Barrel Strength

Thanks, Internet.

Go figure!

I cannot endure another conversation or argument with the ignorant about the nature of Islam. You can have your choice of pictures; you can take the friendly version or the unfriendly version, but you cannot maintain that:

1. It is a religion in either the modern or Christian sense of the word;

2. it is not a political or social project, similar in scope to communism, fascism or parliamentary democracy as different ways of life, but sharing the dimensions of a complete social project, with laws, economic relations, and culture shaped by that project;

3. and that jihad is not one of it sacraments.

If you disagree with any of these propositions you are merely ignorant and I have the cure for your ignorance. Read these books:

Destiny Distrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansari and Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State,  by Tarek Fatah share many traits. Both are written by assimilated western muslims, one of Afghan and the other of Bangladeshi origin.

Both are compendious reviews of the history of Islam and the Islamic world, what Ansari calls the Middle World between China and the Bosphorus, well-written, and highly informative.

Ansari takes a much more friendly tone to his own religion than does Fatah, but the facts are clearly related.

Try to imagine a religion where the followers of the Apostles fought a war with the followers of St. Paul, and executed the losers, where John the Baptist’s family was murdered by followers  of Jesus, where Mary and Joseph died at the hands of followers of St. Paul, and you can begin to capture the flavour of the political turmoil  that is Islam. It begins when the founder of your religion is also the founder of your social community, when the distinction between religion and political structure has no legitimacy, and when no attention has been paid to the question of succession by the founder, when the founder’s vision is explicitly political and social.

That is the thrust of Fatah’s critique of Islam as a religious project: that the Islamic state is an impossibility. After reading it you will feel justified in your anti-Islamism, as you should be, you western liberal, you.

But then you read Ansari and you cannot help but agree with this description:

“From the other (Islamic) side, however, the moral and military campaigns of recent times look like long-familiar programs to enfeeble Muslims in their own countries. Western customs, legal systems and democracy look like a project to atomize society down to the level of individual economic units making autonomous decisions based on rational self interest. Ultimately, it seems, this would pit every man, woman and child against every other, in a competition of all against all for material goods.

“What looks, from one side, like a campaign to secure greater rights for citizens irrespective of gender, looks from the other side, like powerful strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and undercutting people’s ability to maintain their communal selves and familial and tribal networks. In short, what looks from one side like empowering each individual looks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities.” 

The legitimacy of this observation does not argue that the western liberal world is wrong in how it governs itself. But, it does raise a concern that east is east and wast is west, and that the import of millions of unassimilated communalist, tribal and patriarchal people into advanced liberal democratic states, where the bonds among people are much looser and more voluntary, is troublesome to the point of policy insanity.

They do not have to live here, do they? And if they do, why does anyone think they should not adapt immediately to our ways of doinf things, by force of law, if necessary?

It looks like the Citizen’s Andrew Cohen set out to write a column about Ronald Reagan but like many another commentator, Sarah Palin is just way too deeply embedded in his head. She is ‘jumped up’, she can’t speak English, she quit politics to make money. They simply can’t get past this woman. However, I think they are giving her the power to anoint and elect the next Republican presidential candidate, and go on to occupy a key cabinet post in the government.

Surely, a seasoned commentator with his experience and education should be able to casually insult an upstart like Andrew Breitbart. But no! A sample from their Twitter duel (and never did the suggestion of squabbling sparrows seem so apt) -

AndrewBreitbart AndrewBreitbart
Of course, it’s an insignificant lie, @davidfrum. But it’s a provable & telling lie. No wonder you & @msnbc get along so well these days.

Oh, please, please, please, don’t let the suspect’s religion or ethnicity be incorrect. How many times must I refresh, and how many times must I be disappointed? After all, lots of young guys drive around with bomb fixin’s. Could be anybody. It would be sad if it were someone from a community. That would reinforce stereotypes. Think of that savage headline, “British Muslims Fear Backlash From Tomorrow’s Train Bombing”. I shiver with disgust when I think of the mind that would couple a community with an incident. Meanwhile, I hope and I refresh.

Enjoy the show, starting with uncovering what was so shocking the Globe had to do this:

“Editor’s Note: We have removed the text of an original posting on this blog as it fell short of The Globe and Mail’s editorial standards with respect to fairness, balance and accuracy. ”

My perusal of the blogs today and for the past few weeks is enough to generate despair, but the hope persists that people will wake up in time. That is because I am hopeful by nature, not because I know the outcome.

Non-discrimination and Islam

1. The would-be Portland bomber tries to blow up adults and children at a Christmas-tree lighting ceremony. Of thousands of reports, 75% fail to report that the bomber is a Muslim.
2. Elisabeth Sabbaditsch-Wolff is on trial in Austria for expounding the doctrines of Islam. The European Commission is about to pass a law that makes criticism of Islam effectively illegal.
3. Airport pat-downs continue to try to protect against a threat that we dare not name. Israeli airport secuity measures are criticized for “profiling” Muslims.  A counterblast points out that the article might have ignored the fact that Muslims are Israel’s chief security threat. Of course, they are our chief security threat. Robert Spencer makes this point: it is time to profile according to who causes the risk.

Economic collapse

1. You can run an immigrant society or a welfare state, but you cannot have both, as Europe is discovering. You cannot vastly expand state expenditures, collapse the birth rate and attach increasingly dysfunctional immigrants (from Muslim countries largely) to the welfare system, and still remain solvent.
2. Expect one European country to go under every six months until something more dranatic happens (Greece, Portugal, Ireland and so forth).

Given what we have been doing since World War II cannot be sustained, and give that the evidence for this is to be found in ruinous economic and demographic policies, some discussion of these ideas is in order.

What is Islam?

Is Islam:

a) a totalitarian political ideology? or

b) a mass psychosis? or

c) the religion of a raiding party of slave-drivers?

Discuss. See for instance, “The Principle of Abrogation in The Quran“. The difference between moderate and radical Islam is the speed at which world domination is to be achieved.

Every day that passes I increasingly think David Warren is both right and prescient.

Watching the Globe work its way towards a true understanding of current events is like waiting for a slowly developing child to form a complete sentence. Today’s leader, ‘The call of jihad rings far and wide’, is a look at the recent arrests of suspected terrorists. Unfortunately (and I suspect you were waiting for that qualification) the very last sentence betrays a dangerous depth of intellectual immaturity. “But that trust is what makes Canada work, and a few accused terrorists should not be able to ruin it for everyone else.” In other words, if only the student who wrote the saucy word on the blackboard would come forward, everyone else could go for recess.

I know what the problem is. We have seen what happens when terrorists succeed and do ‘ruin it for everyone else’.  I know the solution. I think the Globe does, too.

Everyone of conservative persuasion, meaning those who are concerned with the abuse of state power,  ought to be pleased with Conrad Black’s victory, however partial, in the US Supreme Court yesterday. He spent several millions of his own money to prove a fundamental legal and constitutional issue: there is no such thing as a common-law crime.

Let me explain.

Take the law of negligence for example, which is the basis of all those suits in damages you hear of. It is of a civil nature, and not criminal. It evolves with time, according to judge-made decisions.  What constitutes the standard of care may vary, what constitutes negligence varies with the circumstances, and the standard concerning foreseeability of the accident may vary with time. But no  prosecutor is going to imprison you for an “evolving” understanding of what negligence consists of.  There is no such thing as penal law which evolves unpredictably according to judge-made law. It takes a legislature to make a crime, and the law confines the ambit the crime strictly, through definitions, rules of evidence and procedure, which have the effect of tightly defining what is at stake.

What they nailed Conrad Black with – on most of his counts – was a statute whose actual content was never quite defined: denying the corporation your “honest services”. It was a short paragraph of ill-defined meaning through which American prosecutors drove a wide and unpredictable set of prosecutions, against which no defence could be effectively mounted, because the exact crime could “evolve” to fit the new standard, the one established by the prosecution.

Sensible people ought to be pleased that US prosecutors have lost this one; they have plenty more tools in their arsenal.

“Tunes of Glory” (1960) is one of the greatest films ever made, and I was glad to learn that its author, Ronald Neame, director, writer and cinematographer, thought it his best work. he was also responsible for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and many other significant films. Happily for him, he made a fortune on “The Poseidon Adventure”, of which he took a 5% cut for rescuing it from a failing producer.

I shall not ruin the plot of Tunes of Glory for you; just make every effort to watch it. I place up there with Blade Runner as among the greatest films ever made. The performances of Alec Guinness and John Mills are outstanding. The plot concerns the reaction of the regiment to the new colonel, who has been sent up from London to take over what had been his father’s regiment at some previous time, and the profound rejection the new graft endures when he cannot accommodate to the actual working style and values of the organization.

Tunes of Glory is an accurate depiction of a Scottish Highland regiment, but it is more: it is the exact expression of Jane Jacobs’ ideas about guardian institutions. The guardian institutions are those non-market institutions: the courts, the regiments, the churches, the professional associations, the schools and universities, that form the cultural, legal and military backbone in which the market society works. Corruption, said Jacobs, occurs when the morality appropriate to the market invades a guardian institution (bribing the cops or the judge) as well as when guardian values infect market institutions, such as when values such as resort to force, obedience, violence, hierarchy, secrecy, closedness and prodigious display pervade a market institution.

You do not need to read Jane Jacobs to understand what Ronald Neame was depicting in Tunes of Glory: so great an artist needs no further explanation. But if you will look at the list of contrasting values that Jacobs developed, comparing “guardian” to “market” values, you will obtain a deeper insight into this great movie.

A link to Daimnation goes into the Jane Jacobs’ thinking on this more deeply.

An interesting new post in Newsweek, of all places, on the ongoing issue of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Lest the assembled hosts of Darwinians descend on me for heresy, let me assure them that my allegiance to the party line is questionable: Darwin is largely correct. His theory on the unity of life, the variation of species by random mutations, and the emergence of new species from gradual changes is almost certainly correct. Is his theory complete? Does it cover all possible circumstances? I doubt it, and so do many other biologists more eminently qualified than I.

A 60-year-old lawyer ripped a Muslim woman’s Islamic veil off in a row in a clothing shop in what police say is France’s first case of “burka rage”.

It is no surprise to me that the assailant was female…western women spent a century breaking out of the kitchen and off the chaise longue to participate as fully in society as they choose to and it is infuriating to see this retrograde cultural phenomenon of veiled women taking hold on the specious grounds of religious freedom…my own sister said she felt like ripping off veils when she saw them…and she is over 65 and a middle-of-the-road feminist.

Cool. That logic makes me a Martian.

For years you railed against the CBC’s anti-conservative bias, and for as long people would tell you you were dreaming:  that the CBC is objective, unbiassed, and fair. Bullshit! Then comes Frank Graves, CBC pollster, telling the Liberals to wage jihad against those homo-phobic, xeno-phobic western-based Conservatives, those Christians!

In his advice, Mr. Graves could hardly have been more blunt. “I told them that they should invoke a culture war. Cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy. If the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad. Go south and vote for Palin.”

The Grits haven’t told him whether they favour this approach or not. But they are keen on projecting a more activist agenda for the party.

• opposing the end of the long-gun registry;
• supporting the requirement to make  Supreme Court appointees fully capable of hearing a French-language brief, without translation, thus limiting the Supreme Court to some 10% of the Canadian population or less, most of whom would be French-Canadian.

Ezra Levant is doing an excellent job of showing how many millions Frank Graves has taken out of the Liberal government Hey! for $61 million I can be bought and stay bought, too.

But the CBC! Now you know how they are advised and whom they hire. Like advises like. I know the senior management, personally, and I can assure you they are exactly as you imagine them, true to the values of the organization: statist, elitist, privilege-seeking, and feeding at the taxpayers’ trough. And believe me, to them you are just little people. Little people don’t count, and their values count for less.