Dancing with the one who brought you.

His numerous efforts to camouflage the fact notwithstanding, our president has a longstanding and well-documented relationship with ACORN, the organization recently exposed for multiple and egregious examples of fraud and voter intimidation. Apropos of which:

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) detailing federal investigations into the alleged corrupt activities of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The documents reference serious allegations of corruption and voter registration fraud by ACORN as well as the Obama administration’s decision to shut down a criminal investigation without filing criminal charges.

The documents include background information on two specific complaints filed in October 2008 by Lucy Corelli and Joseph Borges, Republican Registrars of Voters in Stamford and Bridgeport, Connecticut, respectively, during the 2008 election season. . . . (etc.)

The ACORN documents uncovered by Judicial Watch include internal FBI memoranda, signed affidavits, subpoenas, fraudulent voter registration cards, and publications describing ACORN’s policies and practices. The documents also include details regarding numerous allegations of corruption extending beyond voter registration fraud, to include attempts by ACORN employees to coerce workers to participate in campaign activities on behalf of Democratic candidates.

“These documents reflect systematic voter registration fraud by ACORN,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is a scandal that there has been no comprehensive criminal investigation and prosecution by the Justice Department into this evident criminal conduct. Given President Obama’s close connections to ACORN, including his campaign’s hiring of the ACORN’s Project Vote organization, it seems rather obvious why Attorney General Holder has failed to seriously investigate these and other alleged ACORN criminal activities.”

Another example of transparency of the sort we see in the Health Care debate. 

The Judicial Watch piece is here.

HT for photo: Sunlit Uplands

Could it be more emphatic?

Mitt Romney in his own words:

From someone who should know

Nice man trapped inside a party he helped fashion

A few months ago, René Girard and I had a 3-hour lunch with Jerry Brown, California's Attorney General. Brown is now running for governor, a post his father held and that he held in the 1970s. The Attorney General had called me to say he wanted to talk about my book, Violence Unveiled. I suggested that I ask René Girard to come along, which I did.

It was a very cordial visit, and it confirmed what many have said, that Brown is a complex man. He is also extremely well-read and intellectually astute. Thus our lunch went far longer than any of us had anticipated.

The point of mentioning this is to say that, though I like Jerry Brown personally, and I have a degree of respect for him, his position on the sanctity of life and traditional marriage make it impossible for me to support him. I told him at our lunch that I would cheer for him (not being California voter at the time) in his likely contest with San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom -- Newsom being, in my view, both a moral and intellectual light-weight -- but that I could never support him against anyone with a better position on the life and marriage issues. It is to his credit that he took no offense at my saying this.

All this came up for me today when I read an article in the California Catholic Daily about Brown, which you might find interesting. At our lunch, Brown spoke of his work with Mother Teresa, and the article gets into that a bit. I found it interesting.  It is here.

Another take . . .

Daniel Greenfield has this to say on the Biden-Netanyahu talks.

The manifold organs of the ObamaMedia are abuzz with outrage over what they are calling Israel's "insult" to the United States. But what was the nature of this awful and outrageous insult? Did Israeli officials pull off V.P. Biden's rug to show off his bald head underneath. Did they ask him why the suit of his pants is so shiny. Did they make him sit at the kiddie table?

More to the point did Israeli TV air calls for a Jihad against America, as Palestinian Arab TV did? Did Israel name a square after the murderer of an American photographer, as the Palestinian Authority did? Did an Israeli Anchorman do a skit in blackface during Obama's visit, as a Turkish anchorman did during Obama's visit to Turkey? Are Israeli religious institutions issuing Fatwahs against America, as Al Azhar University, which Obama visited and spoke at, has done? Are Israeli leaders funding terrorism against America, as the Saudi King, before whom Obama bowed, does?

No, none of those incidents were described as insults. Nothing that Muslim countries did to mock, humiliate and murder Americans were even noticed at all. None of them produced furious condemnations from the White House or two hours of Hillary Clinton screeching on the phone at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. So what did Israel do that was so awful, so horrible and terrible? It built houses. Yes, civilian houses. Not army bases or nuclear missiles or walls. Houses. . . .

If Israel were approving a construction project to build housing for Arab Muslim citizens of Israel, Biden, Hillary and their media troupe wouldn't be screeching about it to the high heavens. It is only because Jews are to live there, that they have a problem with it. Their objections therefore are purely based on race and religion-- and completely racist. (my italic emphasis)

Feel free, as I'm sure you will, to comment. 

Turning a Deaf Ear . . .

Apropos of the earlier post.

Hamas Sermon in Gaza: Rome Will Be Conquered by Islam

Preacher: "The prophecy of the conquest of Rome remains valid, Allah willing. Just like Constantinople was conquered some 500 years ago, Rome too will be conquered.

"Our prayers, our fasting, and the charity we give will be to no avail, if we doubt the Prophet Muhammad. How can we proceed along the path of righteousness, if we are not secure in our belief that Rome will be conquered, as promised by the Prophet Muhammad and as proclaimed by Allah?"

Former Jordanian Minister Ali Al-Faqir Vows to Conquer Spain and Rome, Declares: America, EU Will Soon Come to an End – May 2, 2008

Sheikh Ali Al-Faqir: "We must declare that Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, is an Islamic land, and that Spain – Andalusia – is also the land of Islam. Islamic lands that were occupied by the enemies will once again become Islamic. Furthermore, we will reach beyond these countries, which are lost at one point. We proclaim that we will conquer Rome, like Constantinople was conquered once, and as it will be conquered again."

Interviewer: "Allah willing."

Sheik Ali Al-Faqir: "We will rule the world, as has been said by the Prophet Muhammad.

Source: Middle East Media Research Center

Who would have thought?

It certainly appears that Mr. Obama's old friends -- Rev. Jemimah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Rashid Khalidi and others, all anti-Semitic enemies of Israel -- had a lasting influence on him.

Who would have thought?

Kenneth Blackwell writes:

Vice President Joe Biden says the Palestinians deserve a state. He has traveled to the Mideast to press the Israelis to surrender more territory more quickly to what has been termed the Palestinian Authority. The Obama administration is giving $900 million of our money to the Mahmoud Abbas regime on the West Bank of the Jordan River, supposedly for "humanitarian" causes. This administration went out of its way to avoid being seen as "meddling" with Iran, but it shows no such restraint with Israel. Meanwhile, the Palestinians go on naming schools for suicide bombers and coaching their children to emulate these bombers. But somehow they are viewed as "partners" in the mythical peace process.

The Obama administration's position is that Israelis should withdraw from the West Bank and leave the entire regions of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians -- all in the interest of a comprehensive Mideast peace settlement. What happened when Israel did evacuate from Gaza? Hamas promptly took over.

Have President Obama, Vice President Biden or Secretary Clinton ever stopped to ask why is it in the interest of the U.S. to foster a Judenrein on the West Bank? That terrible word -- which comes to us from the time of the Holocaust -- means a region cleared of Jews. We need to understand that Jews have lived in this region since biblical times. If Jews have no right to live in Judea and Samaria, why do they have a right to live in Tel Aviv, which was founded only in the early 20th century?  

The idea that Israel can swap land for peace is the geo-political equivalent of bell-bottom pants. It has been so thoroughly mocked by history that any use of that fantasy today is morally irresponsible. 

As for the myth that the hatred of the Jews is simply the reaction against the founding of the state of Israel -- the "occupation" -- PLO terrorist-turned-Christian Walid Shoebat reminds us of this in an interview he gave recently.

"It is the political agenda of these [Islamic] governments that we need to be aware of and not just the military apparatuses," Shoebat said.

He said the creation of the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood – and all the terror it sponsors – was spawned by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

"In 1924, the Caliphate was dismantled by the West, and this is why Muslims hate the West. Americans don't understand why Muslims hate us so much. In 1928, four years later, the Muslim Brotherhood was born. This is the umbrella of all the Muslim terrorist organizations," he said.

"The Muslim Brotherhood is the mother, and it was established four years after the dissolution of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. This really answers the whole question when people ask about the roots of Islamic terrorism," he said.

"They ask if it's because we invaded Iraq or because Israel occupies their territory. That's not true, because in 1928, there was no occupation of Iraq, and there was no occupation of 'Palestine.' This Islamic movement has never ceased to attempt to establish a Shariah hegemony in that region," he said.

So what's going on at this point?

"So we see now the metastasizing of the Muslim Brotherhood into all parts of the Muslim world from Algeria to Syria to Lebanon to Egypt everywhere, even in the United States of America," Shoebat said.

"All the Islamic organizations in the United States of America, no exception, are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood and they have made their declarations of their plans publicly. So, we have ample evidence to recognize that this is an old threat, this is an old war," he said.

 Back to Kenneth Blackwell:

When an election was held in Gaza, the residents there voted against Abbas's Fatah crowd and for the openly terrorist Hamas. Hamas regularly sends missiles into Israel from their Gaza fortress. World media blasted the Israelis for alleged attacks on hospitals in Gaza during a recent incursion, but Hamas routinely stores missiles in hospitals and uses ambulances to transport them. So much for "humanitarian.". . .

Leopards don't change their spots. Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party emblem proves it: All of Israel disappears in the map it shows of the Mideast -- not just the West Bank, not just Gaza. When Vice President Biden stumps for a "contiguous" Palestinian state, he plays right into Fatah's hands.

Today, Palestinian media continue uninterruptedly to spew the most hateful caricatures of Jews. And Palestinian children continue to be indoctrinated in all their schools with hatred of Israel and all Jews. Only now, Americans are footing the bill.

In my opinion, the gradual abandonment of Israel first by Europe, and now by the U.S. under the Obama administration, is a shameless measure of the West's (dependence on Arab oil and) willful ignorance of the true meaning of the drama of cultural annihilation now being played out right in front of our eyes. No litany of Tel Aviv's ill-advised or putatively repressive responses to those committed to Israel's annihilation can justify the West's betrayal. The West today seems as willing to trade Israel for peace as it is to advise Israel to trade land for peace; the former is simply the craven extension of the latter, and it is just as certain to fail to bring peace. 

On this issue, as on the abortion issue, our descendants will ask: Where were you when this was taking place? Did no one recognize what was happening? Our current excuses will do little to exonerate us.

Read the whole piece here.

Sunday Musings on Mimesis

I remember this from some years ago. How true.

HT: Thomas Peters, Catholic Vote Action

Parental Choice . . .

What's left of the left's political soul, after selling most of it to the abortion industry, has been mortgaged to the teachers' unions. When the principle of "choice" -- conjured to legitimize the first sale -- is mentioned in terms of the second, it immediately becomes a cruse. There are many obvious and petty reasons for this, but one of the more subtle ones is this: Some of the best alternatives to public school education -- which produce much better results with far less cost -- are Catholic schools, and there is always a slight chance that children attending these schools will pick up a few points of basic moral theology which might very well complicate their moral acquiescence in the abortion on demand regime of Roe v. Wade, on the continuation of which one of our political parties has placed all its chips. 

That aside, the economic argument for choice is compelling. The scholars at the Cato Institute is to be congratulated for doing, if you'll pardon the expression, their homework on this issue.

Thomas Sowell again . . .

Thomas Sowell, reliably insightful, has this:

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.

She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.

This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov’s dog when we hear a certain sound — in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.

People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.

Educational institutions created to pass on to the next generation the knowledge, experience, and culture of the generations that went before them have instead been turned into indoctrination centers to promote whatever notions, fashions, or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today’s intelligentsia. . . .

Many of today’s “educators” not only supply students with conclusions, but promote the idea that students should spring into action because of these prepackaged conclusions — in other words, vent their feelings and go galloping off on crusades, with neither a knowledge of what is said by those on the other side nor the intellectual discipline to know how to analyze opposing arguments.

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don’t understand or, worse yet, follow leaders they don’t understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin, or Jonestown.

A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one’s own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people. 

Sowell's whole piece is here.

"They will stop at nothing."

Today, a far left pro-abortion group that calls itself a “Catholics in Alliance For the Common Good” published a dishonest letter that suggested that a Catholic organization backed the democrat’s pro-abortion takeover of the health care industry. This supposed Catholic group is a who’s who of far left radicals. The group includes non-Catholic leftists and even has non-Catholic pro-abortion democrat Hillary Clinton listed as one of its leaders.

They Will Stop At Nothing–

So says Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit. Hoft's exasperation -- like mine on occasion -- causes him to speak in something less than serene equanimity, but -- given the gravity of the present situation -- it's hard to fault him for that. But I pass along his post for another reason:

Since I am on the advisory board of an organization whose solid reputation among faithful Catholics the faux-Catholic front group is exploiting, let me remind my friends that Catholics for the Common Good, in sharp contrast with "Catholics (?) in Alliance for the Common Good," is an unquestionably faithful Catholic organization. CCG is committed not only to the Church's social teachings, but fully cognizant of the moral priorities on which these teachings depend, with the right to life of the unborn innocent at the very top of the list, outweighing all other moral concerns in importance. Second to this concern for the innocent unborn is the concern for the sanctity of marriage. The "Catholics in Alliance ..." is in alliance with abortion-promoting forces that now appear to own the Democratic party lock, stock, and barrel, with whom the president is in lockstep ideological agreement.

Not so Catholics for the Common Good, an organization which deserves your attention and could use your help.

Overlooked by the world press . . .

Mark DeYoung is a founding board member of World Youth Alliance, an international coalition dedicated to promoting human dignity and building solidarity among youth of developed and developing nations. DeYoung has an article on the persecution of Christians throughout the world which is worthy of attention.

There are 2.2 billion Christians on the planet. According to Open Doors, a large international non-profit organization that broadly tracks persecution of Christians on the world stage, 100 million are seriously threatened or persecuted because of their faith. Another non-profit, the World Evangelical Alliance (whose Religious Liberty Commission publishes a great deal of stats on religious persecution) puts that number closer to 200 million, and believes another 400 million face “non-trivial restrictions on their freedom and the loss of many basic human rights, simply because they choose to love and follow Jesus Christ.”

There are more than sixty countries where persecution of Christians is a real problem. Open Doors publishes an annual World Wide Watch list that ranks the fifty worst perpetrators. In its latest ranking, eight of the ten worst countries are Muslim, and on the whole, 35 of the 50 countries have Muslim majority populations. Following the recent murders of eight Christians in Mosul, Iraq, Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, addressed this growing problem of Islamic extremism against Christians. He declared that these grave injustices are not a result of “hatred of the West or of foreigners, but [hatred] of the Christian community.” Unfortunately, there does seem to be a rise of newsworthy violence against Christians by Muslims, often within countries where governments look the other way or officially participate in the persecution.

DeYoung ticks off the list of countries where the persecution of Christians is rampant: Nigeria, Egypt, Malaysia, Iraq, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others. He concludes his article:

It is time for the international community (the United Nations and other regional bodies), as well as Western nations, to acknowledge the widespread abuse of Christians that is taking place at the hands of extremist Muslims. To look the other way and suggest such persecution and violence is only the result of secular indicators like ethnic strife and political unrest is to ignore the coming reality. We may be entering one of the fiercest periods of Christian martyrdom in all of human history.

For all our legitimate concern about violence, it remains a mystery why something approaching "the fiercest periods of Christian martyrdom in all of human history" is receiving such scant attention from the press. On second thought, maybe it's in ideological conformity with the media bias and dereliction of duty that is so conspicuous in other areas of our public life.

The whole article is here.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BILL SHEA

One of the truly great
human beings in the world.

Welcome to Wonderland

Mark Hyman has a column in the American Spectator which contains some commonsense observations about the lack of commonsense that often today "goes without saying." The items on his longer list with which I identify are these:

The President appoints as the nation's "Safe Schools" Czar a lifelong activist advocating the sexual exploitation of children. . . .

A national leader who accomplished absolutely nothing was given the Nobel Peace Prize over freedom-loving grassroots leaders and citizens -- including scores who were killed -- who opposed totalitarianism in Iran.

The practice of religion -- particularly Christianity -- is treated like a hate crime.

Officials in charge of the Justice Department's anti-terrorism policies are the same people who worked feverishly to free to terrorist detainees. . . .

American citizens and businesses generously donate more than a billion dollars to ravaged corners of the globe such as Southeast Asia and the Caribbean yet other countries that offer a mere pittance dare to criticize our motives.

The remarkable accomplishments of World War II veterans are denigrated by a president who apologizes for their having defeated Nazism and Japanese Imperialism. . . .

The trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorists is moved to the U.S. while the trial of Navy Seals alleged to have given a fat lip to a terrorist leader may be moved to Iraq. . . .

The national press literally ignores reporting legitimate news stories. . . .

'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English) . . .

"The Nightmare No One In America Sees Coming"

Kathleen McFarland served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. She is a senior adviser to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. She had this to say yesterday:

What if the electricity suddenly went out? One nuclear warhead detonated high above North America would produce a shockwave powerful enough to knock out the entire electric grid and all electronic devices. Not just temporarily because the system was overloaded, but permanently because the circuits were fried.

Ever heard of Electromagnetic pulse, or EMP? Probably not, unless you’re a nuclear weapons expert. 

In the 1950's, At the dawn of the nuclear age, most weapons analysts focused on the unparalleled death and destruction even one nuclear weapon would cause. Bomb blast, fireball, radiation poisoning. But few thought about electromagnetic pulse -- the invisible wave of electricity that would fry electronic circuits seemed almost trivial.

But fast forward 60 years to modern, high tech America. Today every aspect of our lives depends on electronics, computers, the Internet and satellites - our armed forces, our banking system, our communications networks, our infrastructure.

What if the electricity suddenly went out? One nuclear warhead detonated high above North America would produce a shockwave powerful enough to knock out the entire electric grid and all electronic devices. Not just a temporarily because the system was overloaded, but a permanently because the circuits were fried.

Nothing would work – not the phone system, or water pumping stations, or planes, trains or automobiles. Your toilet wouldn’t flush and the TV wouldn't turn on. Planes would stop in mid air. The only way to communicate would be face to face. Credit cards would be useless.

Tens of millions would die of disease and starvation. We would be thrown, unprepared and within seconds, into a pre-electric world. America would likely never recover. Unthinkable?

Think again.

Who would do it to us? Who could? Any country with the ability to shoot a nuclear tipped missile at the US. That’s China and Russia today or North Korea and Iran tomorrow.

It's time we start thinking about the unthinkable.

Is there anything we can do now? Here are three suggestions:

First, the Obama administration must redouble efforts to stop rouge states like Iran from getting nuclear weapons, using force if necessary.

Second, President Obama should reverse his decision to cut back the missile defense program. If we can't prevent nuclear proliferation we must take steps to defend ourselves from attack.

Finally, we should spend the $100 million dollars necessary to harden the electric grid and national infrastructure. It won't protect us from an EMP attack, but it could save the country from catastrophe.

Looking the other way and hoping for the best cannot substitute for the serious effort to prevent catastrophes on this scale.

What everyone once knew . . .

Thanks to Creative Minority Report for this from a 1952 Planned Parenthood pamphlet:

Here's a closeup:

Gendercide: A Population Bomb of another sort

 

 The March 4th edition of The Economist has an extensive article on the gender imbalance created by a combination of governmental meddling -- whether explicitly totalitarian or totalitarian-lite -- cultural prejudice, and outright misogyny. The piece begins with this:

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

It doesn't get much morally grimmer than that, but this explicit infanticide represents only the most horrific aspect of the problem, for due to the ability to determined the sex of a child in the womb, sex-selective abortions are especially rampant in China, India and elsewhere. The article goes on to address the correlative social catastrophe.

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women -- a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

. . . So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

. . .  As CASS says, “the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year.”

Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence—especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble.

The crime rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of women, rape and prostitution.

. . . Over the next generation, many of the problems associated with sex selection will get worse. The social consequences will become more evident because the boys born in large numbers over the past decade will reach maturity then. Meanwhile, the practice of sex selection itself may spread because fertility rates are continuing to fall and ultrasound scanners reach throughout the developing world.

"Religion is the key to history."

That's according to the renowned British historian Christopher Dawson. Reading what he goes on to say is an exercise in remorse, for the situation he described as recently as the late 1940s has simply ceased to exist:

Religion stands at the threshold of all the great literatures of the world. Philosophy is its offspring and is a child which constantly returns to its parent. And the same is true of social institutions. Kingship and law are religious institutions and even today they have not entirely divested themselves of their numinous character, as we can see in the English coronation rite and in the formulas of our law courts. All the institutions of family and marriage and kinship have a religious background and have been maintained and are still maintained by formidable social sanctions.

Gone are the days. What René Girard has helped us realize is that it is the Christian revelation that has led to the desacralization of our institutions, beginning with the "rending of the Temple veil" at the crucifixion. That is a very long story, but it is also a story of our cultural neglect. For the Christian alternative to what Girard once called the "primitive sacred" is a combination of what Philip Rieff calls fresh new interdicts -- a vibrant system of moral constrains -- and what catholic Christianity calls the sacramental life of the Church.

Without such moral constrains (themselves requiring religious underpinning) and the sacramental instantiation of these constraints into the lived experience of those being civilized by them -- without that, secularism and nihilism follow as night follows day.

As late in the day as it is, we must, I feel, commit ourselves ever anew to the task of clarifying our present predicament and summoning the moral, intellectual and religious resources requisite to its amelioration. The happiness, wellbeing and freedom of children's children are on the line.

Healer in chief . . .

"Healing the Schizophrenic Division Between Worldliness and Piety"

That is the task that the great Catholic theologian (and mentor to Joseph Ratzinger) Henri de Lubac laid before us. Think: daily Mass, battling the abortion industry, working to preserve the civilization inspired by Judeo-Christianity, loving one's family, and a little Eucharistic adoration now and then. Something like that. The life of the laity.

An Overdue Discussion . . . Part II

As I said in my introduction to Part I (below):

I have great admiration for Charles Krauthammer, and I give his reflections on Europe's cultural predicament much weight. He has said more or less the obvious about the apparent extreme position that Greet Wilders has taken with respect to the likely Islamicization of Europe. Writes Kauthammer:

What he says is extreme, radical, and wrong. He basically is arguing that Islam is the same as Islamism. Islamism is an ideology of a small minority which holds that the essence of Islam is jihad, conquest, forcing people into accepting a certain very narrow interpretation [of Islam].

Robert Spencer, whose expertise in the area of Islam cannot be questioned, has argued on the contrary not only that the relative size of "moderate" and "radical" Islam is not as comforting as some think it is, but that the distinction between the two is largely a Western distinction which has little relevance in the Islamic world, and that our attachment to the distinction has obscured the true scope and meaning of the rising tide of Islamic supremacy.

Evidence of this can be found even in -- of all places -- the New York Times. See the story headlined: U.S. Sees a Terror Threat; Pakistanis See a Heroine.

Be that as it may, ideas have consequences. For a generation the patently absurd myopia of multiculturalism provided the moral cover for cultural irresponsibility and adolescent moral posturing on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere. The result in some places in Europe (and a few in our society) has been a crisis of governance that has now reached a point at which correctives that might have sufficed to rectify the situation several years ago are far less likely to avoid the violence that every responsible person seeks to avoid.

A mere five years ago, Wilders' "extreme" proposal would have been -- and was -- widely regarded as borderline lunacy. Five years on, and in light of rapid developments in many parts of Europe, it begins to look less extreme to many. Five years from now, those troubled by what Wilders has to say today may find his message convincing, if not prophetic. This trajectory of opinion itself has serious consequences for Europe as it begins to look for alternatives to the civil war which will almost surely break out if things are allowed to drift rudderlessly as they have in the last few years.

I find some of Wilders' proposals as troubling as the next person, but one needn't agree with his proposals to agree with his assessment of the historical and cultural situation. It is that assessment which warrants, in my view, our attention to the video below.

Here's Part II:

Harsh words these, but words Wilders has paid a high price for daring to speak. Whether one agrees with his proposals for dealing with the crisis of Europe, it is hard to question his courage and his sense of historical and cultural responsibility. Wilders has located the heart of the crisis. It is not simply Islamic immigration; it is European flecklessness; Europe's failure to believe enough in its own culture to ask newcomers wanting to enjoy its fruits to assimilate to its traditions and laws.

My friends will surely have a lot to say on this, and I welcome the conversation; it's long overdue.

In the "Meantime" . . .

Part II of the Wilders talk will post shortly. In the meantime, here's something not altogether unrelated to it.

Barry Rubin is reliably insightful, especially about Middle East affairs, his special expertise. He posted a review of sorts today about an article that George Waldon published in the Times of London on when "realism" justifies a moral accommodation in international affairs. Both the Waldon article and Rubin's précis of it are a little to "accommodating" for my taste, but, as usual, Rubin is worth hearing out.

In the course of his reflection, however, he said this:

. . . the sense of Western weakness (the West cannot do anything) and cowardice (it won’t do anything) is Viagra for aggressive regimes -- from Venezuela through Russia and the Middle East to North Korea -- and revolutionary groups.

Good analogy. That makes perfect sense, and, as I say, it is not unrelated to the concerns that Wilders expresses in both Part I (below) and Part II (coming soon) of his talk.

In the course of his reflection, Rubin passes along this from Waldon, apropos of the relationship between international affairs and political and economic health:

. . . the international moral climate seems destined to become more brutal at roughly the same rate as our economic vulnerability increases.

That's something to keep in mind as we continue to sink the hopes of our grandchildren by borrowing from them more than they will ever be able to pay back.

I would be in favor of spending a good deal more thought and energy on "the international moral climate" and the effect on it of "our economic vulnerability" than on global warming. It's the former, not the latter, that is most likely to lead to really dangerous warming trend: hot wars in stead of cold ones.

An Overdue Discussion . . . Part I

I have great admiration for Charles Krauthammer, and I give his reflections on Europe's cultural predicament much weight. He has said more or less the obvious about the apparent extreme position that Greet Wilders has taken with respect to the likely Islamicization of Europe. Writes Kauthammer:

What he says is extreme, radical, and wrong. He basically is arguing that Islam is the same as Islamism. Islamism is an ideology of a small minority which holds that the essence of Islam is jihad, conquest, forcing people into accepting a certain very narrow interpretation [of Islam].

Robert Spencer, whose expertise in the area of Islam cannot be questioned, has argued on the contrary not only that the relative size of "moderate" and "radical" Islam is not as comforting as some think it is, but that the distinction between the two is largely a Western distinction which has little relevance in the Islamic world, and that our attachment to the distinction has obscured the true scope and meaning of the rising tide of Islamic supremacy.

Evidence of this can be found even in -- of all places -- the New York Times. See the story headlined: U.S. Sees a Terror Threat; Pakistanis See a Heroine.

Be that as it may, ideas have consequences. For a generation the patently absurd myopia of multiculturalism provided the moral cover for cultural irresponsibility and adolescent moral posturing on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere. The result in some places in Europe (and a few in our society) has been a crisis of governance that has now reached a point at which correctives that might have sufficed to rectify the situation several years ago are far less likely to avoid the violence that every responsible person seeks to avoid.

A mere five years ago, Wilders' "extreme" proposal would have been -- and was -- widely regarded as borderline lunacy. Five years on, and in light of rapid developments in many parts of Europe, it begins to look less extreme to many. Five years from now, those troubled by what Wilders has to say today may find his message convincing, if not prophetic. This trajectory of opinion itself has serious consequences for Europe as it begins to look for alternatives to the civil war which will almost surely break out if things are allowed to drift rudderlessly as they have in the last few years.

I find some of Wilders' proposals as troubling as the next person, but one needn't agree with his proposals to agree with his assessment of the historical and cultural situation. It is that assessment which warrants, in my view, our attention to the video below.

Here's Part I:



Harsh words these, but words Wilders has paid a high price for daring to speak. Whether one agrees with his proposals for dealing with the crisis of Europe, it is hard to question his courage and his sense of historical and cultural responsibility. Wilders has located the heart of the crisis. It is not simply Islamic immigration; it is European flecklessness; Europe's failure to believe enough in its own culture to ask newcomers wanting to enjoy its fruits to assimilate to its traditions and laws.

My friends will surely have a lot to say on this, and I welcome the conversation; it's long overdue.

Wilders Part II to be posted shortly.

Homegrown Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism on American Campuses - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Political Legitimacy . . .

Our Declaration of Independence observes:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

"Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." This is boilerplate American history, and something that Americans -- and, in particular, America's political class -- have long taken for granted.

But now things are looking a bit dicey. According to a recent Rasmussen Poll , only 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. On the other hand, Rasmussen notes, a full 63 percent of the "political class" believe that the government enjoys the consent of the governed.

It's tempting to stress the disconnect here, and that disconnect is certainly huge. Unsurprisingly, the political class -- which talks mostly to itself -- thinks that it is far more popular, and legitimate, in the eyes of the country than is in fact the case. In this, as in so many things, America's political class is out of touch with reality.

So says Glenn Harlan Reynolds in a column in the Washington Examiner. To which he adds:

It gets worse. Not long ago, the federal government enjoyed a stellar reputation for honesty and competence. Now, according to a recent CNN poll, three-quarters of Americans think federal officials aren't honest . (There's no separate survey here on what the "political class" thinks, but I suspect that its numbers would be sunnier, but still appalling, as above). So what do we do with a federal government that many voters think is illegitimate and dishonest?

This is not just a political issue. It represents a dangerous disconnect between the governed and those increasingly out of touch with them. It almost certainly means a rising level of resentment for which democracy's routine political mechanisms are not supplying the requisite ritual resolution.

The whole piece is here.

P. S. the post below . . .

Unlike many -- Diana West's interviewer for instance -- I do not think Geert Wilders a danger to democracy. Whether the policies he recommends are the most reasonable under the circumstances, I simply cannot say. But those who are troubled by what he is proposing should at least realize that the backdrop for his proposals -- and for his surging political popularity -- is a political class in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe that has been almost completely irresponsible in ignoring the political, cultural and demographic consequences of the rapid Islamicization of Europe. The great majority of these political elites live insulated from the cultural degeneration that less well-connected ordinary Europeans often experience. Moreover, the political class has too often hidden its moral equivocation behind accusations of racism and intolerance made against those who have expressed concerns. Nor is this process unfamiliar on this side of the Atlantic.

Classic example . . .

If you want an example of how obtuse the mainstream media can be, here it is. Diana West is not only courageous and extremely well-informed, but she is gracious and articulate. Nonetheless, the interviewer seems utterly incapable of hearing an argument -- however logical it is presented -- that is contrary to her preconceived and ideologically fixated positions.

"They Need to Be Liberated From Their God"

Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of the founder of terrorist organization Hamas. He was interviewed by a Wall Street Journal reporter about his life as a double-agent, his conversion to Christianity, and his new book, "Son of Hamas."

"I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn't leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it's a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.

"I'm not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can't deny they came from Christianity as well."

HT my friend Chris Morrissey

Source: WSJ

Selective Blindness

 From the BBC, March 5th:

US administration to block vote on Turkey 'genocide'.*

*Note the quotes that render the word genocide dubious.

The Obama administration has said it will seek to block a controversial bill describing as genocide the World War I killing of Armenians by Turks.

A congressional panel on Thursday approved the resolution, paving the way for a possible vote by the House.

But US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the administration would "work very hard" to prevent this.

Turkey voiced strong protests after the vote and recalled its ambassador from Washington for consultations.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country had been accused of a crime it did not commit, adding the resolution would harm Turkish-US relations.

President Abdullah Gul said Turkey - a key Nato ally of the US - would "not be responsible for the negative results that this event may lead to".

Change of position

Mr Clinton - who had urged the House Foreign Affairs Committee not to hold the vote - said on Friday: "We are against this decision. Now we believe that the US Congress will not take any decision on this subject." [...]

During his campaign for the 2008 election, Mr Obama promised to brand the mass killings genocide.

Mrs Clinton has acknowledged his administration's change of opinion on the issue, saying circumstances had "changed in very significant ways".

So now it wasn't a genocide?

In October last year, Turkey and Armenia signed a historic accord normalising relations between them after a century of hostility.

Armenia wants Turkey to recognise the killings as an act of genocide, but successive Turkish governments have refused to do so.

HT: Marisol at Jihad Watch 

"Churchill was right."

After being barred from entering Great Britain, the member of the Dutch parliament finally gets a chance to deliver the speech he was earlier invited by the British House of Lords to give. Wilders' message is uncluttered with the equivocations that have become de rigueur in most of our discourse about this important topic. Feel free to weigh in.

Geert Wilders
Speech House of Lords, London -- March 5, 2010

Thank you. It is great to be back in London. And it is great that this time, I got to see more of this wonderful city than just the detention centre at Heathrow Airport.

Today I stand before you, in this extraordinary place. Indeed, this is a sacred place. This is, as Malcolm always says, the mother of all Parliaments, I am deeply humbled to have the opportunity to speak before you.

Thank you Lord Pearson and Lady Cox for your invitation and showing my film 'Fitna'. Thank you my friends for inviting me.

I first have great news. Last Wednesday city council elections were held in the Netherlands. And for the first time my party, the Freedom Party, took part in these local elections. We participated in two cities. In Almere, one of the largest Dutch cities. And in The Hague, the third largest city; home of the government, the parliament and the queen. And, we did great! In one fell swoop my party became the largest party in Almere and the second largest party in The Hague. Great news for the Freedom Party and even better news for the people of these two beautiful cities.

And I have more good news. Two weeks ago the Dutch government collapsed. In June we will have parliamentary elections. And the future for the Freedom Party looks great. According to some polls we will become the largest party in the Netherlands. I want to be modest, but who knows, I might even be Prime Minister in a few months time!

Ladies and gentlemen, not far from here stands a statue of the greatest Prime Minister your country ever had. And I would like to quote him here today: "Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. No stronger retrograde force exists in the World. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step (...) the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome." These words are from none other than Winston Churchill wrote this in his book 'The River War' from 1899.

Churchill was right.

Ladies and gentlemen, I don't have a problem and my party does not have a problem with Muslims as such. There are many moderate Muslims. The majority of Muslims are law-abiding citizens and want to live a peaceful life as you and I do. I know that. That is why I always make a clear distinction between the people, the Muslims, and the ideology, between Islam and Muslims. There are many moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.

Islam strives for world domination. The Quran commands Muslims to exercise jihad. The Quran commands Muslims to establish shariah law. The Quran commands Muslims to impose Islam on the entire world.

As former Turkish Prime Minister Erbakan said: "The whole of Europe will become Islamic. We will conquer Rome". End of quote.

Libyan dictator Gaddafi said: "There are tens of millions of Muslims in the European continent today and their number is on the increase. This is the clear indication that the European continent will be converted into Islam. Europe will one day soon be a Muslim continent". End of quote. Indeed, for once in his life, Gaddafi was telling the truth. Because, remember: mass immigration and demographics is destiny!

Islam is merely not a religion, it is mainly a totalitarian ideology. Islam wants to dominate all aspects of life, from the cradle to the grave. Shariah law is a law that controls every detail of life in a Islamic society. From civic- and family law to criminal law. It determines how one should eat, dress and even use the toilet. Oppression of women is good, drinking alcohol is bad.

I believe that Islam is not compatible with our Western way of life. Islam is a threat to Western values. The equality of men and women, the equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals, the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, they are all under pressure because of islamization. Ladies and gentlemen: Islam and freedom, Islam and democracy are not compatible. It are opposite values.

No wonder that Winston Churchill called Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' "the new Quran of faith and war, turgid, verbose, shapeless, bur pregnant with its message". As you know, Churchill made this comparison, between the Koran and Mein Kampf, in his book 'The Second World War', a master piece, for which, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Churchill's comparison of the Quran and 'Mein Kampf' is absolutely spot on. The core of the Quran is the call to jihad. Jihad means a lot of things and is Arabic for battle. Kampf is German for battle. Jihad and kampf mean exactly the same.

Islam means submission, there cannot be any mistake about its goal. That's a given. The question is whether we in Europe and you in Britain, with your glorious past, will submit or stand firm for your heritage.

We see Islam taking off in the West at an incredible pace. Europe is Islamizing rapidly. A lot of European cities have enormous Islamic concentrations. Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Berlin are just a few examples. In some parts of these cities, Islamic regulations are already being enforced. Women's rights are being destroyed. Burqa's, headscarves, polygamy, female genital mutilation, honour-killings. Women have to go to separate swimming-classes, don't get a handshake. In many European cities there is already apartheid. Jews, in an increasing number, are leaving Europe.

As you undoubtedly all know, better then I do, also in your country the mass immigration and islamization has rapidly increased. This has put an enormous pressure on your British society. Look what is happening in for example Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford and here in London. British politicians who have forgotten about Winston Churchill have now taken the path of least resistance. They have given up. They have given in.

Last year, my party has requested the Dutch government to make a cost-benefit analysis of the mass immigration. But the government refused to give us an answer. Why? Because it is afraid of the truth. The signs are not good. A Dutch weekly magazine - Elsevier - calculated costs to exceed 200 billion Euros. Last year alone, they came with an amount of 13 billion Euros. More calculations have been made in Europe: According to the Danish national bank, every Danish immigrant from an Islamic country is costing the Danish state more than 300 thousand Euros. You see the same in Norway and France. The conclusion that can be drawn from this: Europe is getting more impoverished by the day. More impoverished thanks to mass immigration. More impoverished thanks to demographics. And the leftists are thrilled.

I don't know whether it is true, but in several British newspapers I read that Labour opened the door to mass immigration in a deliberate policy to change the social structures of the UK. Andrew Neather, a former government advisor and speech writer for Tony Blair and Jack Straw, said the aim of Labour's immigration strategy was, and I quote, to "rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date". If this is true, this is symptomatic of the Left.

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: The left is facilitating islamization. Leftists, liberals, are cheering for every new shariah bank being created, for every new shariah mortgage, for every new islamic school, for every new shariah court. Leftists consider Islam as being equal to our own culture. Shariah law or democracy? Islam or freedom? It doesn't really matter to them. But it does matter to us. The entire leftist elite is guilty of practising cultural relativism. Universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians. They are all betraying our hard-won liberties.

Why I ask myself, why have the Leftists and liberals stopped to fight for them? Once the Leftists stood on the barricades for women's rights. But where are they today? Where are they in 2010? They are looking the other way. Because they are addicted to cultural relativism and dependent on the Muslim vote. They are dependent on mass-immigration.

Thank heavens Jacqui Smith isn't in office anymore. It was a victory for free speech that a UK judge brushed aside her decision to refuse me entry to your country last year. I hope that the judges in my home country are at least as wise and will acquit me of all charges, later this year in the Netherlands.

Unfortunately, so far they have not done so well. For they do not want to hear the truth about Islam, nor are they interested to hear the opinion of top class legal experts in the field of freedom of expression. Last month in a preliminary session the Court refused fifteen of the eighteen expert-witnesses I had requested to be summoned.

Only three expert witnesses are allowed to be heard. Fortunately, my dear friend and heroic American psychiatrist dr. Wafa Sultan is one of them. But their testimony will be heard behind closed doors. Apparently the truth about Islam must not be told in public, the truth about Islam must remain secret.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm being prosecuted for my political beliefs. We know political prosecution to exist in countries in the Middle East, like Iran and Saudi-Arabia, but never in Europe, never in the Netherlands.

I'm being prosecuted for comparing the Quran to 'Mein Kampf'. Ridiculous. I wonder if Britain will ever put the beliefs of Winston Churchill on trial... Ladies and gentlemen, the political trial that is held against me has to stop.

But it is not all about me, not about Geert Wilders. Free speech is under attack. Let me give you a few other examples. As you perhaps know, one of my heroes, the Italian author Oriana Fallaci had to live in fear of extradition to Switzerland because of her anti-Islam book 'The Rage and the Pride'. The Dutch cartoonist Nekschot was arrested in his home in Amsterdam by 10 police men because of his anti-Islam drawings. Here in Britain, the American author Rachel Ehrenfeld was sued by a Saudi businessman for defamation. In the Netherlands Ayaan Hirsi Ali and in Australia two Christian pastors were sued. I could go on and on.
Ladies and gentlemen, all throughout the West freedom loving people are facing this ongoing 'legal jihad'. This is Islamic 'lawfare'. And, ladies and gentlemen, not long ago the Danish cartoonist Westergaard was almost assassinated for his cartoons.

Ladies and gentlemen, we should defend the right to freedom of speech. With all our strength. With all our might. Free speech is the most important of our many liberties. Free speech is the cornerstone of our modern societies. Freedom of speech is the breath of our democracy, without freedom of speech our way of life our freedom will be gone.
I believe it is our obligation to preserve the inheritance of the brave young soldiers that stormed the beaches of Normandy. That liberated Europe from tyranny. These heroes cannot have died for nothing. It is our obligation to defend freedom of speech. As George Orwell said: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe in another policy, it is time for change. We must make haste. We can't wait any longer. Time is running out. If I may quote one of my favourite American presidents: Ronald Reagan once said: "We need to act today, to preserve tomorrow". That is why I propose the following measures, I only mention a few, in order to preserve our freedom:

First, we will have to defend freedom of speech. It is the most important of our liberties. In Europe and certainly in the Netherlands, we need something like the American First Amendment.

Second, we will have to end and get rid of cultural relativism. To the cultural relativists, the shariah socialists, I proudly say: Our Western culture is far superior to the Islamic culture. Don't be affraid to say it. You are not a racist when you say that our own culture is better.

Third, we will have to stop mass immigration from Islamic countries. Because more Islam means less freedom.

Fourth, we will have to expel criminal immigrants and, following denaturalisation, we will have to expel criminals with a dual nationality. And there are many of them in my country.

Fifth, we will have to forbid the construction of new mosques. There is enough Islam in Europe. Especially since Christians in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia are mistreated, there should be a mosque building-stop in the West.

And last but not least, we will have to get rid of all those so-called leaders. I said it before: Fewer Chamberlains, more Churchills. Let's elect real leaders.

Ladies and gentlemen. To the previous generation, that of my parents, the word 'London' is synonymous with hope and freedom. When my country was occupied by the national-socialists the BBC offered a daily glimpse of hope in my country, in the darkness of Nazi tyranny. Millions of my fellow country men listened to it, underground. The words 'This is London' were a symbol for a better world coming soon.

What will be broadcasted forty years from now? Will it still be "This is London"? Or will it be "This is Londonistan"? Will it bring us hope? Or will it signal the values of Mecca and Medina? Will Britain offer submission or perseverance? Freedom or slavery? The choice is yours. And in the Netherlands the choice is ours.

Ladies and gentlemen, we will never apologize for being free. We will and should never give in. And, indeed, as one of your former leaders said: We will never surrender.

Freedom must prevail, and freedom will prevail.

Thank you very much.

Hat Tip: Robert Spencer

Americans United for Life

Transparency?

Boiler Plate Reportage

Pom Pom Media singing from the same old hymnal:

The suspect, John Patrick Bedell, was a Bush-hating advocate of the theory that Bush knew of the 9/11 attacks before they occurred and was complicit in them. Extremism, yes, but "right-wing"? But for the Pravda press that is the only kind of extremism that exists or that merits our concern. 

The Jews in Europe

From the London Telegraph, Nick Meo writes from Malmo, Sweden:

When she first arrived in Sweden after her rescue from a Nazi concentration camp, Judith Popinski was treated with great kindness.

She raised a family in the city of Malmo, and for the next six decades lived happily in her adopted homeland - until last year.

In 2009, a chapel serving the city's 700-strong Jewish community was set ablaze. Jewish cemeteries were repeatedly desecrated, worshippers were abused on their way home from prayer, and "Hitler" was mockingly chanted in the streets by masked men.

"I never thought I would see this hatred again in my lifetime, not in Sweden anyway," Mrs Popinski told The Sunday Telegraph.

"This new hatred comes from Muslim immigrants. The Jewish people are afraid now."

Malmo's Jews, however, do not just point the finger at bigoted Muslims and their fellow racists in the country's Neo-Nazi fringe. They also accuse Ilmar Reepalu, the Left-wing mayor who has been in power for 15 years, of failing to protect them.

Mr Reepalu, who is blamed for lax policing, is at the centre of a growing controversy for saying that what the Jews perceive as naked anti-Semitism is in fact just a sad, but understandable consequence of Israeli policy in the Middle East.

While his views are far from unusual on the European liberal-left, which is often accused of a pro-Palestinian bias, his Jewish critics say they encourage young Muslim hotheads to abuse and harass them.

The future looks so bleak that by one estimate, around 30 Jewish families have already left for Stockholm, England or Israel, and more are preparing to go.
With its young people planning new lives elsewhere, the remaining Jewish households, many of whom are made up of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, fear they will soon be gone altogether. Mrs Popinski, an 86-year-old widow, said she has even encountered hostility when invited to talk about the Holocaust in schools.

"Muslim schoolchildren often ignore me now when I talk about my experiences in the camps," she said. "It is because of what their parents tell them about Jews. The hatreds of the Middle East have come to Malmo. Schools in Muslim areas of the city simply won't invite Holocaust survivors to speak any more."

Hate crimes, mainly directed against Jews, doubled last year with Malmo's police recording 79 incidents and admitting that far more probably went unreported. As of yet, no direct attacks on people have been recorded but many Jews believe it is only a matter of time in the current climate.

The city's synagogue has guards and rocket-proof glass in the windows, while the Jewish kindergarten can only be reached through thick steel security doors.

It is a far cry from the city Mrs Popinski arrived in 65 years ago, half-dead from starvation and typhus.

At Auschwitz she had been separated from her Polish family, all of whom were murdered. She escaped the gas chambers after being sent as a slave labourer. Then she was moved to a womens' concentration camp, Ravensbrück, from where she was then evacuated in a release deal negotiated between the Swedish Red Cross and senior Nazis, who were by then trying to save their own lives.

After the war, just as liberal Sweden took in Jews who survived the Holocaust as a humanitarian act, it also took in new waves of refugees from tyranny and conflicts in the Middle East. Muslims are now estimated to make up about a fifth of Malmo's population of nearly 300,000.

"This new hatred from a group 40,000-strong is focused on a small group of Jews," Mrs Popinski said, speaking in a sitting room filled with paintings and Persian carpets.

"Some Swedish politicians are letting them do it, including the mayor. Of course the Muslims have more votes than the Jews."

The worst incident was last year during Israel's brief war in Gaza, when a small demonstration in favour of Israel was attacked by a screaming mob of Arabs and Swedish leftists, who threw bottles and firecrackers as the police looked on.

"I haven't seen hatred like that for decades," Mrs Popinski said. "It reminded me of what I saw in my youth. Jews feel vulnerable here now."

The problem is becoming an embarrassment for the Social Democrats, the mayor's party.

Their national leader Mona Sahlin - the woman who is likely to become the next prime minister after an election later this year - last week travelled to Malmo to meet Jewish leaders, which they took to be a sign that at last politicians are waking to their plight. After the meeting, the mayor, Mr Reepalu, also promised to meet them.

A former architect, he has been credited with revitalising Malmo from a half-derelict shipbuilding centre into a vibrant, prosperous city with successful IT and biotech sectors.

His city was - until recently at least - a shining multicultural success story, and has taken in proportionally more refugees than anywhere else in Sweden, a record of which it is proud.

Sweden has had a long record of offering a safe haven to Jews, the first of whom arrived from the east in the mid-nineteenth century. Today the Jewish population is about 18,000 nationally, with around 3000 in southern Sweden.

The mayor insisted to The Sunday Telegraph that he was opposed to anti-Semitism, but added: "I believe these are anti-Israel attacks, connected to the war in Gaza.

"We want Malmo to be cosmopolitan and safe for everybody and we have taken action. I have started a dialogue forum. There haven't been any attacks on Jewish people, and if Jews from the city want to move to Israel that is not a matter for Malmo."

(Could a public official issue a statement more politically calculated and contemptible than this?) 

Sweden has had a long record of offering a safe haven to Jews, the first of whom arrived from the east in the mid-nineteenth century. Today the Jewish population is about 18,000 nationally, with around 3000 in southern Sweden.

“Jews came to Sweden to get away from persecution, and now they find it is no longer a safe haven,” said Rabbi Shneur Kesselman, 31. “That is a horrible feeling.”

One who has had enough is Marcus Eilenberg, a 32-year-old Malmo-born lawyer, who is moving to Israel in April with his young family.

"Malmo has really changed in the past year," he said. "I am optimistic by nature, but I have no faith in a future here for my children. There is definitely a threat.

"It started during the Gaza war when Jewish demonstrators were attacked. It was a horrible feeling, being attacked in your own city. Just as bad was the realisation that we were not being protected by our own leaders."

Mr Eilenberg said he and his wife considered moving to Stockholm where Jews feel safer than in Malmo. "But we decided not to because in five years time I think it will be just as bad there," he said.

"This is happening all over Europe. I have cousins who are leaving their homes in Amsterdam and France for the same reason as me."

Malmo's Jews are not the only ones to suffer hate crimes.

At the city's Islamic Centre, the director Bejzat Becirov pointed out a bullet hole in the window behind the main reception desk.

Mr Becirov, who arrived in 1962 from the former Yugoslavia, said that windows were regularly smashed, pig's heads had been left outside the mosque, and outbuildings burnt down - probably the acts of Neo-Nazis who have also baited Jews in the past.

He said that the harassment of Jews by some young Muslims was "embarrassing" to his community. Many of them are unemployed and confined to life on bleak estates where the Scandinavian dream of prosperity and equality seemed far away.

For many of Malmo's white Swedish population, meanwhile, the racial problems are bewildering after years of liberal immigration policies.

"I first encountered race hatred when I was an au pair in England and I was shocked," said Mrs Popinski's friend Ulla-Lena Cavling, 72, a retired teacher.

"I thought 'this couldn't happen in Sweden'. Now I know otherwise."

Source: London Telegraph 

The Decline of the West

Philip Rieff insisted that “the therapeutic education of children is a threat to their inner existence.” What Rieff means by “therapeutic” is the presupposition that freedom involves the emancipation from constraining codes of behavior -- what Rieff calls “interdictions,” seen by a “therapeutic” culture, for instance, as the source of neurosis and the bad behavior of those who find these constraints too tedious or too inconvenient or too demeaning to tolerate. Rieff, on the contrary, and in concert with the Judeo-Christian tradition, argues that freedom precisely requires these interdictions, these constraints on instinct. What he calls “the therapeutic” is the spirit of the age which defines freedom as antithetical to the constraint without which the culture will, he persuasively argues, will simply unravel. (Look around.)

It is the case that “the therapeutic education of children is a threat to their inner existence” because interiority, that is, full functioning personhood, is inseparable from self-control, the restraint of instinct. Since constraining sexual instinct is essential to both personal and social life, a society that teaches its children to regard that restraint with contempt is a society in the act of social suicide, a society willing to compound the literal assassination of its unborn children with the spiritual assassination of those children who managed to make it to their adolescent years. 

Just as Rieff argues that “the true, modern, enlightened solution for a rising rate of crime is the redefinition of crime,” so the solution to the breakdown of sexual morality is programs, the putatively unintended but often enough actually intended effect of which is the further breakdown of sexual morality. As Rieff puts it: “transgressive criticism has its own logic: the new evils to be rooted out from our midst are the forms of renunciation themselves. … The problem of evil is thus to be solved by breaking the repressive tyranny of [the] good.”

Here’s an example of how that works: It’s from a Peter Hitchens column in a recent edition of The London Mail Online here:

More sex education means more teenage pregnancies...always

Sex education has failed. So the Establishment decrees that we must have more of it, and in fact that there shall be no escape from it.

What I don’t grasp is why the people of this country put up with so many separate insults to their intelligence in any given week.

And why this particular blatantly obvious sequence comes round year by year and nobody even laughs, let alone draws the correct conclusion.

Despite the casual massacre of unborn babies in the abortion mills, and the free handouts of morning-after pills (originally developed for pedigree dogs which had been consorting improperly with mongrels), and the ready issue of condoms to anyone who asks, and the prescription of contraceptive devices to young girls behind the backs of their parents by smiling advice workers, and the invasion of school classrooms by supposedly educational smut, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy has failed, is failing and will continue to fail.

In the week that figures clearly showed that the Government’s supposed target for cutting teen pregnancy by half is never going to be reached, compulsory smut education – a key part of this ‘strategy’ – was forced on all English schools by law for the first time.

There will be no opt-outs. The new liberal gospel of ‘do what thou wilt – but wear a condom while thou doest it’ will be taught by order of the State.

Some years ago, I wrote a short history of sex education in this country. I didn’t then know about its first invention, during the Hungarian Soviet revolution of 1919, when Education Commissar George Lukacs ordered teachers to instruct children about sex in a deliberate effort to debauch Christian morality.

But what I found was this. That the people who want it are always militant Leftists who loathe conventional family life; that the pretext for it has always been the same – a supposed effort to reduce teen pregnancy and sexual disease; and that it has always been followed by the exact opposite.

It was introduced into schools against much parental resistance during the early Fifties. And, yes, the more of it there was, the more under-age and extramarital sex there seemed to be.

By 1963, in Norwich, parents were told that their young were to be instructed in sexual matters because the illegitimacy rate in that fine city had reached an alarming 7.7 per cent (compared with a national rate of 5.9 per cent). The national rate is now 46 per cent and climbing, so that was obviously a success, wasn’t it?

Well, yes it was, because the people who force these peculiar classes on our young are lying about their aims. You can see why.

Most of us, in any other circumstance, would be highly suspicious of adults who wanted to talk about sex to other people’s children.

But by this sleight of hand – that they are somehow being protected from disease and unwanted pregnancy – we are tricked into permitting it.

And our civilised society goes swirling down the plughole of moral chaos.

I’m on the road in Wyoming, posting only irregularly. I invite my friends who make this blog far more interesting than I do to have at this one.

Industrial-Scale Depravity

This from a fairly recent Mark Steyn comment on the National Review Online blog, The Corner.

A new book, Message From An Unknown Chinese Mother by Xinran, sheds some light on what happens to those girls who aren't aborted.

She had lived and worked almost her entire life in orphanages, and told Xinran that little girls sometimes arrived there with scars between their legs. Oil lamps or candles had burned them.

'The first thing the village midwives did when the baby was born was not to clear its airway but to check [by the light of the lamp or candle] whether it was a boy or girl, because that was what the family wanted to hear. Some of the burns were on the baby’s private parts…'

When state-of-the-art totalitarianism meets primitive village culture, the result is industrial-scale depravity. These are the words of a young Chinese female university graduate:

Mother love is supposed to be such a great thing, but so many babies are abandoned, and it’s their mothers who do it. They’re ignorant. They feel differently about emotions from the way you do. Where I come from, people talk about smothering a baby girl or just throwing it[!]into a stream … to be eaten by dogs, as if it were a joke. How much do you think these women loved their babies?

The idea that there are peoples who "feel differently" is anathema to the multicultural mind. It's why it cannot comprehend why Minnesota's "Somali-Americans" (heavy on the former, all but weightless on the latter) return to the Horn of Africa for jihad. And why even the Pantybomber's intended victims think that everything would have been swell if they could have just sat down with him and talked about his feelings.

For the most part the West’s comparable industrial-scale depravity is gender-neutral and performed by educated technicians so besotted on steroid rationalism that they are able to rationalize their savagery, carried out as it is in a contrived, stainless steel, faux-medical atmosphere.

Source: here.