Barrel Strength

I have read Robert Fisk on the subject – and reality – of honour killings. His research is exhaustive and he minces no words. “The crimewave that shames the world” may be too strong, because I am not ashamed by other people’s behaviour for whom I take no responsibility, but it surely shames the tribal people who engage in it.

The left will mount the expected disinformation campaign to confuse people that “honour killings” are just a general part of violence against women, the cure for which is greater social intervention in private lives by police and the ‘caring’ professions, plus more social spending on the same client groups.

The appeal in the Shafia case will attempt to throw sand in everyone’s eyes in this regard, seeking to de-legitimate the analysis of honour killing.

Aisha Gill, in the Guardian, writes the following confused nonsense, which will be a template for the Left to avoid the issue of Islam:

“Yet, by focusing on the subject of honour, such violence is too often explained away by cultural stereotypes – allowing society to dismiss these cases as something that only happens in minority communities with their “outdated” notions of justice. This allows us to completely overlook that, first and foremost, these cases are of violence against women, and the concept of honour is being used to legitimate the continued oppression of women.”

The two ideas are perfectly consistent. We are completely aware that the vast majority of honour crimes are Muslim in origin, followed by Hindus enforcing caste sensitivities. This is not a “stereotype”; this is an observation of fact. And yes, we are completely aware that these murders are intended to control women and prevent them from marrying whom they love or choose.

She goes on:

There is a tendency in the west to see so-called honour killings as exclusively related to specific cultural traditions. [Yes, we do, because they are] They are often depicted as culturally specific to Muslim communities although they are not, in fact, restricted to any particular religion, culture, type of society or social stratum[The lack of restriction does not affect the fact that they are disproportionately committed by Muslims] In its report on harmful practices, for instance, the charity Imkaan reported a case of a Traveller woman forced to leave her community due to “honour-based violence”.

Now watch the sand being thrown in your eyes in what follows:

“Yet there is a widespread belief that honour is no longer as important in western societies, what with their emphasis on individual rights and legality. However, the modern-day importance of “honour” should not be so quickly cast aside. In the UK data from the British Crime Survey 2009/2010 suggests that nearly a million women experience at least one incident of domestic abuse each year, while close to 10,000 women are sexually assaulted every week – how many of these cases relate to the “honour” of the perpetrators being allegedly besmirched by victims and survivors?” [You do it too, you nasty white people!]

Merely by asking a fatuous question does not turn interpersonal violence, even male-female violence,  into a culturally approved tradition of killing daughters who consort with males in any way before marriage. Honour killing is the enforcement of the idea that the penalty for unchastity is gruesome death of the daughters, sisters, or other females relatives,even if the unchastity was involuntary, such as rape, especially incestuous rape. Further, these killings are approved by other female members of the family. The last honour killings in Western societies died out in the 1840s, and they were called duels, exclusively fought by successful males of equal rank in formalized contests of bravery.

Watch how  Aisha Gill’s specious analysis shifts the blame from tribalism and Islam to feminism in the following:

“Tackling “honour” killings requires a shift in political thinking. Instead of regarding them as a cultural tradition common to a range of “backward” societies, the issue needs to be seen in the context of violence against women and the inequality found throughout society.

Instead of soft-pedalling the Islamic, Hindu and tribal nature of the phenomenon, let us call it by its true name: barbarism. Why are we importing these people?

Last night, Christmas Eve, is one of the most significant occasions in our faith. My wife and I walked to the nearest Anglican Church. Picture the scene: a lovely wood-panelled modernist church, with a well-trained choir and  a good organist. So far so good, but 70 people in a place that could have held 150 without difficulty. Uh oh…and soon the reason became apparent: a complete dolt for a clergyman. He gave a sermon replete with references to the Grinch, Snoopy and the Red Baron, and told us to go out there and love one another like the coach saying go out there and win one for the Gipper.

This was called a “traditional Anglican service”. Our rector was using one of the newer services from the Book of Alternative Services, the kind for which the responses are in tunes no one yet knows how to sing. It was so banal, so suburban, so second rate I felt I had dropped through the floor into a mixed-sex scout pack in the basement.

I thought to myself, a few minutes of research on the Internet would result in any number of magnificent sermons on the incarnation.

Google “sermons on the birth of Christ”. If too many Baptist sermons appear, google “Anglican sermons on the birth of Christ”. Or try “sermons on the incarnation”.

Here is one:

If I had heard something like this…..

The first thing we must always remember, my dear friends, is this: He became man because God the Father loved the world. We must never tone down the love of God. We certainly live today in a very wicked world. We live today in a lawless and godless world – all of that is true. You and I both believe it is so and we weep over the fact. Let us remember, however, that this is the world that ‘God so loved’ and to which ‘He gave His Son’ (John 3, 16). O, what a strange and wonderful miracle! No other miracle faintly resembles this miracle: that the Son of God, being eternally divine, should take to Himself our nature – and it was done in love. We owe it to sinners round about us to love them though they stone us to death for telling them the truth. We owe it to sinners to witness to them and to tell them of the love of God. The elect will hear it even though the rest will be hardened.

….I would have thought my money well spent.

The Anglican Church, I sigh for it.

Admirers of Blade Runner, Total Recall, Johnny Mnemonic will find this article on Philip K. Dick of great interest. It appears that Dick had a full-fledged mystical experience in 1974.This experience is the subject of his last writing, gathered in the Exegisis of Philip K. Dick. 

A review of the book on the amazon.co.uk site by Paracelsus says:

“Anyone who has read VALIS will know that Dick speaks about a very vague purpose hidden far beyond the words of his stories. It is that ‘vague purpose’ which is here laid bare, in its fullest and richest brilliance, in the author’s most personal and undiluted expression. Do not expect to read an average ‘journal’, scraps of notes, or even ’science fiction’ — be prepared for a deep and exacting examination of Logos and Mind, Christ and Sophia; the philosophies of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Iamblichus; the Gnosticism of Thomas and Valentinus, and much more besides that will threaten or inspire you, if you can even begin to understand it. “

Andrew McKie, writing in the Spectator Arts Blog, says Dick:

“maintained that, in 1974, he had received a message from God telling him the modern world was a fraud, a simulacrum laid over a reality that had not changed since the first century AD. He understood, or came to understand as he wrote about his experience, that this might be a delusion, and that it might be understood as a metaphor – but, uncomfortably for modern sensibilities, only in the way that St Paul or St John the Divine might have been regarded as deluded, or that the Gospels should be read only metaphorically.

“Dick’s theology, though not quite orthodox, is not noticeably more odd or problematic than that of Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena or St John of the Cross. He came, in his last years, to worship as an Episcopalian, and I imagine he’d have been happiest as a liberal Anglo-Catholic in the C of E.”

It’s official. The Roman Church just confirmed every dark thought that every ranting protestant has ever had about the dark schemes of the Vatican.

The Pontifical Office for Justice and Peace has issued a memorandum calling for world goverment.

The proposals are to:
1. Strengthen the United Nations on the way to world government, and make its decisions mandatory.
2. Set up a world bank capable of global monetary management.

The report says:

“A supranational Authority of this kind should have a realistic structure and be set up gradually. It should be favourable to the existence of efficient and effective monetary and financial systems; that is, free and stable markets overseen by a suitable legal framework, well-functioning in support of sustainable development and social progress of all, and inspired by the values of charity and truth. It is a matter of an Authority with a global reach that cannot be imposed by force, coercion or violence, but should be the outcome of a free and shared agreement and a reflection of the permanent and historic needs of the world common good.”

“However, a long road still needs to be travelled before arriving at the creation of a public Authority with universal jurisdiction. It would seem logical for the reform process to proceed with the United Nations as its reference because of the worldwide scope of its responsibilities, its ability to bring together the nations of the world, and the diversity of its tasks and those of its specialized Agencies.The fruit of such reforms ought to be a greater ability to adopt policies and choices that are binding because they are aimed at achieving the common good on the local, regional and world levels.”

The report calls for the progressive surrender of state sovereignty to regional and global authorities.

“So conditions exist for definitively going beyond a ‘Westphalian’ international order in which the States feel the need for cooperation but do not seize the opportunity to integrate their respective sovereignties for the common good of peoples.It is the task of today’s generation to recognize and consciously to accept these new world dynamics for the achievement of a universal common good. Of course, this transformation will be made at the cost of a gradual, balanced transfer of a part of each nation’s powers to a world Authority and to regional Authorities, but this is necessary at a time when the dynamism of human society and the economy and the progress of technology are transcending borders, which are in fact already very eroded in a globalized world.”

On the new world banking authority:

“Specific attention should be paid to the reform of the international monetary system and, in particular, the commitment to create some form of global monetary management, something that is already implicit in the Statutes of the International Monetary Fund. It is obvious that to some extent this is equivalent to putting the existing exchange systems up for discussion in order to find effective means of coordination and supervision. This process must also involve the emerging and developing countries in defining the stages of a gradual adaptation of the existing instruments.In fact, one can see an emerging requirement for a body that will carry out the functions of a kind of “central world bank” that regulates the flow and system of monetary exchanges similar to the national central banks.”

And will a central world army enforce the decisions?

It is clear that no one has been reading a newspaper in the Vatican lately. Have they noticed the European debt crisis cannot be fixed while retaining a common currency, but rather that the solution lies in having currencies that reflect the productivity of many different peoples?

But the proposals for world government imply a world of saints, and depend on virtues nowhwere evident in the common run of humanity.

It is interesting to observe the relatively complete silence with which these proposals have sunk from sight. A decent impulse may be at work here to spare the Vatican from the kind of croticism that would befall a more worldly body. David Warren would be appalled at these proposals, and I would welcome his intervention.

Beyond the misestimation of the virtues of the human species involved in these proposals, a deeper error is being made. Concentrating decision-making at one central agency, rather than at the lowest possible level – which is the usual Catholic position on political decision-making – ensures that when the world government is in error, it will larger and more difficult to recover from. Imagine what such a body would already have done with anthropegenic global warming.

Someone in the Vatican needs to read Naseem Nicholas Taleb’s “The Black Swan“. Since error is inevitable, institutions have to be made more robust against the effects of the unforeseeable.

So it is time to hear from David Warren, Canada’s arch-Catholic. What do you think of this nonsense, David?

Do you think a man as clever as Benedict XVI actually believes this stuff? Did he want to get in ahead of the occupy Wall Street crowd? Does he want to promote the African cardinal who heads the office which produced this claptrap?

I was talking with Rebel Yell the other day about life and perception. In one of his typical flashes of insight, he pointed out that what was before our eyes was all there is. All the rest is inference from perceptions and memories, including both belief in a god and disbelief in a god. There is no ontological basis for the view that atheism is a superior viewpoint, therefore.

David Stove is my philosophical hero. His work is trenchant, profound, anti-leftist, and surprisingly funny. He was, alas, an atheist, not of the Dawkins type -militantly intolerant – but a convinced atheist nonetheless. As a Christian I have very little sympathy for the atheistical interpretation of life. It often seems to forget it is merely an interpretation, rather than a proven reality. We believers know that we believe, rather than know, that some kind of superintending being has created this universe, and every other imaginable. Atheists seem to forget that there is no evidence whatever for the absence of God apart from one’s interpretation of events, and that one’s interpretaion is itself a choice, rather than a demonstrable fact.

Consequently it is consistent with my view of life that Stove fell apart when faced with his own death. I am not claiming that I have any superior virtue or courage than Stove. I merely believe that I am endowed with a soul which somehow survives death, and even if I do not, I am still very grateful for my time on earth.

Here is a portion of his obituary:

“As a teacher, he again drew mixed reactions. If average students found him unexciting, the better ones delighted in him. His students were, on the whole, less concerned than his colleagues by the extremity of some of his opinions. He showed that the range of what could reasonably be thought was wider than one had imagined; at his best, logical consequence could seem putty in his hands.

“He gave permission, so to speak, to think outside the mainstream – if reasons for doing so could be found. Through his encouragement a generation of students found their own voices. His tolerance of views other than his own (if well argued) was more genuine than that of many thinkers who proclaimed tolerance as a principle.

“Of all modern enthusiasms, perhaps the only one he had sympathy with was conservation. He greatly admired those who had preserved stretches of the NSW coastal bush from development. At his Mulgoa property, he planted trees and enjoyed the calming pleasure of cricket, baroque music, old books and especially his family. He died there, after suffering the effects of cancer treatment for some months.”

An appreciation of his life and work was published by Roger Kimball, and is worth a read.

Here is a quote from Kimball’s appreciation of David Stove:

“Impressed by the snippets that Mr. Windschuttle quoted—and by the arguments that he recapitulated—I scared up a copy of the book[Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists]. It was a revelation. With a combination of dazzling philosophical acumen and scarifying wit, Stove does for irrationalism in Karl Popper’s philosophy of science (and that of such heirs as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend) what the Romans did for Carthage in the Third Punic War: he assaults and destroys it utterly. It had been a long time since I had read a book of philosophy as entertaining and illuminating as Popper and After. An Australian friend to whom I mentioned my enthusiasm recommended Darwinian Fairytales, Stove’s posthumously published attack on the absurdities of Darwinism, especially as it was applied to human beings. I found Darwinian Fairytales every bit as absorbing as Popper and After: an invigorating blend of analytic lucidity, mordant humor, and an amount of common sense too great to be called “common.” Once I started it, I could hardly put it down. But who, I wondered, was David Stove? How had his work escaped me all these years?”

Everybody (except me of course) is professing shock and dismay at the deliberate ignoring of the little Chinese girl, hurt and lying in the road.

You do not have to read a book on Chinese culture to realize that, apart from family, the Chinese have no extended civic relations to each other.

Nor are they, in the main, Christians, so there is no cultural commadment to love and care for one another.

They are a highly atomized society, the result of centuries of arbitrary state power crushing or preventing civic voluntary associations. Read Francis Fukuyama’s Trust, and all will be explained.

So this behaviour is not new, it is old, and it is very Chinese.

People really need to link two and two to get four. They need to link what they see of first-generation Chinese immigrants to what the Chinese people are like. In short, to act on the truth of stereotypes.

I once sat in the back of a taxi driven by a Caribbean black man through Toronto’s Chinatown. A car driven by a Chinese driver pulled out suddenly and without looking into traffic, nearly causing an accident. Broaching the subject of racial or cultural differences with a black man might have been indelicate, but I went ahead anyway.

“You see that? What an idiot”

“I see that all the time, man.”

“Uh, do you notice that Chinese drivers are really bad?”

“Terrible. Worst drivers in Toronto!”

So it is not just us white people who find first generation Chinese to be almost totally oblivious to their surroundings. They are oblivious, and it is my observation that they have been trained from birth not to notice what goes on around them. There is no assumption of community with their surroundings in China, why should we expect them to assume community responsibility here? The cultural assumptions it takes to produce western societies go very deep, and these have to be inculcated from birth.

This is yet aother instance of the untruth of multiculturalism. Ignoring babies lying in traffic is their culture, and always has been.

They are not going to learn any different unless we tell them that these are the values of this society and exemplify them in our own behaviour.

Melanie Philips describes the modern situation of valueless Britain.

“This is absolutely catastrophic.”

Gramscian versus Stalinist forms of Islam.

Brian Topp’s argument in favour of recognition of Palestinian statehood in the Globe today drew some mad comments in support. Clearly the man can write and speak calmly, even if, I would argue, wrongly.

Please, o fellow conservatives and moderates, savor the comments in the Globe on Mr. Topps’ views, a selection of which follow, selected for looniness.

#1. “Nice – an opinion based on logic, facts, and rational thinking instead of the Rapture Mythology and Christofascist fundamentalism of THE HARPER GOVERNMENT”.

#2. “Conservatives are generally war mongers. Compromise and cooperation are not in their vocabulary. It’s their way or a gun barrel. Winning on their terms is all that matters to them – not the greater good.”

#3. “Jews, Christians and Muslims lived peacefully together in what was known as Palestine. Than it became Israel and we have had trouble ever since.

“Canada should support a Single state solution where all people have an equal vote and equal rights.

“Enough with the Zionist agenda under which the Israeli economy experiences its greatest economic growth during times of conflict…yes, look at the performance of Israel’s economy and you will find that war is good.

“The Palestinians lands belong to all people of the books. But the Zionist will never allow for democracy as apartheid is there way forward and Harper’s.”

It would be educational for commenter #3 to read Bat Ye’or on the fate of Christians in Muslim lands. I think only the jews have fared worse.

In the meantime I shall entertain myself by repeating “Christofascist fundamentalism of the Harper government” the next time I meet Canada’s foreign minister at elite galas.

On second thought, perhaps not.

A fine article in First Things, the Roman Catholic  magazine, by R.R.Reno, deftly sketches some relevant aspects of liberal and conservative, especially the parochial smugness of the convinced liberal. I am sure you have met them.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/07/the-cosmopolitan-conservative

“Although liberals like to think that those who remain conservative have somehow evaded or insulated themselves from these challenges, the reality is that conservatives have participated in modernity just as fully.”

“Judge or referee, therapist or manager, the liberal governs from above. This distance—the conviction that liberalism has somehow transcended the nitty-gritty of substantive debate and attained a higher outlook—is what allows the old-fashioned rationalists like Steven Pinker to ally themselves with postmodern skeptics in the liberal establishment. The liberal maintains his distance, exempting himself (or imagining himself exempted) from the agonies of the always morally, metaphysically, and religiously fraught content of important human interactions. It’s this insulating distance, along with a therapeutic understanding of those below them, that encourages unwarranted feelings of superiority. The liberal does not see the conservative as a man or woman with ideas and convictions to be engaged but as a person with prejudices and interests to be diagnosed and treated.”

First Things should be added to your conservative bloglist. You may not be a Roman Catholic, but I frequently find that Catholics are firm on some vital issues. Often to read them is to reinforce one’s intuitions and beliefs with sober and profound reasoning.

…that book should be Robert Reilly’s “The Closing of the Muslim Mind”. It is precise, well-written, soundly justified, and terrifying. He says in essence, that the Arab world needs Aristotle even more than it needs Jesus because, until you can think straight, you cannot perceive your problems accurately. Until you are enabled to think, you are lost. Philosophy is the answer. Turn your back on it, and intellectual decline is inevitable. Which is the case of the islamic world for the past thousand years.

When the Muslims took over the better part of the eastern Mediterranean, they inherited the Greek-speaking portion of what remianed of the Roman Empire. The major seats of Christianity included Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in what is now Turkey, Byzantium, and Rome. The world they inherited was both prosperous and infused with Greek thought, which was based in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Antioch and Alexandria, two of the four major patriarchates of Christianity fell to Islam, to be joined later by Byzantium in 1453AD.

Around the year 1000AD, a school of thought arose in Islam called the Mu’tazilites. They were Islam’s response to this Greek (Hellene) philosophical tradition. They sought to subject the Quran to the kind of dissection that rational minds engage in. Was the Quran coeval with Allah, as the theologians pretended? Had it existed before all time in the Mind of God? Questions such as these and others were asked and answered, and the theologians were not amused. Fortunately for the philosphers, they had the support of the then Caliph.

Against this philosophizing tendency – which tends to subject revelation to the rules of evidence and reason- arose the great analyst and philosopher Al-Ghazali, who rejected every premise of philosophy in his magisterial work, “The Incoherence of Philosophy”. His influence throughout the Islamic world was as pervasive and powerful in its way as Aristotle has been on ours, and it was wholly negative.

 Essentially al-Ghazali denounced Aristotle and Plato as un-Islamic, and advanced a theory of causality which eliminated all secondary causes. What this meant was that God was directly responsible for everything. By everything I mean every thing, action, appearance, event and manifestation was directly caused by God. No secondary causes exist.  No law of gravity. No three laws of thermodynamics. Nothing. God maintains the world not by law, but by his habit, and nothing constrains him to sustain it or from destroying at any given pico-second.

Thus an arrow shot from a bow did not move according to laws of gravity and aerodynamics, but by God’s absolute will.

Al-Ghazali argued that our reason could not know the world and that God was not reason. God was will, absolutely separate from his creation. God’s absolute independence of his creation could not be diminished in any way. Thus, in the Islamic doctrine, God implanted no part of Himself in human nature, whereas the Jews and Christians believe that they were made in God’s image. The reason we can know the universe or anything in it is that we partake somehow and somewhat of this divine nature. Western science, which is an outgrowth of Christianity,  rests on the belief that the laws of nature exist and are rationally apprehensible.

In the Christian tradition God was the Logos itself – the reason behind the world’s appearances. You may recall the opening of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was that Word. All things were made by it, and without it was nothing made that was made.” “Word” is the inadequate translation of the Greek Logos, which connotes inner logical order.

And further on in the same paragraph, John records: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt aomong us, and we saw the glory of it”.

These two ideas, of man being made in God’s image, and that God was Logos itself, are so deeply embedded in our thought that it is difficult for us to see how they operate. In that sense, Islam gives us clearest picture of what happens to society when different ideas of God, nature and the human capacity for knowledge prevail.

The argument made by Robert Reilly is that al-Ghazali was altogether too influential. For whatever reason, al-Ghazali’s ideas on the incoherence of philosophy, the inadequacy of human reason to understand the world, and the unknowability of God except through revelation, have had a huge, continuing and debilitating effect on Islamic society.

If nature depends immediately on God’s will, why inquire into anything? Indeed, inquiry verges on heresy, disrespect for the Almighty. Everything is “Inshallah” – as God wills. Inquiry is either blasphemous, heretical, or both.

And we ourselves become playthings, motes of dust in the divine whirlwind, rather than actors with moral responsibility. If God directs everything, then there is no standpoint from which man can act independently of God’s will. We cannot reproach God with anything, nor can we act independently of God’s will, and so have things for which we should repent. We are not actors. We are phantasms.

If God is pure will, rather than reason and love, then when humans model themselves on the divine attribute, they model the behaviour that is seen as divine. In the Islamic case, that is pure willfulness, that aspect of man that is like the Divine Essence.

In 2006 I coined the term Allah’s holodeck. This was my intuitive realization that, for the devout Muslim, they experienced themselves as directly moved by God. Thus,  if they robbed a bank and killed the guards, that was as God willed. The only religious  issue was whether they would still be sweating from exertion or fear when they thanked God after the bank robbery, and that issue  of propriety would be decided by shari’a, not by any innate moral sense or reasoning from first principles.

Reilly’s indictment of the baneful effect of Ghazali deserves your attention. He draws direct links between the disparagement of reason by al-Ghazali and the increasing stultification of the Muslim mind, which has been going on for a thousand years.

The UN’s human development report of 2002, written by Arabs themselves, shows the truly dreadful lack of education, publishing, translation, economic development, patents, and intellectual life generally in Arab Islamic lands. The fact that 4 million Finns produce more goods and services than 80 million Arabs is the consequence of the disparagement of reason that al-Ghazali justified.

The  full text of the Arab Human Development Report of 2002 is here.

Reilly cites an expert on Islam who says that “Islamic fundamentalism is not a solution, it is the cry of despair that that the lack of solution is no longer tolerable”.

Reilly’s argument, which I find wholly persuasive, is that the root of  Sunni Islamic problems in the present day is theological and epistemological: meaning, ideas about God and the capacity for knowledge.  They are deep rooted in the triumph of a philosopher who renounced philosophy a thousand years ago, and the society that accepted his views as definitive.

Hats off to the indispensible Vlad Tepes. Mass migration of you know who.

In today’s sermon, I want to link two epochal events in recent history: the outrage directed at Soviet defectors and ex-communists in the West by large sections of left-leaning society in the 1940s and 50s, and the general undiscussability of what Islam really is in our own time. 

From Geert Wilders’ speech in Rome on March 25, 2011.
 

“Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: Our opponents are keenly aware of our weakness. They realize that the pattern which led to the fall of Rome, is at play today in the West. They are keenly aware of the importance of Rome as a symbol of the West. Over and over again they hint at the fall of Rome. Rome is constantly on their minds.

• The former Turkish Prime Minister Erbakan said – I quote: “The whole of Europe will become Islamic. We will conquer Rome”.
• Yunis al-Astal, a Hamas cleric and member of the Palestinian Parliament said – I quote: “Very soon Rome will be conquered.”
• Ali Al-Faqir, the former Jordanian Minister of Religion,  stated that – I quote: “Islam will conquer Rome.”
• Sheikh Muhammad al-Arifi, imam of the mosque of the Saudi Defence Academy, said – I quote: “We will control Rome and introduce Islam in it.”

“Our opponents are hoping for an event that is akin to the freezing of the Rhine in 406, when thousands of immigrants will be given an easy opportunity to cross massively into the West.

• In a 1974 speech to the UN, the Algerian President Houari Boumédienne, said – I quote: “One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.” End of quote.
• Libyan dictator Kadhafi said, I quote: “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.

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Anytime you want you can read the latest Islamic outrage in Vlad Tepes, that most valuable blog.

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The incredulity and hostility with which alarmists about Islam are treated today and the incredulity with which Soviet defectors and ex-communists were greeted in the 1940s and 50s is that both were telling Western society that something they deeply believed in was just not true.

1. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship where millions were being enslaved and murdered as a deliberate tool of state policy.
2. Multiculturalism is predicated on the equality of cultures, and of nations and peoples as bearers of that culture. This idea is manifestly rubbish.

When people are invested in a lie, and when state power is used to support that lie, they react with hostility to any evidence that would undermine their world view. Mostly that evidence consists of people brave enough to stand up in public and declare it a lie. Ayaan Hirsi Ali being ridiculed on television by the despicable Avi Lewis of Al Jazeera comes to mind.

I am currently reading a fascinating book – aren’t they all? – called The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that shaped the Cold War by John V. Fleming, Professor Emeritus of Literature at Princeton University. These books, Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, Out of the Night, by Richard Krebs, I Chose Freedom, by Viktor Marchenko, and Witness, by Whittaker Chambers, all told a tale that was simply not believable to the bien-pensants of their time, and yet was absolutely true.

1. The the whole of the  Soviet Union was a vast prison where people oculd be sent to even more stringent internal prisons by police fiat.

2. That most of its industrial growth was predicated on slave labour.

3. That it maintained an intense effort to subvert western organs of society generally, and that all Soviet presence in the West was a front for Soviet espionage and subversion.

4. That Stalin’s policies were resulting in the deliberate extermination of national minorities within the Soviet Union.

5. That thousands of Western sympathizers were engaged in deliberate acts of treason on behalf of the Soviet Union in governments, trade unions, publishing houses, scientific laboratories, indeed anywhere they could.

All of this has been established by the library of the KGB itself, and if you should ever want to delve into the period of the 1930s and 40s you can avail yourself of the Mitrokhin Archives. Major Vasilii Mitrokhin was the last archivist of the KGB under the old regime. For years he simply took home documents and copied them. The resulting book shows that the most far fetched rantings of the John Birch society were exactly true. There was a vast soviet conspiracy and many Americans were in on it, proudly. A great deal of the bitterness of the McCarthy period could have been avoided if the American establishment had not been so monstrously naive about Soviet intentions.

The Western idea challenged by Islam is multiculturalism, the doctrine which has been shoved down your children’s throats at school, propagated by organs of state, and used to blunt any rational and moral critique of non-western behaviours. It is the tool that has been used to soften up and disempower all the anti-bodies that let ordinary people say “enough is enough”.

Islam is too alien to the secular humanist to be discussable, or really conceivable. But conservatives they can spot a mile away. When you have had one too many conversations with dutch leftists actually maintaining that Christianity is as much a threat to their national institutions as Islam, you know that they are too far gone into error and wilful blindness to see.

In its day the socialist ideal was upheld by police states, enormous armies and nuclear weapons, and by broad infiltration of western society by communists and fellow travellers. In respect of Islam, it is important to note the differences, yes, but it is at least as important to note the similarities.

In that sense, in relation to Islam, we are in the equivalent of the 1930s and 40s.

The big debate that grew up in the 1920s and continues to this day is whether we are permitted to speak of a reality beyond what is picked up by our instruments,  or whether we are confined to speak only of observations through instruments. The principal protagonist of the new way of seeing things was Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, and in his camp were most of the leading physicists of his day, including Werner Heisenberg (of the uncertainty principle) and Wolfgang Pauli (author of the phrase “not even wrong!”). Ranged against them was the great Einstein himself who, for reasons of his own philosophical/religious preference, was unable to accept that quantum physics was a complete description of reality. Right as far as it goes, but incomplete.

The chief point of what came to be called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics was the role of the observer in formulating the experiement. Set up the experiment one way, and you see a particle, set up another experiment another way, and the same “particle” appears as a wave.

That the mind of the designer of the experiment should influence the outcome this way is intolerable to many who think about it. Einstein was the first and most important of physicists to reject the Copenhagen intepretation as incomplete (not incorrect, just not the complete description of reality) on the basis of a philosophical preference for realism.

In the years since the Einstein-Bohr debate, the general view has been that the Copenhagen interpretation has been successful. The experiments conducted to prove or disprove Bell’s inequality theorem have shown results consistent with the ideas inherent in the Copenhagen interpretation.

But here’s the problem, for some. You may recall Schrodinger’s cat, the creature who lies dead in the box simultaneously with being alive in the box. Schrodinger used his cat as a thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that, until the obervation is made, the probability of it being alive or dead is not determined. Its probability of being either alive or dead”collapses” into a definite observation when the observation is made, and not before. In physics they call this act of observation “collapsing the wave function”.

Physics gained something enormous with quantum theory, but it placed a new god (or God) at the centre by enthroning the act of observation. It dumped materialism – the doctrine that there is only matter and its motions -over the edge of the universe into oblivion. Now mind is at the core of physics. Observation is inextricably linked to the interplay of “material” particles. Observation is the characteritic of mind. Mind therefore enters as a fundamental constiuent of the material universe.

[As a brief aside, it is evident that the biological theorists have yet to come to grips with the philosophical implications of quantum physics. Dawkins take note.]

Once you dump materialism over the edge, you face a certain problem: God.

Quoting from Manjit Kumar’s “Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great debate about the nature of Reality”,

“The Copenhagen interpretation requires an observer outside of the universe to observe it, but since there is none – leaving God aside – the universe should never come into existence but remain forever a superposition of many possibilities”.

Since the world has come into being, the only way to get around the supercosmic observer summoning it forth (as in “I’ll see you to the door”) is to take refuge in the many worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett., published in 1957.

Every time there is a different observation, the universe keeps splitting into one where Schrodinger’s cat lives and another where it dies. It seems absurd at first that one should take refuge in many worlds rather than accept a deity who observes the universe into being, until you think about what the Copenhagen interpretation really does to liberate the universe from the primacy of matter. Once matter no longer matters, so to speak, what limit is there in principle on the generation of as many worlds as observers may contrive with thought alone?

Nothing new is being said here by Sibley; what matters is that for the first time, in a major Canadian newspaper, the house intellectual is giving us some straight talk about the sources of the Islamic crisis in the suppression of reason centuries ago. He is also suggesting, for those with eyes to see, that Muslims cannot adapt to the liberal political order.

“Islamism is grounded in a spiritual pathology based upon a theological deformation that has produced a dysfunctional culture,” argues political scientist Robert Reilly in a newly published book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. Mainstream Sunni Islam, which comprises the majority of the faithful in the Muslim world, “has shut the door to reality in a profound way.” This, says Reilly, is the consequence of Islam’s long suppression of reason in favour of religious dogmatism.

Reilly refers to the abandonment of scientific thinking as the “Dehellenization” of Islam. Islam was eventually dominated by those who thought like al-Ghazali. They held that the Koran contained Allah’s direct speech. And, because Allah’s will and action is unlimited, the Koran, as his eternal word, must apply to all times and places. There is no need to look elsewhere in responding to the human condition, regardless of changing circumstances. Since Allah is the first cause of everything, there is no need to look for secondary causes; that is to say, no need to use reason to understand nature’s laws, and, therefore, no need for science.

Reason and revelation must exist is balance. The crisis of Islam is rooted on the suppression of reason itself, which is one of the two pillars of the balanced life. The crisis of western liberal society, as I read it, lies in the suppression and deligitimization of revelation as the other  source of life-ordering power.

Having spoken enough to militantly anti-Christian leftists, I am persuaded that the current crisis of confidence in western societies is directly rooted on the suppression of revelation. Otherwise they would not need speech codes and “human rights: commissions to police the social order. Between the Muslims and the anti-Christian left, we have nothing to choose. They are both spiritual pathologies.

The “I am not Ashamed” manifesto, from the Archbishop of Canterbury. It reads in part:

This attempt to ‘air-brush’ the Christian Faith out of the picture is especially obvious as Christmas approaches. The cards that used to carry Christmas wishes now bear ‘Season’s greetings’. The local school nativity play is watered down or disappears altogether. The local council switches on ‘Winter lights’ in place of Christmas decorations. Even Christmas has become something of which some are ashamed.

So, it appears that flowing from a combination of well-meaning political correctness, multiculturalism and overt opposition to Christianity, a new climate, hostile to our country’s tradition and history, is developing.
Yet in the last census, 72% identified themselves as Christians. Millions continue to go to church regularly. Parents flock to church schools, knowing that their children are likely to get the best education in an environment with a caring, Christian ethos. Churches and Christian charities continue to provide desperately needed services in every community in the country.

The Church is far from dead but is definitely under attack.  these might have had greater force in 1975 than 2010.

1. Good for you, for finally admitting the obvious.

2. Would this not have had more moral force if it had been said continually since 1975?

3. And maybe the Queen can take note that her Church and her faith is under sustained leftist and Islamic attack.