Barrel Strength

What about the men? What about the damage to society caused by all the surplus involuntary bachelors?

In the commendable decision to rule that a law against polygamy (strictly speaking polygyny) did not constitute an offence to Charter rights, the large obvious fact was missed, at least  in any coverage I have seen. My point is that, given the anti-male bias of contemporary society, the harm to men is not perceived, and if perceived, not thought worthy of mention.

Mr. Justice Bauman discussed the damage in terms of reduced male parental investment in children, and hence lower survival rates for children, higher rates of violent crime (from surplus men), exploitation of women and violence in the household, and the “lost-boy” effect, when male children reckon that they will never have a woman to love, so they leave the community.

If all of the society is polygynous, then there is no community which surplus males can leave except by emigration to another country which forbids polygyny. Fat chance of that for the Muslim world, and the 100 million surplus males of China and India.

And what do you do with 50 million surplus males, such as China or India have? The answer is obvious. You go to war. You have an inbuilt incentive to spend your surplus males on warfare, brigandage, and wife-gathering. And how do you gather a wife? You kill her husband, and take her home. Iran got rid of a huge surplus of its male population in the Iran-Iraq war(1980-1988), spending them as wastefully as they could. Half a million battle deaths resulted from the use of World War 1 tactics in that ill-fought conflict.

Among Mr. Justice Bauman’s many findings, these three struck me as closest to the theme of this article:

[785]     The sex ratio imbalance inherent in polygyny means that young men are forced out of polygamous communities to sustain the ability of senior men to accumulate more wives. These young men and boys often receive limited education as a result, and must navigate their way outside their communities with few life skills and little social support.

[786]     Another significant harm to children is their exposure to, and potential internalization of, harmful gender stereotypes.

[787]     Polygyny has negative impacts on society flowing from the high fertility rates, large family size and poverty associated with the practice. It generates a class of largely poor, unmarried men who are statistically predisposed to violence and other anti-social behaviour. Polygyny also institutionalizes gender inequality. Patriarchal hierarchy and authoritarian control are common features of polygynous communities.

The damage is done by “the internalization of harmful gender stereotypes” is minuscule compared to the evident unfairness of polygyny to most males. Multiple wives mean sons without effective fathering, and produces  a surplus- unwanted collection of surplus males available for war, and crime, and disinclined for useful work. Osama bin Laden was the result of such an upbringing.

Such is the political correctness of our times, and its anti-male bias, that the principal harm of polygyny is mentioned briefly in the decision, and rates nothing in the media treatment of the question.

“Pope says Mass at Easter.” Most headlines are of this sort. They tell us that the world is still in the same place as it was yesterday.  Other examples: “Fresh trouble in the Arab world”. “Seas rising because of global warming!” “Weather worse because of global warming”. They join the 35 other global warming hysteria headlines this month. For forty years we heard of IRA bombings in Northern Ireland and England; it was news when it stopped.

But this week we read headlines which may be of fundamental importance. The second experiment has demonstrated that neutrinos have moved faster than light. If this proves to be true and not merely the artefact of the experiment or observational bias, then the foundations of physics have just taken a five megaton hit.

So what is staying the same this month?

Eurozone crisis - same, but worsening.

Islamic inability to behave democratically? – same, but the evidence keeps coming in, all of which is ignored in the MSM picture of the world.

[Man-caused] global warming hysteria – the nails keep being driven in to that coffin, but the zombie keeps escaping.

My apologies to readers – job pressures have kept me from blogging lately. Happy is the blogger with a day job.

Gates of Vienna has another great posting, this time from V.S. Naipaul’s book “Among the Believers: an Islamic Journey”.

The nature of Islam reveals itself to those who read books. It is neither pretty, nor is it liberal, nor is it compatible with any other religion on earth (let alone Christianity). It is as reasonable to call it a totalitarian political ideology as it is to call it a religion in the Christian sense of that term, or the Buddhist, or post-Enlightenment for that matter. You could also call it a theory of knowledge, a legal code, and a series of schools of jurisprudence. But what it is not, is a private belief about the nature of God, as we westerners understand religion.

The excerpt below is from the introduction to Section II, pp 88-91:

“The idea of a separate Indian Muslim state, once it had been formulated, couldn’t have been resisted. The idea was put forward in 1930 by a revered poet, Sir Mohammed Iqbal (1876-1938), in a speech to the All-Indian Muslim League, the main Muslim political organization in undivided India.

“Iqbal’s argument was like this. Islam is not only an ethical ideal; it is also “a certain kind of polity,” Religion for a Muslim is not a matter of private conscience or private practice, as Christianity can be for the man in Europe. There never was, Iqbal says, a specifically Christian polity; and in Europe after Luther the “universal ethics of Jesus” was “displaced by national systems of ethics and polity.” There cannot be a Luther in Islam because there is no Islamic church-order for a Muslim to revolt against. And there is also to be considered “the nature of the Holy Prophet’s religious experience, as disclosed in the Koran … It is individual experience creative of a social order.”

To accept Islam is to accept certain “legal concepts.” These concepts — revelatory, but not to be belittled for that reason — have “civic significance.” “The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.”

“Iqbal, in fact, is saying in a philosophical way that in an undivided India Islam will be in danger, will go the way of Christianity in Europe and cease to be itself. Muslims, to be true to Islam, need a Muslim polity, a Muslim state. The Muslims of India especially need such a state, Iqbal suggests; because “India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best.” And Iqbal’s solution was simple: the Muslim majority areas of northwest India should be detached and consolidated into a single Muslim state.

“Seventeen years later (and nine years after Iqbal’s death) it happened — and to the Muslim-majority northwest was added the Muslim majority eastern half of Bengal, a thousand miles away. But that Muslim state came with a communal holocaust on both sides of the new borders. Millions were killed and many millions more uprooted. And it was only afterwards that it became clear that that plan for the creation of Pakistan, apparently logical, meeting Muslim needs, had a simple, terrible flaw.

“Muslim passions were strongest among those Muslims who felt most threatened, and they were in that part of the subcontinent which was to remain Indian. Not all of those Muslims, not a half, not a quarter, could migrate to Pakistan. The most experienced Muslim political organizations were rooted in Indian India rather than in Pakistan. Indian Muslim politicians, campaigners for Pakistan, who went to Pakistan became men who overnight had lost their constituencies. They became men of dwindling appeal and reputation, men without a cause, and they were not willing to risk elections in what had turned out to be a strange country. Political life didn’t develop in the new state; institutions and administration remained as they were in British days.

“A special word began to be used in Pakistan for the migrants from India: mohajirs, foreigners. In the province of Sind, especially, where Karachi became a mohajir city, local resentment built up into separatist feeling.

“In the new state only the armed forces flourished. They were seen at first as the defenders, and possible extenders, of the Islamic state. Then it became apparent that they were the state’s only organized group. They became masters, a country within a country. […]

“The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith. The state had been founded as a homeland for Muslims. If the state failed, it wasn’t because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for. And in that quest for the Islamic absolute — the society of believers, where every action was instinct with worship — men lost sight of the political origins of their state. They forgot the secular ambitions of Mr. Jinnah, the state’s political founder, who (less philosophical than Iqbal) wanted only a state where Muslims wouldn’t be swamped by non-Muslims. Even Iqbal was laid aside. Extraordinary claims began to be made for Pakistan: it was founded as the land of the pure; it was to be the first truly Islamic state since the days of the Prophet and his close companions.”

I do not think there is anythng that needs to be added to Mark Steyn’s commentary, “Sunset on the Rideau“. Those who speak of the merits of multiculturalism either have not considered what culture actually means, or are active traitors to the ideals of liberal civilization.

The Star Trek episode, “The Return of the Archons”, plays out the same thesis.

Substitute Mohammed for Landru. The system can be ‘reformed’ only in the inimitable fashion of James T. Kirk.

Gates of Vienna presents a view of Islam today that is accurate. You will be far better informed and entertained by this scholar of Islam than by any other source, short of reading a whole book.

The final quotation of Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey is prophetic:

“Democracy is a tram that brings us to the destination — and then we get out.”

Melanie Philips describes the modern situation of valueless Britain.

“This is absolutely catastrophic.”

Gramscian versus Stalinist forms of Islam.

No one is fooled.

“A majority of Canadians believes conflict between Western nations and the Muslim world is “irreconcilable,” according to a new national survey that revealed a strong strain of pessimism in the country leading up to Sunday’s 10th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.”

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

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3uTPcxLsFo

Watch this. It concerns the (remote? non-existent?)  relationship between anti-Islamic bloggers such as Spencer and Geller, as well as Jefferson, Twain, Aquinas, Plato etc. and the Norwegian assassin Anders Breivik. (Why is the invaluable Vlad Tepes not included in the blacklist?).

Those who make discussion impossible make revolution necessary.

“You’re a Nazi for watching this video to the end”, says the video, mockingly. Okay, if you say so. I merely thought I was defending liberal democratic society. Apparently I need thought correction. So do you for reading this. Bad person!

Nothing Anders Breivik did was in reaction to a real thing, the invasion of Europe by Islam. No sirree! It was all because of Islamophobia!

As if there can be arachnophobia without spiders.

Or fear of snakes without snakes.

Obviously we will have to abolish the fear, and outlaw the expression of the fear, rather than the source of the fear, since we all know there is nothing to fear in Islam, the religion of peace (for those who convert). But slavery and humiliation for those who don’t.

I want all the Christians to take a metaphorical break and allow my inner beast  to rage in explicitly pagan terms against the political Left for failing to enforce social norms. For what I have to say will not be pretty or compromizing. Indeed, I shall have to go into a dissociated state and get in touch with my inner Timberwolf: matchless, iron-willed, upholder of eternal truths of mammalian behaviour.

<Pause for entry into the left hemisphere, my “ka“>

You oath-breakers have offended the gods! You have permitted wholesale dereliction from accepted social norms. Your doom awaits! And I shall bring it to you, Timberwolf, implacable enemy of the lawless,  avenger and vindicator of the gods’ laws.

You know that social cooperation rests in the belief that every little bit of non-cooperation hurts. You know that cheaters must never be allowed to prosper. You know that killing must be avenged! That rape must be avenged! That insolence, bad manners, cutting into line, welfare cheating, bad etiquette, driving selfishly, failing to signal a turn, atheism, Critical Legal Theory, pants hanging so low as to show the butt crack: it all must be reproved, admonished, avenged, or suppressed, as the case requires.

Yet you do not do this. You say everything is an arbitrary social construct, and that we must understand – which is to say tolerate – declining standards of civility, trust, good manners, a due sense of proportion: all this is merely “white” culture that itself is racialist, imperialist, sexist, and God knows what.

Wrong! This is blasphemy to the gods. They will be avenged. They cannot long tolerate the deliberate lessening of civility, coarsening of manners, and falsification of truth.

Social cooperation is the basis of all human achievement: commerce, law, invention, progress, wealth creation, sharing with the poor, understanding of the other’s views, parliamentary government, and treating women as equals. Social cooperation is the essence of all higher achievements, yet you cut the roots of it, all the time. You abuse the trusting, you abhor the honest, you defile the temples of the gods, you proclaim all is merely an arbitrary construct, that it could be different, and should be different. And that you know how it can be different.

Wrong! This way we are on – whose proof is our rising prosperity – has been painfully achieved by hundreds of thousands of years of men taking the law into their own hands, long before there were courts, bailliffs, sheriffs, policemen, and jailers. When there was no agricultural surplus to distribute, a man took revenge on cattle-rustlers, rapists, thieves, and murderers. Society expelled the vicious, kept track of habitual liars and child abusers, and killed  psycopathic manipulators.

Lack of social conscience must not be allowed to prosper, yet you constantly extoll the conscienceless and the social outsider. Why do you not praise the obedient, the cooperative, the honest?  If free-riders are not admonished, the basis of all that you profess to hold true is defeated: honesty, integrity, social cooperation, trust, love, equality.

Not merely must cheaters be punished, but those who will not punish cheating must be exposed and themselves punished. That is the Law of Nature. Failure to be clear about this is the first step on the downward path.

And you know the most effective way to enforce this is to make people believe a superintending deity is watching. Why are you so against the notion of a superintending deity?

Why do you so relentlessly attack the enforcement of standards? Why do you punish the man who defends his home with firearms? Why do you believe that the state should vindicate what the individual most affected by law-breaking should not?

Why then do you so relentlessly attack standards themselves?

Because you are weak! Because you fear to vindicate the rights of the abused woman if her oppressor is large, black or Muslim. Because you think that society can hold together even as you eat into its foundations. You do not insist on civility from barbarians. You assault those who call barbarism “barbarism” as the maintenance of old-fashioned, parochial standards. You confuse the higher attainments of civilization with barbarism itself, so that murder goes unavenged, the rapist is immune, the thug walks free, the sociopathic babble of the Left is proclaimed as wisdom, and the honest, the cooperative, and the humane are considered patsies.

The gods will be avenged, the just shall be vindicated. And the longer your reign of anarchy and antinomianism lasts, the worse the reckoning will be.

Yours truly,

Timberwolf,

vindicator of the laws of the gods

<end of transmission from the thymic system>.

 _______________________________________________________

The difference between me and Anders Breivik is that I know that the necessary correctives to this state of being – and they are necessary – do not begin in murder. The cycle of revenge will not be stopped, even in civilized, democratic, white Norway. There will be a debt to be collected, somewhere, by this act of political slaughter, which will set back the cause of anti-Islamic reaction and equally the defence of  Enlightenment civilization. You did not calculate this, Mr. Breivik. Like Hitler, you set back the cause for which you thought you were fighting. Civilized behaviour is not upheld by slaughtering the children of your political enemies. Though it seem obvious, its truth appears to have escaped Anders Breivik.

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.