The rioting in England that we wrote about yesterday (see our post Anarchy immediately below) is not being perpetrated by members of any one particular ethnic or religious group. The leftist anti-Semitic Guardian newspaper singled out just one “ethnicity” to put a name to, that of three or four Hasidic Jews who were watching the violence in Tottenham and, along with others, were “jeering at the police”.

The arsonists, vandals, and looters are said to be mostly young and male, and of mixed backgrounds. They are Children of the Welfare State, lacking none of the basic amenities of life except, in many cases, fathers. But they have daddy-the-state to support them. Daddy-the-state does not put every luxury their hearts desire within their reach, but a riot can.

There is nothing particularly British about their cushioned condition or their easy resort to violence. Their kind is to be found almost anywhere in Europe. At the drop of an entitlement they are likely to riot, as they do here and there from time to time, on one pretext or another or none at all.

In one European country, however, the violence is continual – and one religious group is responsible for it.      

It is the subject of an essay by Nidra Poller titled A French Intifada, published in the Winter 2011 issue of the Middle East Quarterly, a shocking account of the destructive and terrifying lawlessness that has become endemic in France.

Quoting from it doesn’t do it justice; it needs to be read in full. But here is part of what she writes:

A process described by some as the Islamization of Europe, by others as the failure of Europeans to integrate Muslim immigrants, has reached a breaking point in France. One of the most troubling manifestations of this discord is the development of a particular type of violence that is more than the sum of its parts. A sampling of this year’s news reports reads like a catalogue of stomping, stabbing, shooting, torching, and sacking; attacks on teachers, policemen, firemen, old ladies, and modest retirees; turf wars, tribal fights, murder over women, over attitude, over nothing; dead youths, murderous youths, bodies scattered across a national battlefield.

Is there a connection between the endless series of seemingly disparate criminal incidents and markers openly displayed in insurrectional riots and demonstrations — kaffiyeh face masks, Hezbollah flags, intifada slogans, Islamic chants? A general French tendency to withhold information and a deliberate decision to avoid ethnic and religious symbols leads to white noise coverage of criminality. Names, photos, and background information about perpetrators, suspects, and victims are usually suppressed, especially those that might create a negative image of Muslims.

Yet there is ample evidence that immigration has brought specifically Islamic antipathy to Jews, contempt for Western values, and other antisocial attitudes reinforced by religious zeal and aggravated by the clash between an authoritarian family structure and permissive French society. …

The French republic is in danger as the anti-Jewish thuggery has been extended to the general population, the “dirty Frenchies” and “filthy whities.”

The twisted logic and adulterated ethics devised to blame Israel for failing to bring peace on earth has come back to haunt the French. A compassionate discourse that excuses Palestinian atrocities against Israeli civilians as a reaction to “injustice” also excuses French domestic criminality as payback for colonization, discrimination, exclusion, unemployment, and police harassment. …   The “disproportionate reaction” accusation played like the ace of spades against Israel turns into a joker when riot police are portrayed as Robocops oppressing a “Palestinized” immigrant population. …

Palestinian terrorists are called “militants,” Gaza Flotilla jihadists are presented as “humanitarians,” and the young French criminals are “youths“. This deceivingly generic term used to mask the identity of local Maghrebi and African thugs is a paradoxical translation of the Arabic shabab. Indeed, it is not rare to read of a “36-year-old adult youth” involved in a rumble or suspected of murder. …

During the 2005 uprising, when rioting Muslim youths torched cars and public buildings in housing projects throughout the country and clashed with the security forces trying to restore law and order, Parisians believed they were safe inside invisible walls as fires burned on the other side of the ring road. “It’s just the banlieue [working class suburb],” they said. A second round of discourse about the urgent need to improve housing, infrastructure, transportation, and job opportunities circumscribed the problem. Before the year was out, flames were rising in the center of the city and the banlieue problems spread like wildfire.

Five years later … the discourse is similarly sterile. Newspapers string out a litany of violent incidents in a repetition of stock phrases and opaque vocabulary. Honey-voiced newscasters warble little tunes of tribal violence as if turf wars and fatal stabbings in retaliation for a look, an attitude, or a woman were all in a day’s work. Bucolic place names redolent with memories of Impressionist boating parties are now the sites of bloody murder. Fatal stabbings in schools named after resistance heroes are attributed to the influence of video games and a hunger for consumer products stimulated by capitalism. …

She lists examples of  “bloody murders”  as reported with insufficient information by the media.

What happened next? Were the circumstances elucidated? The perpetrators apprehended? Convicted? We may never know. Convinced that the identity of culprits is withheld for ideological reasons, readers do the detective work with telltale clues and exasperating similarities. Youths, knives, the banlieue? Twenty against one? Drug wars? Turf wars? Gang fights? The puzzled citizen situates each incident somewhere on a line traced from the intimidating rowdiness observed in public to mass revolts seen on television …

Delinquent immigrants are acquitted of responsibility for their antisocial behavior and self-destructive strategies. …  Housing projects are dilapidated by their own delinquent residents only to be displayed as proof of social injustice. …

No matter how much is done or given, it is never enough; no matter how wild the behavior, it is always explained away. Here, there, and everywhere, ethical boundaries are erased and logic surrenders to magical thinking. When mothers offer their children to die as shahids … the very horror of their vengeance is held as a measure of the degree of oppression they endure. In France, every form of brutality, including the murder of Ilan Halimi — a young French Jew kidnapped by a banlieue gang in January 2006 and tortured to death over a period of three weeks — is attributed to some form of “exclusion.”  … Lawyers for the defense organized press conferences and wrote op-eds to deny banlieue anti-Semitism and portray their clients as misguided underprivileged youths. …

No French outlet would touch the “Hamas on the Seine” report by photojournalist Jean-Paul Ney, published …  on May 31, 2010, describing enraged kaffiyeh-masked, pro-Palestinians chanting, “Zionist sellout media,” “Jews to the ovens,” “F–k France,” “Sarkozy the little Jew,” “Obama the Jew’s n —-r”,  repeatedly breaking police lines, determined to reach the Israeli embassy and vent their rage over the Gaza flotilla incident. Joined by anarchist “black-blocks,” the insurgents destroyed property, threw paving stones at the police, and wreaked havoc for several hours at the Champs Elysées Circle. Ney distinctly heard orders broadcast to the riot police: “Don’t try to stop them.” …

The 2005 riots were triggered by the death of two minors who sought refuge in an electrical substation, allegedly pursued by the police, allegedly for no good reason. In November 2007, several policemen were wounded by gunfire in a battle with some 200 youths in Villiers le Bel (Val d’Oise) after two youths without helmets sped down the street on a prohibited mini-cycle, crashed into a police car, and were killed. …  After a similar accident in Woippy, a banlieue of Metz, gendarmes were pelted with stones, fourteen vehicles including a bus were torched, telephone booths and a school were sacked. These are but a few of many incidents where youths in stolen cars or motorcycles, running away from the police, crash and kill themselves.

Yet, no matter how far-fetched the version of the “aggrieved” party, it always takes precedence over the official version in French media. Any police investigation is, by the media’s definition, suspect.  …

The media offered a brief tour when the police raided a housing project in the Parisian banlieue of Sevran (Seine Saint Denis) controlled by drug dealers. Graffiti arrows indicate “shops”; residents tell how they pass through checkpoints to access their buildings, and TV cameramen were lucky to escape with their footage. “Militants” responded to the raid with the now-familiar torching, sacking, and shooting at policemen. Government promises to enforce the law provoke an outcry from compassionate sociologists, left-wing magistrates and mayors, members of do-good associations who protest that “repression is not the solution.”Imposing undue restraint on the police has simply emboldened their adversaries. Over 5,000 were injured in the line of duty in 2009, and in January-February 2010, some 1,100. In recent incidents, police have been surrounded, pelted with paving stones, kicked, punched, hit on the head with hammers, humiliated, and treated like mugging victims, not agents of law enforcement. …

Contrary to expectations, the government did not slip away for the August vacation …  The president … announced a series of tough measures, and dared to link crime with immigration. Not all crime, not all immigrants. But he broke the taboo, simply by stating the obvious and followed with a promise of harsh measures for criminals who shoot at the police. Moreover, naturalized cop-killers will lose their citizenship. Tax officials will be sent into the projects to crack down on people living in luxury while on the dole. The drug market will be dismantled. Severe delinquency, polygamy, and female circumcision will also be grounds for withdrawal of nationality (this provision was subsequently withdrawn). …

The government’s straight talk has shaken France to the timbers. President Sarkozy was accused of cynically fishing for right-leaning-populist Front National voters, replaying the disgraceful Vichy past collaboration, separating the French-French from the foreign-French (akin to death-camp selections) …

Not a day goes by without a barrage of statements condemning the president. Former Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard — remembered for declaring in the early 1980s that “France cannot take in all the world’s misery” — stuck the Nazi label on President Sarkozy and accused him of fomenting civil war. Every opposition leader big or small took up the keyboard or microphone to vilify the president in the most emphatic terms. No Holocaust metaphor is left unturned. …  The rhetoric has come full circle: “immigrants” (meaning Arab-Muslim and sub-Saharan Africans) are today’s Jews when in fact the people who are now persecuting Jews belong to that lawless class loosely defined as “immigrants.”

The media are giving wall-to-wall coverage to the president’s most severe critics while limiting the defense of strict law enforcement to officials, giving the impression that the government stands alone — the 2 percent increase in approval ratings for the president and Prime Minister François Fillon notwithstanding. …

Hundreds of punk jihadists screaming “F–k France” can go amok but no one has the right to say they belong to a specific group or current. No one is even allowed to speculate on what they might have in common with other lawbreakers — unless one portrays them as hapless victims of injustice. …

Every law enforcement effort entails the danger of igniting a generalized insurrection on an overwhelming scale. It is easy to scold President Sarkozy as did The New York Times, parroting the French leftists, or on the other hand, to mock the president with a long list of unfulfilled law and order promises. But it would be wiser to ask why authorities in this western European nation with so much to lose keep mollifying antagonistic elements in the vain hope of avoiding a confrontation. 

How long can this go on? In France and all the Western European countries, anger is growing among the indigenous populations. Anywhere, everywhere, explosions of violence could become so sustained as to develop into civil wars. The continual conflict in France could already be described as “low intensity warfare”  – a sub-heading in Nidra Poller’s essay.

What might save the Europeans, paradoxically, is the economic collapse of their welfare states. If governments have no choice but to stop providing housing, health care, monetary hand-outs, their countries may no longer attract Muslim immigrants from the miserable Third World.

Post Script: This morning there are reports from England of residents turning out to protect their towns from advancing mobs of vandals, whole streets of shops being boarded up, and – particularly to be noted –  synagogues having to be protected by volunteers. The police continue to be defied with impunity.    

“Youths” are rioting in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds and Nottingham. The Washington Post reports:

Rampant looting and raging fires engulfed swaths of London on Monday as the wave of civil unrest that has gripped this sprawling capital escalated sharply …

Police in London arrested more than 160 people over the weekend after two nights of rioting that left several neighborhoods seriously damaged. Dozens of officers were injured. …

Gangs of youths roamed one south London neighborhood while carrying molotov cocktails …

Overwhelmed by the scope of the violence, the embattled Metropolitan Police called in reinforcements from police forces outside London. …

The increasing unrest — spreading in part via BlackBerry text messages as well as postings on Twitter and other social networking sites — was taking root mostly in the powder keg of poorer neighborhoods… But there were outbreaks of severe violence in even gentrified neighborhoods such as Clapham, as well as reports that 50 youths had vandalized shops in the famous shopping district of Oxford Circus.

Police said 250 people had been arrested over the past three days, and at least 69 people have been charged with offenses. …

The violence first erupted Saturday night … after the fatal shooting of a black resident by police investigating gun crimes.

An anonymous London policeman writes:

The next 48 hours are vital for British policing.

If we fail to protect the law-abiding public once more, we will cease to exist in our present form, and rightfully so.

We could end these riots very quickly. …

Now the public can meet the people we have been made to call ‘customers’. It’s not very nice. We have been saying this for years but no one listens. Well, they are listening now.

It’s embarrassing to be a police officer (again) at the moment. As for the 450 we have arrested, we all know nothing will happen to most of them. It never does, I say it again and again. …

So here is the challenge: give us the legal authority in writing and a guarantee of support if we use force and we will sort it by Wednesday tea time.

What is the rioting really all about? And are the police being restrained from using force to put a stop to it?

Winston Smith answers those questions on his always interesting blog:

The underclass are rising up. No longer content with simply burglaring and mugging the decent law abiding working classes that have the misfortune to dwell amongst them, they have now decided to torch and terrorise the very communities they come from. What we are witnessing in London and in other cities across Britain at the moment is an attack upon the decent and law abiding citizenry of the country. Their places of work have been attacked, looted and even burned down. Opportunisitic burglaries have occured and violent attacks upon the police and innocent individuals are widespread. Fear is endemic and people are anticipating a fourth night of chaos and disorder. The once great nation of Britain is being brought to its knees by a festering parasitic underclass that has been fostered by decades of failed social policies in the spheres of education, criminal justice, social services and welfare provision.

The abandonment of effective discipline in schools, the namby-pamby non-judgementalism that pervades social services and ..  a compliant state that funds dissolute lifestyles are all contributory factors to the chaos on our streets. The forces of law and order that are putatively the guardians of the peace are stymied in their efficacy by a political class that eschews robust policing when it is needed.

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, is responsible for law and order. The party in power calls itself Conservative*, but it is indistinguishable in its sentiments from the opposition Labour Party. (Both have sentiments instead of principles to guide their policies.) When the police wanted authorization for the use of water-cannon to disperse the  rioters, Theresa May refused to give it – just as a Home Secretary under Tony Blair would have done.

She said: “The way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon…the way we police in Britain is through consent of communities.” I am sure if she consulted the vast majority of people on this island she would discover that very few people would be too concerned about a few thousand drenched tracksuits if it meant a return of law and order and an absence of terror within communities. She then went on to assure us that, “people will start to see the consequences of their actions”.

Now, just what will these consequences be you may ask? Well, for those over eighteen whatever custodial sentences they do receive, if any, they will no doubt serve just a fraction of their sentences as is common for most criminals in the UK. …

In what will clearly be a perversion of justice, those rioters under eighteen will be treated as if they too are the victims of the very crimes they have commited, as this is the ethos at the heart of the youth justice system. … Within a few weeks many of these rioters that you are now watching loot, burn and terrorise on a twenty four news channel will be on an Intensive Surveillance and Supervision Programme [ISSP], where they will spend the majority of their ‘sentence’ being escorted to gyms, adventure centres, DJ courses and having their lunches bought and paid for and they will even be given the bus fares to attend their ‘punishment’. There will be a minimum of community work as part of their ISSP and in some parts of the country the Youth Offending Service will fail to implement this part of the ISSP. …

Another part of their ISSP will involve them sitting in on classroom based sessions where staff will ask them what feelings they were experiencing prior to setting their community alight and how best they could channel those feelings in the future. We may even get them to do some ‘poster work’, as I have heard it referred to, where they will draw and colour in examples of criminal behaviour just in case they were not aware that torching local businesses and throwing masonry at the police, fire brigade and passers by were indeed criminal acts.

Feel, draw, color in.

When this is the system charged with preventing youth crime is at any wonder we have such high rates of recidivism amongst the more serious of young criminals? Many of the rioters you see on the streets will have been through this sytem. They know there are no real consequences for their actions and thus they behave in the manner we are now viewing. …

These disturbances are not political in nature, or as a result of one ethnic group feeling disenfranchised. This is a rainbow coalition of the underclass, all shades and colours are present on the streets. If it was political in nature the main targets of the rioters would be the state … [but in these riots] the perpetrators are more concerned with acquiring the contents of high street shops. These riots are purely criminal and materialistic in nature and it is the state and its failed social policies that have bred the savage and feral mentality of the perpetrators as well as tying the hands of the police from taking the kind of swift and robust action to deal with the situation.

When wetting criminals and louts is seen as a step too far on behalf of those charged with protecting us is at any wonder we fear another night of chaos?

We hope they get to take the pencils and stuff home with them when the punishment session is over.

Footnote *  David Cameron, now Prime Minister, famously urged his fellow Brits some years ago to “hug a hoodie”.

*

Post Script: Iran has told the British government it should stop using violence against  the rioters. However restrained and gentle a Western government might be it can never be gentle enough to meet the standards of Iran.

The manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist (see our posts Nemesis comes to Norway, and Nemesis comes to Europe immediately below), can be found here.

It is a long pdf document titled A European Declaration of Independence. The author’s name – an obvious Anglicization of his own name – is given as Andrew Berwick; the place and date of posting online, London 2011.

It is clearly and for the most part correctly written. One would suppose he must have had help from someone whose first language is English, but he says, “It should be noted that English is my secondary language and due to certain security precautions I was unable to have the documents professionally edited and proof read. Needless to say, there is a potential for improving it literarily.” Chunks of it, with small variations, are copied from the writings of the Unabomber.

In most of the first two sections, reasonable arguments are set out chiefly against the Islamization of Europe, multiculturalism, Marxism, political correctness, leftist indoctrination in the universities, feminism, and what he calls “Enviro-Communism”. In support of his views he quotes or refers to many of the writers and authorities we respect, such as Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye’Or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, Bruce Bawer, Daniel Pipes, Diana West, Melanie Phillips, Theodore Dalrymple. He deplores as we do the influence that revolutionaries like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs, and Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and his fellow members of the “Frankfurt School”, have had on the politics of the West over the last half century or so. The values Western leaders have failed, he says, to uphold are individual freedom, freedom of speech, democracy. Histories of Islam’s earlier advances into Europe, quotations from the Koran and accounts of Islamic belief are carefully referenced.

The reasonable arguments are interrupted now and then by flights of romantic fancy inspired by the poetry of Ted Hughes, Nordic legend, and the superman ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche. These foreshadow what becomes, in the third section, full-fledged fantasy. It is here that obsession shows itself. He revives in his imagination the crusading Order of the Knights Templar (destroyed by King Philip the Beautiful and brought to a fiery end in 1314, when the last officers of the order, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burnt at the stake as heretics on an island in the Seine). He declares himself to be a “Knight Justiciar”. He writes as if a considerable number of others, predominantly northern Europeans, share the fantasy with him; a company that will mount a violent crusade against the powers who have betrayed the ideals and achievements of Christian Europe. The crusade will become a civil war – a global civil war: “not  between capitalists and socialists, but between nationalists and internationalists”; and between Islam and the non-Islamic world.

He condemns Nazism, but is prepared to fight alongside neo-Nazi groups. Criminal organizations would also be co-opted. The manifesto becomes a handbook for terrorists. He specifies the buildings that should be bombed, including government buildings and mosques. He lists the chemicals needed for making bombs, advises how to acquire them (eg. by having a farm and buying fertilizer in large quantities as if for the land), and describes in detail how to make them.

He expresses regret that women must be killed as well as men, but insists that in pursuit of such a high task as the Knights have set themselves, soft feelings cannot be indulged.

He sees the role in which he is casting himself as heroic. He encourages others to become hero-martyrs like him:

You will forever be celebrated by your people as a martyr for your country, protecting your culture and fighting for your kin and for Christendom.

You will be remembered as a conservative revolutionary pioneer, one of the brave European Crusader heroes who said; enough is enough, it is time to take back our countries before our multiculturalist traitor elites actually manages to finalize their agenda and sell us all into Muslim slavery.

Your sacrifice will be a great source of inspiration for generations of Europeans to come.

You will become a role model for hundreds, perhaps thousands of new emerging martyrs fighting the good fight, our fight.

And when we seize political and military power in Europe within a few decades, it will be pioneers and historical pioneers like you who will be celebrated with reverence.

Revolutionary patriots like the Justiciar Knights will then be celebrated as destroyers of Marxism and the slayer of tyrants; the fearless and selfless protectors of Europe, The Perfect Knights.

For there is no greater glory than dying selflessly while pro-actively protecting your people from persecution and gradual demographical annihilation.

We are destined to win in the end, as our people, all Europeans, are gradually waking up from their slumber and realising the deceitfulness and suicidal nature of multiculturalist doctrine.

We do not only have the people on our side, we have the truth on our side, we have time on our side, we have the will of our ancestors and the will of God on our side.

The Left will almost certainly claim that Breivik’s atrocious acts of terrorism are what opposition to Islamization and multiculturalism et cetera lead to. They will probably use his manifesto as proof of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”.

The Obama administration likes to pretend that white middle class Americans are the most likely terrorists.

But the fact is that for the last 45 years, acts of terrorism carried out by leftists and Muslims vastly outnumber those carried out in the name of any cause of the “right”. And terrorism as a method has not been often or strongly condemned by the leftist intelligentsia.

It will be now. As of course it should be.

We’ll have more to say about Breivik, his manifesto, and the right and wrong  lessons to be learnt from his actions.

American children must be taught the values America traditionally stands for, and why they are the highest and the best.

They must be taught that the United States of America was founded as a realization of the idea of liberty.

They must be taught that only in freedom are individuals able to achieve the best they are capable of.

They must be taught that the conditions necessary for a good life  – prosperity, physical and mental well-being, the pursuit of individual aims  – exist reliably only in a free society.

They must be taught that only the rule of law, not rule by a person or group of potentates, assures liberty.

Generations of American children have not been taught any of this. It is no exaggeration to say that for decades now the schools and academies have been teaching Americans to be ashamed of themselves. So millions of Americans believe that they are justly hated by other nations, and their country should change to become more like other countries. (See our post Zinn writes histories, December 11, 2009.)

William Damon, professor of education at Stanford University and a senior fellow of the admirable Hoover Institution, writes in a recent essay:

In our leading intellectual and educational circles, the entire notion of national devotion is now in dispute. For example, in a book about the future of citizenship, a law professor recently wrote: “Longstanding notions of democratic citizenship are becoming obsolete … American identity is unsustainable in the face of globalization.” As a replacement for commitment to a nation-state, the author wrote, “loyalties…are moving to transnational communities defined by many different ways: by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, and sexual orientation.” In similar fashion, many influential educators are turning to “cosmopolitanism” and “global citizenship” as the proper aim of civics instruction, de-emphasizing the attachment to any particular country such as the United States. As global citizens, it is argued, our primary identification should be with the humanity of the world, and our primary obligation should be to the universal ideals of human rights and justice. Devotion to one’s own nation state, commonly referred to as patriotism, is suspect because it may turn into a militant chauvinism or a dangerous “my country right or wrong” perspective. …

By “justice” the unnamed law professor probably means “social justice’ – the idea that wealth should be taken away from those who have earned it and given to others who have not. “Social justice” is Orwellian Newspeak for injustice.

William Damon points out:

Discouraging young Americans from identifying with their country — and, indeed, from celebrating the traditional American quest for liberty and equal rights — is a sure way to remove their most powerful source of motivation to learn about U. S. citizenship. Why would a student exert any effort to master the rules of a system that the student has no respect for and no interest in being part of? To acquire civic knowledge as well as civic virtue, students need to care about their country.

It is especially odd to see schools with large immigrant populations neglect teaching students about American identity and the American tradition. Educational critic Diane Ravitch observed this phenomenon when visiting a New York City school whose principal proudly spoke of the school’s efforts to celebrate the cultures of all the immigrant students. Ravitch writes, “I asked him whether the school did anything to encourage students to appreciate American culture, and he admitted with embarrassment that it did not.”

At least he was embarrassed.

These and other American students are being urged to identify with, on the one hand, customs from the native lands they have departed and, on the other hand, with the abstract ideals of an amorphous global culture. Lost in between these romantic affiliations is an identification with the nation where these students actually will practice citizenship. Adding to the dysfunction of this educational choice, as Ravitch writes, is the absurdity of teaching “a student whose family fled to this country from a tyrannical regime or from dire poverty to identify with that nation rather than with the one that gave the family refuge.”

We are not “citizens of the world.” We do not pay taxes to the world; we do not vote for a world president or senator.

Professor Damon wants civics taught in the schools, and taught well.

How can we do better? Of course we need to teach students the Constitution, along with its essential underlying principles such as separation of powers, representative government, and Federalism. Excellent programs for such teaching now exist. But these programs are not widely used amidst today’s single-minded focus on basic skills. Compounding this neglect, the school assessments that drive the priorities of teachers infrequently test for civic knowledge. To preserve the American heritage of liberty and democracy for future generations, citizenship instruction must be placed front and center in U. S. classrooms rather than relegated to the margins. …

And he issues a warning:

There is a looming crisis … the very real possibility that our democracy will be left in the hands of a citizenry unprepared to govern it and unwilling the make the sacrifices needed to preserve it. A free society requires an informed and virtuous citizenry. Failing this, as Ben Franklin long ago warned, despotism lies just around the corner.

The citizenry should also be informed what life is like in other countries. Most people in the world are ruled over by despots or despotic regimes. Most democracies, like the European nations, are welfare states rapidly becoming poorer as a result of their socialist economic systems. A proper understanding of capitalist economics  – “the natural order of liberty” as Adam Smith called it –  should be taught in America as well as civics and truthful history.

Walter Williams writes at Front Page:

A recent Superman comic book has the hero saying, “I am renouncing my U.S. citizenship” because “truth, justice, and the American way — it’s not enough anymore.” …

The ignorance about our country is staggering. According to one survey, only 28 percent of students could identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Only 26 percent of students knew that the first 10 amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. Fewer than one-quarter of students knew that George Washington was the first president of the United States. …

Ignorance and possibly contempt for American values, civics and history might help explain how someone like Barack Obama could become president of the United States. At no other time in our history could a person with longtime associations with people who hate our country become president. Obama spent 20 years attending the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s hate-filled sermons, which preached that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need,” called our country the “US of KKK-A” and asked God to “damn America.” Obama’s other America-hating associates include Weather Underground Pentagon bomber William Ayers and Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn.

The fact that Obama became president and brought openly Marxist people into his administration doesn’t say so much about him as it says about the effects of decades of brainwashing of the American people by the education establishment, media and the intellectual elite.

Actually, though we don’t disagree with the point Walter Williams is making, we think it does say quite as much about  Obama. He epitomizes the sort of America-hating ideologue that the decades of debauched education have bred.

Cal Thomas writes with good sense at Townhall:

The Constitution is specific when it prohibits a “religious test” for “any office or public trust” — Article VI, Paragraph III.

That doesn’t mean that voters are prohibited from taking a person’s faith (or lack thereof) into account when deciding for whom they will vote. No law could stop them.

Past elections have been decided when some Catholics voted for a Catholic politician because of their shared religion and Protestants voted against a Catholic because they did not share that faith.

Now come two Mormons — Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman — and two evangelical Christians — Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. There is confusion and division within once nearly solid evangelical ranks over what to do. …

Does it really matter what faith a president or presidential candidate has, or should everyone, regardless of their religious background, focus on their competence to do the job?

Shouldn’t the question answer itself?

I would vote for a competent atheist who believed in issues I care about over the most conservative Christian or Orthodox Jew who lacks the experience, knowledge and vision to do a good job as president.

Orthodox Jew? There has never been a Jewish candidate for the presidency, orthodox or anything else. Which means that a fund of ability has gone untapped for the job. It would be interesting to see what would happen if, say, a secular Jew with widely popular political views were to stand. What might operate against him? Anti-semitism – ie the fact that he is a Jew even though not religious – or anti-atheism, or both?

Religion can and has been used as a distraction to dupe voters. Jimmy Carter made “born again” mainstream during the 1976 presidential campaign and many evangelicals voted for him on the basis of his declared faith. Yet Carter later revealed himself to be a standard liberal Democrat in virtually every category that mattered, from abortion and civil unions, to the economy, to weakening America’s defenses and image worldwide.

What about Barack Obama’s self-declared Christian faith? He attended the Chicago church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons frequently condemned America and contained what some took to be racial slurs [they were racial slurs – JB]. The president’s faith has not distinguished his positions on any issue that matters from that of a standard liberal Democratic secularist. If a candidate says faith is important, shouldn’t that faith take the person on a different path than what someone of little or no faith would propose? If not, what difference does faith make and why should it be of concern to voters? …

It shouldn’t matter whether Mormons believe in baptizing the dead, what undergarments they wear, or that they believe God was once a man like us. Neither should it matter that an evangelical Christian believes in Armageddon, unless, of course, he (or she) wants to advance that day by dropping a nuclear bomb on our enemies, as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has threatened to do to the West. Now THERE is someone who combines his religion with political power, which should scare us all.

The Bible, the guidebook for evangelicals, teaches that there are two kingdoms. Presidential candidates are running to head up a part of the earthly kingdom known as America. The job as head of the other Kingdom is taken. The duties and responsibilities of each should be kept separate.

The writer doesn’t speculate whether a self-declared atheist might stand a chance of even being nominated. To us, that is a most interesting question.

Should the United States refrain from any intervention in the world beyond its borders except in its own incontrovertible interest?

Or should it act as the world’s policeman? Does it have a “responsibility to protect”- if so, whom from what? Populations from their rulers? Vulnerable groups from any and all attackers?

To bring the debate to the moment and the actual, should the US keep its forces in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting savage peasants and failing to crush them? Should there still be a US military presence in Iraq? In Germany? In South Korea? Should the US be fighting – as it is –  in Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen?

Should it not be using force to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power? And immediately against Iran’s ally, Bashar Assad, the bloody tyrant of Syria?

Should it not be outspending China on defense?

Should it not be helping Georgia liberate two of its provinces from Russia?

Should it be protecting South Sudan from its northern neighbors and their Ugandan proxies? Or the Nigerian Christians from their Muslim persecutors? Or the ethnic African Muslims of Dafur from the Arab Muslims who are raping, robbing, hounding and massacring them? Or destroying the pirates of Somalia? Or putting an end to the Arab/African slave trade?

Can those who answer yes to the first question fairly be called “isolationists”?

David Harsanyi considers, in a column at Townhall, whether the label is apt when applied to those who want America to withdraw from Afghanistan and refrain from any further participation in the NATO intervention in Libya:

There’s been a lot of talk about an alleged turn in American public opinion — particularly among Republicans — toward “isolationism.”

In a recent debate among GOP presidential hopefuls, there was some discussion about ending the United States’ commitment to the tribal warlords and medieval shamans of the Afghan wilderness. This induced John McCain to complain about the rise of a new “strain of isolationism” … McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham went on to notify Congress that it “should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi” when the topic of the House’s potentially defunding the military — er, kinetic, non-warlike bombing activity over Libya — came up. It would be a mistake, he vented, for Republican candidates to sit “to the left” of President Barack Obama on national security.

So if you don’t shut up and stop carping about this non-war war of ours, you are abetting North African strongmen. Makes sense. It’s the return of Teddy Roosevelt-style Republicanism, in which arbitrary power (and John McCain’s singular wisdom) matters a lot more than any democratic institution.

Sure, some on the far right and swaths of the protectionist, union-driven left oppose international trade agreements and [are] endlessly freaking us out about foreign influences.

Our interpolation: Is this protectionist section of the left aware of the left-elite’s longing for world government?

But isolationists? Judging from our conduct in the real world of economy, we’re anything but insular. So perhaps McCain simply meant noninterventionists — as in folks who have an unwavering ideological aversion to any and all overseas entanglement.

That can’t be it, either. Maybe, like many Americans, some in the GOP are simply grappling with wars that never end and a war that never started.

And with plenty of troubles here at home, it’s not surprising that Americans have turned their attention inward.

We can’t be in a constant state of war. Then again, Afghanistan is not a war per se, but a precarious social engineering project that asks our best and bravest (or, as our ally Hamid Karzai calls them, “occupiers”) to die for the Afghan Constitution, which is roundly ignored — except for the parts codifying Islamic law, that is. But all these conflicts come with the price of endless involvement. We almost always win.

When and where? Since World War Two, where has America won a hot war? Oh yes – against Granada.

But we never really go home. …

Did sometimes. From Granada after victory. From Vietnam after defeat.

This week, we learned that Obama rejected the advice of lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department who questioned his legal authority to continue this nonmilitary military involvement in Libya without congressional authorization. Instead, the administration offered a string of euphemisms concocted to bypass the Constitution.

Without any tangible evidence that this conflict furthers our national interests or any real proof that we are preventing a wide-scale humanitarian crisis, it’s not a surprise that Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we’re “leading from behind” — which is, in fact, as stupid and deceptive as the case it doesn’t make.

Are you an isolationist for questioning those who continue to weaken the Constitution? … Are you an isolationist for questioning this brand of obfuscation? Are you an isolationist for wanting American forces to win and leave the battlefield rather than hang around for decades of baby-sitting duty?

And Tony Blankley writes, also  at Townhall:

I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghanistan War effort had served its initial purpose and that it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we had removed the Taliban government and killed as many al-Qaida and Taliban fighters as possible. …

But as the purpose of that war turned into nation building, even GOP internationalists had a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy being brought to the new purpose, such policy was likely to be effective.

Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. That is not a judgment driven by isolationism. Neither are we isolationist in our judgment (along with the opinion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and almost the entire uniformed chain of command) that we see no national interest in Libya.

This is not isolationism; it is a rational effort at judging how best to advance American values and interests in an ever-more witheringly dangerous world.

Both Harsanyi’s and Blankley ‘s opinions are apt as far as they go.

But  the problem is deeper, the questions that need to be raised about foreign policy harder than those they are answering.

Can America have a coherent foreign policy that America itself and the other states of the world can depend upon for any useful length of time? The two political parties are now so divided ideologically that foreign policy will depend on whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat. It will necessarily chop and change. Or if relations with some states stay more or less the same for a while, they will do so unreliably.

Could the very uncertainty characterize foreign policy usefully? No foreign state being secure in its relations with the US, each would have to be vigilant, tack according to the US wind, adjust to the changes. A case could be made that a Machiavellian preference to be feared by other nations rather than loved might serve America well.

But there are other developments to be considered. In countries throughout the world – led in this by Europe –  there is an ideological tendency towards world government. The nation state is not liked: new political alignments, such as the European Union, are trying to phase it out. Democrats, for the most part, are in sympathy with the movement; Republicans are not. Democrats – like most leftists everywhere – have a vision of the UN turning into a world government; Republicans – many of them at least – would be happy to see the monstrous institution disbanded. It cannot continue long as it is: being a house of lies, it must fall down.

NATO is weakening. Letting Turkey into it was fatal. No longer secular, Turkey is now in the camp of Islam, inimical to the West.

The world as it was conceived to be after World War Two is changing kaleidoscopically under our eyes.

In relation to the rest of the world, what are American interests? How should they be pursued?

Should America concentrate on preserving itself as a fenced-in area of freedom on an otherwise unfree planet?  That would be isolationism. Should it form a union with other as-yet-free nation-states: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel? India perhaps? Honduras? Papau? …

What would such a union do, what would be in its joint interest – “spreading democracy”, “protecting civilians”, “building nations”? The questions troubling America now would trouble it jointly, and the answers remain as hard to find.

“Will the Democratic Party destroy us all?” ex-Democrat Roger L Simon asks at PajamasMedia.

Our answer is “Yes – if they’re again given the chance.”

But what does Simon say? In part, this:

I used to be a Democrat — for decades. Was it always this bad? Was I that blind?

Well, maybe. But the situation now is drastic. The United States of America has never been in worse shape — foreign or domestic — not since the Civil War anyway. We are en route to being a pathetic, powerless, overblown Greece, but unlike Greece there is no one who can bail us out. We’re too big. We’ll bring everyone else down with us — those left anyway …

Yet to the Democrats — and their bizarrely compliant media — it’s business as usual. According to such solons of big journalism as CNN’s John King, the Dems main aim is and should be retaking the Congress with the same methods they have used for years – blocking spending cuts, accusing Republicans of excessive greed, and catering to unions and reactionary race-based interests groups.  …

This is ridiculous. Why can’t these people wake up? Don’t they have children, grandchildren? Don’t they realize we are going broke? The evidence is everywhere — from Michigan to Madrid. Keynesian economics — the welfare state itself — has become completely inoperative, morphed into a Ponzi scheme by an aging population.

You can pretend that’s not true. You can put your fingers in your ears and wait for it all to go away. You can recite the mantra about taxing the rich until you drop, blame Bush until he’s a figment of our memory more distant than William Henry Harrison, or pledge your allegiance to Gaia while circling the globe in a solar-powered Lear jet. But the reality remains.

(By the way, if you taxed the rich at a hundred percent, it would only push back our bankruptcy from entitlement programs a year, possibly two.)

And what do envious lefties think the rich spend their money on if not employing people and buying stuff and investing in growth? Do they imagine they hoard it under their mattresses?

So what exactly is wrong with the Democratic Party and its constituents? I know change is difficult, that breaking with old ideas … can be painful, and that few of us like to admit we were wrong, but do we have to wait for bread lines?

So what’s the explanation? Why is it that, in these times, there is nothing less liberal than a “liberal,” less progressive than a “progressive”? Why do they and their party adhere to an ideology so shopworn and stultified … ? What explains this political party of lemmings?

I don’t buy the Cloward-Piven argument. Sure, there are some who would like to bring this country down economically so they can rebuild it as some sclerotic socialist utopia replete with Young Pioneer camps and pompous people’s art in the subways (and no food in the stores), but most are not even imaginative enough for that.

I think there are three things at work — habit, fear of change, and pure, unbridled, screw-the-rest-of-us, self-interest. And the ones who focus on the latter — the powerful and self-interested – rely on the habit and the fear of change on the part of the others … to hold the whole tawdry ball of wax together.

And what about stupidity? That’s surely a fourth thing at work.

The Democrats are at a crossroads. Will they face reality?

I sincerely doubt it.

We doubt it too. They won’t face reality any more than the welfare-weakened population of Greece will face it. But real events and conditions go on accruing their consequences whether they like it or not.

Leftism is the stuff that dreams are made on; and the baseless fabric of the Democrats’ vision shall dissolve, leaving an economic wreck behind for the Republicans to deal with.

Either that, or  – if they’re re-elected to power in Congress and the White House – the Democrats will wreck America beyond reclamation.

In a free society, anyone who wants to benefit a fellow citizen, by giving him money for instance, may do so; and if the giving makes the giver feel good, that shouldn’t trouble anyone else. Self-esteem also needs feeding.

But it’s an entirely different matter when it comes to a citizen being forced by government – the only agency that has the necessary power – to give money for the benefit of others.

For a society to be kept free, the power of government needs to be kept within narrow bounds. That’s why we conservatives list “small government”  among our primary principles, following immediately and logically after “the protection of liberty”, which is the first and last thing government should exist for.

As soon as government takes it upon itself to extract money from prosperous Peter and give it to poor Paul, it has exceeded its legitimate power and become a threat to liberty instead of its protector.

Walter Williams writes at Townhall:

If a person benefits from a hamburger, a suit of clothing, an apartment or an education, who should be forced to pay for it? I believe the question has only one moral answer, namely the person who benefits from a good or service should be forced to pay for it …

Our country’s problem is that too many Americans want to benefit from things for which they expect other Americans to be taxed. …

Does one American have a moral right to live at the expense of another American? To be more explicit, should Congress, through its taxing authority, give the Bank of America, Citibank, Archer Daniels Midland, farmers, dairymen, college students and poor people the right to live off of the earnings of another American? I’m guessing that only a few Americans would agree with my answer: No one should be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another American.

We agree with his answer.

As long as government is doing what it must – protecting the liberty of all citizens equally from foreign enemies and domestic crime – it serves the people. If it uses its power to force some citizens to  “serve the purposes” of others, it oppresses the people.

Government should be our servant, not our master.

“What I felt … was the sort of detached, sardonic amusement an alien might feel on viewing from outer space a once-great civilisation destroying itself over an issue of immeasurable triviality. That issue, of course, is ‘Climate Change’.”

So James Delingpole writes at the Telegraph.

He goes on magnificently:

Never before in history, I doubt, has so much money ever been squandered, so much suffering and poverty exacerbated, so much economic damage been inflicted, so many lies promulgated and so much environmental destruction wrought in order to deal with a problem so microscopically miniscule. Really, if Barack Obama were to declare war on Belgium because he’d always found Tintin Au Congo offensively racist, or if David Cameron were to launch a nuclear strike on Mykonos because all those white-painted buildings were “way too gay”, you still wouldn’t be even half way close to equalling the quite breathtaking stupidity, purblind ignorance and suicidal wrongheadedness of the disasters currently being inflicted on the world by our boneheaded political and administrative classes on their holy mission to “combat climate change.”

Let’s concentrate on the British example since, thanks to Cameron’s determination to lead the “greenest government ever”, we’re further down the road to Eco Hell than most, and let’s look at the reasons behind those electricity and gas price rises.

These are outlined here in this must-read piece by the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser, which lists the various mechanisms (Renewables Obligations, European Emissions Trading Scheme, Feed-In Tariffs, etc) which, this year alone, will drive up our domestic energy bills by around 15 per cent and business energy costs by 20 to 25 per cent. Every one of these mechanisms is based on the so-far-very-much-unproven hypothesis that Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide emissions are contributing dangerously to “Global Warming” and that this “Global Warming” is an undesirable thing. In other words, our political classes are imposing on both our domestic expenses and on the broader economy swingeing costs whose sole justification is the threadbare theorising of a small number of heavily compromised scientists brandishing dodgy computer models.

“How did those charlatans get away with it?” That is the question historians will be asking in generations to come. …  And: “How can it possibly have been that, during the worst global recession since the 1930s, the world’s political leaders were able to impose such enormous, unjustified extra costs on their ailing economies without serious criticism from the commentariat or rebellion from their electorates?” …

The answer to that question lies largely in the deceitful propaganda put out by the Left, its hurray-chorus the media, and their useful idiots who hold political power:

Here we have Tim Yeo MP – a Conservative MP, allegedly, and one with an influential position on Britain’s energy policy – joining up with various violently left-wing members of the Opposition to promulgate exactly the same almighty whopper: that the reason are energy prices are skyrocketing is down to a combination of insufficient regulation and corporate greed.

Let me just repeat that: here is an influential member of Britain’s Tory-led Coalition essentially arguing that what Britain needs right now is a less free market and more regulation. …

Prime Minister David Cameron is not the brightest spark in the generally rather damp fireworks of British politics. He is the leader of the Conservative Party,  yet he has expressed admiration for … wait for it … you’ll find it hard to believe … Saul Alinsky (the Marxist revolutionary inventor of “community organizing”, guru to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). See here and here.

Delingpole concludes:

Say what you like about David Cameron … but if there’s one thing he’s good at it’s being more slippery than a jellied eel in a tub of KY Jelly. And he’ll need this skill in spades if he’s not to go down in history as the Prime Minister who, in the name of a non-existent problem, presided over the devastation of the British countryside with bat-chomping eco-crucifixes for rent-seeking toffs (aka wind farms) and the destruction of the British economy thanks to the imposition of wholly unnecessary costs and regulations.

Actually there’s probably no saving the British economy. Or  Britain. Unless it abandons Socialism/Greenism, it will be poor; and whether or not it abandons Socialism/Greenism, it will be Islamized. Few British politicians – few Britons – want to face up to those all-too-real threats. It’s easier to pretend that the problem is climate change and the solution is wind-farms.

More and more Europeans are growing angry over the Islamization of their countries.

Here a Catholic member of the Austrian parliament, Ewald Stadler, rages at the Turkish ambassador, referring inter alia to the beheading of a Catholic Bishop by a Muslim, and the burying alive of adolescent girls by their Muslim families in Turkey.