Politically Incorrect View of Islam

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam by Robert Spencer, is a fascinating glimpse into the religion of one billion earthlings. Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a watchdog blog site that monitors jihadi activities in order to warn about upcoming violence from muslim terrorists.

Spencer has a video on YouTube where he is interviewed on his Politically Incorrect Guide, and presents an overview of his research into the Islamic tendency to violence--historically and in the present. Anyone who has looked at the history of Islam honestly will be tempted to agree with Spencer's assessment.

Spencer's ongoing work can be followed at Jihad Watch, and other websites. It is important that intelligent intellectuals (as opposed to indoctrinate PC pseudo-intellectuals) continue to dog the activities of the violent religious fanatics who make a comfortable home within Islam.

Muslim Death Cult

From the leader of Hezbollah:

“We have discovered how to hit the Jews [the west] where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews [the west] love(s) life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”

From Tunisian intellectual Al-afif Al-akhdar:

“Why do expressions of tolerance, moderation, rationalism, compromise, and negotiation horrify us [Muslims], but [when we hear] fervent cries for vengeance, we all dance the war dance?… Why do other people love life, while we love death and violence, slaughter and suicide, and [even] call it heroism and martyrdom?”

When muslims celebrated the deaths of civilians from New York City, Madrid, London, etc. they were merely behaving according to custom--they are told to celebrate the misery, suffering, and death of infidels.

Unfortunately, Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, and other muslim states are being controlled by people who have the same death cult mind glitch as Nasrallah, Arafat, and Ahmadinejad. It is a mental virus being spread wildly across the middle east, south asia, and some european ghettos.

Understanding the truth about muslims seems too much like dehumanising them, it is repellant to us. Many of us go into denial and refuse to accept the obvious. But the dehumanising is being done in the mosque and the religious schools of indoctrination. It is out of our control, as is so much of the current and future death that comes directly from this dehumanising indoctrination.

The truth is, Islam is very much like most tribal societies were during the dark ages. Islam has buried itself in a time capsule and refused to change, refused to be enlightened into the larger universe. Instead, the islamic cult of death wishes to bury the entire world inside its time capsule of barbaric primitivism.

Hat tip, Augean Stables.

The Truth? Islam Has Always Been a Religion of War--From the Beginning

An excellent review of the book Islamic Imperialism by Efraim Karsh makes it clear that Islam was always a religion of beheadings and massive blood-letting. There is nothing new about Iraqi Shia-Sunni massacres. That is how Islam has always been.

Growing lawlessness... led to the formation of citizen organizations for defense and reprisals... . Notable among these were... thugs drawn from the lower reaches of society... .

Ready to sell their services to the highest bidder, groups... competed against each other to serve the rival Shiite and Sunni camps in their incessant squabbles...

Yesterday's Financial Times on today's Iraq? No, Efraim Karsh on eighth-century Baghdad. Forgive yourself if "the more things change, the more they stay the same" comes to mind.

Muslim scholars, proud of Islam's cultural feats, often don't know what to say about its endemic violence and militarism. Even great ones fall victim to soft-pedaling the endless battles, assassinations and massacres by which Islam expanded from Arabia to become a world religion. In his Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization (2003), the distinguished Iranian philosopher S.H. Nasr embodied this tradition in a telling, self-contradictory sentence:

"In less than a century after the establishment of the first Islamic society in Medina by the Prophet, Arab armies had conquered a land stretching from the Indus River to France and brought with them Islam, which, contrary to popular Western conceptions, was not forced upon the people by the sword."

You might say that Efraim Karsh, head of the Mediterranean Studies Program at the University of London, gives the other side of the story.

In his nervy, tightly documented Islamic Imperialism, Karsh challenges scholars and Muslim leaders to refute his own picture of Islam: an imperialist seventh-century Arabic movement that forced itself on neighboring lands such as today's Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt for secular colonialist payoffs - money, booty, territory.

According to Karsh, Muhammad, by claiming Allah's authority to act as both a political and religious leader, was able "to cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura" and "channel Islam's energies" into geographic expansion.

In seventh-century Arabia, Karsh argues, the peninsula teemed with people claiming divine inspiration. What Muhammad added, Karsh contends, was insistence on Allah as the sole god, a desire to unite believers equally in a Muslim umma (or "community of believers"), and a will to do so by force if persuasion failed.

On the practical side, Karsh maintains, Islam began in banditry. After going to Medina, Muhammad sought to "entice his local followers into raiding the Meccan caravans," and the multiple attacks increased their war chests. His unpopularity with Meccans stemmed not just from his new beliefs, Karsh asserts, but from his brigandage.

Medina, originally known as Yathrib, had been partly "settled by Jewish refugees fleeing Roman persecution." Karsh says Muhammad first tried to persuade Yathrib's three Jewish tribes - the Quainuqa, Nadir and Quraiza - to convert to Islam. He adopted "a number of Jewish rituals," including praying "toward Jerusalem" and not eating pork.

When the "Medina Jews" demurred, Karsh states, Muhammad turned on them, dropping Jewish rituals and changing the direction of prayer to Mecca.

Eventually, Karsh writes, Muhammad expelled the Quainuqa and Nadir and stole their goods. Then, in 627, after accusing the Quraiza of conspiring with Meccan enemies, Muhammad ordered its nearly 800 men beheaded. The Muslims sold the women and children into slavery and split the tribe's money.

Muhammad also continued his conquest of Arabia. He conducted raids throughout the peninsula and "resorted to the assassination of political rivals." In 630, he showed up at Mecca with an army, the city capitulated, and Islam's great rise began.

In Karsh's view, Muhammad has served as a model for Muslims not just as a wise man and prophet, but as a warrior.

Anyone not expert on early Islam will need a scorecard to follow the innumerable murders, impalings, decapitations and dismemberments that marked the early Islamic caliphates and Shiite/Sunni split. You think what's happening in Iraq is new? So many severed heads get sent from one leader to another in Islamic Imperialism, you wonder why "Fed Head" didn't get off the ground as a Meccan firm.

From Muhammad's farewell address in 632 ("I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no God but Allah.' "), to Saladin in 1189 ("I shall... pursue them until there remains no one... who does not acknowledge Allah"), to Osama bin Laden in 2001 ("I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah..."), Karsh finds Islam's outward imperialism consistent.

But internally, Karsh notes, mayhem against rival Muslims also implicated Islam's spiritual side as "a facade that concealed what was effectively a secular and increasingly absolutist rule," one by which Arab caliphs could "enjoy the material fruits of imperial expansion."

Every Islamic takeover, Karsh emphasizes, came with a demand for tribute, taxes, or both: "Arab conquerors were far less interested in the mass conversion of the vanquished peoples than in securing their tribute." Meanwhile, infighting made "a mockery" of Muhammad's ban on fighting among Muslims.

This history of Islam's internal wars forms the timely, eye-opening side of Karsh's book. By the first Abbasid caliphate in 749, Karsh summarizes, "the Islamic empire was an Arab military autocracy run by Arabs for the sole benefit of Arabs."

Source.

It is instructive to study the history of a long-lived movement, to understand where present day irrationalities originate. During the so-called "golden age of islam", it was not the barbaric arab conquerors who brought knowledge to the conquered. The result of the muslim conquest was an extended dark age settling over the muslim countries, lasting for a thousand years, and still smothering the muslim lands.

Islam is a cult of ignorance and murder. There is no refinement, no honour, no future in Islam. It has always been that way. Pity the poor muslim who does not know better.

Bloody Horsemen of Apocalypse: Islamism, Nazism, Communism

The 20th century was very big on messianic political movements. Europe was a particular hotbed of messianic utopian revolutionaries. First communism, then Nazism.

Communism promised a return to an Edenic paradise, once the evils of capitalism and the bourgeoisie were eradicated from the earth. This was to be a paradise of the proletariat, the true heirs of the earth. There are still true believers in communist/socialist paradise, lurking under dead logs, in universities, in the media, and such. Many of these true believers stand ready to join in the final revolution to place the rightful dictators on their thrones.

Nazism was supposed to be the messianic triumph of the true people--the Aryan race--over the "inferior" races of the world. There are still holdovers from that messianic movement. Many of these true believers stand ready to re-ignite the race struggle, to trigger a race war, to place the "rightful" race on top of the world.

Islamism was reignited in the 20th century by Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood. This messianic movement is based upon the ascendancy of Islam over the world of infidels. It consists of both Shia and Sunni movements which often collaborate toward a common goal, in spite of the hatred and distrust between Shia and Sunni.

Islamism aims for a world that is under the boot of Islamist leaders, although true paradise for Sunni islamists is achieved through "martyrdom"--a euphemistic term referring to a death that involves killing as many non-islamists as possible, including women and children. Paradise for Shia islamists can be achieved through martyrdom, but there is also the mystical messianic element of the twelfth imam.

Apocalyptic thinking:

"It means a belief that a cosmic transformation is imminent. The coming transformation of the world can take two forms. The first is that it will end entirely (eschatology). Alternatively, it can be the coming of the Messianic Age. This latter expectation is often called 'millennialism' (mille = 1000, anni = years) not because of the advent of a 1000-year marker like the year 2000, but because it promises a 'thousand-year messianic kingdom'.

"In moderate forms, millennialism exists everywhere since most people have the hope that the world is going to fundamentally improve. But rarely do millennial beliefs become apocalyptic, sweep up groups, movements and whole populations in a frenzied belief that the millennium is now!

"Among believers in an imminent apocalyptic transformation, two major schools exist. The more common passive one says: 'God will cause the transformation, which will lead to either the end of time or the earthly millennium.' The activists claim: 'we are God's agents and have to bring about the apocalyptic transformation.' When they believe that the apocalypse calls for cataclysmic destruction, they deem they can 'save the world by destroying it.' Often their first and most feared targets are Jews and Judaism.

"Hitler's aim for a thousand year 'Reich' - a millennial kingdom - represented the quintessence of the most negative aspects of violent, apocalyptic action. Nazism exploded from a toxic cocktail of conspiracism, rage at a perceived humiliation of the German people, and complete contempt for human life, all the while using the discourse of the salvation of the Aryan race to win over converts. It could thereby inspire 'modern' people, capable of handling sophisticated technology, to engage in the most inhumane activities with a good conscience. The Holocaust was an apocalyptic deed."

.... "According to this teaching, Muslims stand at the brink of a glorious global victory for Islam and a devastating destruction of the West, starting with Israel. Then the world can enter the peaceful millennium of the global Dar al Islam. For many Muslims, Bin Laden is a central player in a cosmic battle between the warriors for truth against Satan's agents in the world, i.e., the West and, in particular, the United States and Israel.

"These are recycled concepts from the time Islam originally spread. Then, Muslims thought that once they threw out the world's bad governments - the Roman/Byzantine and Persian empires - God's dominion would be everywhere. With this ideology, Muslims conquered and spread to half the world, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. However, modern times have treated Islam badly. In particular, from the time of Napoleon's invasion of 1798-99, they have found their political - and now, despite all their oil wealth, economic - inferiority a source of great pain.

...."Jihad operates on two major levels. The first is outright violence. Its aggression emerges in most places where Islam has a border with another culture. From Nigeria, on the Atlantic, across the sub-Saharan divide to Sudan, across Asia to the Pacific, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

"Apocalyptic Jihad in the global era has intensified both the rhetoric and the action. It now emphasizes terrifying hadiths, in which the end marks a genocidal slaughter of Jews, when even the rocks and trees will call out 'Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!' Others include the Christians in the carnage, a theme common in the 'secular' nationalism of Arab riots in the pre-Zionist period: 'First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.'

"Lately, disturbing evidence suggests that the hadith that claims that at the end of time, every Muslim will have 'a Jew or Christian to substitute for him in hell,' has been interpreted to mean that every Muslim has a Jew - or a Christian - to kill in order to be saved. The Arab Muslim French youngster who slaughtered and mutilated a neighbor since childhood, a successful Jewish disc jockey, last winter, came up to his parents' apartment with bloodied hands and said, 'I've killed my Jew, I can go to Paradise.'

.... Landes considers that we have to watch how the apocalyptic discourse's momentum is developing. "It's common to say that Jihadism is an extremist, marginal form of Islam. In order to comprehend its potential role in current events, we need to understand it in terms of apocalyptic dynamics. Successful millennial movements, like the Nazis, spread from the fringes to the center. And in cultures that are vulnerable to apocalyptic messages - e.g., the conspiracist and disoriented Arab world - technology greatly amplifies its impact. Instead of local pockets, a critical mass of people can grow very quickly.

"Once such a mass has developed, a society's leaders use apocalyptic rhetoric, as has the Palestinian Authority. Thus, this discourse becomes predominant in public. Anybody who disagrees is on the defensive and keeps quiet."

When asked what the future will bring, Landes says: "A billion Muslims are at least attracted to an Islamic millennial scenario in which they take over the world. The vast majority is not yet apocalyptic, but it is certainly possible that both Arabs and Muslims worldwide could get swept up in a fever of apocalyptic hope and violence. Such a scenario may strike us as ridiculous. But in millennial matters, since the millennium never actually comes, unintended consequences play a major role. The more violent and active the apocalyptic scenario, the more destructive its consequences can be, no matter how unrealistic its goals.

"The West cannot afford to dismiss these fantasies because we consider them as unrealistic. We have to listen to what the Jihadists say, and especially, what they say to each other. The West needs - at the very least - to stop encouraging the apocalyptic thinkers by wrongly pretending that they are just upset about the Israeli occupation or American imperialism. Jihadis do not read our self-critical breast beating as a cause for moderation but rather to the contrary, an invitation to further violence.

Source.

These three messianic riders of the apocalypse are bloody through and through. Communism killed over a hundred million people in the 20th century, and if Fidel and Kim could work their will there would be many more millions dead in the 21st. Nazism killed ten million or so in the 20th century, and if the neo-nazis succeed in provoking race wars, millions more may follow.

Islamism is the most active bloody horseman of the apocalypse, and given its strong ties to the billion+ strong religion of Islam, it is the messianic horseman with the greatest staying power, and destructive potential.

Nuclear weapons in the hands of Putin are quite different than nuclear weapons in the hands of an Ahmadidinejad. The Iranian madman plans to eradicate entire nations and peoples--he intends radical genocide, lacking only the means, for now. Previous calculations of mutual deterrence do not apply to a messianic.

To understand messianics, a person should have once been a messianic himself. Otherwise it is difficult to think like a messianic, to understand what the radical apocalyptic is thinking and planning. That is the shortcoming of most western analysis. A further shortcoming of western analysis--particularly leftist analysis--is making the a priori assumption that western civilisation is bad, so that any civilisation opposing western civilisation must always be given the benefit of the doubt.

This undercutting of the west by so many western analysts leaves a profound vulnerability, an unpreparedness, in large sectors of the west. That bodes ill for the inevitable conflicts to come. Nevertheless, it is discussions such as this which allow second, third, and deeper level currents in the west to prepare for what is coming. To paraphrase Kyle Reese from The Terminator:

Listen! And understand! They are out there. They can't be bargained with! They can't be reasoned with! They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!

Hat tip augean stables blog.

Crime and Race--Trying to Clarify

Everyone is fascinated with crime statistics, particularly people who have been victimised by crime, or know someone who has been victimised. Take the graph above. Many people will mentally extrapolate the existing curves for each country to supply up to date rates, but is that accurate? No--for reasons of changing demographics, particularly in Europe, and in the more multicultural regions of North America, Australia, and other developed regions.

Audacious Epigone has posted an article that looks at the relationship between "race" and "crime." Using multivariate regression, he found that knowledge of the percent black and/or hispanic in a given population, gives an "r" correlation coefficient of 0.800, which is very high. When he combined the following variables together statistically, the r was only 0.689. (don't add the coefficients arithmetically, or people will laugh at you)

% of population in poverty: .399
% of population with a bahelor's degree: .289 (inverse)
State gini coefficient: .627
% of population owning at least one gun: .060 (inverse, not statistically significant)
% of population with a high school diploma: .388 (inverse)
% of population unemployed: .309

Go the Audacious Epigone's article yourself and look over his methodology. These are his statistics, which he compares to findings of others. Here is an Al Fin Potpourri article looking at a similar topic.
Another interesting variable that would be interesting to look at using the same method, is prison population. This graph shows the New York experience in the 1990s.

For all the people who check their parking spot to see if their car is still there, almost every day, crime is not a joke. For all the people who balance the enjoyment they would get out of the opera, ball game, or concert, with the chance of being mugged or worse, crime is not merely a political issue. For all the people who have their lunch money taken more often than not, crime is not an academic issue.

Arabs are a little people, a silly people - greedy, barbarous, and cruel

Lawrence was describing the arabs of the early 20th century, all the way back to antiquity. And he may as well have been describing modern arabs. The recent raids for hostages by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel, are prototypical arab tribal raids, a throwback to prehistoric raiding cultures.

At one time, arabs in the Mecca/Medina area made progress toward civilisation, by moving away from raids and blood feuds--the tribal ethic--toward trade and laws. Then came Muhammad, who forced the return to tribal blood feuds, raids for slaves, and other primitive tribal customs. But Muhammad wanted to lead one great tribe--the Umma. He wanted to bring primitive arab barbarism to the entire world, under the banner of a religion custom-made for that purpose, Islam.

Ancient tribal societies, especially nomadic societies, which frequently came upon other societies, were warrior societies. Warfare was a part of their culture. Men wanted to be good at it for the sake of their people and to be respected.

Men exercised their skills as warriors by raiding. Raiding happened among tribal people .... Beyond raiding, battles among tribal people were fought. People have gone to war believing that sickness of disease among them was caused by a member or members of another society having cast an evil spell on them...... In the twentieth century the Yanomami of Brazil went to war believing that an evil spirit had been cast upon them - wars for retribution or punishment. Or tribal people went to war merely because tribe had come upon tribe. We have knowledge of tribe coming upon tribe in Eastern Africa, the men of each side in ranks, posturing with their weapons and making threatening gestures, with their women watching from the sidelines, cheering them on.

The nature of war changed when tribes on the move saw advantage in holding ground and exploiting those they came upon. This happened after settled people were successful enough in agriculture to have surplus enough for conquerors to tax. With this, empire was born. A local ruler, if he survived conquest, might become a tool of the conqueror, collecting taxes and controlling the locals for the conquerors.

Wars for empire were wars for wealth. Power was the instrument for wealth and also a means of protecting oneself. In the earliest age of empire -- which included the time of the Sumerians -- the idea arose that if one did not conquer he would be conquered. A competition for power had erupted. Wars were common because a would be conqueror perceived others as weaker. And warring was accepted. Civilization had arrived but the world was still fragmented. Each conqueror had his own god - the ancient Hebrews included - and a conqueror spoke of his conquests as the conquest of his god. He saw his god as more powerful than the god of rival peoples. There was no recognized political body with rules as to which power should rule where. In such a world there were many ready to go to battle to settle petty disputes. War was often chosen over negotiation and compromise. There was fear of becoming a slave or annihilation, and there was still an inclination to see those of the other side as not worthy of the kind of trust and friendship that made agreements work.

It was not an age when people of different groupings were looked upon as equal. It was not a democratic age. It was, instead, the age described in the Old Testament, an age when authority was created and demonstrated through violence.

Source.

Muhammad wanted to place the entire world under the banner of Allah, the conqueror's god. Since Islam was born of primitive arab tribal customs, these customs would eventually rule any world that Allah's fighters conquered.

It seems clear that Muhammed became the leader of the Muslim Arabs because his personal qualities and feats as a religious, military, political, legislative, and judicial leader proved to his followers that he was the charismatic leader that he claimed to be. It is very doubtful, however, that he would have been at all successful had he not respected to an absolute degree the internal structure and independence of the tribe and its leadership. Even his own personal followers, the Muhajirun, were accepted into the Medinan tribal system as members of an individual tribe responsible directly to himself. The geneological principle obviously prevailed since their being Muhajirun never meant that they ceased to be Quraysh. Also the idea generally prevailed that the successors to the Caliphate had to be Quraysh. This failure of the early community and of Muhammed himself to overcome tribal structures other than in the terms outlined gave rise to impossible problems with the subsequent conversion of great masses of people, culturally superior to the Arab clansmen, by means of clientship. This was not due to the lack of a universal religious outlook on the part of Muhammed or his followers, but rather to the inability of the Arab mind, including that of Muhammed, to think of society other than in terms of tribal structures.

Source.

So Muhammad led the arabs of Mecca and Medina from a more enlightened culture back into the primitive barbarism of arab tribal blood feud/slaving culture. Then he permanently fossilized this primitivism into the Islamic religion so that no one could be muslim without submitting to the primitive barbarism of ancient tribal raiding/slaving culture.

This is an ongoing horrific crime against over a billion people of the modern world, a crime that threatens the future of western civilisation and the human race itself. For if the civilised world can find no way to deal with an ascendant primitivism that arms itself with weapons of mass death, massive slaughter and destruction is inevitable.

In the Demography Contest, Islam is Kicking Western Butt

Demography is destiny. If the prosperous developed nations of the world decide to stop having children, the people that shaped those nations will disappear from the earth, and be replaced by other people with a, perhaps, less savoury history.

A recent Fjordman Report discusses this issue most bluntly--in the only way in which it is worth being discussed. Al Fin has posted on this issue many times, but this is the first time I have seen a well-known European blogger discuss the issue so plainly. Here is just a taste of Fjordman's excellent report:

Japan has a declining and ageing population, Yemen and Pakistan have booming populations. Does anybody seriously believe that it would be “good” for the Japanese to open their doors to millions of Muslims from Yemen? “Do you have any education?” “Yes, I know the Koran by heart and can say ‘Death to the infidels!’ in ten different ways.” “Splendid, just what we need here in Japan. Can you start tomorrow on developing a new line of plasma TV screens for SONY?”

When it comes to stagnating populations and Muslim immigration, the problems are not nearly as damaging as the cure.

Among political right-wingers, there is frequently a belief that what is good for business interests is good for the country. The problem is, this isn’t always true. There is sometimes a gap between the short-term interests of Big Business for cheap labor from Third World countries, and the long-term interests of the country as a whole. You cannot compete with cheap commodities from Third World countries unless you lower the general wages to Third World levels.

A few decades ago, Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew realized that Singapore could never win the worldwide competition to offer cheap labor. He decided instead that the country was to become a high value-added producer. To Lee, that meant wages had to be high enough to encourage Singapore’s businessmen to invest in labor-saving technology. To raise Singapore’s salaries he had to make sure that local wages wouldn’t be undercut by migrants. Yes, you could pay an unskilled Bangladeshi $400 dollars a month. But in that case you had to pay the state another $400 a month.

In Europe, the one nation that has proved to be most successful in technology, ”Nokia nation” Finland, is also perhaps the one country within the EU that has accepted the least amount of immigration. Today, this small Nordic nation boasts a thriving hi-tech economy ranked the most competitive in the world and the best educated citizenry of all the industrialized countries. Neighboring Sweden, in contrast, with the largest per capita immigration in Europe, is in serious economic decline, and the only thing growing seems to be the crime rates.

Ethnically homogeneous nations enjoy a “trust bonus” which reduces the amount of conflict. There is little evidence that any theoretical “diversity” bonus from immigration will cancel out the loss of this “trust bonus.” South Korea and Japan are among the world leaders in technology. They are both ethnically homogeneous nations. Even China, which does have significant ethnic minorities, could soon be more ethnically homogeneous than many so-called Western nations. There will be no lack of “diversity” in the 21st century, but there could be a lack of functioning, coherent nation states. Maybe the West will “celebrate diversity” until our countries fall apart, and global leadership will be transferred to East Asia.

Yes, it is true that the ability to attract ambitious and talented scientists from other countries has benefited the USA in the past, and given it an edge over Europe. However, it is not without dangers to “celebrate diversity” in a country as diverse as the US. Americans should try celebrating what binds them together instead, or they may wake up one day and discover that they don’t really have a lot in common. What then for the United States?

Anthony Browne notes that Britain “became the largest economic power in the world in the nineteenth century, in the almost complete absence of immigration to these isles. Japan became the world’s second largest economy after the second world war in the almost total absence of immigration.” “Britain can never compete on the basis of low wages with low cost countries such as China for the simple reason that the cost of living is so much higher, and it is a mistake to try. Although cheap labour immigration may have staved off the demise of those industries for a short while, it also compromised them by encouraging them to go down the cheap labour route, and discouraging them from going up the high productivity/value added route.”

The revered former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, stated in a testimony given to the U.S. Senate: “Although discovery of new technologies is to some degree a matter of luck, we know that human activities do respond to economic incentives. A relative shortage of workers should increase the incentives for developing labor-saving technologies and may actually spur technological development.”

Robert Rowthorn, academic economist, criticizes the claim, frequently repeated by Tony Blair’s Labour government since it took office in 1997, that “if we don’t have immigration, we won’t have economic growth.” According to Rowthorn, “if you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it.” There is no evidence “that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative” as unskilled migrants and their families often are net consumers of taxes.

“Immigration can’t solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions.” “The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons.” “While Britain has always had immigration, the recent influx is totally without precedent in modern times. Relative to population, the scale of immigration is now much greater than during any period since the Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions over a thousand years ago.”

Rowthorn also points out, correctly, that “refugees and others granted special leave to remain under the asylum rules account for only 10 per cent of immigration to Britain. Most permanent immigration consists of people who are economic migrants together with their dependants.” Most of them aren’t people fleeing persecution.

There is much more at the Fjordman Report, on the GatesofVienna blog.

Very slowly, the hardworking citizens of the developed nations are beginning to realise that their politicians are selling them out. Some of these politicians are susceptible to the voters, and should be removed from office. Others, within the EU bureaucracy, have insulated themselves from voters, and may have to be dragged--kicking and screaming--from their well paid sinecured positions of arbitrary power.

It is nothing less than a question of the survival of western civilisation--the most advanced and enlightened civilisation the human world has ever known. The alternatives are dismal throwbacks to more brutal and barbaric times. Wake up, western world. You have not much more time to decide.

Unelected Euro-Elites Undermine Europe

Fjordman has submitted another excellent Fjordman Report over at GatesofVienna. Fjordman is a throwback to the crusty, worldly European who is not afraid to speak his mind. This time it is multicultural europe that is on his mind, giving him mental indigestion:

Is it “xenophobia” if Norwegians, who make up less than a tenth of a percentage point of the world’s population, worry about being overwhelmed by immigration? As American writer Gore Vidal said in a lecture: “Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species.”

Jonathan Friedman, an American living in Sweden, mentions that the so-called Integration Act of 1997 proclaimed that “Sweden is a Multicultural society.” Notes to the Act also stated that “Since a large group of people have their origins in another country, the Swedish population lacks a common history. The relationship to Sweden and the support given to the fundamental values of society thus carry greater significance for integration than a common historical origin.”

The Act thus implicitly states that the country of Sweden doesn’t have a history, only the various ethnic groups that live there. Native Swedes, who have shaped the country for centuries, have thus been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have thus erased their own people’s history, without staging any public debate about this. I have read that Muslim immigrants in Sweden say that Sweden doesn’t have a common cultural or religious heritage; it’s just made up of different groups tied together by the use of a common language. It is thus “racist” to even talk about how “we” should integrate “them,” since there is no “we” to begin with.

Jens Orback, Democracy Minister in the Social Democratic Swedish government, is worried about “the public’s lack of faith in politicians.” Yet the same Orback said during a radio debate that: “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.” It sounded almost too crazy even for Sweden that a minister could say something like this in public, so I checked with several independent sources, and apparently, he really did say this.

This is a government that knows perfectly well that their people will become a minority in their own country, and yet, is doing nothing to stop this. On the contrary, they are actively working to achieve this result. Has this ever happened before in human history, that the leaders of a nation are working to erase their own people and their history, and present this as an act of tolerance? No wonder some Swedes say that there is a war against Swedes going on: A physical war waged by Muslim immigrants, and a cultural and legal war waged by their own political élites.

Following threats from Muslim hardliners, some of the largest companies in England were afraid to display the English national flag during the football World Cup. In Sweden, a man was attacked and nearly killed for the crime of wearing clothes with his own national flag while Sweden was participating in the World Cup. Sweden, of course, has the same Christian cross in its flag as does England, and apparently, some “Multicultural youths” found this to be an intolerable provocation. The 24-year-old man was run down by a car in the city of Malmö. According to the police, he was wearing some clothes with Swedish national symbols on them, and this “provoked some emotions.”

Much more at the Fjordman Report.

Multicultural "nutzis" are running amuk across Europe, with few countervailing forces available for restoring sanity to the continent. Fortunately, there is Fjordman and his cohorts, willing to speak up in the face of tyrannic multi-culti intimidation on the part of authorities.

Too Stupid to Know . . . .

. . . . when people are trying to kill you, part IV. Today's TSTK (too stupid to know) installment is inspired by the May-June 2006 message from Dan Simmons. The current message goes into more detail to clarify the April 2006 message from Simmons, which I posted on here. If you have not read the April message, be sure to do so before proceeding to the May-June message.

As I mentioned in TSTK part II, a lot of people reflexively reacted against the warning from Simmons' time traveler guest. Rather than thinking the issues through, they allowed their viscera to determine their instinctive response--probably without even reading the entire essay. This is typical of the denial response that one sees in people who have adopted a rigidly fixed view of the world based upon old notions learned "once upon a time." This type of person is generally not flexible enough in viewpoint to digest conflicting and contradictory information, nor can he integrate new information easily into his worldview that does not smoothly fit into pre-existing concepts.

For more open-minded individuals, Simmons' recent message is rich with references and supporting quotations:

Books commented on in this essay include—The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan, The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing edited by John Keegan, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order by Samuel P. Huntington, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History by Philip Bobbit, and Replay by Ken Grimwood

Go to Simmons' message, and carefully read through the logic. It is one thing to understand an argument and to possess a reasonable counter-argument. It is quite another--and very infantile--to simply stop reading in the middle and state categorically "this is bullshit", when you have not even read the entire piece, nor understood the foundations of the argument.

This is why the news media is such a poor guide to modern realities: most of the practitioners of media are incapable of incorporating real world level contradiction into a report. Journalists and columnists almost invariably simplify and dumb down their reports to match the world view and meet with the approval of their peers in the media club. The members of that club, as well as a large proportion of the public who take media club reports seriously, are too stupid to know . . . .

Honour Killing in Denmark--Murderers Receive Justice Finally

A recent "honour killing" of a young muslim woman in Denmark has received close attention around the world, to see how the Danish courts would deal with an obvious muslim family conspiracy to commit cold blooded pre-meditated murder. The Danish courts have submitted their sentencing, and they were not lenient.

Worldwide, Islam is mainly a religion of impoverished peoples from harsh tribal traditions. Women are often beaten by husbands routinely, and daughters and wives can be murdered at will for being seen in the proximity of a male stranger. In muslim countries, men have become accustomed to murdering women, and not receiving meaningful punishment for the crime.

In fact, muslims consider women to be property. This is one of the reasons for the high levels of spousal abuse and father-daughter incest in muslim communities. One can dispose of one's property as one sees fit.

In Saudi Arabia, women are not permitted to drive a vehicle, because Saudi men are worried that their women might get involved in a sexual impropriety, were the women allowed out on their own. Then the husbands would be forced to murder the wives, and all that killing and subsequent re-marriage can tend to get a bit cumbersome, you know?

To truly understand the dysfunctionality of Islamic male-female relationships, one must read books such as "The Trouble With Islam" by Irshad Manji and "Leaving Islam" by Ibn Warraq.

Women's shelters across Europe are full of abused muslim women, just as European prisons are filling with muslim males. The muslim influx is straining the social services of European countries, yet only a few European countries have moved to limit muslim immigration.

Perhaps news of the court sentences given to the family conspirators in Denmark will send a message to those still steeped in primitive and bloodthirsty tribal traditions.

Sleeping With The Enemy: Jihadis and the Left

Gates of Vienna's Baron Bodissey has posted an excellent article entitled "In Bed With Beelzebub." I quote extensively from that posting below:

At the international Islamism conference this week in Århus, the left-wing journalist Caroline Fourest pointed to the dangers of the coalition she thinks that some of the international left has entered into with Islamists.

The 30 year old French journalist who, writes for the left-wing magazine Charlie Hedbo, wonders why it is that the European left has not learned anything from what happened during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

“Back then, a group of Marxists made a big mistake. They thought it would be possible to form a partnership with Islamists in the fight to topple the Shah,” said Caroline Fourest in her controversial presentation at the recently concluded international Islamism conference at Århus University.

Repeated Mistakes

She thinks that the left of today is about to make the exact same error as those Marxists in Iran who formed a partnership with Khomeini’s Islamist Movement only to be eliminated by their Islamic partner after the fall of the Shah.

“Today, we see coalitions and partnerships between Islamist groups and progressive leftwing movements that we would not have expected five years ago. Among these, the anti-globalization movement, the European Social Forum, at their most recent three meetings have invited Tariq Ramadan along with a number of activists from the Muslim Brotherhood to speak in the name of Islam. This is happening in a very progressive forum,” Caroline Fourest wondered and added that this meant that the forum’s secular Muslims are no longer present.

“They would just be accused of being pro-Bush, pro-Zionist, or Islamophobes”

Also, in France, Caroline Fourest points to alliances between Islamist groups and progressive groups on the left like Human Rights Watch — groups that came together in the fight against the government’s prohibition against religious symbols in French public schools.

“The worst thing about this coalition was that it attempted to accuse the feminists and secular groups of being racist or Islamophobic. In the same way, an anti-racist left-wing group wanted to sue Charlie Hedbo after it re-published the Mohammed cartoons. We still don’t know if the suit was because we were being blasphemous or racist.”

....Ms. Fourest has joined Christopher Hitchens, Norm Geras, and others in an apostasy from Leftist orthodoxy on the topic of Islam. No doubt she will soon be subject to death threats and have to go in fear of her life, due to her betrayal of her erstwhile comrades.

Fjordman has written here in “I’m a Terrorist Groupie, Hear Me Roar!” about the affinity of the Left for violent Islam, and, more recently, about the connection of Islamism with Marxism.

Expect the divide between the Left and the rest of the West to grow more extreme, as its infernal love affair with the Islamic terrorists continues to flower. Anticipate even more deranged rhetoric from the opponents of Bushitler and Global Capitalist Fascism, as the logic of the alliance with Jihad unfolds.

But one has to wonder how the Left thinks it will all end. As Elvis Costello says,

Two little Hitlers will fight it out until
One little Hitler does the other one’s will.


Assume that the Progressives and the Mujahideen, with their united front, prevail in glorious triumph over the evil West. What then? Do the likes of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore believe they stand a chance against the throat-slitters and the suicide-bombers? Does anyone want to lay odds on the outcome?

Presumably they’ve decided not to think about that for right now…
Source.

PC multiculturalists and other leftists appear to be acting in automaton mode, in reflexive reaction against ascendant secular western civilisation. The fact that western civilisation is fueled by capitalism is regarded as a mortal sin by the nutzis of the left, who have sworn to destroy the west, whatever it takes. Certainly having taken over most universities, most news media, and most western governments, the nutzis might be excused for over-reaching a bit. The thing the PC multiculturalist nutzis fail to understand is the incredible scope of western civilisation--going far beyond their field of vision. Of course the wahabist fascists make the same error, but they can be more easily excused, given the limiting nature of their indoctrination.

Regardless, go read the Baron's work. It is worth your time.

Sweden! What Have They Done To You?

Thanks to Static Noise blog for the link to this National Interest article on the "Swedish Model" of government, and what it has done to Sweden. Sweden was once a wonderful place to live and visit. But gradually under 65 years of the Social Democratic Party, Sweden has become a failing state. Read on:

Sweden's economic success story began in the late 19th century, after a fundamental political shift towards free markets and free trade. Swedish traders could export iron, steel and timber, and entrepreneurs created innovative industrial companies that became world leaders. Between 1860 and 1910, real wages for factory workers rose by about 25 percent per decade, and public spending in Sweden didn't surpass 10 percent of GDP.

The Social Democratic Party came to power in 1932 and has governed Sweden for 65 of the last 74 years. They realized early on that a party of class struggle wouldn't be able to hold on to power in Sweden. Instead, they became a party of the middle class by creating social security systems that gave the most pension, unemployment, paternal-leave and sick-leave benefits to those with high wages.

....From 1975 to 2000, while per-capita income grew by 72 percent in the United States and 64 percent in Western Europe, Sweden's grew by no more than 43 percent. By 2000, Sweden had fallen to 14th in the OECD's ranking of per-capita income. If Sweden were a state in the United States, it would now be the fifth poorest. As the Social Democratic Finance Minister Bosse Ringholm explained in 2002, "If Sweden would have had the same growth rates as the OECD average since 1970, our common resources would have been so much bigger that it would be the equivalent of 20,000 SEK [$2,500] more per household per month."

.... The competitiveness of industry had to be propped up several times by depreciating the currency. Globalization and the new knowledge and service economy made it more important than ever to invest in human capital and individual creativity. High marginal tax rates on personal income, however, reduced individuals' incentives to take risks and to boost earning potential by investing in their education and skills, and made it extremely difficult to attract skilled workers from abroad.

Furthermore, the Swedish model was dependent on having a small number of large industrial companies. As these diminished in importance, or moved abroad, Sweden needed something to take their place. But the policies that benefited the biggest firms created a deficit of small- and medium-sized businesses. Those that did exist didn't grow, partly because of the risks and costs of highly burdensome employment rules that prevented the firing of workers. Indeed, the most important Swedish companies today are those that were born during the laissez faire period before the First World War; just one of the fifty biggest Swedish companies was founded after 1970. Meanwhile, services that could become new private growth sectors, like education and health care, were monopolized and financed by the government. As they grew in importance and size, a steadily growing part of the Swedish economy thus became protected from international market forces and investments that could have turned them into successful and productive enterprises.

....Sweden retained the world's highest taxes, generous social security systems and a heavily regulated labor market, which split the economy: Sweden is very good at producing goods, but not at producing jobs. According to a recent study of 35 developed countries, only two had jobless growth: Sweden and Finland. Economic growth in Sweden in the last 25 years has had no correlation at all with labor-market participation. (In contrast, 1 percent of growth increases the number of jobs by 0.25 percent in Denmark, 0.5 percent in the United States and 0.6 percent in Spain.) Amazingly, not a single net job has been created in the private sector in Sweden since 1950.

....Sweden has one of the developed world's biggest differences between the labor-market participation of natives and immigrants. Many immigrant families are discouraged by the lack of job prospects and end up in welfare dependency.....more than 5 percent of all precincts in Sweden had employment levels lower than 60 percent, with much higher crime rates and inferior school results than in other places. Most of these precincts are suburban, so outsiders rarely see them. The number of segregated precincts has continued to grow. In some neighborhoods, children grow up without ever seeing someone who goes to work in the morning. Pockets of unemployment and social exclusion form, especially in areas with many non-European immigrants. When Swedes see that so many immigrants live off the government, their interest in contributing to the system fades.

Like in other parts of western Europe, the segregation of immigrant areas leads to insularity, crime and, in some cases, radicalism. Last year, Nalin Pekgul, the Kurdish chairman of the National Federation of Social Democratic Women, explained that she was forced to move out of a suburb of Stockholm because of crime and the rise of Islamic radicalism. The announcement sent shock waves through the entire political system. "A bomb waiting to explode" is one of the most common metaphors used when social exclusion in Sweden is discussed.

.... Since 1995 the number of entrepreneurs in the European Union has increased by 9 percent; in Sweden it has declined by 9 percent. Almost a quarter of the population of working age does not have a job to go to in the morning, and polls show a dramatic lack of trust in the welfare system and its rules.

The system of high taxes and generous welfare benefits worked for so long because the tradition of self-reliance was so strong. But mentalities have a tendency of changing when incentives change. The growth of taxes and benefits punished hard work and encouraged absenteeism. Immigrants and younger generations of Swedes have faced distorted incentives and have not developed the work ethic that was nurtured before the effects of the welfare state began to erode them. When others cheat the system and get away with it, suddenly you are considered a fool if you get up early every morning and work late. According to polls, about half of all Swedes now think it is acceptable to call in sick for reasons other than sickness. Almost half think that they can do it when someone in the family is not feeling well, and almost as many think that they can do it if there is too much to do at work. Our ancestors worked even when they were sick. Today, we are "off sick" even when we feel fine.

The real worry is that Sweden and other welfare states have reached a point where it is impossible to convince majorities to change the system, despite the dismal results. Obviously, if you are dependent on the government, you are hesitant to reduce its size and cost. A middle class with small economic margins is dependent on social security. Read the rest at The National Interest.

When you combine a decline in economic vitality and human spirit, with increasing lawlessness and growing numbers of deadender unemployed foreign immigrants, and you have the recipe for disaster. Without serious reform, Sweden is dead--and Swedes dependent on the system, corrupt and crumbling though it is, will not tolerate reform. The spirit of Sweden has died, and anyone still in Sweden who has hopes of a better life will likely be leaving for greener pastures soon.

Civil War in Europe, Londonistan, and Appeasing Barbarism

There is talk here and here, of civil war in Europe. This talk is at least partially inspired by this book review in Asia Times Online by Spengler. From Spengler's book review of Melanie Phillips Londonistan:

She [Phillips] warns that the West faces a religious war with Islam. I concur, and recommend Londonistan as indispensable background.

Britain, Phillips warns, is reaping what it has sown. A large minority of British Muslims are disaffected at best and seditious at worst. Phillips cites a 2004 Home Office survey finding that 26% of British Muslims felt no loyalty to Britain, 13% supported terrorism, and about 1% (up to 20,000 individuals) were "actively engaged" in terrorism or support for terrorism.

Another poll found that 32% of British Muslims agreed that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end". In the event of a violent collision between the West and Iran, for example, civil conflict might arise in Britain on a scale resembling that in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Phillips accuses British security services with complicity in the gestation of a terrorist apparatus in London. Her documentation of overt terrorist activity centered in London is exhaustive, and raises the question of why the open scandal was tolerated. Saudi, Algerian and Egyptian requests for extradition of suspected terrorists were refused, and Arab diplomats vented their frustration over British recalcitrance in public.

A cynically narrow concept of national interest guided this policy, she argues, charging that MI6 (Military Intelligence Section 6, now officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service) believed "that if the Islamists were being left undisturbed to conduct their activities on the assumption that they would not then attack Britain".

But that can explain only part of the story, and Phillips searches for deeper causes of Britain's cowardice. "Denial" is a recurrent theme. She cites an unnamed "foreign intelligence source" as follows:

During the 1990s, many attempts were made to enlighten the British about what was happening. But they refused to see this problem as having a religious character. If this was a religious problem, it became a religious confrontation - and the specter of a religious war was too horrendous. A religious war is different from any other war because you are dealing with absolute beliefs and the room for compromise is very limited. Religious wars are very protracted and bloody, and often end up with a very high toll of lives.

That is not denial, though, but revulsion. The British establishment may have recoiled in horror from the prospect of religious war precisely because it has sufficient institutional memory to know just what such wars entail. Religious war, however, is precisely what it will have, on the worst possible terms, and with an extensive fifth column in place.

.... In any case, Western liberalism, including the sexual habits of English curates, does not appeal to Muslims. On the contrary, Phillips says:

British Muslims are overwhelmingly horrified and disgusted by the louche and dissolute behavior of a Britain that has torn up the notion of respectability. They observe the alcoholism, drug abuse and pornography, the breakdown of family life and the encouragement of promiscuity, and find themselves there in opposition to their host society's guiding values. What they are recoiling from, of course, is the breakdown of Western values. After a visit to the United States in 1948, Sayed Qutb wrote: "Humanity today is living in a large brothel!"

Revulsion and contempt color Muslim attitudes toward the British leftists who most desire to appease them. That is not a recipe for co-existence but for escalation, as last year's subway bombings should have made clear. But the issue now is not terrorism but rather outright war.

The British authorities may have turned a blind eye to terrorism directed against others, and may even have dragged their feet at confronting the terrorist threat at home that erupted in the July 7, 2005, subway bombings. Terrorism is dreadful but, like many nasty things, one can develop a tolerance for it. Now it is not merely terrorism that the West confronts but a strategic debacle of intolerable proportions in the form of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons.

In that sense Melanie Phillips' book comes too late, for it reports a set of circumstances shortly to be overthrown by events. She is writing about 1938, and we are entering 1939, when the West will have to respond to an external challenge in a way that it never could to an internal threat. Britain will have the religious war it sought to dodge.

Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. Encounter Books: New York 2006. ISBN: 1594031444. Price: US$25.95, 213 pages.

For more information by and about Melanie Phillips, read this interview, or this article by Ms. Phillips.

Here is a short excerpt from the excellent interview linked above:

FP: What is your perspective of the alliance of the Left and radical Islamism?

Phillips: It’s remarkable, to put it mildly, that the left – with its obsessions with issues like gay rights, equality for women and sexual licence – should have forged an alliance with radical Islamists who preach death to gays, the subjugation of women and the stoning of adulterers. It is an eye-opener to see, on the streets of London, so-called ‘progressives’ marching shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists under the metaphorical banner of human rights and the literal banners of Hamas. Both the left and the radical Islamists have put aside their differences because they recognise the value of using each other in pursuit of their common objective, the destruction of western society.

In other, less topsy-turvy times, the rest of the country would have raised an eyebrow at such an alliance and at the noxious views it is spewing out, which in turn so closely reflect the views of neo-fascist groups and white supremacists: hatred of Israel, Judeophobic tropes about a global Jewish conspiracy that endangers the world, loathing of capitalism and America. But alas, such is the extent of Britain’s moral and cultural slide, and so poisonous has been the effect of the opposition to the war in Iraq, that far from being denounced such views are finding expression in mainstream society and public debate. Source.

She also comments in the interview about the link between political correctness, multiculturalism, and appeasement in the face of unspeakable barbarity.

Does Western Civilisation have a Multicultural Obligation to Commit Suicide?

The latest Fjordman Report is a hard hitting piece that looks at the political correctness and multiculturalism movements in the west, and traces their origins to the early part of the 20th century. Paragraph by paragraph, Fjordman exposes the ascendancy of this anti-western philosophy within key sectors of western societies, and the dangerous vulnerability it brings to the western world.

I have heard people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism, perhaps more so. Even in the heyday of the East Bloc, there were active dissident groups in these countries. The scary thing is, I sometimes believe they are right.

....At the very least, the people living in the former Communist countries knew and admitted that they were taking part in a gigantic social experiment, and that the media and the authorities were serving them propaganda to shore up support for this project. Yet in the supposedly free West, we are taking part in a gigantic social experiment of Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration every bit as radical, utopian and potentially dangerous as Communism, seeking to transform our entire society from top to bottom, and still we refuse to even acknowledge that this is going on.

In Norway, a tiny Scandinavian nation that was until recently 99% white and Lutheran Christian, native Norwegians will soon be a minority in their own capital city, later in the whole country. And still, Norwegian politicians, journalists and University professors insist that there is nothing to worry about over this. Multiculturalism is nothing new, neither is immigration. In fact, our king a century ago was born in Denmark, so having a capital city dominated by Pakistanis, Kurds, Arabs and Somalis is just business as usual. The most massive transformation of the country in a thousand years, probably in recorded history, is thus treated as if it were the most natural thing in the world. To even hint that there might be something wrong about this has been immediately shouted down as “racism.”

....In Germany, Hans-Peter Raddatz in his book “Allahs Frauen” (Allah’s Women) dissects the destructive attitude of Multiculturalism that is shared by many civil servants, journalists, politicians and lawyers in Germany and the EU. In particular, he documents how the German Green Party has a program for dismantling and dissolving the Christian “Leitkultur,” or common culture, that so far has been the foundation of Germany and the West. Raddatz thinks that the decades of Muslim immigration are used as an instrument for breaking down the institutions, norms and ideas that the Left has earlier tried to break down through economics. From powerful positions in the media, public institutions and the system of education, these Multiculturalists are working on a larger project of renewing a Western civilization that, according to them, has failed.

....Much of the political Left is simply engaged in outing their opponents as evil, instead of rationally arguing against their ideas. Attaching labels such as “racist” or even “Fascist” to anyone criticizing massive immigration or Multiculturalism has become so common that Norwegian anti-Islamists have coined a new word for it: “Hitling,” which could be roughly translated to English as “to make like Hitler.” The logic behind “hitling” is a bit like this: “You have a beard. Adolf Hitler had facial hair, too, so you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler liked dogs. You have pets, too, you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. You like carrots, you are just like Hitler.”

Any “right-winger” can be slimed with such accusations. Curiously enough, the reverse is almost never true. Although Marxism may have killed 100 million people during the 20th century and failed in every single society in which it has ever been tried out, there seems to be little stigma attached to being a Leftist. The fact that Leftists can get away with this and claim to hold the moral high ground amply demonstrates that we didn’t win the Cold War. We let our guard down after the fall of the Berlin Wall and never properly denounced the ideology behind it. This is now coming back to haunt us.

One member of an anti-immigration party in Britain stated that to be called racist in 21st-century Britain is “the same as being branded a witch in the Middle Ages.” He’s probably right, which means that anti-racism has quite literally become a modern witch-hunt. Source.

It is a very long piece, but copiously documented, packed with links to important sources of information.

Just a few minutes of listening to the debate on the Islamist threat between the blase far left, and the concerned middle to middle right, will tell you that Political Correctness and multiculturalism are weakening the spirit of western civilisation against the primitive would-be conquerors. With universities and newsrooms packed with anti-western multiculturalists, clearly the underlying idea is to train future generations to despise the west in schools, and current generations to despise the west in the mass media.

Although no civilisation has ever been perfect, the incredible superiority of western civilisation over every previous and other current civilisations should not be in doubt by anyone with a knowledge of history and current events. Unfortunately, students are not being taught history or current events, but rather a pablumized concoction of multicultural fiction that bears no relationship to the real world. Mainstream media cannot afford to be so blatant as college professors, given the real world experience of most consumers, but still manage to achieve the same effect with time.

What is Wrong with Arabs?

Arabs are lagging in education, economy, democracy and freedom of expression, and computers. 2003—In Arab countries, with a combined population of 284 million, a “best seller” may have a print run of just 5,000 copies, due to censorship and other constraints on independent publishers. Translations of foreign works into Arabic lag far behind figures in the rest of the world: five times more books are translated yearly into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. Just 53 newspapers per 1,000 citizens are published daily in the region, compared to 285 papers per 1,000 people in the developed nations, and there are only 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world, as compared to the global average of 78 per 1,000.

The first Arab Human Development Report in 2002 was a bombshell dropped onto the entire arab world. The report notes that while oil income has transformed the landscapes of some Arab countries, the region remains "richer than it is developed." Per capita income growth has shrunk in the last 20 years to a level just above that of sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is declining. Research and development are weak or nonexistent. Science and technology are dormant.

Intellectuals flee a stultifying -- if not repressive -- political and social environment, it says.

Arab women, the report found, are almost universally denied advancement. Half of them still cannot read or write. The maternal mortality rate is double that of Latin America and four times that of East Asia.

The followup report in 2003 showed the situation to be no better. A group of Arab intellectuals issued a report yesterday that found the Arab world lacking in three areas they deemed fundamental to development: freedom of expression, access to knowledge and women's rights.
The group, criticized by Arab officials for a similar report last year, said the challenges caused by the deficiencies "may have become even graver" since 2002.
After dismal reports in 2002, 2003, and 2004, the UN HDR appears to have given up on the arab world. Who can blame them? Since World War II, the Arab world has lagged the rest of the planet in economic growth. For example, 300 million Arabs, and all that oil, generate less economic activity than Spain, and its population of 40 million. The main problem has been bad government. Too many dictators, and too much government restrictions on the economy. Too much corruption and waste. Even higher oil prices don't help, as it simply provides more money to be wasted on consumption, rather than business investment.

An Economist article, titled "Self-Doomed to Failure," captures the pathetic state of the arab world. The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three “deficits”. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential—and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness.

•Freedom. This deficit, in the UNDP's interpretation, explains many of the fundamental things that are wrong with the Arab world: the survival of absolute autocracies; the holding of bogus elections; confusion between the executive and the judiciary (the report points out the close linguistic link between the two in Arabic); constraints on the media and on civil society; and a patriarchal, intolerant, sometimes suffocating social environment.

The area is rich in all the outward trappings of democracy. Elections are held and human-rights conventions are signed. But the great wave of democratisation that has opened up so much of the world over the past 15 years seems to have left the Arabs untouched. Democracy is occasionally offered, but as a concession, not as a right.


....•Knowledge. “If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.” Although the Arabs spend a higher percentage of GDP on education than any other developing region, it is not, it seems, well spent. The quality of education has deteriorated pitifully, and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system. Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all.

One of the gravest results of their poor education is that the Arabs, who once led the world in science, are dropping ever further behind in scientific research and in information technology. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet, and 1.2% have personal computers.

....•Women's status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. The report sees this as an awful waste: how can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? After all, even though women's literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries' political and economic life is the lowest in the world.

Governments and societies (and sometimes, as in Kuwait, societies and parliamentarians are more backward than their governments) vary in the degrees of bad treatment they mete out to women. But in nearly all Arab countries, women suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements. The UNDP has a “gender-empowerment measure” which shows the Arabs near the bottom (according to this measure, sub-Saharan Africa ranks even worse). But the UN was able to measure only 14 of the 22 Arab states, since the necessary data were not available in the others. This, as the report says, speaks for itself, reflecting the general lack of concern in the region for women's desire to be allowed to get on.

...With so many paths closed to them, some are now turning their dangerous anger on the western world.

Meanwhile in an ethnically divided Iraq with sectarian divisions, the first tentative steps have been taken toward democracy, as the rest of the arab world looks on with a wary curiousity. A few cautious voices believe that, in time, the Iraqi elections will put pressure on neighboring countries to democratize.

In Cairo, Hisham Qassem, chairman of a human rights organization and chief executive officer of a new Arab daily newspaper, believes that both the Iraqi and Palestinian elections have given impetus to democratic reform.
"Once people feel there are positive effects from the democratic process, they will want the same. Especially countries like Egypt who felt they were ahead of Iraq but are now lagging behind,” he said. Many arabs must be wondering if it takes an emasculating invasion from abroad and low level civil war to bring democracy to an arab country.

It takes more than democracy to bring the arab world out of the stone age. It will take economic reform. Since Saddam was tossed out in 2003, the economy has been governed by Western rules. As a result, GDP per capita doubled by the end of 2005, and the GDP is expected to grow another 49 percent by 2008. All this despite continued attacks by Sunni Arab rebels on oil facilities and other economic targets. It's much easier to start a business in Iraq now, even though there's still a lot of corruption. The big change is that now the corruption is illegal, and there is even progress in prosecuting the government officials who take bribes or try to shake down businessmen. Lebanon is the only other Arab state to run its economy in a Western fashion, and they have thrived.

It takes education reform and freedom of expression and the press. It will take implementation of full freedoms for women. Finally, it will take religious reform. Stone aged customs, traditions, and religious restrictions virtually guarantee that arabs will remain backward, laggards of the world.

Update: Here is more from a recent World Bank report. Arabs living in the middle east and north africa are oddly resistant to modernisation and transitioning out of the stone age. Very strange, when you see how successful arabs can be when they migrate to a free environment. I suppose blaming the US and Israel will gain them at least another half century of stone age existence.

Is Europe Burning? Effect of Islam

A recent opinion poll in Germany points out a growing distrust between the native German population, and the muslim immigrants whose culture is so different, and in many ways, so violent. Given the growing feelings of antagonism between the modern indigenous people of Germany, and the growing numbers of mostly third world immigrants from primitive cultures, it appears inevitable that serious conflict looms in the future for Germany.

Germans' esteem for Islam has been falling since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, with 83 percent of the 1,076 Germans questioned in the survey agreeing with the statement that Islam is driven by fanaticism. That amount was 10 percent higher than two years ago. A majority, 71 percent, said they believed Islam to be "intolerant," up from 66 percent.

When asked what they associate with the word "Islam," 91 percent of respondents connected the religion to the discrimination of women, and 61 percent called Islam "undemocratic." Eight percent of Germans associated "peacefulness" with Islam.

It is not only Germany that is affected, of course. Everywhere modern European cultures are hosts to rapidly growing numbers of culturally primitive immigrants, conflict appears, and crime rates increase.

....While 65 percent of those charged with rape are classed as coming from a non-western background, this segment makes up only 14.3 percent of Oslo's population. Norwegian women were the victims in 80 percent of the cases, with 20 percent being women of foreign background.

...68% of all rapes committed this year the perpetrator was from an ethnic minority, leading Muslim organisations have now formed an alliance to fight the ever-growing problem of young second and third-generation immigrants involved in rape cases against young Danish girls.

....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.

...in more cosmopolitan centers like Paris and Australia, the game is blossoming. It consists in the ritual gang rape of white women by non-white immigrants....The ritual is known as a “tournante,” meaning “Take your turn,” and it consists of a black male becoming “friendly with” (seducing) a white female, preferably a teenager. Once they’ve become chums, the male lures the girl to a location where his buddies in the gang “take their turns” with her. Look here for links to above stories.

There appears to be a pattern of sorts, where young immigrant muslim males are placed in close proximity to more liberated European young women. There is very little cultural common ground, for peaceful interaction. You may blame this group or that group, this nation or that nation, this politician or that politician--but in the end the tragedy continues growing. You have not solved anything, you have only dispensed your blame.

It would seem extremely prudent for immigration authorities to confront these patterns of growing distrust and violence between the two cultures, and to halt new immigration from these cultures that are proving incompatible with native European cultures. Any other course of action clearly leads to worsening conflict, and perhaps genocidal violence.

Academics, think tank authors, and government bureaucrats who study these issues can take all the time they wish to issue their "authoritative reports," so long as the underlying cause of this growing violence is curtailed. Some cultures cannot coexist in the same time and place. Face the fact. Admit it. Do something about it.

Dreams of Lost Arab Glory: Living the "Long War"

The US president Bush has chosen to make a stand in the desert country of Iraq. A curious choice perhaps? Afghanistan made more sense on the surface of things. Disrupting the jihadists' base of operations and training was logical. No more large scale jihadi terror attacks have taken place. The Madrid and London train bombings were much more modest in scale, more local in execution. The world jihad movement appears in disarray, under attack even in Saudi Arabia, the very heartland of jihad.

Iraq sits atop large oil reserves, but the oil production infrastructure is so decrepit in Iraq, that gearing up oil production there may take decades. Do Bush and his neo-con friends actually plan for decades in advance? In that period of time anything at all might happen. It is certainly more likely that their goals are more proximate.

Is Iraq truly part of the global jihad? Before Saddam's Baathist was toppled, what part did Iraq play in the global jihad? Was it truly necessary to invade and disrupt the center of the Arab world, the most powerful arab nation, the flagship nation of arab ambition?

Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya function as jihadist institutions of propaganda. These satellite networks appear to conflate jihadist ambitions with the goals of the arab world. It is as if much of the elite in the arab world have taken sides with the jihadists. When did this happen? Before Saddam's removal? Before September 11, 2001? Before the Gulf War of 1990/1991?

If one looks carefully at the history of the arabs, and the history of jihadist Islam, there appears to be a waxing and waning along parallel paths for the two entities. There is an unhealthy interdependency between arabs as a culture and jihadist Islam as a movement. The September 11 attacks were merely one more group of attacks in a long series of jihadist attacks dating back to the mid 20th century. Before that, there were other clusters of attacks going back millenia in time. A waxing and waning of the jihidast movement, along with arab cultural ambitions.

The glory days of the arabs was during the height of the jihadist wars, before the Mongols and the Turks subdued the arabs. After the Turks, the European colonials divided the arab lands. Arabs have been humiliated for centuries now. The tide appears to be turning, since the newfound oil wealth of the 20th century is finding its way to devout and fanatical believers in the oil rich societies. The wealth is being diverted to those who show an aptitude for indoctrinating the young to jihad, and supplying them with weapons of mass murder. Every nation in the world where a mosque is located is also the cradle of jihadist indoctrination. Infiltration, subterfuge, covert preparation for jihad.

Under the rule of law in developed nations, there is really no way to stop this process. Combining the stealth infiltration of jihadist indoctrination with the cultural decline of the west, and demographic trends of high birthrates among muslim immigrants and low birthrates among indigenous non-muslims, and one can see that Europe's days are rapidly slipping away. Europe is destined to come under Islamic subjugation within decades.

What about the Anglosphere? What about North America and Oceania? What about Japan, Korea, India, Thailand, and Singapore? There will be outposts of free thought, of rational activity, long after Europe surrenders.

The US and the UK have chosen to confront the jihadist in the heartland of Islam. Realizing perhaps that direct experience of war with the jihadist was the only way to toughen their troops enough for the long war ahead, the US and UK chose to take the war to the place that they knew the jihadists could not ignore, the center of the Sunni arab pride.

Some say the purpose was to bring democracy to the arab lands. That may have been a long shot gamble, a side purpose. Others say the purpose was access to oil. But we have seen how far in the future any meaningful oil production in Iraq will be. More likely the purpose was to bring a familiarity with the jihadist tactics to the military commanders, in preparation for the inevitable conflict to come. Europe's leaders had already decided on surrender long before September 11. There was no question of Europe preparing for the long war. The will to fight against oppression had been drained from Europeans half a century ago.

The post-modern concept of war is that all war is immoral. Any justification for war is mere obfuscation, excuses by the ruling classes to shed the blood of the underclasses for their own gain. This is the wisdom of the post-modernist in regard to war. There is no real post-modern wisdom regarding oppression originating from third world entities such as the jihadists. Such a thing is considered unlikely in the extreme and not worth analysing. That is the weakness of the post-modern. Ideological hatred for western civilisation to the point of denying the uniqueness and liberating aspects of western civilisation, while simultaneously denying the barbarism and mindless homicidal tendencies of virtually every other civilisation ever known to history.

Iraq is a target of opportunity. Iraq was invaded because Iraq was there, at a particular time and place and state of being. Iraq was chosen by Bush as a place to make a stand. It was a multitude of gambles thrown together in one large toss of the dice. A monumental disruption to the overall scheme of things, such a challenge as not to be ignored by the jihadist, or the arab supremacists who stand one hundred strong behind every single jihadist.

Western civilisation is the cradle of the next level. No other civilisation has approached to a fraction of the enlightenment of the west. All other civilisations have been based on slavery and arbitrary justice, and a far less favorable balance of power between groups and classes, than western civilisation.

Next level humans will be more intelligent. They will live ten times longer. They will balance their emotional brains with their rational brains. They will not fight wars because they will not have to. They will understand the underlying dynamics of power far better than primitive and between-levels humans.

The anti-jihadist wars may be the last wars that enlightened humans will be forced to fight. Forced to fight for the sake of the next civilisation to come. As they say, a war to end war. For that to be true, modern humans must forsake much of their leisure for the sake of learning and growth.

Link to original Al Fin article.