It will come as no surprise that Sarkozy has been fulsome in his condemation of Zimbabwe President-for-Life Mugabe, even while Sarkozy tries to weasel out of the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by the Irish electorate. Euro-hypocrisy knows no bounds ...
Abu Qatada, released by a British court last week.
Melanie Phillips, one of the best commentators out of Britain on that nation's acquiescent culture of supine, pederastic submission to all things Islamic here exposes the eagerness of British courts to find whatever pretext comes to hand on which to base the release of Islamic terrorists. The more dangerous the terrorist, the more willing the British courts seem to be. This ferocious leftism of the British establishment, its rejection of Islamic terrorism as a false conservative discourse is pathetic. There is truly nothing, nada, zilch, about the Diseased Kingdom, one can admire any more. It is little more than a festering cesspool of cultural fawning and appeasement.
Canada should implement a very tight visa policy on all travellers from that sick, twisted, diseased, self-hating graveyard of lost principles. There is simply nothing to value in Britain any more. It can't be content with making zero contribution, so it apparently embraces the opportunity to help the forces of Islamic terror in whatever way it can. How pathetic.
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Why the Brits Are Setting Terrorists Free
By Melanie Phillips, July 1, 2008
London
It turns out that the U.S., whose Supreme Court last month ruled that non-American prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay may challenge their detention, isn't the only country where judges are hampering the war on terror. Many people here are rubbing their eyes at the fact that Britain is letting out of jail some of al Qaeda's most dangerous members. In June, a British court released the notorious Islamist preacher Abu Qatada, who had spent the previous three years in jail pending deportation to Jordan to stand trial on terrorism charges.
Now there are media reports that the U.K. government is considering releasing an even more dangerous terrorist this week, rather than deporting him to his native Algeria. The man known only as "U" (to protect his identity) was a close contact of Abu Qatada and allegedly was involved in planning terror operations in Los Angeles and Strasbourg, France.
Neither Abu Qatada nor "U" has been prosecuted in Britain, because U.K. authorities possess no evidence to charge these men with plotting terrorist acts. Abu Qatada could have faced charges for lesser offenses under Britain's terrorism law. But since these would have imposed only short prison sentences, the government considered it preferable to deport him to stand trial for more serious crimes in his home country.
Yet in both cases, the English courts have ruled that deporting these men would breach their human rights. Given that they were only being held pending deportation, their subsequent release became inevitable. These cases are but the latest examples of the way in which the English judiciary appears to be bending over backward to thwart the fight against terrorism.
"U" is considered so dangerous that his lawyers and the security service are still arguing over the unprecedented restrictions proposed for his bail, including permanent house arrest. Abu Qatada is free on the conditions that he remains at home for 22 hours every day, doesn't use a cell phone, and doesn't visit a mosque.
He now lives in a house in a London suburb, to the undoubted discomfiture of his neighbors. Dozens of police officers are required to ensure that he doesn't violate his bail conditions, at an estimated annual cost of £500,000 ($996,274). Then there are his wife and five children who have to be supported on welfare benefits, as they have been during the years of his incarceration, at a further cost of some £45,000 per year – not to mention an extra £8,000 annually in disability benefits for Abu Qatada on account of his "bad back."
Britain's welfare "rights" culture only accentuates the surrealism of this situation. How is it that people as dangerous as these two men are to be maintained at vast expense by the British taxpayer rather than being deported? Puzzlement surely turns into astonishment when one learns the grounds on which the Appeal Court decided not to throw Abu Qatada out of the country.
The judges were worried that, at his pending trial in Jordan, the court there might use evidence from another witness that had been obtained by torturing him. This concern persisted despite the Jordanians' assurances that they would not do so, since this was against their own law.
Prohibiting torture is one thing. But extending such concerns to a witness in a case in which Britain was not even involved, thus preventing it from throwing out someone who endangered its own interests, is beyond perverse.
No sooner had Abu Qatada been released than yet another set of English judges in a terrorist case arrived at an even more bizarre conclusion. Led by England's top judge, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips, the Appeal Court quashed the conviction of the "lyrical terrorist" Samina Malik.
Ms. Malik had been found guilty of collecting "information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" after a jury heard that she possessed jihadi literature including "The Terrorists' Handbook" and "The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook," as well as operators' manuals for such firearms as an antitank weapon. She is known as the "lyrical terrorist" because she also wrote jihadi poetry.
The judges reversed her conviction, though, because they decided that information "useful" to a terrorist had to offer practical assistance. While the terrorist manuals in her possession plainly did just that, the judges decided that other jihadi literature did not, and so it was not unlawful to possess such literature. They then concluded that the jury may have been "confused" and wrongly convicted her for possessing the jihadi literature – as opposed to convicting her for possessing the terrorism manuals that did constitute an offense.
The debacles over Abu Qatada and "U" have occurred because England's overwhelmingly liberal senior judges have interpreted the prohibition of torture under the European Convention on Human Rights to include deportation to any country where ill-treatment might be practiced. This has made it all but impossible to deport foreign terrorist suspects, since the Muslim countries they usually come from are hardly scrupulous in observing the rule of law.
It was surely never the intention of the framers of the Convention to force a country to harbor individuals who posed a danger to the national interest. Yet that is what the English judiciary has brought about. These judgments are a clear signal to al Qaeda that Britain remains the safest and most hospitable place on Earth in which to ply their appalling trade.
The Samina Malik case, meanwhile, showed once again that the judges seem unable to grasp the part played in Islamic terrorism of literature which incites hatred and violence toward the West.
The undercurrent to all this is the belief among many members of the British establishment that the threat of Islamic terrorism has been overstated. This notion flies in the face of a statement last November by the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, that there were 2,000 known Islamic terrorists in Britain.
There is much emotional talk about defending Britain's ancient rights and liberties, whose erosion in the ostensible cause of fighting terror would, it is said, hand victory to al Qaeda. But this view does not chime with British public opinion – which if anything wants the government to take more draconian measures against terrorism. That's why Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided to extend the current 28-day limit for detaining terrorist suspects before charge to 42 days, a measure which the House of Commons recently passed.
So does this mean that the establishment mood on counterterrorism is toughening up? Not a bit. Mr. Brown forced through the 42-days law only with the last-minute help of the handful of Northern Irish Ulster Unionist MPs. Not only his own Labour backbenchers but the Conservative Party and most of the political and intellectual class are solidly against the measure, which is likely to be thrown out when it reaches the upper house of Parliament this month.
It is surely no accident that this failure to grasp the true dimensions of the Islamic terrorist threat is so pronounced among the British elite. For these are the people whose education and careers embody the key attribute of Britain's liberal society – the belief that the world is governed by rational agents acting in their rational self-interest.
The British ruling class just doesn't get religious fanaticism. That is why its judges and politicians are finding it so difficult to fight Islamic terror. Not just Britain but the whole world is less safe as a result.
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Ms. Phillips is a columnist for the Daily Mail and author of "Londonistan" (Encounter Books, 2005).
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The Global Warming discourse has metastasized into a popular delusion.
Bret Stevens, writing in the Wall Street Jounal, July 1, 2008, offers an explanation for the rather pathetic obstinacy of true believers in the 'global warming' hoax. As is now widely acknowledged, there is virtually no science behind it, nada, zilch. It is an affair of faith, a delusion which tells us far more about ourselves than it ever did about the environment. Stevens explores several possible wellsprings of this delusion, and why it continues.
Partilly, it's leftism in drag (just consider who benefits from the absurd GW solutions being proposed!) dressed up as latter-day science for the 21st Century. In the last year I've often thought that the GW thesis represents the eclipse of 'objective thinking' in scientific discourse, which can only be a destructive thing to the West's future. Then I reflected that such mass delusions have always been part of the intellectual landscape (i.e. 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds'). We should not expect to escape this feature of our own cognition.
Stevens analysis is cogent.
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Global Warming as Mass Neurosis
by Bret Stevens
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").
AP
The New True Believers
But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.
So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.
And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?
As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.
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Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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Protestors against the Islamization of Europe in Brussels last year were silenced and hauled away by EU authorities.
The Baron, after a brainstorming session with Dymphna, brings together all the many strands of the ongoing process of the Islamization of Europe, a topic on which they have written and hosted discussion over the last year or so. This article by the Baron, and drawn from the Gates of Vienna blog (which has become my numero uno site of choice, it seems), here, is helpful as it paints a broad canvas of how the handover to the Islamists in Europe is likely to go. He does not dwell on the issue of Islamist violence, which has become the major hallmark of Islamic civilization in recent decades (though in truth it always was).
This gives a clear picture of the step-by-step abdication of cultural presence by Europeans in their own homelands.
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Demographic Conquest
by Baron Bodissey
Several years ago, after 9-11 but before we started blogging, Dymphna and I often had discussions about the coming Islamization of Europe. It was easy to see the trend: on the one hand there was the demographic decline of the indigenous population, and on the other was a dangerous multicultural ideology that fosters increasing levels of Muslim immigration.
The conclusion was obvious: absent a change of course, Europe will become a Muslim continent by the year X. The only question is whether X will be 2040, or 2100, or somewhere in between.
What was hard to understand was how the transfer of power would occur. Right now the parts of Europe that have been Islamized are mostly the working-class neighborhoods of large European cities and their suburbs. The blue-collar natives are gradually driven out as whole districts become no-go zones.
However, the elites who make policy remain in power and are for the most part removed from the effects of their decisions. They don’t live in the devastated neighborhoods, or send their children to the gang-plagued schools, or worry about being mugged or raped on their way home at night.
So for the time being they get to retain their power and perks, and continue to act out the illusion of an advanced, harmonious, enlightened, multicultural society, superior in so many ways to the racist nationalistic states of the past.
But all that must change eventually. As the immigrant percentage grows larger, especially in the major cities, power must eventually be transferred to the newcomers. How will that occur?
That’s the part of this process which is difficult to visualize. At some point the white post-Christian indigenes of Europe will have to hand over the keys to their new masters, the Arab, African, Pakistani, and Turkish Muslim immigrants.
Until recently, even after five years of studying the situation, I was still struggling to grasp how it will all unfold.
Several recent comments and news stories have fed into the reopening of this question. Though seemingly disparate items, they are pieces in a larger puzzle:
Piece #1: A comment made by What is “Occupation” on my post from last Saturday about the recent rapes in the Gare du Midi in Brussels:
As I recently posted, this is not an isolated situation
Might I suggest the following?
* Attacks on Jews & their property
* Attacks on Single European women
* Attacks on cars and property (car burnings in france)
* Areas of Europe that are no long safe for non-african/islamic peoples
* Areas of sharia control within europe
* Honor Killings IN England and Europe
* FGM in England and Europe
It is not really a fair thing to portray the Gare du Midi situation as JUST how a “european woman” has been raped, but rather it would be MORE fair to tell this story while including all the other attacks by the SAME DEMOGRAPHIC during this period.
Piece #2: The story I posted last night about the corrupt MEPs who are enriching themselves at the expense of European taxpayers whilst doing as little work as possible. These deadbeats show up for work at the crack of dawn on Fridays at the parliament building in Strasbourg, sign in so that they qualify for their lavish per-diem, and then depart for the weekend. Their reaction when caught in their shameful behavior is to call security and have the reporters thrown out of the building.
Piece #3: The promotion of whole-body Islamic swimming attire for women in Sweden, in a simultaneous series of gushing media articles about the fortunate Muslim women who can now go swimming, thanks to an aquatic version of the burqa.
Piece #4: A Dutch news story from last Saturday. According to this article from NIS, the prison population in the Netherlands has grown by 193% in the past twenty years, an average increase of 5.5% per year. Comparing the 2007 population of 16,570,613 with the 1990 population of 14,936,032, we see that the general population increased by 0.6% annually.
In other words, the prison population increased at nine times the rate of the population at large, and “the increase in the Netherlands was higher than in the other Western countries surveyed: the US, the UK, Australia, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark.”
Piece #5: The Dutch government’s plan to crack down on bloggers who criticize Islam.
Piece #6:The emergence of a Muslim majority within the ruling Socialist Party on the Brussels City Council.
So how do all these pieces fit together?
The commenter quoted above touched the main points of the demographic invasion of Europe. The process didn’t turned out the way its planners intended, and a dystopian nightmare has emerged across the continent, with its most intense manifestations appearing in the countries with the largest Muslim populations: France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The pattern is everywhere remarkably similar, considering that the Muslim immigrants in each of these nations come from different countries, and even different continents.
Crime, arson, rioting, rape, honor-killings, and general lawlessness accompany the immigrants wherever they choose to settle.
The prisons are now filled to overflowing, and not just in the Netherlands. There is a general reluctance to build more prisons, since the European anointed — like their counterparts in the United States — hew to an ideology that blames crime on poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, racism, and so on. All of these conditions are alleviated by the supremely generous European welfare state, so how can there possibly be an increase in crime?
The solution: avoid chasing and apprehending most of the criminals. Release the ones that are caught at an earlier date, thus creating the illusion that crime is not all that bad. The governing classes can go on pretending that administration is running as usual and everything is normal, all the while granting themselves ever-larger salaries.
The habit of governing without accountability creates a sense of entitlement and impunity within the ruling classes, and this arrogance is reinforced as power is handed over from national bodies to the aloof bureaucracy in Brussels and Strasbourg. Endemic corruption sets in, secrecy becomes the norm, and any exposure or criticism causes a crackdown on the impertinent journalists who dare to question the actions and decisions of their overpaid and overfed overseers.
Along with the “hard broom” — crime, intimidation, ostracism, loss of employment, and laws against freedom of speech — comes the “soft broom”, a widespread propaganda campaign in public agencies and the state media to present Islamic customs and rules as normal, even admirable. The violence and barbarity are hidden and ignored. Islam is depicted as a peaceful, wholesome religion, like Christianity but somehow better.
The smiling faces of little girls in hijab and the devout men on their prayer rugs become the depicted norm, and anybody who views the situation differently is a racist, a bigot, and a xenophobe.
Real people, people who have to live with the day-to-day reality on the streets, know better. They deal with the consequences every day, but they are atomized and outnumbered. If they have a solution to the dilemma, it is to escape to the un-Islamized countryside, or even abroad — not to try to change a situation which seems hopeless and inevitable.
With the indigenous populace demoralized, and immigrant crime and intimidation ruling the mean streets of Europe’s working-class neighborhoods, the gradual insertion of Muslims into positions of power becomes feasible. The immigrants and the socialist parties have been allies for decades, so it’s only natural that the Muslims who deliver votes for the Reds and the Greens get to occupy seats at the table and help divide up the spoils.
None of the incumbent apparatchiks has to give up his power and perks. Attrition does the job, and when an indigenous office-holder retires, an immigrant from the well-oiled socialist machine is ready to take his place. The corrupt white European politician is replaced with a corrupt immigrant politician, who inherits his predecessor’s lavish lifestyle with its exorbitant salary and perks.
It’s new skin for the old ceremony.
In twenty or thirty years’ time the transition will have passed the point of no return. Muslims will have majority control of local government in many of Europe’s major cities, and will also be well-represented in the regional bodies and the EU machinery. Shariah will have been enacted piecemeal in various places — halal meals in all public institutions, the acceptance of the veil, including the burqa, in government offices and schools, the segregation of the sexes in various activities, penalties for insulting Islam, shariah finance instruments, the legalization of polygyny, etc. — so that the general public will be completely softened up for the advent of the Islamic state.
The process whereby Europe will make the transition to Islamic rule is now quite clear.
It’s already well underway, and it couldn’t happen without the primary institution that mediates the transformation: the European Union.
Baron Bodissey | 6/30/2008 06:50:00 PM
I suggest leaving comments at the article's point of origin at Gates of Vienna, here.
20 Comments:
The Poster Formerly Known as Gordon said...
The scenario is plausible, which is frightening.
But it also has only a remote chance of fruition, as any number of actions along the decades-long timeline you state, or mistakes on any of your assumptions behind the actions, would derail the whole dysptopia.
What I find most disconcerting is your claim that this is all happening because of the EU.
The EU is not the problem, the problem (if you are right) lies with the pusillanimous national governments, particularly the larger ones leading the EU by virtue of their population, traditional leadership roles, and economic might.
Destroying the EU will not solve this problem. It will merely atomize it into 27 individual problems. If Denmark fights off Islamization while Germany succumbs, do you think Denmark has a chance in hell? If Germany fights off Islamization while Denmark succumbs ... do you think a vaporized Copenhagen is an acceptable solution.
The solution to the problem you and Dymphna posit is not the destruction of the EU. In fact, the EU, in the proper hands, IS the solution to your problem, on a continent-wide scale.
So how do European nationalists take back the European Union. I don't know, but it's time for the Brussels Journal crowd to start solving this problem, not fantasizing about the end of the EU.
6/30/2008 7:39 PM
The Poster Formerly Known as Gordon said...
Er, that's "dystopia."
6/30/2008 7:40 PM
PapaBear said...
The problem with extending the trend is that it ignores one thing: The immigrants are not very economically productive, and disproportionately tend to be on welfare.
The welfare state will collapse long before European Muslims reach parity. What happens then is anybody's guess. I'm guessing civil war when the welfare checks don't come.
6/30/2008 7:58 PM
Steven Zoraster said...
What happens to the blue-collar natives displaced by Muslims? They do not just disappear. Surely they are part of the solution? For example, do they have a relatively high birth rate?
Steven Zoraster
6/30/2008 8:02 PM
CarnackiUK said...
it’s only natural that the Muslims who deliver votes for the Reds and the Greens get to occupy seats at the table and help divide up the spoils. As usual their own over-zealousness and impatience trips them up. Like Patrick O'Flynn noted in a recent Daily Express article: 'Muslim urban ghettos have also reintroduced electoral fraud as a regular feature of British political life.'
Unsurprisingly, ALL those arrested for attempted vote-rigging, postal ballot fraud etc have been members or supporters of the Labour Party, including in some instances the candidate himself. In almost every instance, the first name of the people arrested for these abuses has been Mohammed or a variant.
Thus far the UK police have done a remarkable job of identifying and thwarting these widespread electoral chicaneries ... but for how much longer?
6/30/2008 8:08 PM
El said...
I understand that you're playing devil's advocate a bit here, baron, but let's put it slightly differently for a moment.
Given the massive degree of hatred, disgust, and fear that has quite legitimately been directed at Islam in the last few years, given further that this wave of revulsion continues to grow despite the pathetic efforts of political elites to convince us that Islam is the religion of peace, and given yet further that Islam is still in a massive numerical minority in all western European countries, how can we prevent the situation from simply degenerating into the butchering and ethnic cleansing of Muslims back to the dar-al-Islam?
Our societies have pushed our tribal tendencies deep into the furthest recesses of our minds, at least in comparison with the representative foaming Muslim nutjob, whose tribal ferocity is what prompts pathetic capitulation time and again when controversy arises. But if the jabbered threats of, say, 3% of the population in the UK can evoke such a cowering response from the authorities, what response will they generate when the other 97% starts letting it all hang out? The appeasement of Muslims is not really based on political correctness or dreams of Eurabia. It is based on fear of chaos. But chaos can and will come from more than one direction. There is one policeman in the UK for every 430 people, approximately. And they defecate bricks when the Muslims growl even now. Their ability to contain the violence of people convinced they are fighting for their survival will be very close to nil, should they even exist as a coherent force then.
Irrespective of what we may, as individuals, think of the threat that Islam poses for Europe, even skeptics such as Gordon must get a very strong whiff of something dark and unpleasant gradually coming back to the surface among otherwise polite and placid people (that would be us). Though our 'flipping' point, where rage turns into violence, is much higher than that of Muslims (for which we should be thankful, otherwise our societies would resemble theirs), as people start to flip, as the expression of disgust at this totalitarian expansionism unleashed on us by our own 'leaders' becomes more frequent, environmental (i.e. social) inhibition of its growth is commensurately reduced as there are fewer inhibitors all the time.
Thus we enter a positive feedback situation. call it an explosion, if you like, which is not so terribly different mathematically speaking. Does anyone really fancy the chances of Dutch Muslims, say, in the long term? I think they have tough times ahead, very tough times.
By the way, the question of whether Denmark would stand a chance against an Islamized Germany is an interesting one. A suddenly Islamized Germany, intact as a functioning state, would eat Denmark alive thanks to its sheer bulk. But do we foresee, even in the most pessimistic scenario, a transition to Muslim rule without massive damage being inflicted on the integrity, economy, and identity of the German state itself? Without a descent into mob violence and all-out chaos? Surely not, my friends. No clean transfer of power there. I strongly feel that events in the last couple of years have made it clear that the Muslim carrying capacity of European countries without inevitable and unpreventable backlash is in the high single digits, perhaps the low teens for some unusually docile countries. Let us be thankful it was not higher!
El Ingles
6/30/2008 8:17 PM
Sir Henry Morgan said...
CarnackiUK
You're not quite right - almost, but not quite. Read this (it's long but highly informative - and do note who published it). The newspaper article copied near the end is worth filing away.
http://tinyurl.com/67rrzr
6/30/2008 8:34 PM
Paul said...
What happened to European thinking that's lead to the present dismal situation in Europe?
Was it psychological trauma remaining after World War II? Was it fear of plummeting tax revenues due to population decline?
Is it the power of 'group mind' that permeates and dominates European elites in Brussels?
The more significant question is, who or what formed the current EU groupthink? Could well be to participate in the EU, a person must think, speak and act in a way that is consistent with views of the EU bosses. No doubt that's true. The penalty for independent thought and voice is exclusion.
How predictable is human nature. We are suckers when it comes to trying to impress or please others to gain acceptance. The question remains, who is really in control??? And where did the prevailing EU groupthink come from.
As far as answering the question, 'how to bring about change?', I think we're past relying on existing constructs to effect electoral change. Sad to say those days are behind us.
What about the people? Let the people eat cake. Or in today's updated version, 'Let the people watch TV...'.
6/30/2008 8:47 PM
Dymphna said...
Sir Henry Morgan --
You're right: that was a most informative article. I didn't see the news article you mentioned as coming near the end...
...however, one item did stand out for me. I wondered how the "Asians" would get 'round a secret ballot when it came to their women. And now I know. With postal voting, the man of the house simply gets ballots for each member of the household and either fills them in himself or has the women vote as directed.
Very clever, these Asians. Very short-sighted, these politicians who dreamed up the "postal voting for life" option.
This reminds me very much of the Dems' legislation in the US to allow voter registration at the Division of Motor Vehicles. Everyone has to register their car, so why not have them register to vote while they're waiting.
Including the illegal Mexicans, of course...
Labour and the Dems are quite similar.
6/30/2008 9:07 PM
Natalie said...
Has anyone here read Mark Steyn's America Alone? This piece kind of reminded me of it.
Things aren't looking great for the West right now, but I think there still is hope. If people wake up to the threat soon, and we handle the problem of Islam effectively, Europe may not go Islamic.
It's hard to predict what will happen, though. Demographics, like birth rates and that stuff, is important, but there's much more to people than numbers, if you know what I mean. Our weaponry and military might is great, but so is the will of our enemy. And an important factor to consider is that we're divided and they are most certainly not.
Of course, if people continue to be in denial, we're in big trouble. I live in America, and the prevailing mentality over here about Europe seems to be, "Oh, those silly Europeans... but we're not Europe and we've got an ocean between us." I hate to tell you: if Europe goes Islamic, America will also fall to Islam. The distance between Europe and America won't protect us from nuclear weapons, period.
6/30/2008 9:19 PM
Baron Bodissey said...
El Ingles,
You're right about Denmark. If Kepiblanc or Rolf or Henrik shows up, I should think they will agree with you. Denmark will resist Islamization more than any other country, and it also has a formidable military.
I'm not only playing devil's advocate. What I'm doing is holding a lot of variables constant so as to concentrate on the effects of a few.
To make my arguments, I deliberately ignored:
1. The natural tribal/nationist emotions of the populations which stand to be replaced;
2. The severe degradation or collapse of the welfare state;
3. The possible intervention of outside powers in European affairs;
4. The near certainty of a major catastrophic incident -- a nuclear attack on Israel, the Chinese invasion of Taiwan, war between India and Pakistan, an enormous mass-casualty terrorist attack on the USA or another Western country -- that would change the calculus for all of the variables; and
5. The election of Barack Hussein Obama.
These variables are too complex to be modeled on a computer (at least not without the DoD budget & facilities), and even intuition struggles to calculate the effects of them all.
So I find it easier to concentrate on just one or a few, and hold the rest where they are, for the sake of argument.
But not all young European men are going either to convert or volunteer to lie down and die. The welfare state will not survive more than 15 years in its present form, if at all. Russia may well intervene in the Balkans. Mad Jad will do his best to nuke Israel.
And if B. Hussein gets elected, all bets are off.
6/30/2008 9:23 PM
What is "Occupation" said...
I see the following situation...
Africans/Turks/Pakis/Arabs/Islamists will start to compare themselves to the Jews.. They will claim "Jew" status over any slight or anyone who questions their
"differences".
With one small exception...
Europe treated its Jews like crap and the jews were Artists, Bakers, Jewelers, Tailors, Business People. They did not behead the general European population, nor rape, nor riot and burn cars, create dangerous areas unsafe for outsiders. One does have to wonder what if?
What if the Jews of Europe were not snuffed out?
Some could look at this as karma....
But I see a Samuel Huntington's described war between culture...
The Arabs (et al) are no match for the historically brutal European culture.... Once Europeans wake up and have learned from what they did to the INNOCENT Jews and HOW the threat at their DOOR is not either JEWISH OR INNOCENT the streets will run with blood...
And I have no doubt it will be another 1000 years before Arabic will be spoken in public again, except to scream for help...
They will overplay their hand, they will bite the ass of the most successful killing people in history...
EUROPEANS...
Its going to make kristalnaght look like a picnic.
6/30/2008 9:54 PM
Whiskey said...
Baron, I think a naked, brutal power struggle with various Napoleons or Cromwells appearing fairly soon is the most likely scenario, and it will lead to various militia groups practicing ethnic-religious cleansing by terror as was in Bosnia and other places in the Balkans.
I base my (lamentable) conclusions (which I see in horror not joy) on the following:
1. Crime organizations WILL lose unlike native pols. Immigrants may slowly displace native pols, with not much resistance, but rest assured the Camorra, the Mafia, the Union Corse, and other native organized crime groups WILL object.
You don't expect these guys to work, now does anyone? Of course not. They NEED local neighborhoods populated by natives, not immigrants with their own crime groups. European organized crime groups will fight back with both "unofficial" and
"official" action (many of the European security services are heavily influenced by the organized crime groups). Killing is a way of life for these men, so I expect this when they are pressed with either being poor and working for a living or killing their way out of problems.
2. Young European men are in competition with immigrant men for women. I sadly expect counter-rapes to occur, AS IT DID IN THE BALKANS, and for that point of violence to spread ever-outwards. Why not? There can be only one woman for one man, Muslims constructing harems puts [on] terrible pressure and guarantees conflict over the remaining women. Recall Pitcairn Island? When Fletcher Christian arrived there with the six Tahitian men (who he promptly enslaved), the eleven Tahitian women, and the nine mutineers, the predictable result is that all the men but one slaughtered each other. Christian was shot by his fellow mutineers when he was spotted alone with his pregnant wife.
3. Muslims over-playing their hand, by moving too soon with terrorism-jihad designed to install Sharia nation-wide. It's quite likely. Of course the elites would fold like wet noodles, but ambitious young military men would see that as time to "save the nation" and well, run the country themselves? Who better? One result of budget cuts is that the hollowed out militaries of the EU are so small that Colonels and the like probably know every officer in the Army. And likely many in the Air Forces. A coup is much easier with a smaller military, as West Africa (which is plagued with them) attests.
4. As noted, collapse of the Welfare State as rising energy prices cause a global recession, and/or a nuclear shipping container attack ends trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic trade as we know it. Without welfare money to grease things, naked power grabs are likely and people WILL turn to a military leader to sort things out. Particularly if there is no money to pay riot police and security services aka "secret police." Do not of course underestimate criminal organizations in this matter -- THEY will have money, still, and the means even to install their own in power, if they but seize the opportunity.
Much of Europe lives in a dream world. Where nothing bad can EVER happen, well just because. I do not think we will see concentration camps and the like, but I do think the experience of the Balkans is likely to play out at large in Europe, but without the US as Muslim protector.
6/30/2008 9:58 PM
PapaBear said...
During the collapse of the Roman Empire, feudalism arose. Peasant farmers need a stable environment where they are assured of retaining enough of the products of their labor that they could survive and feed their children. The only places where this was the case, were those areas under the protection of a local baron or knight.
And what was a baron? Somebody who was willing to kill in order to protect the people working in his area, and who provided leadership to other proficient killers.
We will eventually see a resurgence of the barons.
6/30/2008 10:17 PM
Dymphna said...
@Natalie:
Has anyone here read Mark Steyn's America Alone? This piece kind of reminded me of it.
Having read the book I agree, though I think Steyn held an even more dystopian view of things. And given what has transpired in Canada, I am sure his outlook is even more so.
He has put his blog in hibernation while he works on "projects" he was forced to put off because of the court bullying. I can't imagine what that experience will do to his writing.
6/30/2008 10:20 PM
Charlemagne said...
Gordon,
I have to strongly disagree with your assertion that the EU is the solution rather than the problem. The Founders of the US purposely designed our system of government such the federal government was weak relative to the states and had very limited but well-defined powers. Over time this proper balance of power has been corrupted for many reasons of which I'm sure you're aware. At the same time increased power has been assumed by the Federal government, [and] we as citizens have had a reduced ability to affect the nation's direction. It takes a huge amount of cash to get a voice on Capitol Hill because so few represent so many and it takes cash to have a voice. Local power however is far more accountable to a larger number of voices per elected official and thus it is far easier to influence local governments. For example look at the large number of laws enacted against illegal immigrants at the state and local level while the Fed dithers, [being] caught up in the vise of opposing special interest groups. Localization atomizes the power of the special interests fighting against the citizenry. The Democrats, IMO, would be much less of a potent force if we had more decisions being made at the state level. California for example would be free to drive itself off a cliff without trying to take the rest of us along for the ride. Gay marriage, CO2 regulation, extreme environmentalism, etc. It isn't Alaskans preventing drilling in Alsaka, it is latte Liberals in SF!
So again I have to disagree.
6/30/2008 10:47 PM
Zenster said...
'The conclusion was obvious: absent a change of course, Europe will become a Muslim continent by the year X. The only question is whether X will be 2040, or 2100, or somewhere in between.'
I continue to maintain that—be it 2040 or 2100—neither date will be reached without there already having been some major upheaval in Europe, if not around the world, specifically the MME (Muslim Middle East). Mind you, “upheaval” is the most diplomatic term I can summon forth.
El Inglés: given the massive degree of hatred, disgust, and fear that has quite legitimately been directed at Islam in the last few years, given further that this wave of revulsion continues to grow despite the pathetic efforts of political elites to convince us that Islam is the religion of peace, and given yet further that Islam is still in a massive numerical minority in all western European countries, how can we prevent the situation from simply degenerating into the butchering and ethnic cleansing of Muslims back to the dar-al-islam?
This is the “upheaval” I’m referring to. With a regularity and illogic that are equally astonishing, Muslims routinely push the envelope so far ahead of schedule (i.e., at the 3% - 8% population level), that they leave themselves hopelessly outnumbered. Thank goodness for small blessings, because even unarmed and psychologically demoralized Europeans are likely to overcome whatever post World War scruples they possess and begin scrubbing this alien parasite from their midst.
El Inglés: … our flipping point, where rage turns into violence, is much higher than that of Muslims (for which we should be thankful, otherwise our societies would resemble theirs), as people start to flip, as the expression of disgust at this totalitarian expansionism unleashed on us by our own 'leaders' becomes more frequent, environmental (i.e. social) inhibition of its growth is commensurately reduced as there are fewer inhibitors all the time.
That “flipping point” can also be called a “tipping point”. There is an extremely simple sequence to describe the fulcrum of this equation. It is when:
Living with Muslims becomes more trouble than living without them.
Every single day, Muslims around the world push Infidels ever closer to this tipping point. It remains impossible to believe that Islam is wholly unaware of this fact, elsewise Muslims would be advised by their clergy to back off of their constant predatory behavior. Nothing could be farther from reality and it serves to indicate that the tipping point will arrive long before 2040 or 2100.
Natalie: It's hard to predict what will happen, though. Demographics, like birth rates and that stuff, is important, but there's much more to people than numbers, if you know what I mean.
I do know what you mean and there most certainly is, “more to people than numbers”. Especially so in the case of Muslims. Take a quick look at this map. A quick look at the link will show you just how prevalent the practice of consanguineous marriage is in the MME.
By now, I’m confident that most people reading this are more than aware of Islam’s penchant for outright defiance of natural law. Be it their blithering disregard for Cause and Effect or a near-congenital predisposition for cognitive dissonance, Muslims have clearly taken the bit between their teeth when it comes to butting heads with natural selection.
I’ve asked the Baron to please consider posting about this aspect of Muslim culture and I’ll just point out some simple but astonishingly vivid statistics regarding Muslim predeliction for intermarriage between cousins.
The hospital, which services a community with a large Pakistani population, reports an unusually high rate of inherited gene disorders. Researchers estimate the rate of birth defects is 10 times higher than in the general population, said spokeswoman Leanne Wilson in a statement.
Seven of the 10 countries with the highest birth defect rates are Muslim nations with a tradition of intermarriage of blood relatives, accounting for at last 20 percent of deformities there.
Its kind of hard to take over the world with degenerative nerve disorders, shrunken heads, learning disabilities, deafness and spina bifida dogging you every step of the way.
What is "Occupation" : I see the following situation... Africans/Turks/Pakis/Arabs/Islamists will start to compare themselves to the jews.. They will claim "Jew" status over any slight or anyone who questions their
"differences".
Too late. They already have and the Politically Correct loons are buying into it like Florida real estate.
7/01/2008 12:39 AM
viske68 said...
I agree completely with you all, except on one point.
You are always talking and discussing the situation of Islam in Europe, and indeed it becomes very dangerous. But don't you ever think that Islam will come into America?
Just look at the news, though I know he's lying, that Khadaffi is congratulating Obama as hopefully the first Muslim president of the USA. And that's also what the other Arab nations think. I heard Khadaffi speaking these words to Obama as his Muslim brother. This proves that Muslims are also only waiting to take over America. And you can be sure of one thing, if Europe falls for Islam, America will never be able to oppose a whole Muslim world.
7/01/2008 4:49 AM
Graham Dawson (Archonix) said...
I shall be brief.
Gordon, to claim that the EU isn't the problem and that the national governments are is to ignore the historical fact that the reason for the EU's creation was precisely to make governments unaccountable to their electorates, in order to take decision-making powers out of the hands of those electorates, by repudiating the national legislatures' ability. The venal nature of our national politicians has grown up alongside the increases in power of the European Union's central government.
You make the constant mistake of assuming that the Eu was created to try and produce a federal state similar to the US and you keep buying into the lie that it was created to promote peace and cooperation. The EU was created to take the ability to make decisions out of the hands of the people. It was created to prevent the ability to wage war and the mindset behind that activity, that the ability to wage war is a de facto intent to wage war, is precisely why we are in the situation we now find ourselves.
A political union of the sort you seem to be fantasising about is not, in any way, the solution to this problem simply because the means to bring about that political union are by necessity going to involve so much compromise and so much deceit to get all parties around the same table, and are as a result going to produce so many uselessly watered down "policies" to satisfy all members, that it would not be able to defend itself from a flea, let alone the massed barbarian hordes.
I shall repeat it. The mindset that created the EU is the mindset that brought us to this point in history, it is the idea that the individual cannot defend himself, the idea that individual nations are incapable of cooperating without being forced to. It is collectivism hiding behind a nice name. Islam is collectivism. Islam, or some other equally barbaric state, is our destination if we continue to suffer the lie, that subsuming our ability to operate independently for the "common good", that removing the ability for nations to defend their borders, that accepting enforced political union with disparate and opposing cultures is somehow the only solution to the problem that collectivism itself has brought upon us.
The mindset that you yourself propose, of union, would bring about precisely what we face now. That mindset would ultimately force us into a political and economic union with the Muslim states in order to prevent the ability to wage war. After all, without borders, how can war be waged? When we're all in the same huge, interdependent collective, how can we fight?
7/01/2008 4:54 AM
The Gates of Vienna blog posted this interesting take on the 'majority of Moslems are peace-loving' argument. The assertion is most certainly true, yet as the author here maintains, it's largely irrelevant, as history has shown.
-----------
A German View of History
by Baron Bodissey
Update: Paul at Celestial Junk claims original authorship of this piece.
A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. “Very few people were true Nazis,” he said, “but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.”
We are told again and again by experts and talking heads that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of fifty shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.
The hard quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the “silent majority,” is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about twenty million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering seventy million people. The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across Southeast Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of twelve million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were “peace-loving”?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we may miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
Baron Bodissey | 6/29/2008 11:18:00 PM
10 Comments:
To comment in this stream of comments, you'd be better off going to the original posting at Gates of Vienna blog, here:
Paul said...
I wrote the essay and posted it on my blog here:
http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2006/02/why-peaceful-majority-is-irrelevant.html
FrontPage magazine published it after I ran it on my blog. Since then it has been published many times in print media around the world. Obviously, my name "fell off" the essay as it got passed around, but I'm glad that it was read as widely as it was.
Cheers!
Paul
Celestial Junk Blog
Canada
6/30/2008 12:03 AM
Zenster said...
Congratulations, Paul.
Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
It goes beyond this. A huge percentage of Muslims are already well aware of how Islamic jihad has begun in earnest. Those who watch al-Jazeera and al-Manar—or other Islamic media outlets—cannot but be keenly aware of global jihad’s impact upon the greater world. Still—confronted with Islam’s constant atrocities—they remain silent.
There can no longer be any excuse about “waiting for the strong horse to appear”. The patent evil of global terrorism long ago negated such callow fence-sitting. The deafening silence of Islam’s ummah has even gone beyond any notion that, “silence is consent”. As a Spanish journalist once observed:
“After a point, silence is no longer consent. To remain silent is to lie.”
Such is the position that Westerners are placed in at this time. There has been more than adequate opportunity for huge numbers of Muslims to make clear their displeasure with fanatical Islam’s barbarity. No such thing has happened and such silence is no longer just a form of tacit consent but an overt lie about whose side these silent Muslims really are on.
The fanatics don’t “own them”, they own the fanatics. Silent Muslims have bought the fanatics lock, stock and barrel. Through constant outpourings of zakat, thay have bought the fanatics every last kilogram of semtex, cell phone trigger and warferin-coated ball bearing.
Only the most remote, backwater illiterate and off-grid Muslim has any possible claim of ignorance. Even then, the incidence of aggression and jihadist violence in distant locations such as Aceh and Southern Thailand still serve to indict even Islam’s most rustic practitioners. There is little to no evidence that Muslims are anywhere near universal in their condemnation of terrorist violence.
Even if there were such unanimity regarding jihad, Islam would still be damned straight to eternal Hell by its continued practice of shari’a law. Beheadings, stonings, genital mutilation, spousal abuse, murdering of homosexuals, sexual child abuse and de facto slavery all make Islam unfit for participation upon the world stage.
Even more offensive than the foregoing practices is the spectacle of shari’a law’s adherents entering free societies to criticize and threaten those who protect not just their own free speech but that of Muslims as well. The stupendous hypocrisy of such monumental Islamic gall transcends all boundaries of reasonable forebearance or tolerance. Constant Muslim demands for their Religious Freedom in Western lands—despite the complete and total lack of genuine reciprocity in Islamic nations—is nothing less than a declaration of religious war.
It is time to tear up the pavement of this horrendous one-way street. Barricades to further immigration plus the lightning quick expulsion of Muslim law-breakers and extremists should only be the starting point of an increasing violent pushback against Islamic supremacism. Western politicians who abet continued colonization by these savages must be thrust from office, by force if elections cannot achieve any meaningful result.
Responsible patriots must ring down the curtain on this Multicultural farce and put an end to the most egregious social engineering experiment since Soviet and communist Chinese tyrants cheerfully slaughtered untold millions of their own. Muslims who take such obnoxious delight in jabbing knives into the dragon’s hide must be given a taste of scorching flame as their reward. The charred embers of Islam should stand as stark testimony to their idiotic folly.
6/30/2008 12:48 AM
Paul said...
zenster: It's interesting how much my own views have changed since I wrote the essay. A lot of reading and world events have evolved my own thinking.
At this point, my belief is that the problem with Islam is Islam. Muslims have no doctrine or theoretical basis to go to that would make them fit in with a pluralistic post-modern society. Their guide is the Islamic foundational texts ... and these support the jihadists. Moderates have nowhere within Islam to go for doctrine that would support them. Keep in mind, that their supreme example is Muhammad.
I wrote about this here:
http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2008/05/muslim-reformation.html
6/30/2008 1:00 AM
Zenster said...
Paul: Moderates have nowhere within Islam to go for doctrine that would support them.
All of your second comment is exceptionally concise and well-put, Paul. There is no commonality between Islam and the modern world. Muslims can continue pretending all they want that this is the West's fault. All it will get them is their own personal holocaust.
6/30/2008 1:23 AM
Henrik R Clausen said...
Paul, thanks a lot for this piece. I remember having read it elsewhere and have since used its points in debates.
Good that it's found it's original ownership again :)
6/30/2008 2:03 AM
Findalis said...
Peace-loving Muslims. Please show me one. That is an oxymoron. They won't be peace-loving until every Jew, Christian, Baha'i, Hindu, Druze, Pagan, etc... is eliminated from this planet.
6/30/2008 2:12 AM
Francis W. Porretto said...
A commenter at Eternity Road once made the pithy observation that we believe in the existence of peaceable Muslims for the same reason we believe in the existence of giant squid: dead ones show up every now and then.
There's a world of insight in that.
6/30/2008 4:28 AM
Henrik R Clausen said...
Finlandis, bad Muslims can be completely peace-loving.
Only if they study the Quran and discover that they were mistaken and regret it, trouble ensues. These people catch what is called "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" and can become very extreme, very fast.
6/30/2008 5:13 AM
mike18xx said...
This is terrible.
We should talk about it on blogs for another twenty years while they smother the planet.
6/30/2008 6:13 AM
Zeke said...
Anyone know exactly how many Muslims Bush had rounded up after 9/11, detained, and then ejected from the USA? It seems to be a forgotten fact that this took place. Wikipedia says:
"Following the attacks, 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants were fingerprinted and registered under the Alien Registration Act of 1940. 8,000 Arab and Muslim men were interviewed, and 5,000 foreign nationals were detained under Joint Congressional Resolution 107-40 authorizing the use of military force "to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States."[132]
That seems like a pretty forcefull response. Detaining 5,000 foreign muslims!
6/30/2008 7:37 AM
Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal, one of the four keynote speakers at the Third International Conference on the Muslim World in Kuala Lumpur: “I can never accept, in my personal view, that freedom of speech is morally right when it supersedes and offends my faith and my belief.”
Below, also available over at Brussels Journal (archived re 6.24.08), is the transcript of a speech given at the California Republican Jewish Coalition (RJW), on June 21, 2008. The speaker gives his reflections on the meaning of the 9/11 Massacre within the context of an ongoing Islamofascist war on the West. He opens by giving his fascinating, if rather saddening, impressions of a recent conference he attended, the 'Third International Conference on the Muslim World and the West', hosted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He then references the lamentable state of the US Democratic Party, and its seeming inability to approach the exceedingly real, present and growing Islamist threat with any level of seriousness. A compelling speech.
---------
Too Good to Win. Is the West Losing the War?
June 24, 2008
Let us begin where all things begin in this political era: on September 11th, 2001. Everyone in this room has a story of that day. Mine is set in Brooklyn, where I waited long hours for my wife to come home with the ash-covered refugee throngs from lower Manhattan. In the sky we saw a black plume that blotted out the sun. Upon our neighborhood fell the charred debris of the morning’s massacre: A manila folder. Nynex billing records. A burnt in-flight safety card from a Boeing 767.
In the subsequent 24 hours, we heard the President of the United States say two things of note: first, that “freedom itself” was attacked — and second, that Islam is a “religion of peace.” The first statement was widely derided as nonsensical… simplistic… or absurd. The second was lauded as an act of statesmanship… as a magnanimous gesture… and as a necessary conciliatory step.
My friends, I submit to you that the popular assessment of both phrases was precisely wrong — in fact, the opposite of the truth about each. By way of explaining this, I’d like to tell you a bit about where I’ve just been.
Last week, I returned from the Third International Conference on the Muslim World and the West in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The aim of the conference was to “bridge the gap,” as they put it, between the Muslim world and the West.
Now, this seems like a worthy thing. Surely we of the West ought to find our common ground with the Muslim world, and vice versa. Surely there is common ground to be found. Surely the problems between us are predominantly problems of understanding and comprehension… and surely they are solvable with a little goodwill.
I admit to having been a bit dismayed when, at a pre-conference interview, the chairman — a Columbia University alumnus named Imam Feisal Rauf — told me that Muslim violence was “predominantly” the fault of Westerners. Nonetheless, I soldiered on in the belief that we could — how to put it? — bridge the gap.
To say that the luminaries of the conference disappointed my hopes is to understate things. But to say that that were luminous is to be perfectly accurate. I’ll just name three of the most prominent and powerful:
• Secretary-General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanouglu of Turkey.
• Former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.
• His Royal Highness Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, former director of Saudi intelligence, and until recently the Saudi Ambassador to the United States.
These men are educated… well traveled… experienced… wealthy… and Westernized. And each of them told the conference that for the West and Islam to reconcile, the West must abandon the principle of free speech.
Secretary-General Ihsanouglu declared that there is “a campaign of incitement under the guise of freedom of expression.” Therefore, freedom of expression must go.
Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, put it in more blunt terms: “I can never accept, in my personal view, that freedom of speech is morally right when it supersedes and offends my faith and my belief.”
Finally, former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said, “Producing cartoons on religious leaders, where sensitivities are hurt, should be discouraged — and should be opposed and not be protected under the guise of freedom.”
For this, he received vigorous applause from the assembled delegates.
I will not bore you with a recounting of the remainder of the conference. Suffice it to say that it was all like this, and that the consensus was that the West need merely yield its freedoms in favor of a regime of enforcement that would quash any speech — and indeed, any thought — that Muslims find offensive. Once this was done, it was explicitly stated, Muslim anger would cool, and there would be no more violence… except, a Palestinian legislator in attendance reminded us, against the Jews, who have it coming anyway.
My purpose here is not to engage in yet another monologue on just how frightening and dismaying our conflict with the Muslim world truly is. After the events of this decade, those who do not already grasp this probably never will. There is a temptation to blame these people for moral blindness or frivolity. But we must be charitable.
Back in 2004, the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California quoted Ken Wornick of the Republican Jewish Coalition as saying, “Jews have this blind belief in negotiations. They believe in their heart of hearts that since we would rather settle almost anything peacefully, our enemies feel the same way. But guess what: They don’t.”
I am ill placed to comment on what Jews at large believe. But I can say that the tendency Ken identifies here is endemic to all people of basic goodwill — especially in America, and in the West, where we assume that our differences will be resolved through open debate and the institutions of democracy.
Our reflex to accommodation and discussion is mostly a healthy thing. But we must develop the wisdom and discernment to realize when our better natures become self-destructive. The tragedy of this war we’re in — and it is a war — is that if we lose, we lose because we are too good to win.
To take one example, the Third International Conference on the Muslim World and the West in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, did feature several Western luminaries. The deputy speaker of the French National Assembly was there, as was a Spanish ambassador, an Australian MP, and various other mostly European functionaries. Every single one of them accepted the demand for an end to free speech without complaint.
We might call this the mindset of the quisling. Or, to invoke the opposite side of that historical allusion, we might say that they merely adhere to Winston Churchill’s admonition that “it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.”
There is tremendous wisdom in Churchill’s statement — but to take it at face value is to ignore that the man himself would not “jaw-jaw” with simply anyone, on any terms. This, after all, is a man for whom Mohandas Gandhi was deemed a morally unfit interlocutor. (I believe Churchill was right on this, but that’s for another speech.) Churchill rightly understood that to talk with someone in the absence of conditions gives some measure of moral sanction to that person.
For Churchill, to sit down with Hitler on equal terms, conceding from the start the legitimacy of the Nazi’s desires, was to lose the battle before it began.
Similarly, I posit that to seek to “bridge the gap” between the Muslim world and the West, conceding from the start that the suppression of a basic freedom may even be discussed, is not meaningfully different from total capitulation.
Remember the President’s statement on September 11th, 2001? The one derided by our chattering classes, about “freedom itself” coming under attack? We need only refer to the rational chain advanced by the Muslim luminaries in Malaysia last week to see how right the President was:
From the existence of freedom… comes the exercise of freedom… comes the outrage at that exercise… comes the violence from that outrage.
The logic is as unassailable as its implication is morally abhorrent. If this is wholly true — and I do not believe it is — but if it is, then we in the West have a stark choice before us: oppression and peace, on the one hand, or freedom and war on the other.
The great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber famously wrote, in “I and Thou,” “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” This is the basic question of our age: if not us, who? Or, to invoke the logic that blames freedom for terror, do we have the strength… the resolve… and the confidence to choose freedom and war?
This, though, is not the whole of Buber’s famous quote: he went on to write, “If I am only for myself, what am I?” In that light, we must not believe that in defending our basic freedoms, we are solely serving our own interests. Indeed, if the Muslim world hates our freedoms and how we use them, then an absolute and uncompromising defense of those freedoms and their use is the single greatest act of charity and, yes, love we can offer the Muslim world.
I said I do not accept the logic that blames freedom for terror. I have traveled through the Muslim world, from Turkey to Jordan to Malaysia to east Africa, and yes, to Jerusalem itself… and I have yet to meet a Muslim who was not a human being, endowed by the Creator with the same basic faculties that our own Founding Fathers identified as providing the natural impetus to freedom.
Muslims are not psychologically and culturally inert, purely reactive to Western stimuli. They have the same capacity for moral choice, and the same independent existence, as all persons — even if their conference-going, globetrotting leaders pretend otherwise. We owe them that basic respect… rather than the infantilizing assumption that they are, as their leaders would have it, easily provoked savages, prone to violence lest we speak softly.
This is not to assert that there is a basic goodness in them that will pour forth upon the display of our own goodness. Here we come to the second of the President’s post-9/11 assertions: that Islam is a “religion of peace.” It is a sign of our own lack of self-confidence, and our own lack of moral bearing, that we largely accepted, and even praised, this trope within days of the slaughter of 3,000 fellow Americans in Islam’s name. What the President said may be defensible on grounds of realpolitik — but not on grounds of truth.
As a good Muslim friend of mine put it, “Islam is not a religion of peace. It’s a religion of justice.” It is incumbent upon us to understand and comprehend what that notion of justice entails — so we may defy it when it threatens ours.
Protecting and exercising our freedoms may cause them pain at points — though not less pain than their violence causes us — but in the long run, if we persist with the courage of our convictions, they will seek those freedoms for themselves.
My friends, whatever comes between now and that day is, I believe, a price worth paying.
At this point, some of you may be asking how the heck this relates to the Republican party. We’re here under the auspices of the Republican Jewish Coalition, after all, and no doubt I owe you a bit of partisanship.
Let me close, then, in the spirit of the greatest Republican of all time, Abraham Lincoln, who once said, “This reminds me of a story.”
I still remember the first time I knew I was a Republican. I even remember the date. It was November 7th, 1984. I was nine years old, and we all — my whole family — lived in Seoul, South Korea, where my father was stationed as a U.S. Air Force officer. Because of the time difference, we watched the election-night broadcast of Tuesday, November 6th on the morning of Wednesday, November 7th before school.
Now, I should tell you a bit about life in Korea in the 1980s. North Korea seems threatening now… but it was even more ominous then. I spent my elementary school years with monthly air raid sirens and evacuation drills. The military dictatorship that ruled South Korea never tired of reminding us of the hordes of Communists ready to sweep down and enslave us all.
And they were right.
Of course, at nine, I didn’t pay attention to politics. But I did watch television, and I did have some hazy sense that the North Koreans who made life so fraught with tension needed a hard man to stare them down. So, over Cheerios and orange juice, I asked my father whom the North Koreans wanted to win. My father is a confirmed conservative now, but then his memories of phone banking for Jimmy Carter were a bit fresh. He thought about it and said, “I suppose they want Walter Mondale to win.”
That was all I needed to hear. A devout love of Ronald Reagan sprang ex nihilo in my young heart. It has never gone away. If the slave state apparatchiks and gulag bureaucrats of Communism hated Reagan, then I was for him with every fiber of my being. And so were 49 of 50 states.
My friends, I’ve been a Republican since. And the reason for my youthful turn to our great party is as appropriate now as it was then. It is a dangerous world, and we Americans still live in what Reagan called the last, best hope of man on earth. When our enemies endorse a leader for us — be it North Koreans for Walter Mondale, or Hamas for Barack Obama — it befits us to pay attention.
In my lifetime, no enemy of the United States, the West, or our freedoms has ever endorsed a Republican. And that is the most powerful endorsement I can imagine. It is a credit to men and women like you, who keep us on the path charted by our Founders, over two hundred years ago — the path of, as Jefferson wrote, “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
May God bless you, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and our great nation.
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This produced in me a desire to pinpoint the moment, day, or month I became a Republican. I'm not American, so for me in its specifics it remains a theoretical project. Yet this makes me an old-school conservative, no matter where I live. I pinpoint it to mid-2004, after receiving a Republican Calendar I had requested when I joined a conservative mailing list. The calendar came and documents the conservative achievements in American history. It was a truly eye-opening experience. I learned that the Republican Party had been created for the express purpose of achieving the abolition of slavery in the United States. The Democrats were the pro-slavery party. The Republicans also led the way during post-war Reconstruction (US Civil War). The Democrats resisted and sought to sabotage these efforts. The Republicans spent more than 30 years campaigning to give women the vote. The Democrats fought against this vociferously. It finally arrived in 1920, becoming the US Constitution's 19th Amendment. The Republicans continued their efforts throughout the 20th Century at creating an authentic equality of opportunity irrespective of race. They did this by launching and pursuing what has become known as the Civil Rights movement. The Democrats, again, resisted this Republican-initiated expansion of freedom in the US. This narrative of American history continues right up to the present day.
Naturally I was skeptical. This contradicted my Canadian bias that all progressive elements in American history had been the work of the Democratic Party. I went out and did the necessary research to convince myself of the truth of these claims. I cannot describe how shocked I was at my own ignorance. Yet I had the ignorance I was intended to have, by the liberal elites both in America and Canada. I've spoken to Americans and some are vaguely aware of this Republican record of achievement, yet they counter it by maintaining that the party also became the champion of big business, as though this somehow vitiates their truly astounding achievements in making America one of the world's only true democracies, with a legitimate and breathtakingly authentic equality of opportunity for anyone who truly wishes to embrace it.
This intellectual experience in 2004 convinced me of the venality, the culture of lies and dissimulation that the left practices, always. Even American history has been falsified by the left. This came after my epiphany in late 2003, studying British online media to determine if the rumors of a resurgence of chronic, delusional, extremely vitriolic and vicious anti-Semitism in Britain were, in fact, true. After two months of reading British online media daily, I concluded that yes, the British media did target and conduct the most horrendously one-sided coverage of Israel and Jews of any media I had read. British knee-jerk leftism and the staggeringly vicious level of Jew-hatred in Britain have become conflated for me. I have since seen that leftism seems to spend much of its time defending, appeasing, and generally sucking-up to the newest totalitarian project on the block, Islamism.
In this context, my transition to conservatism and Republicanism seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. I enjoyed this speech, and extend to the RJW my best wishes.
Tel Aviv, May 2008 - Israeli Air Force jets perform a display during a demonstration to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel. (Photo: AP/Ariel Schalit)
P. David Hornak, reporting from Front Page Magazine, here, states the obvious, yet perhaps it's not-so-obvious to leftist appeasers everywhere. Israel will have no option but to launch targetted strikes, not missiles but aircraft-deployed munitions, against front-line nuclear installations in Iran. Mr. Bolton comments very astutely at one point in this article that if McCain is elected, Israel will likely wait to see what action he takes. Indeed, even the bare fact of his election may be enough to dissuade Iran from launching its oft-promised attacks of liquidation against Israel. However, if Obama is elected, in Bolton's view, Israel will almost certainly launch strikes between election night and January 20, 2009. My previous posts, in which I predict a showdown before April 2009, is probably being overly optimistic. Eight months is likely a more realistic diagnosis of the timeline for this disease.
There isn't a snowball's chance in hell Obama has the wherewithal to solve this escalating crisis. In a way just seeing some sort of resolution, one way or the other, will be a relief.
Needless to say, Iran should be dealt with swiftly, brutally, with absolute and unequivocal dispatch. We have appeased and equivocated, ad nauseam ...
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Crunch-Time on Iran Approaching
By P. David Hornik, June 25, 2008
"Those who shamelessly call for the destruction of Israel will always—always—find France blocking their way," French president Nicolas Sarkozy told the Knesset on Sunday, but it wasn’t clear what he could have meant.
"…shamelessly call for the destruction of Israel" sounds a lot like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders. But even after a year of Sarkozy—considered dramatically more pro-Israeli than most of his predecessors—France remains one of Iran’s major trading partners. Sarkozy has also announced a downsizing of the French military broadly criticized by French commanders.
For Israel and the Jewish people existential concerns are no stranger, and sometimes foreign leaders see fit to address these when speaking to the Knesset. For President Bush last month it was: “Citizens of Israel: Masada shall never fall again, and America will be at your side.”
Again, though the U.S. shouldn’t be compared to France for a moment, with Tehran continuing to march jeeringly and defiantly toward nuclearization after seven and a half years of Bush, Israelis could be forgiven for filing his words under Noble Rhetoric.
Friday’s New York Times report about a massive Israeli air force exercise in the skies of Greece—about as far from Israel as Iran is—underlined the fact that Israel is far from counting on any of these foreign avowals. This week speculation is peaking as to who—if anyone—is actually planning to hit Iran, when, and depending on what.
For former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton it depends on who emerges as the next U.S. president on November 4. He told Fox News on Tuesday that if it’s Barack Obama, he thinks it likely that Israel will hit Iran’s nuclear facilities between that time and the new president’s inauguration on January 20, 2009.
If, though, the winner is John McCain, said Bolton—who himself considers McCain much more realistic on Iran than Obama—there’s a good chance Israel will wait to see what happens and postpone a strike on Iran. Bolton said it was apprehension about Obama—still favored by a majority of American Jews, whose outlook tends to differ from that of their brethren in the Middle East—that was most likely to push Israel to go ahead and act.
The speculation can only be intensified by a surprise visit to Israel later this week by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen. Already touring Europe, Mullen reportedly had a free day in his itinerary and decided to spend it in Israel.
Mullen was already here in December—the first visit to the Jewish state by a Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman in over a decade. That time he heard Israeli objections to the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) published just a week earlier, and Mullen’s spokesman said “The discussion was centered on the mutual challenge that Israel and the United States, indeed the entire Middle East, face right now, and the shared recognition that there remains a potential for Iran to develop nuclear weapons and to threaten its neighbors.”
Mullen’s return so soon, and just after the Israeli exercise over Greece, could mean the U.S. is already past the NIE’s downgrading of the Iranian threat and closer to the Israeli perception—or that the U.S. is worried about Israeli intentions.
And yet another move fueling speculation was Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s extension for another year of Meir Dagan’s tenure as head of the Mossad. Dagan, known as a hawkish realist, is credited among other things with the intelligence feats that enabled Israel’s strike on the Syrian reactor in September.
DEBKAfile, the Israeli scoop site, has a considerably shorter timeline than Bolton and claimed the extension of Dagan’s tenure is “indicative” because “Israeli intelligence estimates the summer months are critical for acting against Iran’s nuclear advances…. If it is not stopped by September or October of 2008, it will be too late….”
As for Iran itself, it claims not to be impressed. On Monday its Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Israel “do[es] not have the capacity to threaten the Islamic Republic of Iran…. They have a number of domestic crises and they want to extrapolate it to cover others.”
He was right at least about the domestic crises, with Olmert’s government teetering and its ceasefire with Hamas already punctuated by a mortar and then a Qassam firing.
But as the strike on the Syrian reactor showed, even under flawed leadership like Olmert’s—let alone a more competent leadership that might, hopefully, replace him—Israel is serious about existential threats, has a long memory, and will act if it sees no other alternative.
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P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.
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I share Hornak's skepticism on Sarkozy's resolve. The French, like the British, are too locked-down into appeasement, surrender, capitulation, not to mention fawning and grovelling to their Islamist masters. Of course this is always expressed as standing in solidarity with their Muslim brothers and sisters. Europe simply cannot be trusted. They're too busy sodomizing grammar school boys and pontificating on global warming to ever take a principled stand on a real issue.
At any rate, the eleventh hour approaches ...
Here's some more data on Iran, from Mark Alexander at the PatriotPost.US, issue 6.20.08, which should be sending up red flags on Iran's short to medium-term intentions. As I've said before, the West has less than 10 months or so to prevent Iran from turning several Arab cities into small mushroom clouds, and trying to do so to several Israeli cities.
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In January 2004, Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan confessed to being the ringleader of a clandestine nuclear proliferation network that provided sensitive uranium enrichment technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Khan’s admission was the result of a decade of surveillance by American and British intelligence, though these agencies stopped short of claiming that Khan’s network provided actual designs for nuclear weapons to rogue states. After the dissolution of the Khan network, the Central Intelligence Agency and Secret Intelligence Service continued to investigate leads while the Pakistani government placed Khan under house arrest and declared
"the A. Q. Khan affair to be over."
Not quite. The story of the Khan network took a sinister turn this week when David Albright, a prominent expert on nuclear weapons, published a report saying that designs for an advanced, compact nuclear warhead were found on computers owned by Swiss businessmen who were members of Khan’s smuggling ring. "To many of these countries, it’s all about size and weight," Albright said in an interview. "They need to be able to fit the device on the missiles they have." The warhead depicted in the blueprints is of Pakistani origin and is small enough that it could easily be mounted on a medium-range ballistic missile.
U.S. intelligence officials, along with the UN’s nuclear "watchdog," the IAEA, oversaw the destruction of more than a terabyte of seized data, including the blueprints in question. However, none of the Western intelligence services have any idea how many times the digital blueprints were copied and distributed. If Iran or North Korea received copies of the design, there is no question that their nuclear weapons programs have made a giant leap in a very short period of time. Just a month ago, nuclear proliferation experts were taking comfort in the fact that Iran would not be able to design a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on its Shahab III ballistic missile anytime in the near future. That assumption has been obliterated by the latest revelations about the Khan network.
Of course, the CIA will not comment on the report, citing ongoing national security issues, but former CIA director George Tenet acknowledged in 2007 that the agency had sources in the Khan network for at least a decade.
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So it's probable Iran now has the capability of building a warhead suitable for their medium-range missiles. They have been working overtime to acquire the means of enriching the required uranium. It really is a race against time. It's very simple. If President Bush leaves this for the next president to respond to, it will be too late.
