Last week, two Jewish girls from London, volunteer teachers at a Christian school in Zanzibar, were attacked with acid by Muslims. Why? Religious hatred.

The two men – one of them (?) now arrested is a Muslim preacher – did it passing by on a motorcycle as the girls walked along the road.

The pictures are from the Mail Online.

Kirstie Trup and Katie Gee, both 18, of Hampstead, north London, had acid thrown at their faces and bodies by Muslim attackers on the island of Zanzibar

This is from AINA, the Assyrian International News Agency. It is written by Farid Ghadry, a Muslim whom we applaud:

I indict Islam.

Yes, I indict it for ignoring the terror against two innocent British teens in Zanzibar who were doused with acid. I do not give a damn what the reasons were and what justification those bastard Islamists had to change permanently the good lives of two innocent young teens who were there to help Muslims in the first place.

What is Holy about Ramadan when the Muslim bastards in Zanzibar use it to commit the unholiest of acts?

I am really, really angry.

Where are our Muslim leaders to speak out against such terror and to commit, once and for all, to its eradication?

Where is the King of Saudi Arabia, or the President of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation? Cooperation on what? With the OIC’s silence, how could not anyone interpret “Cooperation” to mean to cooperate to disfigure the innocent?

Where is the Grand Imam of al-Azhar University, or the Arab League, or Ayatollah Khamenei, or the millions of other religious Muslim leaders?

Where is Erdogan of Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are they silent in the face of such atrocities committed in the name of Islam?

Where are all our collective Muslim voices to indict these senseless acts not even animals in a jungle are capable of?

Islam has become synonymous with terror and the target of justifiable and global contempt. The religion I was born into, and which shelters 1.3 billion people, has turned into a weapon of global destruction against the other 5.7 billion people who do not adhere to Muslim principles.

Islam no longer exists for Islam. Islam exists today to destroy non-Muslims.

I indict all of Islam because the religion that is supposed to support the needy and the helpless has become a cult of terror against the self-sufficient and the enterprising.

I indict all the silent Muslim leaders for their weakness. With their silence, they are feeding these acts of barbarism to define Islam.

I indict them for all the acts of terror committed in the past against thousands upon thousands of innocent people.

I am really, really angry at all the Imams, the Grand Muftis, the Sheikhs, the Mawlawis, the Ayatollahs, the Emirs, the Kings, the Princes, and whatever titles they embrace.

At the end, if they do not indict these acts publicly and couragousely all of them share in the savagery of Zanzibar. That is their legacy.

The Muslim leaders in the OIC and the Arab League must awaken from their slumber by committing serious funds to re-educate our youth and to rid the world of the cancer within, instead of remaining silent or accommodating the evil source of Islamic terror.

It is obvious political correctness and generous aid by the West is not making a difference.

In fact, Western countries have donated hundreds of billions of Dollars in foreign aid to Muslim countries, and we Muslims pay back the West by dousing their children, who came to help our poor and disfranchised, with acid. It is truly sickening.

Something must change. The West must change course to help us find our way, the hard way. This status quo cannot go on.

If you want to help Islam, then it is time to tie your help with what our leaders do or say, and not by how much intelligence they deliver.

Otherwise, stop buying our oil and gas. Let us perish in our own waste. Maybe, then, our leaders will speak out and cooperate with the West based on equality and not based on them forcing Islam upon the rest of the world.

Enough is enough. I am really, really angry.

May those British teens, and all who were injured by Islamic terror in the past, find peace and happiness. May they, and their families, forgive us for not speaking loudly enough.

Horrified as we are by what the Muslim attackers did to the girls, and much as we pity them, we declare they were foolish and wrong to go to Zanzibar to “help the poor and disenfranchised”.

Knowing that a plea to All Mankind to give up the lethal stupidity of religion would be whistling down the wind, we plead instead (no doubt quite as uselessly) only with philanthropists, do-gooders, altruists: Give up your moral vanity. Stop stroking and primping your egos by inflicting your benevolence on other people. 

Yesterday we discussed the dying out of the indigenous European peoples as their numbers halve with each generation. We asked why they are letting this happen, why fewer and fewer children are being born. We argued that it is hard to make a case that Socialism as an economic system is responsible for the death of Europe, or that materialism is responsible for it, or that the lost influence of the old-time religions account for it. But today we argue that Socialism as an ideology may have a lot to do with it.

*

As far as we can discover, the idea that a person should care less for himself than for anybody and everybody else, was introduced into history by the author of Christianity, St Paul.* It is not an injunction of Judaism, which does require its followers to “love [respect?] your neighbor as yourself” but not more than yourself. It has no precedent in Greek philosophy, nor in any of the Far Eastern religions which are intensely concerned with personal benefit. None of them are moral religions. True, Buddhism teaches tolerance, but in order to do yourself good, to help you personally on your way to bliss.

Christianity might seem to do that when it promises heaven to those who do good works. But “redemption” by good works was not St Paul’s idea. It was introduced into the Catholic faith later. St Paul taught that only the grace of Christ Jesus could save you. (And that was Luther’s and Calvin’s doctrine too.) So you must do good works, put others before and above yourself without expecting any reward on earth or in heaven. You must  accept that your life is to be hard, and that your afterlife may be even worse. But at least for the afterlife there is hope. Heaven is the aim. If you attain it, whether by grace or good works, there – only there – you as an individual being will find joy. This life is not to be valued.

It is a ruinous idea. It can mean, if taken to heart, that you should not strive for happiness, or even survival. It can mean that every time you supply a want of your own, however basic and essential – food, clothing, protection, information, healing – you will feel self-reproach. As total selflessness is impossible, it’s a recipe for failure and consequent shame, guilt, self-contempt, even self- hatred. It is against not just human but animal nature, since if  you do not eat and protect yourself you will not survive. If human beings were not innately selfish the race would have died out long ago. Indeed, it would never have arisen.

Christians might say that it’s okay, of course, to see to your own survival needs. Some might even grant you the moral right to supply them amply – just so long as you are also attentive to the needs of others. You only have to consider them more than yourself – liberal Christians might tell you – when that choice inescapably presents itself.

No doubt, in the everyday life of Christians, the injunction to care more for others than for yourself is honored more in the breach than the observance. But the principle remains. It is the essence of Christian morality.

Over some centuries it became the ideal of multitudes and persisted for generations. What follows logically from it? Nobody is judged according to his individual merits. Everyone is more important than you are not because of what he is or does, but simply because he is part of the mass.

To think like that is to think sociologically. And from the notion that the individual is of less account than the mass arises another: that the individual is of no account at all, and only the mass, the “community”, matters.

But the mass, the community, has no identity. It has no personhood. It has no aspirations. Where only the many matter, nobody matters.

The spread of Christianity had a lot to do with the fall of the Christianized Roman Empire. Just how much is voluminously debated. At the very least, the Christian doctrines of universal love and not resisting evil mitigated against vigorous defense when enemies struck. And for a thousand years, from the time Rome fell in the late fifth century, Christianity with its impossible injunctions and its terrors of Hell lay heavy on the peoples of Europe.

As the dominant ideology, Christianity faded with the fading power of the Church. The Renaissance and then the Enlightenment shifted the center of human concern from heaven back to earth. Once again, as in pre-Christian times, the proper business of men was with men. This life mattered again. The individual mattered again.

But the Idea – that terrible, misery-making, destructive idea that you must sacrifice yourself for the rest – did not completely fade away. It changed its host. It became the central idea of Socialism.

Socialism is the child of Christianity. Yes: the secular religion of Socialism, though it has no God, no heaven, is – in its DNA so to speak – Christian. As an ideology it received its central Idea from Christianity: the Idea that only the mass, the many, the community matters, not the individual and his personal life.

Christians may deny it – do deny it – but the Christian Idea is the Socialist Idea. We frequently read Christian apologetics claiming that Christianity created “the individual”, and by doing so made Europe great. Europe’s greatness, however, only began – for the second time since the fall of the Roman Empire – with the dispersal of the darkness that Christianity had spread over it. But then Socialism was born, and came into its inheritance. In its turn it became the dominant ideology of Europe.

Because the mass has no identity, no personhood, no aims or aspirations, Socialism is as anti-human as its mother. While its  goal is not beyond and above the earth, it is in the equally abstract, equally unknown, equally phantasmagorical Future.

Now the Europeans are dying out. Multitudes of them care nothing for their national culture and history. Some positively hate all that, and are happy to let Muslims take over their countries and govern them under a different, ancient, cruel law.

Can their death as a mass, as communities, be the end result of Christianity-Socialism? If they are no longer deceived that paradise awaits them either on or above this earth, for what should they live? Are the nations dying out simply because people can see no reason why they should go on existing?

* For the many substantiating quotations from the letters of St Paul, and the source references, see our post Tread on me: the making of Christian morality, December 22, 2011.

Jillian Becker   August 12, 2013

In a Townhall article today, David Stokes comments on a Time magazine cover story titled  “The Child Free Life: When Having It All Means Not Having Children.”  The theme is interesting to us – the scarcity of children in most of the First World, particularly in Europe.

The author recalls a speech President Theodore Roosevelt gave in France:

Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that chief of blessings for any nations is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of healthy children so that the [human] race shall increase and not decrease. If that is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to the deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done.

That’s right. Theodore Roosevelt told the French that they needed to keep having babies.

At the time of Roosevelt’s speech, France was a major world power. Today—not so much.

And he ascribes a reason for the numerical decline of the French nation:

There is enough blame for such decline in global influence to go around, but the increased secularism of Europe, with its penchant for socialized everything, has certainly played a role.

By “secularism” David Stokes clearly means the increasing absence of religious belief in states that have long – if not always – been secular. It  is the absence or fading of religious belief that he blames (at least in part) for the dying out of Western nations.

Now more than 100 years later, there is an even greater threat to their cherished way of life. If only the French today would rediscover Teddy’s advice and reverse the birthrate trend—they might have a fighting chance. But such is the mindset of secularism, it is all about self and “fulfillment.” Issues of family, not to mention progeny are secondary, if thought about at all. Marriage is deferred—even eschewed. Children are planned—or better, planned around. And over time the birth rate in Europe has fallen far short of what is needed to keep up with the various demands of the future. In other words, the nations are aging. There are fewer children, yet more grandparents—a trend that will continue and accelerate.

All he says about the trend is true, but is he right about the cause?

He goes on, factually correct:

It takes a fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman to keep a nation’s population stable. The United States is drifting away from that. Canada has a rate of 1.48 and Europe as a whole weighs in at 1.38. What this means is that the money will run out, with not enough wage-earners at the bottom to support an older generation’s “entitlements.”

But even beyond that, the situation in France also reminds us of the opportunistic threat of Islamism. It is just a matter of time before critical mass is reached and formerly great bastions of democratic republicanism morph into caliphates. In the United Kingdom the Muslim population is growing 10 times faster than the rest of society. In fact, all across Western Europe it’s the same. The cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam are on track to have Muslim majority populations in a decade or two. A T-shirt that can be seen on occasion in Stockholm reads: “2030—Then We Take Over.”

And he concludes:

A few years ago, Britain’s chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, decried Europe’s falling birthrate, blaming it on “a culture of consumerism and instant gratification”. 

“Europe is dying,” he said, “we are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.”

The Rabbi was right, and so was Teddy.

Was the Rabbi right?

Why are the indigenous peoples of Europe and other parts of the First World dying out?

Why are the Europeans willing to let the Muslims take over their countries?

Is it because of socialism? 

On the one hand it can be argued that socialism discourages you from having children because the state – you believe  – will look after you in your old age. It will care for you if you fall ill. It will make it easy for you to house and feed yourself because, if you don’t want to work, it will give you money. No need for more wage-earners in the family.

And there is a strong streak of anti-human life in the ideology of the far left. Among environmentalists in particular. They say that there are too many people on the planet  – and angrily deny that the numbers are declining. Some even want there to be no people on the earth at all. They maintain that the absence of human beings would be better for shrimps and reptiles.

On the other hand, the socialist welfare state pays people to have children. In America, for instance, millions of women can have children without having a husband or wage-earner to help keep them because with every baby they get more money from the state. And the state also pays for the children’s education.

But then again, socialist economics don’t work. Sooner or later socialism brings an economy to disaster. Is it anticipation of dire poverty that keeps people from breeding? About half the voters in most western countries regularly vote for socialism, so that can’t be a compelling reason.

All this considered, the argument that socialism is to blame for the suicide of the West is not convincing. It may account for an eventual death by inanition, but not for the slow suicide.

Is it because of “consumerism”?

Perhaps. But what proof is there? Do anecdotes about individuals and couples saying they prefer to use their money for a high standard of living – cars, travel and so on – rather than on raising children, prove the case? Not unless they reflect the decisions of a majority, and who has collected and counted them?

By “consumerism” (the preferred term now for what they used to call “materialism” or “conspicuous consumption”) its critics mean comfortable living, good cars, travel and so on. In other words, they ascribe the fall in the birth-rate to prosperity.

Did prosperous people in past times not have children, or choose to have only a few? Not as far as we know. In Victorian times most families, rich as well as poor, were large. And since those who owned much had much to pass on and keep in the family, wealth may have positively stimulated reproduction.

But of course in the days when wealthy families were large, parents had servants to look after their children. Most people now, even if they can afford live-in servants, do not have them. So perhaps it’s not so much the desire for more luxurious living but the desire not to be “tied down” by children. Having to stay in with them at night. Not being able to go on holiday when you choose because of their school schedule. Not being able easily to part from their other parent when you’re sick of him or her.

Implied by the word “consumerism”  is another word: “capitalism”. Though not all who condemn consumerism may be aware that the one word is haunted by the other. As David Stokes’s column appears at Townhall, we may reasonably assume that he’s a conservative. American conservatives are not consciously against capitalism; they are against socialism, as we are. But too many of them are religious. Too many of them are Christians. It is Christian puritanism that inspires the strange prejudice  – if  not against prosperity as such, against the signs of it: high living standards, costly cars, expensive travel and so on. Only in theory, we observe. We confidently expect that most religious critics of “consumerism” have – or aspire to have – a high standard of living for themselves, own costly cars, and jet to their summer vacation on a cruise-ship or a multi-starred hotel. They are seldom in fact less materialistic or less self-indulgent than the “secularists” they scorn. And they are not against having children. The American fertility-rate – which is the measure of population stability, or increase, or decrease – has until very recently been stable while Europe’s declined.

But what of religion? Is its absence the cause we are looking for?

Is it because of “secularism”?

By “secularism” David Stokes clearly means the fading of religious belief in states that have long – if not always – been secular. And it is the absence or fading of religious belief that he blames for the dying out of Western nations.

Such is the mindset of secularism, it is all about self and “fulfillment.” 

Is there no self-fulfillment in having children? Don’t many feel that having a child is more self-fulfilling than anything else?

It does seem to be the case that fewer people are religious, or most people are less religious in Europe now. How did religion formerly keep the birth-rate up?

The mainly Catholic countries used to have  bigger families because birth control was forbidden by their Church. So perhaps now that the Roman Church has lost much of its power, more Catholics use contraception. But that explanation doesn’t affect the traditionally Protestant countries of northern Europe, and there too the indigenous  populations are shrinking. (And one thing Christians who bemoan the dearth of children seem to forget is that St Paul recommended celibacy. Marry if you must, he taught, but it is better to remain unmarried and chaste like him and Jesus Christ. Not a formula for re-populating Europe.)

The bible states that Jehovah enjoins the Jews to be fruitful, to multiply. And  Israel is one of the few Western countries where the population is increasing – although Israel is a secular state. Perhaps the old religious injunction continues to have a subliminal effect.

So if socialism is not the reason why the people of the West are ever more unwilling to have children, nor “consumerism”, nor “secularism” – what is?

We don’t know. Nobody does.

But if the suicide of the West means the loss of our civilization – which it very well may – it will be a great tragedy. One of the greatest tragedies of history.

Jillian Becker   August 11, 2013

This is from the Telegraph:

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

Before you say “Oh well, if it’s disabled …” please read on.

The article, entitled After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?, was written by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.”

“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

Note the “her”. If that was the only word you read in their manifesto of death, you’d know they were a pair of politically correct lefties.

As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.

Death – you must understand – is no damage at all to someone “becoming a person”.

The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.

They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed …

Note now the distance put between the condemners to death and the executioners. Just give the order, have it taken away to be done in, and think no more about it.

… if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.

Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

“When the state provides …” Sure, let the state provide for you, and you are its thing. It can do what it will with you and your child. If a family cannot afford to keep a child, there is the possibility of finding foster parents or would-be adopters, but if the state has the final say … bye-bye, baby!

Well, in such a society, one in which the individual is a thing belonging to the state, maybe it is best to have no babies.

Is death preferable to slavery? Discuss.

Then back to the Telegraph’s report on the ideology of Giubilini and Minerva:

They did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others – their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised.

They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”.

… Minerva was a research associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics until last June, when she moved to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Melbourne University.

Ah, “practical ethics”. None of your airy-fairy theories about right and wrong. It’s what’s practical that counts. If you don’t like the baby, why keep it? If the state’s budget for babies is all used up, away with this one.

And “public ethics”. There’s a phrase to conjure with. A whole “public” can now be deemed to have a conscience, to think, to arrive at a justifiable conclusion. Such a public we need to meet! A many-bodied monster with one head.

What Melbourne University means, of course, is a bunch of academics deciding what is good for “the public”. We’d rather meet the monster than the academics. We might call it “God”, just for fun.

Giubilini … too has gone on to Melbourne … to the city’s Monash University.

Defending [his] decision [to republish the article] in a British Medical Journal blog, Professor Savulescu said that arguments in favour of killing newborns were “largely not new”. What Minerva and Giubilini did was apply these arguments “in consideration of maternal and family interests”.

And the interests of the state.

While accepting that many people would disagree with their arguments, he wrote: “The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view. It is to present well reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises.”

“Well reasoned arguments”: If your baby is a bother to you (or the state), it’s okay to kill it.

“Widely accepted premises”: If your baby is a bother to you (or the state), it’s okay to kill it.

But wait. It’s not the child you should feel sorry for – it’s Minerva and Giubilini who need your compassionate concern. Apparently the authors – former associates of the good professor – have been receiving death threats provoked by the publication of their article.

The journal’s editor, [that same] Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article’s authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

“The very values of a liberal society”. If you don’t think parents should be allowed by law to call the exterminators and have the baby collected for the gas oven or whatever, you are opposed to the very values of a liberal society. Good grief – don’t you understand that approving the extermination of unwanted babies is the very essence of  liberal values? The contemporary liberal society is defined by that approval. Tolerance and open-mindedness are defined by it. Community co-operation is defined by it. To be opposed to it is wildly abnormal. Only sociopaths and fanatics would go so far as to raise an objection.

[Professor Savulescu] added: “This “debate” has been an example of “witch ethics” – a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in.”

See – he’s against extremism. He’s against killing. He’s against people acting on their own moral certainty.

So no doubt are Minerva and Guibilini.

If you thought otherwise, you must be not just illiberal and fanatical, but unable to comprehend a simple text written in plain English.

Note: We dealt with the Giubilini and Minerva thesis when it was first published. See our post The Nazi ethics of the left, March 5, 2012.

Seeking the “origins of poverty”  is like seeking the “origins of nakedness”. Absurd. Nakedness and poverty are the natural state of man. (Quiet, feminists, or leave the room!)

But man found a way to become well-supplied with what he needs and a lot of what he desires in addition – those delicious luxuries. The magic goes under the name of Capitalism. It is the only magic that works. The Invisible Hand stirs the cauldrons of human voracity and ingenuity, and the rest is noisy market traffic.

The community organizers of the world don’t like it. It is chaotic, unpredictable, messy, uncontrollable. And some get more than others in their pursuit of sustenance and pleasure.

The community organizers think that’s immoral, wrong, unfair. So they want to abolish the market. They believe that wealth lies in or on the ground and can be dug up or cut down and distributed equally. They visualize wealth as a “pie” – a fixed amount. They know by gut feeling that poverty is caused by some people grabbing too much of it. Therefore, they hold, the rich are rich because the poor are poor, and the poor are poor because the rich are rich. Their solution to poverty is to slice up “the pie” and hand out the slices.

It would be an orderly procedure, totally under their control. Like handing out the bowls of thin gruel in Oliver Twist’s orphanage. And if you complain, they won’t hand you your slice or bowl – so there!

The UN wants to be the slicer and giver to the world. It had a plan to make the poor, wherever they are in the world (except any they don’t like), not-poor. Or anyway a bit less poor. Central planning on a grand scale would do the trick, the UN intelligentsia imagined.

But they have found – to their chagrin – that central planning does not work.  

Claudia Rosett, the go-to writer for reliable news of Evil Central aka the UN, writes:

At the United Nations, America’s new ambassador, Samantha Power, reported for duty on Monday. In remarks just before presenting her credentials, Power listed some of the top items on her UN to-do list, including working together “to alleviate global poverty.”

Let’s hope Power takes a look at a new study of UN development efforts, which the UN has declined to release — though it was done by one of the UN’s own staffers, Howard Steven Friedman, a statistician with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Friedman took a look at the results of the UN’s centerpiece development scheme, the UN Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs.

Launched with great fanfare by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000, the MDGs were supposed to speed the the world toward an array of specific development targets set by the UN for the year 2015, including reducing disease and hunger, and halving [the number of people in] extreme poverty.

The UN, on its MDG web site, boasts that these UN targets “have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.”

But UN-galvanized efforts do not necessarily translate into the promised results. Friedman’s bombshell finding is that the Millennium Development Goals have made virtually no difference in the pace of development.

So, small wonder that the UN chose not to release his study — claiming, among other objections, that Friedman’s report does not count because he did it while on sabbatical. … [!]

Fortunately, Friedman’s study was published independently … You can find it here, both the abstract and the full report. Unlike the UN public relations machine, Friedman took the sensible tack of looking not just at the years since the program began, but at the longer-term overall trajectory of the development indicators involved, from 1992-2008 — starting eight years before the UN kicked off its global MDGs, through the eighth year of the program. He found that “the data show clearly that the activities following the MDG Declaration did not provide an acceleration in most of the development goals.” …

But broadly speaking, Friedman is highlighting data and questions that ought to be the subject of rapt attention and genuine debate at a UN that advertises itself as dedicated to helping the poor — and solicits billions of taxpayer dollars in the name of that cause. The MDGs have become one of the UN’s justifications for its ever-growing appetite for money. Meanwhile. the most highly visible and consistent beneficiaries of the UN Millennium Development Goals are not the poor. The clear beneficiaries are the first-class passengers on the UN gravy train — UN officials themselves, along with the constellations of well-paid consultants and jet-set conference-goers. The MDGs began with a huge New York summit for the signing of the Millennial Declaration, which Annan has since described as one of the highlights of his UN career. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has carried on in similar vein, touting and lauding the MDGs, and urging that member states pour resources into this UN campaign. The UN has held not only the initial 2000 Millennium Summit, but an MDG 2005 summit, a 2008 “High-Level Event,” a 2010 summit, countless conferences around the globe, and with the original MDG deadline of 2015 now getting near, there are plans afoot for a program of post-2015 MDGs.

The deeper problem here is that the MDGs, for all their lofty aims, amount in many ways to simply a UN-repackaged version of central planning. While we can all agree that it is profoundly desirable to end poverty, the real avenue to that goal is not a set of bureaucratically defined targets, but decent government, protecting a framework of law that leaves individuals free to choose for themselves the tradeoffs with which they try to improve their lives. At a UN where the majority of the 193 member states are not free market democracies, that’s a goal much harder to promote than a set of slickly packaged MDGs. But if the aim is to make a difference, that’s what needs galvanizing. Something the U.S. ambassador could usefully contribute would be to call attention to Friedman’s study, and ask the assembled worthies, in public, why on earth the UN would have the arrogance to consider such damning findings irrelevant.

We doubt Samantha Power will take that good advice.

On the harm that philanthropy does, especially government-to-government aid, Jerry Bowyer writes at Townhall:

Peter Greer of Hope International describes the ways in which government to government aid can be even more harmful [than private philanthropy]. The timing is lamentably good as the Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has managed to get himself ‘re-elected’ to another term as President and his first policy act is to appropriate property from white owned businesses to give to black citizens. …

Jerry: “What about government aid? Are the problems associated with that similar to, greater than, or less than the problems that you’re talking about when it comes to private philanthropy?”

Peter: “There are certainly a lot of similarities, but … [it] actually might be even worse. … By pouring in billions of dollars of aid, and by having it … go through corrupt governments, [it] might prop them up, might actually make it more difficult for development to occur. … [The] places that have received the largest amount of aid — they’re actually experiencing economic stagnation, and oftentimes decline, and part of that is because aid can sabotage the democratic process. …  When I was in Zimbabwe, this was when Robert Mugabe was having one of his “elections” … [and] he was using the international food aid to reward those places that voted for him and to punish those places that had not voted for him. So, the message was pretty clear: If you want any of the maize, if you want any of the food aid, you vote for me. …”

Power (pun intended) is the name of the game.

P.S. The UN must be destroyed.

He says, “The most important value of the Israel Defense Forces, from my perspective, is their respect for human beings.”

The “five pillars of Islam” are: the confession of faith; prayer; fasting during Ramadan; charitable giving (to Muslims only); pilgrimage to Mecca.*

This illustration of the “five pillars” comes, via Atlas Shrugs, from Springfield High School, Robertson County, Tennessee. It was one of five such drawings posted on a wall on the first day of school.

It seems that the religion of Muhammad, and (according to Atlas Shrugs) no other religion, is taught there. If so, it is a clear case of Muslim proselytizing at the taxpayers’ expense.

Atlas Shrugs comments (in part):

This isn’t public education. This is dawah [proselytzing]. Real education about Islam includes the 1,400 year history of jihad wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilation and enslavements. Real education about Islam includes the close to 270 million victims of jihad. Real education about Islam includes their hatred of the “people of the book” (Christians and Jews). Real education about Islam includes current events – the systematic oppression, subjugation, and slaughter of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Bahais, Buddhists et al under the sharia.

*Note that “jihad” is added in the picture of the “five pillars”. It is often said that jihad – holy war waged on the infidel – is a “sixth pillar of Islam”.

We too generously ascribed the Benghazi cover-up to shame on the part of the Obama regime. On second thoughts we knew we were wrong. They ought to be ashamed, but Obama and Hillary Clinton are not capable of shame or guilt because they are not capable of self-criticism. They are arrogance in power. They were not, are not, ashamed. They just fear being found out. Found out for what? That still is not clear.

It is also still a mystery which of Obama’s henchmen or henchwomen decided to leave Ambassador Stevens and the other Americans who were at the Benghazi mission and in the near-by annex on the night of 9/11/12 to be slaughtered by their Arab terrorist attackers.

Obama himself does not make decisions. He is merely “present’. He keeps someone always at his side to make his decisions for him.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

The omnipresent power behind the throne some have called the president’s Rasputin had the power to call off three strikes against Osama bin Laden. She may have used that power again the night four Americans died in Benghazi.

The Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on our diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, came while America failed to mount a rescue mission despite sufficient time and assets. Included in that disaster were the unaccounted whereabouts of President Obama during eight critical hours, the lack of Situation Room photos, the failure by the president to follow up with subordinates before his trip to Las Vegas and the fabricated story that the whole thing was prompted by an Internet video. …

One of the people Obama always talks to is Valerie Jarrett. She emerged from the same Chicago cauldron of radicalism where Obama got his ideological baptism.

The Iranian-born Jarrett (her parents were American-born expatriates) is the only staff member who regularly follows the president home from the West Wing to the residence and one of the few people allowed to call the president by his first name.

Her influence is shown by an account in Richard Miniter’s book Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him.

It relates that at the urging of Jarrett, Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden three times before approving the Navy SEAL mission in Pakistan on May 2, 2011. …

Edward Klein, author of The Amateur, a best-selling book about Obama, asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett, and the president responded, “Absolutely.”   

A former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine, Klein describes Jarrett as “ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple’s friend and consigliere”.

Did Obama run the Benghazi decision not to send help past Jarrett that night?

We do know Obama had a face-to-face briefing from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, early in the evening.

After dinner in his living quarters, Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Iran and other issues in a two-hour phone call.

Present as the call was made, reports blogger Chip Jones at Conservative Report Online, was Valerie Jarrett, who, as the call was ending, went from the living quarters to the White House Situation Room, where the attack in Benghazi was being monitored by Dempsey, Panetta and other top-ranking officials.

What she may have said and whether the president sent her is unknown. We do know the president retired for the night, and no rescue mission was launched.

Once before, Jarrett had called off the military for political purposes. She may have done it that night as well — an action that would answer many questions and may be what the White House is really hiding.

America has its first female president.

From The Religion of Peace:

Ramadan Bombathon
2013 Scorecard 
Because, if you think all religions are the same,
then you haven’t been paying attention

* A Ukrainian has been charged with placing a bomb near a mosque
in England during Ramadan.  No injuries or deaths resulted.
We list it as an attack even though we don’t include attacks
by Islamic terrorists unless they result in actual casualties.

Here, from Creeping Sharia, is an excellent one hour lesson, given by Clare Lopez, on the ideology of Islam and its threat to the West – in particular to the United States: