RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/v-s-naipauls-universal-civilization-1534200168

V.S. Naipaul, who died Saturday at 85, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Oct. 11, 2001, a month after al Qaeda’s attack on the American homeland. As many in the West were still struggling to fathom what drove Islamist fanatics to commit mass murder, it was reassuring to see the Nobel go to Naipaul, who had unapologetically insisted on the universality of Western beliefs.

In the days after 9/11, when a sense of spiritual decapitation briefly prevailed, a lecture Naipaul had delivered in 1990 at New York’s Manhattan Institute leapt back to life from the archives. I received it by email from a friend, read it hungrily, and passed it on to others I thought would be healed by it.

The lecture was titled “Our Universal Civilization,” and in it Naipaul tried to answer what he called some “very serious questions”: “Are we—are communities—only as strong as our beliefs? Is it enough for beliefs or an ethical view to be passionately held? Does the passion give validity to the ethics? Are beliefs or ethical views arbitrary, or do they represent something essential in the cultures where they flourish?”

In response, Naipaul extolled some of the social values al Qaeda had seemingly just attacked, among them “the pursuit of happiness” and “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/13/remembering-nobel-prize-winner-v-s-naipaul-a-brilliant-defender-of-humane-values/ With the death of the Nobel Prize winning author, we’ve lost a great writer who both valued civilization, and saw the world as it is, not how he wished it to be. There are no rose-colored glasses when reading a V.S. Naipaul book. It’s a yellowed, sere world he looks upon, and once you […]

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270999/robert-spencers-surpassing-study-age-old-ongoing-hugh-fitzgerald

Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad tells, in magnificent measure, the story of how, over 1400 years, the votaries of Islam have observed the religious duty of holy war, or Jihad, warfare against the Unbelievers. Reviewers sometimes insist that “if you can only read one book on the subject, read this one.” Here such insistence is not hyperbole. Spencer tells in lively fashion a deadly story, of how what started with a few dozen followers in a dusty town in western Arabia became today’s ideological empire of 1.6 billion members of the Islamic community or umma, mostly to be found in 57 Muslim-majority countries, but now also including hundreds of millions of Muslims in Europe, North America, and India.

How did this happen? How did Muhammad manage to survive early setbacks in Mecca to become the ruler of Arabia? Spencer offers overwhelming evidence that along with brute force, deceit and terror were Muhammad’s chief weapons. “War is deceit,” he insisted. He told his followers that “I have been made victorious through terror.” These — brute force, deceit, and terror — have remained the chief weapons of Jihad throughout history.

Spencer takes us through the campaigns that allowed Muhammad to go from near-fatal weakness to strength. Muhammad’s victory over a much larger enemy at the Battle of Badr in 624 signaled a change in his fortunes; he never looked back. Muhammad relied until 628 only on force to defeat his enemies. But in that year, he agreed to the Treaty of Al Hudaibiyya, which would become the first example of victory through guile. Muhammad had signed a truce treaty (hudna), with the Quraysh tribe of Mecca. It was to last ten years. One of its provisions required Muhammad to return to the Quraysh any member of the tribe who came to him. When a woman of the Quraysh came over to the Muslims, Muhammad broke the treaty (after 18 months) by refusing to send her back, claiming — wrongly — that the treaty only required him to send back men, not women. Muhammad was willing to break the treaty because his forces had grown stronger; he was now prepared to take on the Quraysh. The violation of this treaty by Muhammad has been the model for Muslim treaty-making with Unbelievers ever since; it was even mentioned by Yasser Arafat, to signal to his Muslim followers that they need not worry; he had no intention of meeting his commitments under any agreement signed with Israel. It would be salutary if those who today pressure Israel to sign this or that treaty with the “Palestinians” were to learn about the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya and, for many Muslims, its enduring significance.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/09/thomas-sowells-discrimination-disparities-book-racism-america-needs/

Sometimes the slim volumes are the most deadly. Such is the case with Thomas Sowell’s “Discrimination and Disparities,” which in fewer than 200 pages lays bare the grave faults and assumptions of people on both sides of the political divide about outcomes for racial groups. In a long, storied career, Sowell has been a beacon of reason and evidence-based thinking. In this book, he makes the fruits of his labors accessible to almost anyone. Anyone who wishes to think, speak, or write on race in America would be remiss in not reading it.

Sowell takes aim at two typical explanations for differences in the success of racial groups. One, most associated with the Left, is that discrimination by racial groups in power is the primary force creating bad outcomes for the groups out of power. The other, most associated with the Right, is that racial groups have inherent abilities or disabilities based on factors such as IQ distribution that lead to unequal outcomes.

Not only does Sowell argue that neither of these explanations is sufficient, he also effectively shows that the truth does not lie in some simple combination of the two. In fact, the issue is vastly more complicated than merely finding which balance between these two competing ideas best tells us the truth about why outcomes are what they are.