RUTHFULLY YOURS

Snowden and his allies threaten to bring about the greatest peacetime defeat in the West’s history. His is not a noble crusade. It is sabotage and treason

Anyone who has seen The Bourne Identity, or the many similar Hollywood films, finds the Edward Snowden saga familiar. A heroic fugitive insider is hunted by a rogue government agency. As the credits roll, our man on the run is vindicated, thanks to a combination of media coverage and belated congressional scrutiny. He gets the girl. The villains go to jail.

It is easy to go along with that narrative, particularly for journalists. We instinctively side with David, not Goliath. We thrill to the idea of disclosing secrets. We flinch at any constraint on press freedom. We may have little chance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize (for which Snowden has been nominated) but we certainly cheer his chances.

I disagree. Snowden is at best a self-indulgent “useful idiot” and at worst a traitor. His theft and publication of secret documents is anything but heroic.

His accomplices deserve censure and probably prosecution. The applause they have received reflects astonishing naiveté and hypocrisy. A whistleblower needs to show clear and convincing evidence of abuse, and limit his breach of confidentiality to matters that concern it. Snowden did not.

The documents published do not show the National Security Agency as a rogue agency. He has not found a single deliberate breach of Americans’ privacy. Like other bits of government, the NSA makes mistakes and chafes against its constraints. It is in need of reform. But Snowden has shown no sign of systematic, gross wrongdoing, or of contempt for judicial, legislative and political oversight, by the NSA.

The Snowdenistas, as I call them, say they have sparked a vital debate. It is good to discuss how electronic meta-data should be stored (by governments and by companies). But this is a limited benefit. It does not justify the catastrophic damage done to our intelligence agencies and diplomacy.

The Snowdenistas have published material which has no

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing in itself, but an overdose of arrogance makes it infinitely more so. Doubt that? Just lend an ear to the oracular pronouncements on global climate by those whose greatest skill is not comprehension but a talent for hogging the microphone.

Quadrant Online contributor Steven Kates passionately set down the dichotomy between those who create and those so riven by envy that they would bring it all down. True enough, but how did we get to this point? It is hard to be definitive but, leaving aside the fanatics, I think so-called experts have played a part in warping the minds and feeding the prejudices of those who in normal course would have relied on their common sense to guide them.

Unfortunately these days experts abound and are vocal. The common man and woman are intimidated lest they commit a faux pas by disagreeing with the received wisdom of experts. Take evolutionary theory. How many children, now adults, have been exposed to that diagram showing man emerging by serendipity through numbers of incarnations from his ape-like ancestors? Now don’t get me wrong. Evolution seems beyond much question except, perhaps, to religious nuts who think the Earth is 6000 years’ old. But, but … evolution based on sheer chance; on random mutations and natural selection? It simply doesn’t pass the sniff test. Only very clever people could believe it in that form without there being much more compelling evidence.

Climate change is the latest tablet of stone. Tell us again, experts, why the warming between about 1975 and, say, 2005 was attributed absolutely to man-made CO2 when it warmed by nearly as much between 1910 and 1940? And why did it cool between 1940 and 1975, when CO2 was rising, and why has the global temperature remained broadly constant since around 2000? I don’t get it.

Those who engage in purely academic debate can remain aloof. Those who want to turn our economic life upside down because of their theories have a duty to get down and dirty on our terms and explain (and re-explain) their case ad nauseam.

Many economists have a theory. They, too, have turned economic life upside down; literally so. The theory, originating with Keynes, is that spending money creates wealth. That’s curious. You might say, with your powers of common sense, ‘it has never worked for me.’ Put that aside and follow the theory and see where it leads.

How do you replace a heritage of assimilation and civil liberties with diversity and repression of free speech? First, promote the mere giving of offence as subject to prosecution. After that, count on professional panderers like Bob Carr to agree that ethnic voting blocs need those special protections and, of course, lots of handouts.

In a recent essay at Quadrant Online[1] I described how the debate over Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act reveals some of the inner workings of the multicultural industry. I argued that 18C is being contested the way two desperate combatants might fight over a dropped sword. The mostly Anglo critics want to beat the sword into a plough share in the name of free speech. The multicultural brigade want the sword for its original purpose, as a weapon to protect their ethnic groups and cosmopolitan values from what they see as a racist white Australia. The fight over 18C is really about group power and the inverted ethnic hierarchy on which multiculturalism is based.

This interpretation is confirmed by an ABC report of a new lobby dedicated to the defence of section 18C, mentioned in my earlier comment. Formed in November, 2013, the group is nicknamed the “United Nations of Australia”. The most recent meeting took place in Melbourne on the April 10. It brought together leaders of the Indigenous, Arab, Jewish, Chinese, Korean, Greek and Armenian communities.[2] Their goal is to retain Section 18C, which prohibits statements that “insult, offend, humiliate or intimidate” on the basis of race. The group is explicitly ethnic in makeup and agenda. Excluded from the meeting was any representative of the large Anglo contingent of the pro-18C lobby. And, of course, no one had thought to invite a representative of white Australians vilified in the media, discriminated against in employment, airbrushed from school curricula, excluded from multicultural forums and assaulted by ethnic gangs.

The central place of tribal interests in the defence of section 18C is further evidence that ethno-cultural diversity has multiple costs, which I reviewed in Quadrant.[3] Diversity reduces social cohesion, welfare rights, foreign aid, democracy, equality, governmental efficiency and, in most countries, economic growth. It is the second strongest predictor of civil conflict after lack-of-democracy. Unfortunately, diversity also tends to undermines democracy itself by dividing society into competing ethnic camps. In Australia the multicultural lobby is willing to trade the civil liberty of free speech to gain state censorship of the majority.

As another Passover begins, the echoes of “Once we were slaves and now we are free” and “Next year in Jerusalem” resound briefly and then fade into the background noise of everyday life. We can board a plane tomorrow and fly off to Jerusalem. Some of us are already there now. But will that make us free?
Since Egypt we have become slaves again, lived under the rule of iron-fisted tyrants and forgotten what the very idea of freedom means. And that will likely happen again and again until the age ends. What is this freedom that we gained with the fall of a Pharaoh and the last sight of his pyramids and armies?

Freedom like slavery, is as much a state of mind as a state of being. It is possible to be legally free, yet to have no freedom of action whatsoever. And it is possible to be legally a slave and yet to be free in defiance of those restrictions. External coercion alone does not make a man free or slave, it is the degradation of mind that makes a man a slave.

What is a slave? A slave is complicit in his own oppression. His slavery has become his natural state and he looks to his master, not to free him, but to command him. Had the Jews of Egypt merely been restrained by physical coercion, it would have been enough to directly and immediately smash the power of the Egyptian state. But their slavery was mental. They moaned not at the fact of slavery, but at the extremity of it. When their taskmasters complained to Pharaoh, it was not of slavery, but of not being given the straw with which to build the bricks.

The worst slavery is of the most insidious kind. It leaves the slave able to think and act, but not as a free man. It leaves him with cunning, but not courage. He is able to use force, but only to bring other slaves into line. And most hideously, this state of affairs seems moral and natural to him. This is his freedom.

George Leef, director of research for the North Carolina-based John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, authored a Forbes op-ed article titled “Obama Administration Takes Groupthink To Absurd Lengths.” The subtitle is “School Discipline Rates Must Be ‘Proportionate.’” (http://tinyurl.com/mxnlg9h). Let’s examine some of the absurdity of the Obama administration’s take on student discipline.

Last January, the departments of Justice and Education published a “guidance” letter describing how schools can meet their obligations under federal law to administer student discipline without discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin. Its underlying threat is that if federal bureaucrats learn of racial disproportionality in the punishments meted out for misbehavior, they will descend upon a school’s administrators. If schools cannot justify differentials in rates of punishment by race or ethnic group, they will face the loss of federal funds and be forced to undertake costly diversity training.

The nation’s educators can avoid sanctions by adopting a racial quota system for student discipline. So as Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, predicts, “school officials will either start disciplining students who shouldn’t be, or, more likely, will not discipline some students who ought to be.” I can imagine school administrators reasoning this way: “Blacks are 20 percent of our student body, and 20 percent of suspensions this year have been of black students. In order to discipline another black student while maintaining our suspension quota, we will have to suspend some white students, whether they’re guilty or not.” Some administrators might see some injustice in that approach and simply ignore the misbehavior of black students.

Leef cites Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, who wrote in City Journal (http://tinyurl.com/9k648fj) that “the Departments of Education and Justice have launched a campaign against disproportionate minority discipline rates, which show up in virtually every school district with significant numbers of black and Hispanic students.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/brandeis-surrender-to-the-brotherhood-on-ayaan-hirsi-ali-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

Brandeis’ Surrender to the Brotherhood on Ayaan Hirsi Ali — on The Glazov Gang

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dr. David Wood, the host of the Trinity Channel’s live talk show, “Jesus or Muhammad?” He has been in more than 40 public debates with Muslims, and he runs the website AnsweringMuslims.com.

Dr. Wood discusses Brandeis’ Surrender to the Brotherhood on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and takes us behind the scenes of a university’s shameless surrender to Sharia:

A bombshell revelation has brought the IRS scandal to a new level. Judicial Watch has released internal IRS communications revealing that former Tax Exempt Organizations director Lois Lerner was in contact with the Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding whether it was possible to criminally prosecute tax-exempt groups she believed had “lied” about their political activity. Judicial Watch obtained the documents by successfully filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the IRS in October 2013, following the agency’s stonewall of four FOIA requests dating back to the previous May.

Contained in those documents is an email exchange between Lerner and Nikole C. Flax, then-Chief of Staff to then-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller. On May 8, 2013, Lerner sent the following email to Flax:

“I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ … He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who “lied” on their 1024s –saying they weren’t planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures. DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs.

I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS…”

Flax responded the next day:

“I think we should do it – also need to include CI [Criminal Investigation Division], which we can help coordinate. Also, we need to reach out to FEC. Does it make sense to consider including them in this or keep it separate?”

Europe’s biggest failure vis-à-vis Turkey is another example of its unwillingness to face unwelcome truths: that whenever Islamists go into politics, they never turn out to be moderates.

EU leaders are now, belatedly, coming to realize that Erdogan is not their friend.

Last week, German politician David McAllister, the leading candidate of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) for next month’s European Parliament election, had a message for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. There is no room in the European Union, McAllister said, for “the Erdogan Turkey of 2014.” The politician, whose father was Scottish, is the former Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, Germany’s second largest state, and a heavyweight in Merkel’s party.

The CDU has always been ambivalent about Turkey’s EU membership. Like other major parties in Germany, the CDU hopes to attract the votes of the growing number of Germans of Turkish origin, while, at the same time, the party is well aware that a majority of indigenous Germans oppose Turkey’s entry into the EU.

Europe’s political leaders have been promising the Turks EU membership for decades. The recent actions of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, however, offer the CDU a perfect excuse to distance itself from Turkey at a moment when it is politically expedient to do so. Whenever national elections are due, it is always electorally advantageous to cater to the Turkish vote. However, when European elections are due and parties need to convince as many indigenous voters as possible to turn out and vote, it is rewarding to speak out against Turkey. Lambasting “the Erdogan Turkey of 2014” is then an opportunity not to be missed.

The problem of Islam in public schools has been allowed to snowball to vast proportions… not hundreds but thousands of British schools have come under the influence of Muslim radicals.

Bains was also instructed to stop teaching citizenship classes because they were deemed to be “un-Islamic,” and to introduce Islamic studies into the curriculum, even though Saltley is a non-faith school.

Schools should not be allowed to become “silos of segregation.” — Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister

British authorities say they have widened their investigation into an alleged plot by Muslim fundamentalists to Islamize public schools in England and Wales.

The expanded probe now encompasses at least 25 schools in Birmingham, up from four initially. Investigators are also looking into new allegations that Muslim extremists have infiltrated schools in other British cities, including Bradford and Manchester.

The plot—dubbed Operation Trojan Horse—consists of a strategy to wrest control of schools by ousting non-Muslim head teachers and staff at secular state schools and replacing them with individuals who will run the schools according to strict Islamic principles.

A copy of a strategy document outlining the plot was sent to the Birmingham City Council in November 2013, but its existence did not become known to the public until March 2014, when it was leaked to the London-based newspaper, the Sunday Times.

Although police are still working to determine the authenticity of the document, what remains beyond dispute is that Muslim hardliners are subverting the British school system in ever greater numbers.

Since Operation Trojan Horse came to light, British authorities have been inundated with more than 200 whistleblower complaints in Birmingham alone—including emails, letters and telephone calls from parents, teachers and school leaders—about the imposition of conservative Islamic practices in primary, secondary and community schools, as well as in publicly-funded academies.

Between the February 2011 fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the July 2013 military coup that ousted the ill-fated Muslim Brotherhood regime, I published nearly two dozen articles contending that Egypt’s economy was the problem. Egypt is a banana republic without the bananas, dependent on imports for half its caloric consumption. The foreign policy establishment ignored Egypt’s economic free-fall, focusing its tunnel vision on the players on the political stage. The liberal internationalists of the Obama administration agreed with the neoconservatives that the “Arab Spring” would give rise to a new era of Muslim democracy, and both John Kerry and John McCain counseled patience and sympathy for Egypt’s Islamists. That this was delusional is demonstrated by events: the majority of Egypt’s adult population, nearly 40 million people, took to the streets to demand the Brotherhood’s ouster in the summer of 2013.

Now, long after the fact, comes Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations, warning of Egypt’s impending insolvency and urging American aid to prevent it. In what the CFR calls a “Contingency Planning Memorandum,” Dr. Cook writes:

Egypt is experiencing a deep economic crisis. The country’s foreign currency reserves are less than half of what they were before the January 2011 uprising, threatening Egypt’s ability to pay for food and fuel. Egypt’s budget deficit is 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and its overall debt, which is the result of accumulated deficits, is more than the country’s economic output. In this difficult economic climate, roughly 45 percent of Egyptians live on less than two dollars per day. Inflation, which reached as high as 12.97 percent after the July 2013 military coup, is currently at 11.4 percent. Tourism revenue—traditionally a primary source of foreign currency along with Suez Canal tolls and remittances from Egyptians working abroad—is less than half of what it was in the last full year before the uprising. Foreign direct investment has dried up outside the energy sector. Unemployment remains high at 13.4 percent. Among the unemployed, 71 percent are between fifteen and twenty-nine years old. This economic weakness makes it politically difficult to address the problems that contribute to a potential solvency crisis because the necessary reforms will impose hardship on a population that is already experiencing economic pain.