RUTHFULLY YOURS

In essence, my 2007 book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, was an extended rumination on the cultural factors that made Americans unable to talk about, study, teach, debate, let alone face and ward off Islam like “grown-ups” — honestly, logically, fearlessly. It is a cultural history of how Americans and other Western peoples evolved into the perfect dhimmi.

Today, the taboo against telling the truth about our Islamic crisis, just like the Islamic crisis itself, is far worse because it has been institutionalized, deeply rooted, selected for, and otherwise set in the postmodern equivalent of stone.

After Orlando, after Trump’s response, unique in the annals of national politics for its discussion of protecting the nation from mass Muslim immigration, and after the predictable anger directed at Trump (not the Orlando jihadist and this latest cycle of Islamic conquest that spat him out), I thought it might be interesting to look back not at the beginning, of course, but at a beginning. The first post-9/11 Western counterattack — on the West.

Chapter 8 of The Death of the Grown-Up includes the question:

Who can forget the storm of censure that rained down on former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for illuminating the differences between Western and Islamic culture, and for finding- for stating out loud – that Western culture was superior?

A decade after writing that, I wonder if anyone can remember.

It was less than two weeks after 9/11 on “our civilization,” when he spoke out, in Italian, about the superiority of Western civilization due to its principles of liberty.

The BBC translated his remarks this way:

“We have to be conscious of the strength of our civilization. We cannot put the two civilizations on the same level. All of the achievements of our civilization: free institutions, the love of liberty itself–which represents our greatest asset–the liberty of the individual and the liberty of the peoples. These certainly are not the inheritance of other civilizations such as Islamic civilization.”

And the AP wrote:

“We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights and–in contrast with Islamic countries–respect for religious and political rights, a system that has as its values understandings of diversity and tolerance. [Western civilization is superior because] has at its core, as its greatest value, freedom, which is not the heritage of Islamic culture.”

Versions vary somewhat, but the gist is clear. Maybe the bilionaire media-mogul-turned-politician was an unlikely champion of the virtues of Western civ–or anything else for that matter. After all, the almost operatically buffoonish and scandal-ridden Berlusconi was in the public eye practically as much for his outrageous financial maneuvres as for his political programs. Nonetheless, this Italian prime minister was the lone ranger on the international horizon to seize on and uphold the essence of Western civilization-liberty, prosperity, human rights-and point out the obvious: Liberty, prosperity, and human rights are not part of Islamic civilization. We have to be conscious, we must be aware of this distinction. It was something worth fighting for, Berlusconi presumed, against Islamic terrorists and the Islamic nations and networks that openly, secretly, tactically, financially or religiously support them. Some reports included Berlusconi’s additional point-strangely overlooked–that just as Western liberty had defeated communism, so, too, would it vanquish Islam.

In a pre-PC time, such remarks would have been regarded as boiler-plate bromides, the platitudes of a politician trying out new applause lines at the outbreak of war. But back to real life. According to the “international community” circa September 2001, Berlusconi couldn’t have said anything more horrifying. …

If the looming vote endorses the rejection of the EU, it will be Britain declaring, as it always has, that it is open to the world. More than that, it will be a statement of confidence, an affirmation of history and a declaration that it it is not scared nor has reason to be.
The current government is in a unique position to change Britain. While there seems to be a rise in socialist movements in both the UK and America, they are in no way mainstream. Despite Senator Bernie Sanders success in the Democratic primaries, an analysis of his supporters shows they are not the poorest, who have been voting for Mrs Clinton.[1]. Similarly in the UK, the movement that has recently taken control of theLabour opposition is an unholy alliance of unreformed hard-leftists and younger affluent voters attracted by the fresh smell of musty old ideas, the sport for whom its but a short step from social media to socialism. However the left is intellectually bankrupt, their ideas disproven by the history the right forgot to teach.

The old New Labour faction is reduced to clinging to the Big Government statists on the Continent while the new Old Labour group see the EU as corporate menace and wish to rewind the European clock to the 1970s. In the 2015 General Election the public revolted at the thought of a socialist-light party, never mind a socialist one. This is not to assume that the opposition is unelectable. There are political cycles, just as there are economic ones, and for all their faults Labour is still the alternative government. The Conservative Party made itself electable, but that is not to say it is particularly loved. A vote to leave would unquestionably be a vote for self-determination, and you cannot have political freedoms without economic ones. A radical move by the government could entrench lower tax rates for good, to paraphrase Milton Friedman “the important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically unprofitable for the wrong people to do the wrong thing.”

The reason the left can get any traction is due to the perceived failures of capitalism. One can make an argument for nationalised utilities or railways on the basis that no one is offering to build a new pipe into your home or introduce new tracks for mag-lev trains. The competition principle underpinning the free market gets no suction here. However this is to forget that nationalisation stymies innovation. It is an acceptance of the status quo. An acquiescence to the idea that this is as good as it gets. A surrender to managed decline.

The Answers

In recent times, putting one’s trust in the free market has been given a bad name. Whether it is for the 2008 crash or the behaviour leading up to it, capitalism has been under attack. Yet it was not the free market that crashed the world economy but government interventions. In both Britain and the US, the economic gains of the free market governments of Lady Thatcher and President Reagan were squandered by those that followed. While President Clinton governed as a centrist and was moderated by a Republican-controlled House, the Bush Administration that succeeded ended up spending in a most un-Republican way. The size of Mr Blair majorities effectively made him an elected dictator. After following the economic plans of Conservative Chancellor Kenneth Clarke in their first term, New Labour went on a very Old Labour spending spree in their subsequent ones. The results were to entrench crony capitalism in oligopolistic markets while government spending and regulations grew. By interfering in the markets they created bubbles. Addicted to high tax receipts, assured that all their regulators had everything in check and convinced they could manipulate the markets to solve domestic housing policy, they allowed firms to become too big to fail, then encouraged them to lend and spend like it was 1999 and we were all at the end of history. When the market tried to correct itself the systemic risk panicked policy makers into the biggest transfers of debt ever, yet seemed to absolve anyone of responsibility.

Until the West’s leaders are prepared to call a spade an invasion, all this brave talk of fighting militant Islam will result in nothing more than a few more air strikes, more summits and, just maybe, additional special forces advisers on the ground. That is not enough. We will lose.
Last Wednesday, former Army officer and now poster girl for the LGBTI community, Catherine McGregor, had a piece in the Daily Telegraph. Here is the opening sentence:

Australia is engaged in a war, though you would never grasp that from listening to our political leaders or the political class.

Well, that’s refreshing, I thought. I had previously written McGregor off as, primarily, a self-promoting activist. Maybe there’s more to her than I thought, I thought. Let mes see what she has to say. The piece started promisingly with McGregor explaining that our present troubles had their genesis a long time ago.

I do not subscribe to the populist view that this began on September 11, 2001. There have been perennial frontier clashes between Islam and the West going back to The Crusades. Muslim invasions of Europe were defeated as recently as the lifting of the siege of Vienna in 1683.

She rightly criticizes the progressives’ position: that Islam was not the Orlando killer’s motivation. Unfortunately her piece goes rapidly downhill from there, degenerating into a lament at the way that conservatives have allegedly mistreated her LGBTI cohort:

Conservatives have been just as guilty of sophistry. The worst have instinctively blamed the victims for flaunting their “perversion” and ­ piously observed that Islam and homosexuality are each derived from Satan. I could not make this garbage up.

“I could not make this garbage up”? I rather think she did. Perhaps she should have named and shamed any conservative who spouted this ‘garbage’ – a conservative of standing, that is, not some lunatic on Twitter or the utter crazies who fill the pews at the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. Perhaps she didn’t think to cite them when writing her article, but the ABC certainly did. On Thursday’s Lateline, compere Tony Jones did a satellite interview with Louis Theroux that began by quoting the crackpot congregation’s delight at the Pulse massacre. Remember, it was a Muslim who killed 49 people in an orgy of bloodshed, but Lateline chose instead to place its focus on an entirely unrepresentative group of “Christians”. Why would that be, do you think? No need to answer.

But back to McGregor, who continued in a similar vein. And at the end we are not treated to any suggestions as to how Group Captain McGregor, a senior serving officer, thinks we should prosecute this war she claims we are involved in. On her initial point — Islam’s expansionist enmity for the West — McGregor is right. But like her former boss and mentor, Australian of the Year David Morrison, she seems unable to talk the talk, let alone walk the walk.

Yes, we are at war. Most Quadrant readers have known as much for years. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Francois Hollande also said it, but whether the French president or any of the so-called leaders of the West genuinely understand what this means is highly doubtful. That they have the stomach for such a war for is an even more dubious proposition.

Europe is being invaded, an invasion that commenced many years ago and has been facilitated by one of the most self-destructive initiatives that the West could possibly devise: the European Union. That most of the invaders are unarmed is neither here nor there. Thanks to the mindless vacuity of the progressive Left and its infiltration of all our institutions, they haven’t needed to be armed. But the effect is the same. The sheer numbers of those so called ‘refugees’ guarantee that they will fester as sullen, unassimilated and parasitic communities, feeding off their host nations while coming to represent an ever-larger and more powerful demographic within them. Ultimately, as Mark Steyn has warned (see the clip below), they will take over.

On June 23 the British people will be going to the polls to choose whether they want to continue with the present system whereby 60% of British laws are made in Brussels and foreign judges decide whether those laws are legitimate or not, or whether we want to strike out for independence and the right to make all of our own laws and have our own British judges decide upon them.

It’s about whether we can recapture the right to deport foreign Islamist hate preachers and terrorist suspects, or whether under European human-rights legislation they must continue to reside in the U.K., often at taxpayers’ expense. The European Union is currently experiencing migration on a scale not seen since the late 17th century—with hordes of young, mostly male Muslims sweeping from the southeast into the heart of Europe. Angela Merkel invited them in and that might be fine for Germany, but why should they have the right to settle in Britain as soon as they get a European passport?

Surely—surely—this is an issue on which the British people, and they alone, have the right to decide, without the intervention of President Obama, who adopted his haughtiest professorial manner when lecturing us to stay in the EU, before making the naked threat that we would be sent “to the back of the queue” (i.e., the back of the line) in any future trade deals if we had the temerity to vote to leave.
Was my country at the back of the line when Winston Churchill promised in 1941 that in the event of a Japanese attack on the U.S., a British declaration of war on Japan would be made within the hour?

Was Great Britain at the back of the line when America was searching for allies in the Korean War in the 1950s?

When America decided to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War in the early 1990s, was Britain at the back of the line when we contributed an armored division that fought on your right flank during Operation Desert Storm?

Were we at the back of the line on 9/11, or did we step forward immediately and instinctively as the very first of your allies to contribute troops to join you in the expulsion of the Taliban, al Qaeda’s hosts, from power in Afghanistan?

Or in Iraq two years later, was it the French or the Germans or the Belgians who stood and fought and bled beside you? Whatever views you might have over the rights or wrongs of that war, no one can deny that Britain was in its accustomed place: at the front of the line, in the firing line. So it is not right for President Obama now to threaten to send us to the back of the line. CONTINUE AT SITE

The 57-member-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have been working hard for years to render Islam the only religion, political system and ideology in the world that may not be questioned with impunity. They have tried — and are in many respects succeeding — to ring-fence Islam as a creed beyond criticism, while reserving for themselves the right to condemn Christians, Jews, Hindus, democrats, liberals, women and gays in often vile, even violent language. Should anyone say anything that seems to them disrespectful of their faith, he or she will at once be declared an “Islamophobe.”

Like almost every world leader, Obama declares, with gross inaccuracy, that “Islam is a religion of peace”. It is politically expedient to deny the very real connection to jihad violence in the Qur’an, the Traditions (ahadith), shari’a law, and the entire course of Islamic history. They do this partly for political reasons, but probably more out of fear of offending Muslims. We know only too well how angry many Muslims can become at even the lightest offence.

“If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name. … I hope nobody ever comes after them.” – Salman Rushdie, on the PEN members who objected to giving its award to Charlie Hebdo, after 12 of its staff were murdered by jihadists.

The OIC succeeded in winning a UN Human Rights Council resolution that makes “defamation of religion” a crime. But the OIC knows full well that only Muslims are likely to use Western laws to deny free speech about their own faith. Last year, the US Congress introduced House Resolution 569, also purportedly intended to combat hate speech. It contains an oddity: it singles out Muslims for protection three times. It does not mention any other faith community.

One of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment in Europe and the United States is the principle of free speech and reasoned criticism. Democracy is underpinned by it. Our courts and parliaments are built on it. Without it, scholars, journalists, and advocates would be trapped, as their ancestors had been, in a verbal prison. It is enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, in the words

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman died of a single bullet to the head in January 2015, a day before he was scheduled to testify to Argentina’s Congress about an alleged government coverup of the 1994 Iranian terrorist bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center. There is still no official court ruling on whether he was murdered, but a new investigative report—to be published Tuesday—goes a long way in proving motive.

Joseph Humire, the executive director of the Washington, D.C., based Center for a Secure Free Society, uses thousands of documents and legal wiretaps released to the public to show how the prosecutor’s death eliminated a key stumbling block for Iran and “paved the way for [it] to move into a new phase of its information and intelligence operations in Latin America.” If the theocracy, which is the No. 1 state-sponsor of terrorism in the world, did not murder Nisman, it was the biggest beneficiary of his death.
Nisman was the special prosecutor investigating the terrorist attack on the Jewish community center—known by its Spanish initials as the AMIA. In 2006 he indicted eight former Iranian officials (including former President Ali Rafsanjani) and one Lebanese national. The following year, at Nisman’s behest, Interpol issued “red notices” for the arrest of six of the accused. But Iran took no action.

Using legal wiretaps, Nisman later built a case that President Cristina Kirchner’s government had a covert agreement with Iran to wipe Tehran’s fingerprints off the AMIA attack in exchange for Iranian oil and reopening Iran’s market to Argentine grain and beef.

Nisman had filed a criminal complaint against members of the Kirchner government the week before he died. Killing him did nothing to stop the public from learning of the contents of his report. Yet his death did put the brakes on his plan to bring the Iranian crime into the international arena. It had the potential to undermine the key foreign-policy objectives of Tehran.

Iran’s asymmetric warfare against the West demands commercial engagement because it allows Tehran to deploy political operatives specializing in propaganda, intelligence and terrorism and to finance their activities under the guise of business activity. CONTINUE AT SITE

This essay goes far beyond today’s dispute back into history and covers Jews, Judaism antisemitism and much more. Recommended reading…
In response to a string of anti-Semitic incidents involving prominent members of his party, British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has reluctantly established a commission of inquiry. Members and supporters of the Labour Party and members of relevant communities have been invited to submit evidence.

Let me be very clear: I have zero confidence in this inquiry. And not just because Mr. Corbyn’s past actions (such as calling members of terrorist organisations ‘friends’, sharing platforms with Holocaust deniers, patronage of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign) are questionable to say the least. No, a desire to whitewash, rather than shed light, is obvious from the choice of the inquiry panel.

Mr. Corbyn has called the inquiry ‘independent’ — but it is anything but. It’s Chair, Ms. Shami Chakrabarti, is an enthusiastic member of the Labour Party. In her own words

“I share the values of the Labour Party constitution and will seek to promote those values in any recommendations and findings […] not just in the Labour Party but in the world.”

Ms. Chakrabarti can claim no particular expertise on the subject of anti-Semitism. She formerly headed the campaigning organisation ‘Liberty’, a body that militates – among other things – for unrestricted freedom of speech, including the freedom to publish vile racist rants.

The inquiry’s Vice Chair, on the other hand, can certainly claim to be an expert on anti-Semitism. Corbyn’s appointment for this position is Prof. David Feldman, Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism. But, while his expertise in historical anti-Semitism is not in doubt, Prof. Feldman’s positions on contemporary anti-Semitism are – to use a typical British understatement – ‘controversial‘. As are his views on Zionism and Israel. Prof. Feldman does not see anything wrong with singling out the Jewish state for disproportionate criticism. He does not think that likening Israeli Jews to Nazis is anti-Semitic.

Vice Chair of the Inquiry, Prof David Feldman, shared a platform
with Shlomo Sand, author of a “The Invention of the Jewish People”,
which claims that modern Jews descend from Khazars, a Turkic population.
Prof. Feldman thanked Sand for writing the book.

Even more interestingly, the good professor is a member of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), a group who has stated its opinion before the inquiry even started:

“allegations of pervasive antisemitism within the Labour Party […] are, in our view, baseless and disingenuous [and] deployed politically – whether by the press, the Conservative Party, opponents of Corbyn’s leadership within Labour, or by those seeking to counter criticism of the actions of the Israeli government.”

In its own submission to the inquiry, IJV claims that

“Today, Zionism follows the path of maximalist nationalism and settler colonialism, driven largely by right-wing politicians, rabbis and settlers pursuing an ethnoreligious, messianic and exclusionary agenda. […] This maximalist Zionism is the only form of Zionism that has any political agency or power today. All the constructions of Zionism by those who propagate ‘new antisemitism’ theory are designed to spread the net of the ‘new antisemitism’ ever more widely in such a way as to outlaw recognition of this basic reality. To Palestinians it means the ongoing denial of their civil, political and human rights and the impossibility of achieving Palestinian national self-determination.”

Clearly, some of Mr. Corbyn’s best friends are Jews. No wonder that he has appointed as Vice Chair a ‘good Jew’ – rather than, for instance, the President of the Board of Deputies (the elected representatives of British Jewry). The Far Labour leadership is happy to listen to ‘Jewish Voices’, as long as they are properly ‘independent’, not excessively ‘Jewish’ and voice the correct opinions.

Antony Lerman, who prepared the Independent Jewish Voices submission,
complained in an interview about “the Israel Lobby”.

The second Vice Chair, by the way, is Baroness Royall, a Labour Party peer who has already completed an investigation into antisemitism at the Oxford University Labour Club. Folding that inquiry into the larger one and appointing Baroness Royall as Vice Chair gave Corbyn the excusenot to publish her report in full and not to implement its recommendations.

In light of all this manoeuvring and of its composition, it is clear that the ‘independent inquiry’ is nothing but a cover-up operation. Its report might as well have been written in advance. It will no doubt exonerate the Party and its new, hard-left leadership (as well as some if not all of the individuals accused of antisemitism) of any systematic and pervasive racist inclinations; it will take great pains to emphasise the difference between antisemitism and ‘anti-Zionism’; it will claim instead that anti-Jewish prejudice and anti-Jewish State ‘criticism’ (however obsessive) are two completely different kettles of fish: one rotten, the other smelling of roses.

Is Israel increasingly isolated? Is Israel experiencing a slowdown of foreign investments? Not according to the documentation of foreign investments in Israeli companies.

For instance, Hewlett-Packard (HP), a personal computers and printers global giant, which operates eight research and development centers in Israel, just established theSilicon Valley-Israel HP Tech Ventures, an investment arm seeking path-breaking US and Israeli companies in the areas of 3D, virtual reality, hyper mobility, Internet-of-Things, artificial intelligence and sophisticated machinery. Expressing confidence in the potential of Israel’s healthcare cutting-edge innovations, Orbimed, the world’s preeminent healthcare investment and asset management fund, just raised $300MN for its second Israel Fund, surpassing the $222MN first fund. In May, the German carmaker, Volkswagen, concluded a strategic partnership agreement – involving a $300MN investment – with Israel’s taxi-hailing, delivery and logistics applications start-up, Gett. And, General Motors announced the tripling of the personnel – from 100 to 300 employees – of its research and development center, in Herzliya, Israel, which has developed a number of technologies, enhancing GM’s competitive edge in the global market. Since 2011, GM Ventures, GM’s investment arm seeking growth-driven, innovative technologies, has invested in a number of Israeli start-ups.

Furthermore, during the first ten days of June, $237MN were invested – mostly by foreign investors – compared with $28MN during the first ten days of May and $327MN during the entire month of May, approaching $2BN for the first half of 2016.

Obama of the “if I had a son, he would look like [Trayvon Martin]” prattle, has a very peculiar way of showing his concern for children of all ages. In the U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry asserts that

. . . this is no time for complacency. Right now, across the globe, victims of human trafficking are daring to imagine the possibility of escape, the chance for a life without fear, and the opportunity to earn a living wage. I echo the words of President Obama and say to them: We hear you, and we will do all we can to make that dream come true. In recent decades, we have learned a great deal about how to break up human trafficking networks and help victims recover in safety and dignity. In years to come, we will apply those lessons relentlessly, and we will not rest until modern slavery is ended.” – John F. Kerry, Secretary of State

Yet, “a Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, shows that the [American] government office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior American diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 strategically important countries in this year’s Trafficking in Persons report.” In fact, “. . . analysts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons – or J/TIP, as it’s known within the U.S. government – disagreed with U.S. diplomatic bureaus on ratings for 17 countries [.]”

And, while the State Department claims that “the ratings are not politicized” many of the most egregious violators of human trafficking, i.e., Malaysia were removed from Tier 3 which is designated “for countries that fail to comply with the minimum U.S. standards and are not making significant efforts” to improve.

Even Sen. Robert Menendez, New Jersey Democrat stated that “the latest report on human trafficking was under exceptional pressure to shape the rankings to meet political demands, not the facts on the ground.”

Though Obama claims human trafficking is “one of the great human rights causes of our time,” why then is the office established in 2001 by a congressional mandate “increasingly struggling to publish independent assessments” of these offending countries? Furthermore, why did it take nine months for Obama to nominate someone to be a director for the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (J/TIP). Why the foot dragging?

In August of 2015 Investor’s Business Daily noted that “human trafficking has expanded significantly since Obama stopped enforcing U.S. border laws.” Additionally, “. . . Cuba and Mexico were removed from lists of nations that support smuggling networks. So political machinations have endangered the safety of these border-surge children, who are being lured by some of the most evil people on earth.”

Hostility towards the Palestinian Authority (PA) seems to have reached unprecedented heights among refugee camp residents.

A chat with young Palestinians in any refugee camp in the West Bank will reveal a driving sense of betrayal. In these camps, the PA seems as much the enemy as Israel. They speak of the PA as a corrupt and incompetent body that is managed by “mafia leaders.” Many camp activists believe it is only a matter of time before Palestinians launch an intifada against the PA.

Nablus, the largest city in the West Bank, is surrounded by a number of refugee camps that are effectively controlled by dozens of Fatah gangs that have long been terrorizing the city’s wealthy clans and leading figures.

Hamas, of course, is cheering on the sidelines as it watches the PA-controlled territories going to hell.

Palestinians fear that their communities may be facing a return to anarchy and falatan amni, or “security chaos.”

Recent incidents are yet another sign of the Palestinian Authority’s failure to enforce law and order, especially in refugee camps such as Balata (near Nablus) Qalandya (near Ramallah) and the Jenin refugee camp.

Moreover, these incidents are an indication of mounting tensions among rival camps inside Fatah and between the refugees and the Palestinians living in the big cities surrounding the camps.

These camps, which are hotbeds for gunmen and terror groups, have long been off-limits to the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces. Tens of thousands of Palestinians live in these three major refugee camps in the West Bank. Although the refugee camps there located in areas controlled by the PA, the Palestinian security forces do their best to steer clear of them. Attempts by Palestinian security forces to arrest camp residents wanted for various crimes have often resulted in armed confrontations.