Barrel Strength

Like a lot of people these days, I support and have supported the Conservatives in their efforts to get control of the country wrested away from the Liberals. Am I a conservative? Frankly, it is not a question I much bother with. Other people find me conservative, but if someone told me I was a moderate liberal, I might accept the term, depending on what they meant.

What I want is an end to the hysteria, Stalinism, group rights, suppression of free speech, oppression of the ordinary person, oppression of the gun-owner, oppression of the store-owner, oppression of the ordinary citizen of all races and colours against the depredations of the indigent, the mad, the over-privileged mascot groups of the Left, the police – yes, the police – the do-gooders, the thugs, the professional protest groups, and the damage done by the chattering classes who undermine society like termites.

This is why I read with some sympathy an article by Barry Rubin in Pajamas Media about the distinction between liberals, as he describes them, and the left.

“You shouldn’t have to be a conservative to be horrified by the contemporary situation. But while conservatives and Republican are going to lead the opposition to the status quo, they should seek to build a broad front rather than wage a campaign against historical liberals.”

Historical liberals include people like Teddy Roosevelt, in that definition.  When the situation required intervention, Teddy Roosevelt intervened.  Think of food and drug safety as one of his major contributions to the public weal.

I once read a book Radical Son, by the former marxist, David Horowitz, who was editor of Ramparts magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. I recommend it as one of the great memoirs of former totalitarians, up there with Arthur Koestler, Whitaker Chambers and the other departing communists of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Horowitz’ great observation is that, once he left the Left, he entered the land of freedom. There is just the Left: tight, hysterical, heresy-sniffing, unfree, and then there is all other political opinion, left, right and centre. Only once in the free air, outside the prison-camp of Leftism, did he find that people called “conservative” actually had vigorous disagreements with one another. And felt perfectly free to have them. Such is the nature of life in the free air. Let us keep it that way.

It is for this reason I hate, fear and despise what the Liberals tried to do to this country, that they tried to turn it into a leftist prison camp of controlled opinion, with the minds carefully masked by political correctness, which is just Leftism without the bother of Marxist central planning. So am I a conservative? or just a liberal?  I don’t know. But I am sure enjoying Harper putting a stake through their large-L Liberal hearts. Just to make sure.

The recent suit at one of the too many human rights commissions by a Turkish-Canadian woman complained that, as a racialized ethical vegan, she was the victim of discrimination, and that she was part of a racialized minority. What pray tell, is a “racialized” person?

You will hear more about racialized persons, because the word acts like a dumptruck, transporting a host of grievance-mongering from one site of public discourse to another, without the bother of thought. Sort of like the German High Command sending Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, to get the bacillus out of Geneva and into the prostrate body of Tsarist Russia, where it could really do some damage. (I digress)

Wikipedia says:

Racialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Put simply, a group of people is seen as a “race”, when it was not before.

This led me to the fascinating entry by the University of Guelph on the subject, Understanding Racialization:

In the past, race was defined as a natural or biological division of the human species based on physical distinctions including skin colour and other bodily features. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white. It was used to establish a classification of peoples. Some of the greatest atrocities in human history have been associated with notions of racial superiority.

There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them. It is now recognized that notions of race are primarily centered on social processes that seek to construct differences among groups with the effect of marginalizing some in society.

While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society. The process of social construction of race is termed racialization.

I would say that these three paragraphs contain the essence of the leftist falsehoods that dominate public discourse.

Read the following and inform yourselves:

1. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white.

False. All people at all times have been conscious of racial differences, and “race” did not emerge in post-16th century Europeas an intellectual construct any more than height or weight did. Race, ethnicity, tribehood: each and all have been observed facts of life since before conscious thought, just as rabbits differ from hares, or both from deer. The intellectuals of Enlightenent Europe may have systematized the classifications, but they systematized classifications of everything: taxonomy and species collecting was the fashion of the time, viz. Linnaeus and the modern biological classification system.

The 4,000 year old pictographs of ancient Egypt show Africans and caucasians as recognizable races. The Romans pondered the origin of races as they looked upon the red-haired Scythians and the Negroid Nubians, and considered the origin of races as related to available sunlight in their native lands.

2. There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification.

False. Humans have evolved. (Darwin is apparently a new idea in some quarters). They are evolving still, at an accelerating rate. Races emerged as Africans left the African continent and colonized the rest of the world in a process starting about 50,000 years ago, settling areas where neanderthals had been before them.

• The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, by Spencer Wells
• Race: The Reality of Human Differences, by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele
• Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
• Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, by Philippe Rushton

Racial differences are real, genetic, unfolding in time, and evidenced by both organic processes and statistically-validated behavioral differences. I noted that the list of books above range in political acceptability from The Journey of Man, which has a PBS television series attached to it, to Philippe Rushton’s, which you can only get from non-Amazon booksellers. But they all say the same thing in different ways.

All humans who left Africa in ancient times are the products of adaptation to new environments, and various genetic compromizes have occurred over time to allow us to live in Asia, Polynesia, Europe, and the Americas.

3. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them.

False. Stephen Jay Gould’s Marxist beliefs led him to to emphasize the commonlaity of our species-hood over the fuzzy distinctions of race. He has been debunked elsewhere. See readings above, but more particularly, see Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, for the more general attack on Gould’s bioogical ideas.

4. While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society

“The social construction of race”. Of all the untruths taught in universities, perhaps none is more pernicious for the long-term than the denial of the biological. It has the effect of placing racial tolerance on the false premise that there are no races. Since there are no races, in this view, race is a social construct. Hence “racialized ethical vegans” can become a race – a category of people able to suffer “racialization.” You do not have to be a race to suffer discrimination. People will and do discriminate about anything, frequently for the benefit of human society. (e.g. the fridge is filthy- clean it. Pick up your mess. Get a job. Change the oil in your car) Trillions of discriminations keep civilization working.

Understand this: tolerance has no meaning or moral worth if there are not real differences to be tolerated. Toleration is a political bargain to make society livable without the need for an established religion.

Melanie Philips describes the modern situation of valueless Britain.

“This is absolutely catastrophic.”

Gramscian versus Stalinist forms of Islam.

There are three issues of concern to conservatives: Islam, global warming, and the economic mess in the United States and Europe. One issue concerns a threat to western (and every non-Islamic) civilization, another concerns the threat of centralized and unaccountable government acting on the basis of bad science, and the third concerns the unsustainable growth of the state since World War 2. It is clear that all three of these issues are clear and present dangers. Yet it has to be admitted that we are making progress on all fronts.

The purpose of today’s essay is to outline the reasons for confidence that these menaces are beginning to be better understood and remedied.

Islam

The danger that Islam poses to rational discourse, liberal values, and the status of all non-Muslims, is clear to those who read about the core doctrines of the religion, or read the history of Islamic civilizations and their relationships to the outer world. I do not propose to adduce evidence on this point: no amount of argument can ever settle a matter of fact, and there are plenty of histories available.

Islam has four insuperable difficulties in dealing with the world. First, there is no basis for science, or any fundamental understanding of how the world works. Since there is no basis for science, there is no basis for the Koran to be criticized or understood. Incidentally the lack of belief in cause and effect means there can be no specifically Islamic contribution to scientific understanding or progress. Second, Islam exists in a state of continuous and unending war with all other beliefs and cultures, which may only be suspended, never renounced, and which is enjoined as the religious duty of Muslims. Third, within Islamic cultures, Islamic commandments engender poisonous relations between men and women, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, and males with each other. Fourth, Islam has never figured out what to do with the state, and political succession, so that legitimacy is forever denied to all forms of state organization. Mohammed never ruled on the issue of political organization and the legitimate succession of political rulership, with the result that political stability is made impossible, whether the state be democratic, oligarchic, mercantile, dictatorial, monarchical, customary or modern.

The four elements compose a toxic brew which has stultified Islamic societies in (almost?) every dimension of human achievement.

The recent importation of large numbers of Islamic peoples into Western societies is engendering a much greater consciousness of these issues, but the official cult of “multiculturalism” and its numerous backers prevents or discourages intelligent commentary upon them.

Each of the four issues mentioned above could generate a book, and has. It may be helpful to engage in the briefest possible foray into the first one, because it is the stubborn irrationalism of Islam which lies at the core of all its subsequent failures.

In essence, Islam turned its back on rational inquiry into the nature of things around the 10th century AD. The work may have started with Mohammed, but it was culminated in the doctrines put forth by the philosopher Al Ghazali. The doctrine which he succeeded in propagating is called “occasionalism”. It works like this. When I fire up the barbecue, the spark ignites the propane, and the flame bursts forth. So we think. But for Al Ghazali, the lighting of the flame is but the occasion for God to ignite the propane. God causes everything. When I say everything, I mean everything, and he does so directly, without at any stage the intermediation of physical laws.

The average person might well wonder whether such an abstruse conception could be at the root of Islamic difficulties with the modern world, or indeed with any conceivable world. But as Ayaan Hirsi Ali recounts of her childhood, the eventual social result of holding that God causes everything is to discourage all inquiry into anything. Every inquiry into the operation of the world is either superfluous, or heretical, and therefore haram. She recounts how every question she asked of her mother, no matter how unrelated to religion, was met with a slap across the face: every question. She recounts how, when she first lived in Holland, she watched a Dutch kids’ show every afternoon. On this show, kids would write in and ask questions, and the staff of the TV show would do their best to answer them. She sat for hours, fascinated, with the concept that an entire culture was oriented to answering the questions of children, about anything they chose to ask. It was utterly foreign to how she had been brought up.

When a Muslim says “inshallah”, (“as God wills”) he is not uttering a pious hope in the subjunctive mood; he is actually stating a fact about the nature of causation, as he believes it occurs. God is a tyrant unconstrained in his relationship to the world by natural law. Worse, perhaps, he is not constrained by love for his human creatures because, in Islamic doctrine, God’s majesty requires that humans have nothing in common with him. We are not made in His image, as Christians and Jews believe.

Imagine a universe without either law or love, and you have imagined the Islamic world-view.

To the extent this description of Islam is true, it argues that liberal societies are at a cross-roads: they can continue with the multicultural assumption that all cultures are equal, and fall quickly or slowly to Islamic pressures, or they can recover their sense of self and assert the pride they have in their own culture.

How much evidence do we see that western liberal societies are getting clearer on the concept?

I would point to several events this past year which may amount to a trend.

• both Angela Merkel and David Cameron have spoken conspicuously about the failure of multiculturalism as policies;

• the political persecution of Geert Wilders has failed;

• Prime Minister Harper has stated in calm and clear terms, almost as an aside, that “islamicism” is the principal ongoing threat to Canada.

• The deligitimation of speech controls exercised by Canadian Thought Control Tribunals, courtesy of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, has opened up the public space in a most healthy fashion, and the popularity of Sun-TV continues to broaden the boundaries of what can be said in public.

It is also clear that, when people feel safe to speak their minds, no one is deceived by the Islamic “thing” – everyone is aware that, whatever it is, whoever they are, a major emanation of trouble is coming from Muslims: whether some or all of them is not yet clear. Whether the militant intolerance is part of the religion or a perversion of it, is not yet clear (to the uninformed). People are prepared to be generous and tolerant, but they are not fools.

On balance, I would say that we are on the way to defining the nature of the Islamic problem for liberal societies, and as we are increasingly able to talk about it publicly, we are able to deal with it effectively. Readers of Vlad Tepes or Gates of Vienna may have cause to disagree, and I have my own moments of despair. But gradually the western liberal discourse is becoming far clearer as to what the nature of the menace is. Our policemen and spooks, by contrast, are fully aware. All over the world, our guys are breaking down doors and putting bullets into heads, as required.

Next: The decline of eco-wankery

David Starkey is the British historian who had negative things to say about whites adopting Jamaican black culture that got him into trouble with the bien-pensant elite this past week. For hs reaction to these events go to:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8711621/UK-riots-Its-not-about-criminality-and-cuts-its-about-culture…-and-this-is-only-the-beginning.html

His main offence was to mention Enoch Powell’s prescient  ”Rivers of blood” speech.

“Unfortunately, the speech and still more the reaction to it, are also central to any proper understanding of our present discontents. For Powell’s views were popular at the time and the London dockers marched in his support. The reaction of the liberal elites in both the Labour and Tory parties, who had just driven Powell into the wilderness, was unanimous: the white working class could never be trusted on race again. The result was a systematic attack over several decades: on their perceived xenophobic patriotism, on symbols like the flag of St George, even – and increasingly – on the very idea of England itself.”

This is the question put by a New York Times Magazine article. It explained that Twitter and other elements of post-literate civilization were to blame for the death of Big Ideas.

Rubbish!

Well, here’s a big Idea. 

The US is rapidly going bankrupt. The Pacific Fleet will be rusting in San Francisco harbor in 30 years if they fail to get a grip on it.

 And in turn:

 The US is lowering its general IQ with massive Hispanic and third world immigration.

 The US is losing its middle class. The social cohesion of the US is fraying and we ought to be concerned about it. The US is becoming a stratified Confederacy, and policy will emerge in thirty years to handle the social conflicts generated by stratified population whose bottom quarter is cognitively unfit for 21^st century levels of production and behavior. Dark prognosis? You bet.

 And if those are not ideas but mere observations, let me try this one on you.

 The 20^th century saw a long war 1914-1990 about the form of the state, fought between national socialism (eliminated in 1945) international socialism, eliminated in 1990, and parliamentary democracy, which was left ascendant.

 The 21^st century will see –is actually seeing – a fight between Shari’a and parliamentary democracy. Later maybe there will be a fight with China but I doubt that China’s assertions are any more than normal great power politics. Ugly and we don’t like them, but not world shaking because China does not intend to convert the world to its way of doing things. It wants a general bow in its direction, as Emperors of old used to require.

 I would say that the Harper government’s inner circles are probably aware of these issues, and are generating the public mind-space to deal with them effectively.

 Twitter, social media? Background noise.

 Big ideas? The author of the NYT piece cites:

Albert Einstein, but also Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, as examples of Big Idea thinkers.

Here is my view:

Einstein – vastly important physicist, likely to be supplanted in the next 200 years as Isaac Newton has been, but only by something as world-changing as Newton and Einstein were themselves.

Compared to Einstein, the rest of the list are barely worth a mention in the American portion of the history of the 20th century.

Reinhold Niebuhr – big in the 1930-40s – led American liberals to a more realistic view of Communism. No significant influence beyond his lifetime.Useful work

Daniel Bell – big in the 70s-  foresaw post-industrial society – useful work.

Betty Friedan – big in the 70s – drivelous nonsense, momentarily important, declining to zero influence before her death.

Carl Sagan – a twit, a shallow twit (“Billions and billions” “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – meaning that anything that disagreed with his materialist views required evidence sufficient to satisfy one carl sagan, who together with Gould (below) set up SciCop, a supposed Inquisition for scientific ideas and conjectures of which he did not approve.

Stephen Jay Gould – a proven fraud and a Marxist phlogisticator, and major thought-controller in his own right.

Both Sagan and Gould had a negative influence on the ambit of free thought, and Gould in particular slandered the authors of IQ testing and twin-studies on purely Marxist premises. He is strongly disputed by other Darwinists.

____________________ 

People have to fill magazines with Deep Thought. The challenges are evidently before us, and powerful forces exist to prevent them from being challenged. My guess is that, once the public debt  issue is faced, a great deal of what currently passes for thought will be wrung out of the universities and commentariat. Less of it will be subsidized.

 Thank you for your fleeting attention to this morning’s rant.

For “religion”, substitute “anthropogenic global warming”, “Islam”, “hate speech”, or governmental concern with unwholesome diets.

[Jefferson was writing about the degree of religious toleration in Virginia in 1781, as one of many subjects gathered in what came to be called “Notes on Virginia”, to the Marquis de Marbois, Secretary of the French legation at Philadelphia. The American Revolution was then in progress, and Jefferson living at Monticello, his estate in Virginia].

Notes on Virginia

By Thomas Jefferson

Query XVII

The Different religions received into that State?

“….The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have no authority over such natural rights, only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable to them to our God. The legitimate acts of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. If it be said, his testimony in a court of justice cannot be relied upon, reject it then, and be the stigma upon him. Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but it will not cure them.

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only…. If [free inquiry] be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged.

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. …

Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men: men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face or stature.

Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there s the danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter. Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.  The several sects perform the office of a censor morum over such other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined imprisoned; yet we have no advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth….

Our sister States of Pennsylvania and New York…have made the happy discovery, that the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them. Let us too give this experiment fair play, and get rid, while we may, of those tyrannical laws.”

Ron Cohen, the outgoing National Chair of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, was heard soon after the event decrying the Conservative majority election of May 12th as the occasion for the death of civil liberties in Canada. He was afraid for the country. Like many Liberals, he had drunk the Kool-Aid. Perhaps he had said once too often: “Harper: scary, scary”.

I wish he were right. I wish the Left had genuine cause to fear that their legal and thought regime would soon come to an end. Yet it is still strong and proud, chipping away at your right to free speech, your right to use a gun in the defence of your life and property, your right to say obviously true things about Islam and the threat it constitutes to rational discourse, women’s rights, political life, parliamentary government, Christians, Jews, atheists, secular humanists, and everything else.

Take, for example, the recent CBSC decision in CITS-TV re Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural. The presiding panel consisted of Hanni Hassan (Vice Chair), Jennifer David, a Cree activist,  Michael Harris (from Corus Entertainment),  and Mark Oldfield, a retired broadcast journalist.

The show in question concerned Biblical prophecy. One of the issues before the panel concerned

the guest’s statement that “Muslims believe it is their divine call to eliminate the Jewish people.”  While that statement is, strictly speaking, an opinion, it is a pointed, barbed accusation that all Muslims consider that it is a divine or sacred responsibility to kill every Jew, even when there are no more than a “few Jews left hiding behind a tree or a rock.”  Even if that were a solid, uncontradicted principle established by one or another of the learned texts that are cornerstones of the Islamic religion, the Panel considers that such an accusation directed in such general terms against, in effect, all Muslims is an abusive or unduly discriminatory comment that violates the proscription against such comments in the Human Rights Clauses of the CAB Code of Ethics and the Equitable Portrayal Code.”

So, if, in general, Christians believe in the resurrection of Christ, the fact that some Christians might not believe in the Resurrection, would apparently render  it impossible to say on the airwaves, unless you used the formula, “most Christians believe”, if by so doing you offended the speech codes.

Okay, so most orthodox Muslims believe in the need to exterminate the Jews. Does that make it better? If I said maybe most orthodox Muslims believe in the necessity to exterminate the Jews, is that abusive?

Even if that were “a solid, uncontradicted principle established by one or another of the learned texts that are cornerstones of the Islamic religion”, it is abusive to say that Muslims believe the contents of the Koran, no matter how repellent?

Is it abusive to say that most orthodox Muslims believe it?

Is it abusive to say that Muslims believe what the divinely-authored Koran tells them to do?

Apparently so. Dhimmitude is upon us in the name of non-discrimination.

I have a proposal to make to the broadcasters of this country.

Since the broadcasters are paying for this vast speech-controlling contraption, under the aegis and with the authority of the CRTC, would it not be opportune to cease to pay for the entire CBSC? This would leave the free speech issues with the CRTC, and force the Harper government to confront what is done in its name. In that way, speech controls would become overtly governmental, and more exposed to public scrutiny.

I notice that those most content for power to be wielded in secret recoil in horror at the thought that the responsibility for speech controls should become overt.

Hanny Hassan, a public Adjudicator, is a structural engineer and the President and Principal Engineer for a Toronto-based consulting engineering practice. A member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario, he holds corresponding professional affiliations in Ohio and Florida. Mr. Hassanhas also been President of the Council of Muslim Communities of Canada (CMCC) since 1993. He has a long and distinguished career in community service, including significant contributions to the Muslim and Arab communities, of which he is a member, but also with respect to equity and multicultural issues. Mr. Hassan is a frequent speaker and lecturer to schools, universities, church groups, service organizations and the business community of Islam and Arab issues. He has also focused his publicly-oriented energies and commitments on interfaith and multicultural issues and is currently, among other things, Co-chair of the National Muslim-Christian Liaison Committee, a member of the Toronto Chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, a member of the Advisory Committee to the Secretary of State on the impacts of anti-terrorism legislation and public backlash on the Muslim and Arab communities, the CMCC representative on the Canadian Ethnocultural Council, and the Muslim Convenor in the Jewish-Christian-Muslim Interfaith Dialogue Series. A London native, Mr. Hassan holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Western Ontario and a Master of Engineering degree from Dalhousie University.

You have all read by now the acquittal of Geert Wilders on hate-speech. Some of the commentary upon the acquittal  shows, better than anything conservatives could say, that the left believes that Europeans should

a) cease to exist as culturally dominant majorities in their own countries; and

b) should be punished by law for any attempt to resist that wave of immigration.

On the subject of Wilders acquittal, see here in Vlad Tepes, here in Robert Sibley’s excellent Ottawa Citizen blog; here in the Daily Mail.

For wet hand-wringing on the subject of Wilders, there is no lack. See Tom Rawstorne in the Daily Mail of 2009 (”Is he about to engulf Britain in a holy war?”).

Particulalry hideous is the reaction to the acquittal from Ubaldus de Vries in the Guardian. De Vries,a lecturer in legal theory at the University of Utrecht,  says that though Wilders is technically innocent, we all know he is guilty of thoughtcrime:

“In doing so, Wilders adopts nationalism as a mode to gather momentum, support and power. It feeds on fear and abuses this fear. Whether the fear is real or imaginary is irrelevant. Fear is a powerful and explosive instrument of power. Many “indigenous” Dutch are threatened and frustrated by developments in the globalised world that they do not want but cannot control, such as immigration, and Wilders talks about “a tsunami of an alien culture that increasingly dominates local culture”. The feeding of this fear is an attempt to increase the existing polarisation and segregation of Dutch society, potentially leading to banlieue-type unrest. Unless we all start realising the futility of the attempt – and the court should have given just such a signal.”

Shall we parse that piece of nonsense for a moment?

1) “Whether the fear is real or imaginary is irrelevant.”

So, rational apprehension of risk is not relevant. To what, pray tell? Or to whom? The difference in all kinds of situations rests on the valid apprehension of risk or danger. Distinguishing the direction of a car towards a toddler’s pram will determine whether you will be exonerated for ramming that car with your own, if you were under a valid apprehension of imminent danger to the child. And if you were wrong, you probably face jail time, rather than a favourable review on the local press.

The left constantly wants Europeans not to face the concrete reality of what Islam is: a jurisprudential system called shari’a, which governs every – I mean every – aspect of life, based on a flawed revelation and backed up by a complete refusal to engage in philosphical discussion. It is a totalitarian political ideology as much as a religion. But that is irrelevant, apparently.

Whether the car is heading for the pram is not relevant?

2) “Many “indigenous” Dutch are threatened and frustrated by developments in the globalised world that they do not want but cannot control, such as immigration.”

Since when was it determined that the natives of Europe have no right to determine the ethnic composition of their societies? Note that Ubaidus de Vries does not even bother to pretend that the native population of Holland has any right to deterrmine this question.

3) “Unless we all start realising the futility of the attempt” ….to do what? To stop “a tsunami of an alien culture that increasingly dominates local culture”.

What can one say to the naked proposal that the Court ought to have signalled that any attempt, no matter how rational, to stop the immersion of white europeans in an unstoppable tide of Muslim immigration will be met with jail, fines, and public humiliation?

Their Q&A series with “senior Hamas official” Ahmed Yousef is a mendacious whitewash that printed elsewhere would be dismissed as a cruel parody of mainstream media. The paper believes seriously that it can get away with printing whoppers about Hamas not preaching for the killing of Jews or the sanctioned abuse of women under Islam with this end tagline:

(Questions have been edited for clarity, and similar ones distilled into a single query.)

Of course. And yet the same journos and editors who rail against outbreaks of hate speech have no problem with the presentation of glib falsehoods that are at their source considerably more hateful.

Protein Wisdom summed up these types nicely:

Overheard inside a Najaf bunker, Thursday, August 18

First militant:  “You know, Qasim, I’m really beginning to like this Cindy Sheehan infidel.  Unusual to find an uncovered cur so willing to sing the heavenly music of Truth.”*

Second militant: “I agree, brother.  When we conquer the Great Satan and take his land by force of fiery sword, we shall have to remember to slit her throat last.”*

First militant:  “Exactly.  Allah be praised.”

Second militant: “Allah be praised.”

Update: The BBC is even more blatant about its reporters’ sympathies for extremist Islamist groups.

The times, the morals! When I contemplate the frivolous idiocy of the following items, and when I contemplate them together, I realize there is more folly in the world than I will ever have time to correct, and Steven Harper cannot correct either. Vast forces of idiocy and malice keep the conservative blogosphere at work incessantly.

• Young boys in England admonished not to make pistols with their fingers
• Supreme Court of Canada fails to correct definition of sexual consent; keeps radical feminist (dyke) interpretation of sexual consent
• Subsidized daycare in Quebec forbids telling of religious stories
• Dandelions triumph over 2-4-D on false evidence
• Conrad Black still not free; US prosecutorial intransigence continues

On the other hand, truth may be winning against that outrageous mountebank, David Suzuki. Lord knows what happens when evidence based science confronts the Suzuki foundation. Vivian Krause, who is doing great work investigating the links between leftist US foundations and west-coast politics, scores against the Suzuki Foundation’s claims that farmed salmon spread sea lice to wild ones.

Mrs. Seeker After Truth indeed!

This is 103-page decision  is simply a travesty of justice. Ezra Levant, where are you? Blogging Tories, wake up!

In the judgment of the BC Human Rights Commission, in the case of Guy Earle, the comic who told some heckling lesbians they were obnoxious dykes,  the principal legal finding is that the Commission cannot consider the argument for a right to free speech under the Constitution of Canada, because the argument is outside the legal purview of the Commission because of the BC Administrative Tribunals Act.

Accordingly, the fundamental issue at stake, the freedom of speech of the comic in the circumstances, is held not to be arguable.

[285] The respondents cannot challenge the constitutionality of s. 8 of the Code on Charter grounds before the Tribunal, as the Tribunal does not have jurisdiction to decide the respondents Charter -based free speech arguments. I reiterate my conclusion in Pardy (No. 3) that the Tribunal has no power to state a case on those issues for the B.C. Supreme Court.

 and at paragraph 459

“I conclude that any defence by the respondents that Mr. Earle’s freedom of expression was a bona fide and reasonable justification for discrimination fails on both the facts and the law. Mr. Earle’s conduct was not reasonably related to any effort to deal with a disruption to the show. Mr. Earle was not engaged in exposing the stereotypes of others. Nothing about Mr. Earle’s asserted purposes in verbally and physically attacking Ms. Pardy on the basis of her sex and sexual orientation justified elevating his right to free expression over her right under the  Code to be protected against his discriminatory conduct.”

What idiocy of a government to remove from the Human Rights Tribunal the ability to consider the very issues which are at the core of free speech? This means that the Tribunal cannot consider the effect of its decisions, precedents or rulings on free speech. When they talk of ”railroading” a defendant, this is a case in point.

James Delingpole, an obnoxious right wing punk who happens to be right about everything, beat the rap for saying that the global warming catastrophists were full of shit.

Maybe the sound of Britain these days is the sound of a toilet flushing, but there are still somesigns of hope…..and change.

“The Commission has previously ruled [North v The Guardian] that “In the realm of blogging (especially in cases touching upon controversial topics such as climate change), there is likely to be strong and fervent disagreement, with writers making use of emotive terms and strident rhetoric. This is a necessary consequence of free speech. The Commission felt that it should be slow to intervene in this, unless there is evidence of factual inaccuracy or misleading statement.”

Would that our own domestic speech controllers were as clear about the consequences of free speech.

Go ahead and watch her: glorious wrath in the service of truth. Ann Barnhardt rips into Senator Lindsey Graham (Rep-SC) for proposing that Pastor Terry Jones should be held to account for “causing” the Muslim mobs to invade the UN compund in Kabul and slaughtering the innocent.

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2011/04/manifesto-of-evil-totalitarian.html

Part 2: (Note the bacon bookmarks as she reads from the Koran)

And if you learn something about what the Koran actually says, you will be better off, even as you will amazed that a supposedly serious world religion could be based on such appalling views.