Remembering the Farhūd

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Farhūd (June 1, 1941), the Iraqi Arab equivalent of the mass violence on Kristallnacht. A reader in Israel sent us this essay by Professor Robert Wistrich commemorating the occasion.



Iraq’s Kristallnacht: Seventy Years Later
by Robert S. Wistrich

Seventy years ago, on June 1, 1941, the most dramatic and violent pogrom in the Arab Middle East during World War II took place in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Known in Arabic as the Farhūd, this devastating pogrom left approximately 150 Jews dead, hundreds more wounded, and led to the ransacking of nearly 600 Jewish businesses. The grim events of June 1-2, 1941 were the Iraqi Arab equivalent of the mass violence on Kristallnacht, which had taken place some two and a half years earlier across Nazi Germany. The anti-Jewish riots were mainly led by Iraqi soldiers (bitter and frustrated by their defeat at the hands of the British Army), some members of the police and young paramilitary gangs, swiftly followed by an angry Muslim population that went on the rampage in an orgy of murder and rapine.

The pogrom struck at what was the most prosperous, prominent and well-integrated Jewish community in the Middle East — one whose origins went back more than 2,500 years — long before there was any Arab presence in the country. The 90,000 Jews of Baghdad, it should be said, played a major role in the commercial and professional life of the city. However, in the 1930s they already found themselves confronted by an increasingly virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in the Iraqi press and among nationalist political groups. This agitation treated the intensely patriotic Iraqi Jews as an alien, hostile minority who had to be ejected from all the social, economic and political positions it held in the Iraqi state.

Iraqi Arab nationalists, like their counterparts in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, had been much influenced in the 1930s by the rise of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s National Socialism attracted them as a spectacular, authoritarian model for achieving Iraqi national unity and a wider union of Arabs in the region. It was no accident that the pro-German ideologue of pan-Arabism, Sati al-Husri, exerted a major influence on Iraqi education after arriving in Baghdad in 1921, or that Michel Aflaq, the chief theoretician of the Iraqi and Syrian Ba’athists had also absorbed German national-socialist ideas while studying in Paris between 1928-1932. The Director General of the Iraqi Ministry of Education in the 1930s, Dr. Sami Shawkat, was another fanatical ideologue, especially active in instilling a military spirit (resembling the German Nazi model) in Iraqi youth. He also developed radically anti-Jewish ideas which were heavily indebted to Nazi anti-Semitism. In a book published in Baghdad in 1939, These Are Our Aims, Shawkat openly called for the annihilation of the Jews in Iraq, as a necessary prerequisite for achieving an Iraqi national revival and fulfilling the country’s “historical mission” of uniting the Arab nation.

Significantly, it was also in Baghdad that the first official Arabic translations of parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared in 1934. In order not to offend Arab sensibilities the final translation “edited” out Hitler’s racial theories about inferior “Semites” — making it clear that anti-Semitism related only to Jews, not to Arabs. The Iraqi translator of Hitler’s “magnum opus” was Yūnus al-Sab’āwī, a young Nazi enthusiast and extreme anti-Semite. A close confidant of nationalist officers in the Iraqi army, Al-Sab’āwī came to play an important role in Iraqi politics. From April to June 1941 he even served as Iraqi Minister of Economics. Al-Sab’āwī was indeed one of the architects of the Farhūd in which his anti-Semitic para-military youth group also took part. Al-Sab’āwī had earlier established a close connection with Nazi Germany’s Ambassador to Iraq in the late 1930s, Dr. Fritz Grobba. The latter was a distinguished Orientalist (fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish) who eventually convinced Hitler that helping Arab nationalists to throw off British control of Iraq should be part of German strategy. Grobba also contributed much through the networks he had established in Iraq, towards spreading the idea that Iraqi Jews were a “fifth column” of Great Britain — sworn enemies of Germany and of the Arab nation. Equally, Palestinian nationalists, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (who had fled to Baghdad in the late 1930s), conducted an especially vicious campaign to incite a jihad among the local Arab population against Great Britain, Zionism and the Jews of Iraq. The Mufti — a close ally of Hitler during the four years he spent in Berlin between 1941 and 1945 — would also exert a particularly toxic influence on the pro-Nazi politician Rashid Ali al-Kailani, whose successful anti-British coup had forced the unpopular Hashemite Regent Abd al-Ilāh to flee the country. The coup brought to power on April 1, 1941 some of the most rabid Jew-baiters in Iraq. Anti-British and anti-Semitic propaganda now reached a zenith that greatly contributed to the violence that burst forth two months later.

Ironically enough, it was the decisive victory of the British and the return of the Regent on June 1 that immediately provoked the pogrom, an act of unparalleled revenge by the Muslim masses against the Jews of Baghdad that expressed their deep disappointment at the fall of the popular Rashid Ali regime. The British Army, now encamped on the outskirts of Baghdad, could easily have intervened but it chose not to do so, dubiously claiming this would have damaged the prestige of the (pro-British) Regent in the eyes of his own people. The British behaved in a similar fashion on several occasions in Mandatory Palestine, in Libya (November 1945) and in Aden (December 1945) — standing by as Arab mobs killed defenseless Jews. In fact, for most Iraqi Muslims in 1941, the British were perceived as oppressive colonizers, the Jews as their “agents” and the German Nazis as “anti-imperialist” saviors! But German military assistance, when it finally came, was too little and too late to save the Rashid Ali regime.

The Farhūd has been incomprehensibly ignored or downplayed both in Zionist historiography and even more in general histories of the Middle East. Arab historians have been silent or else falsified the facts and there are even Israeli and Jewish writers who have unconvincingly tried to dismiss its importance. Yet this traumatic event was indeed of seminal importance. It proved beyond reasonable doubt the strength of Arab nationalist anti-Semitism and of Nazi-style incitement on a Muslim population that had come to see in its patriotic Jewish minority “the enemy within.” The Jews of Iraq, seventy years ago, suddenly found themselves in the crossfire of three converging forms of murderous anti-Semitism — that of the German Nazis, the Palestinian exiles in Baghdad led by Amin el-Husseini, and Iraqi pan-Arab nationalists. Ten years later, the government of Iraq under the pro-British Nuri es-Said, expropriated, dispossessed, disenfranchised and brought about the forced emigration of nearly 120,000 Iraqi Jews, thereby cruelly terminating the oldest of all Diaspora histories. This was not only a crime against humanity but an insufficiently acknowledged part of the history of the Holocaust. The Farhūd exposed with shocking clarity just how vulnerable the Jews in Arab lands really were and what their fate was likely to be under any decolonized Arab regime in the future, especially if there was a breakdown of law and order.

Despite the “Arab Spring” not much has changed for other minorities in the Middle East in the last 70 years. As for the Jews, from Morocco to Iraq and Iran they would be “ethnically cleansed” after 1945 by their Muslim rulers. The Farhūd already represented the writing on the wall for those willing to read it. The reinforcement of a strong Israel was and still remains the only viable long-term answer to the repetition of such horrific atrocities in the future.



Prof. Robert S. Wistrich is the director of The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, January 2010). This article is a condensed version of a recent lecture on the 1941 pogrom in Baghdad hosted by the Center in Jerusalem.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/31/2011

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/31/2011In recent weeks a number of protests known collectively as “los indignados” have taken place in central Madrid, with demonstrators objecting to the government’s austerity measures and financial mismanagement. The young Spanish protesters have inspired similar movements in Italy, France, and most recently Greece.

Also in Greece, immigrant criminals have been coping with the current financial crisis by kidnapping illegal immigrants and torturing them until their families pay ransom. Athens police have just arrested fourteen Pakistanis and Afghans who are suspected of being part of the kidnapping ring.

In other news, the maximum possible fine will be levied against the Bulgarian nationalist party Ataka for recent attacks by its members on Muslims praying on the street in front of a mosque in downtown Sofia.

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

Thanks to AC, Andy Bostom, C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, CSP, Fjordman, Gaia, Insubria, JD, Kitman, Steen, Takuan Seiyo, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

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

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Democracy, Virginity, and the Arab Spring

A couple of months ago Amnesty International reported that female protesters arrested during the demonstrations in Cairo had been subjected to “virginity checks” by the military authorities. Spokesmen for the army denied the allegations at the time, but now a general has admitted — and justified — these tests of female virtue.

According to CNN:

Egyptian General Admits ‘Virginity Checks’ Conducted on Protesters

Cairo (CNN) — A senior Egyptian general admits that “virginity checks” were performed on women arrested at a demonstration this spring, the first such admission after previous denials by military authorities.

The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report, published weeks after the March 9 protest. It claimed female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.

At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or “virginity tests.”

But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice.

“The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine,” the general said. “These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs).”

The logic behind the tests is interesting: virginity checks were a necessity, because if the women were not virgins, then any claims that they had been sexually assaulted while in custody could not possibly have any validity.

Of course, if they had been sexually assaulted before the army doctor managed to get their feet into the stirrups, they wouldn’t be virgins anymore, anyway.

That’s some catch, that Catch-22:

The general said the virginity checks were done so that the women wouldn’t later claim they had been raped by Egyptian authorities.

“We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” the general said. “None of them were (virgins).”

[…]

Salwa Hosseini, a 20-year-old hairdresser and one of the women named in the Amnesty report, described to CNN how uniformed soldiers tied her up on the museum’s grounds, forced her to the ground and slapped her, then shocked her with a stun gun while calling her a prostitute.

“They wanted to teach us a lesson,” Hosseini said soon after the Amnesty report came out. “They wanted to make us feel that we do not have dignity.”

The treatment got worse, Hosseini said, when she and the 16 other female prisoners were taken to a military detention center in Heikstep.

There, she said, she and several of other female detainees were subjected to a “virginity test.”

“We did not agree for a male doctor to perform the test,” she said. But Hosseini said her captors forced her to comply by threatening her with more stun-gun shocks.

“I was going through a nervous breakdown at that moment,” she recalled. “There was no one standing during the test, except for a woman and the male doctor. But several soldiers were standing behind us watching the backside of the bed. I think they had them standing there as witnesses.”

Below is a TV news report (also from CNN) about torture, virginity checks, and other horrors inflicted on the Tahrir Square protesters. Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for YouTubing this video:



Hat tip: AC.

Systematically Destroying the Land

Cultural Enrichment News


Below is the second part of a two-part video about the German journalist Udo Ulfkotte and his new book, No Black, No Red, No Gold (Part 1 is here). Dr. Ulfkotte, like Thilo Sarrazin, has dared to confront the politically correct establishment in Germany and demand an accounting for the monetary cost and cultural damage imposed on his country by the mass importation of millions of inassimilable Muslim immigrants.

Rather than blame the Muslims themselves, he lays the responsibility squarely where it belongs: with political leaders whose cowardice and/or calculation have prevented any honest public discussion of the consequences of Islamization in Germany.

Many thanks to the Counterjihad Collective for the transcription and time-stamping, to JLH for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling. The video is below the jump, followed by a complete transcript:

Transcript:

00:00   …we could at least talk about that.
00:02   Until two weeks ago, this subject was taboo. Now all of a sudden, people say:
00:06   we have that in hand. Already.
00:08   It was a taboo subject and these taboos must be breached.
00:15   After all, we are a country where we break through a thousand prohibitions.
00:18   Udo Ulfkotte pleads passionately for rethinking in Germany.
00:23   He makes it clear that his remarks must be understood correctly.
00:27   They are not thoughtless incitement against foreigners, but consist
00:31   of many difficult facts which, on balance,
00:35   must permanently become an impassable acid test.
00:40   The journalist thoroughly believes that Germany
00:43   needs foreign immigrants, but still more urgently,
00:46   he is occupied by the question of why German politicians do not make the greatest possible efforts
00:51   in regard to the highly qualified citizens, innumerable skilled workers
00:56   and high school graduates who, by the hundreds of thousands.
00:59   have turned their backs on their homeland and emigrated —
01:03   to use all means to bring them back.
01:07   The ideal immigrant looks — not the way I would like —
01:12   I am completely insignificant in that respect — the ideal immigrant
01:16   in the view of the population of Europe, of the people
01:21   whose children have something at stake here,
01:27   the ideal immigrant looks like the one
01:30   that is admitted into the United States,
01:32   the one admitted into Canada, that is, the immigrant
01:37   who is not expecting in case of doubt that he can depend
01:44   on being caught by the social safety net,
01:46   but rather says: I want to build something here.
01:49   I have never understood:
01:51   165,000 Germans a year leave the Federal Republic of Germany.
01:55   They speak our language, they come from our culture.
01:58   It is not the stupid ones who are leaving — it is the intelligent ones.
02:01   Millions of German live abroad. No Federal Government
02:04   has ever paid even one cent
02:07   to encourage these people to return to their homeland.
02:13   We spend enormous sums on people who are unwilling to integrate
02:18   or incapable of integrating, to bring them here and try to integrate them;
02:23   and our own people who were educated at our universities and our economy —
02:27   we let them emigrate to distant lands.
02:31   And we find that completely normal.
02:34   Udo Ulfkotte’s book is called “No Black, No Red, No Gold.”
02:41   Thilo Sarrazin named his statement of apprehension: “Germany is Doing Away With Itself.”
02:46   Is that true?
02:48   Is Germany — by means of numerous concessions — running the risk
02:52   of distancing itself from itself and its identity?
02:55   Of destroying itself?
02:57   The following question from a journalist certainly allows this conclusion:
03:02   I would very much like to hear you estimation
03:05   of our situation in regard to values.
03:10   It seems to me that we are sometimes responsible for that
03:15   and perhaps not self-aware enough
03:17   to stand up for our Christian, Western values.
03:21   An example: in many elementary schools in Berlin
03:24   the Sugar Festival [Eid] is celebrated more and more often, and naturally other festivals too, but —
03:30   and I know this from my own experience —
03:33   it is not considered opportune for example at Christmas
03:37   to sing songs that are “too Christian.”
03:40   Do you see that as a kind of retreat in the face of Islamization?
03:46   I see it absolutely the way you expressed it,
03:52   however — however, it is by no means the fault of some Muslim
03:58   or a Muslim population group. This set of problems I definitely cannot
04:03   blame on Muslims as a community
04:07   and make them responsible. That is us, here in Europe.
04:11   As long as we keep standing up at conferences and asking
04:15   what we can do so that you do not constantly feel insulted,
04:19   so that you are more comfortable… I believe integration is an obligation
04:24   and it should be the other way around. But I find it good that these talks take place
04:28   because — this may shock you —
04:31   I am for these talks continuing
04:34   but the subject should not be what can we do
04:37   so that Muslims will integrate more and better; rather
04:41   I would like the subject of such talks to be
04:44   what can these populations groups do
04:47   to make up for the damage they have done.
04:50   That must be discussed too
04:52   That’s what we did with the bankers.
04:56   I would like to know these groups to be involved in the damages they have caused
05:00   and not just push [the damages] off onto the taxpayers.
05:04   Germany has a problem.
05:06   Europe has a problem.
05:08   The passionate resonance in the population for both
05:11   Thilo Sarrazin and Kopp author, Udo Ulfkotte shows
05:15   that the overwhelming majority of people are behind the courageous authors.
05:20   The politicians still balk at admitting the dramatic consequences of their multicultural
05:25   alterations, and stubbornly continue to deny
05:30   what they should have admitted long ago.
05:33   I cannot believe that Hans Dietrich Genscher,
05:37   for example, when he sat with me at Sabine Christiansen’s
05:39   in the talk show — sat together with me and exactly
05:43   like Günther Verhagen coolly said to my face
05:47   as well as the heads of government who were sitting across from me there,
05:49   when I said, as so-called security expert,
05:53   “I maintain that with the EU’s eastern expansion,
05:57   that along the present borders with the expansion
06:02   with the Schengen agreement, with personal freedom,
06:07   that in certain areas, a sharp increase
06:12   in criminality will occur.”
06:15   all of them told me, to my face, that will not be.
06:20   I am firmly convinced that from this point on,
06:23   I am subjectively convinced that at this time, they
06:27   knew it just as I did: of course,
06:30   what they can read today in East German newspapers,
06:35   we will have this development.
06:38   They just did not want to tell people,
06:41   because that is how it is intended to be, for political reasons.
06:44   As yet there are only a number of journalists and freethinkers
06:47   who dare to swim against the current,
06:50   to write against political correctness
06:53   to speak against the political media power cartel.
06:57   They risk much, they make themselves unpopular among the powerful,
07:01   they are summarily dismissed from their professional positions
07:05   and are intended to be cast out of society.
07:08   Yes, they even receive death threats. But they are not intimidated.
07:13   For they cannot and will not accept
07:15   the growing abuses which will systematically destroy the land.
07:21   If not rethought and ultimately dealt with as quickly as possible.



For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.

A Fact-Based Analysis of Islam

For American readers who were away for the Memorial Day weekend and may have missed this video: on May 12, 2011, Bill Warner spoke at the Cornerstone Church in Nashville, TN. His speech was part of Geert Wilders’ event, “A Warning to America”, sponsored by the Tennessee Freedom Coalition.



To reserve a copy of a DVD of the entire event, including speeches by Steve Gill, Bill Warner, Sam Solomon, and Geert Wilders, email the Tennessee Freedom Coalition: info@tnfreedomcoalition.org

Previous posts about the Tennessee Freedom Coalition:

2011   May   14   A Warning to America: “It’s Islam, Stupid!”
        14   The Tennessean Weighs In
        16   Tennessee the Model
        17   Losing Our Community
        18   Being Effective in Tennessee
        29   The Facts of Islam

Perth Says “No Mosque!”

This is a refreshing change of pace, demonstrating that Islamization is not an inevitable, pre-ordained outcome, at least in Australia.

The authorities in Western Australia didn’t address the nature of a mosque, which functions as a beachhead for the Islamic invasion. Every article about a proposed mosque should quote Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”

However, the argument that the mosque would “detrimentally affect the existing rural amenity of the locality” is a good strategy. Most mosques in most Western locales could be barred using the same standard. An honest assessment would recognize that the only neighborhoods not “detrimentally affected” by the addition of a mosque would be those that are already thoroughly Islamized.

From New Kerala:

Perth, May 31: Australian State Administrative Tribunal has rejected an appeal to run a mosque on grounds of detrimental effects of noise in southern suburbs of Perth.

Ruling out the proposal for running a mosque, it said a solid boundary wall surrounding a mosque would be needed to mitigate noise impacts. However, such a wall would take away the serenity of the area.

The tribunal said the mosque’s activities would be “unusual”, resulting in an “undesirable impact … incompatible with retaining the local character and amenity” of the area, The West Australian News reports.

The Islamic community wanted to run the mosque at a property which was previously used to train horses on Valcan Road, Orange Grove in Perth.

The property, located in a rural area, is surrounded by paddocks and pastures.

The City of Gosnells’ council had earlier also rejected the application saying the mosque was not appropriate for the area and that the traffic and noise generated “would have the potential to detrimentally affect the existing rural amenity of the locality”.



Hat tip: AC.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/30/2011

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/30/2011After months of mass protests in their major cities, Syria and Yemen have pushed their crackdowns on demonstrators to a new level. In both countries the army was ordered to quell the protests using all necessary means, including firing into the crowds massing into central urban areas. Yemeni government jets also bombed Al Qaeda strongholds in the coastal city of Zinjibar.

In other news, a 19-year-old beauty contestant in the Crimea was stoned to death by several young Muslim men for violating sharia law with her salacious behavior.

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

Thanks to Andy Bostom, C. Cantoni, Egghead, Fjordman, Gaia, Insubria, JD, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

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

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Migration, Invasion, or Settlement?

In recent years, European advocates for mass immigration have taken up the euphemism “migration” to describe the process they champion. The abbreviated version of the word is less freighted with negative connotations, and serves to anesthetize the general public by evoking images of people who move from place to place occasionally — maybe seasonal farm workers or pastoral nomads — but certainly not a massive influx of hostile aliens.

In other words, nothing like the reality of 21st-century Europe.

Frequent arguments may be heard within Counterjihad circles about what term best describes what is going on now in Europe, since “immigration” hardly covers it. Other suggestions include “invasion” and “colonization”, and I would add “settlement” to the list. But none of these quite captures the essence of what is happening.

Invasion implies an armed incursion, and at least a token resistance by the population that is being invaded. None of that is in evidence in Europe — the target population is largely passive, thanks to generous amounts of soma provided by the welfare state, and the invaders have actually been invited in by the political leaders of the invaded countries.

Colonization also implies a coordinated effort by a militarily superior armed power to overcome the target population. Colonizing a foreign country is similar to invading it, except that any resistance offered by the colony is asymmetric and ineffective. Colonists are not invited in and welcomed by the leaders of the colonized country, unless the latter have already lost the battle and are accepting a fait accompli.

Settlement comes slightly closer, because it implies migration to a land that is open for occupation and exploitation. Yet such a land should be sparsely-populated or uninhabited. Iceland was settled. North America was settled. Europe is not being settled; it is being willingly ceded to an alien population.

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For a change of pace, we’ll take a breather from the Jihad and look at what’s happening today in the United States.

Islamization is the larger threat in the long term, but the immediate danger here in the U.S.A. is Mexicanization. Last night I happened to stumble across the following map, which I adapted from an article published by the Migration Policy Institute:

Map: Mexican immigration in the USA


As we all know, California and Texas are the most Mexicanized states. But Illinois? What brings all those Mexicans to Chicago…?

The data used for this map and the rest of the article are from 2006. We’ll assume that the number of Mexican-born residents of the United States has only increased in the meantime, even if the current depression has induced some of the illegals to return home. The 2006 figures should suffice for the sake of analysis.

I made the following graphs from the tabular data in the accompanying article. The first is a chart showing the increase since 1960 in foreign-born residents of the U.S.A., Mexican and otherwise. As you can see, the overall increase in immigration is accelerating, and the number of Mexicans is increasing more rapidly than all the other nationalities:

Mexican immigration: chart #1


The second graph shows the overall trend more clearly, charting the number of Mexican-born residents as a percentage of all the foreign-born:

Mexican immigration: chart #2


When I was a kid — at the leftmost position on these graphs — Mexicans were an anomaly in America, unless you happened to live in Texas or California. Even there they were generally migrant laborers, the “exploited” workers whose rights were championed by Cesar Chavez just a few years later.

All that has changed in the last forty years. Southern California and parts of Texas have become virtual extensions of Mexico, and the “migrants” have become permanent fixtures in most major cities and many rural areas. We have our fair share of them here in Central Virginia, working on the tobacco farms, in construction, doing highway maintenance, operating equipment, and laboring in various other low-to-medium-skill occupations, including the stereotypical lawn-care services. All grocery stores now have large “Hispanic foods” sections.

So the Mexicanization of America is a very real and ongoing process.

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In Anestos Canelides’ post last night, a commenter objected to the description of ethnicities in the San Fernando Valley as “white and Hispanic”, saying that the phrase should be “Anglo and Hispanic”.

He has a point. However, both distinctions are inaccurate, because the vast majority of Mexicans in the current wave of settlers are not white. Yes, they are “Hispanic” in the sense that they speak a dialect of Castilian Spanish, and share at least some genetic material with the Iberians who colonized Mexico.

But they are not like Asturians or Catalonians. They are mestizos, or persons of mixed Iberian and American Indian descent. Many of them have more Indian blood than Spanish — some of those I see in our area look like pure-blooded Aztecs or Mayans, with faces straight out of the 16th-century codices illustrating temple rituals or human sacrifice in Tenochtitlan.

Large areas of our country are rapidly being converted to de facto mestizo territory. Like most Americans, this is not something I want to see. I like Mexicans just fine — but in Mexico. If I want to, I can book a flight to Acapulco or Mexico City, enjoy the local culture, and then return home to live amongst Americans. What’s wrong with that?

There was a time not so long ago when such sentiments were considered normal. Less than two generations back, mass illegal immigration from south of the border would have provoked outrage and condemnation, but today anyone who objects to it is considered “racist” and “bigoted”. We are enjoined to accept bilingual schools and government institutions, with the various dysfunctional behaviors that accompany the Mexican underclass as a byproduct. All this is billed as an enrichment of our culture.

Yet, funnily enough, the Mexicanization of America is deeply unpopular, and is opposed by a large majority of Americans who were here before the current surge of mestizos began arriving. We don’t want it, but very few national politicians of either party who oppose it ever make it to the ballot where we could vote for them — our only choices are to vote for “amnesty” or “more amnesty”.

To make matters worse, the federal government is working hard to ensure that the states cannot make or enforce laws that are simply locally-enacted versions of federal immigration laws.

We must have the Mexicans whether we want them or not.

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When you examine matters closely, it appears that the importation of Mexicans into the United States is occurring for the same reasons that Muslims are being settled in Europe.

The original motive seems to have been the need for cheap labor to make profits for large corporations and fill out the workforce of an aging population. But over the past forty years that intention morphed into something entirely different, as the socialist parties (in our case, the Democrats) realized that bringing in ignorant and unskilled masses of welfare-dependent immigrants could create a permanent electoral majority for socialism as soon as sufficient numbers of the new arrivals became eligible to vote. The widespread ideology of Multiculturalism simply provided moral justification for a cynical political calculus.

Recent revelations in the UK about the Labour Party’s machinations have confirmed this process in British politics, and it’s easy to see the same imperative at work elsewhere in the West. Socialists need illiterate foreigners to cement their hold on power. They also need to erode national feeling among the natives to help destroy any lingering urge to resist.

Muslims fill the bill by colonizing Europe. Mexicans do the same by invading the U.S.A.

Muslim settlers are the more efficient destroyers of Western Civilization, but the end result is the same.

Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland


Our Muslim Troubles

Part V: A Discredited State

“As the slow motion train crash that is Europe’s experiment with Muslim immigration moves on to its inevitable conclusion, we continue to see a sharp polarization between those Europeans who wish, for whatever reason, to continue the experiment and those who wish to bring it to an end. As each European country collapses into its own Muslim Troubles, there will be no cover, politically speaking, for those politicians and public figures who span us tall tales all along about the wonders of the multi-faith Shangri-las we were building.”

This is the conclusion of a five-part series by El Inglés comparing and contrasting the Troubles in Northern Ireland with the coming Muslim Troubles in Britain. Previously: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

All five parts are now available as a single document in pdf format (thanks to Vlad).


Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland

by El Inglés

X. Political Implications

So far we have limited our consideration of matters political to the assumption that the state will vacillate its way into and through at least the initial stages of the conflict. However, there is a little more to say on the subject of the mainstream political response to the conflict we predict and explore in this document.

Western European nations have been implementing for several decades, more or less consistently, policies which have the inevitable consequence of turning once-homogeneous countries into much more heterogeneous ones, racially, religiously, culturally, and linguistically. We have been encouraged to believe that, not only has this been a good thing, it is bigoted and evil not to believe that it has been a good thing. Calamitous change has thus been justified by the gossamer banalities of multiculturalism, whose orthogonal relationship with reality is now dawning on the worried architects of the culturally-enriched states of modern Europe.

As the slow motion train crash that is Europe’s experiment with Muslim immigration moves on to its inevitable conclusion, we continue to see a sharp polarization between those Europeans who wish, for whatever reason, to continue the experiment and those who wish to bring it to an end. As each European country collapses into its own Muslim Troubles, there will be no cover, politically speaking, for those politicians and public figures who span us tall tales all along about the wonders of the multi-faith Shangri-las we were building.

To put it at its bluntest, one cannot present oneself as the person to save one’s country from the horrific tribal violence that it has recently descended into when one has spent the last however-many decades cramming as many people of the hostile, enemy tribe in question into that country and describing all opposition to those efforts as racist, bigoted, or worse. We will examine in a later section the way in which the Troubles only came to an end when key decision-makers in the paramilitary organizations on each side decided that they were prepared to lay down their arms to try and reach a negotiated peace. Here we will simply stress the significance of this point: if paramilitaries continue to fight, no government can force a peace. And it is utterly inconceivable that any British paramilitary organization would cease hostilities in this fashion if it believed that the political figures attempting to mediate that process were implicated in the mass immigration, multiculturalism, and Muslim appeasement that had led to the conflict in the first place. As such, any government or person so implicated will be utterly ineffective as a mediator.

In the Netherlands, there exists a politician, Geert Wilders, and a political party, the Dutch Freedom Party, committed to defending the Dutch people and their country from the disaster it has been plunging toward for the last several decades. Whatever unpleasant things some might believe of Mr. Wilders, few would doubt that he means what he says about defending his country and way of life. We are not interested here in trying to predict what will happen in the Netherlands, but we will suggest that any Dutch paramilitary that may emerge to defend the Dutch people as and when the state fails to do so will presumably consider Wilders to be a man worth doing business with, a man who might be worth listening to if he asks them to lay down their guns and let the state take over in meeting the Muslim threat.

One of the greatest dangers we in Britain face with respect to our forthcoming Muslim Troubles is the possibility that all such potential actors will already have discredited themselves in the eyes of British paramilitaries. This is one of the great evils of our electoral system. If we look at the populist right-wing parties throughout Europe that are espousing nationalism and opposing Islam, Islamization, and Muslim immigration, we observe that they are, overwhelmingly, new parties that have only been able to flourish because the electoral systems of their respective countries are based on proportional representation. To take the most obvious example, Wilders’ Freedom Party has attained the influence it currently enjoys because the re-tribalization of Dutch politics made inevitable by Muslim immigration is shunting large numbers of angry Dutch people (which is to say, Dutch-Dutch people) to his party. Even if everyone else in the country considers him to be Lucifer incarnate, his party can simply content itself with taking its share of the vote and seeing the whole of Dutch politics start to dance to its tune.

None of this can happen in the British system. The Dutch Freedom Party won about 16% of the vote in the 2010 election, which gives it a great deal of power. In contrast, winning 16% of the vote in a UK election renders one irrelevant apart from in those very rare cases where a hung parliament opens up the possibility of a coalition government. In the 2005 general election in the UK, the Liberal Democrats won 18.3% of the vote, which gave them 52 out of 646 seats and rendered them essentially impotent, as it did every party other than Labour, who won a significant majority. In other words, a party can win nearly a fifth of the vote in a general election and still attain neither outright power, nor a place in a governing coalition, nor even the slightest possibility of a place in a governing coalition for the simple reason that no such coalition is required.

This is an electoral system that could have been designed to kill off political innovation and ensure the mainstream parties are almost unassailable in the great big coin-toss that happens once every few years in the UK. UKIP, the closest equivalent to the Dutch Freedom Party in the UK, won 16% of the vote in the European election in 2009. Granted, the European elections are often used to register protest votes, so this result should not be taken as meaning that 16% of the British public considers UKIP its preferred party across the board. Nonetheless, despite their popularity clearly being far greater than their 3% of the vote in the 2010 general election would suggest, they have yet to win a single seat in the House of Commons. As a consequence of this lopsidedness in British elections, debates vis-à-vis Islam and Muslim immigration in mainstream British politics take place entirely within the confines of what the three main parties are comfortable with. No party can storm the pitch from the sidelines, breaking taboos the way Wilders does in the Netherlands, because those who do break taboos, like the BNP, simply do not have to be responded to by anyone with a chance of winning.

Of the three main parties, the only one that could reasonably be expected to start trying to turn the British ship of state around before it crashes onto the shores of our Muslim Troubles is the Conservative Party. Now, as by far the strongest party in a coalition government after thirteen years in the wilderness, it is starting to strut its stuff with respect to the terrible problems we face, and its stuff is not especially reassuring. To be sure, David Cameron has indicated that he will not be prepared to tolerate certain of the things that Labour turned a blind eye to, and the government has already started to make far-reaching changes to the immigration system, the single most crucial area of policy. But there is no public recognition from the Conservatives of the breadth or depth of the problems Islam and Muslims pose us in Britain, and this is what is crucial. Perhaps David Cameron is well aware of what we face, but does not feel he can talk about it. This may seem like a wise course of action to him at present, but can only discredit him and his party later on. One cannot feign ignorance of an iceberg, crash into it, and still insist that one is uniquely qualified to deal with the ensuing catastrophe, because, truth be told, one had seen it all along. This will not convince anyone of one’s qualifications for dealing with the problem, least of all those who have committed murderous acts of violence on behalf of paramilitary organizations.

In short, the Conservatives are in danger, not imminent danger, but danger nonetheless, of discrediting themselves as a party capable of understanding and dealing with the threat we face. We are, of course, obliged to take into account the fact that they are part of a coalition and are therefore somewhat constrained in what they do. Even so, it is far from obvious that they are up to the challenge of charting the dramatic change of course that would be required to put clear blue water between us and the ever-closer hulk of our Muslim Troubles, which lie directly ahead.

It will come to be seen as a historic misfortune that the window of opportunity for dealing with the threat our Muslim population poses us without massive violence happened to coincide with a juncture at which our main centre-right party was busy trying to convince the UK electorate that it was no longer the ‘nasty party.’ However peripheral non-entities such as Baroness Warsi may be to the real power in the Conservative Party, the mere fact that Cameron has felt the need to parachute them into such prominent positions as party chairman shows how hard the Conservatives are trying to be all things to all people. Could we imagine Geert Wilders dragging some token Moroccan into his party to convince people that he was tight with the believers?

Is it a coincidence that the only European country to have seen the rise of a robust, successful, anti-Islamic street movement like the EDL is also the only country to have no mainstream political party that has woken up to the threat of Islam, not Islamism, not radical Islam, not extremist Islam, but Islam itself? We cannot say for sure, but it seems likely that opposition to Islam will emerge by hook or by crook, and that if it does not do so through electoral politics, it will have to do so some other way. Whether it likes it or not, the EDL is already on course to become the UDA of our Muslim Troubles. There are undoubtedly UVFs waiting to emerge as well. Is this what our political masters want?

There are presumably people in the Netherlands who believe that Wilders is a threat to their democracy. But this is a mistake. Wilders is the last hope of their democracy, as a democracy that destroys the possibility of peaceful, political self-correction, will make inevitable violent, apolitical self-correction, and kill democracy itself in the process. Wilders is the last chance the Netherlands will have to avoid blood on the streets. And the window of opportunity is closing even for him.

XI. The Two Insanities

We have already stated our core assumption that the British government will, by and large, be wholly ineffective in the face of the violent conflict that breaks out between British and Muslims and seek merely to contain it. However, there are crucial issues pertaining to the government response that must be considered beyond this assumption. The violent conflict that we predict in this document is not something that can be solved in any obvious sense by any government. But there are still certain potential courses of action that different parts of the apparatus of state can take within the constraints of our earlier assumption that are of relevance here.

Broadly speaking, the long-term objectives of British paramilitaries in the conflict will include at least the following:

  • to prohibit Muslim immigration
  • to prohibit the granting of citizenship/permanent residency to Muslims already in the UK and bring about the repatriation of, at the very least, those non-citizen Muslims in the country
  • to protect British people from Muslim violence and depredation
  • to ensure the deportation of Muslims deemed incompatible with British society, be they British citizens or not
  • to ensure that Muslims are no longer able to have their existences significantly subsidized by the British taxpayer

We have already discussed the permissible types of violence from the points of view of the different actors in the conflict. But this analysis was based on an assumption that the government of the day will not act in a manner which simply allows the Muslim colonization of the UK to continue. In other words, we are assuming that certain of the objectives of the British will be achieved very quickly, just as the NI and British governments moved quickly to address the core grievances of the Catholic population of NI when the Troubles broke out (though to little avail, at least in terms of pre-empting further violence). More specifically, we are assuming that the British government will not engage in either of what we will refer to here as the Two Insanities.

In the First Insanity, the British government treats the violence between British and Muslims as if were some strange bump in the road on the way to the creation of a multicultural paradise and keeps on allowing Muslim immigration to occur. Should the government actually be so imbecilic as to adopt this course of action, then it will become clear in short order to British paramilitaries that the key causal factor in the Islamization of Britain remains unchallenged. Furthermore, in the context of violent conflict, such immigration will legitimately be construed by these paramilitaries as the effective collusion of government in the reinforcement of the Muslim side. If even the outbreak of widespread violence as already described cannot jolt the British government from the suicidal stupidity of allowing Muslim immigration, then British paramilitaries may well conclude that they have no option but to take their violence to new levels to impress upon the government that its behaviour is unacceptable.

In the Second Insanity, the British government understands that a continuation of Muslim immigration makes utter disaster inevitable, and moves to shut it down completely. However, upon trying to do so, it discovers that, due to a combination of the actions of the judiciary, the EU and its various institutions, and international agreements of whatever sort, this action ‘cannot’ be taken. In this case too, we could expect new levels and types of violence from British paramilitaries.

With respect to the probability of either of the Two Insanities occurring, we suggest that the ability of government to make a clean break with the madness of the last several decades and recognize the brute incompatibility of Britain and Muslims can by no means be taken for granted. To be sure, there is a growing recognition right across Europe that something has gone very badly wrong as a result of Islamic immigration, and the causal relationship between admitting Muslims to one’s country and having those Muslims contaminate and destroy that country is too obvious to escape the attention of even the political class forever. Leaving to one side the hard leftists committed to revolution through the mass importation of Third World peoples of whatever provenance and Muslims in particular, there will be very few in this country who actively desire a descent into Balkan-style violence. Nevertheless, the record of the democratic systems of European countries to date in pre-emptively defusing the ticking time-bomb of Muslim immigration is so astonishingly poor that we should not take too much for granted in this regard, and must therefore consider the possibility that one or other of the Two Insanities will be indulged in by the respective actors with effects we will now consider in more detail.

Ultimately, Muslims can only be kept out of the UK by government, as government is entirely responsible for our borders. No amount of violence short of the absolutely genocidal could conceivable remove the threat of Islam as long as Muslims are allowed to pour into the country. Therefore, government has a crucial role to play in resolving matters to the satisfaction of British paramilitaries. If it will not play this role willingly, it will have to be forced to do so through violence of a type and on a scale so extreme as to threaten a collapse into utter chaos and outright civil war. Of course, violence of this type will be one of the few ways British paramilitaries have of persuading Muslims to simply leave Britain, and could eventually end up being resorted to for this reason alone. But only one of the Two Insanities will make it a virtual certainty. There is already a growing awareness across Europe that Muslim immigration could be better described as Muslim colonization. Once British paramilitaries and the British people in general are blooded by the violence involved in civil conflict, escalating the violence to the levels described here will not be considered nearly as outrageous as it seems at present, even if we ignore the likelihood of Muslim atrocities against similar targets on our side.

We have already discussed the types of bombing campaigns that British and Muslims are likely to be able to engage in, and have concluded that only British paramilitaries will be able to build and utilize large car and truck bombs in any significant numbers. As we have suggested, such devices will be deployed in the conflict we have thus far imagined even in the absence of the Two Insanities, but predominantly to cause damage and disruption to Muslim communities without causing mass casualties. The most obvious parallel here would be the PIRA bombing campaign in England in the 1990s, which aimed to cause economic damage and disruption without inflicting the civilian casualties of, for example, the Remembrance Day bombing at Enniskillen.

The issue here is whether or not there is likely to come into existence a perceived necessity to use these devices against Muslims en masse, be it at a mosque, in a Muslim residential area, or a Muslim commercial area. Of course it is possible that intrinsic ruthlessness and indiscriminate Muslim suicide bombings of British targets will already have combined to create a willingness on the part of British paramilitaries to engage in such attacks. However, their relative scarcity in the three-decade conflict of the Troubles suggests that such total ruthlessness is somewhat more alien to the peoples of the British Isles than it is to Muslims in general. Whether or not such devices are used in such a manner by British paramilitaries therefore becomes a pivotal point, and one that will be critical in determining the nature of the conflict.

Earlier, we made reference to the Dublin and Monaghan bombings as being the single most ruthless act of the Troubles, as well as the single most lethal. Taken together, they killed 33 people, and these people were not killed by mistake, because a bomb went off too soon, or because a phone box was out of order. The bombs were intended to kill large numbers of civilians without warning, which is precisely what they did. The UVF, which carried them out, did not carry out similar bombings in the Republic of Ireland at any other time in the conflict. Why then did they carry out this one?

To understand the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, one must understand the backdrop against which they took place. In 1973, the British and Irish governments implemented what they hoped would be a political solution to the Troubles, which were going through their most violent years. Broadly speaking, the contours of this agreement, referred to as the Sunningdale Agreement for the English town where it was signed, were such that: a) a power-sharing agreement between nationalists and unionists would be introduced in Northern Ireland, and b) a Council of Ireland would be created to allow for consultation and cooperation between NI and the Republic of Ireland on matters pertaining to transport, trade, and the like. This was widely perceived by loyalists to be a step towards a united Ireland, and, though it had majority support from NI political parties at first, the support it enjoyed from unionists waned as 1974 wore on. Furthermore, it was bitterly opposed by the loyalist paramilitaries, and a massive strike was organized by the UDA in May 1974 to derail it.

As the UDA was bringing NI to its knees with strike action, the UVF was taking matters into its own hands slightly differently, via the bombings we have already mentioned. One must suppose that the UVF was trying to impress upon the Irish government that it considered its participation in the Council of Ireland under the Sunningdale Agreement to be an intrusion into the affairs of Northern Ireland. It is striking indeed to think of how the aborted Sunningdale Agreement and the successful Good Friday Agreement were so similar in so many ways that the Good Friday Agreement was referred to as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’ by the Deputy Leader of the SDLP at the time. Yet the former still evoked within loyalist paramilitaries the will to commit the worst single atrocity of the Troubles.

The perceived threat of Sunningdale led the UVF to engage in such extreme violence against civilians, despite the fact that, over twenty years later, it would acquiesce to something similar (albeit under different circumstances). This being the case, could anyone seriously imagine that British paramilitaries, seeing their country devoured from within by that part of the global ummah imported and subsidized by an idiot government, would refrain from eventually derailing that process of colonization through massive, indiscriminate acts of violence against a community they had come to consider an existential threat to Britain and its people?

On the basis of the foregoing considerations, we predict that the Two Insanities are virtually certain to persuade at least some British paramilitaries to escalate the violence in the manner we have described here. Indiscriminate bombings of Muslim civilian targets are a virtual certainty without the promptest and most effective action by government to shut Muslim immigration down completely in the early months of our Muslim Troubles.

XII. To the Broad Sunlit Uplands?

We have so far focused our attention on the nature of the early stages of the conflict into which we are doomed to be plunged thanks to the witlessness of our political class and the hostility of at least parts of it to the British nation. Now we turn our attention to the end of the conflict, and ask ourselves what it might look like.

Broadly speaking, there are only two ways in which a violent conflict can come to an end: a) a peace negotiated between two sides who consider themselves to be essentially undefeated but no longer interested in fighting a war, for whatever reason, or b) a peace whose terms are dictated by one side, the victor, to the other side, the defeated. Needless to say, this is a simplification, but it is one that is useful for our purposes here.

The best example of a negotiated peace for our purposes would be, of course, the Troubles. Arguably, the Troubles were not a two-sided conflict, but an unorthodox three-sided conflict in which two sides, the British state and loyalist paramilitaries, fought one, the PIRA, and all three had to agree to stop the fighting for it to come to an end. A good example of an imposed peace would be that which the Japanese were forced to accept at the hands of the U.S. during the Pacific War, which was an unconditional surrender and the military occupation of Japan.

If our government continues to implement immigration policies similar to those at present, and the British people are forced into a violent conflict with the Muslim population of the UK within the next twenty years, it is very difficult to see how they could possible lose it. The only advantage Muslims would have in this conflict, if advantage it be, is that they will start it with a greater willingness to inflict indiscriminate civilian casualties. However, atrocities of the sort that they will be so keen to inflict on us will very quickly result in counter-atrocities, as has been the case in every conflict in the history of the world, so this will quickly even out, for better or for worse. Bearing in mind our earlier conclusion, to wit, that British paramilitaries will be able to conduct a comprehensive bombing campaign while Muslims will be sorely restricted in this regard, it is difficult to see how Muslims could possibly prevail.

Assuming then that conflict is inevitable and that the British cannot lose it if they fight it in earnest, the question then becomes: will there be even the possibility of a Troubles-type conclusion to our Muslim Troubles, or will we have to aim for a Pacific War-type conclusion, which would entail the utter crushing of Muslims, their subsequent unconditional surrender, and our dictation of terms to them? We believe the answer to this question is that there can be no equivalent to the Good Friday Agreement this time around. As such, once they commence, our Muslim Troubles will have to be fought until, one way or another, by far the larger portion of the Muslim population of the UK has left and the relatively well-integrated remainder understands that it remains under the watchful eye of a government which will immediately act against troublemakers in the most draconian fashion. This is a bold predictive claim, and one we must now try to justify.

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Given the sheer violence of the Troubles, the depth and breadth of the sectarian hostility they evoked and reinforced, and the decades they lasted for, their most remarkable feature is, perhaps, that they ever came to an end at all. How did this happen?

The British and Irish governments had been trying to find a negotiated solution to the conflict for decades, which is precisely what they tried and failed to do in 1973—1974 with the Sunningdale Agreement. Though the IRA came close to defeat in 1976, its reorganization under a new leadership in 1977 gave it the structural robustness to wage a long-term, low-intensity war against British forces in Northern Ireland. Whether or not peace could be achieved was therefore a function of whether it and the other paramilitaries in the conflict could be persuaded to lay down their arms. We have made this point already, but reiterate it here: the paramilitaries were the key decision-makers. Without the ceasefires of the three main paramilitaries, the PIRA, the UVF, and the UDA, the killing would have continued, inviting retaliation and counter-retaliation. The paramilitaries that did not go on ceasefire until after the agreement passed, the INLA (which split from the OIRA in 1974) and the LVF (which split from the UVF in 1996), were deadly on occasion, but too small to derail the peace process. This is the only reason it succeeded.

What this means is that the Good Friday Agreement not only had to convince at least 70% of the population of Northern Ireland to vote in favour,[12] but also had to convince the main paramilitaries to abandon violence. How does one craft a compromise between two sides to such a violent conflict, a compromise in which both feels it is getting more than it is giving up, when both sides feel themselves to be undefeated and still possess the means to wage war? What political alchemy made this possible?[13]

By the early 1990s, there was a growing recognition on the part of on both sides of the conflict that the only alternative to killing each other in perpetuity would be a political solution that, by its very nature, would require compromise. The Troubles had already lasted for about 25 years, and had blighted the lives of the people of Northern Ireland for all that time. There had long been a realization at leadership level in the PIRA that forcing a British withdrawal from NI by force of arms alone was not a realistic strategy. Violence in the province had peaked in 1972, drastically declined in 1977, and stayed more or less at that level ever since. By the early 1990s, preparations had been in the works for a long time to move the PIRA in the direction of constitutional politics, though news of this radical plan was not communicated to PIRA volunteers until it was well-developed and had real momentum behind it.

For their part, loyalist paramilitaries were also moving in the direction of politics, with senior figures in the UVF and UDA trying to determine if there was a way in which the killing could stop. However, it must also be acknowledged that loyalist paramilitaries went through a resurgence in the early 1990s that saw them kill relatively large numbers of Catholics, Sinn Fein politicians and their family members, and republican paramilitaries. Some years in the early 1990s, they out-killed the PIRA for the first time ever. They had effectively demonstrated that they could terrorize the Catholic community of NI just as effectively as the PIRA could terrorize the security forces and the Protestant community, and this is thought by some (including the loyalist paramilitaries in question) to have contributed to a sense on the part of the PIRA that the time had come to bring the conflict to an end.

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If we consider our Muslim Troubles in this light, we see more clearly than ever before what an unmitigated disaster Muslim immigration is dragging us towards. Every single one of the foundations of the Good Friday Agreement will be absent in our Muslim Troubles. As we put it in our previous document:

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which brought an end to the Troubles as commonly understood, essentially resulted in nationalists being granted a fairer share of political power, and unionists being provided with a guarantee that a united Ireland could only be brought about with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland. This is how these two different peoples of Northern Ireland have found a way, at least for the last twelve years, of living together in relative peace. But this cannot happen in the event of a conflict between the British and their Muslim fifth column. Indeed, every single part of this compromise in the Good Friday Agreement would be meaningless at best, absurd at worst, in the context of a possible violent conflict of this nature.

As we have already established, the Muslim community of Britain is parasitic with respect to both financial and social capital, criminal and subversive, aggressive and rapidly growing. Its characteristics in these regards are not things it could alter even if it wanted to. Moreover, we cannot grant Muslims the vote, because we have already given them the vote. We cannot give them a fair slice of the economic pie, because they already suck out far more than they put in, consuming wealth created by others with nary a word of thanks. We cannot guarantee them that they will not be incorporated by force into our country, as they are already trying to get every mother’s son in here themselves, by hook or by crook, with the express purpose of being incorporated into it, at least in some sense. And we cannot grant them political influence commensurate with the contributions they make to British society, as their contributions to British society are all severely negative, and the political influence they already have is entirely undeserved and increasingly resented by the indigenous population.

[…]

It will be clear to the British people in the case of tribal conflict between them and their Muslim fifth column that defeat will result in the disappearance of their civilization, their way of life, and their existence as a people. Accordingly, they will have to win it, which means they will have to do what needs to be done to win it, which means they will have to do a great many violent and unpleasant things, things that, though quite inconceivable to many at present, will seem right and obvious to most when the nature of the conflict has become sufficiently clear.

Let us expand upon this here. Firstly, though nationalists and unionists have reconciled themselves to the legitimacy of each other’s traditions in NI, it cannot be said of the UK that there are two traditions, the British tradition and the Muslim tradition, both equally valid in their own right. It can only be said that there is the British tradition, and the cultural psychopathy of the various Muslim peoples who, having escaped their own miserable countries, are now busy recreating them in microcosm in Britain. This latter is not a ‘tradition’ whose legitimacy we will have to, or even could, acknowledge. It is antimatter to our matter and, sooner or later, we will have to take steps to ensure that it cannot annihilate us. Enjoying a glass of beer at the village pub on a Sunday afternoon and kicking the daughter-in-law down the stairs because she burned the chapattis are not two facets of two equally valid traditions of the British Isles. They are behaviours of the British people and our Muslim fifth column respectively.

Secondly, it is observed across Europe that, among the main factors driving hostility between Europeans and Muslims is the overwhelming criminality of the latter. We will not revisit this matter in detail here; rather we will content ourselves with the observation that a peace that allowed degenerate Muslim peoples to continue to inflict the multitudinous costs of their crime on any given European people is a peace that would evaporate fairly quickly. In many countries, this appears to be the key driving force behind the rapidly escalating European-Muslim conflicts. Unfortunately, a criminal population cannot simply decide to stop being criminal in the way that a paramilitary organization can decide to stop shooting people. Muslim populations throughout Europe are characterized by contempt for us, contempt for our laws, contempt for the rigours of our prisons, low psychological barriers to the use of violence, and feeble, if not downright non-existent, educational and professional achievements. Such peoples cannot suddenly stop being what they are, and only an exceptionally draconian crackdown by the state could conceivably dampen their criminal ways. This crackdown would be far too one-sided for the Muslim side to accept it as part of a political solution to violent conflict. Reading about the sheer everyday thuggishness of Muslims in countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands, and Belgium, one sometimes gets the impression that every other young Muslim male would have to be locked up to restrain the pathologies of these communities as wholes. This would be internment, not a step towards peace.

Thirdly, there would have to be a drastic scaling back of the extent to which Muslims could have all the good things of this world provided for them by the British taxpayer. Saying, in effect, ‘you will continue to massively subsidize people you are currently at war with’ will be a good way to break off negotiations between the British government and British paramilitaries. But saying ‘you will no longer receive any significant transfers of wealth from the British taxpayer’ to Muslim paramilitaries will condemn their communities either to lives of the most appalling urban squalor or an undignified return whence they came. Northern Ireland is small enough that the entire population can be somewhat subsidized by the UK as a whole, which is something that already happens with Scotland, Wales, and parts of England. But there does not exist in Britain the financial wherewithal to throw money at millions of increasingly hated Muslims in perpetuity. Historically, the victor in a war receives an indemnity from the vanquished. It will be quite a thing if undefeated British paramilitaries are expected to see their communities pay one instead.

Fourthly, the rate of growth of the Muslim population is so rapid that any ‘peace’ between it and the British would have to act to curtail this growth very quickly and even, in all likelihood, partially reverse it. In the absence of the overwhelming paramilitary violence that is already ruled out through our stipulation that we refer here to a peace agreement, this latter would only be achievable through a large-scale repatriation program that put significant pressure on Muslims to return to their countries of origin. A peace that let the Muslim population continue to colonize the UK, more or less quickly, would be of no utility to British paramilitaries uninterested in allowing the enemy to rest, recuperate, reinforce, and then reinitiate hostilities when it was in a better position to do so. A peace that ends the conflict without addressing the demographic time-bomb of Islam is a peace that could only thrust one’s children’s generation into a far more desperate and destructive conflict. Who would accept this and why?

The only peace that British paramilitaries would be likely to accept in return for laying down their arms would be one that allowed them to resolve the four issues above to their satisfaction. In other words, this negotiated peace would have to curtail and at least partially reverse Muslim immigration, pull the rug of the welfare state out from under the feet of Muslims (despite the fact that, by and large, they cannot function without it), ruthlessly clamp down on their criminality, and acknowledge and reinforce the absolute cultural supremacy of the indigenous people of Britain, referred to in happier times simply as the British. But this is not a negotiated peace at all! Rather, it is the peace that would follow the crushing victory of the British paramilitaries and the defeat of their Muslim enemies, who will find themselves being promptly deported if they are lucky. Our attempts to sketch the outline of a negotiated peace have instead demonstrated why none could exist.

Any conceivable peace process mediated between British and Muslim paramilitaries will be about as fruitful as the Israel-Palestine peace process, which is to say it will be very heavy on process, but deliver decidedly little in the way of peace. There simply does not exist a negotiated end to the Israel-Palestine conflict that could satisfy a critical mass of the key actors on both sides of that conflict. The same will be true of our Muslim Troubles.

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In closing, the author begs the indulgence of his readers here as he inserts a personal anecdote into this document. Driving through Ireland not so very long ago, he picked up a hitch-hiker in County Donegal. This hitch-hiker, his Scottish accent notwithstanding, was an Irishman who was obviously a staunch member of what could be called the republican tradition. As we passed through the small town of Dunfanaghy, he told me that it had a large Protestant population. Indeed, his attitude seemed to be that it had virtually been taken over by Protestants during the Troubles, the Protestants in question coming across from the Six Counties, as my hitch-hiker would have put it, to get away from the violence for a while. Apparently they bought up holiday homes in the town, thereby spurring on a new wave of construction which had, in his opinion, ruined the place.

If one reflects upon it, this is quite a thing to them to have done. The nationalist people of Northern Ireland are, overwhelmingly, those members of the historic Irish nation who ended up north of the new border after the partition of Ireland. Though the reality of partition has undoubtedly fashioned in them a consciousness that their brethren in the Republic of Ireland cannot entirely share, it has hardly turned them into two unrelated peoples, unconcerned by each other’s woes or sufferings. On the contrary, it is precisely the continuing sense of shared nationhood that has led the push for a united Ireland. Yet, somehow, unionists engaged, at least in some sense, in a violent conflict with nationalists north of the border felt happy travelling south of it to buy up homes in a country populated entirely by those who were, historically speaking, more or less the same people they were in conflict with in Northern Ireland. Is this not indicative of the fundamental compatibility of the peoples in question, and, however much it might irk both sides to read it, their similarity?

Now, when a vast swathe of the urban UK descends into tribal violence, would any British person ever say, ‘Oh well, at least we will be able to get away from it for a while by buying a holiday home in Karachi’? Ignore for a moment the logistical difficulties involved in heading off to Karachi for the weekend and focus on the psychological implications. Not only is Karachi a truly horrendous-sounding place, but it is full of Pakistanis. Why, precisely, would any British person wish to escape our Muslim Troubles by fleeing to the country that is the single biggest source of those Muslims?

Not a single one of the good things that exists in Britain could possibly exist in Pakistan, and not a single one of them will survive in any area of the UK that comes to be dominated by Pakistanis. The spread of these people in the UK represents the complete obliteration of everything that the British people have built over their thousands of years of history. This is why there can be no political compromise to bring our Muslim Troubles to an end. All compromise will be an option worse than war. Compromise is precisely what we are engaged in at present, and it is the increasingly intolerable nature of this compromise that will drive us to war. Why then would we pull back from that war to re-establish a state of affairs already judged inferior, and that would simply result in a return to war, further down the line, with a Muslim population grown larger and stronger in the meantime? Anything short of outright victory will be pointless, and British paramilitaries will presumably be clearsighted enough to realize it.

XIII. Note on Sources

The factual claims made in this document are not considered controversial enough to warrant rigorous documentation, which would add little of value. To the extent that any of the content herein proves contentious, it is likely to be the interpretative and analytical claims based on those factual claims, and these, of course, are the author’s own and must be assessed on their own merits.

Nonetheless, to point interested parties in the right direction, we make a note here of the sources we relied upon for such understanding of the Troubles as we have managed to obtain.

  • Big Boys’ Rules, Mark Urban
  • Brits, Peter Taylor
  • The Dirty War, Martin Dillon
  • Fifty Dead Men Walking, Martin McGartland
  • The Informer, Sean O’Callaghan
  • INLA: Deadly Divisions, Henry McDonald and Jack Holland
  • Killing Rage, Eamon Collins
  • Loyalists, Peter Taylor
  • Mad Dog, Johnny Adair
  • Mad Dog: The Rise and Fall of Johnny Adair and ‘C’ Company, David Lister and Hugh Jordan
  • The Operators: On the Streets with Britain’s Most Secret Service, James Rennie
  • Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein, Peter Taylor
  • A Secret History of the IRA, Ed Moloney
  • The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder, Martin Dillon
  • Stakeknife, Martin Ingram
  • Unsung Hero, Kevin Fulton
  • Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast, Kevin Myers
  • 25 Years of Terror: The IRA’s War Against the British, Martin Dillon

Those who wish to know more about explosives are invited to do their own research online.

But remember: you are being watched…

Link to the complete paper in pdf format



Notes:

12. It also had to convince 70% of the population of the Republic of Ireland to do the same, but the outcome was never in doubt there, and 94% voted in favour.
13. It is important to remember that there is no guarantee whatsoever that the peace that today prevails in Northern Ireland will last. Though dissident Republican groups such as the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA are believed to lack the military muscle to engage in extended bombing campaigns, the recent murder of policeman Ronan Kerr with an undercar bomb shows that they are attempting to return to violence on a large scale.

Even if such groups are not capable of forcing a return to the war, this is not the long-term threat to peace in the province. The long-term threat to peace is the demographic reality that the Catholic population is steadily increasing as a fraction of the whole, and that this population is, of course, overwhelmingly nationalist. In the next twenty years or so, Catholics will come to outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time ever.

The principle of consent was one of the cornerstones of the Good Friday Agreement. Under this principle, all parties to the agreement recognized that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland could only change with the consent of a majority of the population. This was one matter entirely while Protestants were in the majority, but primary schools across the province are apparently already educating a generation that is majority Catholic, making the coming into being of a Catholic majority a matter of if, not when.

The inevitability of a Catholic majority is not some sort of unpredicted bug in the system. On the contrary, just as Michael Collins argued that the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed at the end of the Irish War of Independence would give Ireland not freedom, but the freedom to achieve freedom, republicans in Northern Ireland obviously calculated that the Good Friday Agreement would grant them not a united Ireland, but a sure-fire means to attain it. This goes some way towards explaining why republicans were, by and large, persuaded to vote in favour of the agreement. What unionists will do when faced with this reality cannot be predicted.

Previous posts by El Inglés:

2007   Nov   28   The Danish Civil War
2008   Apr   24   Surrender, Genocide… or What?
    May   17   Sliding Into Irrelevance
    Jul   5   A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 1
        6   A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 2
        8   A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 3
    Aug   25   Identity, Immigration, and Islam
    Oct   4   The Blackhoods of Antifa
        26   Racists ’R’ Us
    Nov   25   Surrender, Genocide… or What? — An Update
2009   Feb   16   Pick a Tribe, Any Tribe
    Apr   11   Pick A Tribe, Any Tribe — Part II
    May   18   To Push or to Squeeze?
    Nov   2   On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 1
    Dec   5   On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 2
        7   On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 3
2010   Mar   25   The Death of Democracy
        25   Some Fallacies On the Subject of Crime — Part 1
        28   Reflections on the Civil War in Britain
    Apr   1   A Consideration of the Criminal Investigation Process — Part One
        2   A Consideration of the Criminal Investigation Process — Part Two
        5   On Vigilantism — Part One
    Oct   29   Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 1
    Nov   1   Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 2
        4   Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 3
        2   Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 4
2011   Mar   10   Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part One
        11   Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part Two
        12   Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part Three
        13   Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part Four
    May   25   Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland — Part One: The Idiot Paradigm
        26   Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland — Part Two: The Chocolate Cake Diet
        27   Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland — Part Three: An Explosive Situation
        29   Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland — Part Four: The Military and the Paramilitaries

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/29/2011

Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/29/2011Trouble broke out on the Tunisian side of the border with Libya when protesting refugees from the Choucha camp in Libya crossed over to Tunisia and clashed with the locals there. The army had to be called in to restore order, and several protesters were reported killed. The refugees involved were said to be from several sub-Saharan countries, including Somalia and Eritrea.

In other news, a man in England was forced to pay £100,000 in child support to his ex-wife for two children she gave birth to after their marriage had ended. She conceived both children after their separation, using his frozen sperm, but without his knowledge.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Egghead, Insubria, JD, Nilk, Takuan Seiyo, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

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

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Borders, Language and Culture

Our Greek-American correspondent Anestos Canelides returns with an essay on the growing immigration crisis in his ancestral home.



Borders, Language and Culture
by Anestos Canelides

The Melting PotBorders, language and Culture are words that are spoken every day by America’s premier talk show host Michael Savage. They are spoken to remind Americans that our nation is a sovereign nation and that we have the right to protect our borders from an invasion by illegal immigrants. It says that if we do not control this explosion of illegal immigrants across our borders then America, as we know it, could be radically altered as a nation. Even our culture and language could be threatened.

In the fall of 2001 I was in Athens, Greece to study archeology and history. It was an honor to be in the land of my grandparents, on my mother’s side, and to see the splendor of not only ancient Greece but also modern Greece. I stayed in Athens for an entire month and in that period I saw immigrants from all over the world. Most of who were in Greece illegally or as refugees. I saw people from the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Western Asia, and as Far East as the Philippines and China. I will admit that compared to the overall Greek population their numbers seemed small but it brought me back to the mid 1970’s in the San Fernando Valley, of Southern California, were I grew up.

I recall that at first there was a small trickle of illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico, but in time that trickle turned into a flood. I saw entire communities change from white to Hispanic in a short time, and the crime in the San Fernando Valley skyrocketed. I am not saying that all these immigrants are bad people and, in fact, most of them are hard-working and honest, but the influx brought changes that were not good. And the fact is they were in our country illegally.

America is a big nation, and many whites took to what we call “white flight”, but Greece is a small nation with fewer resources than the United States and Canada. The question I would ask is: “Where are the Native Greeks going to flee to as more and more immigrants, from wherever, pour into this tiny nation?”

I have read numerous web pages by left-wing radical groups who believe the Greeks should give these illegals amnesty over and over again. If every so many years Greece allows these so-called immigrants to stay then they will just keep coming, hoping to get amnesty in a few years’ time. The Greeks have every right to protect their borders, language and culture by deporting anyone that enters their sovereign nation illegally. I believe that anyone that enters a nation in this manner will generally not respect the rule of law in that nation, whether it is the United States or any nation.

I saw what was happening in parts of Southern California, so I moved to the Pacific Northwest, but Greeks do not have that luxury, so I urge them to take a much stronger stand against this illegal invasion before it is too late. In my opinion the native citizens of Greece should do the following:

  • Demand heavier fines and possible jail time for companies or individuals who hire illegal aliens.
  • Turn in companies or individuals who hire illegal aliens.
  • Start to look at it as an invasion, but do not mistreat the illegals in any manner.
  • Demand that the government deport all illegal immigrants, and no more amnesty.
  • Form groups similar to the Minutemen since the government is not doing enough.
  • Take a real stand against the anarchists in Greece, who are traitors.
  • Demand that the military be used to protect the borders and allow the Police to arrest illegal immigrants

If something is not done to stop or slow down this invasion then I am afraid that the Greece that I saw on my two previous visits, in 1998 and 2001, will disappear, and Greece will lose its borders, language and culture forever.

It has been eight years since I first wrote this as a draft on my computer. Since that time neither the conservative nor liberal governments of Greece, much like those of the USA, have done much to stem this problem of illegal aliens.

I was in Greece in 2006 along the Turkish border but I have not been back to Athens since 2001. since that time the illegal aliens have been granted amnesty again, and areas of Athens have been taken over by these invaders. Many native Athenians are being forced to move because of the illegal aliens, who have caused a sharp rise in crime. The government is doing little to help the legal citizens, and Greece does not have a first Amendment like American to protect free speech, so any criticism about the illegal immigrants borders on “hate speech”.

Meanwhile, radical communist and anarchist groups defend the rights of illegal immigrants rather than fighting for their own borders. The anarchists resort to thuggery if any Greek tries to take a stand against illegal immigrants. At the same time radical Muslim groups riot in Athens while yelling Allahu Akhbar after an Athenian Police officer was accused of disrespecting a Qur’an. Even if such an event did happen, it did not justify the wanton destruction by these largely illegal immigrants and their communist-anarchist allies.

The fact is that most of the illegal aliens are Muslims, and while I believe this alone does not mean they are all bad, it is still a good reason for alarm. With the low birth rate amongst native Greeks today, it won’t take many years for the largely Muslim illegal alien incursion to outnumber the native Greeks. I ask what will be the fate of the Christians when the majority becomes a minority among the Muslims?

One good example is the fate of the Coptic Christians. Even as recently as the Crusades they were the majority in Egypt, but today they are a despised minority. Looking at current events you can read about the horrific plight of the Christians in Egypt. If the Greeks don’t put an end to this growing threat then one day the same fate will await them. Will there be an America for them to flee to like the Copts have?

My plea is both to my fellow ethnic Greeks and Americans: we must fight for not just our very borders, language and culture but we must fight as if this illegal alien invasion is a threat to our very existence. We must recognize this for what it is, an invasion! If the we and the Greeks don’t fight, then who will?

So it is time to wake up and make our battle cry “Borders, language and culture!” If the Greeks don’t resist, then history may well look back and say that they deserved what they got for not taking a stand and fighting for their very existence.



Previous posts by Anestos Canelides:

2010   May   29   The Last Empire
    Jun   18   The Muslim Devastation of India
    Aug   20   Are They Lying to Us?
    Sep   28   Devshirme: A Muslim Scourge on Christians
    Oct   6   AIFD: Friends of America and Freedom
    Dec   3   A 19th-Century Jihad on American Shipping

The Ravaging of Cyprus

The following book review was originally published at Europe News by Henrik Ræder Clausen.



Book essay: The bloody truth about Cyprus
by Henrik Ræder Clausen

Bloody Truth

Nicosia, March 2009. ISBN 9789963962204

Bloody TruthThe apparently endless stalemate on Cyprus is getting a thorough treatment in the publication by the organization “Freedom and Justice for Cyprus”. While the documentation of what went down through the 1960’s and 1970’s is shocking and brutal, the real coup of the book is that it goes back to the 1950’s, once and for all settling the question of who originally created the conflict in Cyprus: It wasn’t the ‘Turkish’ Cypriots. Nor was it Turkey. It was, documentably, Great Britain.

The book has a cover as brutal as the title, an image of Cyprus with blood dripping from the north into the southern part. Based on this, one might expect it to contain a vitriolic anti-Turkish diatribe, but this isn’t really the case. In spite of some linguistic excesses, such as the phrase “The Turkish Propaganda Machine”, the book in general sticks to the documentation of events and developments on the ground, and thus becomes a valuable resource for understanding the current stalemate, as well as for assessing the merits of various proposed solutions.

As for who sowed the seeds of the current problems, the book is clear: It was not Turkey, nor Turkish Cypriots, it was Great Britain. Seeking a way to maintain the colonial rule established in 1923, Britain feared a united Cypriot opposition to their rule, and gradually worked to strengthen the Muslim/Turkish identity of the Muslim Cypriots. That included construction of new mosques in villages without any, initiating the use of the term “Turkish Cypriots”, and later requesting Turkey to reclaim rule of the island, an idea initially received with disinterest by the Turkish government.

However, a committee on the subject was formed in July 1955, and in 1956, professor Nihat Erim was appointed special advisory on the Cyprus issue. In November and December 1956, he released two reports endorsing an active Turkish engagement in Cyprus, aiming first at a division of the island into Greek and Turkish parts (termed “Taksin”), and to work long-term for a full Turkish takeover. This policy was adopted by the Turkish government, and has been followed by various Turkish governments — civilian or military — since then.

The book details chronology of various Greek and Turkish groups formed in the late 1950’s, including EOKA (Greek), VOLCAN (Turkish) and TMT (Turkish). Their chronology is particular important, for it is useful in weeding out honest statements from deceitful ones. This includes Turkish statements about the “Bloodthirsty Makarios”, the work by Rauf Denktash to turn TMT into an underground Turkish organization, the killing of Turkish voices other than those of TMT, and the efforts to make Turkish Cypriots segregate themselves from the Greek Cypriots. The tacit approval of the British in this marks a low point of harmful colonial divide-and-rule strategies.

Descriptions of events after 1962 are somewhat more sketchy. The proposed constitutional changes in 1963 play a central role, and the efforts by the TMT to segregate the Greek and Turkish are recorded in a very varied degree of detail. The Turkish bombardment of Tylleria in August 1964 is mentioned, but the heavy fighting in the preceding months are not. Advance references to the 2004 Annan Plan and similar chronological leaps are annoying, in spite of their relevance. The 1974 invasion is likewise accounted for in an unsystematic way, jumping rapidly from overall descriptions to individual tales of mass rapes and executions by the Turkish soldiers.

The real strength of this book is the wealth of original sources — British, Cypriot, Turkish — drawn in and quoted here. Many common fallacies and outright lies are dismantled, and for this reason it is easy to forgive the somewhat uneven narrative of the book. Harder to forgive is the lack of illustrations. Some maps providing an overview of violent incidents and the 1974 invasion would be welcome, as would some tables with statistics.

This book provides essential background information for the situation in Cyprus. It has its strength in quoting vital original documents in their proper context, showing a clear route from British colonial machinations to direct Turkish involvement, and provides an indispensable understanding of many key events. On the other hand, it is jumpy, both chronologically and emotionally, clearly one-sided, and skips chunks of history needed for a full account of the developments.

Review opinion: 4/6

If you have interest in the Cyprus conflict, adding this book to your collection is recommended, in particular because it provides crucial information regarding the role played by the British.

For those interested, more details out of “Bloody Truth”, and some closing comments:

In 1878, Cyprus was ceded from Ottoman to British rule, initially as a long-term lease agreement. The Cypriots, having been ruled by the Ottomans since 1571, welcomed the change, rejoicing in a European power coming back to Cyprus, setting the hopes for eventually establishing a modern, independent Cypriot state, much as countries in the Balkans during the 19th century had cast off centuries of brutal Ottoman rule and restored their independence.

Independence and self-determination were not in the cards for Cyprus, however. Even after World War I, when the Wilsonian Principles of self-determination of the peoples led to dismantling of empires and the re-establishment of multiple nation-states, Cyprus was not one of the states to return to independence. Rather, it became a British crown colony in 1925, after Turkey in the Treaty of Lausanne had relinquished all interests in the island.

Maintaining colonial rule was growing increasingly difficult, however, and not least in a country that considered itself part of the Western civilization, the Greek in particular. Great Britain set out to do what it had done so successfully elsewhere, to divide and rule. Strengthening the Islamic identity of the Muslims in Cyprus was deemed essential to this, and to do so, Britain initiated construction of mosques in many villages that had never had one.

Opening the door for Turkey

Then [BT: Page 208], on June 8th 1949 came a note in the minority newspaper “Halkni Sesi”: It reported that the British Governor R. E. Turnbull requested the term “Muslims of Cyprus” to be replaced with the currently used “Turkish Cypriots”. This seemingly insignificant change of terms in time brought about a change in perception, that the Muslims in Cyprus were Turks, and thus that Turkish interference on the island represented a legitimate concern for Turkish citizens.

But that was hard work. As Turkish foreign minister Ali Kuprulu said in 1950:

“For Turkey, there does not exist any Cyprus issue”.

Only in 1954, when Archbishop Makarios with the aid of Greece got Cyprus on the agenda of the United Nations, did help from the British press become sufficient that a Turkish demand to gain control of Cyprus could be raised at the United Nations. This is related in chilling detail on pages 208 through 213, and since the long-term consequences of these machinations are well known, it stands as a sinister example of how to cause severe long-term damage in international relations.

Taking the opportunity

For Turkey was not late in spotting an opportunity to increase regional influence and gain an advance strategic stronghold south of Turkey proper. In 1956, Turkish Prime minister Menderes set out to investigate the potential of getting a foothold in Cyprus. Professor Nihat Erim endorsed the idea, which has remained official Turkish policy since. The aim was to first provoke an ethnic division (Taksin) of Cyprus, then in the long term aim to take over the island entirely.

Turkey didn’t miss the opportunity offered to them by the British, having no particular interest in upholding international law in the process.

Taking up arms

On pages 214 through 231, we get quite a bit of detail about the increasing use (and misuse) of weapons and violence, in particular the formation of the Turkish orgs VOLKAN and TMT. Simultaneously, the armed movement EOKA was formed to dislodge the British colonial rule and replace it with a free and democratic Cypriot state. The story of this struggle is related elsewhere, but it clearly strengthened the British resolve to invite Turkish involvement in Cyprus, for it is much easier to rule over a divided people than a unified one. Thus Britain made Turkey partner in all formal proceedings, and turned a blind eye to Turkey’s creating a paramilitary organization TMT, 10,000 members strong, discreetly armed from Turkey and led by retired Turkish military staff.

Violent acts also took place elsewhere. On September 6th 1955, a minor bomb went off at the house where Kemal Atatürk was born, and on that pretext, along with pressure from the Turkish group “Cyprus is Turkish”, the Greek quarter of Istanbul (previously Constantinople) was severely damaged and looted, leading eventually to further ethnic cleansing of the Greek minority there.

The underground army TMT were to play a pivotal role in the following years. The predecessor, VOLKAN, had been partly British directed, but under the excellent leadership of Rauf Denktash, things slipped out of British control to the radical Turkish-supported circle around TMT. With this group systematically killing off Turkish-Cypriot dissent from their radical agenda, including labor union leaders, journalists and others of the opinion that peaceful coexistence between all Cypriots was a preferable option. Thus, TMT and Rauf Denktash managed to establish themselves as the only major voice of the Muslim / Turkish Cypriots. Not exactly democratic, but effective.

Winding up

After the semi-independence of 1960, the book becomes more spotty and could well have covered the events much more systematically. It does, however, bring out a valuable series of mythbusting, including the so-called “Bathtub murders” in 1963, the bombing of the Bayraktar mosque in Nicosia, the burning of a mosque in 1974, and other incidents staged to escalate Greek-Turkish animosity in ways similar to bombing the birthplace of Kemal Atatürk, then blaming the Greeks.

The pattern of Turks staging a (minor) event, or exploiting an unrelated crime for propaganda purposes, has been revealed bit by bit many years after they had the desired effect on the ground. Here, for instance, is a report from Today’s Zaman touching on several key events staged by Turkish parts in the conflict.

It is an unfortunate fact that whipping up emotion and confusing the minds of decision-makers can lead to a lot of mistakes in the heat of the moment, leading to the creation of more problems than the existed before, and in particular to situations on the ground that are difficult and/or embarrassing to solve correctly. This has been the case in Cyprus for decades on end.

However, bringing to light the details of past manipulations and mistakes is helpful in the long run, and Bloody Truth, in spites of its flaws, does a good job at delivering facts and details that really should have been out decades ago. It might have been a better book if it had put down a full stop at, say, 1964, leaving coverage of the 1974 Turkish invasion, the 1983 TRNC declaration and the 2004 Annan Plan for future books. But it is plenty readable and useful as it is, and has as its particular strength the extensive use of primary sources.

The path forward

No article about the conflict in Cyprus without outlining some principles about how to proceed, even though it is not directly the subject of Bloody Truth. The developments since the 1950’s has been marked by a never-ending failure to uphold international law, though usually under the pretence of doing so. “Never let a good crisis go to waste” has been applied repeatedly, all to frequently to crises created by deliberate manipulations. The Annan Plan marks a low point in that development, for as Alfred de Zayas wrote about it:

One year after the vote [the 2004 referendum], upon a calmer rereading of the Annan plan, the non-committed observer may wonder whether anyone could have reasonably expected the Cypriot population in non-occupied Cyprus to vote in favour of a plan that entailed abandoning positions held by the Security Council and the General Assembly since July 1974, and which seriously undermined fundamental principles of international law contained in numerous universal and regional documents.

On the state of international law in the context of Cyprus and Turkish aggression:

Can such grave violations of international law be retroactively legalized ? International law experts hold the view that such violations cannot be legalized. Alas, the situation of violation of international law norms by States — in total impunity — is not rare. However, this does not mean that international law has ceased to exist or that these particular norms have ceased to be applicable.

Further:

This Annan Plan is all the more distressing, because it manifests the application of double-standards at the highest level of the United Nations. Ethnic cleansing was condemned at Nuremberg. It is condemned today at The Hague by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. And yet Turkey is allowed to occupy militarily one third of the territory of another European country and to keep the fruits of the crime. Why this double-standard?

In order to uphold international law and the underlying principles of national sovereignty, a solution for Cyprus should be decided upon only by proper citizens of Cyprus — not Turkish soldiers or illegal settlers — and should adhere to principles laid down in international law, such as:

1.   Implementation of all relevant judgments and resolutions of international courts.
2.   Withdrawal of foreign military forces from Northern Cyprus;
3.   Withdrawal of illegal settlers in Northern Cyprus, in line with article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention;
4.   Recognition of the right of return of all displaced Cypriots; and
5.   Restitution or compensation to displaced Cypriots for confiscated or destroyed properties.

This is no easy task, for much confidence has been placed in the United Nations, which has not lived up to it. But the underlying principles of international law are not that hard to understand, including not rewarding aggression or letting aggressors keep the fruits of their aggression, as well as the obvious principle of respecting private property. The latter has been made easier by recent court verdicts upholding the property rights of Cypriots who for over 30 years have been kept from using their rightful property by the Turkish occupation forces.
Cyprus has become a test case for honest upholding of international law. So far, it has resulted in many more failures than successes, which is eroding Cypriot confidence in international negotiations and deals to solve their problem. The reality on the ground is what matters to most. This includes the fact that passage to the occupied territory is now legal and easy, that the property rights of Cypriots is being upheld, and that even Turkish Cypriots are protesting the Turkish presence on their island. The hardest issue is the fate of the 200,000+ illegal Turkish settlers in the northern part of Cyprus. That, however, is a problem that the state of Turkey must resolve. For Cyprus belongs to the Cypriots, not to British, Turkey or illegally imported Turkish settlers.

A pdf file of “Bloody Truth” is available here.