Denmark is an unusual place.

Take, for example, the newspaper Politiken. It is The New York Times of Denmark, a repository of the conventional wisdom, the place to look for a reliably politically correct opinion on anything and everything.

But not always. Recently there have been cracks in the liberal monolith that is Politiken. The feature article translated below is unusual, and rings out as a voice of sanity in the politically correct wilderness.

Our Danish correspondent TB volunteered to translate the article, and has this to say about it:

Something has definitely changed among the people in charge of this paper. A year ago you would never have seen an article like that in Politiken. Actually the most insane editor in Denmark, Thøger Seidenfaden, walked out on all of us last time there was a meeting of Trykkefrihedsselskabet [the Press Freedom Society], the one in support of Lars Vilks, telling everybody in the room that they were a bunch of misusers of freedom of speech. He was especially targeting Flemming Rose, Vilks, and the creators of the Mohammed cartoons. It was hilarious…

Maybe they have now seen the signs…? One can only hope.

And now for the article itself.

Now, What If…?

Now, what if our ideals destroy our sense of reality and lead us down the wrong path? What if Bush is really a great president?

By Mogens Rukov

What if Bush…? What if Islam…? Think, what if the intelligentsia…? What if multicultural…? Think, what if Arafat…? What if my a.. was…? What if you could go on forever?

Now, what if there existed the equivalent of contrafactual history writing? What if there were the equivalent of hypothesizing what the world would be like out if history hadn’t turned out the way it did?

What if Hitler had won the war? What if the Iron Curtain had never been imposed on Europe? What if the incandescent light bulb had never been invented?

What if the mind could entertain these kinds of questions, which are counterfactual to the conventional wisdom.

What if some are more concrete, others more fluid. But what if all of them now work for the sake of clarifying reality, of the facts, of the sum of what we know about reality. What if we can open up a perspectives on an alternative world of thought to the one we already agree about?

What if many of them lead us directly into paradise or hell? What if they individually put history on a knife’s edge, where it balances and where it could have fallen out differently than it did?

Contrafactual questions shake the way we, by habit, react to the course of history. They are part of history’s teaching.

Aren’t there also questions which can shake up our thinking, so that it doesn’t become habitual thinking?

What if you could ask contra-conceptual questions instead of contra-factual?

To think new thoughts one often has to change concepts. Such a change of concept lies in the contra-conceptual.

Concepts are our prisons, our direction, and our freedom. They are our dreams and our nightmares.

Contra-conceptual questions do not have to be wise, or logical, or rational. Actually, they have to be the opposite. They have to be stupid, unthinkable, to the verge of ignorance.

What if Bush was a great president?

Is that unthinkable? Reagan was called a fool too, an actor, parvenu. Nor could he read — as Bush is said not to be able to — Reagan didn’t have any experience in foreign policy, should never have been in The White House. All these kinds of things they said, our foreign policy experts, many of our politicians, the intelligentsia, the intellectuals, the writers.

Now he is called a great president. By the same people, or among the same people who have little interest in what happens around them.

In those days you where taken as a big idiot if you said anything else except that Reagan was a big idiot. People laughed at you if you didn’t laugh at Reagan. But the experts say that it was Reagan’s policy that ended the Cold War, that it was his stubbornness that won it.

The man who didn’t know anything about politics, the ridiculous fool who could not read, the actor, won the biggest political fight in modern time, after forty years of cold war.

Do you have to be illiterate to become a great politician? Do you have to be a Western politician not to understand a thing?
– – – – – – – – –
What if the Iraq war is a real war?

The Korean war was stupid. The Vietnam war was insane, all the good people said as much in those days. But both wars stopped communist aggression. Both served in part to hasten the fall of communism.

What if the war in Iraq will lead to a new balance in the Arab world, if it is a probe thrust into the Muslim sea?

What if it is only a temporary fiasco, what if it becomes a success? What if it made Libya give up its weapon of mass destruction program in December of 2003 as a reaction to the war in Iraq, or if it is true, made Iran to halt its development of nuclear weapons in 2003, also for that very reason. Is that not enough to call the war in Iraq a good war?

What if there is no such thing as a legitimate war, as some opponents of the Iraq war claim because they see the war in Iraq as illegitimate.

What if legitimate war is only a concept which has been invented by some bureaucrats as a concept that allows them to make wars that are just as insane as any other war but which they would not be able to do without the juridical term “legitimate war”, partly because they don’t have the power, partly because there is no reason to do it?

What if “legitimate war” leads us into the most insane wars because some insane states in the UN vote for it?

What if UN with all their perception and legitimacy are leading the world into Armageddon, if it becomes an instrument for powerless madness.

What if the fight against Islam is the big European war right now?

What if it is the new Thirty Years War that replaces the old one prior to the peace of Westphalia, which is now defines Europe?

The European establishment, the European debate , treats Islam as if it was only a religion.

Think — what if Islam is only a religion if seen from the perspective of the individual Muslim?

What if Islam is already at war from within the mosque and further up in the hierarchy. And think — what if it actually already is at war from the viewpoint of the individual Muslim believer.

What if the order in the Quran about killing or dominating the infidel (non-Muslim) is part of the doctrine that the individual Muslim recognize?

What if the Muslim terrorists are only the storm troops in the war, those who commit the commando raids in the broader fight?

What if the only way the war can be won for Christian Europe is by prohibiting Islam and sending all Muslims back to Islamic countries? What inhumane conduct does the war not impose on us?

What if all European countries develop Muslim no-go zones as already exist in Great Britain?

What if the Bishop of Rochester is right, and the problem is the political establishment, as the chairman of the Muslim Forum, Manzoor Moghal, has replied: “No matter how much his (the Bishop’s) opponents are rumbling against his accusations, the fact is that the determination with which some of my Muslim kinsmen stick to a specific lifestyle, specific habits, language and way of living has led to create neighborhoods where non-Muslims would feel uneasy, and might even get attacked.”

What if the rising violence in our streets is actually making no-go time zones? Will the politicians still talk about freedom of religion, about tolerance towards different ways of thinking, when they speak of Islamophobia?

What if any generation of Muslim immigrants in reality functions as occupying troops?

What if the positive results of multiculturalism do not exist. What if the brotherhood, mutual understanding, deeply felt empathy, and cross-fertilization are only part of the mental activity of some members of the intelligentsia?

What if multiculturalism dissolves society?

What if the big survey of multiculti societies by Robert Putnam — who has studied 41 multicultural areas in the US — is right? What if it is true that diversity not only reduces the so-called social capital between different ethnic groups but also inside the groups themselves?

What if multiculture not only dissolves society, but destroys it.

What if the problem of multiculture is not the ethnic conflicts or the difficult race relations, but the fact — as the survey shows — that confidence in society, and “the others” in society, is lower. What if — as was reported — altruism, which the distribution of burdens in the welfare society is built upon, is reduced.

What if such a simple thing as friendships between likeminded men and women is not as frequent in a multiculti society. “In plain speech, people who live under ethnic diversity ‘keep their head down’, hide like a turtle”.

What if many Muslims throughout their childhood have been raised to show more solidarity towards the Quran than towards the country where they were brought up?

What if it is a fact that “the terror threat does not come from marginalized citizens with a pure Danish or Dutch background, it comes solely from citizens with Muslim background,” as Ayaan Hirsi Ali says?

What if that is what we have seen in the last few years?

What if the divide in opinion surrounding the Mohammed Cartoons was a consequence of this diversity. What if the violence in Nørrebro and the violence in general is a consequence of this?

What if the tough debates are coming from this? If the tone in the debate is not a consequence of anybody’s cynicism, but a consequence of the destruction of our society?

What if the knife-stabbers understand more about multiculturalism than the guys behind “Images of The Middle East”?

What if a festival with title “Images of The West” could win the curiosity of the intelligentsia?

What if those writers — good writers of fiction — who warned against the sharpening of the tone and the exclusion of the Muslims especially by that tone, by supporting the multicultural development themselves actually bring the sharpened tone into society accompanied by the use of sharp knives?

These “Now, what if…” questions are aiming at exactly these kinds of circumstances. On the absurd reverses of events, reality’s grotesque play between surface and foundation.

What if now the fulfillment of intentions tends to produce the opposite of what was intended?

What if we are on the verge of a world war?

Consider whether such a war is as all other wars: the solution to conflicts that politics cannot cope with.

What if the politicians had taken care of the conflicts without war, and with the consent of the populace. Which social development is prevented by the intelligentsia, DR, Politiken and Information [PC Danish media outlets]?

What if it’s true that war solves insoluble conflicts, but that negotiations do not.

What if it is violence and negotiations together that solve the conflicts? First violence, then negotiations.

What if those who speak of peace actually generate wars.

What if the biggest threat to peace is to focus on peace, while focusing on war preserves the peace?

What if those people who speak of peace (with Islam) only promote our defeat, and the victory of Islam?

What if paradoxical preparations for war are exactly preparations for peace?

What if immigration is actually occupation?

What if the Muslim immigration into Christian Europe constitutes an army of occupiers, even if the individual Muslim does not want to be a soldier in that army, but just wants to be a respected settler.

What if the Jewish settlers on the West Bank are nothing but immigrants?

What if the world’s problems with these Jewish settlers are the same as our problems with integration?

Now, what if the Palestinians have developed a strategy that makes them the gangsters of the world?

What if the Palestinians suffer due to our massive aid to the Palestinian areas ($6 billion over three years), where the help up until now has only turned the whole population into social clients, while their leaders have ruled with corruption and lawlessness — just like a bunch of mafia bosses?

What if the Israeli attacks into Gaza should be the model for Århus in dealing with Gellerupparken [Muslim ghetto outside Denmark’s second largest city]?

What if Arafat was a mafia boss of the magnitude of Saddam? What indicates otherwise?

And what if there actually were no Palestinian problem, but that a Palestinian problem has been created by the Arab side going all the way back to the 1920s, and that it is inspired by the Nazis’ anti-Semitism?

What if there still exists only an Islamic/Jewish problem? And that what we see around Israel is of the same character as what is about to happen in Europe: The Muslims everywhere invent their “legitimate” rights.

Now, what if.

What if Europe is a huge West Bank? If neighborhoods such as Gellerupparken and Mjolnerparken are only Arab settlements in Denmark.

What if Israel’s military strength — as weakened as it may be by now — is its only possibility of survival in an Arab world, and that it is now equally necessary for the military to be raised in European countries and turned against other usurpers?

Now, what if we have a common foe, Islam?

What if Huntington is right about the clash of civilizations, and that is what we see in the Arab-European space; as opposed Fukuyama’s end of history, “the point in human ideological evolution and the universalization of the liberal democracy of the West as the final form of governance”; as with any other fascist development, in this also the religious foundation must stand up against it and fight.

What if sharia should replace Roman Law? Have we no rights? Shall tolerance make room for Allah and Mohammed?

Shall experiments and innovation be succeeded by a literal reading of primitive scriptures?

Now, what if the control whose intended imposition on the public, instead of enhancing efficiency of public affairs, drains it of energy?

Is it not what we see in connection with aid to the elderly, help in the home, in the hospitals, and in the schools?

What if our habits have destroyed our foresight?

What if our ideals destroy our realities? What if our ideals actually mislead us instead of showing us the right way?

What if tolerance, for example, is not a universal notion but only valid under circumstances which have disappeared — even though we thought that it was universal?

Now, what if our language has thereby been emptied?

Now, what if our language only has meaning in the most banal circumstances, and no longer serves to express actual careful thought?

What if fiction is now the proper form for a clarifying documentary realism?

In the latest issue of National Review, Jay Nordlinger interviews former secretary of state George Shultz (subscription required). Mr. Shultz has many noteworthy things to say, including this brief discussion of Islamic terrorism:

Further, says Shultz, if we are to attain victory in the War on Terror, we have to borrow a page from the beginning of the Cold War and come up with a containment policy for today: “Our object is to contain the spread of radical Islam, that uses terror, and help whatever you want to call it — mainstream Islam — learn how to be part of the modern world in a manner consistent with their religion.” Also, the opening up of economies makes a big difference in the opening up of governments: as in Chile, Taiwan, and South Korea, to name three.

I’m a big fan of National Review. It’s the best political magazine around. And I admire and respect George Shultz.

However, this quote illustrates the divide that has opened up between “old school” conservatives, as represented by the Cold Warriors, and the new grassroots activists of the Counterjihad.

Regardless of one’s opinion about the number of “moderate” Muslims (or even whether they exist), resistance to the Great Jihad bears only a superficial resemblance to the anti-communist cause during the Cold War.

There is no “Iron Curtain” behind which Islam sits.

There were no communist no-go zones within capitalist countries in which communism could be practiced with impunity.

It was rare for Western communists to call publicly for the overthrow of capitalist governments, and those who did were often tried and imprisoned when caught.

Capitalist governments did not have an official policy of paying for the training and upkeep of communists within their midst.
– – – – – – – – –
Communists had no vast community of “moderate” sympathizers amongst whom they could hide in order to launch terrorist attacks on the civilian populace.

The struggle against the Great Jihad requires a different paradigm.

The jihad is indifferent to national borders. The jihad is not interested in keeping a standing army, or fighting a conventional war.

Before we can form a successful strategy in the “War on Terror”, we must acknowledge that “terror” is not what we are fighting.

Before we can think of containing militant Islam, we must first exorcise it from our midst.

To do that we must acknowledge our original and fundamental error: we invited millions of Muslims to immigrate to our countries and form enclaves within our cities. Among those Muslims are untold thousands of our deadly enemies, people who wish to destroy our societies utterly and construct a worldwide totalitarian theocracy in their place.

There is no way to “contain” militant Islam when we are so thoroughly infiltrated by Muslims.

First we must address the issue of the enemy among us.

We must also acknowledge the fact that — regardless of how many moderate Muslims walk our streets — the problem is inherent in Islam itself.

Only then will we be able to consider containment.

We just received an email from someone who says she is unable to comment, or even preview her comment, here at Gates of Vienna.

If you have a moment, please help me troubleshoot the problem. Attempt to leave a comment, and if it fails several times, drop an email to gatesofvienna@chromatism.net, so I can find out how bad the situation is.

There’s probably nothing to be done about it — as far as anybody knows, there is no way to get an email to the Blogger Powers That Be. I sometimes doubt that any actual human beings work for the company.

Still, it would be nice to know the scope of the problem.

Update: Well, it worked for my own comment. If you arrive at this post and find more than ten comments, there’s no reason to test it — obviously comments are working. I’ll close the post in the morning when I wake up.

For anyone who has problems: try closing your browser, deleting all cookies that end in “@blogger.com”, and then start all over again. That sometimes clears up problems with Blogger.

Further update: Eleven comments when I woke up this morning. Conclusion: no Blogger-based problem exists.

I’ll leave this open for comments until a real post goes up later this morning.

Also, we received one email on the topic:

Hello from Italy. When I was living in a hotel for a couple of months, working on a movie, my Internet connection was via a Proxy. I wanted to post, but couldn’t get the comments box to show anything, just a blank box would pop up. On Sundays I’d go visit my mom and hook up with a regular, direct connection and it would work just fine. Chances are you need to tell us computer doofuses what to do when connected via a proxy. BTW other pages (like my bank) and a few other internet programs refused to work as well. The problem you mentioned at GOV might have to do with proxies.

Heavenly blessings on the Baron and Dymphna!

Unfortunately, I am a computer doofus myself when it comes to networks, proxies, firewalls, etc. If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to leave them here.

Assuming comments work for you, of course…

Final update: I closed this thread for comments now that a real post is up.

[Nothing follows]

From Downeast, last week. I hadn’t seen any information on this before.

Mike has translated an open letter from Filip Dewinter to his former bank, Fortis. As he says in his title: “IF FILIP DEWINTER DID NOT EXIST, THEY’D HAVE TO INVENT HIM” – but fortunately, he does exist and is willing to take on the Goliaths.

Antwerpen, 21 januari 2008

Open letter

Fortis NV
To the Chairman of the Board of Directors
Sir Maurice Lippens
Koningsstraat 20
1000 Brussels, Belgium

Dear Sir Lippens,

From media reports I learned that Fortis, as the first Belgian bank, launches an investment product in compliance with the rules of sharia, the islamic law. More specifically, the “Fortis B Fix 2008 Islamic Index 1”, a bevek [ ] offered in 80 Fortis franchises. The investment fund comprises only sharia-approved shares. Indeed, it is coupled to the so-called ‘Dow Jones Islamic Market Index’ (DJIM) a Dow Jones Index excluding shares from companies whose principal activities are not allowed by sharia.

On the ‘Dow Jones Indices’ site I found which companies are exempt from this index. They are companies active in the fields of alcoholic beverages, tobacco, pork-related products, conventional financial services (banking and insurance), arms/defence and leisure (hotels, casinos, movies, music, …). Compliance with the sharia rules is controlled by the ‘Sharia Supervisory Board’, an advisory board of islamic theologists.

With this letter I wish – also in my capacity as a Fortis client – to protest against the fact that you – presumably out of commercial interests – offer these sharia investment products to your clients. By selling these products, you legitimize the ideology of muslim fundamentalism, the ideology that strives for a society based on sharia law. The teachings of sharia are, by the way, fundamentally incompatible with our western values of democracy and rights and freedom. Sharia stands amongst others for an inhumane judicial system with corporal punishments, prosecution of other religions, female inferiority and a total rejection of whatever kind of distraction. By promoting these sharia investment funds, you simultaneously promote the rise of muslim fundamentalism and you seriously hamper efforts by moderate muslims who are willing to integrate and are themselves no advocates of sharia. Indeed, you foster the notion that one can only be a good muslim when one obeys sharia rules. In the meantime, I took the trouble to check out which islamic theologians have a seat in the ‘Sharia Supervisory Board’ which determines whether a share fulfills the requirements of the ‘Dow Jones Islamic Index’ (and thus also your Fortis-sharia investment fund). They are: Sheikh Nizam Yacubu from Bahrein, Sheikh Mohd Daud Baker from Malaysia, Sheikh Justice Muhammed Taqi Usmani from Pakistan, Sheikh Mohamed A. Elgari from Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Ghuddah from Syria and Sheikh Yusuf Talal DeLorrenzo from the United States. Apparently you let fatwas from fundamentalists determine which shares you offer, by means of your investment funds, to your clients.

The members of the ‘Sharia Supervisory Board’ are controversial. One of them is Sheikh Justice Muhammed Taqi Usmani, one of the most important islamic theologians and former sharia judge in Pakistan’s Supreme Court. During his tenure he opposed an amendment furthering the protection of women in Pakistan. This amendment aimed for the abolishment of several extremely woman-unfriendly measures which, a.o., obliged rape victims to come up with four male witnesses, lest, in the absence thereof, the woman not be accused of adultery, a crime to be punished by stoning.

Usmani is also a proponent of violent jihad. In an interview with the Times (08/09/2007) he stated last year that ‘muslims have to live in peace in countries such as Great Britain, until they acquire enough power to enter battle’. In his book ‘Islam and modernism’, Usmani pleads for an agressive military jihad as a means to achieve islamic world dominance. The Times writes that his book is a polemic against the islamic modernists who ‘want to transform the whole Koran in a poetic and metaphoric book’. According to Usmani these modernists are ‘bewitched by western culture’.

Another member of the ‘Sharia Supervisory Board’, Abu Ghuddah, is Chairman of the Sharia Board in the Saudi bank ‘Al Baraka Investment and Development Corporation’. A group of relatives of more than 1,000 victims of the attacks of 9/11 has filed a lawsuit against this bank because it reportedly is one of the main financiers of these terrorist attacks. Another member of the ‘Sharia Supervisory Board’, DeLorrenzo, is also a member of the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA), which counts many fundamentalists within its ranks and which was the subject of an investigation regarding the financing of muslim terrorism.

Because your bank is selling these sharia investment funds [and] because this constitutes a surrender to muslim fundamentalism, I feel compelled to scrap my accounts at your bank.

Yours sincerely,

Filip Dewinter

That is an appalling list of miscreants Fortis has managed to get onto its Board. Mr. Dewinter did his homework.

In the comments, someone explains how the mechanisms of Shari’a finance really work. Great scam – an exhibit of genuine Bedouin thinking scheming:
– – – – – – – – –
Sharia finance is not analogous to Kosher restaurants in that everyone eats & s**ts pretty much the same way.

Sharia finance hides interest in a long term fee structure so that the borrower is tied to the deal despite any change in the general economy. As in, you can not refinance your mortgage so you continue to pay 12% when other borrowers are paying 10% because they refinanced.

The fee structure hides the actual APR. This undoes the legal protection won for consumers when having a standard and common cost of borrowing stated up front was made a mandatory part of credit and loan paperwork.

Sharia banking empowers the wealthy which hold the money and not the people – businessmen and the like – who actually use money to create wealth. The lack of wealth creation is the most evident in Islamic countries as building homes etc, is not seen as a normal part of a consumers life, but rather as a gift of the wealthy to the poor.

Read up on places like UAE and the construction of new homes is not financed by the people who will live in them, but by the ruling family, usually as a way to keep the lid blowing off of social unrest.

Sharia banking is also very closely tied to the bankrupting and the denying of credit to non-Muslims. In Sharia banking, all transactions must be approved by a religious committee, of which only Muslims can sit on. This promotes crony lending and reinforces family/tribal connections between the borrowers and the loaners. Sharia law demands that Muslim interests are served first and so to be compliant a bank must loan to Muslims regardless of ability to repay or to be a good businessman.

Also by sharia law, money must be made available for jihad. So pretty much anyone using Sharia banks is contributing zakat to Al-Queda or Hezbolla or Hamas.

And these are the people who complain about the Jews and money. Talk about projection…

A business woman and her financial analyst colleague were having coffee in the “family section” of a Starbucks coffeehouse in Riyadh when they were approached by two men.

Family sections are the only places where men and women can sit together in establishments in Saudi Arabia. Officially, these sections are for families only, but in practical terms these sections – usually in international chains like Starbucks – become the only places where unrelated men and women can be comfortable that they won’t be harassed by commission members.

“What,” you ask, “are ‘commission members’?” I’ll tell you.

These are Saudi Arabia’s very own Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Think of it as an Arab version of the KGB, except that its raison d’être is random harassment of its citizens for purported violations of propriety.

Remember the girls who were sent back in the burning school building because they had fled the fire without grabbing their veils? That was the crowning highlight of these thugs enforcers of the law.

This recent incident is merely a routine call. Here is how Arab News covered it:

Yara, a petite 40-year-old woman, was in tears yesterday after she narrated to Arab News her encounter with a commission member that ended in high drama.

Yara, who has been married for 27 years, said she spent several hours in the women’s section of Riyadh’s Malaz Prison, was strip-searched, ordered to sign a confession that she was in a state of “khulwa” (a state of seclusion with an unrelated man) and for hours prevented from contacting her husband in Jeddah.

Her crime? Having a cup of coffee with a colleague in a Starbucks.

Yara said she arrived in the capital yesterday morning from Jeddah to check on the company’s new office.

“The minute I came into the office my colleagues told me that we have an issue with the electricity company and that we do not have power but that it would be back on in half an hour,” she said.

As they were waiting, they decided to go to the ground floor of the building to have a cup of coffee in the family section of Starbucks.

That’s when her troubles began. She and her male colleague were separated. He, a Syrian, was put in jail, while Yara was put through her paces as a sinful Muslima:
– – – – – – – – –

“Then (the commission member) came to me and said: ‘You need to come with us. This man is not a relative,’” she said.

When she told the commission member that she wanted to contact her husband by phone, he refused.

“I am the government,” Yara quoted him as saying. He then ordered her to come with him.

She was first locked in a van while various officers of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice came by and lectured her on her lack of virtue. Then Yara was forced to sign a “confession” and a false statement that her phone and purse had been returned to her. When she protested that they hadn’t been, nor had she been permitted to call her husband, there was the routine “shut-up-and-sign,” which she did, fearing a worse outcome if she continued to refuse.

Once they had her “confession” in hand, they started up the van and drove her to jail (the Commission may be the “government” but as of last year, the über government ordered them not to detain these offenders very long). There, the whole thing recommenced:

“The next thing I saw from the window was that we were approaching a place with a sign written on the outside: Malaz Prison,” she said.

Inside the prison, Yara recounts being taken to a cell with a one-way mirror. On the other side was a sheikh.

“I could not see him because there was a dark window,” she said, adding that each time she paused he would reprimand her, telling her what she did was wrong. “He kept on telling me this is not allowed.”

Yara told the sheikh that her husband knew where she was and what she was doing. He then started writing a report. Another pre-written confession was fingerprinted, she said. She pleaded with prison authorities to contact her husband.

“They would not let me contact my husband,” she said. “I told them… please… my husband will have a heart attack if he does not know what has happened to me.”

She was not given a phone to call her husband. She was not given access to a lawyer. “They stripped me,” she said. “They checked that I had nothing with me and threw me in the cell with all the others.”

Meanwhile, Yara’s husband Hatim, an executive director of a prominent company, was in Jeddah when he received a phone call. “My friend contacted me and told me that the commission had captured my wife,” he said.

He booked the next flight to Riyadh and, after some strings were pulled, Yara was out of jail.

Here’s her husband’s take on the experience:

“I look at this as if she had been kidnapped by thugs,” said Hatim. “There’s really nothing else to it … I know this has nothing to do with the country, but these (people) are thugs. Unfortunately, they told her that they are ‘the government’ so she could not resist.”

That’s where you’re wrong, husband Hatim. You have the “thug” part right, but this has everything to do with your country. These men are law-enforcing thugs, and your wife broke the law by having coffee in public with a male colleague. Your problem is indeed your country, where the spirit of the law exists in a sea of whimsy and the letter of the law often kills innocent people.

Yara’s colleague is a Syrian national and a devout Muslim. He’s still in custody – probably just to make the Syrians beg.

Saudi Arabia: a nightmare not even Kafka could have devised.

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

The thing I found most touching about this story is Yara’s heartfelt recollection of her biggest concern:

“They would not let me contact my husband,” she said. “I told them… please… my husband will have a heart attack if he does not know what has happened to me.”

Good marriages are the same the world over.

Hat tip: TB

Update: LN sends a link to this Aftonbladet article (in Swedish) which states that there have been seven deadly “balcony incidents” so far, in various Swedish cities.

Our Swedish correspondent LN sends the following cartoon, and has provided an English translation of the text in the speech balloon. Also, here’s a translation of the caption that originally appeared under the cartoon:

(It has almost become commonplace for a young girl to fall from a balcony in Malmö…)

This cartoon is referring to a news story that Dymphna mentioned last week.
– – – – – – – – –
A teenage girl in Malmö fell from the balcony of her apartment sometime during the night of January 23rd. Her parents told the police that they found her on the ground below the following morning.

However, two male “relatives” have since been charged with pushing her off the balcony.

There is no mention in any of the news stories of the girl’s ethnicity, or why her relatives might have pushed her off the balcony.

A Swedish contact just sent us the following press release:

Swedish Migration Board Bans Freedom of Expression

The Swedish Migration Board has demoted — and in practice fired — Asylum Assessment Manager Lennart Eriksson, 51, for voicing support for democracies such as Israel and the USA on his personal website. The Migration Board has not alleged that Eriksson’s personal beliefs have in any way affected the quality of his work, nor is it alleged that he has behaved in any way inappropriately while at work, acknowledging that he manages his website entirely in his own private time. It is for his political beliefs that he is being persecuted. Eriksson is a Conservative.

Lennart Eriksson, 51, has worked at the Swedish Migration Board in Göteborg in western Sweden in a variety of positions for almost 20 years. He is a Conservative in his personal political affiliations and has for many years managed his own Internet website where he has expressed his personal opinions on a variety of subjects. On this website Lennart Eriksson has voiced support for Israel and the USA as pillars of democracy. His employers have known about the website for many years.

Conservative politics “not mainstream”

Over the past five years, up to September 2007, Lennart Eriksson served as manager of an asylum assessment unit. On his return from a year-long leave of absence during which he completed his doctoral thesis, he was immediately called to a meeting with the newly appointed operational manager. The manager informed Eriksson that he had seen his website and that Lennart Eriksson’s Conservative views were both “unusual” and controversial. The manager was particularly opposed to Lennart Eriksson’s support for Israel and the USA and his online description of WW2 US general George Patton as one of the heroes of the Second World War. Lennart Eriksson was then summarily informed that he had been demoted.

In response, Lennart Eriksson sued the Swedish Migration Board in county court. Eriksson’s view is that he has in practice been fired from his job as asylum assessment unit manager, camouflaged in the form of a transfer. Lennart Eriksson feels that whatever the final legal outcome regarding the terminology — demotion or transfer — there is no cause for this move. The Migration Board confirms that Lennart Eriksson has been transferred as a result of the opinions he expressed on his private website. Opinions that are not against anything, but rather for certain beliefs — Conservative politics and democratic countries, specifically Israel and the USA.

Freedom of expression in danger in Sweden

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The right to freely express opinions on political, cultural and social issues without risk of reprisal is the very foundation of a democratic society. Freedom of expression, which is protected in Sweden by the Constitution, does not provide unlimited freedoms but it is a very far-reaching right indeed. The opinions that Lennart Eriksson expresses are based in their entirety on a strong democratic foundation whose cornerstone is an unassailable conviction of every individual’s equal human value. Lennart Eriksson’s opinions are politically Conservative. These opinions may naturally be disputed within certain quarters, not least among a largely left-leaning media. They may not always be regarded as politically correct in a society where there is a strong innate tendency to conformity. However, these views are nonetheless shared to a large extent by the entire Swedish government, a coalition that includes a large number of Conservatives. A long history of Social Democratic control at the helm of the nation and of the Swedish Migration Board, however, has left a very firm imprint on both the nation’s media and various state departments — not least the Migration Board.

Political persecution

Political persecution is not easily identified in a country where generations of citizens have been brought up to hear that this sort of thing does not occur in Sweden. If someone in another country had suffered the treatment to which Lennart Eriksson has been subjected — the more so in a State-run and State-funded department — the victim would in fact have been entitled to seek and thus be granted political asylum in Sweden.

The Swedish Migration Board fulfils a vital social function. Protecting human rights and offering asylum to victims of persecution are among the Board’s central roles. However, the Swedish Migration Board reveals that it will not hesitate to pursue its own employees for their political beliefs. Consequently, the Swedish Migration Board’s credibility in its everyday operations — operations of immense sensitivity to the nation’s security — is being rapidly undermined and risks total collapse.

By supporting an operational manager who displays a remarkable lack of education, an embarrassing shortfall in historical perspective and a penchant for prejudice coloured by personal political belief, the Swedish Migration Board has diluted the democratic nature of one of Europe’s oldest democracies.

For more information about this case, the media are requested to contact:

Ilya Meyer, phone +46 31 694431, 426 68 Västra Frölunda, Sweden.
Fax: +46 31 690486
Email: ilya.meyer@transtext.se

Are the French the first to hop onto the Lisbon train? Do they think they have a return ticket?

France’s deputies and senators meeting in Parliament in Versailles ratified by a vote of 560 to 181 the constitutional revision for the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon.

Jean-Marie Le Pen of “Front National” just issued this communiqué:

Treason In Versailles

Once again, the Palace of Versailles, symbol of the sovereignty and the grandeur of France, is the theater of a betrayal of the nation.

In 2005, the deputies and senators had modified the French Constitution to make it compatible with the European Constitution.

The French people rejected these modifications.

The deputies and the senators reenact the same scenario today as if the French people had never voiced their opinion.

What the people refused in 2005, the representatives of the people are imposing in 2008.This betrayal disqualifies the national representation.”

“Today, we are all French.”

America will recover from 9/11. I do not think the French will recover from this. Not in our lifetimes.

From Transatlantic Conservative

[finis]

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (a.k.a. Lenin) famously said, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

But the modern Western welfare state, in its eagerness to commit suicide, is willing to pay our enemies to take the rope. “Please! Have one for free, on us! It’s made of top noose-grade hemp, guaranteed to take the weight of any infidel of up to 200 kilos…”

Over the weekend Dymphna wrote about the British government’s announcement that it is willing to pay Muslim men for their extra wives. And now the Swedes are going to use taxpayer funds to pay for the training the country’s imams:

Swedish state to train imams

The Swedish government is to set up an inquiry to look into the possibility of using state funds to provide training programmes for imams.

Muslim religious representatives should be able to benefit from Swedish tax kronor in the same way as Christian priests and ministers, according to Minster for Higher Education and Research Lars Leijonborg.

The former Liberal Party leader also believes that the move will help stem the development of radical Islam in Sweden.

Ah yes! The rationale for every weaselly weak-kneed surrender to the demands of Islam: “If we don’t give them what they want, the radicals will gain ascendancy, and then the Muslims will hurt us! Here’s some money — now we can crawl back under the bed.”

The idea is to replace Saudi money with Swedish money — as if that will guarantee a crop of more “moderate” imams:
– – – – – – – – –

“It has been suggested that radical Muslims from Saudi Arabia are offering to provide imams for free, and a lack of money means that moderate Muslims who want to set up a mosque don’t have any alternatives,” Leijonborg told Svenska Dagbladet.

Concrete proposals regarding the structure and composition of a training course for imams would only be put forward following close consultation with Muslims in Sweden, he said. The minister added that the government had already begun discussions with the newly formed Ibn Rushd study foundation.

“My opinion is that we should help Muslims by providing a Swedish training course for imams, or at least supplementary studies in Swedish language and society.”

The other day Dymphna mentioned “Muslim Stigmata”, the bruises on devout foreheads which are derived from vigorously banging Muslim heads against the mosque floor when praying.

What about the “Swedish Stigmata”?

Those are the subdural hematomae caused by the repeated pounding of Swedish heads against the wall of Multiculturalism.

Hat tip: TB.

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

Dymphna of Gates of Vienna recommended to me a book called “Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization,” by Rémi Brague. The Romans admired the earlier culture of the Greeks. Christians had a love/hate relationship with Judaism, but they did recognize that the Jews had an older religious tradition than they did themselves, and that they were greatly indebted to it. Christian Europeans thus inherited a twin “cultural secondarity” in relations to their Greek and Hebrew parent cultures. Brague sees this phenomenon of secondarity as the very essence of the Latin West, and dubs it “Romanity.”

According to him, “All that the most severe judges are willing to concede to Romanity is that Rome spread the riches of Hellenism and transmitted them down to us. But this is precisely the important fact — everything changes if one stops examining the content of the Roman experience only, and instead turns to the transmission itself. This one little thing that is conceded to be properly Roman is perhaps the whole of Rome… The Romans have done little more than transmit, but that is far from nothing. They have brought nothing new in relation to those two creator peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews. But they were the bearers of that innovation. They brought innovation itself. What was ancient for them, they brought as something new.”

As Edward T. Oakes says in First Things magazine:

One of the standard prejudices of philosophers plying their trade in the West is the notion that Latin is more impoverished than Greek for expressing the nuances of metaphysical speculation (Heidegger felt the same about the virtues of German over French or English). Whether true or not, Latin certainly served as a linguistic bonding agent in the European West in a way not paralleled by any other language in the world. As Brague argues, Latin ‘suffers’ from a triple secondarity: 1) it was no one’s mother tongue after the collapse of Rome; 2) it was never a deliberately coined Christian language, but the language of the Roman Empire, a political rather than a religious entity and one that antedated Christianity by centuries and was mostly hostile to it; 3) it was the language of the officially recognized Bible in the West (the Vulgate), but the Scriptures themselves were originally written in Hebrew and Greek. The Vulgate, therefore, perfectly expresses the essentially Roman (that is, secondary) feature of Christianity, whose originating ‘Greeks’ are the Jews.

One of the great ironies of history is that the Greek legacy rediscovered by Westerners via the Byzantines had an arguably greater impact in the West than it did in the Byzantine Empire itself. Although the Byzantines called themselves “Romans,” which was certainly true in the sense of institutional continuity, we should remember that for the original, Latin-speaking Romans, Greece represented a great, but still essentially foreign culture. The diminished Byzantine Empire after the Arab conquests encompassed a predominantly Greek-speaking region. The people who lived there didn’t view the ancient Greeks as “the Other,” but as their ancestors. To them, Greek philosophy was “theirs,” hence they didn’t reflect as much over it as some outsiders did. To Westerners, it was new and exciting and at the same time a part of a forgotten past, a legacy of an older civilization, hence they greeted it with greater enthusiasm.

If we state that what created the Scientific Revolution in the West was the combination of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian impulses, we have to explain why the same thing didn’t happen in the Byzantine Empire. There are several possible explanations:

1.		The Byzantine Empire spent too many resources on fighting Jihad, all the while being a bulwark against Islamic expansion deeper into Europe. There is some truth in this, but we should remember that Muslims did manage to penetrate deep into Western Europe, too, and controlled the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. The West was not free from Jihad, either.
2.		Theological differences. Although both the Byzantines and Westerners were Christians, there were subtle, yet potentially important differences in theology, for instance in the emphasis on work as a way of worshiping God, which was stronger in the Catholic West (and arguably even more in the Protestant West later) than in the Orthodox East.
3.		Structural differences. The Byzantine Empire had a more centralized, bureaucratic power structure than did the West, which was divided into many competing states, had more internal power centers and a split between church and state created by the Papal Revolution. Structurally speaking, the Byzantine Empire probably resembled China more than the West, although it was certainly smaller than China.
4.		The Byzantines never understood the Crusaders’ passion for the Holy Land because for them Jerusalem, although now under Islamic control, was still “theirs.” The original Byzantine Empire geographically encompassed both the Hebrew and the Greco-Roman roots of European culture. The Byzantines saw themselves as the center of civilization in a way Westerners could not and did not do. In this, they also resembled the Chinese.

As Brague points out, Christians do recognize that the Hebrew Bible is valid and authentic. Muslims, on the other hand, believe that Christians and Jews have falsified their texts, which accordingly have no specific value in themselves:

One should be careful, therefore, not to make an implicit analogy between what one calls, with an expression that besides is quite superficial, the ‘three monotheisms.’ Islam is not to Christianity (not even to Christianity and to Judaism) what Christianity is to Judaism. Admittedly, in both cases, the mother religion rejects the legitimacy of the daughter religion. And in both cases the daughter religion turned on its mother religion. But on the level of principles, the attitude toward the mother religion is not the same. While Islam rejects the authenticity of the documents on which Judaism and Christianity are founded, Christianity, in the worst case, recognizes at least that the Jews are the faithful guardians of a text that it considers as sacred as the text which is properly its own. In this way, the relationship of secondarity toward a preceding religion is found between Christianity and Judaism and between these two alone.

– – – – – – – – –
Europeans have always recognized that Europe is a younger culture compared to Egypt and the Near East. The cradle of civilization was always “somewhere else.” As Ibn Warraq demonstrates in his book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the ancient Greeks admired the civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, but the crucial difference is that although they readily admitted to borrowing from these older civilizations, they didn’t incorporate their religions and texts into their own culture unchanged. They assimilated outside influences, which didn’t give them the same permanent cultural secondarity as the Romans developed towards them later.

As Brague says, “on the collective level, every culture is the heir of the one or several that preceded it. In this sense, every culture is a land of immigration. But there is more: cultural secondarity seems to me to have, in the case of Europe and of it alone, a supplementary dimension. Europe has indeed this special feature of having, one might say, immigrated to itself. I mean by this that the secondary character of the culture is not only present there as a fact, but is explicitly recognized and deliberately desired.”

In the history of Europe, “one witnesses a constant effort to go back up toward the classical sources. One can thus describe the intellectual history of Europe as an almost uninterrupted train of renaissances.” For example, “One can then begin with the ‘Carolingian Renaissance,’ proceed to the ‘Renaissance of the Twelfth Century,’ and continue, of course, with the series of Italian Renaissances. But one could not stop there, because one finds the German cycle of Hellenism in the same line. One can make it begin with Winckelmann — unless one insists on going back to Beatus Rhenanus. Weimar classicism then followed and resulted in the dream of becoming Greeks once again.”

As Rémi Brague explains, this situation of secondarity in relation to the past aimed at by the “renaissances” in Western Europe was alien to Byzantium: “Admittedly, one does not have any trouble locating, in the cultural history of the Byzantine world, an uninterrupted ‘humanist’ tradition. One sees there a series of ‘renaissances’ follow one after the other, which constitute the counterpart, and often the model or a more or less direct motor, for analogous events occurring in Europe: the reestablishment of philological and literary studies in the ninth century with Photius or in the fourteenth with John Italus and Michael Psellus, and even in a dream of Neo-Paganism in George Gemistus Plethon in the fifteenth century. But the great difference is that, for the Byzantine Greeks, Hellenism was considered as their proper past. Theodorus Metochites [in the fourteenth century] could still affirm: ‘We are the compatriots of the ancient Hellenes by race and by language.’ For the Byzantines, it was only a matter of appropriating better and better what had always been their property.”

True, as Timothy Gregory writes in A History of Byzantium, by the twelfth century there was a new individuality in Byzantine arts: “The mosaics and frescoes of the period abandon the abstractness of earlier art and the figures are depicted more in a three-dimensional view and with a real sense of movement.” This is unlike the stylized paintings that became the direct ancestors of the religious icons made by Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs and other Orthodox Christians who consider themselves the heirs of Byzantium. These icons can be very beautiful, but they are distinctly different from later Western art.

It would obviously be untrue to claim that Byzantine art or culture was unaffected by the Classical heritage. However, it is significant that the Italian Renaissance and the revolutionary realism it introduced in describing nature, which was also arguably mirrored in science, marked a permanent change in Western art. Nothing equivalent ever happened in Byzantium. This also had practical consequences tied to science. In Western Europe, technical drawings, scale drawings and development of models were later aided by advances in mathematics and the development of geometrical perspective in painting during the Renaissance.

The 20th-century Austrian historian of Byzantine art Otto Demus explains that in the “renaissances” in the West and at Byzantium, the intention and the direction were similar. However, “the Occidental renaissances were of shorter duration, of less intensity, and separated from each other by intervals during which the tendency went entirely in the opposite direction. The Byzantine renaissances, conversely, followed nearly without a resolution of continuity, they were only nodal points on which forces were concentrated and efforts were almost always there. This is why one is right to speak of a ‘permanent renaissance’ in Byzantium. But as a consequence these concentrations lacked tendencies that aimed at just what characterizes an authentic renaissance: Antiquity was for the Byzantines something so near that it could not establish the feeling of estrangement which would drive creation [schöpferisches Fremdheitserlebnis] and so nothing could truly be ‘reborn.’”

In contrast, according to Brague, Western Europeans had “a consciousness of being latecomers, and of having to go back to a source that ‘we’ are not and which has never been ‘us.’ This consciousness is vivid from the beginning of the European project. It is even, perhaps, the motor of its history.”

For instance, Charlemagne, whom one nicknamed “the father of Europe” (Pater Europae), “dreamed of competing with Byzantium, in comparison with which, despite its then-weakened state, he could not help but feel inferior. Byzantium had all the signs of legitimacy: material riches (‘the gold of Byzantium’), a dynasty, the Roman name (the second Rome), manuscripts and scholars to read them, and numerous saints’ relics that were signs of the continuity of the Church from its apostolic foundation. In his biography of Charlemagne, Einhard recounts that the emperor had bequeathed three tables of silver and one of gold in his will. On the first were represented, respectively, the maps of Constantinople and of Rome, and a map of the entire world. One will note that two maps are conspicuous by their absence: among maps of cities, that of Aachen, the capital of the Carolingian Empire. This city must at that time cut a poor figure alongside the two reference points which Europe never ceased ogling, the two Romes, the ancient and the contemporary. But also missing was a map of Europe, the newly founded empire of the Occident. Its founder could not gaze at himself complacently in the image of his creation.”

Brague states that “Charlemagne could thus see the place his own Occidental empire occupied, far from the centers, far from Jerusalem, far from everything — eccentric. He tried to be linked to Byzantium first by competing with it, and even in aping it — in architecture, for example: the basilica of Aachen imitates that of Ravenna, the single accessible example of Byzantine architecture.” He also dared to have himself crowned emperor of the Occident. All of this rested on an admission: “Legitimacy was elsewhere, it came from elsewhere.”

While in the Orient the Byzantine Emperor, who besides received liturgical prerogatives at his coronation, made and unmade the Patriarchs, the Occident followed another course. This may have been for reasons that one can consider as purely historical contingencies, and even as completely bad (the Pope was also a head of state, had privileges to defend etc.). The fact remains that, in the Latin Occident, a non-conflictual union of the temporal and the spiritual, which was not less dreamed of here than elsewhere (‘union of the throne and of the altar,’ or the theocratic dreams of certain Popes, etc.), has never been a historical reality. In Byzantium the situation was less clear.” There “the idea of a ‘symphony’ (a harmonious agreement) of the temporal power of the Emperor and of the spiritual power of the Patriarch tended to confound the two much more than in the Occidental theory of the ‘two swords.’

This had major long-term consequences for the growth of political liberty in the West: “In actuality, the Russian Orthodox clergy was brutally forced into submission to the Tsar starting with Peter the Great. In contrast, the Pope has always constituted, in the Occident, an obstacle to the ambitions of emperors and kings. This conflict is perhaps what has allowed Europe to maintain that singularity which has made it a unique historical phenomenon. Its importance was clearly seen by Lord Acton, who wrote: ‘To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty. If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king whom it anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism’ It was this conflict that prevented Europe from changing into one of those empires that reflected an ideology in their manner and their image — whether they produced it or pretended to incarnate it.”

Rémi Brague’s conclusion is that “when all is said and done, the cultural poverty of Europe has been her good fortune. It obliged it to work and to borrow. On the contrary, the richness of Byzantium paralyzed it, got in its way, because it had no need to look elsewhere. This has been noticed in regard to the history of art. One noticed it equally in regard to philosophy.”

”The consciousness that Europe had of having its sources outside of itself had the consequence of displacing its cultural identity, such that it has no other identity than an eccentric identity. It is now fashionable to hurl at European culture the adjective ‘eurocentric.’ To be sure, every culture, like every living being, can’t help looking at the other ones from its own vantage point, and Europe is no exception. Yet, no culture was ever so little centered on itself and so interested in the other ones as Europe. China saw itself as the ‘Middle Kingdom.’ Europe never did. ‘Eurocentrism’ is a misnomer. Worse: it is the contrary of the truth.”

Kenneth Pomeranz in The Great Divergence — China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World claims that “as late as the mid-eighteenth century, Western Europe was not uniquely productive or economically efficient.” Pomeranz belongs to the school of historians who believe that it wasn’t until the full effects of the Industrial Revolution set in during the nineteenth century that Western technological and economic superiority became undeniable. According to this view, as late as the year 1800, there were regions in Asia that matched Western Europe in terms of wealth and health. Some regions in India and to a lesser extent Southeast Asia did, but especially in China and Japan:

”….there is good reason to think that ‘luxury’ demand was at least as dispersed among various classes of Chinese and Japanese as it was among Europeans. And as we have already seen at some length, when it came to matters of ‘free labor’ and markets in the overall economy, Europe did not stand out from China and Japan; indeed, it may have lagged behind at least China. At the very least, all three of these societies resembled each other in these matters far more than any of them resembled India, the Ottoman Empire, or southeast Asia. Thus, at least so far, we would seem to have similar conditions in these three societies for the emergence of the new kinds of firms that we generally think of as ‘capitalist.’”

I will leave out the details of his argument for now. Let’s assume that China and Japan had a roughly equal capacity to challenge the West in the nineteenth century. If so, how come Japan did so quickly, but China was slower and less efficient in meeting the new challenge?

As Jared Diamond says in Guns, Germs and Steel, “Firearms reached Japan in A.D. 1543, when two Portuguese adventurers armed with harquebuses (primitive guns) arrived on a Chinese cargo ship. The Japanese were so impressed by the new weapon that they commenced indigenous gun production, greatly improved gun technology, and by A.D. 1600 owned more and better guns than any other country in the world. But there were also other factors working against the acceptance of firearms in Japan. The country had a numerous warrior class, the samurai, for whom swords rated as class symbols and works of art (and as means for subjugating the lower classes). Japanese warfare had previously involved single combats between samurai swordsmen, who stood in the open, made ritual speeches, and then took pride in fighting gracefully. Such behavior became lethal in the presence of peasant soldiers ungracefully blasting away with guns. In addition, guns were a foreign invention and grew to be despised, as did other things foreign in Japan after 1600.” The samurai-controlled government gradually restrict gun production and licenses “until Japan was almost without functional guns” again.

Contemporary European rulers also included some who despised guns and tried to restrict their availability. But such measures never got far in Europe, where any country that temporarily swore off firearms would be promptly overrun by gun-toting neighboring countries. Only because Japan was a populous, isolated island could it get away with its rejection of the powerful new military technology. Its safety in isolation came to an end in 1853, when the visit of Commodore Perry’s U.S. fleet bristling with cannons convinced Japan of its need to resume gun manufacture. That rejection and China’s abandonment of oceangoing ships (as well as of mechanical clocks and water-driven spinning machines) are well-known historical instances of technological reversals in isolated or semi-isolated societies. Other such reversals occurred in prehistoric times. The extreme case is that of Aboriginal Tasmanians, who abandoned even bone tools and fishing to become the society with the simplest technology in the modern world. Aboriginal Australians may have adopted and then abandoned bows and arrows. Torres Islanders abandoned canoes, while Gaua Islanders abandoned and then readopted them. Pottery was abandoned throughout Polynesia. Most Polynesians and many Melanesians abandoned the use of bows and arrows in war.

Cristóvão da Gama, the son of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, also fought a Muslim Jihad in Ethiopia in support of local Christians with harquebuses during the 1540s. Within a mere decade of seeing this weapon for the first time, the Japanese were mass producing them on their own, and they soon had more guns than any European army, including great power Spain, did at the time. The fact that this was later suppressed shows that there can be powerful social factors resisting change in any society, but the Japanese had certainly demonstrated a remarkable talent for innovation and adaptation.

The Japanese were afraid of an invasion by Spain or Portugal, which was not entirely unfounded given that they had recently conquered large areas in the Americas and the Spanish had a foothold in the Philippines in Southeast Asia, ruled as one of the territories of New Spain. They were also annoyed at the spread of Christianity which accompanied the European newcomers, and the authorities finally expelled Catholic missionaries and executed a significant number of Christians.

During a period of self-imposed relative Japanese isolation from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Nagasaki was maintained as the primary window to the outside world. Western sciences were called Dutch Learning, since trade was largely in the hands of the Dutch, one of the most technologically and scientifically advanced Western nations of the time. Much of it was eventually translated to Japanese and published in numerous books.

The invention of woodblock printing during the Tang dynasty in China (around the seventh or eighth century AD) was intimately linked to Buddhist monasteries and art. Stamped figures of the Buddha marked the transition from seal impression to woodcut. Buddhism came to Japan via Korea and China, and monks brought with them, in addition to tea and thus the basis for the elaborate Japanese tea ceremonies, other aspects of Chinese civilization, among them printing. Yet this invention remained tied to religion for a long time. Until the sixteenth century, at roughly the same period as they encountered Europeans, the Japanese printed only Buddhist scriptures.

According to the book Technology in World Civilization — A Thousand-Year History by Arnold Pacey, “Printing has been stressed here because the ready availability of books was a stimulus to the growth of habits of abstract thought, often analytical, in China and Japan as much as in the West. But while there were many seventeenth-century Europeans who applied such analysis to problems of map-making or mechanism — to wheels, levers and chemical substances — in China, people with the same inclinations applied them instead to the analysis of documentary evidence or linguistic problems.”

Some Europeans arrived in China during the late sixteenth century, among them the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci. At this time, the printing press invented by Gutenberg had been turning out large amounts of printed material in Europe for a century and a half. Still, Ricci commented on the sheer number of books that were available in China, as well as their low prices. Even though book printing had been operating in China for at least eight centuries, the content of these books did not always favor science or technology. The more decentralized book trade in Europe had been concentrated around the universities from an early age, a kind of institution that did not have any real equivalent in China. This gave it a different direction.

Consequently, “by 1601, when Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest, presented a European clock to the Chinese emperor, the literary and agricultural emphasis of Chinese culture was so strong that, as Ricci noted, nobody with real ability took up mathematics, and no new work was being done. The great clocks made before 1100 no longer existed, and the thinking behind them had been forgotten. So the European clocks which were now being introduced were not recognized as symbols associated with cosmological ideas. They were collected along with other mechanical novelties as ‘intricate oddities’. The Chinese writer who used this phrase added that they were ‘attractive to the senses’, but ‘they fulfil no basic need’.”

In many societies, astronomical work was an important stimulus behind dissemination of ideas about mathematics, clocks etc. In China, the emperor claimed to have a Mandate from Heaven, which meant that interpreting the heavens was important for the legitimacy of the dynasty. Maintaining a precise calendar was also crucial for running the daily lives of his subjects. Astronomy thus had a political significance.

In the eleventh century, the polymath Su Sung rose to prominence through the bureaucratic examination system and did work for the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy. His star maps are considered among the oldest ones ever made in printed form. He is remembered for his large, water-powered astronomical clock tower, completed in Kaifeng in 1094 on the emperor’s orders. However, although it was the most advanced piece of clockwork created to date, it was a government-sponsored project. When the imperial court lost interest, it wasn’t followed up. Nomadic invasions, first by the Jurchens of the Manchurian-based Jin Dynasty in the twelfth century and then by the Mongols in the thirteenth, also disrupted these developments.

By the time Europeans made their presence felt in the region, though water clocks were used in China and India, “Japan was the only Asian country where clocks of the western type were being made in the seventeenth century, and where new designs evolved.” Just as with guns, the Japanese saw the potential in European mechanical clocks before any other Asians did.

As Pacey says, “In Japan, the adoption and development of technologies transferred from the West may seem to have begun abruptly soon after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. However, the reality is that Japan was able to use those technologies effectively because a technically innovative culture had been evolving for a long time. This had been stimulated by a selective adoption of western techniques since the sixteenth century, and by a much longer tradition of borrowing and developing technology from Korea and China.”

The Tale of Genji, written by the noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the eleventh century, is considered one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature, and a testimony to the fact that Japanese culture could create works of great beauty before the modern era. However, during the ensuing “feudal” centuries and samurai period, powerful families and warlords, or shogun, ran the country, with the emperor usually as a figurehead. Following the Meiji Restoration ending the Tokugawa shogunate, a centralized government with the emperor (or an oligarchy around him) as its focus was established. The samurai class was abolished and crushed. A modernizing civil service emerged, with institutional changes in banking and company law. This modernization was partly paid for by the continued poverty of peasant farmers.

The dark side of this was the rise of a militaristic Shinto religion, the native Japanese religion but purified of Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian elements and promulgated by the state to shore up its support and strengthen Japanese national unity. Shintoism was again reduced to a private, personal faith, as it had originally been, under the leadership of American General Douglas MacArthur following Japan’s defeat in the Second World War.

As Arnold Pacey says, “Undoubtedly, the greatest of all Japanese industrial skills inherited from before the Meiji period were those relating to organization and commerce, and these skills were clearly demonstrated by the way in which the introduction of new technologies was managed.”

Moreover, “despite the many reforms, there was also an important element of continuity, notably in the strong merchant class. For example, the Mitsui firm dated back to 1683. There was also continuity in technology, both with respect to the long-standing Japanese interest in western techniques, and in the persisting importance of traditional technology and local innovation. It will be recalled that from the 1630s, Japan had limited its trade with the West to one small Dutch trading post. In 1720, the import of European books was liberalized. A number of scholars learned Dutch and studied medicine, agriculture and other technical subjects from the imported literature. Translations were authorized and circulated widely in this highly literate society. By 1820, there were schools of ‘Dutch studies’ or western knowledge, and a handful of young men were being quietly sent abroad to study western technology.”

By 1905, “Japanese raw silk exports equalled China’s and supplied one-third of the world market. Soon after, Japan overtook China and became the biggest supplier to countries such as France which had large silk-weaving industries. Although improved silk-reeling machines played a part in this expansion, the more crucial changes were associated with improvements in organization rather than technique. There was better quality control through a government system of licensing producers of silk-worm eggs, and large-scale marketing of the product was undertaken by firms such as Mitsui.”

Moreover, “The employment of foreign technical advisers was also very carefully organized. In particular, all their costs were paid by the Japanese so there would be no doubt about who was in control. One of the largest groups of foreigners were the British railroad engineers and managers working under William Cargill, who was director of railways and telegraphs from 1871 in partnership with a local man, Inoue Masaru. The British supervised the building of the first railroad in Japan, the Tokyo-Yokohama line, which opened in 1872.”

After 1881, “Japanese railroads continued to depend on imported rails and equipment (until after 1900), but foreign engineers were called in only when major bridges were designed. Railroads and shipyards were encouraged particularly strongly by the government in Japan, and considerable subsidies went into these two industries between 1868 and 1913.”

With the rapid expansion of scientific and technical education, “foreign teachers were employed, mainly at Tokyo University, which was founded in 1877. But Japanese teachers were so quickly trained that by 1893 there were no foreign professors left.”

Japan also embarked on creating a colonial empire of its own. Pacey again:

The western powers prevented a full Japanese take-over in Korea until 1910, but Taiwan became a colony, and Japanese goals in Korea were pursued by buying up its first railroad, which had been begun by American engineers in 1896. (…) Russia had not only built a railroad across Manchuria (part of China) to reach Vladivostok, but had leased the Chinese ports of Dalian and Lushun (‘Port Arthur’). These had been connected by railroad with the Russian system, and considerable numbers of troops were employed guarding the lines. Fearing further Russian consolidation, the Japanese attacked ‘Port Arthur’ and in 1905 defeated the Russians both there and at sea. Under the treaty which followed, they took over the port and its railroad connections, and formed an organization known as the South Manchurian Railway to run them. This became the main agency for Japanese economic penetration of this Chinese territory, and was particularly important in giving access to iron ore reserves, shortage of which had been a considerable disadvantage to Japan hitherto.

China experienced a period of unrest and civil war in 1852-60 and was subject to foreign invasions. There were attempts to modernize, but these “depended heavily” on engineers from Western countries. The Chinese “were also limited by the way in which ‘self-strengthening’ policies were conceived only in terms of acquiring technology and technical education. There was no recognition of the need for new forms of organization to make the new technologies effective, and thus there were no institutional reforms like those in Japan after 1868. One result was the chronic difficulty in raising capital for new projects and arbitrary taxation of profits.” The extra-territorial rights for traders from Western countries established after the Opium Wars, a less-than-proud chapter in Western history, didn’t help, either.

During the time of the Han dynasty in China (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), Japan imported iron and bronze-making, rice farming and other ideas with migrants from the Korean Peninsula and China. By the sixth century A.D., Chinese characters dubbed Kanji or “Han characters” had become widespread. There was no writing system in Japan prior to this. In modern Japanese, Kanji has been combined with two other systems, hiragana for words for which no Kanji exists and katakana for words from foreign languages, to make up written Japanese. During the sixth and seventh centuries, the Baekje kingdom in the Korean peninsula and the Tang Dynasty in China brought philosophies such as Buddhism and Confucianism to Japan.

In light of these examples, it would be tempting, but not entirely accurate, to say that Japan was to China what Western Europe was to the Byzantine Empire. Some regions of Western Europe did once belong to the same political entity as Byzantium, which Japan never did with China. Also, the Japanese relationship with China (and Korea) is highly complex. Japan the apprentice attacked China the master, and many Chinese and Koreans are still angry over Japanese war policies in the twentieth century. They behaved at least as badly in Asia against the civilian population and Allied prisoners of war as the Nazis did in Europe. Many Chinese also tend to dismiss Japan as a slightly inferior copy of China. This isn’t fair, but it is true that Japan has borrowed heavily from China in the past and that no Japanese can deny this.

No major civilization exists in total isolation. Byzantine glazed ceramics developed, beginning in the seventh century, “based in large part on models from Persia and even China. A thriving industry in ceramic production developed with many regional centers and different styles.” In some periods like the Tang dynasty, outside influences (above all from India) to China could be quite substantial. However, in the long line of history, China has indeed been more self-sufficient than Japan, and was probably one of no more than a handful of cultures on earth to invent writing independently. China could thus make a legitimate claim to be the center of the world. Japan could not, precisely because it was next door to China.

Japan is different from the West in some very important respects. Japan does not share the Western notion of universalism or the same strong feelings of guilt for its colonial history. Some observers have suggested that this is due to the absence of Christianity, which means that concepts like original sin and the global brotherhood of man find little cultural resonance there. The Japanese have remained largely insulated from the “diversity” problems of the West. They obviously don’t copy anybody slavishly, yet are flexible enough to adopt good ideas from abroad while still sticking to the core of their cultural traditions.

Despite many obvious differences, perhaps there was a defining trait that Western Europe did share with Japan: They were both, strictly speaking, upstarters and latecomers, and could make no claim of being the original seat of civilization when compared with their far older neighbors. Perhaps this cultural secondarity gave them a flexibility that the older civilizations lacked. The Japanese were thus the first people in Asia to take up the challenge from the West because in some ways, they were most like the West. It now looks as if China is making a determined effort of making up for lost time. Only time will tell if they will succeed.

Western Europe in the early modern age was unusually apt at both innovation and at improving inventions imported from abroad. They met their match in the Japanese. Whatever the cause, it is a fact that the Japanese have performed remarkably well at innovation and at making outside inventions even better, assimilating them and improving them during a remarkable short period of time. This remains as true in the twenty-first century as it was in the sixteenth.

Jens of Human Rights Service in Norway writes:

You might remember that a while ago I sent you an article (see news report below the jump) about a Norwegian resident who is fatwa-convicted of blasphemy.

The man is Mariwan Halabjaee, a prolific writer and intellectual of Iraqi Kurdistan. After the release of his latest book Sex, Sharia and The History of Women in Islam (2005), which is highly critical of Islam and the moral qualities of the Islam-inventor Mohammed, Halabjaee received a fatwa on his head from Kurdistan’s “High Commission for Fatwa”, sentencing him to death, unless he repent and publicly apologize his blasphemous writings. Halabjaee thus fled his home country, taking his pregnant wife and three children along with him, and sought refuge in Norway, where he now lives in hiding.

I personally met with Halabjaee at a secret location in Norway, and obtained a TV-interview with him; the first he has given since after he fled Kurdistan. Halabjaee spoke neither English nor Norwegian, so I had to have a translator along with me. The result is this little film, published on YouTube.

I had to overcome some technical obstacles in learning how to edit multimedia material, but now that I have thrown myself into it, film is something I plan to do more of.

I am already in contact with one more refugee who has had to flee his home country after receiving death threats from Islamists, simply for publishing material criticizing Islam. These people feel isolated and forgotten, and I believe that we have an important mission in lifting them up, making them visible and getting their voice on record (before it is too late).

Who knows, perhaps this can develop into something like a series of portraits of people who are persecuted by Islam? So if you know of persecuted people living in Europe, people you think ought to come on air, please send me the information.

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From You Tube

Mariwan Halabjaee has been called the Salman Rushdie of Kurdistan. As an established writer and prolific intellectual of Iraqi Kurdistan, Halabjaee in 2005 published the book “Sex, Sharia and Women in The History of Islam”. Deemed blasphemous by the Kurdistan High Commission for Fatwa, the Islamic League of Kurdistan issued a “conditional” fatwa to kill him if he did not repent and apologize for writing his book. Thus forced to flee his home country, taking three children and a pregnant wife along with him, Mr. Halabjaee was granted asylum in Norway, were he now lives in hiding.

This is the Aftenposten article from January 8 of this year:

Two years ago author Mariwan Halabjaee wrote “Sex, sharia and women in the history of Islam”. Here he wrote that the prophet Mohammed had 19 wives, married a nine-year-old when he was aged 54 and that he took part in murder and rape. Last month a court in Halabja convicted him of blasphemy in absentia.

Halabjaee has lived in hiding in Norway for one and a half years. The sentence states that he should be arrested upon his return to north Iraq but he has now been granted asylum in Norway, newspaper Bergens Tidende reports on its web site.

The writer has had 14 books published. Halabjaee says that he has received a series of death threats and that there is a fatwa saying he should be punished by death unless he asks forgiveness.

Halabjaee also believes Norway is naive about radical Islamist groups that he says authorities allow to develop without control on Norwegian soil.

“Norway has protected me against the terrorists and I hope to be able to play a role in this democratic system. But I am alone and feel imprisoned. I have little contact with people and have to move carefully. Even if I have lived here a year and a half no cultural or other organizations have contacted me,” Halabjaee says.

The key sentence here is Halabjaee’s wistful plaint, “…I hope to be able to play a role in this democratic system. But I am alone and feel imprisoned. I have little contact with people…”

I think Lionheart in this country feels much the same way: missing Britain and cast-off just for telling the truth.

I Didn’t Know the ACLU Gets Government Funding!

I lead a sheltered life. Thus I had no idea thatgovernment pays our tax dollars to the ACLU. Somehow I thought it was funded by all those leftie civil rights enthusiasts…live and learn.

Here is that benevolent institutions latest enthusiasm:

The American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that men who have sex in public washrooms should be protected under court rulings guaranteeing privacy.

…the ACLU filed an amicus brief to the Minnesota 4th District Court citing a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago that found that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms “have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

The brief was filed in defence of Republican Senator Larry Craig who was arrested and charged with lewd conduct in June 2007.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said, “The real motive behind secret sting operations like the one that resulted in Sen. Craig’s arrest is not to stop people from inappropriate activity. It is to make as many arrests as possible – arrests that sometimes unconstitutionally trap innocent people.” Solicitation for private sex is protected speech under the First Amendment, the ACLU argues.

Romero wrote, “If the police really want to stop people from having sex in public bathrooms, they should put up a sign banning sex in the restroom and send in a uniformed officer to patrol periodically. That works.”

Mr. Romero is absolutely right. Big signs in men’s bathrooms; that will do the trick, so to speak. Except what do you say to children who want to know what those signs mean? If we’re really going to be fair about it, why not separate bathrooms for the heterosexual and homosexual male members [sorry] of the public? Surely that would be cheaper than all this litigation.

On the other hand, it would probably mean having to downsize the ACLU. We wouldn’t need as many lawyers, would we?

From the same article:

In 2006, the American Legion, the largest veterans’ organization in the US, called on the government to stop funding the ACLU’s efforts to abolish traditional expressions of Christianity. District 21 Commander Rees Lloyd, on behalf of the Legion, testified to the Senate in support of a bill that would remove the power to award taxpayer-paid attorney fees to the ACLU.

“Benevolently intended fee provisions are being used as a bludgeon against public entities to surrender to ACLU’s demands, and being used to obtain profits in the millions.”

Our tax dollars go to the ACLU?? It still won’t compute…
– – – – – – – – –
Why don’t we just burn dollar bills to run electricity plants instead? Certainly it would make for less pollution than that which emanates from the nefarious activities of the ACLU.

In “A History of the American People,” Paul Johnson (a distant cousin of Charles, perhaps?) has a pertinent observation about the lawyer culture in the US:

[Their] subsequent growth in numbers and power in American, especially in the last quarter century, has been dramatic. Between 1900 and 1970, the numbers of lawyers as a percentage of the growing population was fairly constant, at about 1.3 per thousand. Doctors were 1.8 per thousand. After 1970, lawyers outstripped doctors, despite the increase in medical services, Medicare and Medicaid, and growing health-consciousness, because the demand for legal services rose still more sharply. By 1987 lawyers were 2.9 per thousand and by 1990 3.0 per thousand. In the quarter century 1960-1985, the population of the US grew by 30 percent and the number of lawyers by 130 per cent. Equally significant was the increase in the numbers of lawyers resident in Washington DC…from 1972-87, from 11,000 to 45,000.

Johnson attributes this extreme increase to several causes: an increase in our awareness of rights, the growth of the federal judiciary, and the ever-larger number of regulatory laws pumped out by Congress…

His most telling statement is about the effect of all these lawyers on our economy:

…despite the huge increase in those entering the legal profession, from 1,000 women and 15,000 men a year in 1970, to 14,000 women and 22,000 men in 1985, average annual legal earnings kept up very well. Inevitably, this increase in lawyers, litigation, and legal work was parasitical on the economy as a whole. One 1989 study indicated that the optimum number of lawyers needed was only 60 percent of he existing total and that each additional lawyer joining the profession above this total reduced America’s GDP by $2.5 millions.

[Quick: someone multiply 2.5 million by 40, just to see the big black lawyer hole to see how much money actually went down the tubes]

…the whole thing gives one a schadenfreude moment: what would happen to all that if Ron Paul took the oval office while the Dems and Pubs were arguing about hanging chads? Yeah, I know he’s unrealistic, but so is our lawyer-burdened society, and he’s a whole lot less smarmy.

The interesting times would proceed apace should the good doctor take the prize. If it’s any comfort at least the ACLU would be hit by the same missile that would get us.

Hat Tip: The Bear Diaries

The State of Kentucky was founded in 1775, the State of Ohio only twelve years later; but twelve years are more in America than half a century in Europe, and at the present day, the population of Ohio exceeds that of Kentucky by two hundred and fifty thousand souls. These opposite consequences of slavery and freedom may readily be understood, and they suffice to explain many of the differences which we notice between the civilization of antiquity and that of our own time.

Upon the left bank of the Ohio labor is confounded with the idea of slavery, upon the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement; on the one side it is degraded, on the other it is honored; on the former territory no white laborers can be found, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the Negroes; on the latter no one is idle, for the white population extend their activity and intelligence to every kind of employment. Thus the men whose task it is to cultivate the rich soil of Kentucky are ignorant and apathetic; while those who are active and enlightened either do nothing or pass over into Ohio, where they may work without shame.

—

Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America (1840, Everyman’s Library edition, pp.362-363)

According to the ancient Chinese, the goal of a civilized man was to attain virtue. “Virtue” can be defined in various ways in different times and places — it might by measured by the number of cattle one owns, or by the height of one’s castle towers. Virtue might lie in excessive philanthropy, or in martial prowess, or in successfully controlling the females in one’s family. In the modern capitalist West, virtue is often measured by money, either directly as shown by a bank balance, or indirectly by the visible signs of wealth, such as expensive goods, real estate, servants, perquisites, and privileges.

As Tocqueville pointed out, in a society based largely on slavery, engaging in labor is an emphatically non-virtuous activity. A man’s status is measured by how little work he has to do, because work is done by slaves. Thus any free man who has to work for a living occupies a decidedly inferior position. Uncoerced labor becomes dishonorable, and in such societies frivolity, indolence, and inactivity become the norm for anyone who is not a chattel.

This may explain the presence of huge numbers of “guest workers” in the countries of the Persian Gulf. In a normal country, the arrival of all that oil wealth would have bid up the price of local labor and allowed native workers to raise their standard of living while developing the infrastructure in their countries.

But the Arab countries have a long history of slavery, which lasted from Mohammed’s time until the 1960s, and still continues today in many places in an unofficial capacity.

The natives of the region would damage their honor by engaging in so vulgar an activity as paid labor. Hence the ruling classes must bring in a vast labor force of foreigners, who work under near-slave conditions.

And now the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council have come up against the same problem that all societies with mass immigration face: they have a huge number of unassimilated foreigners living among them, and the natives (surprise!) don’t like the newcomers:
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Last month the United Arab Emirates got its own, first-ever comic book superhero, Ajaaj. His mission? To promote national identity in a state overrun by foreigners, where natives could become negligible in 20 years. A cultural melting pot, the seven-member oil-rich Gulf federation stands out as an oasis of prosperity in the troubled Middle East, and Dubai as the jewel in the crown. But for native Emiratis, this glory has come at a price, reports Middle East Online. Foreigners continue flocking in, transforming demographics and prompting some analysts to warn that the indigenous population could end up strangers in their own land.

Enter cartoon hero “Ajaaj”, the brainstorm of Watani, the UAE’s social development program which tapped into pop culture as a way to target both natives and foreigners. An ancient fictional character, “Ajaaj” (which means sandstorm in Arabic), has been recast as a trim, young, Emirati man ready to upstage Western comic book icons. His feats are set in the future, in the UAE in 2020, and he is part of Watan’s efforts to “uphold the national identity and encourage a sense of good citizenship”, said the group’s general coordinator Ahmad Obaid al-Mansuri.

The Arab states are actually in worse shape than Sweden or the Netherlands: in some cases foreigners make up more than half their populations. No wonder the rulers try to make sure that “guest workers” remain powerless, oppressed, atomized, and unorganized.

Here’s the latest from Ansamed:

GCC: Gulf Residents Against Foreign Labour Force

Local population against foreign workforce: the imbalance in some countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has reached such levels that there are calls from many sides to curb the phenomenon by launching processes of ‘nationalisation’ of the labour market. The latest call came from Bahrain’s Labour Minister Majeed Al-Alawi, who proposed a limit of residence of six years for foreign workers.

The proposal, advanced to the representatives of the GCC countries — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman — in view of the next summit which will be held in Doha in December, is hardly new. It has been circulating since 2005 but then, as it does today, finds strong resistance, beginning with that of entrepreneurs. The Chamber of Commerce of Bahrain rebutted the minister, claiming that the measure would create gaps in the qualified labour market with significant repercussions on the economy. That opinion is shared by the big Emirates entrepreneurs, while in the past months Qatar Airways showed its reluctance to a project of nationalisation which in its opinion would end up damaging a healthy competition.

More cautious are the comments of Oman, which despite admitting the feasibility of the proposal subject to careful study, warns against a possible boomerang effect: the investments in education of the personnel would be fruitless if the workers are forced to leave the country.

Out of a total 32,362 million residents in the Gulf countries, the foreign workers number some 7 and a half million. While in some countries like Saudi Arabia the local population prevails (22 million against 3 million foreign workers) in others, regardless if it consists of unskilled workers or professionals, the immigrant labour force accounts for more than half of the population with significant peaks of 83.1% in Kuwait and 97.3% in Dubai.

Despite the imbalance, the Gulf economies cannot yet afford to themselves take up the reins of their professional fate, sector analysts have repeatedly warned. The issue was also raised the Sheikh of Dubai, Mohammad Al Maktoum. At the presentation of the strategic plan for 2015, the governor answered the insistent requests of emiratization, reiterating that the country is not ready yet and that it is still in the stage of investment in the education of the youngest generations which, later, will take care of the economic fate of the emirate.

A position adopted by most of the oil monarchies of the Gulf, whether they like it or not. “The demographic nightmare”, as defined by Abdulkhaled Abdullah, Professor in political sciences at the Emirates University and leader writer of the Gulf News, also has a cultural dimension and is destined not to exhaust itself soon if Abu Dhabi announces projects which need a mass employment of foreign workforce and estimates a population which will reach 3 million in the next decade. But it is once again Bahrain’s minister Al Alawi to suggest a solution which will spark discussions: “Revising the rhythm of the economic development of the entire region,” he proposes,” avoiding projects which need mass low-cost workforce and investing in industries capable of providing jobs to properly educated local workers.”

“Properly educated local workers” — there’s the rub. The locals may be educated, but will they work?

If you’re a gentleman in a slave-based society, work is for slaves, serfs, or helots — it’s not for you.

Hat tip: insubria.

In two stories from the UK today we see the toxicity of extremist P.C. behavior carried to its bizarre limits . By coincidence, they both involve hospital behavior…umm, inhospitable behavior:

According to The Manchester Evening News:

A hospital porter has been sacked after a row over a crucifix being covered up in a prayer room used by Muslims.

Joseph Protano, 54, was suspended four days after the incident last month at a children’s hospital – and has since been dismissed.

It seems that this miscreant, who was interrogated by the police for four hours on suspicion of the crime of “religiously aggravated assault” [I kid you not] had the audacity to request that the Christian icons in an interfaith chapel be uncovered while he prayed.

There were three Muslims in the chapel at the time – one doctor and two patients – and an argument ensued when they refused to allow him to restore the crucifix and the picture of the Virgin Mary to their accustomed places.

The outcome of the argument – umm, “assault” – was that the porter, Mr. Protano, a Roman Catholic, was dismissed for gross misconduct, and will have to go on welfare benefits. Up until now he had worked for two years at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, Pendlebury.

His case has not been dismissed. He has to wait to see if the police have any follow up charges:

He said he was unable to comment on his sacking as the police probe and his plans to appeal were ongoing.

But a friend said: “He was very shocked at the decision. He thinks he has been treated terribly.

[…]

“They are saying he should not have gone into the prayer room and it is alleged he used racist language, which he totally refutes.

The case has angered many hospital staff, who think he has been treated unfairly.

Police said a file had been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service for a decision over any further action.

So that’s where the time, money, and productivity of Britain’s public servants go: harassing whomever the Muslims complain about. And the Manchester Children’s Hospital? They’re just trying to avoid a costly lawsuit.

Seems to me that Britons could get together and begin to collect monies to protect their citizens from terrorist libel charges. No one person would have to donate much money, and surely there are barristers willing to serve their countrymen for reduced fees…or even pro bono.

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In another hospital situation, it is the Muslim women who are rebelling, though it is interesting to note that none of them has been sacked:
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Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands, because it is regarded as immodest in Islam.

Universities and NHS trusts fear many more will refuse to co-operate with new Department of Health guidance, introduced this month, which stipulates that all doctors must be “bare below the elbow”.

The measure is deemed necessary to stop the spread of infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have killed hundreds.

Minutes of a clinical academics’ meeting at Liverpool University revealed that female Muslim students at Alder Hey children’s hospital had objected to rolling up their sleeves to wear gowns.

Similar concerns have been raised at Leicester University. Minutes from a medical school committee said that “a number of Muslim females had difficulty in complying with the procedures to roll up sleeves to the elbow for appropriate handwashing”.

Sheffield University also reported a case of a Muslim medic who refused to “scrub” as this left her forearms exposed.

Documents from Birmingham University reveal that some students would prefer to quit the course rather than expose their arms, and warn that it could leave trusts open to legal action.

Hygiene experts said last night that no exceptions should be made on religious grounds.

Dr Mark Enright, professor of microbiology at Imperial College London, said: “To wash your hands properly, and reduce the risks of MRSA and C.difficile, you have to be able to wash the whole area around the wrist.

Not if you’re a Muslim woman, you don’t. What if someone glimpsed your arm? Heaven forefend!

In this case, you don’t have to wash and if anyone tries to make you, or discharges you, then you can sue the offending hospital. What are a few lives lost in comparison to breaking one of Allah’s many rules?

Besides, the women can always go to the funerals of the diseased deceased and offer up a few prayers…well, they can if their victims are Muslims, that is. Infidels don’t need any prayers since they’re damned anyway.

Perhaps Mr. Protano can join Lionheart in requesting asylum. It is certainly fitting and just. America has been taking Her Majesty’s religious rejects since the very beginning of our founding. These men will simply be following in the footsteps of millions before them.

Hat tips: HTP and TB