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John Goodman: Latest News of the Progress Wars

Lulled by the charms of rational nationalism, which include the growth and global spread of prosperity, the progressive mind fails to spot its twin in the shadows, irrational nationalism. The besetting sin is ignorance of the dark side, a weakness that catches liberals asleep at the wheel every time.

Battle over the idea of progress has been long-running, depending on how you want to see it, since the Enlightenment, or in recent forms since 1923, when J.B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress appeared. This seminal book summed up progress as an optimistic function of secularism, rationalism and science. It became a new religion on the Continent during the eighteenth century and—delayed by Napoleon’s wars—in England during the nineteenth century. Fortune, however, proved fickle. World wars and depression in the first half of the twentieth century destroyed the belief, replacing it with the tragic sense of life. Angst eased during the “trente glorieuses” only to mount again as those years ended ingloriously amid stagflation, unemployment, unsavoury dictators and underground torture.

The twentieth century, however, was a game of two halves. Rising liberal capitalist prosperity transformed decisively, if unevenly, home, hearth and workshop around the globe, not to mention its face, seen today by billions in comfort from forty thousand feet up. Most non-capitalist countries rushed to join in the game, as Marx predicted. The very prosperous again saw need to rebel against their oppression by the poor, a development foreseen by Aristotle long before Thomas Piketty.1 So are further optimistic cannonades in the progress wars now due? Some recent writers think so, among them Joel Mokyr, an economics and technology historian, in A Culture of Growth, and Matt Ridley, an evolutionist, in The Evolution of Everything. On the side of sceptics, and perhaps populist politicians, John Gray’s Soul of the Marionette weighs in with counter-punches.2 Who is right, or at least headed in the right direction?

Mokyr’s Culture of Growth makes a pleasant change from the tsunami of books on globalisation, for or against. He steps back in time, albeit with modernity in view, and undertakes to explain “why” and “how” what happened in Europe from 1500 to 1700 led to growth through scientific and technological progress, perhaps deeper background to David Landes’s work on the period after 1750, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. 3 Mokyr’s central idea is that writers and thinkers in Europe developed a preference for what Bacon called “useful knowledge”, rebelling against subservience to traditions of authority that Mokyr thinks characterised Europe till that point, much as it did other world cultures. To explain the unique European break-out, Mokyr tries to apply systems drawn from evolutionary and economic studies to the development of ideas by thinkers, both well-known and less well-known. Along the way he gives good accounts of influences prevailing among them. And in a separate article dealing with his leading exemplar, Descartes, he concludes, like Churchill, or perhaps Maurice Chevalier, that belief in progress is “better than the alternative”.4

But how much of this is true? Amiel maintained that “a belief is not true because it is useful”. And Bacon, a courtier high up the slippery pole of authority, thought he saw that “a man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true”. What does belief mean? What are the alternatives? Faith? Hope? Charity? Fate? The Deity? Which is better? And how can describing the factual “evolution” of any of these give rise to any judgment of value?

Few nowadays will refuse importance to the idea that knowledge should be useful to human life in the here and now rather than in the life to come, if any. This was a leading idea of the Renaissance and Reformation in major European countries in general, together with secular ideas about linear time—as opposed to classical circularity—and the value of the individual (both concepts invented by the Church and adopted by secular thinkers).5 These ideas have long been noted—although Mokyr does not note them—as crucial to the rise of new liberal ideas in social, economic and political thought as well as in arts, medicine, science and technology. Altered worldviews resulted, about history, geography and “Nature” as well as about humanity’s place in the scheme of things. Bacon’s own career illustrates this. Slipping back down the pole—he accepted so many bribes he threatened the official system of bribery—he turned to writing essays, essentially tips for apprentice courtiers, and scientific utopias. Nevertheless, the idea of revolt against authority may seem newer than it actually is. Bury mentioned it in his book, but it had short shelf life and has been soft-pedalled in subsequent skirmishes for good reason. It is wrong.

Before what today are called secular issues moved outside the Church, they were fully and usually violently discussed inside it, as the reign of Frederick II showed in Italy or Henry VIII in England. Paradoxically, the first lay people were French Protestants. Twelfth-century Albigensians and Waldensians, repressed as heretics and denied sacraments by the authorities, were forced into secular occupations as merchants, bankers, medical men and weavers. These were travelling jobs so their ideas survived and spread in extensive, if repressed networks. (Medicine and weaving were the locus of innovation, if not revolution, in scientific, technological and political affairs, much as merchants and bankers were in commerce, and possibly still are.) As happens under all repressions, the ideas eventually resurfaced with renewed energy and fanaticism, in this case, in Huguenot and Calvinist forms. When persecutions (briefly) eased during the Huguenot wars, the first secular discussions were held between Catholics and Huguenots—in the salon of one Madame Des Loges. An achievement of Renaissance and Reformation—although it may be too soon to know if it is an achievement—was to extend to anyone the critical spirit that spiritual and secular rulers never denied themselves nor allowed to others.

The Nuclear Spirit of Iran Tehran continues to exploit John Kerry’s missile loophole.

One almost has to admire Iran’s chutzpah. On Wednesday after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill, 419-3, which would impose sanctions on Iran’s ballistic-missile program, its foreign ministry called the legislation “illegal and insulting.” On Thursday Iran made a scheduled launch of a huge missile, which it says will put 550-pound satellites into orbit.

The only people who should feel surprised or insulted by this are Barack Obama and John Kerry, who midwifed the 2015 nuclear-weapons agreement with the untrustworthy Iranians. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert rightly called the missile launch a violation of the spirit of that agreement.

That is as far as she can take it because Iran’s ballistic-missile program wasn’t formally in the nuclear agreement, despite Mr. Kerry’s statements of concern during negotiations. In the end he wanted a deal more than limits on those missiles. We assume Iran’s missile engineers are at least as competent as those in North Korea, which is approaching the ability to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Advocates of the nuclear deal persist in arguing that Iran is in compliance with its provisions. It takes considerable credulousness to believe that over the course of this agreement the Iranian military won’t adapt technical knowledge gained about launch and guidance from projects like its “satellite missile” program. With or without compliance, Iran is making progress as a strategic threat.

Iran Test-Launches Rocket Designed to Carry Satellites Move could further inflame tensions with the U.S. By Asa Fitch and Aresu Eqbali

Iran successfully test-launched a rocket designed to carry satellites into space on Thursday, official media reported, a move that could further inflame tensions with the U.S. as Congress passes new sanctions on the country.

The test-launch of the rocket, called the Simorgh, or “Phoenix” in Persian, took place at the official opening of a space center around 140 miles east of Tehran, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. The Simorgh can carry satellites weighing up to 250 kilograms into low-earth orbit, it said.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.S. considers the launch to be in violation of the spirit of a landmark 2015 nuclear agreement between world powers and Iran.

She also said it violates a United Nations Security Council resolution endorsing the deal, a complaint the U.S. has lodged with respect to other Iranian missile tests. The U.N. resolution in question doesn’t specifically bar missile testing but calls on Iran not to undertake such activities.

U.S. military officials said Thursday that there was no indication that any satellite had been successfully deployed or that the rocket had reached space.

Capt. Brian Maguire, a spokesman for US Strategic Command, said the military tracks more than 24,000 objects in space that are bigger than a softball and that there was “nothing new to add” to the list on Thursday.

While Iran’s satellite launches aren’t part of its ballistic missile program, some of the country’s critics in the West see satellite-carrying rockets as abetting missile development and contrary to the spirit of international agreements. Many of the technologies used in satellite launches have applications in long-range missiles.

The U.S. sees the move as a “provocative action” and as “continued missile development,” Ms. Nauert said.

In an interview earlier this week with The Wall Street Journal, President Donald Trump said he doesn’t expect to find Iran to be in compliance with the nuclear deal when a periodic administration review is due in October, and said he would overrule his aides, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to declare Iran noncompliant. CONTINUE AT SITE

South Africa’s Great Reconciliation Is Coming Apart President Zuma has imperiled the nation. Will his successor be able to turn things around? By F.W. de Klerk

Mr. de Klerk was president of South Africa, 1989-94. This is adapted from a longer article published by Raddington Report.

South Africa’s “miracle,” the great nonracial constitutional accord negotiated in the early 1990s, is in deep trouble. Ten years ago, Jacob Zuma was elected leader of the ruling African National Congress. At the ANC’s 2007 national conference, 60% of delegates voted for Mr. Zuma in full knowledge of the 783 outstanding fraud and corruption charges against him.

They chose Mr. Zuma because of his struggle credentials, his charisma and his appeal to African traditionalists. But he turned out to be a far more formidable politician than the ANC’s left wing, which assured his victory, had anticipated. Many of the delegates who voted for him now bitterly regret their role in his ascendance.

Mr. Zuma was elected president in 2009, and soon he began to seize personal control of important state institutions by appointing loyalists to lead them. Those under his control include the National Prosecuting Authority, Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (better known as the “Hawks,” South Africa’s version of the FBI), the intelligence services, and possibly even the new Public Protector, or state ombudsman.

These institutions are now routinely abused to harass Mr. Zuma’s opponents and protect his corrupt friends and allies. Parliament has all too often been an uncritical rubber stamp for his policies. Legislators have failed to exercise proper oversight to prevent corrupt practices.

The erosion of these institutions’ independence has released a flood of corruption. Media accounts, along with a report from the former Public Protector, show that the three Gupta brothers, Indian-born business magnates, have played a brazen role in this process. They are closely associated with Mr. Zuma and have allegedly, according to thousands of leaked emails, siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars from state contracts, such as a recent locomotive deal, and redirected millions to finance the lavish wedding of one of their nephews. (The Guptas have denied wrongdoing.)

The ANC’s policy of “cadre deployment,” its euphemism for appointing party loyalists to key posts despite their lack of skills and experience, also has weakened government departments and debilitated state-owned enterprises. Since 2007, South Africa’s government has abrogated bilateral investment treaties with 13 European Union countries. It has adopted a new Mining Charter that would ratchet up requirements for black shareholding and management, though the policy is now shelved by legal challenges from the mining industry. The Zuma government is adopting legislation to limit land holdings and prohibit foreign ownership of agricultural property. Mr. Zuma has threatened to expropriate white-owned farms without compensation to accelerate land reform.

These actions, together with Mr. Zuma’s decisions to fire two competent and principled finance ministers, have led to recession and discouraged critically needed investment. South Africa’s bond ratings have been downgraded to junk.

It’s about Sovereignty By Shoshana Bryen

The disgusting terror murders of two Israeli policemen (one shot in the back) on the Temple Mount, coupled with the indescribable terror murders of three Israelis (grandfather, father, and aunt) celebrating the birth of a baby at their Sabbath dinner, were met with howls of outrage and threats of retaliatory violence and even religious war –- not by Israelis seeking vengeance, but by Palestinians!

Echoed by Jordanians, al Jazeera, and the UN, Palestinian strongman Mahmoud Abbas claimed he couldn’t be held responsible for escalated violence if Israel maintained the metal detectors on the Temple Mount installed to prevent a recurrence of violence directed at Jews.

Nothing in the Middle East is ever what it looks like. Metal detectors may be metal detectors elsewhere, but on the Temple Mount they are an attack on “Muslim patrimony.” Turkey’s President Reccep Tayyip Erdogan made that clear. “When Israeli soldiers carelessly pollute the grounds of Al-Aqsa with their combat boots by using simple issues as a pretext and then easily spill blood there, the reason [they are able to do that] is we [Muslims] have not done enough to stake our claim over Jerusalem.”

Israel, to the relief — and kind words — of the White House, has removed the metal detectors, but far from resolving the problem, the retreat encouraged Fatah to announce it would “intensify the struggle” because the “campaign for Jerusalem has effectively begun, and will not stop until a Palestinian victory and the release of the holy sites from Israeli occupation.”

Two important issues have to be sorted out here: first, the political and religious rights of Jews in their indigenous space; and second, the right not to be murdered for the “crime” of being Jewish, or Israeli, or non-Jewish and non-Israeli but being in Israel. Among the recent victims of Palestinian terror are Druze Muslim police officers Kamil Shnaan, 22 and Haiel Sitawe, and American Vanderbilt University student and U.S. Army veteran Taylor Force, as well as American and Israeli Jews.

Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people — the restoration of Jewish sovereignty to even part of the historic homeland was prayed for since the end of the Second Jewish Commonwealth and celebrated since 1948. In the 20th century, Jews and Israelis accepted various suggestions and commands for borders of a reconstituted State — everything from the lopping off of 75% of the British Mandate for a Judenrein Arab state (1917) to the split-state Peel Commission Partition Plan (1937) to the British Partition Plan (1938) to the Jewish Agency plan (1946) to the much smaller UN Partition Plan (1947).

The Arab states agreed to none of those and declined to say where Jews might then exercise sovereignty — because there was no such place. The 1949-67 lines were unacceptable and so were the post-67 lines. Israel and the U.S. posited new lines after the Oslo Accords, and in 2008 when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed 93% of the West Bank plus political rights in Jerusalem for the Palestinians (the Gaza Strip already being 100% in Palestinian hands). Mahmoud Abbas said no.

“No” was the necessary answer because the Palestinians agree there is no legitimate place for Jews to exercise sovereign authority. This goes directly to the question of the Temple Mount and metal detectors.

The Missing Weapon at Dunkirk By Steve Feinstein

Although most people under 40 are astonishingly ignorant about it, a great worldwide armed conflict known as World War II took place from 1939-1945 in the European and Pacific regions. It is relevant and important to know and understand because the outcome of World War II put into place the political, economic and geographical conditions and relationships that make the world what it is today. An understanding of the ramifications of WWII is central to comprehending how today’s world came to be. People under 40—heck, even under 60—would do themselves a huge favor if they learned some history and saw how that history affected today’s world.

The 1939 war in Europe was caused mostly by the consequences of the unresolved complications and volatile conditions that persisted following the end of World War I in 1918. World War I took place from 1914 to 1918 and was a struggle for the control of Europe, primarily between the Germans on one side against the French and British (aided by America after 1917) on the other side. Germany remained particularly unstable in the years after the end of the Great War (as WWI came to be known) and in retrospect, many historians now feel that another war in Europe was inevitable.

The inevitability of another European war after 1918 became reality on Sept. 1, 1939 when Germany turned eastward and attacked Poland. Having built up its military forces in direct contravention to post-WWI treaties, Germany overwhelmed Poland in a matter of a few short weeks, using their newly-developed blitzkrieg tactics. Unlike the ponderous, static, slow-motion trench warfare that dominated World War I, Germany saw the potential of combining fast-moving armored forces with close-support air power (dive bombers and fast low-altitude bombers) to deliver a decisive, overpowering blow to their enemy’s critical targets in the very early stages of the action. (Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics were so successful that the term has now become part of the popular lexicon, meaning any quick, overwhelming action, whether in sports or business or some other endeavor.)

Following a relatively uneventful 1939-1940 winter (a time period that came to be known as the “Phony War”), Germany resumed its hostilities against Europe in the spring of 1940, turning its attention westward. German forces blasted through the “Low Countries” of the Netherlands and Belgium and swung around to invade France from a point behind its main defensive eastern border with Germany. Following World War I, France fortified its eastern border with Germany with a massive wall of concrete and armament called the Maginot Line in an effort to prevent any future invasion by Germany. But Germany attacked the Netherlands and Belgium to the north and west of Germany, through the supposedly impenetrably dense Ardennes forest and then swung into France from behind the Maginot Line. France’s expensive, foolproof defense against German aggression proved to be a worthless folly.

As German forces poured into France, the French military was disoriented, confused and demoralized. Despite having numerical superiority over Germany in planes and equipment, the French utterly failed to mount an effective defense of their homeland. Desperate and panicked, France pleaded with Britain to send men and materiél to their aid.

The British did so, in the form of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), consisting of several hundred thousand troops along with tanks and aircraft. It was a wasted effort, as the British could not buttress the listless and disorganized French forces against the brilliantly trained, highly motivated German army. Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics decimated the allied formations, inflicting severe losses and taking great swaths of French territory.

Sometimes, what might seem to be a small decision at the time can have huge long-range consequences, with repercussions that last decades into the future, even to the point of altering the course of history. Such was the case in the battle for France in May of 1940. British Air Marshal Lord Hugh Dowding made the decision to not send any of Britain’s valuable Spitfire fighter aircraft to France for the fight against the Germans. The Spitfire was generally regarded as the best fighter plane in the world at the time (narrowly edging out Germany’s BF-109). Dowding correctly recognized that Britain would soon be in a one-on-one fight for survival against Germany and any hope Britain had of fighting off the German air force (the Luftwaffe) rested squarely on the shoulders of their small contingent of Spitfires.

Sarah Halimi case: Will truth lead to justice? Nidra Poller

Commemoration of the Rafle du vel d’hiv

There was every reason to expect the July 16th commemoration of the Rafle du vel d’hiv to be limited to the usual concern for the dead. It does not take a gigantic soul to condemn retrospectively the arrest, deportation and extermination of more than 13,000 Parisian Jews, including over 4,000 children. Since 1995, when President Jacques Chirac placed responsibility for the irreparable crime on France, subsequent presidents have followed suit. But the Front National candidate Marine Le Pen dissents. During the presidential campaign she vehemently rejected this misguided repentance: France was in London, the Vichy government was not France. Her international anti-jihad supporters didn’t even notice let alone understand this reassertion of the founding values of the party she inherited from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen.

dozen members of the Truth and Justice for Sarah Halimi committee, meeting a few days before the commemoration were resigned to the certainty that it would be restricted to the historical past. The Crif, they supposed, would maintain its lay-low institutional role and not make waves or in any way embarrass the president who, at this stage, had shown absolutely no interest in the case and its broader implications. One member suggested they wear white armbands, a knotted piece of torn sheet like the ones handed out at the recent demonstration of cyclists for Sarah.

The ceremony kicked off early in the morning on July 16th with a walk around the memorial garden guided by Serge Klarsfeld who has tirelessly unearthed and published information about the exterminated children one by one. For security reasons, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu did not accompany the small group. The Vel d’hiv ceremony was a striking contrast with the pomp and circumstance of the 14th of July parade with honored guest President Donald Trump, protected by the most imposing security detail known to man. The magnificence of French architecture, French style, French ceremony, the Champs Elysées, the mounted Garde Républicaine, combat planes with their red white and blue plumes, military cadence, well-rehearsed exactitude, the first ladies and their wardrobes (no one can compete with Melania Trump). The back-slapping shoulder-tapping good hearted-hugging friendship between the Trumps and the Macrons was almost comical…and almost sincere.

The site where the infamous winter velodrome stood until it was demolished in the mid-fifties is surrounded by nondescript buildings. The modest ceremony was held before a small audience under a pitched tent roof in the presence of a handful of survivors, a bouquet of children, a sprinkling of descendants of righteous gentiles. Brigitte Macron, contrary to what had been announced, did not attend. The commemoration, broadcast live by BFM TV, LCI and, of course, i24 news French channel, was followed by ample media commentary. As far as I could tell CNN Intl. did not cover or even mention the ceremony.

Rabbi Oliver Kaufman chanted El Mole Rachamim, Raphael Esrail recited the kaddish, followed by a minute of silence, the Marseillaise…but no Hatikvah. And then, Crif President Francis Kalifat stood upright and articulated forthrightly the message that Jews and non-Jews have been trying to communicate to French society and authorities over the past seventeen years. Yes, Jews and non-Jews. One of the ploys used to stifle this message is the constant repetition of “the Sarah Halimi murder has dismayed French Jews, the Jewish community is distressed by the failure to investigate the anti-Semitic motive of the suspect,” etc. as if it were a narrowly Jewish issue pushed by parochially Jewish worry warts and exploited to attract attention to their minority concerns.

Hamas Must Remain on Terror List, Says EU’s Top Court The European Court of Justice reversed a lower court’s decision By Laurence Norman

The European Union’s top court ruled Wednesday that Palestinian group Hamas should be kept on the bloc’s terror list, reversing a lower court decision, but said the striking down of a Sri Lankan terror group listing was appropriate.

The decisions won’t have an immediate impact. Both groups were relisted on new grounds by the EU earlier this year and any funds connected to the groups remain frozen. However, the earlier ruling on Hamas in 2014 had added to tensions with Israel and raised questions about the bloc’s counterterror work.

In the case of Hamas, the European Court of Justice said the lower court’s 2014 decision wrongly demanded stronger evidence from EU member states to keep the group on the terror list.

“We welcome the ECJ ruling which confirmed the legality of Hamas listing in 2010-2014,” said the EU embassy in Israel. “The EU continues to consider Hamas a terrorist organization; measures restricting its activity remain in force.”

The ECJ said that while specific evidence must be provided by an EU member state to blacklist a group or person, there were less strict conditions on evidence to maintain that blacklisting. All that was needed to extend the listing was evidence showing that there is a continuing risk of the person or group being involved in terrorist activities. As a result, the lower court was wrong to discard the looser evidence provided on Hamas’ continuing terror activities.

However, for the Tamil Tigers, the court said that the EU didn’t explain why it believed the Sri Lankan group, following its military defeat in 2009, still posed a terror risk.

The court therefore confirmed the lower court’s decision to annul the freezing of Tamil Tiger funds from 2011 to 2015.

E.R. Drabik The Great Immigration Non-debate

If the only justification for sky-high immigration is it’s “good for the economy”, it is a policy fundamentally flawed. Judged through the prism of existing citizens’ interests, there is no economic case that can justify the transformative changes current policies are inflicting.

According to recent media reports, President Donald Trump and his team are working with Republican senators on a bill to halve legal immigration – to 500,000 per annum – into the United States. Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Theresa May has vowed to reduce immigration to less than 100,000 a year. In launching the Tory’s recent election manifesto, May said immigration to the UK needs to be brought down to “sustainable” levels. In 2016, she argued that there was “no case, in the national interest, for immigration of the scale we have experienced over the last decade.”

Immigration has also erupted as a major issue in the lead-up to September’s New Zealand election. The country’s main opposition party, Labour, has pledged to slash the migrant intake, which is presently running at record levels. Perhaps more significant is the recent surge in support for the populist New Zealand First, led by the wily Winston Peters. The great survivor of Kiwi politics and known for his colourful utterances, Peters has slammed the government’s unfocused immigration “merry-go-round” and wants permanent visas restricted to 10,000 per annum. With his party likely to hold the balance of power come September, Peters may very well get his way.

Yet, while other Anglosphere countries look to curb immigration, Australia is moving in the opposite direction, with Canberra firmly planting its foot on the mass-immigration accelerator.

The numbers coming in are, quite frankly, insane. Over the last 12 years, annual average net immigration has tripled from its long-term historical average, to 210,000 people a year. Australia is importing a population equivalent to Hobart each and every year or an Adelaide every six years, with this turbocharged intake expected to continue for decades. By way of comparison, Australia’s annual immigration inflow is roughly equal to that of Britain’s, despite Australia only having around a third of the population.

While the populations of most other developed countries have either stabilised or declined, Australia’s population surged by a staggering 21.5% between 2003 and 2015 on the back of Canberra’s immigration-on-’roids policy. If current trends continue unabated, Australia’s population is projected to nearly double by 2050, to over 40 million. Needless to say, this immigration-fuelled population explosion will have a host of far-reaching social, cultural, demographic, economic and environmental consequences. But practically no effort has been expended by governments considering what Australia will look like in 10, 20, 40 or 80 years under this high immigration scenario. Canberra is rushing at breakneck speed while blindfolded towards a big, ultra-diverse Australia. In the long history of human folly, this must certainly be a stand-out.

Nor has the Turnbull government provided an official rationale as to why it is running the largest per capita immigration programme in the world. The entire sum of its immigration policy appears to be to bring in as many people as quickly as possible while assiduously burying any sort of public discussion on the issue. The government didn’t even mention the 2017-18 permanent intake number in the budget papers. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton made no public statement on the matter. Dutton’s position atop a new super ministry, ostensibly to enhance national security, has been pilloried by pundits on both sides of politics as ministerial overreach. Yet, at the same time it has been reported that Dutton is considering outsourcing vast swaths of Australia’s immigration system to the private sector, effectively surrendering control over our borders. Rorters, dodgy middlemen and fifth columnists will be rubbing their hands in anticipation.

There has been a steady stream of puff pieces in the mainly left-leaning media claiming that mass immigration is both necessary and beneficial. However, the arguments proffered tend to be exasperatingly specious and quickly fall apart under scrutiny. Despite the various claims by some business groups and others, Australia does not have a general skills shortage requiring heavy and sustained inflows. Moreover, current immigration policy is, in fact, largely detached from Australia’s labour market requirements. As a recent report by the Australian Population Research Institute found, any relationship that existed between skills recruited under the points-tested visa subclasses and particular shortages in the labour market has eroded under successive governments. This is resulting in large numbers of ‘skilled’ permanent migrants of dubious professional quality and relevance in fields such as IT and accounting, despite these sectors having a significant surplus of workers. In any case, the annual immigration report by the Australian Productivity Commission made it clear that about half of the skilled migrant steam includes the family members of skilled migrants, with only around 30 percent of Australia’s total permanent migrant intake actually ‘skilled’.

Nor can immigration realistically provide a solution to the ‘problem’ of an ageing population, as is frequently claimed by immigration enthusiasts. Again, the Productivity Commission has stated in numerous reports that immigration is not a feasible countermeasure to an ageing population since migrants themselves also age. As migrants grow old, even larger inflows will be required to support them, and so on ad infinitum. In other words, using immigration in an attempt to counter population ageing is the epitome of an unsustainable Ponzi scheme. Cambridge Professor of Economics Robert Rowthorn has memorably compared it to Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory’s insatiable demand for virginal victims. According to legend, the “Bloody Lady of Csejte” used to regularly bathe in the blood of chaste young women in an effort to preserve her fading youth. To stay young, she needed to constantly replenish the supply of virgins. At some point Australia’s Báthoryian policymakers are going to have to bow to the inevitable and deal with the ageing population, as Japan and other smart countries are already doing, rather than trying to delay the day of reckoning through misguided and ultimately counterproductive immigration policies.

UK Terrorism: ‘Enough’ is Not ‘Enough’ by Douglas Murray

Were terror attacks like this simply something that the British public would have to get used to, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, had suggested? What if the public did not want to get used to them?

That the UK authorities allowed the “Al-Quds Day” march to proceed through the streets of London and for Palestine Expo to assemble such an array of speakers just down the road from one of this year’s terror attacks, suggests that all that has happened this year in Britain is extremely very far from “enough”.

So, rather than expecting resilience, the British people will have to be prepared to accept still more terror — and doubtless more pointless platitudes to follow each attack — as surely as they have followed all the attacks before.

On June 3, Britain underwent its third Islamist terror assault in just ten weeks. Following on from a suicide bombing at Manchester Arena and a car- and knife-attack in Westminster, the London Bridge attacks seemed as if they might finally tip Britain into recognising the full reality of Islamist terror.

The attackers that night on London Bridge behaved as such attackers have before, in France, Germany and Israel. They used a van to ram into pedestrians, and then leapt from the vehicle and began to stab passers-by at random. Chasing across London Bridge and into the popular Borough Market, eye-witnesses recorded that the three men, as they slit the throats of Londoners and tourists, shouted “This is for Allah.”

A day later, British Prime Minister Theresa May made another appearance on the steps of Downing Street, to comment on the latest atrocity. In what appeared to have become a prime ministerial tradition, she stressed that the terrorists were following the “evil ideology of Islamist extremism”, which she described as “a perversion of Islam”. All this was no more than she had said after the Manchester and Westminster attacks, and almost exactly what her predecessor, David Cameron, had said from the same place after the slaughter of Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of London in 2013, as well as after the countless ISIS executions and atrocities in Syria in the months that followed.

Yet Prime Minister May’s speech did include one new element. She used her speech on June 4 to go slightly farther than she had previously done. There had been “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the UK, she said, before adding, “Enough is enough”.

It was a strong statement, and seemed to sum up an increasingly disturbed public mood. Were attacks like this simply something that the British public would have to get used to, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, had suggested? What if the public did not want to get used to them? As with one of Tony Blair’s statements after the July 7, 2005 London transport attacks — “The rules of the game are changing” — Theresa May’s statement seemed full of promise. Perhaps it suggested that finally a British politician was going to get a grip on the problem.

Yet now that we are nearly two months on from her comments, it is worth noting that to date there are no signs that “enough” has been “enough”. Consider just two highly visible signs that what Britain has gone through this year has been, in fact, no wake-up call at all, and that instead, whatever might have been learned has been absorbed into the to-and-fro of political events, passing like any other transient news story.

Nearly two months on from British Prime Minister Theresa May’s comments, following the Westminster terror attack, that there is “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the UK and that “Enough is enough”, it is worth noting that what Britain has gone through this year has been, in fact, no wake-up call at all, and that to date there are no signs that “enough” has been “enough”. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

The first was an event that took place only a fortnight after Theresa May’s claim that something had changed in the UK. This was the annual “Al-Quds Day” march in London, organised by the badly misnamed Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). Apart from organising an annual “Islamophobe of the Year” award — an award which two years ago they gave to the slaughtered staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — this Khomeinist group’s main public activity each year is an “Al Quds Day” in London. The day allows a range of anti-Semites and anti-Israel extremists to congregate in central London, wave Hezbollah flags and call for the destruction of the Jewish state, Israel.

As Hezbollah is a terrorist group, and any distinction between a “military” and “diplomatic” wing of the group exists solely in the minds of a few people in the British Foreign Office, waving the flag of Hezbollah in public is waving the flag of a terrorist group. If the rules of the game were indeed changing after the followers of a Hezbollah-like creed had slaughtered citizens on a bridge in London, then the promotion of a terrorist group in the same city only days later would not have gone ahead. Nor would the speeches from the “Al Quds Day” platform have been allowed to be completed without arrests being made. The speeches to the 1,000-strong crowd included the most lurid imaginable claims.