Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/28/2010

Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/28/2010The pedophilia scandal in the European Catholic Church continues to generate headlines. Most of the reports of abuse come from Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany, and Pope Benedict XVI is implicated in an alleged failure to take action against an abusive German priest whose case was referred to the office of then-Archbishop Ratzinger.

In other news, an FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force made raids on a Christian militia group at locations in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, on the basis of reports that the group threatened violence against Muslims. Meanwhile, on the Indonesian island of Java, a conference of gays and lesbians has been successfully blocked by Muslim street protests.

Thanks to Barry Rubin, C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Freedom Fighter, Frontinus, Insubria, JD, KGS, Sean O’Brian, TB, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

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The Last Shtetl

There have been a number of recent reports about increasing attacks by Muslim immigrants against Jews in Scandinavia. The following article from the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten focuses mainly on anti-Semitism in European countries other than Norway.

Camelot, who translated the article for Gates of Vienna, includes this introductory note:

The article below reports the growth of anti-Semitism in other Western European countries as well as Norway. In my view, this is a symptom not only of increased immigration, but also a sign that the Muslim communities are becoming braver and more “daring”.

The translated article from Aftenposten:

Increase in harassment against European Jews

by Per Kr. Aale

European Jews feel more insecure and threatened. Last year, the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents since the 2nd World War was registered.

“Cancer Jew, cancer Jew!” yelled the two Moroccans loudly.

Shalom Dov Ber van Halem (22) was on his way home from Sunday supper at his parents’ house in Amsterdam when two Moroccans on bicycles started shouting at him.

“Cancer Jew! Hitler didn’t finish the job!” they yelled, and then went away.

Van Halem continued walking, but was suddenly knocked to the ground by a heavy blow to the back. The two Moroccans had run over him. A third one came running, and all three threw themselves on top of the young man.

“We hate Jews! You kill people in Gaza,” they spat at him, while kicking and beating van Halem, who suffered severe injuries.

Raphaël Evers is a Rabbi in the orthodox Jewish society in Amsterdam. He says that the hate against Jews is getting worse every year.

“The Jews here can never feel safe. Usually it’s racist statements being made, but many have also been attacked,” he says.

According to the Dutch authorities there has been a significant rise in the number of attacks on Jews, especially during the war on Gaza last year. In most cases it was Muslim immigrants who carried them out.

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The situation in the Netherlands isn’t unique. Anti-racism organizations and institutions registering anti-Semitic incidents report a large increase of attacks on Jews and synagogues. Jewish children are being bullied, people are being knocked down, synagogues are smeared with racist slogans. In several cases, firebombs have been thrown against synagogues. The Jewish Agency, an organization connected with the Israeli government, wrote in a report that there were more attacks on European Jews last year than in any year since the Second World War. The report concludes that the Israeli military offensive in Gaza last year led to a wave of anti-Semitic incidents.

The side curls wave in the wind when the Jewish man in a black caftan comes down Lange Kieviestraat on his bicycle. Outside the Kosher King store, two people converse loudly in Yiddish. Here in Antwerp, Belgium, around 22,000 Jews form their own community. They have their own schools, doctors and shops with kosher food. Many are Hasidic, ultra-orthodox Jews who follow the Torah strictly. Now, the community is shaken by the increasing anti-Semitism.

At the Restaurant Hoffman, Mochi Hoffman serves kosher food. He acknowledges that the situation has become more difficult.

“The other day, there was a football match where the fans started singing old Nazi songs,” he says. He and other Jews that Aftenposten speaks with confirm reports of increased anti-Semitism. Synagogues have been attacked, cars smashed, and walls painted with anti-Semitic statements.

“We see incidents almost daily. People are scared. The higher unemployment rate has contributed to making the situation worse,” says Diane Keyser, a member of a forum connecting Jewish organizations in the city. Almost all the attacks are carried out by young immigrants from the Middle East. But Ms. Keyser emphasizes that the relationship with the many Muslims of Antwerp is mostly a good one.

“There’s a small group of young people who make all the trouble. Except for that, we live next to one another, though not with each other.”

Antwerp is a lively Jewish society. At Restaurant Hoffmann, most of the customers speak Yiddish. Alongside Jerusalem, London and New York, this is one of the largest communities where this language is still being spoken. While many of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe were exterminated during the war, Antwerp is often called the last shtetl, Yiddish for village.

Recently the US State Department made public a report stating that the anti-Semitism in Europe had increased, especially during the Gaza conflict. “Such incidents include attacks on Jews or synagogues, desecration of cemeteries, and allegations about Jews having an especially great influence over the country’s politics and media.”

Last year the Center Against Racism in Belgium registered well over 100 attacks against Jews, twice as many as the year before. In the Netherlands, over 100 anti-Semitic attacks were carried out in January 2009 alone, more than the whole of 2008. In Great Britain, the Community Security Trust (CST) reported 924 attacks, the highest number since they started counting in 1984.

France has the largest Jewish community in Western Europe, but several thousand have emigrated to Israel during the last couple of years because of the hatred against them. The French Jewish Community registered 832 incidents last year, a 100% increase compared to 2008. According to the American Pew research institute, many Europeans have a negative attitude towards Jews, especially in Spain, Poland and Russia, but also about 20% of the French population share the same view.

The Jews have been living in the Netherlands for several hundred years. At the beginning of the Second World War there were 140,000 of them. 75% were killed by the Nazis. Bloeme Evers-Emden (83) survived Auschwitz.

“The anti-Semitism is a lot worse now than before the war. Today, Jews are attacked on a regular basis; that didn’t happen back then. The anti-Semitism has become more violent,” says the fit lady. She tells us that the Dutch Fascist Party (NSB) spread a lot of propaganda about the Jews before the war, and that Jews couldn’t hold certain jobs or join certain clubs.

“But our lives weren’t threatened as they are today. Then came the war and the Nazis, and the situation became a totally different one, of course.”

Rabbi Raphaël Evers says he is harassed every time he goes out.

“We Jews don’t feel at home in the Netherlands anymore. Many people talk about moving to Israel.”

Shalom Dov Ber van Halem tells us he is the object of racist remarks almost every week. He has been beaten several times.

“Sadly, anti-Semitism has become an everyday thing here in the Netherlands. People aren’t shocked anymore when they hear about such incidents. I regret that,” says the 22-year-old.

Reflections on the Civil War in Britain

El Inglés returns to the topic of a possible culturally enriched civil war in the UK during the not-so-distant future, and speculates about some of the characteristics and constraints that are likely to apply to such a conflict.

Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike, 1934


Reflections on the Civil War in Britain
by El Inglés

Given the obvious and apparently unalterable trajectory that Britain is charting towards violent conflict between the historic British people and our Muslim fifth column, it might be interesting to indulge in a little harmless futurology with respect to the likely characteristics of this conflict. The idle speculation that makes up the content of this essay is hereby offered up by a playful mind with, perhaps, too little to gainfully occupy it.

If the historic British people (hereafter referred to as HBP) and the Muslim fifth column (hereafter referred to as MFC) contaminating their country ever do descend into a Troubles-style conflict writ large across the whole of the United Kingdom, it is certain that the conflict will be highly asymmetric in nature. I do not imply by this that it will be a particularly close parallel of any classic asymmetric conflict, such as those in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Malaya. Rather, I imply simply that the characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, and geographical dispositions of the two sides are so different as to preclude the possibility of them bringing to bear on each other the same types of violence with the same objectives. This point will become clearer as we proceed through the essay.

In the interests of imposing order on a subject matter that lends itself to disorderly rambling, I will organize this essay thematically. Each section will pick a specific theme and consider, as seems appropriate, the relative advantages and disadvantages of HBP and MFC in each regard.

Size

The UK currently has a Muslim population of approximately 2.4 million. Let us assume, conservatively, that 5% of this population is supportive of terrorist attacks against the British state and people by believers residing within it. This equates to 120,000 people who might be prepared to support, more or less directly, an attack of this sort.

In comparison, the UK has a total population of 61 million people, of whom approximately 90%, or 54.9 million, can be considered white British. If a mere 1% of these people were to be supportive of terrorist attacks of some sort on the Muslim population of the UK, then we would already have some 549,000 white Britons in this category. A brief ‘exchange’ of terrorist actions between these two subsets of their relative populations would undoubtedly polarize the political situation, increasing the size of both terrorism-supporting groups, to an extent not amenable to being solved by any purely political means at all. As and when such natives minorities emerge and start to occupy themselves with their political agendas, we will be in a hard game indeed.

MI5, the British domestic security service, has repeatedly claimed to be stretched to the limit by the very real threat of Muslim terrorism. One is reluctant to believe everything people in such services say in public statements, but it does seem to be the case that the reason Mohammed Siddique Khan, ringleader of the 7/7 London bombers, was not put under continued surveillance was that there were simply not sufficient resources to do so, despite existing concerns about him. Given the massive growth in the Muslim terrorist threat in the UK in the last few years, and given further that any branch of government will be afforded resources roughly commensurate to the tasks it must undertake, it seems likely that MI5 will indeed have been struggling to make its budget cover the rapidly emerging Islamic threat.

Of course, budgets can be increased. But organizations cannot be usefully or speedily expanded simply by throwing money at them. An organization like MI5 must grow organically, screening and training new staff and incorporating them into its operational structure. Accordingly, the rate at which it can grow will be limited quite irrespective of the financial limitations imposed upon it.

Now imagine a state of affairs in which 549,000 people, amongst a population a hundred times as large, support in some fashion the use of violence by non-state actors against the UK Muslim population or some part thereof, and some smaller subset become involved in actively planning and attempting to carry out such attacks. Such a development would instantly dwarf the ability of MI5 and Special Branch to keep track of even a small fraction of the terrorist violence being plotted throughout the entire country, and this would be true as long as the conflict raged, as there is no conceivable way that these services could increase their capacity by a factor of, say, 50, to keep up with an entirely plausible (indeed, laughably conservative) 50-fold rise in the amount of tribal violence between MFC and HBP.

Geographic Distribution

This is, apart from size, arguably the single greatest asymmetry in the looming conflict. MFC is overwhelmingly concentrated in urban areas, most obviously London, the West Midlands, and the North of England. HBP on the other hand, have, unsurprisingly, a strong presence throughout the entire country, and are the only occupants of rural Britain to all intents and purposes. This situation has many and varied implications. I will discuss them mainly from the Muslim point of view, HBP’s advantages and disadvantages being implicit in the reverse position.
– – – – – – – –

1.   The urban concentration of Muslims gives them a high chance of being able to obtain some sort of local dominance in key areas. How long this dominance lasts is another question, but it is probable that certain areas will hemorrhage non-Muslims fairly rapidly.
2.   The urban concentration of Muslims and the consequent urban nature of the battlefield (no Muslims, no battle) gives Muslim an advantage of sorts in that their ‘forces’ are all close at hand and their lines of communication short. In any serious breakdown of civil order, however, during which it becomes dangerous to be identified as the enemy outside one’s own territory, this will effectively trap Muslims in small urban enclaves from which they cannot easily escape, with all accompanying psychological and logistical pressures.
3.   At least in its early stages, the conflict will still be at least somewhat amenable to being constrained by regular law enforcement activities. Urban areas are so saturated with CCTV cameras and will have such a short police response time that great risks will be taken by those who engage in paramilitary activity in these areas at first, be they Muslim or British.
4.   The urban concentration of Muslims and the drastically reduced general mobility they will suffer when things start to get ‘hot’ will be a huge disadvantage. Curfews; house-to-house sweeps looking for weapons, explosives, and wanted individuals; aerial surveillance; all of these things will be much easier for the apparatus of state to perform on Muslims than on their opponents, who will be a) naturally dominant in more rural areas and b) able to move around there with little suspicion. Only very rarely does one encounter a cultural enricher whilst strolling England’s leafy pathways, and their sudden presence there will not go unresponded to in the event of unpleasantness between them and the British, by state or non-state actors.
5.   Muslim enclaves cannot be considered self-sufficient in any way, shape, or form. Food, water, medical supplies, and power must all be provided, albeit in different ways, from outside. Any or all of these supply routes can, in principle, be cut. Rubbish collection can be disrupted; mobile phone masts can be shut down or signals jammed; phone lines can be cut. All Muslim areas will be subject to these pressures should conflict break out; British areas will not be subject to them at all except insofar as they are adjacent to Muslims areas. Furthermore, the technical expertise required to build and maintain infrastructure of this sort lies overwhelmingly in the hands of the British.
6.   A significant majority of the land mass of the United Kingdom has virtually no Muslims in it at all. This will provide the British with a huge area of operations in which to train, drill, experiment with firearms and explosives, and also with plentiful opportunities to meet and plan in areas where both technical and physical surveillance on the part of the police/security services are hard to conduct.
7.   Muslim enclaves are likely to expand, or at least consolidate, as ethno-religious cleansing forces both Muslims and British to retreat from certain areas in favour of others. This will simplify the situation for all actors and entrench the psychological divide.

People in Positions of Power

MFC has, thankfully, relatively low concentrations of people in professions which would provide privileged access of the sort that would be useful to would-be terrorists. Policemen, politicians, military personnel, civil servants, and the like: any such figure in a position to aid and abet any sort of terrorist organization would be worth his weight in gold to it.

Such figures are, of course, to be found overwhelmingly among HBP, and will likely prove to be recruitment targets for any underground organization which finds itself to be sufficiently underwhelmed by MFC to decide to try and attack it in some fashion. Even something as straightforward as an illicit flow of reliable intelligence as to the whereabouts and/or routines or potential targets in the Muslim community would massively increase the effectiveness of such organizations, for whom intelligence-gathering will be difficult due to the tribal nature of the conflict and the difficulties of infiltrating enemy groups.

The degree of intellectual and ideological corruption that swathes of our apparatus of state now labour under notwithstanding, there must still be high concentrations of people in the military, the police, and the civil service who are appalled at what the cancer of Islam is doing to their country, and who will eventually end up being well-disposed to those who would strike back against Islam on British soil. This will become all the truer if Muslims target the police or military on British soil, which they have already tried to do and will almost certainly try to do again in the event of serious conflict. The collusion of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army in at least some loyalist paramilitary attacks on republican targets during the Troubles is well known (though the scope of such collusion is still controversial).

Dispositions/Sympathies of Police, Military, and Ex-Military

Following on from the previous section, the British police are, for reasons I will not pretend to understand, perpetually trying to increase the representation of ethnic minorities within the force. Thankfully, these efforts seem to be doomed to failure, with all minorities remaining underrepresented. This is a huge blessing for those of us concerned about the shape of things to come. Irrespective of the degree of corruption the police manifest as an institution due to the political pressures already being placed on them, they will remain overwhelmingly white, and of working class and lower middle-class background. Their sympathies can therefore be expected to remain with HBP, and the degree of contempt and disgust the British bobby feels for MFC can only be expected to increase.

As with the police, so with the military. Muslims are massively underrepresented in the British military, with this too being a situation that the idiots at the Ministry of Defence are trying to ‘remedy’, with a similar degree of success. Trying to predict in any detail the likely deployments or attitudes of the military in the event of a serious breakdown of civil order between MFC and HBP is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say for the moment that it is highly unlikely that the rank and file of the military, having spent the last several years fighting Muslims across the world, will feel much sympathy for MFC. Nor can they be expected to be well-disposed to the idea of shooting their fellow white Britons to enhance the security of Muslims. Whether or not the officer class would be likely to pass along orders from their civilian superiors to engage in such shooting is a question I will have to leave to others to answer. Personally, I consider it unlikely. Forcing one’s troops to disobey one’s orders by ordering them to shoot their own people in their own country is an activity that no right-minded officer is likely to engage in.

Lastly, there is the question of the likely activities of ex-military personnel during conflict between HBP and MFC. At the risk of stating the obvious, it seems improbable that such folk would sit around watching the growing disorder on the television when they could be ‘contributing’ to it themselves. No longer constrained by chain of command, quite possibly full of hostility towards Muslims, certainly missing the smell of cordite in their new 9-to-5 office jobs where ‘combat’ consists of firing elastic bands at people, and with old military networks and know-how still in place, ex-military personnel are likely to flood into any organizations promising a chance to stick it to the believers on the shores of Albion itself. And there will be tens of thousands of them, many of them, one would imagine, in the police. If those in government tasked with considering these matters (as opposed to those tasked with singing the glories of our newfound diversity) are not having sleepless nights over this, then they are not doing their jobs properly.

In contrast, Muslims have virtually no one in the UK with any conventional military experience. The Muslim way of war consisting largely of car bombings and throat-cuttings, and we must expect these to be the most commonly-used tactics during what is to come. However, in contrast with the strict rules of engagement that apply in Iraq and Afghanistan, tribal conflict on home soil will be a largely gloves-off affair. HBP responses to such Muslim attacks are likely to be conducted with a robust disregard for the Geneva Convention, to which MFC is not a signatory anyway.

International Networks/Support

During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Volunteer Force (one of the two main loyalist paramilitary groups) suffered severe weapons procurement difficulties, largely as a consequence of the lack of ideological allies outside of Northern Ireland. Their attempts to procure the equipment they needed to advance their war against the IRA often foundered on the mercenary nature of international arms dealers, who would take their money then fail, in whatever fashion, to deliver the weaponry. In contrast, the IRA enjoyed two sources of genuine support in this regard during the Troubles. One nationalist, one ideological, they were the Irish-American population and the Libyan regime of Colonel Gaddafi respectively.

In contrast with the difficult position of the UVF, there is a huge, gradually unfolding wave of hostility and alarm with respect to Islam not only across the whole of Europe, but also across the United States, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Canada and Australia. Israel and India are two other countries which appear to have their own ‘issues’ with Islam, and surely contain factions who would not be averse to seeing a blow struck against it in the UK or any other European country. What this means is that intelligence, propaganda, funding, personnel exchanges and the procurement of war materiel on the part of anti-Muslim non-state actors will increasingly come to be distributed across a vast swathe of the world with massive trade and transport links, substantial cultural, historical, and racial ties, and large concentrations of educated and wealthy people.

Even in Europe alone, there is already a thicket of countries with vocal anti-Islamic parties and organizations, and the stirrings and rumblings of less orthodox resistance to the ongoing process of Islamization. The almost perfect overlap of concerns, dangers, and likely responses will make the formation of international networks amongst these parties inevitable. A situation may be reached in which the difficulty facing anti-Muslim paramilitaries is not how to procure weapons, but exactly what to choose and whom to accept it from.

Muslims are in a slightly different position in this regard. There are extant Muslim criminal networks in place throughout Europe, be they looser or tighter, which are already cooperating to some extent in their various criminal activities. These gangs will already have smuggling operations in place for shipping, for example, stolen cars out of Europe and weapons and drugs in. It is highly probable that they will be very heavily involved in logistical, financial, and operational aspects of the Muslim side of any widespread tribal violence that ensues in Europe. Indeed, they may well end up taking a central role, in contrast to the probable central role of ex-military, rogue military, and rogue police elements on the British side.

Ease of Identification

Proselytisation efforts notwithstanding, the Muslim population in the UK still consists overwhelmingly of peoples who are ethnically foreign. Well aware of the degree of scrutiny this brings down upon them, they seem of late to have started trying to recruit people from other ethnicities. Germaine Lindsay, one of the four 7/7 bombers, was of Jamaican origin; Richard Reid, the now-infamous shoebomber, the son of an English mother and a Jamaican father; and Nicky Reilly, the failed Exeter bomber, white British. This development notwithstanding, certain regularities of appearance, name and country of origin will continue to make Muslims stand out from Europeans, particularly the most ideologically and politically important ones.

In contrast, Britons determined to oppose the Islamization of their country by fair means or foul will not be physically identifiable as belonging to any group worthy of concern. Muslims in the UK can be profiled to a greater or lesser extent, but ‘profiling’ the British population of Britain will not be possible.

Cultural Barriers to Violence

There is only one clear disadvantage that Europeans will possess with respect to law enforcement, and it is one of the likely consequences of what one might call the unimaginability of violent or vigilante action for many of those Europeans. It is, in some sense, the reverse of the culturally sealed nature of the Muslim community, as outlined above.

It is, of course, a great thing to live in a country in which the rule of law obtains, and in which the authorities do, on the whole, a good job of maintaining law and order, helping people to live in peace and prosperity. But one of the consequences of this is that any sort of vigilante action becomes borderline inconceivable for the overwhelming majority of the population. ‘They’, the authorities, the government, the people upstairs, will always take care of any problem, even when it is clear that ‘they’ created the problem in the name of their social engineering goals, that ‘they’ are not about to admit their own culpability, and that ‘they’ are willing to identify their own people as the source of all difficulties and act accordingly if that is what it takes to try and control the situation.

Even those not convinced of the omnipotence and benevolence of the state will, on the whole, have lived lives in which major criminality and violence have played no part. It will not be a simple matter for such people, many with homes, careers, families, and other things to lose, to step over the line into vigilantism or paramilitary activity. Even providing financial, logistical, PR, or intelligence-gathering support may be a bridge too far for many who are otherwise concerned about Islam. Of course, this resistance to involvement will weaken as the conflict escalates, often in response to specific events or incidents (as happened with support for the IRA after Bloody Sunday). The point to be made here is that, at least at the onset of major hostilities, a far greater fraction of Muslims can be expected to pass the psychological threshold to participating in these activities due to the following factors:

1.   Their brute tribalism, and tribal hostility and contempt for the British people
2.   Their contempt for British law, evinced by their crime rates and incarceration rates
3.   The savagery and degeneracy of their cultures (for first-generation immigrants) and parent cultures (for second and later-generation immigrants)
4.   Their personal and historic (i.e. cultural) lack of acquaintance with the rule of law, a strong and fairhanded state, and civic identity
5.   Their (accurate) awareness of themselves as minorities and their acute vulnerability should conflict break out

There is a second advantage for MFC in this regard. The high barriers to vigilante violence among HBP will not only reduce the fraction of them prepared to engage in such violence, it is also likely to increase their unease at the idea of others amongst them engaging in it, and therefore the probability of them informing on those of their fellow Britons who do. This is a subtle point, and one upon which there will be legitimate disagreement. Let us consider the issue from the Muslim perspective.

The general hostility that many Muslims in the UK feel to their host country is well known to even the most casual observer of these matters. Though this hostility has many unfortunate effects, the one that is most obviously relevant to the discussion here is the larger margin for error that it will grant to Muslims interested in planning and carrying out some sort of terrorist on British soil.

One of the critical moments for any type of would-be terrorist organization is surely that moment at which it approaches a potential recruit and asks him (it probably will be a him) whether he is interested in joining. How exactly the offer is phrased is undoubtedly a matter of personal taste, but the key point here is that there must be some point at which a line is crossed, and at which it is conveyed to the potential recruit that the recruiter is a member of a terrorist organization.

There is no one way of guessing what the likelihood of such an offer being accepted is. But if it is not accepted, what happens then? Of course, the side making the offer is likely to simply let the matter drop there, perhaps pretending that it was only made in jest or that the party they attempted to recruit misunderstood their intentions. But the side receiving the offer is now faced with a choice of sorts: to inform the authorities or keep their new knowledge about the affiliations of their acquaintance to themselves. What then, is the probability of them deciding on the former? Again, there is no way of providing a definitive answer to this question, but it seems reasonable to suppose that many Muslims will refrain from informing on other Muslims involved in terrorist activities, especially given that opinion polls conducted in the UK have suggested that it is so. If this speculation is correct, it constitutes a big handicap for the security services trying to infiltrate such groups, all other things being equal. Muslims guerillas may well be able to swim in the sea of MFC more easily than their British counterparts can swim amongst HBP. Whether this will actually prove to be the case is an empirical question that cannot yet be answered with confidence.

Degree of Pre-Infiltration

I suggested above that the ability of the security forces to keep a lid on rapidly escalating MFC-HBP violence would be extremely limited. Of course, one could argue that this would work to the advantage of Muslims just as much as to the advantage of Europeans, but there is an important reason why this is not so. I am no authority on the ins and outs of intelligence work vis-à-vis Muslim communities in Europe, but one thing is passably clear from the very small number of successful attacks and very large number of disrupted terrorist plots: Muslim communities in Europe must be riddled with security service assets and/or severely compromised with respect to investigation in other regards. There is simply no other way that so many plots could be disrupted. Not all Muslim would-be terrorists are stupid enough to try and buy ten gallons of hydrogen peroxide from a hairdresser.

Clearly, this degree of infiltration is not something that can be obtained overnight, or without a substantial investment of time, money, manpower, and political capital. To rephrase, the security services must have already sunk a great deal of their available operational capital in infiltrating MFC, and this investment is one of extremely low liquidity. They cannot cash in an asset in Hizb ut-Tahrir’s UK branch and use the proceeds to buy an equivalent asset in the (presumably) fictional Albion Liberation Front. If they wish to similarly infiltrate the loosely-knit web of European anti-Muslim paramilitary groups that will, I predict, emerge in the years to come, they would have to start almost entirely from scratch except insofar as such groups are part of the conventional extreme right, which is undoubtedly already infiltrated to some extent. What this means is that the MFC would be likely to both constitute and remain a much more heavily infiltrated and therefore compromised community than its enemy, HBP, in the event of the outbreak of mutually inflicted tribal violence.

Availability and Types of Targets

It is to be observed that virtually all paramilitary organizations have operational constraints imposed upon them by the amount and type of violence that their supporting populations are prepared to tolerate. Even an organization as ruthless and unconcerned with civilian casualties as Al-Qaeda eventually ran into trouble for the massive civilian casualties it inflicted in Iraq, on Sunnis, Shias, men, women, and children. Other, more restrained organizations (such as the IRA) took trouble, at least some of the time, to choose non-civilian targets, to give warnings shortly before bombs were to detonate to facilitate evacuation of the relevant areas, and so on.

In the event of serious hostilities between HBP and MFC in the UK, British paramilitaries will have to consider their targets carefully so as not to lose political and other types of support. It would be futile to try and examine this matter in detail, as the political state of play in such a scenario cannot be predicted. However, there is one observation that can already be made with confidence, and that is that Britain is already a target-rich environment for those who would target Muslim actors without bringing an unacceptable degree of opprobrium down on their hands, even in the initial stages of conflict before polarization was complete.

Let me be more explicit, and provisionally divide potential Muslim targets up into three categories, in order of decreasing whackability (my apologies for the technical language).

Category 1 – A significant fraction of the British population would be happy to see these people get whacked, and those who really objected would be few and far between

  • Muslim gang members and drug dealers
  • Released Muslim criminals, especially rapists, murderers, and the like
  • Pakistani pimping gangs and accomplices in the North of England
  • Openly seditious Muslims/members of seditious Muslim organizations
  • Members of British-located outlets/subsidiaries of problematic organizations with headquarters abroad, such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood
  • Foreign jihadists in the UK, allowed to remain for whatever reason

Category 2 – A reasonably large fraction of the British population would be happy to see these people get whacked, but there would also be substantial objection from another large fraction

  • Members of Islamic ‘civil rights’ organizations
  • Muslim public figures who cause HBP paramilitaries ‘concern’
  • Muslims at ‘radical’ mosques, i.e. mosques whose attendees have an unfortunate tendency to espouse jihad and sharia

Category 3 – A hardcore minority of the British population would be happy to see these people get whacked, but the majority, including many broadly on the anti-Islam side, would have serious reservations or express complete outrage

  • Muslim petty criminals
  • Muslim illegal immigrants

Beneath Category 3 we would have unobjectionable and blameless Muslim civilians, violence against whom would overwhelmingly be condemned by the British people at least in the early stages of conflict. Of course, if the conflict became unpleasant enough, violence against random Muslims might be supported. But that is another matter.

The significance of the above lies in the fact that British anti-Muslim paramilitaries could liberally hack away at certain parts of the MFC without particular concern over the possibility of a damaging PR backlash. Category 1 Muslims will earn little sympathy irrespective of what happens to them, and Category 2 Muslims perhaps not a great deal more. Whacking Category 3 Muslims or below could start to cause problems, but staying away from them will keep violence within a zone that will not start to dangerously compromise support for the paramilitary group in question. Those who are unclear on this point should research, for example, the difference between the Warrenpoint bombings (when the IRA succeeded in killing 18 members of the British Army) and the Enniskillen bombings (when they succeeded in killing one off-duty policeman and ten civilians, massively to their own detriment).

HBP paramilitaries will therefore have myriad opportunities to polarize relations between HBP and MFC in the UK and take the situation beyond the point of no return, without incurring the opprobrium directed at those who kill innocent civilians. Furthermore, there are so many targets that they could continue to focus on them even if MFC started to engage in random sectarian killings in response. The response of the British state to such killings on the part of MFC would probably be more than sufficient to deal with such a development.

If MFC wishes to retaliate, it will have to do so via random killings and bombings as mentioned in the previous paragraph because it has no equivalent targets. The only targets they will have that will not bring the hostility of the entire British people and establishment down on their heads will be each other. If I were a Muslim trying to construct my own list of targets equivalent to the above, who would I put on it? The Conservative Party? UKIP? The BNP? The Centre for Social Cohesion and Douglas Murray? The police? The EDL? Prominent critics of Islam? Salman Rushdie? Campaigners against Islam, like SIOE and its leader, Steven Gash? Lord Pearson and Baroness Cox, who invited one Geert Wilders to the House of Lords? Any attack, successful or otherwise, on any of these targets (including the BNP), would repel and outrage the entire country. MFC will have no ‘elbow room’ in this regard.

Objectives and Plausibility of Objectives

The last great advantage that HBP will have over MFC in the event of major hostilities between them is that HBP will have open to them formal and informal objectives both legitimate and plausible, whereas this will be much less true for MFC. Let us consider this important point in detail.

MFC is a very recent graft, a graft that has been inflicted on HBP without their consent, and through the perfidy and treason of their political class. Its roots in the UK are shallow, and its disproportionately criminal, parasitic, seditious, terrorist, and ideologically hostile and subversive nature make those roots much shallower in effect than those of, say, the Hindus, whose history in the UK is of essentially the same length. Very few British people would walk down a street full of Pakistanis, or Somalis, or Algerians and feel in any meaningful way that the people around them were now ‘just a part’ of the British people. No good thing that exists in the UK, not one, exists because Muslims in the UK created it.

In contrast, and at the risk of stating the extremely obvious, the British people have been in Britain rather a long time. Moreover, every good thing that exists in Britain exists because, and only because, they created it. As a consequence there is no meaningful claim that Muslims can make to Britain, anything in it or a single square inch of its territory. Contrast this with, for example, the centuries-long presence of the Protestant British settlers in Northern Ireland. Whatever one’s take on Irish history, it can hardly be argued that they are some blip within it, and even the IRA never argued against the presence of these Protestants in what they would call the Six Counties. Rather, they argued against the political authority of the British state in Ireland, and for the creation of a united Ireland with substantial regional autonomy enjoyed by its component parts.

Now, it is my contention that the British can argue in favour of a relatively Muslim-free Britain, and against the presence of any substantial numbers of believing Muslims in their country at all. Even failing that, they can argue against further Muslim immigration, for the deportation of Muslims without British citizenship, for the deportation of criminal Muslims, for the deportation of sharia and jihad-supporters, for the withdrawal of benefits from Muslims, and so on. Many would think these political objectives are hopelessly implausible, but I feel we are not that far away from seeing them enter the political mainstream in more and more European countries, as they have already started to do in the Netherlands. Either way, they are real, concrete objectives that are all physically plausible and will all eventually be demanded.

MFC has no such equivalent goals. They cannot demand the deportation of Britons, reduced immigration of Britons, fewer Britons sucking tax revenues out of them, or the like, because these demands are all meaningless. They cannot even demand partition and independence, as it could not possibly be granted. They would not be economically viable, their Muslim territory would simply be besieged, savaged, and destroyed by the non-state actors already in the conflict, and any members of the government trying to grant independence would be swinging from lamp-posts by the end of the day. Besides, what would we give them? The North of England? No, partition is clearly inconceivable. The only meaningful demands Muslims could make would be for more of the same: more immigration, more money, more appeasement and more sharia. But of course, it will have been precisely these things that will have precipitated violent conflict in the first place, so such conflict would only be further inflamed by granting more.

Of course, Muslims being Muslims, there will be the usual maniacs who think they can beat the whole of Britain in a civil war and somehow benefit from it. But in reality, the increasingly precarious status of Muslims in Europe, already clearly visible at a psychological level, will only increase massively when real conflict breaks out. Muslims will then have no good options left to them. They may demand protection, but there is not much more they can ask for. What this means is that there is no obvious way the British government can ‘break’ in favour of MFC, but many ways it can do so in favour of HBP. Concessions are likely to be granted in one direction only when things start to disintegrate.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/27/2010

Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/27/2010The Congressional Budget Office estimates that within ten years, the US budget deficit will rise to 90% of GDP. By that time the federal public debt will amount to $170,000 per household.

In other news, illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe who are camped along the River Nene in England are catching, killing, butchering, and eating the river’s swans. The immigrants live in shanties made of plywood and tarpaper along the river, and are depleting the river’s stocks of fish as well as the swans.

Meanwhile, a curio dealer in Montreal is trying to sell what he claims is a bar of soap made from WW2 Holocaust victims. Also, Dutch police are being given special training that will teach them to respect gangs of “youths”.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Escape Velocity, Freedom Fighter, Gaia, Insubria, JD, KGS, Steen, TB, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

[This post is a stub — nothing further here!]

Geert Wilders Oppresses Women

That’s what the Turkish-Dutch State Secretary says, anyway. When I took a look at the material below, my first thought was, “What the heck is the Netherlands doing with a ‘Turkish-Dutch State Secretary’?”

Our Flemish correspondent VH helps answer that question and many others with the following translations and contextual material. First, from De Telegraaf:

Turkish-Dutch State Secretary: Wilders is the oppressor of Muslim woman

With his plea for a ban on the headscarf, PVV-leader Geert Wilders shows that he himself is “the chief oppressor of the Islamic woman,” according to the Turkish-Dutch State Secretary (Justice Ministry) Nebahat Albayrak [PvdA, Labour Party, Socialists] in an interview with de Volkskrant (paper edition).

“If my mother had not been able to work with her headscarf, I had never become who I am,” Albayrak said, who was born in Turkey. “We owe the emancipation process in our family to a mother who had contact in the meat processing industry with the outside world and earned her own money.” This week Albayrak decided she wants to become a parliamentarian again for the PvdA.

Wilders is not impressed with her comments. “Albayrak, as owner of a Turkish passport, should have known better: Even many official Turkish bodies and institutions ban the headscarf. She lost it a bit with her two passports. Moreover, the Islamic headscarf is a symbol of oppression of woman, ergo: of the backward Islamic culture,” Wilders said in a response.

Albayrak also says in the interview that she is “pleasantly surprised” with the statements of the business union frontman Bernard Wientjes about Wilders. The chairman of employers’ organization VNO-NCW warned publicly last week of the damage caused to the reputation of Netherlands abroad by Wilders and his PVV.

VH adds more context:
– – – – – – – –

From De Telegraaf: Wilders was “totally unimpressed” by the opinion of Wientjes. The PVVer says that addressing mass immigration, crime and high taxes will rather strengthen the Netherlands, and that is what the PVV stands for. “Wientjes does not represent the employers of the Netherlands. He primarily consults within the paper bureaucratic reality of the SER and the Stichting van de Arbeid [Labor Foundation], from out of his comfortable conference chair.’’ […] A lot of citizens and businesses people are sympathetic towards the PVV and our necessary solutions for the Netherlands. Wientjes and his semi-civil servants club do not change an iota of that.”

Also Christian Democrat Dhimmis Jan-Peter Balkenende (PM) and Maxim Verhagen (Foreign Affairs) joined Wientjes, possibly because: “A study of the international image of The Netherlands which the department of Foreign Affairs had assigned to be carried out in fifteen countries showed that the Netherlands scores the lowest in Muslim countries like Indonesia, Turkey and Egypt. The score of the Netherlands in the countries studied ranges from 6- to 8+ on a scale of 10. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has launched a diplomatic offensive to directly to speak to the people in other countries or to respond quickly to incidents. Therefore three regional coordination ventures have been established, in Washington, Beijing and Cairo. Also young future leaders, journalists and opinion leaders from important or emerging countries are being invited to obtain a more balanced picture of the Netherlands.” [source]

On the threat against the indigenous Armenians in Turkey by Erdogan however, they remained silent.

Returning to the original article:

In an open letter in De Volkskrant [printed edition] some former ministers and other (former) politicians take a stand against Wilders and other “populist preachers of hate and fear” which have mainly targeted immigrants and in particular Muslims. “The naming of hatred of foreigners should not be a taboo. The fear of the verbal violence of fear and hate-mongers must not take us hostage. Therefore we speak loud and clear against discrimination and racism and for solidarity regardless of ethnic origin and religion,” the signatories state.

VH adds:

Among them are the InterNazi René Danen, chairman of Netherlands Admits Color (Nederland Bekent Kleur) and the Moroccan refugee-immigrant and Muslim Marxist, Mohamed Rabbae (GreenLeft, International Socialists) who has always pushed to ban [pdf] the book “The Downfall of the Netherlands” and called Geert Wilders “A little Hitler”.

Here is the text:

The open letter “against hate-mongering” [hold tight]:

The Netherlands is a beautiful country. A civilized country, thanks to the — up to now widely represented in the population — sense of social justice. Equality for all citizens is laid down in the first article of our Constitution and the Convention on Civil Rights of the United Nations. Thanks to the deep-rooted tradition of tolerance and respect for diversity, religious and ethnic minorities could until now take their fully-fledged position.

This internal openness has always been a strong basis for the international openness of the Netherlands. Up to now the Netherlands has compelled respect in the world. These important characteristics are threatened by populist preachers of hate and fear. They want to change the Netherlands into an intolerant country, a cultural humdrum, cleansed of “non-Western” ethnic, religious and cultural elements. With their policy of “we” against “them” they put citizens against each other and with their advocacy of racism and discrimination based on religion and descent, they squeeze minorities in a corner.

Immigrants and especially Muslims must suffer. They would not be allowed to have their own schools, not allowed to build mosques, and not allowed to become minister or state secretary. And women are deprived of their right to wear a headscarf.

Not Muslims, but the radical right-wing politicians are “Islamizing” the political debate and social life in the Netherlands, reducing every problem — from traffic jams to housing and crime — to a matter of religion. The actual socio-economic problems that disproportionately affect ethnic minorities, have disappeared from the political debate and been replaced by an ideology of “conflicting cultures”.

They impress on the people that their problems, which are the result of the economic crisis, unemployment, poverty and crime, can be resolved by rejecting the headscarf, the by the closing of Islamic schools, and shooting nuisance-causing youngsters in the knee!”

All too often the preachers of fear and hate hide behind the freedom of expression. The respecting of that freedom does not relieve us of the obligation to publicly take a stand against the abominable hatred of foreigners and to protect minorities against discrimination and racism.

Too few citizens, intellectuals and politicians speak out against the discrimination under the guise of “religious critique”. The populists want to abolish Article 1 of the Constitution [on discrimination], advocate “slamming shut the borders to all non-Western immigrants” and want to deport “tens of millions” of European Muslims.

Also the call for a “major cleaning of our streets”, to start with the introduction of a “head-rag tax”, affects the dignity of Muslims and undermines the democratic principles of the Netherlands. A powerful counter-voice is heard too little. The naming of foreigner-hatred must not become a taboo.

The fear of the verbal violence of fear- and hate-mongers must not take us hostage. Therefore we speak loudly and clearly against discrimination and racism and for solidarity among all citizens regardless of their ethnic origin and religion. [source]

Note: They try to avoid the word “xenophobia” and suggest that they quote, but without reference. They also talk of “they” while it is clear who they are aiming at.

As VH points out, the Turkish-Dutch State Secretary Albayrak did not comment on Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s expressions and politics:

Erdogan on Armenians:

PM Erdogan’s Armenian hostages

[March 18, 2010] Angered at the Armenian “genocide” resolutions passed by a U.S. House of Representatives committee and the Swedish parliament, Turkey’s prime minister says he is prepared to deport 100,000 Armenians living illegally in Turkey if necessary. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan made the following remark in an interview with the BBC’s Turkish Service during a visit to London a few days ago: “Look, there are 170,000 Armenians in my country; 70,000 are my citizens. But we are not making a fuss over the remaining 100,000. So what will I do tomorrow? If necessary, I am going to tell these 100,000, ‘come on, back to your country.’ I will do this. Why? Because they are not my citizens. There is nothing that forces me to keep them in my country.” […] Ergun Babahan of daily Star went the whole way and wrote [in a comment], “If Hitler had been Turkish, we would also be denying the Holocaust today.” He added, in so many words, that that the spirit of Enver Pasha and his “Ittihadists” was alive and kicking in today’s Turkey.

Erdogan on genocide

“A Muslim can never commit genocide”

[Nov. 8, 2009] It was not clear whether al-Bashir will come to Turkey on Monday or Tuesday for a summit of Islamic nations, the officials added, according to a report by the Doðan news agency. The statement came hours after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan defended al-Bashir’s visit by saying, “A Muslim can never commit genocide.” […] “Those world leaders who criticize us, have they ever visited Darfur? Their information is solely based on what the rapporteurs are reporting. These kinds of moves will not contribute to world peace,” Erdoðan said Sunday in an address to party members. “It’s not possible for a Muslim to commit genocide,” he said. “That’s why we are comfortable [with the visit of al-Bashir].”

Erdogan on Integration

“Do not integrate, but become more politically active in your country”

[March 19, 2010] The Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has at a meeting in Istanbul called 1500 Turkish politicians who are active in Europe [politicians in European countries] not to integrate into the country they live, but just to become politically more active. This is reported by the German weekly Der Spiegel [“Erdogan umgarnt deutsch-türkische Politiker”], which relies on statements by Turkish politicians living in Germany. Some1,500 Turkish politicians, mainly from Germany [there is an investigation ongoing in which Dutch politicians were present], have last month at the invitation and expense of the Turkish government attended a conference in Istanbul and stayed in a five star hotel.

Erdogan, leader of the orthodox religious party AKP government, had a crystal clear message to proclaim to the participants: “Do not integrate, but become more politically active in your country. European countries who speak out against dual nationality are opposed to fundamental rights,” he stated. Furthermore, he compared Islamophobia with anti-Semitism and said that “assimilation is a crime against humanity.” This statement he had earlier expressed in 2008 during a speech in Cologne. According to Ali Ertan Toprak, vice-president of the Alevi community in Germany, Erdogan also said that European culture should be based on that of Turkey. It is not the first time the Turkish government seeks contact with politicians of Turkish origin in Germany [and other countries]. After the 2009 parliamentary elections, politicians of Turkish descent were congratulated by the conservative AKP government on their victory. In October 2009 German parliamentarians were invited to a congress of the AKP in Ankara. […]

Erdogan on Imams

Turkey wants immunity for Imams

[March 18, 2010] The Turkish government wants to provide a limited guarantee of immunity to the by authorities appointed religious Imams. A bill in Parliament provides that imams can only be sued with the consent of the highest authorities. The new law would restrict the possibility to legally prosecute scholars for their political statements. The draft law on the duties of the Turkish administration for religious affairs (Diyanet) provides that its director comes directly under the Prime Minister and reports to him. […] Turkey follows the principle of separation of church and state, which was ordained by the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In practice this means that the Turkish state controls the religion. The opposition however, accuses the Islamic-conservative government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of seeking to Islamize Turkey.

Homegrown Jihad Redux

We’ve posted previously about the Christian Action Network and its movie Homegrown Jihad, which chronicled the establishment of Jamaat ul-Fuqra terrorist compounds throughout rural areas of the United States.

JuF was founded by Sheikh Gilani, who is a Sufi Muslim from Pakistan. The Sunnis of Al Qaeda got a late start, but they are catching up quickly in terms of recruiting and deploying American citizens as Islamic terrorists.

The British documentary below takes a look at recent Al Qaeda-inspired and -sponsored terrorists in the United States:



Hat tip: Vlad Tepes.

[Post ends here]

Kidneys

Whiz kidsOn those rare occasions when I remember obscure or interesting facts, someone may ask me, “How d’you know that?” In response I always tap my forefinger against my temple and solemnly answer: “Kidneys.”

At this point in our conversation my interlocutor will generally back away, look at his watch, and suddenly remember that he has an urgent prior appointment elsewhere.

My reference is actually to an old joke, one that made the rounds when I was a kid, but which is too politically incorrect to be told nowadays. It concerns the annual visit of a school superintendent to Special Class. The teacher had taken great pains to prepare her charges for the occasion, and had drilled them in the proper identification of body parts.

One particular boy named Jimmy did especially well when called on by his teacher. “Show me your elbow”, she said, and he tapped his elbow.

“Where is your ear?” Jimmy pulled at his ear.

“Now your ankle,” and Jimmy bent over and grabbed his ankle.

The process continued through the rest of his anatomy, and Jimmy answered all the questions promptly and correctly. The superintendent was impressed, and said, “My, my, Jimmy! That was very good. Tell me: how do you know all these things?”

Jimmy smiled at the superintendent, pointed his finger at the side of his head, and solemnly answered, “Kidneys.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *


I bring all this up because of recent discussions here — on threads that are too numerous to find and link — about race, evolution, IQ, and human intelligence. Rather than tackle the issue of race and IQ, which Fjordman has addressed more than adequately, I want to take a step back and undertake a broad-based evaluation of IQ from a Darwinian standpoint. After reading all the statistical data and demographic analyses, only one conclusion can be drawn:

Intelligence is overrated.

ProdigyRemember: I’m dealing with this issue from a Darwinian point of view. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume that nothing is at play here except for natural selection based on random genetic variation — no God, no “higher power”, no teleological framework, no divine plan. Just a big vat of all-natural protoplasm contending against itself in the glare of a cold, unheeding universe.

Under the rules of this game, there is only one measure of success: survival. It doesn’t matter how charming or good or beautiful any particular species is. The only important factor is whether a given individual can survive long enough to pass on his genome.

Those are the rules. The survivors win. And the winners are by definition “the fittest”.

This is where the Eugenicists missed the mark: there’s no second-guessing evolution. If you “cull the herd” by eliminating imbeciles, and engage in selective breeding to improve the bloodline, the survivors are indeed “the fittest”. But if all your schemes fail, and the morons and cripples reproduce by the millions while brilliant and refined folk like yourself languish — surprise! All those lumpen unwashed lowbrows are still “the fittest”.
– – – – – – – –
Once again: the only measure of success is to survive and spread your alleles. From a Darwinian perspective, nothing else matters.

Brain Now we return to the topic of intelligence and IQ. Based on the empirical evidence, couch potatoes with navel jewelry and tattooed private parts who wear their hats backwards and are literate solely in l33t — if at all — are the fittest of our species. They remain stubbornly fecund, and somehow manage to raise their numerous offspring to child-bearing age — which, for the demographic in question, seems to average about 14.5 years.

You and I, on the other hand, for all our refined sensibilities and university educations and appreciation of Mozart, are evolutionary toast.

If the great unwashed have an average of 3.2 children per unmarried slatternly woman, while the latte-drinking literati have 0.6, what selective advantage does high intelligence confer? If IQ is heritable (and all the evidence says it is), then what in blue blazes is the evolutionary point of a high IQ?

To make matters worse, the allegedly intelligent people of the Glittering Classes are providing the wherewithal for the booboisie to continue propagating. The high-IQ elites provide the money, personnel, and technology to keep those of more limited intellect alive, comfortable, and healthy through their multiple parturitions. The best and the brightest are non-breeding themselves into a genetic dead end whilst enabling the success of their evolutionary competitors.

I mean, really, how smart is that?

Forget the IQ tests. Our genes are screaming at us: “Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *


Smart kidThis doesn’t mean that intelligence as measured by IQ has no survival value at all. Obviously, it must have done some good for the tribes of Europe and Northeast Asia, because they became the dominant human groups on the planet.

But look at what’s happening now. Check out what the very intelligent people of Israel and Europe and Japan and Canada and the USA have managed to do to themselves. Even the Chinese have forcibly constrained their own reproduction. All these populations are dwindling, while the numbers of less intelligent peoples are still growing exponentially.

Obviously, at some point all this much-vaunted intelligence ceased being an evolutionary advantage and became a disadvantage. Every objective indicator tells us that past a certain point high IQ negatively impacts survival of the genome, and is being selected against.

Evolutionarily speaking, a high IQ is overrated. We are prejudiced in our admiration of it. Our preferences are irrelevant sub specie aeternitatis. Brontosauri no doubt preferred the company of their own kind and disdained the tree shrews, but the tree shrews won in the end.

The bottom line is that the highest-IQ people have the fewest offspring, and this has been true for generations. Our fifteen minutes are almost up.

It’s the kidneys, stupid!

Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/26/2010

Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/26/2010In England, a man dressed as a Muslim woman walked into a Dorset bank and robbed it. He wore full hijab, with a veil covering his face, so the bank’s staff had no idea he was a man until he spoke in a deep voice and demanded money. Fortunately there is a security camera photo of him, and police are asking members of the public who think they recognize the rascal to contact them immediately.

Actually, there are thousands of people walking the streets of London right now who bear a striking resemblance to the suspect. But that’s just a coincidence…

In other news, with Greece now taken care of, the next EU financial basket case has shuffled to the head of the queue: Portugal. The Portuguese have a deficit that is 8% of GDP, and their bond rating has been downgraded to AA- by Fitch, although S&P has left their standing unchanged.

Meanwhile, demonstrators in Malaysia burned a Swedish flag in front of the Swedish embassy in Kuala Lumpur to protest Lars Vilks’ drawings of the prophet depicted as a roundabout dog.

Thanks to Barry Rubin, C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Freedom Fighter, Gaia, heroyalwhyness, Insubria, KGS, LN, TB, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

“Islamophobia is a Threat to Democracy”

Our British correspondent JP points out this letter published in yesterday’s Guardian and signed by various notables, both the culturally enriched kind as well as progressive “persons of British background”.

JP includes this note:

This letter deserves highlighting, primarily for its sheer and utter egregiousness.

A perfectly valid documentary was broadcast on Channel 4 recently which investigated the entryist tactics of an Islamic organisation, Islamic Forum of Europe as it infiltrated the Labour Party in east London, a documentary which was supported by the local Labour Party MP, Jim Fitzpatrick, who also appeared in the film.

Now, according to the letter writer and co-signatories this is an attack on democracy.

These people will not be happy until democracy and London are smoking ruins, because this is exactly where these interventions are leading.

Below is the letter, which has some familiar signatures — the usual suspects — but most are people I’ve never heard of:

Islamophobia is a threat to democracy

We are concerned by the rise of Islamophobia, the negative coverage of Muslims in the media, the violent street mobilisations of extreme rightwing organisations like the English Defence League, and the rising electoral support for the British National party (The battle for Barking, Weekend, 13 March). Following Channel 4’s recent inflammatory documentary, Britain’s Islamic Republic, which saw concentrated attacks on the East London Mosque, the English Defence League marched through central London with placards including the demand “Close the East London Mosque now”.

The East End of London is not new to having its communities attacked by fascists and the media. The 1930s saw the Battle of Cable Street when Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts attempted to march into the Jewish community in the area. We cannot allow this terrible history to repeat itself. Further, the documentary, and articles since, have attacked the participation in politics by the Muslim community. We cannot stand by and watch this continue without remark or action.

In the runup to the general election, all parts of the population should be actively encouraged to exercise their votes. That is democracy. We welcome the work of organisations who work to this end. We call for solidarity and support for those organisations that work to encourage political participation from all sections of society, including Muslims, and condemn those who seek to undermine it.

– – – – – – – –

Ken Livingstone
Bonnie Greer
Dr Abdul Bari Secretary general, Muslim Council of Britain
Brendan Barber General secretary, TUC
Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC
Dr. Edie Friedman Executive director, Jewish Council for Racial Equality
Diane Abbott MP
Neil Jameson Executive director, London Citizens
Jagtar Singh Sikh Secretariat
Tony Woodley Joint general secretary, Unite the Union
Bruce Kent
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC
Professor Eric Hobsbawm
Louise Christian Christian Khan solicitors
Billy Hayes General secretary, Communication Workers Union
Rabbi Lee Wax
Anas Altikriti Spokesperson, British Muslim Initiative
Caroline Lucas MEP
Professor Avi Shlaim

Lord Nazir Ahmed
Kate Hudson Chair, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Andrew Stunell MP
Ismail Patel Co-ordinator, YouElect
Claude Moraes MEP
Rev. Alan Green Chair, Tower Hamlets Interfaith forum
George Galloway MP
Musleh Faradhi
Central president, Islamic Forum Europe
Jean Lambert MEP
Salma Yaqoob
Leader, Respect party
Jenny Jones AM
Steve Hart Regional secretary, Unite London Region
Andrew Murray Chair, Stop the War
Bell Ribeiro-Addy NUS black students officer
Sabby Dhalu Joint secretary, Unite Against Fascism

Among the Dogs and Dung

A brief poetical interlude here, while I get the material together for the real posts.

The late Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was sometimes whimsical, often metaphysical, occasionally incomprehensible, and never pedestrian. The poem below is taken from the 1972 edition of The Palm at the End of the Mind:

The Glass of Water
by Wallace Stevens

That the glass would melt in heat,
That the water would freeze in cold,
Shows that this object is merely a state,
One of many, between two poles. So,
In the metaphysical, there are these poles.

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink. There
And in that state, the glass is a pool.
Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws
When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws

– – – – – – – –

And in the water winding weeds move round.
And there and in another state — the refractions,
The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems
Crash in the mind — But, fat Jocundus, worrying
About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,

But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,
It is a state, this spring among the politicians
Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,
One would have still to discover. Among the dogs
         and dung,
One would continue to contend with one’s ideas.

Out of the Bubble

“We must remember that the efforts of intellectuals in the 20th century have not been a success story; on the contrary. There is no end to the atrocities that have been legitimised by intellectuals, and the lies that they have had a part in spreading.”

Many thanks to Anne-Kit of Perth, Australia, who has kindly translated Lars Hedegaard’s recent interview with Mikael Jalving from Sappho:

Out of the Bubble

In his book “Mig og Muhammed” (“Me and Mohammed”) Mikael Jalving bids a final farewell to fashionable society.

By Lars Hedegaard (President of the Danish Free Press Society)

As depicted in your book, until a few years ago you were living a privileged existence as a rising young intellectual with a high profile, European tours and Chlamydia. What made you leave this protected workshop? You could have lived happily until you were 92 if you had chosen to continue swimming with the rest of the Danish opinion elite.

Mig og Muhammed“It was reality calling. You search for the meaning of existence, and existence knocked on my front door. I was living in life’s fast lane as a carefree luxury student without any major concerns. To start with I pushed away any bad news. I would rather hit on the pretty girl at the party or bicycle around Tuscany. One day in 1999 I was on the airport shuttle and started a conversation with a middle aged man who could have been my father, and who expressed great concern over the consequences of Muslim immigration. It was a clash between two worldviews, but not until after 9/11 did I admit that something was seriously wrong.”

You obviously experienced what psychologists call cognitive dissonance or — more straightforwardly put — an insurmountable contradiction between that which you believed about the world, and the world as it actually is. How does such a break occur?

“I was living in a kind of parallel society, in a bubble where everybody had the correct opinions and where no one had any interest in reality because it was too awful and populist. But after 9/11 I realised that I would have to study Islam and put myself in the picture. When it became obvious that those who exploded bombs and worked towards destroying Western freedom had business with me, then it was clear that I would have to have business with them.”

Pseudo-Christianity

Why are there so few others who come to that conclusion — especially when we speak about the highly-educated? After all, they should have the best prerequisites for reading, understanding and learning.

– – – – – – – –

“Everybody is busy with their careers and scraping together enough money for mortgages, taxes and luxury consumption. The ‘zeitgeist’, this intangible entity, does not invite scepticism or critical reflection; you’d be crazy to engage in that! On top of that we’ve all become a kind of ‘liberalist’ because we have a great deal of trouble imagining that we have enemies, ideological enemies. Enemies are something only evil people have, or something we enjoy watching in Star Wars or in crime dramas. Instead we are subject to a tacit agreement on some pseudo-Christian positive words — tolerance, respect, understanding — and a notion that all cultures are equally good. We are brought up and educated to silence problems to death, and if someone dares to come and tell us that there’s a problem, we collectively turn on the messenger.

“We must remember that the efforts of intellectuals in the 20th century have not been a success story; on the contrary. There is no end to the atrocities that have been legitimised by intellectuals, and the lies that they have had a part in spreading. Think for a moment of the totalitarian ideologies which have derived their justification from intellectuals, philosophers, artists, scientists, journalists. Intelligence or higher education is no guarantee against fanaticism and extremism. That is just something we, the educated and the chattering classes, believe.

“However banal it sounds, intellectuals are no different from other people when it gets down to basics. They, too, must ask themselves where their next paycheck will come from and if they perceive, consciously or unconsciously, that the future in some sense belongs to Islam, then they will try to make some arrangement with the coming rulers, or with their current Western henchmen.”

We have forgotten our cultural heritage

What do you think is wrong with Western culture, since it is voluntarily and enthusiastically letting itself be overtaken by a backward culture?

“What is wrong with our culture is that we no longer carry it within us. We have stopped teaching it. We no longer know our history. We are ignorant of the pinnacles of Western thought on freedom, which you and I have given examples of in the book ‘Frihedens vaesen’ [‘The Essence of Freedom’ — an anthology of essays on freedom from ancient to modern times — translator]. Today you are almost considered a nerd if you know something about the history which has brought us to where we are today. It is considered — even at universities and by the cultural elite — ‘old’ knowledge. Which is the same as saying it is useless.

“But if we don’t know where we have come from then we cannot know where we are going, and we become easy victims of deception. From there it’s not a long stretch to adjust to the future which others have imposed upon us. The intellectuals and the cultural elite presumably notice the demographic trends and can see which way the wind is blowing in those places where Islam has a heavy presence — e.g. Malmö, Bradford, Rotterdam or Marseille. And they find a niche where they think they can survive and make arrangements with the future rulers, while they harangue others with accusations of racism or indecency.”

Why has it become “right wing” to fight for freedom and oppose religious fanatics?

“I ask myself that question every day. It is most peculiar, especially if you consider our experiences from World War Two. The Left is rapidly collapsing, and has seemingly given up on defending freedom. So much so that today it may be perceived as a mark of ‘nobility’ to be right-wing, thanks to the left wing.”

How will it end? Who do you think will win the struggle? The defenders of freedom or the enemies of freedom?

“I am a pessimist and an optimist on alternate days. It will depend on whether we can, want to, and dare to make up our minds to defend Western civilization — rather than how many or how few Muslims come here. To my mind it’s more about culture than about demography. Without a conscious reaffirmation of our own culture we cannot win the fight. If we refuse to admit that gang riots cannot be explained with the usual clichés about poverty and alienation, but must be seen in conjunction with Islam’s struggle for political supremacy and cultural virility, we don’t stand a chance.”



Mikael Jalving has a PhD in History, is a writer and columnist at Jyllands-Posten.

Who Are the Anti-Semites in Norway?

Recent media reports about attacks by Muslims on Norwegian Jews have brought the issue of Muslim Jew-hatred to the surface. Up until now, public officials have been loath to acknowledge that such a problem exists in Norway, but that attitude seems to be changing.

The following article was adapted from Islam in Europe (based on originals from VG and NRK) by our Swedish correspondent Freedom Fighter:

Jewish leader demands investigation of Muslim anti-Semitism

The Holocaust Center in Oslo will investigate Jew-hatred in Norway, but the center doesn’t plan to investigate the attitudes of Norwegian Muslims as a group when it comes to Jew-hatred.

This has become a topical issue with the recent news reports of Jew-hatred among students of Muslim background.

“Anti-Semitism among Norwegian Muslims should be part of the study,” says the head of the Mosaic Faith Society in Norway, Anne Sender.

“I can see no other solution when the world looks as it does, and we have the facts and the experiences in any case, essentially from the European reality, with last week’s revelations,” she says.

The Holocaust Center will now consider whether they’ll investigate what Norwegian Muslims think about Jews.

Education minister Kristin Halvorsen (SV) already took the initiative to set up a work-group to attempt to fight racism and anti-Semitism in Norwegian schools.

“I’ve spoken with many teachers who think it’s important to tackle the problems that turn up with harassment, racism and anti-Semitism in Norwegian schools. Therefore we’re inviting representatives from the schools, police, and various faith communities to participate in the work-group,” said the education minister, who also added that they’ll focus on attitude-creating work.

Following NRK’s report on Jew-hatred in Norwegian schools, the minister put the issue on her agenda. On Wednesday she met with representatives from the Mosaic Faith Society.

Chairman Anne Sender is positive about the work-group.

– – – – – – – –

“I think something concrete can come out of it,” Sender told Norwegian news agency NTB.

She thinks it’s all about what type of society one wants, and that everything regarding racism and anti-Semitism should be taken seriously. She says that now that it’s dealt with at a national level, the chances for success are better.

Sender has on several occasions linked anti-Semitic attitudes to Muslim communities, and said that this is exactly where the problem lies.

Kristin Halvorsen doesn’t agree with that conclusion.

“It’s not a Muslim problem, but a Norwegian problem,” she says.

The minister also emphasized the importance of differentiating between anti-Semitism and Israel’s politics.

Red Alert in the Yellow Sea

This is breaking news, so by the time I finish formatting and posting it, the story may have changed completely.

But… as of right now, it appears that North Korea has fired a torpedo at a South Korean naval vessel and sunk it. The ship was patrolling in the Yellow Sea with 104 crew members on board, and some of them were probably killed.

The earliest reports emphasized the likelihood of hostile fire as the cause of the sinking. According to Digital Journal:

South Korean Navy ship believed attacked by North Korea

A South Korean naval vessel is sinking off the Korean Peninsula’s North-South divide and could have been attacked by a North Korean ship. South Korea is investigating the sinking of the ship, with more than 100 sailors aboard.

Seoul, Korea, Republic of — Reuters says many of the sailors aboard are feared dead. The agency quoted South Korean YTN TV network, which said the sinking could be due to a torpedo attack by the North and Korea’s national news agency, Yonhap, said an emergency meeting of cabinet ministers had been called.

The agency also reported that a South Korean navy ship had fired toward an unidentified vessel to the north.

Besides making threatening noises with its rocket armoury, North Korea in recent weeks said it would strengthen its defences to balance US-South Korean military drills earlier in the month.

The BBC says more than 50 sailors have been rescued from the sea near Baengnyeong island by South Korean naval and coast guard ships. The island is in a disputed zone.

Since then the storyline has shifted slightly. According to Breitbart:
– – – – – – – –

Korean Naval Vessel Sinks in Yellow Sea

Notice: no mention of a North Korean attack in the headline, nor in the next two paragraphs:

A South Korean naval ship with a reported 104 crew members aboard sank off a South Korean island in the Yellow Sea near the maritime border with North Korea on Friday evening, prompting an emergency meeting of security-related Cabinet ministers, Yonhap News Agency reported.

There were few details of the mishap, but Yonhap, quoting the navy, said the vessel went down about 9:45 p.m. Friday and that a rescue operation was underway.

Other South Korean media said there were believed to be multiple casualties in the sinking and some suggested the ship may have come under fire from a North Korean vessel.

OK, so they finally mentioned it. But why this new reticence? Maybe it has something to do with this:

But the presidential office was quoted later as saying the chances the North was directly involved was “small.”

President Lee Myung Bak ordered the South Korean military to focus efforts on rescuing sailors from the ship, aides said early Saturday morning, adding it is unclear if North Korea was involved in the incident, Yonhap said.

He convened the emergency meeting of ministers at the underground bunker at the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae immediately after reports arrived that the 1,200-ton naval ship was sinking near the western sea border with North Korea, Yonhap said.

“For now, it is not certain whether North Korea is related” to the incident, presidential office spokeswoman Kim Eun Hye was quoted as saying. “President Lee ordered the military to do its best to rescue the (sailors).”

However, it seems that not all of the South Korean naval commanders have received the word from on high:

Yonhap said South Korean naval officials refused to give details about the incident, but they did say a South Korean vessel fired at what was believed be an unidentified ship toward North Korea later in the evening, “indicating possibilities” of a torpedo attack from the North.

Local residents in the area were quoted by the South Korean news agency as having heard gunfire for about 10 minutes from about 11 p.m.

And birds may be the culprits:

But YTN television said analysis by the South Korean military of radar images in the area indicated the firing may have been toward a flock of birds rather than at a suspicious ship.

So what’s going on? Here’s my inexpert and ill-informed analysis:

The North Koreans habitually do nasty threatening things just before returning to the negotiating table, in order to leverage more concessions out of Uncle Sucker with their scary belligerence. Sensing a weak reed in the White House, they have upped the ante this time, saying, in effect, “OK, Mr. Big Man Hussein — whaddaya gonna do about this one, hey?”

For South Korea, everything hinges on the reaction of the United States. In a conventional attack, according to war game results, North Korea could overrun Seoul before the South could fully mobilize. This is due to the proximity of the capital to the DMZ, and is true even with the participation of some or all of the 40,000 American troops in South Korea.

If the United States does not react to a provocation by threatening an overwhelming air response, nuclear or otherwise, South Korea faces a major military disaster.

Presumably Seoul knows the same thing that Pyongyang knows: Obama is a weakling and a coward, and is likely to equivocate and waffle and grope for dialogue rather than act decisively. His most forceful response would probably be to take it to the UN Security Council and demand a strongly-worded resolution.

If the South Koreans were to acknowledge that the North was behind the sinking, then they would be obliged to retaliate. After that they would probably find themselves in, shall we say, a spot of bother.

So they’re lying low and waiting to see which way the O-wind blows.

All of the information included above was dredged from my memory and has not been verified by any googling. People who really know what they’re talking about are welcome to correct my mistakes in the comments.



Hat tip for the Breitbart article: KGS.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/25/2010

Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/25/2010France and Germany are yet again reported to have struck a deal to bail out Greece, this time with the help of the IMF. We’ve heard this several times before in the past two weeks, but each time Chancellor Angela Merkel has backed away from forcing the German taxpayer to save the Greeks from their debt crisis. Meanwhile, the government of Dubai has committed another $9.5 billion to prevent Dubai World from defaulting on its debt obligations.

In other news, according to the latest opinion poll, immigrants in the Netherlands think there are too many immigrants in the country. A larger percentage of Dutch Turks feel that way than do the native Dutch.

Thanks to Barry Rubin, C. Cantoni, Gaia, GB, Henrik, Insubria, JD, Paul Green, Steen, TB, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

[This post is a stub — nothing further here!]