In its February issue, the Journal of Medical Ethics published an article titled: After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

Glenn Beck’s newscast The Blaze reports:

Alberto Giubilini with Monash University in Melbourne and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne write that in “circumstances occur[ing] after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.”

The two are quick to note that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion“ as opposed to ”infanticide.” Why? Because it “[emphasizes] that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.” The authors also do not agree with the term euthanasia for this practice as the best interest of the person who would be killed is not necessarily the primary reason his or her life is being terminated. In other words, it may be in the parents’ best interest to terminate the life, not the newborn’s.

The circumstances, the authors state, where after-birth abortion should be considered acceptable include instances where the newborn would be putting the well-being of the family at risk, even if it had the potential for an “acceptable” life. The authors cite Downs Syndrome as an example, stating that while the quality of life of individuals with Downs is often reported as happy, “such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

The editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Professor Julian Savulescu, said that those who object are “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

Regardless of your views on abortion – a subject that even atheists cannot, we have found to our dismay, debate rationally – we invite your reasoned arguments for or against the killing of children if their existence is inconvenient for their parents, or a burden on the welfare state.

If you are for it:

Under what age is a child disposable? 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years? Why that age?

How should the child be killed?

Should a child be killed only if it is abnormal? Should all abnormal children be condemned to death? What degree of abnormality would mark him/her for killing?

Should any child who is a burden or nuisance to its parents be destroyed?

Should the parents alone have the right to decide on the child’s elimination? What if they disagree with each other ?

Since the welfare state supports the lives of the people, would it also be right for the state to kill those it no longer chooses to support? If so, on what grounds would this be justified – age, physical health, deformity, mental health, political activity, political opinion, general non-conformism, unpopularity, any?

At what level of government should such a decision be taken, and should it be taken by a single bureaucrat or a committee?

What method of killing should the state use?

Should the organs of parent- or state-condemned children/citizens be regularly harvested for transplant? Should children/citizens be killed in order that their organs may be harvested?

Would it be acceptable for freshly killed people to be eaten? Should human meat be sold by butchers?

Discussion need not be limited to these questions. Any aspect of the topic may be examined.

*

Afterword (March 9, 2012)

Giubilini and Minerva, the authors of the paper advocating that newborns who are a nuisance to a parent or “society” should be killed, have issued this sort-of apology:

We are really sorry that many people, who do not share the background of the intended audience for this article, felt offended, outraged, or even threatened. We apologise to them, but we could not control how the message was promulgated across the internet and then conveyed by the media. In fact, we personally do not agree with much of what the media suggest we think.

Their suggestion is that reaction to what they wrote is merely emotional: “people … felt offended, outraged, or even threatened”. Such people, they imply, are not capable of the superior detached ratiocination that they themselves and their “intended audience” bring to ethical questions. Yet it is they who did not think out objectively the results of their recommendation if it were to be enacted in law. And what they meant was perfectly clear and not distorted by the media.

Check out the whole article on their weasel-worded apology here.

It is our contention that Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. It extinguished the bright light of classical culture, of which Socratean doubt, the need to examine all ideas critically, was the enlightening principle. Christianity claimed a monopoly of truth, and the  totalitarian-minded Catholic Church did its utmost to suppress dissent by the cruelest means imaginable. So did Protestant churches as far as they could reach. Like Communism and all ideological orthodoxies, Christianity feared open criticism, recognizing that it’s power could not survive argument. The Enlightenment proved that to be the case; a great upwelling of doubt, criticism, exploration and discovery, it loosened the grip of theocratic tyranny, dispersed the darkness of superstition, and let Europe flower again after a long and terrible night. Science flourished once more, achieving an immense extension of knowledge and giving birth to new technologies. The might of the West is rooted in the Greco-Roman culture revived in the Enlightenment, not in a “Judeo-Christian tradition”.

Now darkness is descending again on the West. Islam, a tyranny of the mind as cruel as Christianity and even more intolerant, an ideology from the Dark Ages that forbids criticism and kills critics, is spreading rapidly through Europe and America, zealously assisted by Western governments and passionately defended by the intelligentsia of the political left – which on principle favors ideological conformity and its totalitarian enforcement.

This is from the Stonegate Institute, by Soeren Kern:

The European Union has offered to host the next meeting of the so-called Istanbul Process, an aggressive effort by Muslim countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam.

The announcement comes less than one month after the United States hosted its own Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC.

The Istanbul Process – its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law – is being spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries.

Based in Saudi Arabia, the OIC has long pressed the European Union and the United States to impose limits on free speech and expression about Islam.

But the OIC has now redoubled its efforts and is engaged in a determined diplomatic offensive to persuade Western democracies to implement United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution 16/18, which calls on all countries to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief.” (Analysis of the OIC’s war on free speech can be found here and here.)

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted at HRC headquarters in Geneva in March 2011, is widely viewed as a significant step forward in OIC efforts to advance the international legal concept of defaming Islam.

However, the HRC resolution – as well as the OIC-sponsored Resolution 66/167, which was quietly approved by the 193-member UN General Assembly on December 19, 2011 – remains ineffectual as long as it lacks strong support in the West.

The OIC therefore scored a diplomatic coup when the Obama Administration agreed to host a three-day Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC on December 12-14, 2011. In doing so, the United States gave the OIC the political legitimacy it has been seeking to globalize its initiative to ban criticism of Islam.

Following the Obama Administration’s lead, the European Union now wants to get in on the action by hosting the next Istanbul Process summit, tentatively scheduled for July 2012.

Up until now, the European Union has kept the OIC initiative at arms-length. But Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the OIC, says the EU’s offer to host the meeting represents a “qualitative shift in action against the phenomenon of Islamophobia,” according to the International Islamic News Agency (IINA), the OIC’s official news/propaganda organ.

According to the IINA, “The phenomenon of Islamophobia is found in the West in general, but is growing in European countries in particular and in a manner different than that in the US, which had contributed to drafting Resolution 16/18. The new European position represents the beginning of the shift from their previous reserve over the years over the attempts by the OIC to counter ‘defamation of religions’ in the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations. …

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. But not without  protest.

The OIC is especially angry over its inability to silence a growing number of democratically elected politicians in Europe who have voiced concerns over the refusal of Muslim immigrants to integrate into their host countries and the consequent establishment of parallel Islamic societies in many parts of Europe.

According to the IINA, “Ihsanoglu said that the growing role of the extreme right in politics in several European countries has become stronger than the capacity of the Organization [OIC], explaining that the extreme right, who [sic] hates Muslims, became leverage in the hands of politicians. He added that the rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered, considering the democratic way in which these extremists reach their positions. He pointed out to the referendum held in Switzerland, as an example, which resulted in suspending the construction of minarets there following a vote by the Swiss people.”

In other words, the OIC is now seeking the support of non-elected bureaucrats at the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels to enact pan-European hate speech legislation to limit by fiat what 500 million European citizens – including democratically elected politicians – can and cannot say about Islam.

To be sure, many individual European countries that lack First Amendment protections like those in the United States have already enacted hate speech laws that effectively serve as proxies for the all-encompassing blasphemy legislation the OIC is seeking to impose on the European Union as a whole.

The author lists a dozen examples of Europeans who have dared to raise their voices to criticize the barbarous ideology of Islam and defend their own culture, only to be prosecuted and punished for it under recently enacted, bad and stupid laws. Among them, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Geert Wilders, whose cases we have discussed in our posts: The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11,2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010);The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26/11).

Almost everywhere in Europe now, “speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties” as the author says.

Why should any religion be exempt from criticism? Religious ideas above all need to be criticized, being the most irrational and the most oppressive. And even more than other religions, Islam needs to be dragged into the sunlight. It is the only intolerant religion of our time –  and it is asking to be protected from intolerance!

Right now, when Islam is intent on conquering the West by all possible means including terrorism, it is especially necessary to be Islamophobic.

Americans must resist the Obama administration’s efforts to help the OIC drive our world back into darkness. At least in the United States – the great product and political embodiment of the Enlightenment – the light of liberty must be kept burning.

As an answer and antidote to St. Paul who spoke on our front page yesterday, here’s Ayn Rand speaking against self-sacrifice, and against loving everybody:

Zombie lists the “Occupy Wall Street” protest supporters, sponsors and sympathizers:

Communist Party USA. Sources: Communist Party USA, OWS speech, The Daily Caller

American Nazi Party. Sources: Media Matters, American Nazi Party, White Honor, Sunshine State News

Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. Sources: The Guardian, Tehran Times, CBS News

Barack Obama. Sources: ABC News, CBS News, ForexTV, NBC New York

The government of North Korea. Sources: Korean Central News Agency (North Korean state-controlled news outlet), The Marxist-Leninist, Wall Street Journal, Times of India

Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam. Sources: video statement (starting at 8:28), Black in America, Weasel Zippers, Philadelphia Weekly

Revolutionary Communist Party. Sources: Revolutionary Communist Party, Revolution newspaper, in-person appearance

David Duke. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, davidduke.com

Joe Biden. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, Mother Jones

Hugo Chavez. Sources: Mother Jones, Reuters, Examiner.com

Revolutionary Guards of Iran. Sources: Associated Press, FARS News Agency, UPI

Black Panthers (original). Sources: in-person appearance, Occupy Oakland, Oakland Tribune

Socialist Party USA. Sources: Socialist Party USA, IndyMedia, The Daily Caller

US Border Guard. Sources: White Reference, www.usborderguard.com, Gateway Pundit, Just Another Day blog

Industrial Workers of the World. Sources: IWW web site, iww.org, in-person appearances

CAIR [the terrorism-supporting Council on American-Islamic Relations].  Sources: in-person appearance, Washington Post, CAIR, CAIR New York

Nancy Pelosi. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, ABC News, The Weekly Standard

Communist Party of China. Sources: People’s Daily (Communist Party organ), Reuters, chinataiwan.org, The Telegraph

Hezbollah. Sources: almoqawama.org, almoqawama.org (2), almoqawama.org (3), wikipedia

9/11Truth.org. Sources: 911truth.org (1), 911truth.org (2), 911truth.org (3)

International Bolshevik Tendency. Sources: bolshevik.org, Wire Magazine

Anonymous. Sources: Adbusters, The Guardian, video statement

White Revolution. Source: whiterevolution.com

International Socialist Organization. Sources: Socialist Worker, socialistworker.org, in-person appearance

PressTV (Iranian government outlet). Sources: PressTV, wikipedia

Marxist Student Union. Sources: Marxist Student Union, Big Government, marxiststudentunion.blogspot.com

Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Sources: FightBack News, fightbacknews.org

ANSWER [Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, an anti-war umbrella protest group]. Sources: ANSWER press release, ANSWER web site, Xinhua

Party for Socialism and Liberation. Sources: Liberation News (1), pslweb.org, The Daily Free Press, Liberation News (2)

The list is far from complete. It doesn’t include George Soros or his front organizations, for instance.

But Zombie is not finished –

UPDATE: Thanks to the hundreds of readers who have made suggestions for additional entries on this list. I now have a large pile of potential new OWS supporters to investigate, and will work on updating this list over the upcoming weeks. When I’ve made it more thorough, I will re-launch an updated list that will be much more “official” in its comprehensiveness, sometime later this month.

We’ll be watching for it.

We like this article by Andrew Klavan, both what he says and how he says it:

The true test of a philosophy is not what it promises to make of the world but what it makes, in fact, of its adherents. Human nature is remarkably recalcitrant, but ideas do affect people over time, for good or ill, and the societies people make will ultimately bear the image of those effects and thus of the ideas. … Our beliefs arise from who we are and we become what we believe …

Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.

This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves. 

Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil? Leftists call conservatives hateful… I would answer “Read the papers!” but the papers lie because our journalists are leftists and they know down deep what they’re like, who they are. Compare instead the rhetoric and honesty — not of those selected by the media, or those quotes they’ve selected — but of those in equivalent positions at equivalent times. The gracious and open-hearted George W. Bush versus the divisive, self-serving, and dishonest Barack Obama, just to take one example.

Every one who sympathizes with the Occupy movement should take a good look at them — not as they will be in the paradise of their aspirations but as they truly are this minute. Look at them, and understand that that’s what tomorrow will look like if they have their way today. 

As a perfect illustration of what Andrew Klavan is talking about, here’s Roseanne Barr:

A meeting of the Black Panthers

Obama with the Black Panthers

Obama marching with the Black Panthers

Andrew Breitbart found the photos and published them at his website Big Government.

He writes:

New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.

The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.

In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.

The images … also renew doubts about the transparency of the White House’s guest logs–in particular, whether Panther National Chief Malik Zulu Shabazz is the same “Malik Shabazz” listed among the Obama administration’s early visitors.  …

Shabazz [is] the Panther leader who was one of the defendants in the voter intimidation case that Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed. Also present was the Panthers’ “Minister of War,” Najee Muhammed, who had called for murdering Dekalb County, Georgia, police officers with AK-47’s …

The photographs show Obama sharing the same podium at the event with the Panthers.

In the first image, Shabazz stands at the podium, surrounded by uniformed Panthers, including Muhammed. In the second photograph, Obama commands the same podium.

Commenting on the photos, Bryan Preston writes at PajamasMedia:

This is the current president choosing of his own free will to accept support from and appear with some very radical and racist figures, during his rise to power. The New Black Panthers’ militant radicalism and racism are impossible to ignore. A “Malik Shabazz” (not exactly a common name) has appeared numerous times on White House visitor logs since Obama’s inauguration; the White House has insisted that it’s not the same Malik Shabazz who leads the New Black Panther movement but has not produced the alternative Malik Shabazz. …

It’s close to impossible to overstate how noxious a character Shabazz is. Among other things, he led the NBPP’s protests at the Danish embassy in Washington DC during the Muhammad cartoon controversy, siding with the extremists who falsified some of the cartoons and turned those cartoons into a cause for violent riots.

We are not in the least surprised that Obama made common cause with these rabidly racist terrorists. Didn’t he attend the church of America-hating Jeremiah Wright for twenty years?

We are glad that there is such vivid proof of it.

Will the mainstream media ignore the proof, or try to disparage it into insignificance?

Breitbart’s article informs us that –

Tomorrow, J. Christian Adams, the Department of Justice whistleblower in the New Black Panther Party case, will release his new book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery).

The book exposes Obama administration corruption far beyond the Panther dismissal, and reveals how the institutional Left has turned the power of the DOJ into an ideological weapon. …

Injustice has these photos and more, including one of  Shabazz and the Panthers marching behind Obama with raised fists in the “Black Power” salute.

The mainstream media might ignore it, but that is one for the history books.

The presidency of Barack Obama is disastrous for America, and so for the world. Yet it may turn out to be good for America, and so for the world, because it is such a disaster.

Obama coming to power was “progressive” liberalism coming to power. It was environmentalism coming to power. It was a late-twentieth-century revised leftism coming to power – the leftism that had given up on a vanishing proletariat as the target of its ruthless “compassion” and substituted “victims of colonialism, racism, and sexism”. It was multiculturalism – ie sympathy with Islam – coming to power. It was Robin Hoodism – take from the rich and give to the poor –  coming to power. It was the Western-academic version of egalitarianism coming to power. All those ideological theories that had been stewing in the skullpots  of professors and community-organizers and pacifists and spoilt-kid terrorists ever since the 60s and Vietnam, could now at last be put into practice, and a new Virtuous America would emerge. There would be “social justice”. There would be “free” health care for all and education distributed and quality-controlled by the wise decisions of trade union bosses. Everyone would work – in ever greater numbers for the government. There would be no more fossil-fuel pollution; the sun, the wind and the waves would keep everyone cleanly supplied with light and warmth and transport. No one would eat too much or anything bad for their health. Of course everyone would be less free, but that would be a trifling sacrifice for Virtuous America. All the Left’s high ideals would at last be realized.

To do this Obama was elected.

He has made America poorer and weaker.

Will the lesson be learnt?

If the Obama disaster doesn’t bring the ideology of the Left into derision forever, it should at least keep a few generations from trying the failed experiment again.

Victor Davis Hanson is thinking along the same lines as we are. He writes at PajamasMedia:

Barack Obama has done the United States a great, though unforeseen, favor. He has brought to light, as no one else could, many of the pernicious assumptions of our culture from the last half-century. He turned theory and “what ifs” into fact for all America to see, experience, and, yes, suffer through. …

As a young, post-racial, first African-American president — glib, hip, cool, charismatic, with unapologetic Chicago hard-core leftist roots and Ivy League certification — Barack Obama was right out of liberal central casting. He would do what no other liberal had done in fifty years: prove to America that it really, really was left-of-center by ramming down its throat both a liberal agenda and thousands of left-wing facilitators. …  Obama arrived with a super-majority in the Senate, and a large majority in the House: anything was now possible and almost everything was thus tried. …

At last we sheep got the messianic prophet to deliver the divine message. When he was declared a “god,” with supernatural powers that sent tingles up journalists’ legs, we were at last to climb the mount into the Promised Land. Electing him was the trick; simply enacting his redistributive agenda would be easy … now the people’s money could be at last directed to saving the planet, helping mankind, and bringing heaven to earth. …

What of the Obama effect on the outer world – of the weaker America?

I don’t think another president will ask the Arab League and the UN — but not the U.S. Congress — whether he can lead from behind France and Britain in bombing an Arab oil exporter on behalf of “rebels” who promise Sharia Law. “Putting light” between America and Israel earned us this week’s charade at the UN, and a new Middle East war on the horizon in the manner of 1967 or 1973, but this time with new enemies on the periphery like Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan in addition to a hostile Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. “Reset” won’t be used any more, and the idea that friends like Britain, Israel, Eastern Europe, etc. were to be shunned while rivals and enemies like the Palestinians, Russia, and the Latin American communists were to be courted is over also. Friends are friends for a reason, and enemies the same …

And of the poorer America?

After $5 trillion in borrowing and 9.1% unemployment, Keynesian economics has been slain by Obama. Oh, Obama may crisscross the country demanding just one more chance to borrow another half-trillion to “grow jobs,” but no one is listening any more. “Shovel ready,” “stimulus,” “investments,” and “infrastructure” simply have been redefined by Obama as euphemisms for wasteful borrowing. I doubt they will regain currency for a decade or so. And thanks to Obama, a billion is now a passé noun, and trillion has been reduced to the status of monopoly money. …

The old welfare state after Obama will soon be addressed as never before. With almost 50 million on food stamps, and record numbers on new extended unemployment insurance, with Medicare and Social Security nearly insolvent, the Obama boilerplate remedies of making “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” and “fat cat bankers” pay their fair share won’t nearly be enough. Obama demagogued the “fair share” issue to the death, and it cannot be demagogued much longer since the money is about gone. …

Of nationalized health care?

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, we were told that we lacked a British-style National Health Service, thanks to all sorts of devilish AMA conspiracies. JFK, LBJ, and Carter could not get passed what we all secretly were supposed to have craved. Hillarycare failed. But Obama alone brought us federalized health care, a trillion-dollar borrowing plan that will supposedly streamline care, save us trillions in the long term, and cost less in the here and now, as state GS-20 doctors attend to us, in DMV lines, far better than their greedy counterparts. Despite all the noble lies, no one believes that. After 2012, ObamaCare will be repealed in short order, and there will be no more fantasies about economical cradle-to-grave health care denied us by conspiratorial doctors and greedy insurers. …

Of race relations?

The public thought, with their first “black” president, they would be hearing even-handed lectures, as one week Obama explained why the federal government had to ensure equality of opportunity in a multiracial society, while on the next he gently warned minorities not to rely on government to ensure parity when success or failure for all Americans far more often hinged on personal choices, discipline, and sacrifice. Instead, Obama voted present while his surrogates ensured that America is more racially polarized than any time in our history [recent history, anyway – JB]. But this too was cathartic. A majority of the population of all races has simply tuned out the now near meaningless charge of “racist” and sees the real danger to America in racial tribalization and balkanization rather than classical racial discrimination. We will see another black president some day, but race will be incidental not essential to his or her character.

Of environmentalism?

For the foreseeable future, “millions of green jobs” and “cap and trade” are also the stuff of comedy. Thanks to Obama we’ve been there with Van Jones, Solyndra, and EPA hyper-regulations, and done that. I don’t think Al Gore will be any more quoted or EU policies emulated. More likely we will go back to finding new fossil fuel sources as private technology keeps improving on alternative energy. Fairly or not, “green” conjures up everything from Climategate to Solyndra, and suggests an entire class of elite academics, financiers, and activists who wished to follow the oil companies’ crony-capitalist business plans of the 1940s and 1950s without the basic truth that oil is a logical energy source and so far a windmill isn’t.

Of socialist idealism in general?

After Obama, I don’t think there will be any more John Kerry or Al Gore sermons about the superior Europe model either. A disarmed, undemocratic, insolvent, shrinking, and increasingly polarized continent is now a model of what the United States should not be. There simply have been too many California as Greece stories for any politicians to advise us with the old admonition: “But In Europe, they….”

Obama thought that he would replicate the EU paradigm. He would bring in properly certified technocrats from academia or government like Chu, Geithner, Goolsbee, Holder, Orszag, Romer, and Summers to oversee massive new regulations and taxes that would dictate from on high how the ignorant masses must be protected from everything from cheap gas to old-style light bulbs. In less than three years, they all proved far more ignorant about what makes America work than the local car dealer, welder, or farmer. After Obama, Americans will not be fooled for a generation or so into thinking that a Harvard PhD or Berkeley professor “really” knows that borrowing is prosperity …

Had McCain been elected, or had Obama proved a canny Clinton triangulator, we would never have gotten out of the bipartisan rut of massive borrowing, growing government, higher taxes, and unionized public employee regulators. But with Obama as the great liberal deliverer and with the masses scared to death of Him, the next president will inherit an America in catharsis. The future is uncertain, but at least now, after our cauterizing, we have some sort of chance to return to the old principles that might save us.

Yesterday we claimed that in the very long run we atheists will win the war with Islam, because in the very long run mankind will outgrow religion.

We have to concede that at present Islam is winning most of the battles.

Diana West explains this well. She writes:

It is something to have gone 10 years without an Islamic attack of similarly gigantic proportions to those of Sept. 11, 2001, but it is not enough. That’s because the decade we look back on is marked by a specifically Islamic brand of security from jihad. It was a security bought by the Bush and Obama administrations’ policies of appeasement based in apology for, and irrational denial of, Islam’s war doctrine, its anti-liberty laws and its non-Western customs. As a result of this policy of appeasement — submission — we now stand poised on the brink of a golden age.

Tragically for freedom of speech, conscience and equality before the law, however, it is an Islamic golden age. It’s not just the post-9/11 rush into Western society of Islamic tenets and traditions on everything from law to finance to diet that has heralded this golden age, although that’s part of it. More important is the fact that our central institutions have actively primed themselves for it, having absorbed and implemented the central codes of Islam in the years since the 9/11 attacks, exactly as the jihadists hoped and schemed.

Take the U.S. military, symbol plus enforcer of American security.

In Afghanistan, our forces are now “trained on the sanctity of the holy book (the Quran) and go to significant steps to protect it,” as the official International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) website reported last year.

Are they similarly trained to take “significant steps” to “protect” other books? Hardly. It’s reckless and irresponsible to demand that troops make the protection of any book a priority in a war zone. But it’s not merely the case that U.S. troops have become protectors of the Quran in the decade following 9/11. “Never talk badly about the Qu’ran or its contents,” ISAF ordered troops earlier this year. Did the Pentagon restrict language about “Mein Kampf” or the “Communist Manifesto”? They, too, were blueprints for world conquest that the United States opposed. Of course not. But the Quran is different. It is protected by Islamic law, and that’s enough for the Pentagon. Not incidentally, ISAF further cautioned troops to direct suspects to remove any Qurans from the vicinity before troops conduct a search — no doubt for the unstated fear that infidel troops might defile the protected book. None may “touch the Qu’ran except in the state of ritual purity,” the Islamic law book Reliance of the Traveller declares. …

Since when did Uncle Sam incorporate Islamic law into military protocols?

Since 9/11.

Now take the State Department, symbol and nerve center of U.S. action on the world stage.

In July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a collaborative effort between the United States and the OIC, newly repackaged as Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. (It used to be “C” for Conference.) The get-together planned for Washington, D.C., is supposed to implement a non-binding resolution against religious “stereotyping” (read: Islamic “stereotyping”) that passed last March at the U.N. Human Rights Council. Such “stereotyping,” of course, includes everything from honest assessments of the links between Islamic doctrine and Islamic terrorism to political cartoons. This makes this U.S.-led international effort nothing short of a sinister attempt to snuff free speech about Islam. And that sure sounds like a U.S.-co-chaired assault on the First Amendment. Not only is this treachery on the part of the U.S. government, it also happens to be part and parcel of the OIC’s official 10-year-plan.

Since when did Uncle Sam get in the business of doing the bidding of the OIC?

Since 9/11.

This is just a snapshot of what the rush toward Islamization as a goal of national policy looks like, 10 years since the Twin Towers collapsed in a colossal cloud of dust and fire. The air has cleared, but the appeasement and the Islamization go on. Thus, a golden age begins, but unless we throw off this mental yoke of submission, it cannot be our own.

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Palestinians handed out candy to celebrate the Islamic victory of 9/11.

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.