killed or wounded. Yet, those who want to emigrate to Britain were denied visas on the ground that their ties to Britain were "insufficiently strong."
George Will on the Survival of the Sudsiest
"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."
Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol -- in beer and, later, wine -- which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.
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The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors -- by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer.
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"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
Benjamin Franklin
Some would consider that news that contrary to what we were all brought up to believe mayonnaise protects against food spoilage the best of the weekend.
But there was other fantastic news.
From Iran
Ahmed Batebi, a leader of the Iranian student movement escaped from an Iranian jail after being imprisoned and tortured for nine years and made his way to the U.S. He was interviewed on the Voice of America.
I wish each and every Iranian could travel abroad, come to the U.S. or go to Europe, for just one week, and feel, smell, and breathe freedom, human dignity, and realize the value of their lives.
Gateway Pundit has lots more on Batebi, Iran's most famous dissident.
From Iraq
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki announced on Saturday, "We have defeated terrorism". Gateway Pundit again with lots more.
550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium were transported in 37 military flights from Iraq to Canada.
From Colombia
The joyful news that Ingrid Betancourt and three American hostages were released from a jungle prison where they were held by the revolutionary terrorist group called FARC in a spectacular, impeccable operation by the Colombian armed forces with advice, support and training from the Americans and the Israelis.
"I was in chains all the time, 24 hours a day, for three years," she told Europe 1 radio. "I tried to wear those chains with dignity, even if I felt that it was unbearable."
Asked whether she had been tortured, she said, "Yes, yes," and said her captors had fallen into "diabolical behavior," adding: "It was so monstrous, I think they themselves were disgusted."
She called her rescue "a miracle of the Virgin Mary" and said: "You need tremendous spirituality to stop yourself falling into the abyss." She had made herself a wooden rosary in the jungle, she said.
Thanking God on the tarmac. When was the last time you saw something like this?
"God, this is a miracle," Betancourt said. "Such a perfect operation is unprecedented."
Just how were the rebels fooled? Mary Anastasia O'Grady reports in the WSJ on FARC's 'Human Rights" Friends.
It may have taken years for army intelligence to infiltrate the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and it may have been tough to convincingly impersonate rebels. But what seems to have been a walk in the park was getting the FARC to believe that an NGO was providing resources to help it in the dirty work of ferrying captives to a new location.
Many of the NGOs in Colombia are nothing but fronts for terrorists.
Left-wing NGOs have made undermining the Colombian government's credibility a priority for many years.....
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Since the late 1990s, the NGO practice of dragging the military into court on allegations of human rights violations has destroyed the careers of some of the country's finest officers, even though most of these men were found innocent after years of proceedings. "Judicial warfare" turned out to be especially effective because under legislation pushed by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, "credible" charges against officers put at risk U.S. military aid unless the accused was removed. The NGOs knew that they only had to point fingers to get rid of an effective leader and demoralize the ranks. Given this history, it's not surprising that the FARC thought a helicopter from an NGO was perfectly natural.
What's particularly disturbing is what appears in notes captured from FARC
Piedad says that Chávez has Uribe going crazy. He doesn't know what to do. That Nancy Pelosi helps and is ready to help in the swap [hostages in exchange for captured guerrillas]. That she has designated [U.S. Congressman Jim] McGovern for this.
David Warren reports
We have seen lately what happens when “human rights” commissions turn themselves loose on rightwing journalists and the periodicals that publish them, from Maclean’s magazine, down. We seldom see reported the myriad small decisions, in which defenceless little people are hauled before the tribunals, stripped of all due process, ground down and destroyed both financially and spiritually.
In the course of this last grim week, the Ontario government of Dalton McGuinty quietly announced a huge expansion of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, giving its apparatchiks enhanced powers of intrusion, removing the cap on fines, providing a new class of lawyers to assist in prosecutions, and opening 22 new “hearing and mediation rooms” around the province where these star chambers will conduct their quasi-legal proceedings.
As a writer who does not subscribe to the “politically correct” ideology, it is reasonable to expect that, sooner or later, they will come for me....
I was born a free citizen of the Old Canada, and before her God I declare, that I will go to jail rather than acknowledge the legitimacy of any “human rights” commission. I invite other journalists and indeed, every other Canadian, to declare likewise.
The 4th of July was splendid especially since I had the privilege to see the celebration of America's birthday through a foreigner's eye. When a new friend, a visiting scholar at Harvard said she had no plans for the 4th of July, I invited her to spend it with me and another friend.
After a lunch of hotdogs, beans, chips and beer, we visited Lexington Common and the Minuteman National Park . My foreign friend was much impressed with the natural beauty, the modesty of the monuments and the innocence in the best sense of word of the national park rangers who told the thrilling story of the first battle of the revolutionary war. This could never happen in Europe she said. The closest a European could come to the evident feeling of national pride she saw all around was winning a soccer match. Later at the Boston Pops concert on the Esplanade and the fabulous fireworks, she was amazed at the tenor of the crowd, some 500,000 strong, particularly its civility and self discipline. Living very near a soccer stadium in Europe, she's used to drunken louts who crash bottles on the streets, get into fights and vomit in the nearest space available. Of the crowd in Boston she said "This is so civilized."
Catching up on all the coverage of the 4th, the following caught my attention.
Thomas Sowell on Does Patriotism Matter?
When the intelligentsia in France launched a systematic purge of textbooks after the First World War in order to promote internationalism and pacifism, the epic defense of France seen during the First World War evolved into a "sudden and humiliating collapse" in six weeks to the Nazis despite superior French tanks and planes.
Roger Kimball's thoughtful essay on July 4, America and multiculturalism
I fear that for every schoolchild standing at attention for the National Anthem, there is a teacher or lawyer or judge or politician or ACLU employee militating against the hegemony of the dominant culture, the insupportable intrusion of white, Christian, “Eurocentric” values into the curriculum, the school pageant, the town green, etc., etc.
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Those forces are not isolated phenomena; they are not even confined to America. They are part of a global crisis in national identity, coefficients of the sudden collapse of self-confidence in the West–a collapse that shows itself in everything from swiftly falling birthrates in “old Europe” to the attack on the whole idea of the sovereign nation state. It is hard to avoid thinking that a people that has lost the will to reproduce or govern itself is a people on the road to destruction.
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The threat shows itself in many ways, from culpable complacency to the corrosive imperatives of “multiculturalism” and political correctness. ... In essence, as Huntington notes, multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization. . . . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”
The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. The “sensitivity” of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness.
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For what we have witnessed with the triumph of multiculturalism is a kind of hypertrophy or perversion of liberalism, as its core doctrines are pursued to the point of caricature.
While in Bagdad, the wonderful sight of 1200 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in the largest re-enlistment in history, in Saddham's old palace.
The Mudville Gazette reports one command sergeant said
I'll always remember the message you've sent to the adversary: the same guys and girls who've been kicking your butt for the past five years signed up for some more.
Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are the primary jewels we have been given as Americans, part of our common patrimony. To see them under threat and being attacked in Canada was alarming, a little too close to home. Like acid rain and pollution which know no boundaries, such threats should be stopped at the source. And so I have written ...
Whither Canada?
The Chilling Effect of Richard Warman
"Freedom of Speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value"
The good news is that many others are concerned and most of them are playing a much larger part than I. The other good news ...
On Thursday, the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission dismissed the complaint of the Canadian Islamic Congress against Maclean's magazine for printing an excerpt of Mark Steyn's America Alone.
Counsel to the Islamic Congress, Faisal Joseph expressed his disappointment and claimed "inappropriate political pressure."
Steyn was sited at the Prime Minister's Garden and when told of the decision joked maybe he should appeal.
Macleans responded
Though gratified by the decision, Maclean's continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation's media. ...We enthusiastically support those
parliamentarians who are calling for legislative review of the commissions with regard to speech issues.
Still to watch is the decision from the HRC of British Columbia and the many cases filed against Christians and others like the comedian recently charged for his offensive comments against a pair of hecklers.
The best solution is to get rid of all the silly pseudo-judicial commissions and revert to the common law which has done quite well over the past 800 years in taking care of the true free speech abuses - fraud, defamation and libel.
An Anatomy of Surrender Bruce Bawer argues, quite convincingly, that too many Westerners, motivated by fear and multiculturalism, are acquiescing to creeping sharia.
These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.
Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.
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The driving force on the road to sharia is the media who have caught the spirit of the age which is nothing other than the spirit of appeasement.
Bawer expands on the role the New York Times plays in The Times, It Ain't a-Changin
Let’s examine some highlights from the history of the Times — not only America’s most famous newspaper, but the one from which the nation’s media have, to an extraordinary extent, taken their lead for generations. These highlights do not even begin to tell the whole story of the Times’s treatment of totalitarianism over the decades, of course, but they point to something chronic, unhealthy, and dishonest at the heart of the Gray Lady’s editorial sensibility that has yet to be effectively addressed - and that has its counterparts in countless less prominent media on which the Times has long exerted a major influence.
There follows a sad litany of the NYT's denial of the famine under Stalin, its failure to report on the vicious anti-semitism of the Nazi regime, its far too long denial of genocide against the Jews in Germany and its portrayal of Fidel Castro as a romantic, guerilla hero.
In this sense, the Times is not a liberal newspaper at all, but deeply conservative, determined above all to provide its largely comfortable and affluent readers with a consistent, predictable picture of the world that doesn’t challenge their own worldview in any significant way or make them feel obliged to deal with things they’d prefer not to deal with. Certainly a loyalty to “established patterns” is a factor in the refusal by the Times and other media today to report honestly on the dramatic changes in European society wrought by the continent’s ongoing Islamization.
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The Times should have learned a valuable lesson or two from its past. But it’s making exactly the same mistakes today with Islam in the West that it did with Stalinism and Hitlerism, ignoring and discrediting the testimony of honest observers while giving legitimacy to tyranny’s sympathizers and apologists. The Times’s power is such that it might play an immensely positive role in educating its readers about the situation before them and helping them to recognize where their own responsibilities lie. Instead it’s pursuing an editorial policy that bids fair to be every bit as disastrous as was its approach to Stalin, the Holocaust, and Castro. And a large segment of the mainstream Western media is following its example.
They voted NO to the Lisbon Treaty. They were the only citizens allowed to vote on the proposed treaty in the only referendum allowed, 3 million voting for the 490 million who were not allowed.
David Pryce Jones explains
The Lisbon Treaty was supposed to mark the moment when the United States of Europe irrevocably became a political and juridical entity, with the character of an empire. In earlier stages of the empire-building process, the French and the Dutch voted NO in referendums, but the European Union and national governments chose to ignore those votes, pressing ahead as though public opinion did not exist. The 27 heads of states in Europe all signed up to the treaty in draft, and all are in the process of ratifying it, simply bulldozing it through by means of presidential decree or parliamentary measures without consulting their populations. The absence of democratic consent would have been delightfully familiar to Stalin.
All except the Irish, that is. Their constitution alone specified a referendum. As usual, the elite, big business, the media, favoured a YES vote, and took it for granted. But the Irish people did not want to lose their constitution or their sovereignty. If other countries in the EU were allowed a similar vote, they too would reject the Lisbon Treaty. In a very real sense, the Irish have spoken for the majority of Europeans.
The E.U. will find someway some way to ignore this resounding NO just as they did two years ago when the French and the Dutch voted NO on the proposed E. U. Constitution which was then repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty.
Richard North has a round-ip at Pajamas Media, the Irish Voters Dump Latest EU Treaty and sent it packing.
Such an idea is akin to the voters of Colorado deciding on the president of the United States of America, the others leaving it for their state legislatures to decide.
I loved the comment by Letalis Maximus.
First Guinness, now this. The Irish; is there nothing they can’t do?
Bravo, I say. Bravo.
A surprising document from the Church of England, what Ruth Gledhill in the London Times calls the Church's strongest attack on the Government in decades.
The policies of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have helped to generate a spiritual, civic and economic crisis in Britain, according to an important Church of England report.
Labour is failing society and lacks the vision to restore a sense of British identity, the report says.... It accuses the Government of “deep religious illiteracy” and of having “no convincing moral direction”.
The report, commissioned for the Church of England and to be published on Monday, accuses the Government of discriminating against the Christian Churches in favour of other faiths, including Islam.
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The authors find evidence of deep-seated hostility to the Church in particular, excluding it from important areas of policy and research – despite Mr Blair being one of the most devout prime ministers of the past century. They portray a Government committed to research into Muslim communities but barely interested in Christian involvement in Britain’s civic and charitable life.
This is in spite of what the authors describe as centuries of pioneering work by the Church in areas of welfare and social provision. “We encountered on the part of the Government a significant lack of understanding or interest in the Church of England’s current or potential contribution in the public sphere,” the report says.
They are right.
No other European nation is giving its citizens the right to vote on whether to accept or reject the Lisbon Treaty which would result in a massive transfer of sovereignty from the nation states to the European Union.
The Irish Post editorializes
First, on Thursday, four million Irish citizens resident in the Irish Republic will be asked to ratify a new democratic structure for the European Union and its 500 million citizens. Despite the fact that this proposed structure will radically alter the relationship between all the member states and the union, and between all the citizens and the union, it apparently does not require the votes of the other 496 million or so citizens. Such is European democracy.
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I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a European superstate run by Eurocrats who are unsackable, founded on a treaty that is unintelligible and watching the democratic linkage between citizen and state disappear under oceans of verbiage. I don’t believe the architects of this treaty, people like Valery Giscard D’Estaing or Guiliano Amato. I think they are practised political truth-massagers, - and tax-free ones to boot. As Amato himself said at the LSE last February: ‘‘The good thing about not calling it a constitution is that no one can ask for a referendum on it.”
Brits at their Best calls it Funeral rites for Britain
In the same week that Magna Carta will be 793 years old, the funeral rites for Britain have begun with scarcely a mention in Britain's mainstream press, or in America's.
Transnational elites have stealthily seized control of European nations and Britain, and though there are three last opportunities to escape the EU this week, it is doubtful that a Britain that has been hollowed out from inside can take advantage of them. If Britain does not, she will be finished as a nation according to the stated intentions of the EU.
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Unless the British people rise up and rebel, they will have lost their country and their freedoms - achieved with so much sacrifice - 'not with a bang but with a whimper'.
And so the silence - as if we could pretend that nothing is happening as long as we don't make a sound.
Forty years ago, I stayed up late to watch the television reports of the Democrat primary in California and watched in disbelief as the tragic scene unfolded on the tiny screen in real time.
On the 40th anniversary of his assassination, four dispatches written by Robert Kennedy for the Boston Post have been found.
Robert Kennedy's 1948 Reports from Palestine
Via The Belmont Club where Richard Fernandez writes
Maybe, having been disillusioned by the hatred and duplicity all around him, RFK was struck by a strange mood of wistfulness. He inserts this strange monologue into his narrative seemingly out of the blue.
Having been out of the United States for more than two months at this time of writing, I notice myself more and more conscious of the great heritage and birthright to which we as United States citizens are heirs and which we have the duty to preserve. A force motivating my writing this paper is that I believe we have failed in this duty or are in great jeopardy of doing so. The failure is due chiefly to our inability to get the true facts of the policy in which we are partners in Palestine.
It was a time before the incessant din of propaganda has since convinced Americans that evil was exclusively Made in the USA. History that is ostensibly written to enlighten is often in practice written to deceive. The most common use of history is to make us misremember the past. What we believe happened, as well as what we believed about RFK may have nothing to do with how things were. Reading his contemporaneous reports is like visiting a country we never knew existed and meeting a man who died twice; once at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan and again by the knife of popular culture. Twenty years after Kennedy left Palestine, Palestine came to him in a Los Angeles hotel.
‘Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.” —Canadian “Human Rights” Investigator Dean Steacy, responding to the question “What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?”
This is the way free speech ends, not with a bang but as the result of an administrative hearing in a windowless basement in Vancouver, Canada.
At least that’s where a “Human Rights Tribunal” is taking place this week that will further solidify the Canadian legal position that the right not to be offended by something you read is more sacred than the freedom of the press.
Mark Hemingway writes the Idiot's Guide to Completely Idiotic Canadian 'Human Rights' Tribunals.
The hearing against Mark Steyn and Canada's most popular magazine Maclean's has been going on this week in Vancouver.
I've been following the liveblogging by Maclean's national editor Andrew Coyne.
It reads like a slapstick farce in a kangaroo court and would be laugh-out-loud funny if you didn't know that both Steyn and Maclean's will be found guilty after hearing closing arguments tomorrow.
As Hemingway notes
the Canadian Human Rights Commission is stunningly effective: In its 31 years of existence, not a single complaint brought before it has been dismissed. That's right: Everyone is guilty before God and the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
Mark Steyn reflects himself on the goings-on "Geez, these days, I don't seem able to step out of the house without committing a hate crime"
By the way, I see I've been nominated for a National Magazine Award, to be handed out later this month. By then, Mr. Joseph will have succeeded in getting the B.C. troika effectively to ban me from Maclean's and from all Canadian journalism. An impressive achievement. My book was a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, and the new paperback edition was at No. 4 the other day, and President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Governor Mitt Romney, Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator Jon Kyl and (at last count) six European prime ministers have either recommended the book or called me in to discuss its themes. But in Canada it's a hate crime.
One thing I've learned these last few months is that it's always worse than you expect. The willingness of the B.C. troika's social engineers to trample over every basic rule of English law has embedded at the heart of Canadian justice a soft beguiling totalitarianism. I'll be the first No. 1 bestselling author and National Magazine Award-nominated columnist to be deemed unpublishable in Canada.
But I won't be the last.
To get a sense of what these HRCs are doing, they are now attempting to prosecute a case against an American resident, based upon what an American citizen allegedly posted to a mainstream American Catholic website.
Britain again where the jails are so comfortable, criminals are breaking in.
40,000 prisoners snub chance of early release because jails are so 'cushy'.
The findings follow warnings from prison officers' leaders, who claimed inmates were often happy to enjoy 'soft' conditions behind bars, where drugs are cheaper than outside.
They said prostitutes plied their trade in open prisons and criminals in secure units enjoyed breakfast in bed, satellite TV and sports facilities, while staff treated them 'with kid gloves' and were 'subservient' for fear of breaching their human rights.
Meanwhile the government is planning a nationwide 'deradicalisation' program to deal with the many who have been drawn into Islamist extremism but have yet to commit a crime.
One pilot program cited
is already mentoring "vulnerable individuals" using techniques including encouraging them to feel more valued and to eradicate myths and assumptions which have led to them becoming alienated and disempowered.
Boosting the self-esteem of would-be jihadists through counseling. It's probably better than it sounds since the proposed plan supports grassroots projects. A bottom-up approach to transforming youths in trouble rather than a top-down government initiative.
A British teen-ager in England was told by a police officer to remove his England flag from inside his car because it could be offensive to immigrants. If he didn't he was told, he would be fined 30 pounds.
Meanwhile two Christian preachers face arrest in Birmingham.
A police community support officer ordered two Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominately Muslim are of Birmingham.
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The evangelists say they were threatened with arrest for committing a "hate crime" and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. The incident will fuel fears that "no-go areas" for Christians are emerging in British towns and cities
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West Midlands Police, who refused to apologise, said the incident had been "fully investigated" and the officer would be given training in understanding hate crime and communication.
Britain continues its slow suicide
Social workers said we were too middle class and too white to adopt
As prospective parents, they might seem ideal. Gavin, 39, is an executive editor of BBC TV’s prestigious Question Time and The Politics Show. Teresa, 42, is a director of a staff recruitment business.
They have good incomes, a spacious home and a supportive family and friends. They have been together for nearly 20 years and married for ten.
Yet they have been ignored, rejected, patronised and repeatedly humiliated by Britain’s adoption system. They have willingly paid thousands of pounds, accepted rude and intrusive questions, completed countless bureaucratic forms and have come to a shocking conclusion: that all they can offer is outweighed by the huge disadvantage of being white and middle-class.
It is a story that illustrates the distressing truth about adoption – that children are routinely denied loving parents and a home because of politically correct policies that prevent the placement of black or mixed-race babies with white couples.
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‘We have discovered that if you are white and have a decent living, the adoption authorities put you to the bottom of the pile,’ explains Teresa.
‘This is despite the fact that there are children who desperately need families. It’s so heartbreaking that we have decided to speak about this in public.
'Many couples don’t dare say anything, fearing it will hinder their adoption. But we feel that children are being let down by a system that is wrong and operates on a set of imperatives that don’t work.’
The Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, already facing death threats for saying that certain areas of Britain have become "no-go" areas for non-Muslims says the Collapse of Christianity is wrecking British society.
It has destroyed family life and left the country defenceless against the rise of radical Islam in a moral and spiritual vacuum.
In a lacerating attack on liberal values, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said the country was mired in a doctrine of 'endless self-indulgence' that had brought an explosion in public violence and binge-drinking.
Radical Islam filling void
The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, claimed the "social and sexual" revolution of the 1960s had led to a steep decline in the influence of Christianity over society which church leaders had failed to resist.
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Asking what weapons are available to fight this new "ideological battle", the bishop said the values trumpeted by modern politicians such as "respect, tolerance and good behaviour" are "hardly adequate for the task before us".
"The consequences of the loss of this discourse are there for all to see: the destruction of the family because of the alleged parity of different forms of life together; the loss of a father figure, especially for boys, because the role of fathers is deemed otiose; the abuse of substances (including alcohol); the loss of respect for the human person leading to horrendous and mindless attacks on people."
The bishop added that Christian hospitality has been replaced by the "newfangled and insecurely founded" doctrine of multiculturalism, which has led to immigrants creating "segregated communities and parallel lives".
He said many values respected by society, such as the dignity of human life, equality and freedom, are based on Christian ones. But he warned that without their Christian backbone they cannot exist for ever, and that new belief systems may be based on different values.
"Radical Islamism, for example, will emphasise the solidarity of the umma (worldwide community of the Muslim faithful) against the freedom of the individual.
When I read the news from England, I imagine the bright, shiny coin of the British Empire on which Britannia stood strong to protect the rights of her citizens now falling into the darkness with just her head above water, gasping.
Children no longer have a right to a father or even a male role model since Parliament voted that fertility clinics need no longer consider a child's need for a father when a single woman or a lesbian couple seeks fertility services. The experience of the ages that tells us that fathers are necessary for the stable environment needed to raise healthy and happy children is being tossed aside. Instead human beings are now to be manufactured to suit the selfish desires of the putative parents trumping the needs of those children brought into the world in such a fashion.
We have evidence of "donor-conceived adults who describe the psychological and emotional anguish of being "genetic orphans" who struggle with
powerful feelings of loss of identity through not knowing one or both biological parents and their wider biological families... They believe society was complicit in a serious wrong done to them in the way they were conceived and ask, “How could anyone think they had the right to do this to me?”
Donor-conceived children
know that the parents raising them are also the ones who intentionally created them with a severed relationship to at least one of their biological parents. The pain they feel was caused not by some distant, shadowy person who gave them up, but by the parent who cares for them.
This knowledge brings the loyalty and love they naturally feel for the parents raising them in direct conflict with the identity quest we all must go through. When they ask, "Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here?" they confront a welter of painful uncertainties our culture hasn't begun to understand.
Despite overwhelming evidence that children without fathers are far more susceptible to problems in school and with drink or drugs, the government now takes the official position that creating fatherless families is just fine.
No wonder two million British citizens have left the U.K. in the past decade, in the greatest exodus from the country in almost a century.
"Crossing the ultimate boundary" -human-animal embryos.
Regulators have agreed that 'Human-animal' embryos can be created and used for research. This decision by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority crosses a moral absolute, horrific all the more so because it's totally unnecessary.
Scientists want to create hybrid embryos by merging human cells with animal eggs in a bid to extract stem cells. The embryos would then be destroyed within 14 days.
One conservative MP said
mingling animal and human DNA crossed an “ultimate boundary”. He said that exaggerated claims were giving patients false hope and that the dangers of the research were unknown. “In many ways we are like children playing with landmines without any concept of the dangers of the technology we are handling,” he said.
The United States, Canada and Australia ban the creation of human-animal hybrids. But Britain, the nation that prides itself on its caring for animals, has strict regulation on medical testing of animals, prohibits almost all genetically-altered food (much to the detriment of African farmers working their way out of poverty), where all natural ingredients are a 'must' for their cosmetics, shampoos and lotions, and only organic food will do, seems to have lost regard for the sanctity of human beings.
Human-animal embryos are being "manufactured" to be used to extract embryonic stem cells despite the fact that embryonic stem cell research to date has been a bust.
There are currently 72 therapies showing human benefits using adult stem cells and zero using embryonic stem cells.
Even worse the Gordon Brown, the current Prime Minister from the Labour party is a strong advocate, making "shameless use" of his own son who suffers from cystic fibrosis, as David Warren points out in Down the Slope:
But using his own son, as his exhibit, he has very emotionally declared that the creation of hybrid animal/human embryos for research purposes is "an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions"
This in turn allows such as his unpleasant public health minister, Dawn Primarolo to follow the argument through, and accuse those who are morally repelled by animal/human hybrids of actually willing that humans should suffer from incurable diseases. To be plain: emotional blackmail is being compounded with vile slander.
For Gordon Brown was uttering an untruth. As even the leading "expert" advocate of the government's measures - Lord Robert Winston, the English fertility specialist, politician, and television personality - has admitted, there is no pressing need for animal/human hybrid embryos. He had already said that the loss of the hybrid clause "won't fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology." The research could perfectly well go on with adult stem cells, to the use of which there is no moral objection. Even the Roman Catholic Church has contributed directly and materially to that research.
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We are most certainly dealing with a moral absolute in this case. Our entire civilization (including all legal codes throughout the western world) depends upon the sharp and unambiguous distinction between what is human, and what is not.
We do not abandon this "front line" without inevitably lapsing into the kind of barbarism of which fascist-era Germany and Japan served as terrible warnings.
"Unless we have an active memory of, and feel a certain awe for, those now dead and too often forgotten -- who built our universities, erected our majestic buildings, crafted the protocols of our government, and won our wars --then we have become dead souls of a sort, who drift among the infrastructure they left behind."
A classicist, Victor Davis Hanson takes as his starting point, the Funeral Oration of Pericles
The first is to remind the Athenians that they were simply born lucky: the imperial grandeur that they enjoyed was due to their fathers and grandfathers, who “handed it down free to the present time by their valor.” Such gratitude and humility in the moral sense are, of course, important for a free people, likely to think their present success is all their own, and therefore, in their self-congratulation, prone to hubris and a lack of reflection. Recitation of the accomplishments of earlier others also reminds Athenians that they are a mere link in a larger chain. And therefore they carry obligations to their children not to squander what the sacrifices of their parents achieved.
Victor Davis Hanson warns of the Perils of Cultural Amnesia at the 2008 Bradley Symposium.
The perils Hanson sees are
1. Forgetting the Drudgery of the Past.
We make no allowance for the horrific frontier experiences of millions of poor immigrants of all races, whose real enemies were not always each other, Native Americans, or the “system”....but rather the physical world itself. In pre-industrial times, how did people head westward without good maps, with only horse-powered wagons, when a strep throat, a pregnancy, or an infected small cut could mean a painful death.
2. Forgetting what was important
The loss of a proper notion of magnitude about the past not only means we elevate the less important over the seminal, but also lose any yardstick of the past by which to measure the present. Today we speak of the 4,000 American dead in an ongoing war for a democratic Iraq as part of the “worst” decision in American diplomatic or military history. But only a generation that was ignorant of the nearly 23,000 casualties suffered in a single day at Antietam, or the 81,000 dead and wounded lost at the Battle of Bulge, or the over 5,000 Americans killed in the first four years of the Philippines insurrection could employ such superlatives of their own experiences with war in Iraq.
3. Losing the ability to understand dilemmas
or the need to accept a bad choice when the alternative is far worse...History is tragedy... If we do not understand the sometimes bleak choices of history, then in the present and for the future we place upon ourselves such utopian burdens that almost any result will be caricatured and second-guessed. And the ultimate result with be a moral stasis,and the bankrupt notion that inaction is not an error of omission.
4. Our present hypocrisy . A symptom of our cultural amnesia is the too easy casual judgment on past deeds especially in the academy and by taking our present affluence and prosperity for granted while condemning those in the past for those were largely responsible for it.
So what are the ramifications of our cultural amnesia?
Ignorance for one, self-indulgence for another.
Our present generation has nearly bankrupt the social security system, accumulated trillions of dollars in national debt, lost a war in Vietnam, spent trillions of dollars in national wealth on cosmetic surgeries, and induced a crass popular culture of conspicuousconsumption and self-indulgence—and yet has rewritten our public school history textbooks to emphasize the sins of our prior generations. The more we demonize the dead, the more we the living are then free to rewrite the rules of our own moral behavior.
If we can only see our history, Hanson concludes, in terms of racial, gender and class oppressions, what reason is there for the American experiment to continue?
The hard work of uniting diverse peoples under uniquely humane principles is the work of over two centuries; the easy task of ending it can by accomplished in a mere generation through our ignorance or hatred of ourselves and own past.
The Department of Justice for the Canadian conservative government has released its defense of the hate speech provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
(Under the authority of this provision of law, Mark Steyn and MacLeans magazine have been brought up on charges of hate speech before three human rights commissions in Canada. See Whither Canada?. Five Canadian bloggers have also been sued by one Richard Warman, a former employee of the Canadian human rights commission. See The Chilling Effect of Richard Warman)
37. The defences of truth and fair comment remain available to torts such as defamation and seditious libel, regardless of the medium in which they occur. However, none of the traditional media can avail themselves of these defences in cases of alleged hate propaganda, whether the communication appears in print, on television or on a website.
38. As the Federal Court has explained, defences that may be available in tort actions are not available in cases of hate propaganda because the prohibition is concerned with adverse effects, not with intent.
Blogger Deborah Gyapong writes
I feel like a coup d'etat has taken place and I have awakened to the aftermath.
And this egregious affront to civil rights and to the freedom to speak the truth in Canada is being perpetuated now by the Conservative government.
Woe is us. I have this awful, awful feeling that we're too late. The war has been won by the other side and there are just mopping up operations left, and those that will be mopped up will be those who try to speak the truth in ways that the elite power structure does not like.
Despite my self-imposed general ban on politics, I do write often about freedom of speech and freedom of religion, those priceless rights we've been given and for which we have an obligation to pass on unhindered to the generations that follow us. These civil rights are a legacy that belongs to all of us; they transcends political differences.
Jonathan Strong writing in the American Thinker is troubled by the same Human Rights Regression that bothers me.
Canadian author Mark Steyn has warned in his book, American Alone, that the West faces major civilizational threats from a combination of it's declining birth rate and an influx of Muslim immigrants, many of whom do not share Western values, and some of whom are violently opposed to Western values. Like Mr. Levant, Steyn too has been summoned to appear before the British Columbia Human Rights Commission (HRC) to answer before the thought police for portions of his book that were published in Maclean's magazine (Canada's largest weekly news magazine).
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These HRCs are dangerous (and illegitimate) because they defy hundreds of years of British legal tradition and history. The British legacy of the rule of law is one of the greatest legacies of British culture in all of history. Around the world in former colonies and protectorates, the traditions that stem from British courts often continue today even if those nations no longer consider themselves as part of the Commonwealth. The defiance of history observed by the HRCs and plaintiffs against Steyn are exemplified by a brief review of the time tested legal principles of standing, evidence, and damages.
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There are also no rules of evidence. There is no "proof" required, and hearsay abounds within a HRC trial. The lack of evidentiary rules makes most lawyers cringe. Everything, including the kitchen sink, can be included in a complaint for the HRC to examine without any fact finding, witnesses, or proof. The HRC members will then determine what is admissible, important, and "true", which commonly means everything alleged.
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Steyn does not advocate violence or hatred, he writes to warn the west of the danger that looms because of an ideology that opposes to the values the West has held dear for hundreds of years: freedom of speech, equality of opportunity, the rule of law, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Steyn's book has warned us of the threats to our Western values, the law suit against him exemplifies that the threat is real and immediate.
Just in case you think 'Well, that's Canada. It couldn't happen here', look what happened to a student and janitor who was found guilty of "racial harassment" for reading a public library book on a university campus in Indiana.
My 'racial harassment' nightmare
the $106,000-a-year affirmative-action officer who declared me guilty of "racial harassment" never spoke to me or examined the book. My own union - the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees - sent an obtuse shop steward to stifle my freedom to read. He told me, "You could be fired," that reading the book was "like bringing pornography to work."
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Affirmative Action Office of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis from branding me as a detestable Klansman.
They didn't want to hear the truth. The office ruled that my "repeatedly reading the book . . . constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers."
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After months of stonewalling, the university withdrew the charge, thanks to pressure from the press, the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.
Let me be clear: I don't view this episode as a black-against-white or conservative-vs.-liberal issue. It's a basic civil-liberties issue.
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The unchecked power of such campus bureaucrats needs to be restrained. And if a union like AFSCME won't protect its workers' constitutional rights, it should go out of business.
If they can stop me from reading one book, then they can stop any American from reading any book.
The book incidentally, not that it should matter, was Todd Tucker's "Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Klu Klux Klan.
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" is often quoted though no one knows who first said it. Don't be tempted to think that the freedom of not being offended in any way rises to the importance of freedom of speech and religion.
Am I supposed to feel guilty because I eat salads and fruits?
The Silent Scream of the Asparagus
This sounds like a joke but isn't. What it does demonstrate is another way the rights you take for granted can be made subject to a bureaucrat's whim.
What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.
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ts majority view holds that it would if the genetic modification caused plants to "lose their independence"--for example by interfering with their capacity to reproduce.
So much for breeding seedless Clementines or grafting hybrid wine grapes.
Belmont Club on the Plant Rights
Swiss lawyers are elaborating the doctrine of vegetable rights.
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Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out." In short, they are arguing that plants have inherent rights which humans can't transgress. It sounds ridiculous.
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who is really being "empowered" by the Swiss committee's decision? Is it plants? No. It is bureaucrats. The point of vegetable rights isn't to give plants dignity but to transfer yet more individual human freedoms to activists and government officials.
Deciding that individuals had power over themselves and the things around them was central to the development of human freedom -- and human rights
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The point of legally empowering vegetables is not to give standing to a stalk of celery who might suddenly decide to appear in court, but to empower the bureaucrats and activist lawyers who will appear on their behalf. Today we already have spokesmen for Gaia. Tomorrow the lawyers from Brussels will be lawyers for brussels sprouts.
Bruce Bawer collects all too many examples of how Westerners are acquiescing to 'creeping sharia' in An Anatomy of Surrender.
Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.
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Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic.
From the BBC to the lack of coverage of the astounding result in the 2007 Pew poll of American Muslims aged 18-29 that showed 20% of them supported suicide bombing to the 'affectionate' reporting of a Brooklyn Iman, Reda Shata, by a New York Times reporter who focused on sympathetic personal details, only mentioning
in passing that Shata didn’t speak English, refused to shake women’s hands, wanted to forbid music, and supported Hamas and suicide bombing.
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Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled.
What are you doing to preserve and pass on the freedoms given you?
Whatever you feel about homosexual rights ( and isn't every person due full respect as a human being/) , if you value the right to free speech and freedom of religion, you have to be disturbed by the recent decision of the New Mexico Human Rights Commission (HRC) .
A lesbian couple went to an evangelical Christian husband and wife photographic team to hire them to take their wedding photographs. They refused to photograph the same-sex ceremony for reasons of religious conscience. The New Mexico HRC
fined them $6600. Fortunately hat decision is being appealed
Mr. and Mrs. Huguenin was represented by Jordan Lorence, senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), who argued that photography was a form of artistic expression, thus forcing the couple to photograph the wedding was a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment.
"It was a very short order [with] absolutely no reference to the First Amendment defenses that we raised," Mr. Lorence told the Washington Times. "I find this a stunning disregard for the First Amendment issues in this case."
"This is compelled speech; this is forcing a photographer to advance a message with her artistic skills that she would not do absent government coercion," Mr. Lorence said.
Would it be so hard for the lesbian couple to tolerate and respect their views and just go somewhere else?
Aren't we all obligated to do so in this rich, variegated society of so many different peoples, practice tolerance.
via Kathy Shadie
I found this extraordinary and demoralizing but not surprising. Remember this the next time you order UNESCO cards or send your kids out to collect funds for the same.
U.N. Organization Destroyed Thousands of Books
For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by UNESCO, the United Nations organization created to preserve global culture and heritage.
Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.
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Mexico's ambassador, Homero Aridjis, said at the organization's executive council meeting this past week: "This is not only a blow to the culture and knowledge of entire populations and nations, it contradicts the mandate entrusted to UNESCO."
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The director general of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura, said it was "completely incomprehensible and inappropriate" that some of the organization's "most important and successful collections" were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and Africa, and surveys of ancient monuments.
When the book warehouses were moved from Paris to Brussels, UNESCO officials ordered the books pulped so they wouldn't have to pay to move them.
Just think how many schools around the world would have been ecstatic to receive these books.
The circus that's going on in Canada would be amusing but for the fact the Canadian right to free speech is being imperiled by kangaroo courts known as Human Rights Commissions where truth is no defense and due process rights don't exist.
Sean Murphy of the Catholic Civil Rights League aptly summed up one notorious case, in which, "a Christian printer is ordered to produce business cards and letterhead for an organization that promotes pro-pedophilia essays, is fined $5,000 for having refused to do so and is left with $40,000 in legal bills for daring to defend himself."
One man who ran a small restaurant was brought up on charges of human rights abuses because he dared ask a guy who was smoking a marijuana cigarette on his doorstep to move away.
Two transexuals are suing a prominent physician because he refused to perform labiaplasty on them on the grounds that he operates on biological females and doesn't have any experience in labiaplasty on men.
Doesn't this seem crazy to you? You may be wondering what human rights have these people violated. Join the crowd.
The columnist Mark Steyn was caught up in the madness being called up before two on the CHRCs. Yesterday the Ontario HRC dropped its investigation against Steyn and Maclean's magazine for printing an except of Steyn's book, America Alone, but not before saying they were guilty of Islamophobia, in what Steyn called a drive by conviction. Freedom of speech and the presumption of innocence? Nah.
One man in particular is using those commissions as his private star chamber. Richard Warman has made a profitable business by suing hapless Canadians for thought crimes, achieving a 100% conviction rate, and pocketing tens of thousands of tax-freedollars in awards from the Canadian human rights commissions where he used to be employed for his 'pain and suffering'. Apparently, he has full access to the HRC investigations and he's perfectly free to use the HRC computers or to hijack the wireless network of a private citizen to pose hate messages on a white supremacist site that apparently wasn't hateful enough. He is so litigious that the province of British Columbia had to pass a special law to stop him from suing libraries who carried books he didn't approve of.
Now, Warman is suing the Canadian bloggers who have been on his case and reported his nefarious shenanigans to the world, no doubt hoping for private settlements offline. Not a chance with these folks
Kate McMillan of small dead animals had the effrontery of linking to allegedly libelous statements of Kathy Shadie who writes at five feet of fury and that's just what she's been, allowing Warman no quarter and no cover for the nasty business he's been engaged in and the nasty piece of work he is. When a Canadian senator, Anne Cools, announced her intention to intervene before the Supreme Court on the question of gay marriage, Warman posted a under pseudonym ( on Richard Lemire's Freedom site already under investigation because of a complaint Warman filed) that Senator Cools was a "n**ger "and a "c**t". This revelation seems to be what sparked the lawsuits against Kate, Kathy, Free Dominion, the National Post and Ezra Levant who has posted all the details of the suit.
Steyn wrote yesterday about Global Warman
It's not possible to take a stand against the Canadian Human Rights Commission without also talking a stand against Richard Warman. He has been the plaintiff on half the Section 13 cases in its entire history and on all the Section 13 cases since 2002. There are 30 million Canadians yet only one of them uses this law, over and over and over again.
Make no mistake. Warman is attempting to censor the free speech of Canadian bloggers by intimidation.
To defend themselves, the bloggers can expect to pay hefty legal fees. Just the threat that some crazy person like Warman will sue them and you can expect other bloggers to begin, if they haven't already, to censor themselves. It's called the chilling effect. If Warman is successful, if the HRCs are successful, we all lose. Not only will Canadians say or write what they think, the pattern will be attempted here in the USA. Free speech has to be defended and it has its costs.
Please consider, especially if you are a blogger, donating to their defense funds. Each of them has a button on the site that you can click to donate even a small amount to show support. Be part of the defense of free speech.
UPDATE:
From blazing cat fur who calls such donations "Save the Canadian Blog Children Fund"
" Free speech is your God-Given Right, it should be theirs too"
These are the British Muslims, now on trial for their conspiracy to detonate liquid explosives on transatlantic passenger flights, "all in the name of Islam."
Airline terror plotters planned bigger 9/11
Their plans were allegedly so advanced that they had drawn up details of specific flights to be targeted and bought the components needed to make hydrogen peroxide bombs disguised as soft drinks such as Lucozade and Oasis.
But they were arrested before they were able to make "a violent and deadly statement of intent that would have truly global impact", a jury was told.
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The alleged bombers had drawn up plans to attack seven Boeing 777, 767 and 763 aircraft, each carrying between 241 and 285 passengers and crew, operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada, said Mr Wright.
The next time you have to dump your coffee and want to complain about the new restrictions on carrying liquids on airplanes, remember them and why the restrictions were imposed.
Let's not forget that In Britain, terrorism by Muslim fanatics has been renamed "anti-Islamic activity.
The head of MI5 has warned that 4000 Muslim fanatics are on the loose. Terror attacks, he said, are part of a deliberate campaign by Al Qaeda. Thankfully, they caught these eight.
After years of working as a psychiatrist at one of Britain's prisons, observing closely the destructive behavior and environments that brought him his clients, Theodore Dalrymple analyzed the underclass:
"not poor... by the standards of human history" but trapped in "a special wretchedness" from which it cannot emerge.
"Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass" (Theodore Dalrymple)
Long term poverty, he concludes, is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values.
"The combination of relativism and antipathy to traditional culture has played a large part in creating the underclass, thus turning Britain from a class to a caste society. ... Henceforth what they had and what they did was as good as anything, because all cultures and all cultural artifacts are equal. Aspiration was therefore pointless: and thus they have been immobilized in their poverty -- material, mental, and spiritual -- as completely as the damned in Dante's Inferno. Having in large part created this underclass, the British intelligentsia, guilty about its own allegedly undemocratic antecedents, feels obliged to flatter it by imitation and has persuaded the rest of the middle class to do likewise."
The searing account of British youth in Time magazine, Britain's Mean Streets, is getting a lot of attention across the pond by ordinary people defenseless in their encounters with 'youths' and despairing of the reluctance of the police to do anything to protect them.
the increase in nasty teenage crime that really has Britain spooked. Violent offenses by British under-18s rose 37% in the three years to 2006. Last September, 29-year-old Gavin Waterhouse died from an assault by two boys. It was recorded on a cell phone by a 15-year-old girl. In January, three teenagers from northwestern England were convicted of kicking to death 47-year-old Garry Newlove after he tried to stop them vandalizing his car. In the wake of their trial, the Sun newspaper declared "the most important issue now facing Britain" to be "the scourge of feral youngsters."
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All that is true. But it is also true that for what Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the Children's Society, calls a "significant minority" of British children, unhappiness — and the criminality, excessive drinking and drug-taking and promiscuity that is its expression — really have created a crisis. Says Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of Kids Company, an organization working with some of London's poorest young: "If I was sitting in government, I'd be really worried — not about terrorist bombs but about this.
What accounts for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British society? Dalrymple offered this explanation in an interview with Front Page magazine following the publication of his book :
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"Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses" (Theodore Dalrymple)
One reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British, if not the whole of Western, society, is the avoidance of boredom. For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness. I have noticed, for example, that women who frequent bad men - that is to say men who are obviously unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal, or violent, or all of them together, have often had experience of decent men who treat them well, with respect, and so forth: they are the ones with whom their relationships lasted the shortest time, because they were bored by decency. Without religion or culture (and here I mean high, or high-ish, culture) evil is very attractive. It is not boring.
George Weigel writes in The West and the Rest
What's right about the West, about this unique civilizational enterprise formed by the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome — biblical religion, rationality, and the idea of a law-governed polity?
1. Openness
2. Freedom
3. Knowledge
4. Generosity
5. Beauty
6. Humor
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In addition to ending the slave trade, abolishing slavery, and enfranchising women, the West has produced virtually every major humanitarian initiative in modern history, from the Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders, from the green revolution to the eradication of river blindness, from care for the mentally and physically handicapped to the abrogation of forced marriage.
Raymond Ibrahim writes Islam's 'Public Enemy #1' is a Coptic priest Zakaria Botros who appears
frequently on the Arabic channel al-Hayat (i.e., “Life TV”). There, he addresses controversial topics of theological significance — free from the censorship imposed by Islamic authorities or self-imposed through fear of the zealous mobs who fulminated against the infamous cartoons of Mohammed. Botros’s excurses on little-known but embarrassing aspects of Islamic law and tradition have become a thorn in the side of Islamic leaders throughout the Middle East.
Botros has famously made 10 demands of Islam that serve to highlight the radical demands Islam makes of non-Muslims. The result: mass conversions to Christianity, albeit many clandestine ones. One Islamic cleric on Al Jazeera estimated that 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity annually. This is an extraordinary number considering that each convert faces ostracism, persecution and even death for apostasy.
The ultimate reason for Botros’s success is that — unlike his Western counterparts who criticize Islam from a political standpoint — his primary interest is the salvation of souls. He often begins and concludes his programs by stating that he loves all Muslims as fellow humans and wants to steer them away from falsehood to Truth. To that end, he doesn’t just expose troubling aspects of Islam. Before concluding every program, he quotes pertinent biblical verses and invites all his viewers to come to Christ.
Botros’s motive is not to incite the West against Islam, promote “Israeli interests,” or “demonize” Muslims, but to draw Muslims away from the dead legalism of sharia to the spirituality of Christianity. Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying — not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. — must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire.
Another writer on the big untold story in the Middle East, looks at country by country to say Muslims converting to Christianity in record numbers .
The Egyptian Bible Society told me they used to sell about 3,000 copies of the Jesus film a year in the early 1990s. But in 2005 they sold 600,000 copies, plus 750,000 copies of the Bible on tape (in Arabic) and about a half million copies of the Arabic New Testament.
Spengler, brilliant as always writes on The mustard seed in global strategy
A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam
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Magdi Allam tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Magdi Allam has a powerful voice as deputy editor of Italy's newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, and a bestselling author. For years he was the exemplar of "moderate Islam" in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be "moderate".
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Magdi Allam presents an existential threat to Muslim life, whereas other prominent dissidents, for example Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offer only an annoyance.
Allam hails Benedict XVI as the leader of the West.
The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West. None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehends this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address.
The way out Spengler wrote after the Pope's Regensberg address, the way out is conversion.
"Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity." Today's Europeans stem from the melting-pot of the barbarian invasions that replaced the vanishing population of the Roman Empire. The genius of the Catholic Church was to absorb them. If Benedict XVI can convert this new wave of invaders from North Africa and the Middle East, history will place him on a par with his great namesake, the founder of the monastic order the bears his name
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The global agenda has changed, not through the machinations of statesmen or the word-mincing of public intellectuals, but through the soul of a single man. Benedict's Regensburg challenge to Islam now demarcates the encounter between the West and the Muslim world, and nothing will be the same.
UPDATE: Intentional Disciples questions the 6 million figure cited above and calls it an urban legend, but she does point to the work of Independent Christianity which I had never heard of, yet composes 20% of all Christians in the world. She calls it an explosive global movement that most Catholics don't know exists.
It is these evangelizers - almost all of whom are lay - living in Muslim communities, loving their neighbors, teaching school, healing the sick, founding and running businesses, planting thousands of evangelizing small Christian communities in hundreds of different language groups and situations, writing books, making radio broadcasts, building relationships, trust, and credibility with Muslims they actually know personally - who have been used by God to turn the tide. Fr. Zacahrias is one rather loud horn in a vast symphony orchestra - and he isn't even first chair.
Remember that study that Dudley Woodbury did about why Muslims become Christian? Of the 5 primary reasons that 750 MBBs gave - the central theme was love. God's love reflected consistently in the lives of Christians they knew. Being exposed to the love of Christ through the gospels.
Not media, Not TV. Not apologetics. Love. From tens of thousands of expat missionaries and hundreds of thousands of national Christians who are "Great commission" Christians.
"Having been condemned to death, I have reflected a long time on the value of life" wrote Magdi Allam, a Muslim and deputy director of Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper, when he wrote about threats to his life after he condemned Palestinian suicide bombers in 2003.
On the vigil of Easter, Magdi Allam was baptised by Pope Benedict XVI himself and took a new baptismal name Christian on what he later called, "the most beautiful day of my life."
He wrote in an article appeared in the Corriere della Sera that
the witness of Catholics, who “gradually became a point of reference in regard to the certainty of truth and the solidity of values,” played an important role in his conversion.
His most decisive influence he said was Benedict XVI
“who I admired and, as a Muslim, defended for his mastery in setting down the indissoluble link between faith and reason as a basis for authentic religion and human civilization, and to whom I fully adhere as a Christian to inspire me with new light in the fulfillment of the mission God has reserved for me.”
I had always admired Pope John Paul II as a great and holy man, I marveled at his courage and later at his visit to prison to forgive his assassin, but from a certain distance. When Cardinal Ratzinger spoke to the Sacred College of Cardinals assembled in Rome for the funeral of John Paul II, I was electrified.
Let us dwell on only two points. The first is the journey towards “the maturity of Christ” as it is said in the Italian text, simplifying it a bit. More precisely, according to the Greek text, we should speak of the “measure of the fullness of Christ”, to which we are called to reach in order to be true adults in the faith. We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14). This description is very relevant today!
How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. .... Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.
I was that small boat of thought, tossed around 'by every wind of teaching' , motivated mainly by my ego and desires until inspired by Ratzinger who became Pope Benedict XVI , I began my journey towards an 'adult and mature faith'. The whole journey is too long to be recounted here and now, except its conclusion; I have come home to the Catholic faith and the Mother Church: I have I felt so whole.
No where near as brave as Christian Allam, I am humbled by his journey to conversion that he recounts here.
my mind was freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimates lies and deception, violent death that leads to murder and suicide, the blind submission to tyranny, I was able to adhere to the authentic religion of truth, of life and of freedom.
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My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy.
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It is thanks to members of Catholic religious orders that I acquired a profoundly and essentially an ethical conception of life, in which the person created in the image and likeness of God is called to undertake a mission that inserts itself in the framework of a universal and eternal design directed toward the interior resurrection of individuals on this earth and the whole of humanity on the day of judgment, which is founded on faith in God and the primacy of values, which is based on the sense of individual responsibility and on the sense of duty toward the collective. It is in virtue of a Christian education and of the sharing of the experience of life with Catholic religious that I cultivated a profound faith in the transcendent dimension and also sought the certainty of truth in absolute and universal values.
I too want to fight against the dictatorship of relativism and its softer cousin, the culture of whatever - wherever and whenever I can. I too want to stand behind the Pope who offers the only strong and muscular defense of faith and reason as the basis for authentic religion and the culture of life as the basis of civilization. I too want to uphold reason and the sacredness of life against the tide of nihilism and extremism that threatens to engulf us. So, in my small way, I will do so.
These past three days of the Triduum, I have been drenched in music and beauty with friends and fellow worshipers and filled with gratitude and immense joy. I feel reborn, even Exultent and can only point to the beautiful Easter chant I found via the Anchoress.
On December 1, 2006, one of the eeriest autopsies in the annals of crime was conducted at the Royal London Hospital. Three British pathologists, covered from head to toe in white protective suits, stood around a radioactive corpse that had been sealed in plastic for nearly a week. The victim was Alexander Litvinenko, a 44-year-old ex-KGB officer who had defected from Russia to England in November 2000 and had drawn on his experience to denounce the government of the newly installed President Putin. What the pathologists found is still a state secret.
The Specter That Haunts the Death of Litvinenko by Edward Jay Epstein.
Litvinvenko was not poisoned with thallium as originally thought but by polonium-210, one of the world's rarest and most tightly controlled radioactive isotopes. Polonium-210 is a critical component in early-stage nuclear bombs.
Most likely Litvinenko came into contact with a polonium-210 smuggling operation.
What it obscured is the elephant-in-the-room that haunts the case: the fact that a crucial component for building an early-stage nuke was smuggled into London in 2006. Was it brought in merely as a murder weapon or as part of a transaction on the international arms market?
Ali Eteraz has the best response to Harvard's decision to ban men from a gym for several hours a week to accommodate Muslim women who can not exercise comfortably in their presence.
If the university had simply said that the gym was closed in those hours to accommodate “women that do not feel comfortable working out in front of men” — that would be OK. This new classification would include women who might have been raped, assaulted, molested, or had other emotional issues that made it difficult for them to work out in male dominated spaces.
Muslims play a dangerous and stupid game when they start demanding things based on their Islam. Even the most conservative reading of classical Sharia reveals that Eunuchs were allowed to wander freely through the harem. In other words, a known homosexual man who has never had sex with a woman and never will, can make a powerful case under Sharia that he cannot be excluded from the gym hours.
Michael Graham has the funniest
In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.
At Harvard, that’s called progress.
Mark Steyn has the last word.
In Minneapolis last year, the airport licensing authority, faced with a mainly Muslim crew of cab drivers refusing to carry the blind, persons with six-packs of Bud, slatternly women, etc, proposed instituting two types of taxis with differently colored lights, one of which would indicate the driver was prepared to carry members of identity groups that offend Islam. Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.
Harvard should be ashamed if only for the sloppy thinking that led to this embarrassment.
If you haven't been keeping track of the soft sharia that's creeping up in Canada, then you must read Kathy Shaidle's article on Free Speech vs. Muslim Sensibilities.
You will not believe the kangaroo courts, ostensibly set up to "protect human rights", but which operate to intimidate those who don't accept the ideology of multiculturalism and don't believe that the right not to be offended trumps the right of free speech, the right to practice one's religion and the right of due process.
Sean Murphy of the Catholic Civil Rights League aptly summed up one notorious case, in which, "a Christian printer is ordered to produce business cards and letterhead for an organization that promotes pro-pedophilia essays, is fined $5,000 for having refused to do so and is left with $40,000 in legal bills for daring to defend himself."
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Most Canadians don't realize that these Commissions and tribunals aren't "real" courts. They operate outside the criminal justice system in an Orwellian world of their own. To the CHRCs, traditional rules of evidence don't apply. Truth is no defense. Commissioners can confiscate a defendant's computer without a warrant. Defendants can be forced to apologize to their accusers, even though the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that even convicted murderers cannot be obliged to apologize to their victim's family; that, the Court ruled, would be, "cruel and unusual punishment."
Incredibly, the CHRCs boast a Stalinist 100 percent conviction rate: no one has ever been found "not guilty." Columnist David Warren's chilling description of CHRC tribunals is impossible to improve upon:
"They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant's right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgments on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, 'the process is the punishment' in these star chambers -- for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing. (...)
"That's why you go to an HRC: because your case is not good enough to stand up in a legitimate court of law. And because you don't want to invest your own time and money, but would rather the taxpayer provide officers to do the paperwork, and pick up the tab. Instead, you want a slam-dunk way in which you can victimize someone you don't like, by playing the victim yourself, without any financial or legal consequences, except to him. 'Human rights' commissions were designed to provide just this service, for the use of persons who are both litigious, and lazy."
Two people caught up in the madness that are Canada's Human Right Commissions are Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, yes that Mark Steyn.
Ezra Levant printed the Mohammed cartoons in his magazine the Western Standard.
An excerpt from Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" was reprinted in Canada's largest weekly magazine, Maclean's.
There are existing laws against defamation, death threats and libel that work perfectly well. Neither Steyn nor Levant said or did anything that would make them liable in a court of law. What the Human Right Commissions are attempting to regulate is not a crime but political thought and expression that may offend an individual or a group.
Ezra Levant was smart enough to have his interrogation sessions videotaped which he then put up on YouTube where they were seen by over half a million people and promptly became a hero to me and many, many others for his eloquent defense which can be seen here
Ezra Levant's Opening Statement
Ezra Levant, I don't answer to the state.
His website, ezralevant.com, keeps us informed of the fast-moving events in this case and in another threatened lawsuit by one Richard Warman and the support he has received.
the former investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, who quit the commission in 2004 to become the commission’s biggest customer. Approximately half of all complaints filed under the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s section 13 “idea crimes” provision have been filed by Warman. The CHRC has a 100% conviction rate under that section, and besides ordering the poor shleps Warman complains about to pay fines to the government, they’re often ordered to pay thousands of dollars to Warman himself, too, for his “hurt feelings”. Unlike the paycheque he got when he used to work there, the cash he gets from commission fines is tax free.
Warman and his friends at the CHRC aren’t hitting me with a human rights complaint – not yet, anyways. But he is threatening me with the most bizarre defamation lawsuit I think I’ve ever encountered.
A new website Free Mark Steyn keeps track of the Steyn and Levant cases and the furious debate in Canada and in the blogosphere.
I rarely write about politics with one great exception, the alarming danger I see in the encroachment of the rights - freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right to vote, the rule of law, the equality of all men and women before the law - that have been passed on to us by the generations before us. I believe we hold those rights in trust and are bound to pass them on to future generations intact. Those rights recognized in our Constitution and Bill of Rights do not belong to Americans alone but to everyone; they are universal human rights.
When those hard-won rights are being lost little by little under the guise of multiculturalism and tolerance of 'whatever', I am greatly alarmed. Mark Steyn writes So what would it take to alarm you?
Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you'd suggested such things on Sept. 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn't seem such a big deal, and nor will the next concession, and the one after that. It's hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book "alarmist" accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada's Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few. The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith.
The war against Islamic jihadism now being fought around the globe is about more than terrorism, fearful and horrific as that is, it is also about the oppression of women.
If you have any doubt watch the video below but not with any children present because it is so graphic. Weep for the millions of Muslims who are denied the basic rights we take for granted.
As home-grown terrorists are acquitted, a new report says a lack of national identity as made Britain vulnerable.
The report, published through the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, declared Britain’s security to be at risk and its vulnerability to be down to a “loss of confidence in our own identity, values, constitution and institutions”.
Blaming multicultural Britain, the report concluded with a classic soundbite: “We look like a soft touch. We are indeed a soft touch, from within and without.
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The public could be forgiven for being confused. What is the reality of Britain’s efforts to combat terrorism: impressive or rubbish? Soft or tough?
The RUSI report and the case of Raja and his codefendants reflect two important strands in Britain’s engagement with terror: the strength of our security apparatus and the nation’s cultural identity.
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But for Prins the detection and conviction of extremists is the end point of a more important part of the fight against terrorism: disseminating a vision of British values so the various communities that live here do not become radicalised.
Hearts and minds. It's all about Hearts and Minds.
Why the West is Best by Ibn Warraq
The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy—are superior to any others devised by humankind. It was the West that took steps to abolish slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in Africa, where rival tribes sold black prisoners into slavery. The West has secured freedoms for women and racial and other minorities to an extent unimaginable 60 years ago. The West recognizes and defends the rights of the individual: we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live lives of our choosing.
In short, the glory of the West, as philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, is that life here is an open book. Under Islam, the book is closed
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A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.
Whenever I write about the Archbishop's remarks on sharia, I can't help but recall that disgusting saying, "When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it." The Archbishop, Spengler points out,
acknowledged the fact of coercion of women in his February 7 address, but insisted that because it belonged to "custom" rather than "religious law", he preferred to change the subject:
Spengler on the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks on sharia being "unavoidable", Europe in the house of war.
Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim sharia law in Great Britain.
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Europe may not have war, but it already has violence: its political authorities cringe and scurry and evade and lie in the face of actual or threatened violence by its Muslim communities. If its duly-constituted governments abandon their monopoly of violence to self-appointed religious leaders, the likelihood is that a river of blood will flow, just as Powell warned in 1968.
It only took a generation.
There are the four million Dutch who describe themselves as Roman Catholics but the young people are far more familiar with Islam than Christianity.
The Christian Ramadan
The Catholic charity Vastenaktie, which collects for the Third World across the Netherlands during the Lent period, is concerned that the Christian festival has become less important for the Dutch over the last generation.
"The image of the Catholic Lent must be polished. The fact that we use a Muslim term is related to the fact that Ramadan is a better-known concept among young people than Lent," said Vastenaktie Director, Martin Van der Kuil.
What he wishes on us is an abomination. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent
What Rowan Williams wishes upon us is an abomination and I write here as a modern Muslim woman. He lectures the nation on the benefits of sharia law – made by bearded men, for men – and wants the alternative legal system to be accommodated within our democracy in the spirit of inclusion and cohesion.
Pray tell me sir, how do separate and impenetrable courts and schools and extreme female segregation promote commonalities and deep bonds between citizens of these small isles?
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He passes round what he believes to be the benign libation of tolerance. It is laced with arsenic.
He would not want his own girls and women, I am sure, to "choose" to be governed by these laws he breezily endorses. And he is naive to the point of folly if he imagines it is possible to pick and choose the bits that are relatively nice to the girls or ones that seem to dictate honourable financial transactions.
Look around the Islamic world where sharia rules and, in every single country, these ordinances reduce our human value to less than half that is accorded a male; homosexuals are imprisoned or killed, children have no free voice or autonomy, authoritarianism rules and infantilises populations.
On the heels of her statement comes this one from the Association of Chief Police Officers in Britain. Up to 17,000 women in Britain are being subjected to 'honour' related violence, including murder each year.
the number of girls falling victim to forced marriages, kidnappings, sexual assaults, beatings and even murder by relatives intent on upholding the "honour" of their family is up to 35 times higher than official figures suggest.
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Commander Steve Allen, head of ACPO's honour-based violence unit, says the true toll of people falling victim to brutal ancient customs is "massively unreported" and far worse than is traditionally accepted.
They really do believe they will establish a world wide caliphate.
From Schmoozing with Terrorists.
A deputy commander of Fatah's al Aqsa Martyrs Bridade, Nasser Abu Azziz, explained to Klein that when sharia law is imposed in Western countries, "these sick people [homosexuals] will be treated in a very tough way," explaining that the Islamic leadership will "prevent social and physical diseases like homosexuality." All the terrorists whom Klein interviewed agreed that homosexuality would not be tolerated in the US once Islam rules.
And homosexuality is not all they condemn. The failure of western women to conform to Islamic standards of dress will reap harsh responses including, if necessary, torture. Sheik Hamad, a Hamas cleric, said those women who refuse to cover themselves in conformity with Islamic values would be punished either by imprisonment, whipping or stoning.
Say what you will about the Archbishop of Canterbury's idiotic comment that sharia law seems unavoidable in Britain, he finally got some people to stand up and support the institutions of their own country.
Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, said,
"There can be no exceptions to the laws of our land which have been so painfully honed by the struggle for democracy and human rights."
Writing in this newspaper, Lord Carey condemns multiculturalism as "disastrous", blames it for creating Islamic ghettos and says that Dr Williams's support for sharia law will "inevitably lead to further demands from the Muslim community"
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, said
the Government's promotion of multiculturalism had destroyed the unity that used to hold society together.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the shadow minister for community cohesion, said
setting up rival systems of law would alienate sections of society and may lead to legal apartheid.
Ruth Gledhill in the Times Online wrote
A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a 'no-go area' for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: 'The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes. There can be many reasons. The women are sent for assessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don't you people write about this?'
My interlocuter went very red and almost started to cry. Instead, she began shouting at me. I was a member of the press. 'You must write about this,' she begged.
'I can't,' I said. 'Not unless you become a whistle-blower. Or give me some evidence. Or something.'
She shook her head. 'I can't be identified,' she said. 'I would be killed. And so would the women.'
The London Telegraph editorialized
In his effort to find an accommodation with other religions, in particular Islam, Dr Williams appears to be willing to give up on values which define his own. In fact, it is hard to understand why the leader of the Church of England should be so willing to "accommodate" the values of sharia law at all. Sharia law is abhorrent not just to most Christians, but to anyone who is committed to human rights - a group that includes many Muslims. In the countries where it operates, sharia law is brutal, cruel, discriminatory, and viciously oppressive of women, whose testimony is worth only half that of a man, and who are disadvantaged, relative to men, in marriage law, in disputes on the custody of children in divorce cases, and in inheritance law.
Still, there's a long way to go. Let's not forget that Her Majesty's government has renamed Islamic terrorism as "anti -Islamic activity" so as to avoid inflaming Muslims.
To which Mark Steyn replied
Jacqui Smith, unveiled the new brand name in a speech a few days ago. "There is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief," she told her audience. "Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic."
Well, yes, one sort of sees what she means. Killing thousands of people in Manhattan skyscrapers in the name of Islam does, among a certain narrow-minded type of person, give Islam a bad name, and thus could be said to be "anti-Islamic" — in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction on Londoners during the Blitz was an "anti-German activity." But I don't recall even Neville Chamberlain explaining, as if to a five-year old, that there is nothing German about the wish to terrorize and invade, and that this is entirely at odds with the core German values of sitting around eating huge sausages in beer gardens while wearing lederhosen.
The Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman personally supports barring white candidates from running for office in certain constituencies so that more black and Asian (meaning Muslim) MPs can be elected.
Quarter of Brits think Churchill was myth while a majority think Sherlock Holmes was real.
What are they teaching them in school.
Another chilling warning from Bruce Bawer who writes from Oslo First They Came for the Gays.
Once an oasis of tolerance, Europe is slowly but surely succumbing to Islamization.
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It’s very clear what’s going on here – and where it’s all headed. Europe is on its way down the road of Islamization, and it’s reached a point along that road at which gay people’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is being directly challenged, both by knife-wielding bullies on the street and by taxpayer-funded thugs whose organizations already enjoy quasi-governmental authority. Sharia law may still be an alien concept to some Westerners, but it’s staring gay Europeans right in the face – and pointing toward a chilling future for all free people. Pim Fortuyn saw all this coming years ago; most of today’s European leaders still refuse to see it even though it’s right before their eyes.
The soft sharia is spreading.
Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, if you are the polygamous sort with multiple wives, you can apply for and get multiple benefits. A Muslim man with four spouses could receive 10,000 pounds a year in income support alone.
Meanwhile a study in Britain says that whole communities are involved in assisting and covering up honor killings with informal networks of taxi drivers, councillors and even police officers tracking down and returning who try to escape.
Women have been raped, abused and even killed for forming "inappropriate" relationships or merely for wanting to go to university.
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The report found that...women may be attacked for nothing more than listening to western music ..... Local authorities are not acting because of "political correctness" and a fear of being accused of racism.
Many Muslim women training to become doctors are refusing to comply with hygiene rules to stop the spread of deadly superbugs by rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands before entering surgery because they say it is against their religion to be bare below their elbow.
Born in Pakistan, the Bishop of Rochester warned of 'no'go' areas where people of a different race or faith face physical attack said
attempts are being made to give Britain an increasingly Islamic character by introducing the call to prayer and wider use of sharia law, a legal system based on the Koran.
The bishop was warned that he would not "live long" and would be "sorted out" if he continued to criticise Islam.
"The irony is that I had similar threats when I was a bishop in Pakistan, but I never thought I would have them here,"
When the global economy depends on communication and more and more the Internet, When news that damaged undersea cables disrupt businesses and personal use across a vast swath of Mideast countries, we begin to see how much the global economy depends on the Internet.
The biggest impact comes from the outages across India, with the companies that serve the East Coast of the United States and Britain badly hit.
Submarine cables carry the bulk of international telecommunications traffic. These cables can be damaged by earthquake, accident or terrorism.
Who protects and repairs the networks of underwater cables and communication satellites? The Belmont Club writes
unheralded and unnoticed the USN and USAF maintain the "freedom of navigation" not only of the ocean waves but of the ether. It is behind their shield that the world economy literally lives. The cars people drive, the fuel that propels them, the food they eat, the conversations they have, the television signals they receive, all travel the broad highways of sea and sky that men unsung defend.
Italy is in a funk, a malaise, a bad humor. A country that fascinates and infuriates Italians and tourists alike, a country that claims to have mastered the art of living has the least happy people in Western Europe.
In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment.
“It’s a country that has lost a little of its will for the future,” said Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome and a possible future center-left prime minister. “There is more fear than hope.”
The first populist movement in decades is growing, led by a stand-up comic Beppe Grillo who's become a blogger with the tenth most-inked blog in the world. Using the Internet, he encourages like-minded others to organize meet-ups across the country to choose candidates to stand against the Parliament that is hated for its financial corruption, inaction, ineffectiveness, excess, not to mention the 24 convicted criminals who are members.
This deep well of distrust for politics and politicians manifests most strongly in the younger generation who know how much better things work elsewhere.
Doubt clouds the family itself: 70 percent of Italians between 20 and 30 still live at home, condemning the young to an extended and underproductive adolescence. Many of the brightest, like the poorest a century ago, leave Italy.
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The divorce rate has risen. Large families are a thing of the past. Italy has one of Europe’s lowest birth rates, the fewest children under 15 and the greatest number of people over 85, apart from Sweden. Unemployment is low, at 6 percent. But 21 percent of the population between 15 and 24 did not work in 2006. And the old are not letting go.
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“The generational problem is the Italian problem,” said Mario Adinolfi, 36, a blogger and an aspiring lawmaker. “In every country young people hope. Here in Italy there is no hope anymore. Your mom keeps you home nice and softly, and you stay there and you don’t fight. And if you don’t fight, it is impossible to take power from anybody.”
We don’t have a Google,” he added. “We can’t imagine in Italy that a 30-year-old opens a business in a garage.”
Says Beppe Sevenigni, a columnist for Corriere della Sera, says change has to come first from the Italians themselves.
The malaise is: ‘I can see all that, but there is nothing I can do to change it,’
To change your ways means changing your individual ways: refusing certain compromises, to start paying your taxes, don’t ask for favors when you are looking for a job, not to cheat when your child is trying to reach admission to university.”
That’s the tricky part,
We have reached a point where hoping for some kind of white knight coming in saying, ‘We’ll sort you out,’ is over.
We Italians have our destiny in our hands more than ever before.
Can a popular movement change the government and the culture as well? No wonder there's more fear than hope for the future.
Rapid acceleration in human evolution described
In fact, people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin.
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Africans have new genes providing resistance to malaria. In Europeans, there is a gene that makes them better able to digest milk as adults. In Asians, there is a gene that makes ear wax more dry.
Study finds people on different continents are increasingly different from each other.
Rapid population growth has been coupled with vast changes in cultures and ecology, creating new opportunities for adaptation.
At the same time, many people from New Agers to Sri Aurbindo to Teilhard de Chardin to Ken Wilber see a quickening in spiritual evolution.
Simultaneously, there is a devolution going on in many parts of the world where Islamic fundamentalism of the Wahhabi sort holds sway, intent on bringing back the eighth century.
Doris Lessing's Nobel Lecture On not winning the Nobel Prize
What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging.
via Rainy Day
She compares the thirst for books and reading that she found in Zimbabwe where everyone begs for books and some learn to read from the labels on jam jars and a privileged school in North London where a lot of boys never read at all and the library is only half-used.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
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Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and owe respect to our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning, but it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the working men's libraries, institutes, colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.
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We are a jaded lot, we in our world – our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house – a treasure – of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come on it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
It's hard to believe some of these stories out of England and its National Health Service.
Nurses Told to Turn Muslims' Beds to Mecca
OVERWORKED nurses have been ordered to stop all medical work five times every day to move Muslim patients’ beds so they face towards Mecca.
The lengthy procedure, which also includes providing fresh bathing water, is creating turmoil among overstretched staff on bustling NHS wards.
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But despite the havoc, Mid- Yorkshire NHS Trust says the rule must be instigated whenever possible to ensure Muslim patients have “a more comfortable stay in hospital”.
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It comes on the back of the introduction in some NHS hospitals last year of Burka-style gowns for Muslim patients who did not wish medical staff to see their face while operating or caring for them.
Would an advertisement of a tattooed skinhead urinating into a china teacup encourage you to visit London?
"It's fun, it's supposed to show how cosmopolitan London is. Yes, I really think it says London is cosmopolitan," insisted a spokeswoman for Eurostar about the ad designed to attract Belgians to hop on the new high-speed train to the English capital.
Personally, I think it explains why record numbers are emigrating from Britain, 207,000 Britons left last year .
I think this is rather good news.
US thwarts 19 terrorist attacks against America since 9/11.
Especially since Islamic terrorists have carried out more than 10,009 deadly terror attacks since that same date, mainly against other Muslims.
Michael Yon, embedded with the troops for the past three years posts this photograph and calls it Thanks and Praise as men and women, both Christian and Muslim, place a cross atop St. John's Church in Bagdad, a church that had been bombed and burned in 2004 but has since been restored with the cross, the crowning touch.
The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.” The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.
Iraqpundit welcomes the recent changes in Baghdad and writes.
Frankly, I don't understand why so many mock us for wanting a future for Iraq. Is your hatred for George Bush so great that you prefer to see millions of civilians suffer just to prove him wrong?
It really comes down to this: you are determined to see Iraq become a permanent hellhole because you hate Bush. And we are determined to see Iraq become a success, because we want to live.
Sometimes, it takes a fresh eye to see America as it was and is. French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his speech before a joint session of Congress did just that.
Fathers took their sons to see the vast cemeteries where, under thousands of white crosses so far from home, thousands of young American soldiers lay who had fallen not to defend their own freedom but the freedom of all others, not to defend their own families, their own homeland, but to defend humanity as a whole.
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And as they listened to their fathers, watched movies, read history books and the letters of soldiers who died on the beaches of Normandy and Provence, as they visited the cemeteries where the star-spangled banner flies, the children of my generation understood that these young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children.
To those 20-year-old heroes who gave us everything, to the families of those who never returned, to the children who mourned fathers they barely got a chance to know, I want to express France's eternal gratitude.
Now and in the years to come, I hope and trust the Iraqis will feel the same way towards the treasure of American blood and money expended there.
Charles McCarry is one of my favorite writers and his espionage novels are extraordinary. If you haven't read any of them, you're in for a treat. The Boston Globe calls him "the best writer of intelligence and political novels in the world."
Many had gone out of print until brought back and republished by the Overlook Press. Wrote one reviewer of the Tears of Autumn in 2005
I approached this handsome new edition of Charles McCarry's masterpiece, "The Tears of Autumn," with trepidation. The novel was first published in 1974, and it has been more than 20 years since I last read it. I had only a hazy memory that (1) it was beautifully written, (2) it offered a plausible theory of the Kennedy assassination and (3) it was a classic. My concern was that, given a new reading, the novel might not hold up, but my fear was groundless. "The Tears of Autumn" is beautifully written, its conspiracy theory still intrigues and it most assuredly is a classic.
I've reread many of them several times over in the past two decades and everyone is a classic in my opinion. I write about him today because of the death of Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In a talk before the New York Public Library, McCarry tells an extraordinary story about the head man of a Japanese village who had never met an American and invited McCarry who was hiking with his wife in the Japan Alps to have lunch with him.
The story which I've printed verbatim is below the fold, so you have to click to read it. I found it at Jonathan Delacour's Consequences.
Robert Birnbaum interviews McCarry here. And below are some of McCarry's books to get you started.
"Tears of Autumn" (Charles McCarry)
"The Secret Lovers: A Paul Christopher Novel (Paul Christopher Novels)" (Charles McCarry)
"The Last Supper" (Charles McCarry)
"Second Sight: A Paul Christopher Novel" (Charles McCarry)
"Old Boys" (Charles McCarry)
"Christopher's Ghosts" (Charles McCarry)
Charles McCarry in an essay called A Strip of Exposed Film (based on a talk given at the New York Public Library and published in Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel). .
Charles McCarry had been climbing in the Japan Alps when he and his wife were invited to visit the head man of a village called Nodaira.
His name was Toyomi Yamagishi. The same twenty families had been living in this very remote village since the twelfth century; the first road had been built only thirty years earlier. Before that everything that went into the village and came out of the village went in or came out on the back of a human being.
The visit took place at ten in the morning, “the usual Japanese hour for such affairs. They all sat around the kotatsu, a table with a blanket draped over it and a charcoal brazier underneath, “so that your lower body was warm enough and you warmed your upper body by drinking whiskey and sake at ten in the morning.” After they had eaten and been served green tea, Yamagishi began to speak.
He spoke in a recitative style, somewhat like the narration of a Noh play or a Bunraku puppet theater performance, except that he was speaking modern Japanese so that we could understand what he was saying.
He said he had invited us to his house because he had never met an American and had wanted to ever since World War II. We chatted a little about the history of the village and about the life that he and the other villagers had led before the war. He said it had been a life of ceaseless toil. As a child he had only rarely seen the faces of his parents because they worked every day from dark to dark, leaving the hut before he woke and returning after he was asleep. He had had no children of his own because he wanted to avoid this sadness in his own life. I remarked that I had grown up on a farm and knew how hard that life could be. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you do not know. Human beings are not beasts of burden in America.”
Yamagishi then told us about his life during the war. He had been drafted in 1944, at the age of forty, and sent to Osaka to guard the emperor’s forest. Then the Americans took Saipan and the B-29s came. “The Americans burned the forest with incendiary bombs, so it was not necessary to guard it any longer,” he said. “I became a firefighter. The Americans would drop incendiary bombs to set the city on fire, and when we went to fight the fires they would wait until we were very busy and then they would come over with other B-29s and drop antipersonnel bombs and kill the firemen. I thought, ‘The Americans are very clever.’ Then, after the whole city had been destroyed, a single B-29 flew over Osaka and dropped not bombs but hundreds of little parachutes. When these parachutes landed we saw that a gift was tied to each—a mirror, a harmonica, a fountain pen. The Japanese people had lost nearly everything in the bombing and they were very glad to have these gifts from the Americans. They ran to get them, and when they touched them they exploded in their hands, blowing off fingers and blinding people. I thought, ‘The Americans are not only clever; they are ruthless. We have lost the war.’”
Yamagishi said, “Your ships came and shelled us. The bombers kept on also, every day. I was assigned to train people to fight the Americans when they invaded. We showed women and children how to make spears from bamboo. Every Japanese was prepared to die defending the homeland. Then the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The emperor’s voice came over loudspeakers in the streets. He told us we must surrender. No one had ever heard his voice before, and to us it was the voice of God. But our commanding officer said, ‘No! We must kill the Americans! He is no true emperor if he tells the Japanese to surrender.’ Nevertheless we obeyed the emperor, and I came back to this village. All the younger sons of every family—all twenty families—had been killed in the war. Only old men and women were left to do the work. I thought we would starve to death. But as you see, we did not.
“Now,” the old Japanese said, “I will tell you why I invited you here. It is because I have something to say to you, and to all Americans.” He was out of breath and his face was full of color from the whiskey he had drunk, and I thought, “Well, here it comes.”
Yamagishi said, “Thank you. Thank you for defeating Japan. If you Americans had not done so, this village would be as it always was. The militarists would never have let us have democracy. But the Americans built the road; my nephews and nieces have cars and television sets, and they see their children every day. And because they have eaten American things like milk and vegetables and fruit, instead of the millet and pickles we had to eat, they are tall and beautiful like Americans instead of short and homely like me and my wife.” He bowed and said, “Thank you.” I realized, to my surprise, and in spite of everything I believed about the morality of bombing civilians, that the U.S. Air Force had won Yamagishi’s heart and mind by pitilessly destroying Osaka, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In one of my novels a political idealist asks Paul Christopher what he believes in. Christopher replies, “I believe in consequences.” In the novel, as in politics and in life itself, you can’t know what the consequences of any act will be until you come to the end.
Ralph Peters believes that too many of us know too little history and so believe whatever's comfortable. We've lived in safety and comfort too long to grasp what war means and instead believe in myths.
How many of the 12 Myths about 21st Century War he writes about do you believe because you never really thought it through?
Myth No. 1 War doesn't change anything.
On over 100 campuses across the country, a large roster of speakers are talking about matters that are not being addressed in women's studies programs or in Saudi-subsidized Middle Eastern studies departments.
Kathryn Lopez interviewed David Horowitz on how he is getting students to listen to the counter-curriculum
I begin my speeches by explaining the poster we have created which shows a Muslim woman having her head blown off by a Taliban soldier for sexual improprieties. I refer to the 130 million Muslim women who have had their genitals sliced off without anesthetic to conform to some barbaric Muslim custom. I recall the 200,000 moderate Muslims slaughtered by Islamo-fascists in Algeria calling themselves “al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” The room gets pretty silent after that.
Nonie Darwish, an Arab-American author and feminist as well as a vociferous critic of radical Islam, spoke at Wellesley College last week and got the "Mean Girl Treatment according to Phyllis Chesler.
The radical Muslims on American campuses are getting more belligerent, far more militant,” author and lecturer Nonie Darwish tells me. “They have perfected their intimidation and disruption techniques.”
And more of the same at Berkeley according to Zombietime.
Nonie Darwish writes herself of the Berkeley incident
I felt that even in America I am being silenced. My response was: “Who will speak for women who are stoned and for Muslims terrorized in radical Muslim countries? It is sad that I left oppressive Sharia Muslim culture, where I had no freedom of speech, only to find myself silenced in America, by groups who claim they are for free speech.”
Let's hope David Warren is correct when writes in Confrontational
Attempts to disrupt the events have thus far largely played into the organizers' hands. For they are trying to get attention, and disruptions help. And since the protesters from various campus radical cells do a good job of illustrating the very points the organizers are making -- trying to silence people by intimidation -- people can see the main point in action.
Let's hope the organizers are right when they say
By the end of the week millions of people will have heard our message that we will no longer turn a blind eye to the violence directed against women, gays, and 'infidels’ in Islamo-Fascist regimes. This homicidal intolerance, and the conspiracy of silence that protects it on America’s campuses, will no longer be accepted.”
So the President of Columbia Lee Bollinger in defending his decision to give a platform and a forum to President Ahmadinejad says he would have invited Adolf Hitler and subjected him to the same 'sharp challenges' he plans to give to the Iranian president. In the same week, we're watching Ken Burns's documentary on the second world war and seeing just what it really cost us and our Allies to defeat the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
Just what is in the waters of academia these days? Ahmadinejad, the president of a terrorist state that calls for death to America, has American blood on his hands through the arming of terrorists in Iraq, executes homosexuals, oppresses women imprisoning them if they venture outside in public without a burka, allows stoning of women, denies the Holocaust happened, calls for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, and is busy making nuclear bombs in open defiance of U.N. resolutions, is welcomed at Columbia.
Before a woman is stoned in Iran, she is half-buried.
Shrinkwrapped writes
The Iranian propaganda operatives in Tehran, one can be sure, are gleeful over Mr. Bollinger's blunder. They know that no matter how tough the questions Mr. Bollinger asks Mr. Ahmadinejad — whether they palaver about Israel, ground zero, human rights, or Madisonian principles like free speech — the Iranian is the victor merely by being received on Morningside Heights. They know that Mr. Bollinger will not permit protesters to rush the stage and physically drive a speaker from campus the way the university permitted students to do when Jim Gilchrist of the Minutemen attempted to speak there.
Where do you draw the line? Roger Kimball says it best.
By providing a madman like Ahmadinejad with a platform at Columbia University, President Bollinger has in effect welcomed him into the community of candid reasoners. He has granted him a patent of legitimacy that no amount of "dialogue and reason" can dissipate. In this case, "listening" is indeed tantamount to an endorsement. It reduces free speech to a species of political capitulation and renders dialogue indistinguishable from a suicide pact.
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The spectacle of these left-wing academics repudiating men like Larry Summers and Donald Rumsfeld even as they abase themselves scrambling to find excuses for welcoming a fanatic like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the halls of a great American University is disgusting. I think again of Bagehot's observation that "History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it." Are we really willing to let ourselves--our ideals, our way of life--be carelessly traduced by a rancid leftism so enfeebled that it can no longer distinguish between free speech and suicide? We are even now in the process of answer that question. How we answer it will determine a lot more than the issue of who gets to speak on American college campuses.
John O Sullivan, Social acid has burnt the heart of Britain
It didn't happen overnight. Breaking down a strong culture of civic self-control takes time and several social acids.
The first such acid was the cultural liberalism generally associated with the 1960s: the attempt to free people from irksome traditional moral customs and the laws that reflected them.
Anthony Jay has recently described how the "media liberalism" of the BBC - an institution founded in part to promote social virtues and British institutions - increasingly undermined them all: from military valour to the monarchy.
Assuredly, this revolution had its worthwhile side, especially for the educated and prosperous. Britain today is a freer and more relaxed society with less supervision from maiden aunts and aldermen than in 1955.
Combined with a welfare state that picked up the tab, however, cultural liberalism promoted social irresponsibility - more voluntary workless, more divorces, children with fewer opportunities because they live in homes without two parents, a growing underclass, a society that is cruder, more disordered, less gentle.
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Except for the Thatcher years, however, the British establishment, from a blend of multiculturalism and Europeanism, drained all pride and meaning out of Britishness. No one, not even the Scots, wants to assimilate to a nullity.
The result is a fractured, distrustful and disorderly society. And because a diverse society lacks agreed values and standards, governments regulate the behaviour of all, including the law-abiding, to maintain social peace.
Thus, we have far more officials supervising us than in the 1950s, but they are anti-smoking social workers and ethnic diversity officers rather than park wardens.
I find this so appalling, I can't imagine the mind-set that that thinks promoting incestuous pedophilia as healthy sex education is an appropriate role for a government.
German Government Publication Promotes Incestuous Pedophila
Booklets from a subsidiary of the German government's Ministry for Family Affairs encourage parents to sexually massage their children as young as 1 to 3 years of age. Two 40-page booklets entitled "Love, Body and Playing Doctor" by the German Federal Health Education Center (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung - BZgA) are aimed at parents - the first addressing children from 1-3 and the other children from 4-6 years of age.
"Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex," reads the booklet regarding 1-3 year olds. The authors rationalize, "The child touches all parts of their father's body, sometimes arousing him. The father should do the same."
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According to the Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita, the BZgA booklet is an obligatory read in nine German regions. It is used for training nursery, kindergarten and elementary school teachers. Ironically it is recommended by many organizations officially fighting pedophilia, such as the German Kunderschutzbund. BZgA sends out millions of copies of the booklet every year.
For older children, the Department of Family teaches 9 year-olds to put condoms on a banana. By age 10, education in homosexuality is required. In Berlin, teachers are told to "homosexualize" classes in biology, German, English, history, Latin, and psychology according to Gerald Augustinus, a native Austrian who has translated parts of the books into English so we can see just how depraved such education is.
Since homeschooling is illegal in Germany, there is no way parents who desire a period of innocence for their children can take refuge. How quickly an entire moral order has been upended.
Gil Bailie describes it thus
In rapid succession, the declension began: from understanding to tolerance, from tolerance to moral indifference, from indifference to celebration, from celebration to intolerance for any moral objections, from intolerance to legal threats, and finally to teaching seven and eight year-olds the moral and social indistinguishability of homosexual coupling and heterosexual nuptiality.
When Britain, a First World country, loses a democratically-elected politician because he fears for his life, we are entering a wholly new era. Britain is now an Iraq, a Zimbabwe.
Paul Weston writes about The Big Story That Isn't.
Mohammad Sarwar, a member of Parliament from Glasgow, Britain's first Muslim MP, is being driven from office following threats to his life and that of his children by other Muslims.
The offense? He pressed the government to seek extradition from Pakistan of the killers of a young 15-year-old Scottish boy Kriss Donald who was tortured in an especially brutal way, than killed.
Our national heart has ceased to beat. Our national soul is hovering indecisively above the operating table. The crash team have been called, but the politically inclined hospital switchboard have told them there is no problem, that everything is under control.
Carlin Romano explores why government and media are so mealy-mouthed when it comes to naming terrorists for what they are.
He asks why not employ the tool of moral judgment forcefully expressed by calling them "savages, scum and uncivilized losers"?
If We Don't Call Them Names, the Terrorists Win
What might we argue in favor of calling terrorists names?
Let's mention just one key goal: the education of the world's Muslim youth. Instead of hearing moral praise and encouragement for terrorism from jihadists, which then gets mixed in their minds with the nonjudgmental, tactical talk of Western officials and media, they'd have to absorb a steady stream of insults of terrorists' intelligence, morality, decency, and reasoning. Young Muslims would have to get used to hearing jihadist heroes described as savages, scum, and uncivilized losers, along with the reasons why. It would intellectually force them, far more than they are forced today, to choose between two visions of the world.
We should not minimize the thirst for respect among terrorists and their potential sympathizers. When we treat terrorists only as tactical foes, as though we're too jaded for moral talk, we raise the self-respect of terrorists and their appeal to young people...Perhaps officials around the free world, under a portfolio titled "Terrorism Is Not Great," could start stockpiling verbal weapons that penetrate the enemy more sharply than, "They're dangerous and we must fight them."
Who watches over Western Civilization?
Back in the 20s, Charles Coulombe writes, the German General, the British House of Lords, the Academie Francaise and the Holy See were thought enough to prevent the takeover of Europe by Communism. Today, only the Holy See remains an influential institution at a time when threats to Western Civilization come from Islam and the forces of secularism that threaten the expression of national identities.
He asks Could the Latin Mass Save Western Civilization?, an outstanding essay.
The truth is that the Catholic Church is a bellwether for the health of Western Civilization in general—a sort of canary chanting in the coal mine of culture.
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When, in 1971, news came out that the traditional Latin Mass was to be scrapped, a primarily non-Catholic group of English artists and writers protested to Paul VI.
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Fifty-six of the most prominent and celebrated English writers, artists, and musicians of the time signed it --- among them Vladimir Ashkenazy and Yehudi Menuhin (pace Mr. Foxman), Graham Greene, Robert Graves and Cecil Day-Lewis (onetime poet laureate and father of Daniel), Iris Murdoch, and, in the end most importantly, Agatha Christie. The importance of the last signatory lay in the fact that the then-Pontiff was a devotee of her mysteries, and so granted her request. The resulting permission for the Old Mass to be continued in England to some degree has therefore been dubbed the “Agatha Christie Indult.”
What these illustrious folk understood, better than many theologians, was that the health of the Catholic Church was and is integral to the health of the West. If our civilization is to withstand its current slate of internal and external foes—throughout Europe and the Diaspora—it must regain its hold on the things that first enkindled its spirit. Restoration of liturgical sanity and unity within the Catholic Church will inevitably have a beneficial “trickle-down” effect far beyond the Church’s borders. Those who prize the health of the West must welcome Benedict XVI’s action, regardless of their own creed.
Keep your eyes on Rome.
On July 7, Pope Benedict XVI issued a Moto Propio saying in essence that both the Latin form of the Mass, the one blessed by Pope John XXIII using the 1962 Roman Missal and the New Mass of the Roman Missal of Pope Paul VI following the Second Vatican Council (novus ordo) are equally valid, the former "extraordinary" and the latter "ordinary" and can be used at just about any time. The Latin Mass was never forbidden or even changed, but following the Second Vatican Council, it could only be offered under special dispensation of the bishop, a requirement no longer.
One of the most arresting essays on patriotism was written by John Scharr back in the time of the Vietnam war. Case for Patriotism
Perhaps, I like it so much because it focuses on legacy, on that extraordinary gift we have been given just because we were born in the USA, that gift entrusted to us to pass on, if not enlarged, than intact and not diminished.
Trouble is patriotism seems such an old-fashioned virtue.
Millions of Americans are simply without patriotism, and this large group includes all classes and kinds of persons. They do not think unpatriotic thoughts, but they do not think patriotic thoughts either. The republic for them is a vague and distant thing absent from their hearts, lost to their eyes. Reflecting this difference, our great patriotic holidays, now administratively arranged to provide long weekends, are less occasions for shared remembrance and renewal of the political covenant than boosts to the consumer economy.
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The word patriotism is a member of a family of words and largely takes its meanings from its membership. Some other members of the family are legacy covenant, reverence, loyalty, nurture, roots, citizen, debt, gift, republic. These words, which once clarified the matter, today encounter the same barrier of mystification-distrust-in- difference as does patriotism itself.
Sophisticated types find it simple-minded, lacking in nuance for the multi-perspectival, multi-cultural and diverse society we are today. I used to be sophisticated, but I'm glad to say I've grown out of it. Increasingly, the old-fashioned virtues seem to me to be the only ones that last, the ones necessary for a good society, the ones we must pass on.
At its core, patriotism means love of one's homeplace, and of tthe familiar things and scenes associated with the homeplace. In this sense, patriotism is one of the basic human sentiments. ... We become devoted to the people, places and ways that nurture us, and what is familiar and nuturing seems also natural and right. This is the root of patriotism.
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To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more accurately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by its debts;: one is what one owes, what one acknowledges as a rightful debt: or obligation. The patriot moves within that mentality.
The gift of land, people, language, gods, memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot, defines what he or she is. .... The conscious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts, grateful to the people and places through which they come, and determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it unspoiled to those who will come after. But such primary experiences are nearly inaccessible to us. We are not taught to define our lives by our debts and legacies, but by our rights and opportunities.
There is something distinctly different about American patriotism, that reaches far beyond love of homeland or people. Scharr calls it "covenanted patriotism"
Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world.
What our Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Abraham Lincoln called "the electric cord ...that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world."
So long as we remember.
John Quincy Adams wrote to his wife
Yesterday the greatest question was decided which was ever debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, that those United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.
He also said
Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
Do you make good use of it? Is the Fourth of July just a day off with fireworks? Or is it a time to consider again what patriotism means and what value it has in our lives today.
I quite like what Edmund Burke wrote about society being a partnership among the deceased, the living and the unborn. Even more than a partnership, Burke saw it as a trust, with the living as the trustees of an inheritance they must strive to enhance and pass on.
Patriotism is the virtue that conserves and safeguards the best of the past, to pass on undiminished, even enhanced.
I am a conservationist at heart. Not just of the natural world, but of art and society and Western civilization. And what Lincoln called "The Golden Apple" is this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Via Powerline, I just read what Calvin Coolidge said in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the signing.
It is not so much then for the purpose of undertaking to proclaim new theories and principles that this annual celebration is maintained, but rather to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound. Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken. Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the Nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection.
That Declaration, Coolidge said, came from a movement by the people
The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them.
The most important civil document in the world
It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world.
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A great spiritual document
A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.
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Exceedingly restful in its finality
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful.... If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.
God Bless America.
St. Joseph's Catholic school is the only Catholic school in New York City that has an open enrollment policy accepting any child regardless of faith, academic ability or emotional stability; yet, 95% of its students graduate in four years.
Mary Anastasia O'Grady reports on the music and
the sheer joy that had filled that school hall. It dawned on me that what had made my heart sing wasn't the trumpets or the flutes. It was the sound of 210 children, from one of the roughest neighborhoods in New York, beating the odds
St. Joseph's is a run-of-the-mill four-story structure of yellow brick. Like so many buildings in its neighborhood, it has heavy wire mesh covering the windows at street level. But what's on the inside of that ordinary schoolhouse makes it special. For the 491 Hispanic, African-American and West Indian students who attend kindergarten through eighth grade, it is a place of safety, structure and promise in a dangerous and disorderly world. The school band, which is mandatory for all students from fifth to eighth grade, reflects the discipline and sense of accomplishment that are synonymous with St. Joseph's student body.
Eighty percent of the children at the school are from single-parent homes or live with their grandparents; 85% live in Section 8 housing; and for 60% of them, English is not their first language. Most come from New York's notorious South Bronx, where the city's schools seem to devour the innocent. "The public schools in this area aren't good," the mother of a third-grader on scholarship was quoted as saying in St. Joseph's December newsletter. "The kids there grow up too fast. I wanted my son to go to a Catholic school." No wonder. Only 58% of New York's public school students graduate in four years, but the number is 95% for St. Joseph's students.
St. Joseph's and other Catholic schools, no longer staffed by nuns, are able to do it because of the generosity of private donors, many of them Wall St executives. Those who can give more do, like retired hedge-fund manager Robert Wilson, a self-proclaimed atheist who gave $22.5 million to the Archdiocese of New York to fund a scholarship program for needy inner-city students attending Roman Catholic schools.
In a phone interview, Wilson said,
`Let's face it, without the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no Western civilization. Shunning religious organizations would be abhorrent. Keep in mind, I'm helping to pay tuition.
Hats off to St. Joseph's and Robert Wilson.
Bill Whittle in another of his brilliant essays convincingly demonstrates that Tit for Tat is the best strategy for the Prisoner's Dilemma. You have to punish the cheaters, those that take advantage of the common trust, in order to preserve an environment where people cooperate.
His post is called You Are Not Alone (part 1) and (part 2) and I can't think of better reading for the weekend.
Then ask yourself whether you are part of The Remnant - those people whose force of character hold civilization together and when it's destroyed, rebuild it.
Theodore Dalrymple in another brilliant essay on The Virtue of Freedom, speaking of Tony Blair's legacy.
But his government has created 3,000 new criminal offences in ten years, that is to say more than one per working day, when all along the problem in Britain was not a insufficiency of laws, but a lack of will to enforce those that we had. The law is now so needlessly complex, and so many laws and regulations are promulgated weekly, daily, hourly, without any parliamentary oversight, that is to say by administrative decree appropriate to a dictatorship, that lawyers themselves are overwhelmed by them and do not understand them. There could be no better recipe for the development of a police state.
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The average Briton, for example, is photographed 300 times per day as he goes about his normal, humdrum existence
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The assault on freedom in Britain in the name of social welfare is an illustration of something that the American founding fathers understood, but that is not very congenial to the temper of our times: that in the long run, only a population that strives for virtue (with at least a degree of success) will be able to maintain its freedom. A nation whose individuals choose vice rather than virtue as the guiding principle of their lives will not long remain free, because it will need rescuing from the consequences of its own vices.
In Britain, it is not so very long ago that most - of course not all - people had an idea of virtue that was intensely focussed on their own individual conduct, irrespective of whether they were rich or poor. People did not in general believe that poverty excused very much. One of the destructive consequences of the spread of sociological modes of thought is that it has transferred the notion of virtue from individuals to social structures, and in so doing has made personal striving for virtue (as against happiness) not merely unnecessary but ridiculous and even bad, insofar as it diverted attention from the real task at hand, that of creating the perfect society: the society so perfect, as T S Eliot put it, that no one will have to be good.
Dalrymple understands that under the guise of solving serious social problems, immense control over the population can be achieved and brand new bureaucracies created to serve the "victims'.
Social problems, when they are on a sufficiently large scale, create two large classes of dependents: those who are dependent on the government because of their own behaviour, and those who are employed by the government to alleviate the inevitable consequences of that behaviour. In other words, a very large vested interest is created in the continuance of the very behaviour that causes social problems.
Read it all.
Fjordman, the noted Scandinavian blogger to whom I often link to asks What Do We Fight For? and coins two new words: “Caucasophobia” for anti-white racism, and “self-termination” for organized Western self-loathing and the Western policy of unilaterally dismantling our own culture.
Here's what he has to say about hate crimes.
Hate crime legislation constitutes a radical departure from the idea of equality before the law. You will be punished differently for assaulting a black Muslim than for the same crime against a white Christian, a Hindu woman or a Jewish woman, a gay man or a straight man etc. Some would argue that this already happens in real life. However, the point here is that this principle has now become a formal aspect of the law. This constitutes a gross perversion of justice. It mirrors Islamic law, which mandates different punishments for the same crime, depending upon the religious background and the sex of both the perpetrator and the victim.
I happened upon this video of Muslims Say God Bless America and thought it so remarkable I want to give you the YouTube link with the translation by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute
We did not know what democracy was
Until America brought it against our will
We are like a tiny bird born in a cage
Its father and mother were born in the same cage.
And so were its ancestors
— For the past 1,400 years…
Along came America and
Broke the cage open.
But the bird does not know how to fly.
Because it has never used its wings.
We do not know what to do
With the values of freedom
— Because we were born slaves, the sons of slaves,
the sons of slaves for the past 1,400 years…
Hat tip No Pasaran
The Business of Life for women in Iran is getting harder every day.
We worry about bad hair days; they worry about stray locks that might land them in jail.
Imagine walking down the street when a police car stops and arrests you for not wearing your veil properly. You're detained and forced to undergo psychological counseling.
Gateway Pundit has posted a shocking video of such a woman pulled off the streets and into a police car. She didn't go without fighting back.
Some 150,000 women have already been arrested or detained because they haven't complied with the strict, new Islamic dress codes.
It's the toughest crackdown in 20 years.
How this one great land lost its soul
ST GEORGE'S Day should be an occasion for patriotic celebration.
But for those of us who love this land, today has the tone of a funeral wake.
The England that we cherished has disappeared. We can only raise our glasses to the memory of a once great country whose spirit has been broken by her own rulers, its fabric torn apart by social revolution.
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Thanks to the twin malign forces of mass immigration and multi-culturalism, the scale of England’s transformation is alarming....
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And the pace of change is being accelerated by the ruthlessly enforced official ideology of cultural diversity, which holds that any manifestation of traditional patriotism is akin to racism.
Our cultural crisis is so great, we could be reliving the late days of the Roman empire. Too many in academia denigrate the Western tradition and are poorly training those who will be called to defend it but who will lack the intellectual resources to do so.
"If the elite class sees nothing in the West to defend, we're reproducing this situation of the late Roman Empire, which was very cosmopolitan and very tolerant, but which was undone by forces from within," she says.
Camille Paglia, defender of the West, an interview with Ron Dreher
I remain concerned about the compulsive denigration of the West and the reductiveness so many leading academics in the humanities have toward their own tradition," she tells me. "They reduce it all to the lowest common denominator of racism, imperialism, sexism and homophobia. That's an extremely small-minded way of looking at culture and a betrayal of the career mission of these educators, whose job is to educate students in our culture."
Chiefly responsible she says are the American professors of the humanities. When you look at what the VT killer who majored in English was taught, it's hard not to agree with her.
In Was Cho taught to hate? James Lewis spent some time checking out the websites of the English faculty to find
a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated.
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I'm sorry but VT English doesn't look like a place that gives lost and angry adolescents the essential boundaries for civilized behavior. In fact, in this perversely disorienting PoMo world, the very words "civilized behavior" are ridiculed --- at least until somebody starts to shoot students, and then it's too late. A young culture-shocked adolescent can expect no firm guidance here. But we know that already.
Paglia is shocked at the stunning loss of cultural memory among college students, especially how few college students grasp basic biblical concepts.
"The only people I'm getting at my school who recognize the Bible are African-Americans," she said. "And the lower the social class of the white person, the more likely they recognize the Bible.
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What are they left with? "Video games, the Web, cellphones, iPods – that's what's left," Dr. Paglia laments. "And that's what's going to make us vulnerable to people coming from any side, including the Muslim side, where there's fervor. Fervor will conquer apathy. I don't see how the generation trained by the Ivy League is going to have the knowledge or the resolution to defend the West."
Our cultural crisis is precisely that serious, says Dr. Paglia, who believes – as does Pope Benedict, one of the most cultured men on the planet – that we could well be reliving the last days of the Roman Empire.
What do you think of a university that
• issues loans that have to be repaid and not outright grants
• refuses to provide curtains when women swim in the college pool
• neglects to provide multiple prayer spaces in new buildings
• prepares all food in a sanitary manner
In Canada, such a university would be considered Islamophobic and racist according to the Canadian Federation of Students representing more than 500,000 students across Canada.
To remove any vestiges of such Islamophobia, the Canadian Federation of Students goes on to say, the faculty, staff, students and administrators must learn the tenets of Islam, in "education modules", taught not from a Western perspective because that would be racist, but by true believers. In Canada!
Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom in reporting the above, calls it a
a revolution from within—using the inchorent assumptions of multiculturalism along with the pernicious policing methods of political correctness to insinuate a new master narrative into a host culture ....an opportunistic theocratic movement to infiltrate and undermine liberalism and pluralism.
Meanwhile in Britain, the London Times reports
Pupils and teachers have been told by an official body not to stare at Muslims for fear of causing offence.
In Saudi Arabia, a brave woman fights to show her face.
"My face, which is my identity"
Westerners cannot understand what kind of courage it takes to stand up to a lifetime of daily oppression, but a young Saudi woman, TV newscaster Buthayna Nasser, is stating her case without apology. In a face-to-face debate with Islamofascist Nasser Al-Huneini she states:
"Sir, when I appear on TV, and when I claim my right to play a role in this professional field, I demand that my face, which constitutes my identity, be seen. Under no circumstances am I prepared to allow my identity to be obliterated."
Today in Britain one in five young people rely on handouts
A lost generation
Roughly one in five young people faces a lifetime on government handouts, under-achieving in education and runs the risk of falling into crime, says a report by the London School of Economics for the Prince's Trust charity.
Dennis Prager says Britain Was Once Great Britain
If Great Britain can cease to be great in so short a time span, any country can. All you need is an elite that no longer believes in their country, that manipulates history texts to make students feel good about themselves, that prefers multiculturalism to its own culture, and that has abandoned its religious underpinnings.
UPDATE: Melanie Phillips writes Weep for Britain
After reading Andrew Robert's A History of the English-speaking Peoples Since 1900.
The central argument of the book is that in these last hundred years the English-speaking peoples have not merely formed the most successful, powerful, creative, inventive and dynamic societies on the planet but have embodied uplifting moral virtues, subscribing to notions of collective altruism, decency, courage, gallantry, stoicism and self-sacrifice which derived at root from the profound belief that what they stood for was right.
Almost every page of this book is painful to read, because to be invited to admire these virtues of the English-speaking world is to recognise the sheer magnitude and irreplaceability of what we have lost. These virtues, which enabled the English-speaking world to triumph over the despotisms of German nationalism, fascism, and communism and brought down tyrannies over four continents, belong to a culture that has now simply vanished.
Hero's Tale is 'too positive' for the BBC.
Private Johnson Beharry's courage in rescuing an ambushed foot patrol then, in a second act, saving his vehicle's crew despite his own terrible injuries earned him a Victoria Cross.
For the BBC, however, his story is "too positive" about the conflict.
The corporation has cancelled the commission for a 90-minute drama about Britain's youngest surviving Victoria Cross hero because it feared it would alienate members of the audience opposed to the war in Iraq.
The BBC is now fighting in court to suppress and keep secret an internal report into its coverage of the mideast and in particular its bias against Israel
What's going on in Britain?
Now schools in the U.K. are dropping controversial subjects such as the Holocaust and the Crusades to avoid giving offense to some children from "certain races and religions."
What's the problem with the truth?
Andrew Bolt's Easter Message A surprising message from an agnostic.
..when I see a Western artist mock Christ, I see an artist advertising not his courage but his cowardice – by not daring to mock what would threaten him more.
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It's no accident that we feel safer insulting Christians than trashing almost anyone else. This is a religion that's always preached tolerance, reason and non-violence.
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This is one reason why I, an agnostic, will today do what I do every Easter, and play Bach's divine St Matthew Passion while I sit for a while and give thanks.
I will be thanking again not only a preacher of astonishing moral clarity and courage, but one who inspired a faith that has brought us unparalleled gifts...
Little reported in the coverage of the Iraq war is the internal war by Arab and Muslim islamists on the Assyrian Christian community. They are Assyrians, speaking Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, sometimes called Syriacs or Chaldeans.
This is what the Islamists or Muslim militants, righteous and violent murdering gangs of men, have done to the Iraqi Christians since the Iraq war began.
They have bombed 28 churches.
They have murdered hundreds of Christians.
They have beheaded a priest in Mosul.
They have crucified a 14-year-old Christian boy in Basra.
They have kidnapped a woman's baby in Baghad and, when she couldn't pay the ransom, they returned her child, beheaded, roasted and served on a mound of rice.
Read Ed West's We must not let this ancient Church slide into oblivion
just to be aware of what's happening.
From Palestine, to Iraq, to Iran and Pakistan, Christians who have lived in the middle East are leaving for fear of their lives in ever increasing numbers.
American Catholic bishops have called for asylum for Iraqi Christians
You could say this is what happens when the Peter Principle infects government, but it's more serious than that.
Theodore Dalrymple realizes that incompetence is the best way of keeping power.
In the looking-glass world of modern British public administration, nothing succeeds like failure, because failure provides work for yet more functionaries and confers an ever more providential role upon the government.
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Britain now has more educational bureaucrats than teachers, as well as more health-service administrators than hospital beds.
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The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence very few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to be omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation, and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organizations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.
Those who lose are the underclass; yet, they are essential to the whole system.
At the very end of the chain of patronage in the British state is the underclass ...Impoverished and degraded as they might be, they are nonetheless essential to the whole system, for their existence provides an ideological proof of the necessity of providential government in the first place, as well as justifying many employment opportunities in themselves. ... what I have seen myself in this most wretched stratum of society: large numbers of people corrupted to the very fiber of their being by having been deprived of responsibility, purpose, and self-respect, void of hope and fear alike, living in as near to purgatory as anywhere in modern society can come.
When multiculturalism goes too far.
In Germany, a judge cites the Koran apparently saying it's all right to beat your wife if you both come from Morocco.
"The exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565 (of German federal law),"
A 26-year-old woman, with two children, and a violent, abusive husband sought a quick divorce when her husband threatened to kill her. No said the judge, you have to wait a year.
From an essay by Fjordman on Why Europeans Should Support Israel
Europeans need to understand how closely intertwined are the fates of Israel and of Europe itself. The term “Judeo-Christian” is not a cliche. We cannot defend Western civilization without defending its Jewish component, without which modern Western culture would have been unthinkable.
The religious identity of the West has two legs: The Christian and the Jewish ones. It needs both to stand upright. Sacrificing one to save the other is like fighting a battle by chopping off one of your legs, throwing it at the feet of your enemies and shouting: “You won’t get the other one! We will never surrender!” We could always hope that our enemies will laugh themselves to death faster than we bleed to death, the Monty Python way of fighting. Maybe that works, but most likely it will leave us crippled and pathetic, if not dead.
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To reduce absolutely everything about Europe to gas chambers, thereby allowing the Nazis the opportunity to expropriate everything that has been created during thousands of years, is to grant Adolf Hitler victory posthumously.
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We cannot change what has happened in the past. We should, however, consider it our duty to combat anti-Semitism in the here and now and make sure that the remaining Jews both in Europe and in Israel are safe. This is not just because it is our moral and historical obligation, which it is, but also because we only gain the right to defend ourselves against Islamization of we grant the same right to Israel. Likewise, we can only begin to heal our self-inflicted civilizational wounds if we embrace the Jewish component of our cultural identity.
Richard Landes calls anti-Zionism a form of cultural AIDS and pinpoints the moment of infection to the time when France 4, the PBS of France, publicized and distributed around the world faked photographs of the death of Mohammed Al Durah, faked photos that sparked the intifada and a horrifying wave of suicide bombers in Israel and, at the same time, exacerbated the fever of anti-Israeli and anti-semitic feeling in Europe.
From the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston this quotation by Martin Niemoller:
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
His experience as a slave made him a holy man, a mystic and the first person in the history of the world to denounce slavery unequivocally. For that alone, he would be revered. But his influence in Ireland may well have saved Western Civilization at an earlier time when it was in mortal peril.
And so it was that a young Briton named Patricius died an Irishman named Patrick, and neither Ireland nor Christianity was ever quite the same. By the time of his death, or shortly thereafter, the Irish stopped slave trading and never took it up again. Human sacrifice had become unthinkable. His countrymen never stopped making war on one another, but war became much more confined and limited by what we now call the rules of warfare. In the modern classic How the Irish Saved Civilization, it is said that Patrick's conversion of Ireland made possible the preservation of Western thought through the early Dark Ages by means of the monasteries founded by Patrick's successors. When the lights went out all over Europe, a candle still burned in Ireland. That candle was lit by Patrick.
The light of a candle can be blown out, die out or used to light another candle.
After the fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarians, back in the fifth century, Thomas Cahill writes in How the Irish Saved Civilization
... to reasonable men in the second half of the century, surveying the situation of their time, the end was no longer in doubt: their world was finished. One could do nothing but, like Ausonius, retire to one's villa, write poetry, and await the inevitable. It never occurred to them that the building blocks of their world would be saved by outlandish oddities from a land so marginal that the Romans had not bothered to conquer it, by men so strange they lived in little huts on rocky outcrops and shaved half their heads and tortured themselves with fasts and chills and nettle baths. As Kenneth Clark said, "Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth-century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time--almost a hundred years--western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea."
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as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature--everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one--a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.
It's fitting that St. Patrick's Day is the First Green of the Spring. Drink up.
God help us. Now there's the "Post-Normal" Science of Climate Change
Professor Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change apparently is willing to toss out the scientific process, the truth of facts as he writes in the Guardian
Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking,
Melanie Philips writes
So the true battleground has now been illuminated for us. The real fight is between scientists who believe in empirical observation and the truth, and ‘post-normal’ scientists who believe in ideology and lies. It’s a battle between Enlightenment values of rationality and those who wish to return us to a pre-rational era where thought was controlled and truth was a heresy. The stakes could not have been delineated more clearly.
I'm for both religion, science and legacy of the Enlightenment which separated the two realms.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised in this post-modern world where more and more believe that truth is relative that eventually scientists would be infected with the toxic meme, but still, it's shocking they would welcome it.
UPDATE: Others commenting on Post Normal Science are much better than I and include The Belmont Club where Wretchard writes
Post-normal science is nothing but a cheap and lying term for a political diktat; for the rule of the self-appointed over everyone else. Whatever truth "Global Warming" may contain it has surely been damaged by its association with this disreputable and vile concept which brazenly casts aside the need for any factual basis and declares in the most unambiguous terms that whatever values it chooses to promote constitutes a truth unimpeachable by reality and a set of values that none dare challenge. Until "post-normal science" is repudiated as a method of proving "global warming" then both must share the same reputation.
Over at One Cosmos, Gaghdad Bob writes
Instead of unity and truth, they substitute solidarity and commitment, which is to say exterior or "top-down" order and coercive action, for the lie is always coercive whereas the truth "attracts."
He cites Al Gore's
own acknowledgment (in numerous interviews he has admitted that the main point of his impropaganda film was to frighten people into action, not to dispassionately inform them). ...
What is so objectionable about Gore's film is that, like all post-normal science, its intention is to coerce one into action before one even knows the truth -- not just any action, but probably the most massive and cataclysmic economanical actions ever undertaken by mankind, actions that will kill and/or ruin the lives of millions. There are undoubtedly "accuracies" in any post-normal science, including Gore's film, but the accuracies are not there to serve truth but to spur action. It is science for the limbic system -- the emotional center of the brain -- not the cerebellum, which is capable of disinterested objectivity, which is the foundation of the human capacity for truth.
Hina Saleem, the daughter of a Pakistani immigrant to Italy, was killed by her father because he was appalled at her adoption of western ways. He slit her throat and buried her in the back garden. He and three other relatives who are now awaiting trial in Italy.
Loredana Gemelli, a self-described life-long leftwinger said, "I thought Hina would become a symbol for Italian women."
In an interview she decried
the fact that women's groups had, in fact, shown no interest whatsoever in either Hina or the trial.
Far from joining themselves to the civil suit Ms Gemelli had brought, feminist associations had "not lifted a finger", she said. Her explanation, which at least one noted feminist agreed with, is that Italy's women's groups - all of the left - were scared witless of seeming racist or anti-immigrant.
From the Guardian, An Uncomfortable Silence.
So if feminists and the left are not going to help, who will? The case of Hina Saleem offers a possible answer. It was not till last month that she was buried. Only one woman - apart from Loredana Gemelli - turned out for her funeral. Her name is Daniela Santanche and she is a member of the Italian parliament for the "post-fascist" National Alliance.
For anyone who regards himself or herself as liberal, that is cringe-makingly shameful.
Fjordman argues yes as he reports on what is happening in Scandinavia right now. How Feminism Leads to the Oppression of Women.
Although countries such as Norway and Sweden like to portray themselves as havens of gender equality, I have heard visitors comment that the sexes are probably further apart here than anywhere else in the world. Radical feminism has bred suspicion and hostility, not cooperation.
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Scandinavians celebrate “gender equality” and travel to the other side of the world to find somebody actually worth marrying.
Norway and Sweden are countries with extremely high divorce rates. Boys grow up in an atmosphere where masculinity is demonized, attend a school system where they are viewed as deficient girls and are told by the media that men are obsolete and will soon be rendered extinct anyway.
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A feminist culture will eventually end up being squashed, because the men have either become too demoralized and weakened to protect their women, or because they have become so fed-up with incessant ridicule that they just don't care anymore. If Western men are pigs and “just like the Taliban” no matter what we do, why bother? Western women will then be squashed by more aggressive men from other cultures, which is exactly what is happening in Western Europe now.
This is an extraordinary figure via Kathy Shadie - Since the 1950s, teenage suicide has increased 5000% in North America.
More from Michael Coren in The Toronto Sun. in an article called "Sliding into an Abyss".
In 1958 a broad cross-section of school principals was asked what were the five most challenging problems they faced in dealing with students. The answers were as follows: Not doing homework; not respecting property, such as throwing books; leaving lights and/or doors and windows open; throwing spitballs in class; running in the halls.
In 1988 the same question was put to a similar group of teachers. This time the answers were a little different: Children having abortions; young people infected with AIDS; incidents of rape; widespread use of soft and increasingly hard drugs; a fear of murders and guns and knives in class.
I'm reading now Life at the Bottom The WorldView That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple, .
The underclass he says is a specter that is haunting the Western world. They are neither poor, by any historical standards nor are they politically oppressed, yet they live in squalid wretchedness and meaninglessness.
Dalrymple is a British psychiatrist who treated the poor in a slum and at a nearby prison.
Having previously worked as a doctor in some of the poorest countries in Africa, as well as in very poor countries in the Pacific and Latin America, I have little hesitation in saying that the mental, cultural, emotional and spiritual impoverishment of the Western underclass is the greatest of any large group of people I have encountered anywhere.
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If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look to the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass.
Here is the whole gamut of human folly, wickedness and misery may be perused at leisure ---in conditions, be it remembered of unprecedented prosperity. Here are abortions procured by abdominal kung fu, children having children, in numbers unknown before the advent of chemical contraception and sex education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month before or a month after delivery, insensate jealousy, the reverse of the coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous oppression and violence; serial step-fatherhood that leads to sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale; and every kind of loosening of the distinction between the sexually permissible and the impermissible.
So what does he see as the cause? There is passivity, the unwillingness to take personal responsibility for the choices in their lives, but most of all, it's
The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism -- a relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for intellectuals --has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects.
In a follow-up that rather proves the point of A "long march through the culture" comes news from Scotland, that nurses should avoid using the terms 'Mom' and 'Dad', 'husband' and 'wife' as they are homophobic and could be offensive to homosexual couples with children.
Instead, they should use the words 'carers' and 'couples', 'partners' and 'next of kin'.
Use of 'Mom' and "Dad' Too "Homophobic", Scottish Nurses Told.
via Pajamas Media
Even though Britain is the fourth wealthiest nation in the world, its children are the worst off in the world's 21 richest nations.
The Betrayal of a Generation is shocking and depressing.
The UNICEF report blames it on family breakdown, drink, drugs teenage sex and fear of violence.
The Government has stripped the last tax breaks from marriage while bringing in benefits like tax credits which help single parents rather than couples.
Yet Unicef linked single parent families and stepfamilies with poor education, poor health and poor quality jobs.
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Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank said: 'I have seen the evidence piling up for 20 years that married families are better for children than single parents or stepfamilies. It has become impossible to ignore.
'The question is how long the Government can close its eyes to the reality.'
Teenagers blame the baby boomers.
It used to said that the height of women's skirts was the best indicator of Wall St.
If fashion can anticipate the market, what pray does this foretell in London.
In the U.K, young British muslims are getting more radical.
Forty per cent of Muslims between 16 and 24 said they would prefer to live under sharia law. One in eight said they admired Al Qaeda and other groups prepared to fight the West. Thirty six per cent said they believe that a Muslim who converts to another religion should be 'punished by death'.
While Bernard Lewis, the pre-eminent Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar said the Muslims seem about to take over Europe.
Instead of fighting the threat, he elaborated, Europeans had given up.
"Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence," he said. "They have no respect for their own culture." Europeans had "surrendered" on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of "self-abasement," "political correctness" and "multi-culturalism," said Lewis, who was born in London to middle-class Jewish parents but has long lived in the United States.
The threat of extremist Islam goes far beyond Europe, Lewis stressed, turning to the potential impact of Iran going nuclear under its current regime.
The Cold War philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other, would not apply to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, said Lewis.
"For him, Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement," said Lewis of Ahmadinejad. "We know already that they [Iran's ruling ayatollahs] do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. If they kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a quick, free pass to heaven. I find all that very alarming," said Lewis
UPDATE. What Ayaan Hirsi Ali said to the Council of Racial Equality via Deroy Murdock at the National Review
“Human beings are equal; cultures are not.”
"A culture that holds the door open to her women is not equal to one that confines them behind walls and veils,”
“A culture that encourages dating between young men and young women is not equal to a culture that flogs or stones a girl for falling in love.
"A culture where monogamy is an aspiration is not equal to a culture where a man can lawfully have four wives all at once."
“Unfortunately, it is this culture that is under threat today,” she told CORE’s guests. “Many of those born into it take it for granted or, worse, apologize for it.” As Ayaan Hirsi Ali asked: “Let’s join together to protect this culture of life, this culture of liberty, this culture of ladies first.”
At first, I thought this was a joke.
From ABC News, Al Qaeda Sends A Message to Democrats
Al Qaeda has sent a message to leaders of the Democratic party that credit for the defeat of congressional Republicans belongs to the terrorists.
In a portion of the tape from al Qaeda No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahri, made available only today, Zawahri says he has two messages for American Democrats.
"The first is that you aren't the ones who won the midterm elections, nor are the Republicans the ones who lost. Rather, the Mujahideen -- the Muslim Ummah's vanguard in Afghanistan and Iraq -- are the ones who won, and the American forces and their Crusader allies are the ones who lost," Zawahri said, according to a full transcript obtained by ABC News.
Then I wondered, are they going to any of the parties.
I'm late with this and all I can say is about time.
Tony Blair has had it with multiculturalism, ending more than three decades of Labour support for the idea.
Adopt our values or stay away.
he set out a series of requirements that were now expected from ethnic minority groups if they wished to call themselves British.
These included "equality of respect" - especially better treatment of women by Muslim men - allegiance to the rule of law and a command of English.
If outsiders wishing to settle in Britain were not prepared to conform to the virtues of tolerance then they should stay away. He added: "Conform to it; or don't come here. We don't want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed.
"If you come here lawfully, we welcome you. If you are permitted to stay here permanently, you become an equal member of our community and become one of us. The right to be different. The duty to integrate. That is what being British means."
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"The right to be in a multicultural society was always implicitly balanced by a duty to integrate, to be part of Britain, to be British and Asian, British and black, British and white," he said
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"When it comes to our essential values, the belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage — then that is where we come together, it is what gives us what we hold in common; it is what givesright to call ourselves British," said Mr Blair.
"At that point no distinctive culture or religion supercedes our duty to be part of an integrated United Kingdom."
I am reminded what J.F. Kennedy said so famously in his inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country"
The Afghan keyholders who put love of art and country above all else and hid the country's national treasures from the Russians, the Taliban, warlords, drug lords and Islamic fundamentalists, pledged never to tell where they were hidden.
One keyholder was tortured, international art officials say. Another survived by selling potatoes in the Kabul market. Through it all, they kept their secret.
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On Wednesday, the fruits of their silence went on display at the Guimet Museum in Paris. It began exhibiting more than 220 artifacts from the Afghan National Museum, including masterpieces of gold and ivory that have never been seen in public and that a few years ago were believed lost forever.
In fact, the pieces had been delicately wrapped in toilet paper and newspaper and stashed in such places as a bombproof vault in the basement of Afghanistan's presidential palace, where keyholders finally revealed them to Afghan President Hamid Karzai about three years ago.
"It was heroism by silence. It was the Afghan curators and keyholders themselves who preserved these things and . . . made sure no one got into the storerooms," said Fredrik Hiebert, an archaeologist at the National Geographic Society who inventoried the artifacts at the request of the Afghan government. "They were safeguarding these treasures even when people couldn't eat, and when people said they would kill them if they didn't give them up. But they didn't."
James Q Wilson, the former Harvard professor of Government who now teaches at Pepperdine University, has garnered honors too many to cite, save say, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He may be most famous for his "broken windows" theory of crime that so influenced Rudy Guiliani in New York City when he first became mayor. Guiliani and Police Commission Bill Bratton adopted an aggressive enforcement strategy of zero tolerance that involved cracking down on minor offenses like graffiti, turnstile jumping, and "squeegee men". A sharp drop in crime followed to the amazement and delight of New Yorkers.
The original article by Wilson and George Kelling was published in 1982 in the Atlantic, Broken Windows.
The theory is simple - Little things lead to big things. A broken window if promptly taken care of does no harm to a neighborhood. A broken window left unrepaired is a signal that no one cares, so breaking more windows costs nothing. When one broken window is left unrepaired, soon all the rest of the windows will be broken.
I pay attention when he writes about the Press at War in City Journal and its "drumbeat of negativity".
When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51 percent of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77 percent were negative; in the 2004 general election, 89 percent were negative; by the spring of 2006, 94 percent were negative. This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam.
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Most of what I have said here is common knowledge. But it is common knowledge about a new period in American journalistic history. Once, powerful press owners dictated what their papers would print, sometimes irresponsibly. But that era of partisan and circulation-building distortions was not replaced by a commitment to objective journalism; it was replaced by a deep suspicion of the American government. That suspicion, fueled in part by the Vietnam and Watergate controversies, means that the government, especially if it is a conservative one, is surrounded by journalists who doubt almost all it says. One obvious result is that since World War II there have been few reports of military heroes; indeed, there have been scarcely any reports of military victories.
This change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone’s interests.
The mainstream media’s adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines, and television programs we enjoy.
When journalists no longer care about objective reporting, we no longer know what the truth is.
Little things lead to big things.
"Death with dignity" is the gleaming white shroud on the rotting corpse of societal fear, self-interest and ruthless self-preservation.
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We are blind to the horrendous consequences of our wrong decisions, but see infinite visions of hope for their benefits.
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Reason of itself is morally neutral; it can kill children or discover cures for their suffering and disease. Reason tempered by humility, faith, and guidance by higher moral principles has enormous potential for good - and without such restraints, enormous potential for evil.
From a remarkable essay by the Doctor is In, called The Children Whom Reason Scorns about a civilized European country that measures lives by their utility following the Groningen Protocol.
Via The American Digest who reflects on the Atlantis in Orbit and meditates on a Goya engraving entitled, "The sleep of reason breeds monsters." On Advent: "We Are All Lying in the Mud, but Some of Us are Looking at the Stars.
Spengler on Jihadis and whores.
Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.
It's not just Europe that has a plummeting birth rate, so does Iran.
As the most urbane people of Western Asia, the Persians grasped the hopelessness of circumstances quicker than their Arab neighbors. That is why they have ceased to bear children. Iran's population today is concentrated at military age; by mid-century, today's soldiers will be pensioners, and there will be no one to replace them.
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it is one thing to read the statistics, and quite another to consider the millions of intimate decisions that together sum up to national suicide.
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What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish...
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The proliferation of Iranian prostitutes in Western Europe as well as the Arab world helps explain the country's population trends.
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Ot is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad became president last year. Anti-regime sociologists claim that at least 300,000 women are whoring in Tehran alone.
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Along with Albanian, Chechen and Bosnian women, Iranian prostitutes are living evidence of the dissolution of the traditional Muslim society that purports to shield women from degradation.
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Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists......The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.
He's a medical doctor who trained as a terrorist under al-Zawahiri, but now Tawfik Hamid is in hiding.
Sexual frustration, he says, is the dynamic behind suicide bombings who are overwhelming Sunni Muslims. Sunnis don't have the release valve of "temporary marriage" that can last as little as one hour that Shia Muslims do. Hot for Martyrdom
Don't for a moment underestimate this blinding passion or its influence on those who accept fundamentalism."
A pause. "I know. I was one who accepted it."
It's not about poverty.
"I've heard this poverty nonsense time and time again from Western apologists for Islam, most of them not Muslim by the way. There are millions of passive supporters of terror who may be poor and needy but most of those who do the killing are wealthy, privileged, educated and free. If it were about poverty, ask yourself why it is middle-class Muslims -- and never poor Christians -- who become suicide bombers in Palestine."
He has more to say on fundamentalist Muslim imperialism
"Yes, 'imperialism,' " he tells me. "The deliberate and determined expansion of militant Islam and its attempt to triumph not only in the Islamic world but in Europe and North America. Pure ideology. Muslim terrorists kill and slaughter not because of what they experience but because of what they believe."
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He's exasperated now, visibly angry at what he sees as a willful Western foolishness. "Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want.
Read the whole interview by Michael Coren of the National Post.
About 30 major terrorist plots are being planned in the U.K. according to the director general of MI5, every one a priority one case.
UPDATE: Terror Threat Here to Stay
Tony Blair has backed the chilling assessment of the scale of the terror threat in the UK given by the head of MI5.
In a rare public statement, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said the threat from Islamic extremists would last a "generation".
She said the security services were dealing with up to 30 plots designed to cause mass casualties.
And MI5 agents and the police are tracking more than 1,600 suspects.
Dame Eliza warned that weapons of mass destruction could be used in future attacks.
The Prime Minister said Dame Eliza was right in her assessment.
"This is a threat that has grown up over a generation," he said.
"And I think she is right in saying that the it will last a generation."
Novelist Martin Amis says nothing beats jihad that promises people they can be righteous and violent at the same time. He recently wrote a short story about Mohammed Atta's last day on earth, in part because "his face, so rich and malevolent haunted" him.
As for motivation, he says in his story that Atta was in it for the killing, "killing people is obviously terrific fun. It's a crude expression of power to kill people, and it's arousing."
He believes that Western ideology is to blame for weakening the West in the war on terror.
moral relativism is so far advanced that we don't believe we can be right about anything. It just hasn't been accepted in the consciousness of the West that we have a fight with irrationality on our hands. Everyone's casting about, saying, "Why are they doing this?" And gooey-eyed newscasters on CNN say, "Why? Why this anger?" Paul Berman, the author of "Terror and Liberalism," calls this tendency "rationalist naïveté."[Terrorists] rejected reason. This is what Hitler did, and it's what Lenin did. They want to believe anything is possible, and they're not constrained by the laws of logic. This, plus the death-cult element, gives any movement a huge surge of energy.
But the West goes on. I'm talking about a certain strata of opinion that is dying for American failure in Iraq because they hate George Bush. They're dying for failure, but they're also attributing reason to the enemy, saying, "What terrible historic wrongs have we committed to bring this down on ourselves?" And they haven't made the leap to seeing that it isn't a matter of reason. It's a psychopathology. Their war is against God's enemies and it's meant to last for eternity, and how rational an undertaking is that? Yet people won't make that leap because it feels racist to them.
When asked where he draws the line between Islam and Islamism, he replied
Violence. Any violence against civilians is absolutely intolerable. [And] there is a huge moral difference between trying to kill civilians and trying not to kill civilians. When an American soldier kills an Iraqi civilian on purpose, he faces the death penalty. There's no equivalent mechanism among the enemy. [They have] celebrations throughout the land when a good number of civilians have been killed.
Meanwhile one French priest, Father Patrick Desbois, travels through the Ukraine to hear confessions from villagers in the Ukraine...
the last witnesses to the mass killing of Jews in a little-known part of the Holocaust more than 60 years ago.
He recounts one story - just one of a thousand he's heard - of a Ukrainian woman who was ordered by Nazi soldiers to cook them dinner. As they ate, the 25 Germans went out in pairs to kill Jews. By the time the meal was over, they had shot 1,200. It was the first time the woman had ever told the story. "These people want absolutely to speak before they die," says Father Desbois of the bystanders. "They want to say the truth."
Father Patrick Desbois has become one of the world's foremost chroniclers of what the French call the Shoah par Balles - the Holocaust of bullets. Though neither Jewish nor Ukrainian, he spends half his year combing the poverty-stricken landscape of Ukraine to document the annihilation of tens of thousands of Jews at the hands of traveling bands of Nazis called the Einsatzgruppen.
It is a self-appointed task that led the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to decree him "Patrick the Saint." Embarrassed, Desbois calls the characterization a midrash - Hebrew for exaggeration.
The priest, who has devoted his clerical life to fighting anti-Semitism, is uncovering, village by village, unmarked mass graves from the Holocaust era. Here the Jews were shot, one by one, mother in front of child, child in front of father.
The "Holocaust of bullets" was every bit as brutal as the extermination of Jews by gas chamber, starvation, and other means at Auschwitz and elsewhere in Europe. Yet the depth and details of the tragedy in Ukraine have only recently surfaced .
Another report that a Hungarian Roman Catholic cardinal, the primate of the nation, was an informer for the communist government according to Ron Dreher at Crunchy Con who also points to a YouTube video of Father Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian Christian, who describes the brainwashing techniques he endured.
Horrific, the evil that men can do. It only makes what the Pope Benedict said at Regensburg, more right and brave and true.
Dhiren Barot who plotted to kill thousands in Britain and the United States has been sentenced to 40 years imprisonment.
The London Times writes that Britons need to know about the fanaticism that threatens them. The Face of Terror.
The 40-year sentence imposed yesterday on Dhiren Barot, the Muslim convert who masterminded plans for mass murder on a horrendous scale, is one of the longest terms handed down for non-capital offences. It reflects not only the gravity of the appalling acts that this senior al-Qaeda operative was planning, his callous glee at the scale of death and injury and his cunning in elaborating plans to maim and terrify thousands of people in Britain and America; it is also a clear message to other fanatics abusing the name of Islam that a democracy will take whatever measures are needed to protect itself from such evil.
The threat posed by Barot is hard to envisage. The middle-class Hindu, who went to school in London and worked briefly as an airline ticket clerk, sought out the most radical and violent form of Islam after his conversion and spent the next nine years as a full-time terrorist planner. His expertise and professionalism in surveying the nine London hotels, three stations, synagogues, banks and Underground lines targeted for destruction is matched only by his sadism in contemplating how he could increase the panic and human suffering caused by exploding gas cylinders, napalm, nails and a radiation bomb.
Remember that terrorist plot to blow up 10 airplanes over the Atlantic as well as London landmarks that was aborted by brilliant police work this summer?
Dhiren Barot, a Hindu who converted to Islam, plotted to kill thousands, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit murder. The details of his plans are now being revealed in a London court. Al Qaeda Briton 'plotted to kill thousands'.
Barot expected the devastation and loss of life to match 9/11 and the Madrid bombs, the court heard.
The attacks would have been coordinated in a series of back-to-back explosions with further strikes on landmark buildings in Washington, New York and Newark, New Jersey.
Barot costed every aspect of the terrorist outrages, then travelled to Pakistan to present them to al Qaeda bosses "like a business plan", the court was told.
There aren't many general essayists anymore, though some bloggers come close. There's an art in writing about complex ideas in an engaging fashion.
The News Hour features two essayists, Anne Taylor Fleming and Richard Rodriguez. Unfamiliar to most Americans is the Canadian David Warren who writes Essays on Our Times.
Here he is on Regeneration.
The question is, how do we find our way out of the wilderness that has grown in the heart of man? How does a society, a whole civilization, that is on the skids and bound for destruction, arrest its slide? I pose this today in the broadest possible way, because I think it is the one, common, practical, and even political question that should remain near the front of all minds capable of charity and goodwill.
The obvious answer, to those who realize that our civilization was built not only by human hands, but under the guidance of Church and religion, is to counsel a re-centring, a return to God. But for those who have moved and been moved so far away, that the very idea of God chills them, what paths lie open?
I think there are quite a few, and that all have in common this mysterious element of joy. I think art, broadly, offers many alternative means to the kind of regeneration -- moral, and ethical, as well as aesthetic -- that can help us out of our enclosed spaces. Learning to draw, from nature; to sing, in key; to dance, in pattern; to write, metrically; even to sew, or to master carpenter’s joints -- all such enterprises offer the lost soul an individual direction out of the jungle.
The reason why, is that each is a discipline that restores us to harmony with the natural order of things. Each offers a way of seeing into God’s creation, and puts us in the presence of what is infinitely greater than ourselves.
To be able to draw a single flower, with full attention to all its colours and parts, is to be lifted out of one’s tawdry self into a realm where good, truth, and beauty still prevail. It is to recover joy.
The Australian sheik who said that Muslim rapists were not entirely to blame because women without veils were "uncovered meat" that attract predators has been forced to apologize. Aussies were up in arms about the sheik's outrageous comment, not so the Europeans.
Rape in Europe seems to be part of the jihad.
Fjordman reports about a Muslim rape wave in Sweden.
Swedish girls Malin and Amanda were on their way to a party on New Year's Eve when they were assaulted, raped and beaten half to death by four Somali immigrants. Sweden's largest newspaper has presented the perpetrators as "two men from Sweden, one from Finland and one from Somalia", a testimony as to how bad the informal censorship is in stories related to immigration in Sweden. Similar incidents are reported with shocking frequency, to the point where some observers fear that law and order is completely breaking down in the country. The number of rape charges in Sweden has tripled in just above twenty years. Rape cases involving children under the age of 15 are six - 6 - times as common today as they were a generation ago. Most other kinds of violent crime have rapidly increased, too.
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82% of women in Sweden expressed fear about going out after dark.
A group of Swedish teenage girls has designed a belt that requires two hands to remove and which they hope will deter would-be rapists. "It's like a reverse chastity belt," one of the creators, 19-year-old Nadja Björk, told AFP, meaning that the wearer is in control, instead of being controlled. Björk and one of her partners now plan to start a business to mass produce the belts and are currently in negotiations with potential partners. "But I'm not doing this for the money," she said. "I'm really passionate about stopping rape. I think it's terrible." In an online readers' poll from the newspaper Aftonbladet, 82% of the women expressed fear to go outside after dark.
There are reports of rapes happening in broad daylight. 30 guests in a Swedish public bath watched as 17 girl was raped recently, and nobody did anything.
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Some Muslim immigrants admit their bias quite openly. An Islamic Mufti in Copenhagen sparked a political outcry after publicly declaring that women who refuse to wear headscarves are "asking for rape."
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If you postulate that many of the Muslims in Europe view themselves as a conquering army and that European women are simply war booty, it all makes perfect sense and is in full accordance with Islamic law. Western women are not so much regarded by most Muslims as individuals, but as "their women," the women who "belong" to hostile Infidels. They are booty, to be taken, just as the land of the Infidels someday will drop, it is believed, into Muslim hand.
