The Islamification of Britain proceeds apace. The British government, media, public choose not to notice it. Or not very much. Not as the existential threat it is. Only an occasional lone voice cries out a warning: Look what’s coming, our doom, the obliteration of our culture, the end of our national identity, the cancellation of all we have achieved, our death as a free people.  

Here is one of the lone voices speaking. We quote from the Commentator:

Britain is in denial. There is no real public debate on a historic event that is transforming the country. Mention of it occasionally surfaces in the media, but the mainstream political class never openly discuss it.

What is that historic event? By the year 2050, in a mere 37 years, Britain will be a majority Muslim nation.

This projection is based on reasonably good data. Between 2004 and 2008, the Muslim population of the UK grew at an annual rate of 6.7 percent, making Muslims 4 percent of the population in 2008. Extrapolating from those figures would mean that the Muslim population in 2020 would be 8 percent, 15 percent in 2030, 28 percent in 2040 and finally, in 2050, the Muslim population of the UK would exceed 50 percent of the total population.

Contrast those Muslim birth rates with the non-replacement birth rates of native Europeans, the so called deathbed demography of Europe. For a society to remain the same size, the average female has to have 2.1 children (total fertility rate). For some time now, all European countries, including Britain, have been well below that rate. The exception is Muslim Albania. For native Europeans, it seems, the consumer culture has replaced having children as life’s main goal.

These startling demographic facts have been available for some time . … But on this historic transformation of the country there is silence from the political establishment.

Not everyone agrees with these demographic figures. Population projection, some say, is not an exact science. Perhaps the Muslim birth rate will drop to European levels.

But this seems to be wishful thinking. For years it was believed that Muslims would enter what is known as “demographic transition”, with European Muslim birth rates falling to native European levels. But that demographic transition has not happened. In Britain, for example, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities continue to have significantly higher birth rates than the national average, even after more than 50 years in the country.

Over the short term (a few generations) demographic forecasting is as scientific as any social science can be. Britain and the rest of Europe are in native population decline and European Muslim birth rates are up. If that trend continues, then the projection of a majority Muslim population in Britain is sound. …

Many [almost all] British people find it hard to believe their country could become majority Muslim. After all, it was never what they wanted so why, in a democracy, should it be happening? …

The fact is that the deathbed demography of native Britons has come up against increasing Muslim birth rates and the result is a classic Malthusian geometric increase in the Muslim population. As Malthus emphasised, populations increase geometrically, not arithmetically. Given two populations, one declining one increasing, within a few generations the geometric increase of one over the other can be substantial.

Why has the Muslim birth rate not fallen to native levels? Just as there may be consumerist-cultural reasons for the low birth rates of native Britons, there may be strong cultural reasons for higher Muslim birth rates. …

Besides which, the Muslim jihad against the non-Muslim world requires high birth rates.

Population projections over the long term can be wrong. But for Britain … whatever way you do the numbers, they all point in one direction: Britain will be a majority Muslim state by the year 2050.

The political and social consequences of all this will be significant.

They will be huge. They will be terrible. The writer goes on to mention one or two, considerably understating them.

Britain’s traditional foreign policy, particularly regarding the US and Israel, would very likely change. In fact the US and Israel are already anticipating the consequences of a majority Muslim Western Europe.

Are they? We’ve seen no sign that they are. But a Muslim-governed Europe, armed with nuclear weapons, will be more than a minor nuisance to America and Israel.

Britain’s social landscape would also be changed. The Adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, would very likely be heard throughout most of Britain. The traditional iconic sights and sounds of the country would also change from church bell-towers to minarets.

Sharia will replace British law. Unless sharia law undergoes revision – which is unlikely – women will be subjugated, homosexuality will be treated as a possibly capital crime, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians (yes, there are even a few of those in Britain) will have to pay a special burdensome tax, polytheists such as Hindus may be confronted with a choice between conversion to Islam or death.

To fill out the picture of how everyday life in Britain could change under sharia law with a little concrete detail: There will be no more beer or wine or whisky. No pubs. No more bacon for breakfast, no more ham sandwiches. No mixed-gender dances or sport. Women will cover their heads in public (if not their whole bodies in a black tent).

There will be no freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly – in short, no freedom.

Very likely all of this would happen gradually but there can be little doubt that it will happen, and it would be perfectly democratic.

Given that such a historic change is taking place, the silence of the political class is curious, to say the least. Britain, until the 1950s, could trace its ethnic and cultural ancestry back thousands of years. In 1903, in Cheddar Gorge Somerset, the remains of a pre-historic man were found. Known as Cheddar Man, DNA tests on this almost 9000 years old skeleton showed that he has living descendents today, still in Somerset.

In fact, genetic studies show that the populations of the British Isles (and Western Europe) have been stable for millennia, giving the lie to the oft quoted liberal comment that “Britain has always been a country of immigrants.” That’s false. Until the mass immigration of the 1950s [of black immigrants from the West Indies], Britain was ethnically homogeneous. …

Waves of conquest, waves of immigration had brought only fellow ethnic Europeans to the British isles. Some additional thousands of  Jews, Chinese, Hindus did not alter the character of the nation. They were assimilated. They enriched the native culture. Europe owes it greatness in part to its eclecticism, its easy assimilation of foreign ideas and customs.

The dawn of cultural doom only came with the mischievous and malevolent decision taken by unnamed bureaucrats wielding irresistible power over elected politicians (as documented hilariously but accurately  in the TV series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister) to invite millions of unassimilable Muslims into the country. Muslims are not a race but the adherents of a primitive and cruel ideology, an essential part of which is world-conquest. They came at the same time as the British people developed a reluctance to have children.

The long stretch of Britain’s exclusively European identity is now coming to an end, yet the political class refuse publicly to discuss such a culturally transforming event. Why the silence from the politicians? Are they not proud of their achievement?

The answer is that the demographic projections of a majority Muslim Britain show the British political class to have been catastrophically wrong on multiculturalism and immigration, and they are genuinely afraid to admit it. 

So they cannot take action to change it. When and how did the British become so cowardly? What weakened them so? We think it is socialism that has done it; socialism with its debilitating sentimentalities known as “political correctness”. That is the slow poison with which the British people – and other West European nations –  are committing national suicide.

So it’s coming – war? The big one?

As the Syrian war rages on – now a religious battle between Sunnis and Shiites as much as an armed rebellion against Bashar Assad’s tyranny – the Russians have offered troops to replace the withdrawing Austrian contingent of the UN’s “peace keeping” force on the Golan border between Syria and Israel. It looks likely that Fijian troops will be preferred by the UN, but Putin is nevertheless going ahead and preparing a Golan brigade. He is committed to helping the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad by supplying advanced weaponry, and he has warships near the Syrian coast.

At this juncture, Obama has decided that the US must send military aid to the rebels, composed of al-Qaeda affiliated and Muslim Brotherhood Sunnis. Assad himself is an Alawite, but his main support comes from Shia Iran and Iran’s Shia proxy, Hezbollah.

We quote from the (British) Mail Online .

The chilling headlines:

Could Syria ignite World War 3? That’s the terrifying question as the hatred between two Muslim ideologies sucks in the worlds superpowers.

• Syrian conflict could engulf region in struggle between Sunni and Shia
• Already claimed 93,000 lives and made 1.6million people refugees
• UK, France and U.S. taken different side to China and Russia

The article proceeds:

The crisis in Syria may appear to be no more or less than a civil war in a country many people would struggle to place on a map.

But it’s much more than that: it is rapidly becoming a sectarian struggle for power that is bleeding across the Middle East, with the potential to engulf the entire region in a deadly power struggle between two bitterly opposed Muslim ideologies, Sunni and Shia.

Already, the war inside Syria has resulted in 93,000 dead and 1.6 million refugees, with millions more displaced internally. And those figures are escalating rapidly amid reports of appalling atrocities on both sides.

Fearing that Syria faced the kind of protests that had toppled the rulers of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya during the “Arab Spring”, Bashar al-Assad’s security forces used tanks and gunfire to crush the demonstrations. But it only stoked the fires.

The opposition developed into an armed insurgency, and now Syria has been engulfed in a civil war which has degenerated into a vicious sectarian conflict.

On one side are those who follow President Assad, who belongs to the Alawites — a splinter sect from Shia Islam.

On the other are a loose affiliation of insurgents drawn from the majority Sunni population, some of whom have close links to the Sunni jihadists of Al Qaeda.

The level of savagery is appalling. This week, up to 60 Shia Muslims were reported to have been slaughtered in an attack by opposition fighters in the eastern Syrian city of Hatla. …

Syria might fragment into three or four pieces on sectarian lines, with anyone marooned in the wrong enclave liable to face vicious ethnic cleansing.

And because the conflict is driven by religion, it could easily leap Syria’s frontiers to draw in regional powers.

So who is aligned with whom? Broadly speaking, Assad is supported by Iran (the main Shia power in the Middle East) and its militant Lebanese ally, the terrorist group Hezbollah.

The latter is Iran’s main weapon in any fight with Israel.

As a result, Assad is advised (and protected) by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and there are also between 5,000 and 8,000 seasoned Hezbollah fighters inside Syria. …

The forces against Assad are joined by thousands of fighters flooding the country every week from across the region.

The rebels have also benefited from the ferocious will-to-die of an Islamist group called Jabhat al-Nusra, which is allied with Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Many more rebels are Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood persuasion.

They are supported with guns and money from Sunni states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Such are the complex connections between modern nations, and the globalised nature of international politics, that repercussions could be felt around the world.

What happens in Syria affects Israel, with which it shares a militarised border on the Golan Heights. …

Although President Obama wants to downgrade America’s involvement in the Middle East now the U.S. can rely on reserves of cheap shale oil and gas at home, his own somewhat ostentatious concern for human rights keeps sucking him back in to side with the rebels.

We would correct that to (newly appointed Ambassador to the UN) Samantha Power’s and (newly appointed National Security Adviser) Susan Rice’s concern to be concerned gives Obama the excuse he needs to side with the rebels.

Why do we say “excuse”? In his role as pacifist and demilitarizer he is reluctant to have the US actively involved in another war so soon after the Iraq war ended and the Afghanistan war started winding down. But he is (we are convinced) on the side of the Arabs in their endless hostility to Israel, and he is a consistent supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood (sending, for instance, lavish aid to the MB government in Egypt). We guess he would not be sorry to see a Sunni victory – or an Israeli defeat. Regardless of his own prejudices, however, the US has commitments to NATO.

That [“concern for human rights”] is also broadly the position of Britain and France, whose leaders seem swayed by lurid and unverified social media footage of atrocities.

But while leading NATO nations line up in sympathy with the rebels, on the other side President Assad is being backed by Russia — a long-time friend of Syria — and by China.

Russia and China feel they were tricked by the West over the way the Libyan regime was overthrown with Western aid two years ago, and are determined Assad won’t be ousted and murdered like Gaddafi.

The war in Syria therefore has had a destabilising effect on the entire region, and could exert a terrifying domino effect as states disintegrate.

Whether such a nightmare scenario can be avoided — and global superpowers can be persuaded to keep their powder dry — we must wait to see with baited breath.

Obama, having said that if Assad used chemical weapons he would be crossing a “red line”, and having now acknowledged that sarin gas has been used, announced that the US will provide military aid to the Syrian rebels.

While there’s nothing new about the US aiding the Muslim Brotherhood (lavish aid to Egypt’s MB government is a case in point), it will be a strange development for the US to be allied with al-Qaeda. (How, we wonder will the survivors and bereft families of 9/11 feel about it?)

The most fearsome fact is that the powers are lined up now as the Mail reports: China and Russia on the side of the Shias,  Britain and France and the US – which is to say NATO – on the side of the Sunnis. And the West cannot allow Russia and China to become dominant powers on the edge of the Mediterranean.

In Britain, in its pre-Islamized days,when it was thought necessary by intellectuals to take the opinions of the “common man” into account, they would allude to him as “the man on the Clapham omnibus”. That man, considering that he lived in the London district of Clapham, which is on the wrong side of the river (though over the last 30 years or so very much gentrified), and considering further that he was not transporting himself in a car, was lower middle-class in the calculation of the always class-conscious Briton. But his opinions could be held to be representative of a wider band of the class spectrum, from middle-middle-class to working-class.

Tommy Robinson, a working-class Englishman, is the leader of the English Defence League. Apparently he speaks for the many tens of thousands of Britons who show their approval of his organization by joining it. At the moment, though he lives (we suppose) further to the east of London, he is our man on the Clapham omnibus.

The organization he leads is called “far -right” and “fascist” by its critics.

If they are what we would call fascist – authoritarian collectivists – we are their opposites, our highest value being individual freedom.

We find, however, that we do not disagree with the view he expresses in these two videos on the issue of Islam, its jihad, the actions Muslims are taking in Britain (and elsewhere) in waging their jihad, the weakness of government and police in dealing with it, and even with the recommendations he makes for what should be done about it. Though we might word our arguments differently, and advocate other, more considered remedies, they would be in addition to those he demands, not instead of them.

The videos provide an opportunity for viewers to judge the organization and its leader, at least on this issue, for themselves.

Come fix upon me that accusing eye.

I thirst for accusation.

                                   – W.B.Yeats

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How interesting that you are intent on destroying our nation – please tell us all about it, Sir. And tell us how we deserve it. How bad we are.

Thus the BBC (in effect) to a leading jihadist, inspirer of the Butcher of Woolwich. To provide him with one of the biggest platforms for his loathsome propaganda that the world can offer.

This is from the MailOnline:

As the awful events unfolded on the streets of Woolwich on Wednesday, the mobile phone secreted inside the black Islamic robes worn by Anjem Choudary — the self-styled Sheik of East London — soon started ringing.

Calling him were producers from the BBC’s Newsnight programme, as well as rolling BBC news shows and Channel 4, all wanting to find out from this so-called ‘expert’ what exactly drove young, British-born men to hack an innocent young soldier to death in the capital with knives and a meat cleaver.

An expert on what? On JIHAD. On Islam’s mission of slaughter and subjugation. Why else phone HIM? By the very act of inviting him to come on their programs they were demonstrating that they know what they will not confess to knowing – that the butchery on the street in Woolwich was a religious act, and the religion is Islam, and Islam is a murderous ideology.

Media-savvy, and far more intelligent than his oafish demeanour suggests, Choudary was given star billing on a discussion panel with Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark, as he insisted he was not a ‘hate preacher’ or Islamic extremist.

Indeed he is not an Islamic extremist. He is just Islamic. A Muslim. Like the Butcher of Woolwich.

The 45-year-old, who is often seen talking in whispers with young acolytes at Middle Eastern cafes in London, was given a platform as if he were a respected academic talking at arm’s length about Islamic extremism.

Refusing to condemn the killers of Lee Rigby, the British drummer crushed by a vehicle and then hacked to death with machetes, Choudary even suggested that ‘one man killed in a street’ was hardly proper vengeance for those killed by ‘Britain and the U.S.’ in wars overseas.

Claiming most Muslims support that view, the ‘preacher’ — he has no formal religious qualifications — also talked over the presenter and other guests as he implied that the killing was the result of British prejudice and racism towards young Muslims.

Lap it up, lap it up, Kirsty Wark and all ye BBC dhimmi! To your decadent and corrupt taste, accusation is sweeter than honey.  Must be. You grovel for it so.

As well as admitting that he knew and had been on marches with Michael Adebojalo, one of the alleged Woolwich killers, who was photographed standing immediately behind him at a demonstration in 2007, Choudary insisted that ‘persecution’ of Muslims prompted attacks against Western targets.

Perhaps that’s why he felt moved to describe Adebojalo [the Butcher of Woolwich]— whom he first met eight years ago — as a man of ‘impeccable character’.

Disgracefully, Choudary even claimed that he and his followers had signed a covenant — akin to the British military’s covenant to care for the welfare of its soldiers — not to wage war against this country’s people in return for living here unmolested and at our expense.

There is only one problem with this preposterous claim: it is simply not true. For the preacher is a fan of what is known by Islamic extremists as taqiyya — the telling of lies to protect their secret, deadly aims.

What is the point of inviting an habitual liar to say anything on a public platform? The BBC is so full of Islam-lovers and cowed dhimmis that that question would not occur to it.

… The extent of Choudary’s activities in Britain raises disturbing questions about how individuals with known terror links are allowed to flout the law and openly recruit on our streets.

Though he comes over as an excitable buffoon (he orders his young recruits to call him ‘Sheik’ and shouts down anyone who disagrees with his extremist views), the reality is that Choudary is smart, cunning and dangerous — prompting [some] commentators to brand him the most dangerous man in Britain.

Funded by benefits from the infidel taxpayers he so despises, for the past four years he has openly staged ‘Islamic road shows’ across Britain to recruit young men to his chilling cause.

As a result, some of those with whom he has come into contact have become embroiled in hatching terrorist attacks here and abroad. An extremist who believes his sole calling is to wage holy war against Britain and her ‘infidel’ allies, his real goal is trying to prepare the ground for a global Islamic jihad.

He dreams of seeing the black crescent flag — which is the symbol of his extremist Islam and Al Qaeda — flying over Downing Street, and a draconian form of sharia law imposed across Britain. …

Once described by a moderate Muslim as the sort of religious leader who ‘sets the mood music for suicide bombers to dance to’, Choudary wants alcohol banned, amputations for thieves and adulterers to be stoned to death. …

According to terrorism experts, Choudary is the recruiting sergeant for what U.S. intelligence dubs Britain’s ‘Generation Jihad’. …

In a chilling portent of the horrors that unfolded in Woolwich this week, [one of Choudary’s native British converts to Islam] told me that British soldiers were a fair target. …

Choudary’s tentacles run far across a number of militant Islamic groups. He is a founding member of extremist groups that are banned in many countries, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun — of which the alleged Woolwich killer Michael Adebojalo is thought to have been a member.

It was this group that praised the ‘magnificent’ July 7 London terror attacks that killed 52 innocent people in 2005. Choudary also once ran a hard-line sect called Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jama’aah Muntada. …

‘Jihad is part of the Koran,’ he says. …

And there he speaks the truth.

He wants Britain to become an Islamic state.

He believes Muslim immigrants will eventually out-breed the native British population, pointing out that Medina in Saudi Arabia once had just 200 Muslim inhabitants, but went on to become the second city of Islam. His mood will no doubt have been buoyed by new figures this week showing that one in ten of under 25-year-olds living here are Muslim. …

Choudary claims to have converted hundreds of young men to his cause. …

With breathtaking cynicism, Choudary instructs his recruits that it is their Muslim duty to claim benefits, ensuring they make no contribution to the ‘enemy’ British state through taxation.

And successive British governents, whatever their party color, support this terrific idea. And judges uphold the “right” of immigrant Muslim criminals to continue to live in the country and be housed, educated, and medically treated at the expense of the British tax payers.

The ‘Sheik’ leads by example. Now separated from his wife and three children, for years he has received more than £1,700 a month in benefits — which he once referred to as ‘Jihad seekers allowance’. …

So why is he still allowed to preach hate on Britain’s streets — and why is he given airtime on flagship TV news programmes only hours after a murder he refused to condemn? That is a question that is going to enrage more and more people …

Until tolerance is tried to breaking point, and more tens of thousands will join the English Defence League –  just any organization, however unsavory in itself, that will take action – violent action – to stop Muslim immigration, deport Muslim criminals, ban terrorist-affiliated Muslim organizations … No. Against Muslims. It will be too late then to start arguing against the ideology of Islam – at present a more promptly punished crime in Britain than butchery on the streets of London –

This is from PowerLine:

A 22-year-old man has been charged on suspicion of making malicious comments on Facebook following the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby.

Benjamin Flatters, from Lincoln, was arrested last night after complaints were made to Lincolnshire Police about comments made on Facebook, which were allegedly of a racist or anti-religious nature.

Thus does civilization end with a whimper.

How interesting that you are intent on destroying our nation – please tell us all about it, Sir. And tell us how we deserve it. How bad we are.

Today two Muslims beheaded a 20 year old British soldier on a street in London. They shouted “Allahu Akbar!” of course. Police shot them. They were taken to a hospital.

The young soldier was  wearing a T-shirt of a military charity called Help for Heroes.

Why did the Muslims do it? Because they are Muslims fighting perpetual jihad, and the victim was a British soldier. In their primitive mentality, a legitimate target.

WHEN ARE THE PEOPLE OF CIVILIZED NATIONS, INVADED BY THESE BARBARIANS, GOING TO START FIGHTING BACK?

This report comes from the Telegraph:

One witness, called James, told LBC radio: “We saw clearly two knives, meat cleavers, they were big kitchen knives like you would use in a butcher’s, they were hacking at this poor guy, we thought they were trying to remove organs from him”

“These two guys were crazed, they were not there, they were just animals. They then dragged him from the pavement and dumped his body in the middle of the road.

“They took 20 minutes to arrive, the police – the armed response.”

He added: “There was only a few people at first then traffic began to build up because people were getting out of their cars to shout at them they were taking no notice, they were standing there, I think they were proud of what they were doing.

“When they dumped the body in the road, these two black guys had the opportunity to hurt other people if they wanted to because there were brave women with the dead guy on the floor, they were shielding and covering him. The attackers with the knives were standing over these women.

“The guy with the gun, the tall guy with the beanie cap on, even a bus had pulled up – he was going over to the bus and asking people to take his photo.”

Are these cannibals the same Syrian rebels that Obama and Cameron declared to-day deserve help in their fight against Bashar Assad?

Or is there a different rebel army over there, one we never get to hear of; one that punctiliously observes “the rules of war”; behaves like gentlemen towards the enemy; will establish a civilized government; and will be so grateful to Obama and Cameron that they will be friends of the West forever?

*

Update next day, May 14, 2013. Extracts from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page:

Time Magazine has obtained an exclusive interview with Khalid al Hamad, a commander of the Omar al Farouk brigade of the Free Syrian Army, who was caught on video trying to eat a dead Syrian soldier’s heart. … Al Hamad has now confirmed that the video is real, and that he did indeed take a bite of the soldier’s lung. … Al Hamad, who is Sunni and harbors a sectarian hatred for Alawite Muslims, said he has another gruesome video of his killing a government soldier from the Alawite faith. Hopefully we will slaughter all of them [Alawites]. I have another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip I am sawing another Shabiha [pro-government militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use to cut trees. I sawed him in small pieces and large ones.” … Time identifies the Islamist cannibal as a commander of the Omar al Farouk brigade. Despite being known as the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade, they are one of the largest units of the Free Syrian Army.The Farouk Brigade has been described as “Moderately Islamist.” In other words, these are the people we would be giving weapons to if Obama decides to arm the Syrian rebels. While Khalid al Hamad’s cannibalism seems bizarre and demented, there are unfortunately precedents. Syrian soldiers, before the Six Day War, were shown biting the heads off cats and dogs in ceremonies demonstrating their valor. Two years ago, Rumsfeld posted a video given to him by Saddam which featured Syrian soldiers biting the heads off snakes and stabbing puppies to death while Assad Sr. watches.

… in perfect safety.

Salman Rushdie does it. As author of The Satanic Verses, which set Muslim mobs raging in the streets of Muslim lands, including those of western Europe, he had to be defended by British conservatives and patriots, because free speech has always to be defended. Many did it only reluctantly, since they didn’t share his leftist political views, or didn’t like his books, or both. But they did it.

Yet Rushdie – an immigrant from Pakistan – had before then judged Britain to be a severely intolerant, “racist” country, though, he conceded, the state of affairs was “not yet” like the Third Reich:

Britain is not Nazi Germany. …  Auschwitz has not been rebuilt in the Home Counties. I find it odd, however, that those who use such absences as defences rarely perceive that their own statements indicate how serious things have become. If the defence for Britain is that mass extermination of racially impure persons has not yet begun, or that the principle of white supremacy has not yet been enshrined in the constitution, then something must have gone very wrong indeed.

When Salman Rushdie said this in 1982 in a BBC radio talk, he was as free as any man in Britain. Some years later, in 1989, he did indeed become the victim of intolerance, not British but Islamic, when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa was issued in Iran condemning him to death for having written The Satanic Verses. From that moment on, the British authorities, at the expense of the tax-payers, provided Mr Rushdie as a matter of course with constant protection. He then got to know some members of the police force better than he had known any when, in that broadcast speech of his, he had said that the British police “offer threats instead of protection”; yet when he published the speech in a book of essays in 1991, he did not qualify the accusation – or any of his criticisms – by so much as a footnote.

That was all a long time ago. Has he grown any more just, any more perceptive of the truth, as he’s grown older?

The answer seems to be – not much.

Ron Radosh writes at PJ Media:

Leave it to Salman Rushdie to bring back the Left’s favorite stratagem: moral equivalence. During the Cold War, leftists used to say the following: “Sure, the Soviets are doing bad things, but so is the United States.” Those a bit more to the left would advance the argument, and say: “The Soviets do terrible things, but the U.S. is responsible, since its leaders view them, as Reagan did, as ‘the evil empire.’ Since we won’t accommodate their just demands, they have to respond to us with hostility.” Those even further to the left would push the analogy even further, arguing: “The Soviets may do some bad things, but at least they stand on the side of progressive change. The U.S., on the other hand, oppresses Third World peoples and supports right-wing reactionary regimes all over the world.”

A good example of the old moral equivalence was to equate the Gulag in the Soviet Union, in which hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, starved to death and executed in massive frame-ups, with McCarthyism in the United States. During the so-called McCarthy era, relatively few were imprisoned or lost their livelihoods, and many actually guilty of being actual Soviet agents portrayed themselves as innocents accused because of their political views. Yet the Left in America argued both were the same.

Now Salman Rushdie has a lot to be wary of. After the Iranian revolution, the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa along with a reward for anyone who murdered him. Because of his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had to go into hiding in different safe houses for a number of years, while under the protection of the British government. Intellectuals and writers in the West rallied to his defense. Eventually, Rushdie came into the open, moved to the United States, and became a favorite in the celebrity world, as well as a best-selling novelist.

In his New York Times op-ed last week, Rushdie complained that … those who stand against abuses of power or dogma are viewed suspiciously.

But where? He gives examples from China, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia – states not noted for tolerance.

Ron Radosh goes on:

His examples are correct, and telling.  … .

But then, Rushdie writes the following, and it deserves letting you see his own words, because they are so preposterous:

“America isn’t immune from this trend. The young activists of the Occupy movement have been much maligned (though, after their highly effective relief work in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, those criticisms have become a little muted). Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, “anti-American,” and in Mr. Said’s case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian “terrorism.” (One may disagree with Mr. Chomsky’s critiques of America but it ought still to be possible to recognize the courage it takes to stand up and bellow them into the face of American power. One may not be pro-Palestinian, but one should be able to see that Mr. Said stood up against Yasser Arafat as eloquently as he criticized the United States.)”

Let us take up his two major points. Occupy Wall Street protestors were handled by the authorities with kid gloves. When they took over the park in New York City over a year ago, although it was privately owned, they were allowed to camp out, disrupt and close down local businesses, and engage in anti-social and horrendous behavior — from public defecation to rape of women — without consequences. Rushdie mentioned Occupy for one reason alone: to show his heart is on the Left so that he can get his comrades in that camp to listen to him about how Islamists persecute those they disdain.

It is his second point that is most ridiculous.

Rushdie acknowledges that Chomsky is “a crazy extremist”. But, Ron Radosh rightly says –

Chomsky does not have to show much courage to take on all U.S. administrations and to oppose them as oppressors and imperialists.

Or any at all.

Indeed, he has become an international intellectual superstar, applauded and heralded by the Left at home and all of our enemies abroad, who shower him with high lecture fees and give him a gigantic audience abroad and at home. He is continually on the lecture circuit, has the support of both student audiences and assorted Hollywood and music world celebrities, and writes best-selling books, for which he has no problem finding a publisher. Bellowing “into the face of American power” is hardly an offense that has landed him even in any white-collar prison, not to speak of a Gulag or Gitmo.

As for the late Edward Said, his critique of “Orientalism” became the favored paradigm to explain U.S. policy in the Middle East, and influenced scores of leftist professors of Middle Eastern politics. As for his supposed standing up to the late Yasser Arafat, anyone who recalls what Said’s complaint about Arafat really was will remember that he was angry that Arafat appeared to play the game of engaging in negotiation with his enemies, rather than reject such posturing and commit himself exclusively to armed struggle against Palestine’s supposed oppressors. His former friend Christopher Hitchens pointed out in his own memoir that Said’s “low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s”.

One might also recall Said’s trip to the West Bank during the first intifada, when he and his young son joined the mob in throwing rocks at Israelis, something of which he was quite proud. To Said, any action taken by Palestinians, no matter how violent, was “resistance.” Again, Hitch well summed up what Said believed, which was that “if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.” And that is why Said eventually rejected Arafat. He thought that the PLO leader was heeding the agenda of the U.S., by his very action of negotiating with its leaders.

To equate those who are truly courageous — like the brave Chinese dissidents who risk their lives to speak up for democracy, or critics of radical Islam who speak up knowing what their future is likely to be if they live under the rule of Islamic regimes — with critics of U.S. policy who live in our democratic republic is more than preposterous. It is the opposite of moral courage. A man of words and letters, Salman Rushdie should by this time be able to know the difference.

We are highly gratified by this splendid review of our editor-in-chief Jillian Becker’s book L: A Novel History, posted today at Front Page, written by Daniel Greenfield, and quoted here in full.

Jillian Becker comments: “There are few writers in the world whose appreciation of a political book is as worth having as Daniel Greenfield’s. Those who regularly read Front Page and his daily essay at his own website, will know this to be true.”

Imagine the UK Without Thatcher

With the recent death of Margaret Thatcher, one novel takes a look at a UK without Thatcher. L: A Novel History by Jillian Becker, the author of, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang, is a modern 1984 taking place in an England fallen to the left. A country where the atrocities and horrors perpetrated in the east found their way to the west.

1984 showed us tyranny from the perspective of an ordinary man coping with the tyranny of an omnipresent Big Brother, while L takes us into the mind of Big Brother.

Becker’s L is a child of the modern left, attracted to the violent spectacle of revolution, feeding on blood and pain, gorging on the emotional spillage of the disgruntled, perpetrating riots, terrorist attacks and finally the mass starvation of the United Kingdom.

1984 takes place in the fragments of a lost history, but L develops its history out of the recent past. L doesn’t emerge out of a vacuum. He is the child of privilege, the student of leftist academics and the tyrant who rises out of the class warfare struggles of the burgeoning welfare state.

L abandons his name, going by a single letter, dabbling in dehumanizing Marxist theory while developing a cult of followers, the L-ites, who become the core of a movement that takes over the United Kingdom. L: A Novel History is as much about L, piecing together his inner thoughts from diary entries and newspaper articles, as it is about the milieu of the period and the more moderate figures on the left who hand over power to him and allow him to perpetrate his acts of terror.

As Becker notes in her introduction, there are historical precedents for L, for his associates and the fascist opposition that eventually allies with him. What she has done is transpose the history of various Communist atrocities from Russia and Eastern Europe into an England on the wavering end of the Cold War.

As a fictional history, L: A Novel History assembles painstakingly an entire alternate history in a metafictional narrative composed of newspaper articles, diary entries and historical speculation that combines the perspectives of L, his followers, the L-ites, his opponents, both genuine and disingenuous, and the people of England who react with bewilderment and then horror as the stores are emptied, the food vanishes and they are put through a brutal and degrading process meant to break their spirit.

L’s great obsession is the cultivation of empathy. Like most sociopaths, he is incapable of genuinely empathizing with others, but has a narcissistic obsession with the experience of emotion as spectacle.

Embodying the privileged empathy of the left, L promises to raise up the people, but instead degrades them, robbing them of their dignity, their humanity and finally their lives, in order to force them to identify with the sufferings of the less well off.

L is Big Brother given form, substance and motive. His resentments and narcissism represent all too well the modern left. Obsessed with image, L is driven to be a cult figure and succeeds in achieving true cult status at the expense of millions for his grand experiment in enforced empathy.

The UK has a long literary tradition of dystopias which imagine a descent into fascism, even as in real life it has continued a descent into Socialism. Jillian Becker’s L: A Novel History challenges that fictional narrative with a meta-fictional narrative that warns of what might have been and what may yet be.

May yet be in America …

Margaret Thatcher’s reign over Britain was a pause in the decline of the nation. That is the verdict of almost all the most insightful obituaries that have appeared since her death. She changed Britain, held it for a while as a model to the world of how capitalism can restore wealth and prestige, but did not succeed in reversing its downward trend.

Nevertheless she was one of the British people’s greatest leaders.

Mark Steyn writes:

In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail . . . The government owned every industry — or, if you prefer, “the British people” owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income-tax rate was 83 percent, and on investment income 98 percent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obvious to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required an extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the cliff edge.

Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was.

She [Margaret Thatcher] was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and Britain’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.

Mrs. Thatcher saved her country — and then went on to save a shriveling “free world,” and what was left of its credibility. The Falklands were an itsy bitsy colonial afterthought on the fringe of the map, costly to win and hold, easy to shrug off — as so much had already been shrugged off. After Vietnam, the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa, Communist annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Afghanistan to Grenada, nobody in Moscow or anywhere else expected a Western nation to go to war and wage it to win. Jimmy Carter, a ditherer who belatedly dispatched the helicopters to Iran only to have them crash in the desert and sit by as cocky mullahs poked the corpses of U.S. servicemen on TV, embodied the “leader of the free world” as a smiling eunuch. Why in 1983 should the toothless arthritic British lion prove any more formidable?

And, even when Mrs. Thatcher won her victory, the civilizational cringe of the West was so strong that all the experts immediately urged her to throw it away and reward the Argentine junta for its aggression. “We were prepared to negotiate before” she responded, “but not now. We have lost a lot of blood, and it’s the best blood.” Or as a British sergeant said of the Falklands: “If they’re worth fighting for, then they must be worth keeping.”

Mrs. Thatcher thought Britain was worth fighting for, at a time when everyone else assumed decline was inevitable. … [But for her and] anyone with a sense of history’s sweep, the strike-ridden socialist basket case of the British Seventies was not an economic downturn but a stain on national honor.

A generation on, the Thatcher era seems more and more like a magnificent but temporary interlude in a great nation’s bizarre, remorseless self-dissolution.

She was right and they were wrong, and because of that they will never forgive her. … For eleven tumultuous years, Margaret Thatcher did shock them. But the deep corrosion of a nation is hard to reverse …

Not just hard. Impossible. What great power that declined and fell ever rose to greatness again?

America, beware!

*

China had to turn to the capitalist model set by Margaret Thatcher to save its economy – which it did, spectacularly. 

But far from acknowledging a debt, this obituary published in China belittles all her achievements, putting her whole career through the Marxist class-analysis mincer.

Petty, mean, and puerile, it is an exercise in Schadenfreude; sneer after sneer concluding with a spiteful joke:

Thatcher grew up in a classical English petty-bourgeois family. Her father owned two grocery shops in Grantham. He preached the word of God, was staunchly patriotic, and became the town’s Mayor from 1945-6. His self-confidence derived from selecting food that commanded a good price and turned a good profit. His daughter, Margaret, also formed her intellectual outlook around the petty proprietor’s fetish for the magical qualities of prices. …

Her marriage to Dennis Thatcher in 1951 elevated her into the ranks of the bourgeoisie. He had inherited his wealth and felt that business distracted him from dabbling in amateur military escapades. He was generally seen as a blithering incompetent buffoon to be shunted out of ears reach, in case some bigoted diatribe escaped his lips, but Margaret dearly loved him and treasured the life opportunities his wealth had opened up for her. Dennis funded her career change from studying the chemical composition of ice cream, to studying to become a barrister …

The 1960s were characterized by an entrenched social-democratic consensus whereby social and economic development was widely seen as the product of an alliance between theclasses. Employment was easy to come by and wages rose, and public housing, health care and education expanded rapidly. This all smacked of communism to Margaret Thatcher, who was allowed to bark vitriol against socialism to the gleeful cheers of her bourgeois-aristocratic colleagues in parliament.

The victory of the mineworkers against the Conservative government in two strikes in 1972 and 1974 led to an election, which the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath, claimed would answer the question “who runs Britain?” He lost the election to a minority Labour government and Margaret Thatcher became the Conservative Party leader in 1975.

The shopkeeper inside her, meant she automatically gravitated toward economic theory based on price. Her ideology imagined a world of free and unrestricted competitive pressures where atomized individuals replace organized workers. The pathway to this free market utopia involved selling off state resources and public housing at prices that were absurdly low. This created a significant constituency within the working and middle classes who suddenly acquired money from nothing. In this way the shopkeeper’s delusion, that an economy is simply a nation of buyers and sellers, was materially anchored in the minds of those who suddenly had loads of money. In this way a significant minority acquired a material stake in Thatcher’s “property owning democracy.” Making goods and services was replaced by selling second hand bricks; producing coal, steel, ships, trains and cars was replaced by speculative instruments conjured up by a Thatcherite tribe of arrogant barrow boys who were encouraged to take over the trading floors of the City of London, elbowing aside the “toffs” in bowler hats, and revolutionizing financial markets in a cocaine fueled [?] speculative orgy.

So severe was the economic dislocation and the scars of social conflict that the government was thrown into deep crisis. However, luck was on the side of Mrs. Thatcher, as President General Galtieri of Argentina used their nation’s historical conflict over British occupation of the Malvinas Islands to launch a war to take them by force. Thatcher dispatched the British fleet and reconquered the Islands, whipping up a wave of jingoistic flag-waving. Riding a new tide of popularity, the real war began. Its objective was to smash the central core of trade union strength, the National Union of Mineworkers. Huge reserves of coal were stockpiled, the police were militarized, and war was declared on millions of British workers. Thatcher proclaimed the miners’ union to be agents of the Soviet Union. When she described them as “the enemy within” she had the look of hysteria in her eyes. The strike lasted a year and was defeated. This was a result of Thatcher’s determination and an impotent response by the majority of Labour and Trade Union leaders. The defeat of the miners union led to greater control by capital over labour and a long period of passive industrial relations.

The greatest nonsense is spoken about Thatcher’s significance in the struggle against what she called “the Evil Empire” of the USSR. The role of the U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was insignificant and peripheral. Even though the Soviet press had given her the name, “the Iron Lady,” of which she was so proud. The collapse of the USSR was a result of internal disintegration and not external pressure. …

May the Iron Lady rust in peace!

China’s prosperity is the result of allowing private enterprise. It makes China a rising world power.