Category: Islam and the West

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Macron is in trouble with all the right people

It appears that President Macron is no longer favoured by the likes of the Washington Post and the New York Times. A good thing too. Here is Aris Roussinos in Unherd, a periodical I would recommend to your attention on the subject of Macron’s newly found resistance to Islam, right-wing  reaction, and intellectual obscurantism.

 

“Yet it is surely in his vision of Europe as a commonwealth, a continent where we share a sense of belonging and ineffable political values despite our division into discrete nation-states, that we see Macron’s evolution most clearly: the defender of the French Revolution’s values has become an unexpected Burkean. It is not just that his horror at the tyranny and fanaticism of what became of the Arab Spring shapes his worldview, as the French Revolution did Burke’s, with his drift to the right deriving from a similar claimed desire to save liberalism from its own worst excesses.

Macron also echoes Burke’s conception of Europe as a political unit, an orderly and pacific civilisation of its own, and a commonwealth of shared values to be defended against internal and external challengers. Whatever divides us Europeans, he asserts, in a quote which could be lifted directly from Burke’s 1796 Letters on a Regicide Peace, “something unites us. We know that we are European when we are outside of Europe. We feel our differences when we are among Europeans, but we feel nostalgia when we leave Europe.”

 

Angela Merkel is not yet gone, and the damage continues

 

 

This from our social betters at the CBC, by Don Murray:

“I stood on the border between Hungary and Austria as the gates opened in September 2015 and the refugees flowed through, most to be taken by train to Munich. People cheered. Europe, and much of the world, applauded.

But beside me a German cameraman from Bavaria muttered, “The Germans aren’t going to like this.”

I was surprised and dismissive, but I shouldn’t have been. The Germans swallowed and took in an estimated one million refugees, but almost from that moment Merkel’s popularity began to drop. And just as significantly, the AfD, which was born as an anti-euro and European Union party, shifted dramatically. Its target now became immigrants and refugees, and it rose dramatically in the opinion polls.”

“I was surprised and dismissive.”

In older times the CBC  had a few old European refugees from Nazis and Communists, people who knew which end was up, like Joe Schlesinger, of blessed memory, a Czech Jew. CBC had a few people who had seen combat, or reported on it close up, like the elder Mathew Halton. Nowadays the better sort of commenter is a downtown Toronto Volvo-driver who would know what lies north of the 416.

Here we see a man watching a vast column of Islamic refugees, mostly male, mostly of military age, and he is incapable of seeing the implications of what is before his eyes. This is an invasion. And ineluctably the Cologne mass attack on German females followed. Duh! What is it about Islam these idiots do not understand? Oh! Everything!

As a German friend of mine said: “These people all lost their passports somehow but kept their cellphones”.

Finally, Angela Merkel, pounded by electoral defeats, has decided not to run for re-election as party chairman but not actually resign as Chancellor until the next elections in 2021. Imagine the long drawn-out death scene.

The Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats are each being hammered by the electorate, and no wonder. The AfD on the right and the Greens on the left are gaining.

I asked my Austrian correspondent for his views this morning. He writes:

Well, [Merkel is a] lame duck for sure, but she’s working hard to implant her clone, Annegret
Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK), as her legacy, and the CDU has been completely castrated – no
leadership potential and substance left.

AKK is certified charisma- and thought-free, just as AM

Some people throwing their hat in the ring now:

Her old enemy Friedrich Merz is just another European superstate cheerleader.

The guy from NRW (North Rhein Westphalia) , Armin Laschet, is a walking joke.

Then there’s Jens Spahn, 38, gay, a bit of a hipster, a tad more conservative – that’d be the best option (and not much at that).

You’d have to be a special breed of idiot to take over the party at this point and leave Merkel as chancellor to continue driving Germany against the wall, just to be ready to take the blame for the next election disaster.

what I do not understand is – the greens are going through the roof and now routinely overtake the SPD, which is fried and in free fall.

Obviously the shit hasn’t hit the fan hard enough; Germans are – I am sorry – an electoral idiocracy and wholehearted preference falsifiers. As long as the CDU is in this sorry state I don’t see that trend abating

So – no great cheers coming from over here.

-Baron Steiermark

 

 

Diversity means uniformity; inclusion means exclusion

You are not alone if you have begun to cotton on to the idea that “diversity” does not include you, dear reader. You are probably male, probably over forty, probably white, and you do not fit into the desired categories of “diverse” people that the Left favours. Tucker Carlson  started into the diversity mantra the other night by asking some long overdue questions.

 

 

Diversity is hogwash. I come from a formerly diverse society. It is called Quebec, and whatever you might feel about the French Canadians, they are very sound on the diversity question. They will have none of it, as long as diversity presents an English-speaking face. They have resisted “diversification” for centuries, which they call assimilation, and will continue to do so until they disappear demographically, which is a long way off. Having been raised in a society where I was the rejected outsider, I have come to appreciate how normal it is for a society to reject multiculturalism, and insist on the society’s right to perpetuate itself, even at great cost.

Perhaps by reason of personal history I am skeptical of diversity, or at least conscious of where it begins and ends. A common language is good, though not essential. But a common set of civic values is essential to the maintenance of liberty, order, cohesion, and yes, actual tolerance for diversity.

If you want to experience “diversity”, go to India. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains Sikhs, Parsis: all vie for space, respect, and resources. Forty,  or is it four hundred, languages create a babble of mutual incomprehension.  Racial, caste, and ethnic differences are as great as anything in all of Europe, even considering how it is after the Muslim refugee invasion.

I want everyone to start questioning “diversity”.

A new bumper sticker is needed.

 

Question diversity

 

Germany’s Islamization

 

 

 

The other night I listened to two intelligent Germans discuss the state of Germany and the Islamic threat to it. In brief, it is worse than it is reported, and that under-reporting is the essence of what they complain about. The political establishment – all three major parties – are devoted to preventing public discussion of what people perceive with their own eyes.

They observe from the news they gather from informal channels, such as friends and gossip, that there is much more Islamic crime than reported. Islamic crime has had the effect of rendering German women much less safe than they had been within recent historical memory.

Now none of this is news. It  was apparent from the tone and substance of what my guests were saying that:

  • the under -reporting and covering up of Islamic crime is deliberate state policy;
  • people are afraid to speak freely; Germans think very carefully about what they will say in the presence of friends and strangers;
  • Official state organs, such as the public broadcast system, are fully complicit in this suppression;
  • Indeed, they may be compelled to suppress news of Islamic crime (that was not clear from the context);
  • The three major parties (Christian Democrat, the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats) are united in their opposition to free expression by ordinary people of any form of anti-Islamic views, including especially views that are simply observations of what they have experienced in their own lives.

The conversation lasted over an hour and we listened, fascinated, to some sincere and considered thought about the state of their country. They were enjoying the freedom of speech that came from being three thousand miles away from home. Their anxiety for the state of their country was palpable.

In passing they mentioned the case of the writer Thilo Sarrazin, whose book, Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany is abolishing itself) has created a huge stir.

Citing the Wikipedia article, which mentions his book:

Within two months, Sarrazin’s book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Is Doing Away With Itself or Germany Is Abolishing Itself), published end of August 2010, became the best-selling book on politics by a German-language author in a decade, with overall sales hitting 1.1 million copies[4] and the first editions sold out within a matter of hours or days. In the 13th edition Sarrazin added a foreword commenting on the nationwide debate his book has sparked.[22] As of May 2011, 1.5 million copies had been sold.[23]

Sarrazin’s views and criticism of them[edit]

Sarrazin advocates a restrictive immigration policy (with the exception of the highly skilled) and the reduction of state welfare benefits. There were severe reactions to his statements on economic and immigration policy in Berlin, which were published in September 2009 in Lettre International, a German cultural quarterly. In it he described many Arab and Turkish immigrants as unwilling to integrate. He said, among other things:

Integration requires effort from those that are to be integrated. I will not show respect for anyone who is not making that effort. I do not have to acknowledge anyone who lives by welfare, denies the legitimacy of the very state that provides that welfare, refuses to care for the education of his children and constantly produces new little headscarf-girls. This holds true for 70 percent of the Turkish and 90 percent of the Arab population in Berlin.[24][25][26]

He has also said regarding Islam, “No other religion in Europe makes so many demands. No immigrant group other than Muslims is so strongly connected with claims on the welfare state and crime. No group emphasizes their differences so strongly in public, especially through women’s clothing. In no other religion is the transition to violence, dictatorship and terrorism so fluid.”[27]

Sarrazin’s statements were criticized by the chairman of the Interior Committee of the German Bundestag, Sebastian Edathy (SPD), the ver.di union and the political scientist Gerd Wiegel. The Central Council of Jews in Germany has strongly criticized Sarrazin, condemning him as racist.[28][29][30] Sigmar Gabriel, the General Secretary of the SPD, condemned Sarrazin for his eugenic approach.[31]

Sarrazin’s book came under criticism for claiming that Germany’s immigrant Muslim population is reluctant to integrate and tends to rely more on social services than to be productive. Moreover, he calculates that their population growth may well overwhelm the German population within a couple of generations at the current rate, and that their intelligence is lower as well. He proposes stringent reforms for the welfare system to rectify the problems.[32][33] The first edition of his book sold out within a few days. By the end of the year, the book had become Germany’s number 1 hard-cover non-fiction bestseller for the year and was still at the top of the lists.[34]

and further from the article:

Henryk Broder, the Spiegel commentator, offered an explanation for attacks on Sarrazin’s statements. “And there’s a second trick that’s being used now: he’s being accused of anti-Semitism. If you could accuse him of anything, it’s philo-Semitism, because he wrongly thinks Jews are more intelligent than others,” Broder said. He added, “But of course, with an anti-Semitism accusation you can really go after someone, because anti-Semitism of course is no longer acceptable in Germany, and rightly so. There is no substantive debate here at all – the issue is that a nation gets up, as it were, they all agree and they take it all out on a scapegoat who they’d like to send into the desert. It’s very disturbing.”[44]

“Political correctness is silencing an important debate” said Matthias Matussek (de) of Der Spiegel magazine. “Sarrazin’s findings on the failed integration of Turkish and Arab immigrants are beyond any doubt. He has been forced out of the Bundesbank. The SPD wanted to expel him from the party, too. Invitations previously extended to Sarrazin are being withdrawn. The culture page editors at the German weekly Die Zeit are crying foul and the editors at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung are damning Sarrazin for passages he didn’t even write. But what all these technicians of exclusion fail to see is that you cannot cast away the very thing that Sarrazin embodies: the anger of people who are sick and tired—after putting a long and arduous process of Enlightenment behind them—of being confronted with pre-Enlightenment elements that are returning to the center of our society. They are sick of being cursed or laughed at when they offer assistance with integration. And they are tired about reading about Islamist associations that have one degree of separation from terrorism, of honor killings, of death threats against cartoonists and filmmakers.[45]

It’s still legal to say what you think

I have been watching a considerable amount of the Rubin Report in my leisure, which I recommend highly. The hour-long discussions allow for an exchange of views, as opposed to a ritualized six-minute interchange on cable TV of talking points.

One of the heroes of truth is Douglas Murray, who has written The Strange Death of  Europe. Asked by Rubin what words of encouragement he has for others, he responded: “It’s still legal to say what you think”.

I want to add my two cents’ worth to that observation. It is surprizing the degree to which, in the absence of any secret police, and with human rights commissions still occasionally defeated in  public and embarrassing ways, that people feel so constrained to toe the line of political correctness.

Yet they do, and for good reason. There are innumerable enforcers out there, in almost any occasion in which polite society meets.

Last year I was talking to a lady at a cocktail gathering and had occasion to observe that North American Indians or blacks were overrepresented in our prisons – and no, I did bring up the topic but did not avoid it either. She asked me quite bluntly: “Was I racist?| I thought for a moment and said, “No. I merely observe statistical realities”. What I ought to have said, and wish I had said, “Are you a member of the thought police?”

Because there are many members of the thought police and they do not hesitate to comment on the slightest deviation – it is the slightest and not the greatest deviation they are sensitive to.

More than any other thing which lies behind the success of Trump is his capacity to talk ordinary language about difficult subjects: to talk like a real person and not in a series of carefully crafted talking points. What he has done is enlarge the capacity of ordinary people to react as normal people should to violations of common sense, good manners, and good public policy. The Emperor of PC has no clothes, which we have seen for some time. Yet it is the power to force people to say that His Majesty is splendidly clothed, to humiliate the general public by ceaseless participation in lies or doubtful propositions, that gives the guardians of PC their power.

To wit:

  • mass immigration is good for all people of the receiving society
  • free trade with China is actually free – that is, standards-based, law abiding  – trade
  • there is no link between Islam and jihad
  • that different rates of criminal incarceration among different ethnicities is a sign of racism or other injustice

Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said that Communism would not survive the day if everyone spoke the truth. As I have said recently, we are living in the liberal version of Oceania, and we will not get out of it until we each decide to tell the truth.

So say something.

———————————-

For  good measure, here is the interview with Douglas Murray.

 

 

 

How come when a Muslim male goes crazy he kills people?

And the cover up never stops.

From Pajamas Media, which I think captures the enormous effort to divert attention from Islamic jihad to mental illness, toxic masculinity, or “look. there’s a rabbit!”.

According to police, Hussain — who had lived for a time in Afghanistan and Pakistan — had “expressed ‘support’ for a website that was seen as ‘pro-ISIL.’” This and other fishy online activity had led the authorities to speak to him. Indeed, reported Warmington, Hussain had been on the radar of the Toronto Police, the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Well, that certainly sounds dispositive. But while Warmington was serving up this hard information about Hussain’s jihadist sympathies and shady background (what was he doing all that time in Afghanistan and Pakistan?), virtually every other journalist or public figure in Canada seemed determined to lead the public down this or that garden path –whether by calling for even tighter gun laws, meditating on the mystery of the individual human soul, serving up academic hogwash about toxic masculinity, or embracing the argument that it was all about mental problems. They were willing, in short, to make any argument, however absurd, rather than to acknowledge the manifest possibility that a young ISIS fan named Faisal Hussain might be yet another enemy within, driven to mow down infidels in the name of the caliphate.

Islamic jihad taunts the liberal vision of diversity and inclusion with the adamantine fact of total rejection. No we will not assimilate. Yes you are fit to be slaughtered. You are vermin and we will destroy you.
Jihadists preach it, and all jihadists are Muslim, though not all Muslims are jihadists. I do not know what is to be done, but what I want to hear is public authorities wrestling with the question.
In Canada, as elsewhere, we hear the choirs preaching diversity and inclusion. Actually, if there was one style of masculinity I would call toxic, it is the Islamic male’s sense of rightfulness to seize or women, kill and enslave there rest of us, all in the name of the Prophet. This has gone on since the beginning of the creed’s war against all, kuffar.

 

Steve Bannon explains what is happening

Steve Bannon takes some young puppy interviewer and whips him for being a snot-nosed idiot. He also explains why he is a nationalist populist and not a globalist. Bannon is far ahead of the interviewer, who is both tendentious and none too bright.

“You guys love liberal democracy until you start losing elections, then it becomes dangerous nationalism”.

“The Party of Davos” is Bannon’s term for what governs Europe.

“Central banks are in the business of debasing your currency”.

“Crony capitalist governments have been imposed for the past thirty years”.

Bannon identifies the Financial Times, the Economist, the BBC and MSNBC as the media arms of the Davos Party.

“I admire Orban because he took a very tough stand and saved his country”.

“Angela Merkel panics, realizes she made a great mistake and the EU tries to farm out the problem to other countries”.

“George Soros is one of the most evil people in the world. He has been trying to destroy the United States for years with his open borders policy”.

Bannon does not take an inch of  guff from the journalist, who is so deep into the world view of the Davis Party that Bannon’s points essentially escape him. An entertaining tour through the world view of Bannon and of his Davos Party opposition.

“The US doesn’t need Europe as a protectorate, it needs Europe as an ally.”

 

 

Tommy Robinson and the British Disease

What can be said with absolute certainty is that Tommy Robinson has been treated with greater suspicion and a greater presumption of guilt by the United Kingdom than any Islamic extremist or mass rapist ever has been. That should be — yet is not — a national scandal. If even one mullah or sheikh had been treated with the presumption of guilt that Robinson has received, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the rest of them would be all over the U.K. authorities. But different standards apply to Robinson.

 

—From the National Review, article by Douglas Murray

 

Further observations on the state of the United Kingdom from the Zman.

This is the heart of the matter. The Pax Americana, which has guaranteed peace in Europe for the last 75 years, has done more than pacify the continent. It has turned the political classes of Europe into children. They are not real leaders in any meaningful sense, because no matter what they do, Uncle Sam is there to make sure they never get a serious boo-boo. Because they are insulated from serious consequences, they have become the Eloi, playing dress-up and pretending to be big boys and girls.

5 for 5

 

My subject is the astonishing level of incomprehension of and contempt for Trump by the American elites.

A perfect illustration is available from Real Clear Politics’ Monday edition of the state of incomprehension of Trump by the American elite. It is called “the End of Intelligence”, and appeared first in the Sunday New York Times. It is written by Michael Hayden, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009 and the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005.

His concern is with ‘post truth’ America, and what follows is Hayden’s line of argument.

He illustrates his case with some whoppers (outright lies), exaggerations and nonsense that Trump told during the election. [No discussion is made of anything from Hillary].

Hayden writes:

We in the intelligence world have dealt with obstinate and argumentative presidents through the years. But we have never served a president for whom ground truth really doesn’t matter.

The case in point is the ill-conceived Presidential directive that has come to be called ‘the Muslim-ban’. Hayden detects a pattern: something starts with a Presidential tweet, then the legions of  experts are called in to dampen, palliate, or moderate the instincts of the President.

“Sometimes, almost magically, he gets it right”, as when Trump agreed with the establishment to keep troops in Afghanistan.

But most of the time, Trump does not agree with the establishment, as on sanctions against Russia. In fact Trump disagrees with large sections of official opinion.

In this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement and science — all of which, like intelligence gathering, are evidence-based. Intelligence shares a broader duty with these other truth-tellers to preserve the commitment and ability of our society to base important decisions on our best judgment of what constitutes objective reality.

On how many issues is the American establishment wrong? They consist of journalists, academia, the courts, law enforcement and science.  And on how many issues are the the general consensus of the establishments in North America and Europe absolutely, completely wrong?

  1. Global warming/climate change: a concatenation of errors in false analysis, false conclusions, and wrong-headed solutions that will impoverish us, all driven by an anti-development ideology masquerading as “science”
  2. Iran deceiving us about their nuclear plans, and we being willing to be deceived
  3. Russia, seen as if it were still the Soviet Union, a confusing the thuggish Putin with the mass-muderer Stalin
  4. Islamic terrorism – you cannot be allowed to see or speak to the link between Islam the religion and Islam the political idea
  5. Korea – seen as insoluble

I would say it is five for five, on the most important issues confronting the West today. And I am not talking about the ideological mess of our universities.

Of course Hayden and his ilk believe that Trump is irrational in opposing Establishment views, because it is impossible that they could be wrong. We have all read their 60-page memoranda; we have all taken our lessons from the professors; we have all bowed our heads to the liberals in robes on the courts; and the police are busy policing thoughts and attitudes, as they ought. How can we all be wrong?

How can the establishments in law, policing, science, foreign intelligence and academia be wrong? The answer is quite simple, really. They have been animated by wrong ideas for fifty or a hundred years, and the results are now being seen.

I was once subjected to spiteful derision from a man who thought my views on global warming were utterly wrong. Without his ever having researched the subject, he found most offensive the fact that I dared to have an opinion that was not the consensus of scientists, as he saw it. How could I be so bold? [As a Protestant I am culturally accustomed to taking on Establishments and declaring them without authority, is the answer.]

The heresy or sin is in having a view that is not an establishment view. And Trump is five for five. And that, my friends, is why the Establishment thinks that Trump is irrational. Because they cannot be wrong.