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ANOTHER CLUE TO BRITAIN’S FUTURE UNDER EUROPEAN UNION.

November 7, 2018 by Paul Merkley

ANOTHER CLUE TO BRITAIN’S FUTURE UNDER EUROPEAN UNION

By Paul Merkley.

………………………………….

Discussion continues to rage around Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union.

So far as I can tell, almost all of this discussion revolves around what writers imagine will be the economic consequences of withdrawal.  These will of course be large, but, I expect, manageable—certainly worth the price of achieving greater sovereignty over Britain’s affairs in general.

Still, I suspect that most Brits voted to leave Europe because they had concluded that a great gulf had developed between Europe’s values and purposes and what Brits imagine are their own values – what they are today, and what they have been in the past. The instinct of most was that Britain had to recover its former distance from Europe and henceforth follow its own purposes.

In colorful illustration of this existential imperative we need look no further than to a decision issued just a few days ago by the unelected members of the European Court of Human Rights. (Soren Kern, “European Human Rights Court Backs Blasphemy Law,” October 29 [www.gatestoneinstitute.org/1302; “A Black Day for Austria,” ibid. December 26, 2011.]

The immediate object of this decision was something that happened in the courts of Austria, but the decision itself is immediately applicable to all of Europe. In the opinion of this body, Austria has violated the human rights provisions laid out in protocols of the European Convention on Human Rights. by failing to prevent Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, from dishonoring Prophet Muhammad.  The offending speech was an offhand remark by Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff during a three-part seminar on Islam held in in November, 2009, in Austria, under auspices of a body called “the Freedom Education Institute,” to the effect that Mohammed was a pedophile because he married his wife Aisha when she was just six or seven years old. Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff’s actual words were: “A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?”

The ruling establishes a dangerous legal precedent, in that it requires European states – and this would include the United Kingdom — to curtail the right to free speech if such speech is deemed to be offensive to Muslims and thus might pose “a threat to religious peace.” In effect, the decision would establish in the law-codes of Western nations the full force of the Islamic blasphemy code.

The case began when Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” according to Section 188 of the Austrian Criminal Code. Her subsequent appeal to the Provincial Appellate Court in Vienna was rejected on December 20, 2011, as was her subsequent appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The decision at the ECHR was that states could restrict the free speech rights enshrined in Article 10 of the Convention if such speech was “likely to incite religious intolerance” and was “likely to disturb the religious peace in their country… [or was] capable of arousing justified indignation.”

In making this decision, the European court has in effect imposed an Islamic code about blasphemy upon the people of Europe and has done so for the sake of  preserving religious peace in Austria.  Their view was that “it was not compatible with Article 10 of the Convention to pack incriminating statements into the wrapping of an otherwise acceptable expression of opinion and claim that this rendered passable those statements exceeding the permissible limits of freedom of expression.”

Did you get that? You are deluding yourself if you imagine that you did. This is a clear case of smothering failed logic under impenetrable syntax — as ever, the clue to a bad conscience.

Still, it is clear that this decision now imposes on European governments – including that of the U.K. – the duty of curtailing the right to free speech of their citizens, if such speech is deemed to be offensive to Muslims. Such an obligation might not stop the President of France in his tracks; and we can be quite sure that it will not spoil Justin Trudeau’s day when, not if, the same matter comes to be deliberated by our courts.

The American tradition, following the British tradition, does of course acknowledge limits to the right of freedom of speech. These are best summarized in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s proscription of the right to cry fire in a crowded theatre. But only good sense, not jurisprudence, is needed for understanding these matters. The bottom line here is that proscription of free speech along the lines mandated by the European Court is plainly incompatible with what every grown up recognizes as my right to criticize other persons and/or the institutions which they embrace—as I am doing here.

The story behind this story is the campaign waged over recent decades by the Organization of  Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries, which argues for entrenchment  of the Islamic view-of-things at the United Nations. OIC  also claims to speak for the  interests of the exponentially-growing Muslim community in Europe and in North America.

Hard to grasp for us born-Westerners is the reality that these immigrant communities in our midst for which OIC claims to speak and who are made up of persons in flight from incompetent or oppressive Muslim governments in their homelands are telling us with apparent enthusiasm that they want to see established here,  in Europe and in North America, for themselves and their children and their children’s children,  equivalently oppressive Islamic institutions.

The cornerstone of the Muslim campaign against people like Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff who stumble into negative expression about the Prophet is an appeal to UNHRC Resolution 16/18, to which Canada like other Western nations subscribes, and which requires our governments to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of religion and belief.”

It never occurs to Roman Catholic or Protestant or Jewish organizations to fight this same fight under their own banners — even though ear-splitting mockery and abuse against Christian and Jewish faith and practice rings out all day long in lecture halls in every university and college in the West, and likewise finds unchecked expression in academic bodies and academic journals

If Britain intends to stay in the European Union, she will have  to promptly adjust her ancient vision of the rights and duties of citizens so as to conform to the utterly alien view of the same which has always obtained in the Islamic world. This is, indeed, what Europe is doing and doing gladly, as must be concluded from the judgments of the European courts with respect to the challenge to the peace caused by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

All by itself, this prospect should be enough to validate the  wisdom of the British public in the Brexit plebiscite of 2016, when they rejected by democratic ballot the project of total immersion of Britain’s identity in Europe’s

There should be no need for British libertarians to crank up a mighty public campaign against the creeping accommodations of British intellectuals to the clamoring of Muslim activists. All that is needed now   is for British politicians to carry through on their commitments to lead the British people out of the European Union.

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TOPPLING THE WORLD’S TOP COP

October 21, 2018 by Paul Merkley

TOPPLING THE WORLD’S TOP COP:

China Has Re-Defined the Meaning of Law for All of Us.

By Paul Merkley.

………………….

Triumphs of Engineering.

In recent days, we have witnessed a breath-taking acceleration of the  state-planning project of the Communist regime in China.

Co-incidentally, we are witnessing great strides towards political and social absolutism — a vindication of the sober fantasy envisaged by George Orwell back in 1948. (See Paul Merkley, “Orwell Didn’t See The Half Of It, Bayview Review, September 22, 2018.)  China is actively promoting around the world a fantasy about record-breaking economic consequences that are expected to follow from the building of its “Belt Road Initiative.”  (See , Matt Brown, “New Silk Road seemingly built on good intentions, but some fear a China  ‘debt trap,” October 14, 2018, https://www.stuff.co.nz.

A Chinese government spokesman for this project pledges that the highway itself, plus a global infrastructure to be built around it, will usher in “the Silk Road spirit of peace and co-operation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit.” Continue Reading »

Posted in Politics & Law, Uncategorized |

ORWELL DIDN’T SEE THE HALF OF IT.

September 22, 2018 by Paul Merkley

ORWELL DIDN’T SEE THE HALF OF IT.

By Paul Merkley.

…………..

For 1984¸ his now-classic book describing the dystopian possibilities for totalitarian thought, George Orwell lifted information about recent technology and extrapolated its possibilities to describe the life that would await his descendants — that is to say, us.

1984 is certainly the best-known of the works of Eric Blair (1903-1950), the short-lived genius who wrote under the nom-de-plume, George Orwell. The futuristic novel describes a state-of-the-1940s-art universal two-way communications system, which, in the book, cannot be turned off and from whose eye one is never allowed to turn away. All agree that it would be awful to live under such circumstances.

Yet the painful truth is that some parts of Orwell’s vision-of-the-future are far too benign. One quaint feature is that Orwell has had to imagine giant, in-your-face -television screens as venues for give-and-take between the regime and the citizen, whereas the instruments of control today are those ubiquitous tiny hand-held electronic devices.

But if you really want to get yourself worked up about the possibilities for mass control in the world today set aside Orwell and consider what is actually happening in China as we speak. (https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12988/china-social-credit-system; https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/google-and-china-made-for-each-other.)

As far back as 1995 President Jiang Zemin spoke of the Party’s intention to meet the challenge of “informatization, automation, and intelligentization.” What he had in mind, apparently, were the newest means by which non-compliance with the regime’s wishes could be rendered literally impossible. In theory, violent force should  never be required to accomplish these ends. Instead, all means necessary to the accomplishment of total compliance with the Party’s would soon exist as Chinese society becomes encompassed, with no loose ends left over, in a massive totalitarian system of knowledge about the actual behavior of each-and-every citizen.

Some first fruits of this effort can already be seen in China’s new “social credit” system. Over the years, each and every Chinese citizen has been dragooned into an ever-more-exhaustive information-gathering system run by the State. And now the acquired details are being sifted, with the result that each citizen can now be assigned a numerical score for reliability, based upon the regime’s reckoning of the “social value” of each and every activity in which he is engaged or to which he admits to being drawn.

Keep in mind that Xi Jin-ping appears by name in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China as China’s President-at-will — Dictator for Life. He believes and declares that the Party must have absolute control over society and he must have absolute control over the Party. Not a peep of dissent is being heard.

How will this be accomplished? Well, for starters, the plan is to have about 626 million surveillance cameras operating throughout the country before the end of next year. Those cameras will, among other mercies, feed information into a national “social credit system.” That system, when it is in place in perhaps two years, will assign to every person in China a constantly updated score based on all observed behavior. For example, an instance of jaywalking, caught by one of those cameras, will result in a reduction in one’s “social credit” score – helping to establish one’s place along a scale culminating in over-the- top virtue —sainthood,” we might almost be tempted to say. China will then be truly what the Economist called “the world’s first digital totalitarian state.”

In their own words, Chinese officials describe the goal of their finished work as “to allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” Hou Yunchun, a former deputy director of the State Council’s development research center, said at a forum in Beijing in May that the social credit system should be administered so that “discredited people become bankrupt”. As early proof of the system and how it works we are told that as of the end of April 2018, authorities had blocked individuals from taking 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed rail trips.

And by the way: Xi Jin-ping, the Lord-High-Everything-Else-for Life of China,  does not believe in second chances for those who fall short: “Once untrustworthy, always restricted,” he proclaims.

But of more immediate concern to us are signs of early cooperation between the Chinese regime and certain zealous entrepreneurs in our own midst who are attracted by marketing possibilities in such pioneering work.  Roger Simon, writing for pjmedia, September 13, 2018, has caught wind of this, story, virtually ignored by our media. Documents leaked to a source called Intercept disclose that Google plans to substantially expand its role in the Chinese market through the potential launch, as early as next year, of “Dragonfly,” a  Chinese search app for Android devices..  https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/google-and-china-made-for-each-other.)

Prototypes and negotiations with the Chinese government are already far along, laying the groundwork for the potential service to launch as soon as early 2019.

Simon notes:

In its attitude toward political dissent, the Chinese Communist Party has proven much harsher than the old Soviet regime of the Brezhnev era. Modern Chinese sentences are longer, the prospects for early release are far worse, and the Chinese authorities are generally unmoved by pleas for leniency from foreign diplomats. None of this seems to bother Google…

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/google-and-china-made-for-each-other/

It is a chilling thought: collaboration between the mighty Google empire and the Chinese Communist party in preparation of two-way information systems for sale to governments and merchandizers alike. Right out of 1984!

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Posted in Politics & Law, Uncategorized |

ON HATING YOUR CHILDREN

September 15, 2018 by Paul Merkley

ON HATING YOUR CHILDREN.

By Paul Merkley.

……………………………….

 On Hating Our Children and Being Applauded For It.

What must be the future of a civilization whose most privileged voices are celebrated for declaring that they hate their children and that they have told them so? 

Here is the link : https://www.macleans.ca/regretful-mothers.

And here, to spare you, are a few salient lines:

French psychotherapist Corine Maier stoked an international firestorm and condemnation in 2008 with her manifesto No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children. Her two children, the manifesto proclaims, left her bankrupt and exhausted. 

Also summoned to the spotlight to receive applause is “Isabella Dutton, a 57-year-old British mother of two grown children [who] created a furor with a Daily Mail  Essay headlined: ‘The mother who says having these two children is the biggest regret of my life.’”

These researchers  have cornered a number of mothers who describe the happy day when they sat their “kids” down and explained that they hated everything about them. “Hated” is the very word they use. In the words of one, the new life of liberation began with discovering that “their amazing life comes at the expense of my own.” This heart-stopping truth – this truth which Maclean’s  magazine imagines is the hottest bit of psychology off the press — has been the homeliest of home-truths, proclaimed by our ancestors back in cave -man time.  But now expunged is all sense that something of priceless value has been gained in exchange for this “expense.”

Children are Exhausting.

Maclean’s refers us to “a French psychotherapist Corinne Maier [who] stoked an international firestorm and condemnation in 2008 with her manifesto No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children; her two children left her ‘exhausted and bankrupt,’ and she couldn’t wait for them to leave home, she wrote.” And there is “Isabella Dutton, a 57-year-old British mother of two grown children [who] created furor with a Daily Mail essay headlined: ‘The mother who says having these two children is the biggest regret of her life.’”

A special heroine of the anti-motherhood cause is Lauren Byrne, who “rejects the idealized script, and with it the silencing of mothers. That’s why she set up her Facebook page, she says: ‘Everyone was talking about how fantastic it was. And I was, “Who are you people?’ I’m exhausted. … Even saying you want time away from your kids is verboten… People say, ‘You shouldn’t say that. They’re blessings. You should feel lucky.’ But it’s not unicorns and rainbows all the time. But women can’t complain that ‘this is really hard’ because people think you’re a bad mom.”

Angela, who lives in Newfoundland, went for months with debilitating undiagnosed post-partum after the premature birth of twins. She felt cheated, she told Maclean’s, when she didn’t experience the instant bond she was told mothers are supposed to have. ‘I felt I had been robbed.’ She wasn’t prepared for the difficulties: ‘Everyone talks about motherhood like it’s this wonderful thing and you’re going to love those children the second they come out,’ she says. ‘Nobody talks about how hard having children can be, how exhaustion can affect you and how sometimes love has to be developed.’ She doesn’t feel she can be candid, even with health professionals.”

 **Discovering Sex and Suffering and Motherhood.

Imagine telling your children that you hate them, that you regret ever having born them, and that your wish they were out of your way for ever! This is exactly what these exemplary Canadian mothers have told Maclean’s  magazine that they have done. These are people who imagine that their generation invented love and sex and suffering. They are, in short, people with no sense of history. In more seemly times homicidal intention along this line, with the right names embedded, would lead immediately to calling in the police.

But all of this is to the good: “In pushing the boundaries of accepted maternal response, women are challenging an explosive taboo.”

As to how these children –no doubt now famous among their peers at school – reacted to Mother’s refreshing declaration, we are left to our own imaginations. 

***Some Demographic Realities.

Since 1971, the fertility rate in Canada has dropped from 2.1—the replacement level needed for the population to renew itself without immigration—to 1.6 in 2016. Maclean’s“ scholarly source explains the decline in fertility rates to “older, more educated first-time mothers.” “Being older than mothers used to be in previous generations, these better-educated, mothers,  Maclean’s believes  are “entitled to expect a bigger boost from the experience of child-bearing.”

There is a revealing line of thought! No until this jaded, morally-bankrupt generation has anyone stooped to describing child-birth as about “a bigger boost!”

And why are precious upper-income, better-educated women entitled to anything more than their less educated peers? The thinking here is downright feudal – and very ugly.

These older but not wiser mothers confront the reality of motherhood just like all mother before them: “incontinence,  boredom , weight gain, saggy breasts, depression, the end of romance, the lack of sleep, dumbing own “ (that is, adjusting  to the intellectual demands of conversing with infants and toddlers.)

But this cohort of educated mothers is, we repeat, “entitled” to exemption from the experience of women down through the ages. So they are fighting back. There is a  Facebook community having more than 2,600 members founded by Lauren  Byrne, a 32-year-old ER nurse and mother of two who lives in Newfoundland. “Angela, who lives in Newfoundland, went for months with debilitating undiagnosed post-partum after the premature birth of twins. She felt cheated, she told Maclean’s, when she didn’t experience the instant bond she was told mothers are supposed to have.”

I Work, Therefore I Am.”

Isn’t it amazing that this cohort, described as educated several levels above the level of mothers of yore, should have to start so far before the starting line of all these other mothers in the matter of common folklore about having babies! Maclean’s  ideal of a mother takes out all of her rage at the low-down-ness of it all – and they take it out against the appropriate object: the children. Dealing with the ugly truth of mother hood, “Augustine Brown says she ‘s candid with the children, telling them that being a mother is not the most important aspect of her life. They know that It (that is, the most import aspect of her life) “ties with my work and who I  am… They cry when I leave [on a vacation by myself]…  but I feel it is important for them to know they’re not the centre of the world.” 

Another Mother tells her children that she “hates them for having prevented her from becoming a success in life.”

What room is there for doubting the long-term future of Canada, in light of this testimony of the best and the brightest—the people who have for half-a-century-or-so turned out Maclean’s  magazine?  

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THE TWO FACES OF VENEZUELA

September 1, 2018 by Paul Merkley

THE TWO FACES OF VENEZUELA

By Paul Merkley.

…………….

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

Plato
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When you set the googlim to searching for VENEZUELA AND MUSIC they will drop into your lap items that describe in terms of excitement the good work being done in Venezuela by its music program in the schools.

One is struck immediately by an embarrassing contrast to the situation here in Canada where music has always been a poor relation, God-only-knows-how-many notches below sports in the “academic” pecking order. The actual content of “music studies,” where these exist at all in any school draws mostly upon commercial-popular music, rather than upon  the classical heritage.

By contrast (according to Reuters, in an article from a decade ago), “Venezuela’s youth orchestras and choirs have helped thousands of children resist thug life in some of South America’s most violent slums, and now wealthy countries are lining up to emulate the system.” The Reuters reporter notes a great irony here: “Governments from Los Angeles to Scotland may not much like President Hugo Chavez’s brand of Cuba-inspired socialism but they will soon try to replicate Venezuela’s achievements on their own streets… Teachers say the system markedly reduces truancy in slums with some of the highest murder rates in the world… There are now orchestras being formed in Venezuela’s almost lawless prisons.”

“The System” was inaugurated in 1975, and has thus been around long enough that it is tempting to imagine the effects of music training ramifying through the schools and working a massive transformation of the economic, social and political life of the land. But anyone who has been paying attention to Venezuela’s political, economic and cultural life of Venezuela knows that the national life is not governed by that “moral law” that Plato said radiated from the study of music. In fact, Venezuela today presents quite a desperate picture.

Just a few days ago, President Nicolas Maduro announced a 95 percent devaluation of the country’s currency – just the latest in a series of perverse governmental actions intended to head off an economic crisis caused by falling oil prices, but in reality leading to a massive exodus of economic refugees.

Sadly, the public life of Venezuela has been sliding downwards towards hell just about as long as The System has been pouring its graduates into Venezuelan society.

Without doubt, the most widely celebrated graduate of the System is Gustavo Dudamel, 38, today Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the superstar Guest Conductor of just about every major orchestra this season. Precisely because of his unmatched fame he is being called upon today to speak out about the political reality  in Venezuela. But he won’t be moved. This week, Gustavo Dudamel told the Los Angeles Times that he is simply “a musician. If I were a politician, I would act as a politician for my own interest. But I’m an artist, and an artist should act for everybody.” Grandiose and cowardly at the same time! That very week, six people had lost their lives in Venezuela amid protests against what another Venezuelan musician, pianist Gabriela Montera, calls the “organised thuggery” of Nicolas Maduro’s government.

Poignantly, these protests occurred precisely as Dudamel was conducting a concert to celebrate the 39th year of The System.

Without claiming to know how Venezuelan musicians should discharge their political duties, we certainly have a right to point up the failure of the most thoroughly democratic music-education system in the world to affect political realities under what would seem to be nearly-ideal conditions. With Gustavo Dudamel leading the parade, the children of The System are moving in lock-step celebration of the dictator, Nicolas Maduro. Yet, there seems to be nearly-universal agreement that Maduro cannot long preside over a government so incompetent and so venal that prices are rising at an annualized rate of over 100,000 percent!

Since the opening of the French ‘Revolutionary Era three centuries ago, the prosperity of music and musicians has generally been seen to follow from political stability and that has meant, for the most part, singing the praises of extant political regimes. Confronted by critics on the matter of his apparent political apathy, Dudamel says: “We are creating in Sistema not only musicians but better citizens. We exchange instruments for guns. We teach tolerance and respect….I’m a musician. If I were a politician, I would act as a politician for my own interest. But I’m an artist, and an artist should act for everybody.”

 Unless musicians of the stature of Dudamel discharge the responsibility of political leadership that goes with their cultural eminence they risk seeing the rapid collapse of their cultural eminence.

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SOME REASONS WHY ISLAM IS WINNING

August 19, 2018 by Paul Merkley

Some Reasons Why Islam is Winning.

By Paul Merkley.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

I can say categorically that there never was a moment in my life when I could detect anything appealing in Islam.

To begin with,  I am far too respectful of the positive accomplishments of our civilization to be tempted by “orientalism” in all of its forms. The manly accomplishments as well as the thoughts of Lawrence of Arabia are wasted on me. But as for the substance: Muslims seek to change our minds about the allegiances that we might have inherited from four  two thousand years of the history of Christianity by directing our attention to Islam’s sacred history – which, quite apart from being 3400 years shorter, has to me the aesthetic appeal of desiccated fruit.

According to Islamic teaching, “God created man from clot of blood. “Surah 96. How did blood get onto the scene of human history before or any  part of the animal creation did? Whose blood, then?

There is an Islamic answer to this and other mysteries. It is: Shut up!   

Consider that, by contrast, for several centuries radical criticism of our own sacred texts has taken place, not only in our academic world and in our general culture but perhaps most aggressively in our theological seminaries.  A Christian intellectual knows that his faith has been fully examined — inside-out and upside-down  – not  always with profit, but certainly exhaustively — by all branches of scholarship. That it seems to lack appeal among intellectuals today is owing to the shallowness and frivolity of secular scholarship.

In Islam, the merest gesture towards  criticizing a text or doubting a truth allegedly based upon a text puts the questioner at immediate liability to death at the hand of the nearest male member of family. This duty is mandated by Islamic scripture.

( sheikyermami.com/apostasy-whoever-changes-his-islamic-religion-kill-him’;www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/apostasy.aspx/)

It is true that many young people in our part of the world are converting from Judaism and Christianity to Islam, Still, this is not happening at the  rate that young people all around the world are turning from traditional faith systems to Christianity. (According to one scholarly source, “since the 1960s, there has been a substantial increase in the number of known conversions from Islam to Christianity. Most of these conversions have been to forms of evangelical or Pentecostal Christianity Duane Alexander Miller. “Believers in Christ from a Muslim Background: A Global Census, St.  Mary’s University San Antonio, Texas. WEC International Singapore Abstract.)

Behind each defection from Christianity in our part of the world is usually a story of parental failure and\or the success of our now aggressively-atheist school systems. It is rarely impelled by philosophy.

The record of history, as well as contemporary political reality, bears out the fact that the religion of Islam offers no materials out of which stable society can be built. The famous Nineteenth Century French philosopher and Sociologist, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859) saw this clearly:

I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself

Winston Churchill’s bloody-minded judgment on Islam, formed in his youth as a soldier in India and Sudan, is frequently quoted:

Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.

Our contemporary, Robert Redeker, an academic philosopher who writes for Le Figaro, brings this indictment up to date:

A merciless war chief, plunderer, slaughterer of Jews and a polygamists, such is the man revealed through the Koran… The stoning of Satan, each year at Mecca, is not just a superstitious phenomenon… Here in effect is a rite, which each Muslim is invited to submit himself to, emphasizing violence as a sacred duty in the heart of the believer. This stoning, annually accompanied with deaths by trampling of the faithful, sometimes in several hundreds, is a ritual which nurtures archaic violence…

(As it happens, I write this on the day when the  hajj begins in Mecca, and when authorities are predicting the probability of hundreds of deaths though the crushing effect of these exalted crowds. (https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/724211/Hajj-pilgrimage-Mecca-Medina-Saudi-Arabia.)

Islam is a religion which, even in its sacred text, as well as in its banal rites, exalts violence and hate. Hate and violence inhabit the book with which each Muslim is educated, the Koran. (Robert Redeker, “Face aux intimidations islamistes, que doit faire le monde libre?”, Le Figaro, september 2006.)

Not surprisingly, death threats poured down upon this man for these words, and he was forced into hiding under police protection. “The West is under ideological surveillance by Islam,” Redeker concluded. “I have the impression that I’ve been drafted against my will into a conflict from the 17th or 18th century. It’s all about opposing religious intolerance.”

As so often, Mark Twain gets to the heart of the matter:

That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters.

But returning to my opening thought: why does this embarrassingly barbaric teaching appeal to so many young people?

The question answers itself! It is because it is barbaric. We live in an age in which all moral advantage belongs to those who most viciously attack received faith in any and all its forms. This is increasingly an age of barbarism. The news-media , the journals of opinion, the universities – and even increasingly the pulpits – are commanded by barbaric souls – that is, souls who are self-consciously aware of themselves as in revolt against received culture and tradition. The most barbaric of these barbarians, having captured the castles of elite opinion, are now finding sustenance for their barbaric suppression of thought in the mindless pages of the Qur’an.

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Posted in Politics & Law, Uncategorized |

“THEY BURNT OUR TREES. Let’s Plant Even More.”

July 14, 2018 by Paul Merkley

 

‘THEY BURNT OUR TREES. Let’s plant even more….”

By Paul Merkley.

……………..

The organization United with Israel  is putting out an appeal for funds based on this message:

Thousands of trees have been destroyed from devastating kite and balloon fires sent from Gaza. Now more than ever, Israeli farmers need your help… so that they can buy over 20 kinds of fruit trees to replace the thousands of trees that have been destroyed from devastating kite and balloon fires sent from Gaza Together, let’s plant many more trees than were destroyed.

Bring them on, this says to the terrorist-arsonists. Just keep on burning. As you do so, we will go on for ever, on a matching basis, buying and planting and buying and planting. Singing in the rain until the end of time…

Am I alone in thinking this is madness?

Apart from other more complicated considerations: does it not occur to these people that a planted tree does not replace a mature tree immediately.?

United With Israel describes itself as a “Jewish organization, open and welcoming to all people, Jewish and non-Jewish, regardless of race, religion or region… a global, grassroots movement comprised of individuals who are deeply committed to the success and prosperity of Israel.”

It is also, apparently, an organization that imagines that zealous contributors are as countless as the sand:  they stand ready to respond with zeal  to the challenge of replacing any and all of the trees that the enemy, in his madness,  decides he must destroy – from now until doomsday. “They burn. We will plant more, is the motto that they recommend.

Perhaps we need to take a deep breath ad think back to how we got to this point.

First we must reflect on how Gaza became  the fully-owned fiefdom of one of the darkest of all that host of dark Islamist gangs whose names only a tiny group of security experts know but whose numbers are growing daily.

Try counting back  twenty-five years or three and one-quarter Presidents to September 13, 1993, when President Bill Clinton  held a fabulous reception for three thousand guests on the White House Lawn — witnessed on television by virtually all of the grown-ups in the world. The entire Congress (both houses), the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, the entire diplomatic corps and several hundred other dignitaries were also there to be seen, enjoying the champagne and canapés on the American taxpayers’ dime. On this occasion, the Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine liberation Organization, each declared his commitment to “the Peace Process.”

What followed upon that festive reception is a long story: the simple version is that Israel, coaxed at every step by the American President and his State Department, began at once giving over to Arafat’s gangster regime custody of more and more of the land painfully acquired by Israel in the wake of several failed invasions of its sovereignty by armies of the Arab world. The concessions  inevitably made Israel, more vulnerable to terrorism. The Palestinian side has conceded nothing but taken everything that the U.S and the United Nations  could dream up to give away.

Early in this process, Israel invited Yasir Arafat, the exiled Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization to “return”, at first to Jericho, and then to Ramallah, in order to preside over the Palestine Authority — pending conclusion of  diplomacy between Israel and Arafat’s organization over a few matters that needed agreement before sovereignty was ceded over Arab “Palestine.”

But from the moment when he set foot on the ground of “sacred Palestine” Arafat made it clear that he had no intention of living at peace with the People of Israel and that he would not release his followers from their sacred duty of ceaseless warfare to the death against Jews until every inch of what we have called Israel now for seventy years should be incorporated into the Muslim world.

The PLO has turned the “Palestinian” educational system into a propaganda machine dedicated to preparing subsequent  generations of local children into regimented, anthem-singing uniformed robots – along Hitlerian lines.

Like every other Arab ruler in a comparable situation – a virtual dictator in a one-party-State — Arafat, and then Mahmoud Abbas, failed so completely at governing the Palestine Authority” that, after several seasons of brutal inter-party conflict, Abbas went to his corner while a new champion took over the other corner and “Arab Palestine”  broke in two. The new contender was Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of  Hamas, a terrorist organization beloved by the masses of Palestinian people.

Without doubt, Gaza is today on the very short list of places in the world where none of us would want to find himself. It is an Islamic theocracy, a dictatorship sustained by fear of eternally-active consequences, where governmental thugs enforce (selectively)  Islamic notions of good behavior.  Think of Yemen or Central African Republic or Somalia. Think of at least twenty other Muslim polities in the Arab world today. What they all have in common is their incapacity to govern. The appearance of government is achieved through extorted acquiescence of the masses. Like the leaders of all these other Arab-Muslim states – and like Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Arab Palestine and the leader of Fatah —  Gaza’s leaders wallow in billions of dollars of undeclared personal wealth, acquired over the years by ruinous taxation and extortion, (See “Gaza’s Millionaires and Billionaires,” www.algemeiner.com, July 28, 2014; http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/134537/lifestyles-rich-and…Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous. … Mahmoud Abbas ) while holding out the begging bowl on behalf of their “oppressed citizens”- “oppressed,” that is by Israel, which has not an iota of legal responsibility for the care and feeding of the people of Gaza.

Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the government of Gaza and the head, of course,  of Hamas has the Jewish state next door to blame for everything that his regime is too incompetent or too indifferent to achieve. Judgment of the character of that Jewish state is a matter left to the most prestigious of Muslim clerics. A representative voice is that of Sheikh Ibrahim  Mujdeiris, the Imam of the al-Aqsa  Mosque, a paid appointee of the Palestine Authrhoity, who reminds his flock:

We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. .. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews … . And the day of resurrection will not come without the victory of the believers [the Moslems] over the descendents of the monkeys and pigs [the Jews] and with their annihilation.

To the Muslim-Arab population of Gaza, living in expectation of this ultimate War to End All Jews of which the Prophet speaks, Ismail Haniyeh looks like being the man of that hour. Since  April, the gangs of  Hamas, operating at all times within camera range of the  BBC, have been spilling  out of Gaza to set fire to the length and breadth of Israel. Kites and balloons carrying containers of burning fuel and several kinds of explosive devices have sparked several hundred fires in southern Israel, burning more than 2,600 hectares  of Israel’s limited, precious  forest and farmland and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage.

Today, after several weeks of being jerked about by Haniyeh and his theologically-driven pyromaniacs, Prime Minister Netanyahu  is speaking of ”using a “heavy hand” against Hamas.

Let’s hope that Netanyahu uses that heavy hand soon for the purpose of toppling this monster.

The worst possible plan is that recommended by Friends of Israel. Their call for a no-holds-barred contest between planters and killers of trees sounds as heroic as all-get-out. But it concedes all freedom of action to the forces of darkness while consigning the forces of light  forever  to rushing about with fire-hoses. in the desperate hope of keeping ahead of the great conflagration.

The secret to the Hamas strategy is their contempt for the lives of their enraged masses. We see it over and over again. Totally defenseless zealots dashing out into the Israel defensive forces, seeking the bliss of entering heaven before the sun sets. We cannot reason with this demonic mindset. But we have an obligation to keep our own spirits under rational and ethical control.

United With Israel is promoting the idea of challenging THEM to a contest with US. You go one burning and we will go on planting. This is mindless—a surrender of everything moral so that we can enter into the kind of game that children are playing out today in schoolyards.

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