We are not adverse critics of President Bush’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein. But we think the intervention should have ended when the tyrant was gone. We don’t believe that Iraq (any more than Afghanistan) can be transformed into a liberal democracy.

Americans will not change Iraqis, will never break their habits and reform their customs. In Arab and Islamic countries, torture of captives is routine. It’s a normalcy of the culture, and the US showed recognition of this by not even trying to interfere with the practice in Iraq.

When First World nations fought wars of conquest in the Third World to subdue native populations and establish rule over them, they hoped to civilize them – or at least the British did. It would take time and colonization, they thought. And here and there they succeeded to some extent. The United States never wanted even to try such empire-building. Americans want to go in, force a regime change, get the natives voting, and get out.

If they don’t get out in good time, they themselves will be damaged and vitiated.

Here’s part of the Telegraph’s take on the Iraq war documents released last week by Wikileaks:

The 391,831 reports, drawn up in many cases by US soldiers of relatively junior rank … provide a terrifying insight into the anarchy which enveloped Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed.

The reports reveal in terrifying detail how any hope of replacing the former dictatorship with a functioning democracy quickly became a faded dream as Iraq descended into an orgy of killing which reached every corner of the country.

In often nauseating detail, the files disclose the coalition commanders turned a blind eye to acts of torture and murder conducted on an industrial scale.

In one log it is reported that an Iraqi man was arrested by the police and shot in the leg by an officer. The report continues: “this detainee suffered abuse which amounted to cracked ribs, multiple lacerations and welts and bruises from being whipped with a large rod and hose across his back”. The report, with stunning understatement, adds that these acts amount to “reasonable suspicion of abuse” but the outcome was: “No further Investigation Required”.

The decision not to investigate was a direct order from the Pentagon as US officials sought to pass the management of security from the coalition to the Iraqis.

It was a cataclysmic error which probably lengthened the insurgency as the victims of abuse sought vengeance and directed their anger at US and British troops. How many dead coalition troops would be alive today had the Iraqi death squads been stopped?

Stopped how, when the tactic was to make friends with as many Iraqis as possible with a view to “winning hearts and minds”? Even if it were possible to stop the death squads and torture, would interfering with their traditional pleasures do anything but annoy them?

And now Americans, who – like the great British imperialists in the past – see it as their moral duty to improve the lives of backward peoples, are finding themselves blamed, and not unjustly, for the anguish and calamity that has attended their intervention.

Rudyard Kipling gave warning of the hazards of such foreign adventures. He wrote what is now an extremely politically incorrect poem about them. The first line alone would earn it a fatwa and a banning by National Public Radio.

Here are some lines from it:

Take up the White Man’s burden–

Send forth the best ye breed–

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need…

Take up the White Man’s burden–

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride…

Take up the White Man’s burden–

The savage wars of peace–

Fill full the mouth of Famine,

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

(The end for others sought)

Watch sloth and heathen folly

Bring all your hope to nought…

The ports ye shall not enter,

The roads ye shall not tread,

Go, make them with your living

And mark them with your dead…

Take up the White Man’s burden,

And reap his old reward–

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard…

Take up the White Man’s burden–

Ye dare not stoop to less–

Nor call too loud on Freedom

To cloak your weariness…

The three judges in the trial of Geert Wilders have been dismissed.

(See our posts Civilization on trial, October 11, 2010; A stink of Fox, March 12, 2010; Freedom versus Islam, January 20, 2010; The West on trial, December 16, 2009.)

A new trial will have to be called – unless the case against Wilders is abandoned, as it should be.

From a report by Leon de Winter at PajamasMedia:

Wilders’ lawyer Abraham Moszkowicz today asked for dismissal of the three judges, and his request was approved by the dismissal commission of the court. …

Moszkowicz asked for a dismissal after the three judges refused to allow Dr. Hans Jansen to testify regarding a discussion he had with one of the judges of a higher court that ordered the prosecution of Wilders.

Dr. Hans Jansen is “one of the foremost Islam experts in the Netherlands”. He had given testimony in a closed session of the Wilders case.

As in the US, judges in a case are not allowed to discuss it outside the courtroom.

In May, Dr. Jansen was invited to attend a dinner party together with one of the higher court judges. This judge started discussing the Wilders trial, and his order to prosecute, with Dr. Jansen. Jansen revealed this on his personal blog last Wednesday. Moszkowicz wanted the judges to hear, in court, Dr. Jansen’s impression of this discussion. …

The court refused Moszkowicz’ request to hear Dr. Jansen. Moszkowicz subsequently asked for dismissal of this court, and after a short session the dismissal commission agreed with him.

Of great interest to us is a statement made by the host of the dinner party, Bertus Hendriks, “a well-known pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist journalist and activist in the Netherlands”.

On his blog published Wednesday, October 20, Dr. Jansen writes about Hendriks: “Bertus once explained to me that he didn’t care that much for the Palestinian problem. It was more … that the Palestinian fate could expose the global structures of exploitation.”

We have seldom if ever come across so bald a confession of why the Left exploits the Palestinian cause; of the comrades’ actual indifference to people for whom they claim their hearts bleed. It’s an honest confession of hypocrisy.

Mouthing their meaningless socialist platitudes – such as “global structures of exploitation” – they blindly ally themselves with forces inimical to the civilization that sustains them: blood-soaked tyrannies in the recent past, and now Islam. Uncountable millions of corpses strew their chosen path, but on they go. And all in the name of bettering the lot of humanity!

One by one, the East End parishes and boroughs of London are becoming small de facto Islamic Republics. The latest  – not the only or the first as this report suggests – is Tower Hamlets. The police fear to act in them. Sharia law is enforced in them.

From the Telegraph:

Britain’s poorest borough …  has elected [Lutfer] Rahman as its first executive mayor, with almost total power over its £1 billion budget. At the count last night, one very senior figure in the Tower Hamlets Labour Party said: “It really is Britain’s Islamic republic now.”

Lutfer Rahman has links with “a Muslim supremacist body, the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) – which believes, in its own words, in –

transforming the “very infrastructure of [European] society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed… from ignorance to Islam.”

He won a democratic election, standing as an Independent, but –

We should be clear what this result was, and was not. It was a decisive victory. But it was not much of an endorsement by the borough’s people. Turnout, at 25.6%, was astonishingly low, with most voters (particularly the white majority, and they still are a majority) unaware of, indifferent to or turned off by the process. Lutfur’s 23,000-odd votes are only about 13 per cent of Tower Hamlets’ electorate.

It was not a victory for any sort of democracy.

Was it not? Okay, not a “victory” for the electorate, in the sense that most of the local population probably don’t want a jihadist in power, but if most of them couldn’t be bothered to vote then democracy hands the victory to those who do bother.

It was the execution of a careful and sophisticated plan by a small, well-financed and highly-organised cabal to seize control of a London borough. It deployed not just volunteers from the IFE and other bodies but also people paid to campaign by Lutfur’s business backers. Someone also paid for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of copies of the most pernicious literature ever seen in a British election, in which [Lutfer Rahman’s Labour Party opponent] Mr [Helal] Abbas was falsely smeared as a wife-beater, a bankrupt, a racist and and an insulter of Islam.

Britain has dhimmified itself. It has capitulated to jihad. Most Britons, of all classes, either passively accept Islamization or actively promote it. Prince Charles loves it. The Archbishop of Canterbury worked to have sharia law “partially”  adopted, and succeeded.

Fear of offending Muslims holds the nation in thrall.

That is real Islamophobia. Unfortunately there is all too little of the alleged sort – criticism, derision, outspoken rejection, organized opposition – that Muslims whine about. A cowering Western nation is a triumph for the jihadists, proving the efficacy of their terrorism.

So this is what the nation of Nelson and Wellington has come to? No spirit to resist? No pride, no courage?

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, says multiculturalism has failed.

It has. It was a bad idea to start with.

*

Multiculturalism is based on a fallacy: that “diversity” – measured in the number of different discrete ethnic groups and the intensity of their self-conscious difference – is an indication of tolerance and that such tolerance is the most important civic virtue.

What are in-comers assimilating to when they immigrate into a Western country? At a minimum, they should obey the law – most importantly where the law contradicts their customs (polygamy, mutilation, domestic abuse) – and speak the language. They should also adopt the traditional mores of the public square: the customs of greeting and farewell, hospitality, conversation, queueing, and the codes of deference and dignity (the veil is no longer a sign of respectable women, but of gender inequality). Assimilation should also mean above all else understanding and accepting the concept of individual liberty, particularly free speech. If assimilation conflicts irreconcilably with the core identity of the in-comers, they should leave.

To tolerate in-comers setting up ghettoes (Chinatowns) is one thing, but it is quite another to allow them to establish a foreign jurisdiction within a state where the state’s law does not reach. States-within-states – the logical conclusion of multiculturalism – is not evidence of national openness and tolerance, but of a cold (potentially boiling) civil war. Multiple, separate groups (apartheid, surely) are evidence of separatist mind-sets and mutual distaste, if not revulsion. The more diversity is used as a proxy for tolerance, and the greater the number of militantly diverse groups, the more intolerant and divided a nation becomes.

What of the in-comers should the host nation be assimilating? Their participation in the economy. No more, no less. The in-comers customs may add color to the high street – exciting restaurants, music, dancing, hairstyles, clothes. But that is a matter of taste. Some of their public manners – greetings, hospitality – may even be reciprocated by their host nationals. Certainly, petty xenophobia and snobberies of host nationals should be discouraged. The law itself should protect in-comers from violence and exclusion from the market. But in essence the host nation is assimilating bodies, and the host-nation is entitled to assume that their minds have adapted to the laws and ways of the nation. The in-comers, in other words, are assimilated by their hosts to the extent that they may be regarded in the same way as any other fellow national not known to them personally: as strangers who can be trusted to know the rules, not foreigners who cannot be so trusted. The in-comers are owed no love, no hate, just the common respect of indifference. That indifference to the in-comers would be proof of a tolerant and open society, and should be its goal. “Celebrations” of diversity could be enjoyed as parades, or fairs, or what have you, not as distortions of the economy by policies of quotas and legal special treatment.

But surely, cry the multiculturalists, the presence of diverse cultures enhances our national lives? Universities (where multiculturalism was born) are firmly convinced that higher education – the sharpening of mental faculties and the acquisition of knowledge – is about diversity, meaning the presence on campus of students who “represent” different races, national origins, economic classes, religions. Almost every brochure sent to prospective students boasts about diversity – as if it were itself the product being offered by the university. I have found no convincing argument that the mere presence of diversity adds any intellectual advantage to the university experience. Yes, there is talk about “perspectives” – but the only courses that might actually benefit from a class members’ biographies are the confessional courses – sociology, English, history, education etc. – where multiculturalism is dogma in any case. A minority student is more likely to learn what should be his culturally correct thinking rather than know it by virtue of being born to a cultural identity. The result is, again, apartheid – in subjects (black studies, Islamic studies, gender studies), in living (separate ethnic dorms) and in social life (separate tables in dining halls). (Think of Michelle Obama’s thesis.)

What multiculturalists refuse to accept is that the Western tradition is one of cultural assimilation. The Western world has gorged itself on the ideas and practices from cultures around the world. The Western tradition of exploration, conquest, rule and study of peoples around the globe has enriched the West materially and far more significantly, intellectually. Western scholarship of other cultures is vastly more broad and deep than Eastern scholarship of the West. And our civilization has taken that knowledge and used it to develop scientific, technical, philosophical and political understanding superior to any other. By assimilating – integrating – into Western culture, immigrants will be given far more of all cultures than they give up of their own.

Multiculturalism, in short, far from promoting tolerance and national virtue, is the fastest way to cultural impoverishment and political disintegration.

C. Gee    October 21, 2010

By some accident we cannot account for, comments on our post The camel treatment were blocked.

This was particularly regrettable because we want answers to our questions.

The comment section is open now, and we hope to receive replies.

Environmentalism started as a rational conservationist movement, but evolved into mass lunacy. It’s decline – terminal, we hope – started with the global warming scam.

For many environmentalists the cause of “saving the planet” has become an obsession.

The worst threat to the planet, they believe, is the human race. We are too many. If there were far fewer of us the earth would be less threatened. When people were few in primitive times, living close to nature, struggling for survival, they did less damage. Civilization is the enemy of nature: with its manufactures, its consumption of raw materials, its profligate use of energy, its plunder of earth and ocean, its alteration of the natural order, it is finally recognizable as a bad, destructive development that should never have happened and must be reversed. The population of the world must be greatly reduced. People must go back to living from hand to mouth; stay where they are born; walk where they need to go; eat what grows about them…

Revert, in other words to the life of the savage, which, as Thomas Hobbes pointed out, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Those who preach such reversion may know that that’s how it was and would be again if they had their way, but the health, safety, longevity, prosperity, happiness, freedom, and inventiveness of human beings is of no concern to them. The only thing that “matters” is the planet.

We’ve picked some samples of their thinking from a collection to be found here.

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last! – Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).

Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed. —Pentti Linkola [Finnish ecologist]

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems. —John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs. —John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem. —Lamont Cole [Cornell University Zoologist]

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels. – Carl Amery [German environmentalist]

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans. – Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

How should the reduction of population be effected?

Some say by killing off many at a time with fatal infections:

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels. —Prince Phillip, [patron and past president of ] the World Wildlife Fund

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planet … Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. – David Graber, biologist, National Park Service.

Some advocate more dramatic and economical solutions, with recycling in mind:

Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.” — Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995

There seems to be broad agreement that births should be restricted by governments.

The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.—Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)

They see (rightly in fact) that our civilization is a product of capitalism, and as in their eyes civilization is the supreme disaster, capitalism must be understood as an abomination:

Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…. Capitalism is destroying the earth. —Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land. —David Foreman, Earth First!

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. —Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

Some of the most fanatical, forgetting, or intellectually unable to grasp, that value and meaning reside only in the human mind, and believing that the globe itself is all that “matters” (why? to whom? for what?), have come to the conclusion that the human race must be totally eliminated. No adjustments of life-style or behavior can make it fit for continued existence, because by its very nature the human species is a pollutant and wrecker of what would otherwise be a perfect ecosystem.

They long for the utter extinction of their kind. They have become exterminationists.

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight…. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.—David Foreman, Founder of Earth First!

It sure would.

They are not lone nuts raving on the fringes of society. Among them are highly respected opinion formers:

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run. —Economist editorial [no less]

There we have it: if the human species is no help to the world, away with it. As if the concept of a “world” were not dependent on human consciousness!

Environmentalism has become the most nihilistic movement of all time. It is a death cult.

Jillian Becker    October 19, 2010

We have taken these extracts from an essay on slavery in Arab Africa, in particular Mauritania and the Sudan, by Samuel Cotton, titled Arab Masters-Black Slaves:

These black African slaves in Mauritania are subjected to mental and emotional torments that have always been concomitant with slavery. “Routine” punishments for the slightest fault include beatings, denial of food and prolonged exposure to the sun, with hands and feet tied together. “Serious” infringement of the master’s rule can mean prolonged tortures, documented in a report by Africa Watch.

Some of the tortures are highly imaginative. Even a natural sadist would need to ponder for a while to come up with them:

These include 1. The “camel treatment,” where a human being is wrapped around the belly of a dehydrated camel and tied there. The camel is then given water and drinks until its belly expands enough to tear apart the slave. 2. The “insect treatment,” where insects are put in his ears. The ears are waxed shut. The arms and legs are bound. The person goes insane from the bugs running around in his head. 3. The “burning coals” where the victim is seated flat, with his legs spread out. He is then buried in sand up to his waist, until he cannot move. Coals are placed between his legs and are burnt slowly. After a while, the legs, thighs and sex of the victim are burnt. There are other gruesome tortures … Another report states that some slaves caught fleeing are often castrated or branded like cattle. …

The civil war … led to the resurgence of the slave trade….Arab militias, armed by the Government, raid villages, mostly those of the Dinka tribe, shoot the men and enslave the women and children. …

The price varies with supply. According to the London Economist (January 6, 90) in 1989, a woman or child could be bought for $90. In 1990, as the raids increased, the price fell to $15. …

The head of state, Omar Hassan el Beshir, is reputed to have six or eight slaves in his home in Khartoum.

The author asks “why has the media given such little attention to this story?” and suggests an answer:

Perhaps fear of incurring the wrath of the Islamic governments of Mauritania and the Sudan lies at the heart of the issue. It is dangerous business to expose corrupt regimes in Islamic countries.

We have heard so.

Certainly Gaspar Biro found it was:

Biro produced a 42-page report to the U.N.’s Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. He pointed to slave trafficking, and that the Sudanese criminal law provides routinely for flogging, amputation, death by stoning, and in special cases, for the execution and crucifixion of children as young as 7. The Sudanese called his report a “flagrant blasphemy and a deliberate insult to the Islamic Religion” on which it says Sudanese law is based.

Biro received “veiled threats” against his life, and a blunt warning not to offend Islam from the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C.

Will any power come to the aid of the slaves held by Arab owners?

The United Nations will not. Islamic states dominate that disgusting organization.

Will the US State Department do anything? Not while Barack Obama is president and Hillary Clinton is secretary of state.

Last questions:

Should the United States – once rid of Obama and his black-winged minions – act to put an end to this time-honored custom of slave-owning in Islamic countries? If so, why? As a moral imperative? As resistance to the jihad? Both?

We have a proposal to make that is sure to be greeted with universal approbation.

We start from the principle – not quite universally conceded – that the state should not be an agent for the redistribution of wealth. Which is to say, government should not be the provider of welfare.

But, we acknowledge, there will always be some people who cannot provide for themselves and have no one else willing and able to provide for them.

Then we ask: is there some institution other than the state that could manage their support?

We propose that the churches be charged with the responsibility. It would be splendidly consistent with their declared principles. They could collect money from the tens of millions of people who believe they have a duty to care for their less fortunate neighbors and compatriots.

As giving voluntarily is truer to the social consciences and religious precepts of these good people than having it extracted from them by government, with what delight they’ll seize the opportunity!

With the ample funds that will pour in from liberals, progressives, socialists and Christians, the churches will establish shelters for the homeless and clinics for the sick; feed, clothe and equip the helplessly dependent. They’ll be able to do it lavishly. Material want will be abolished.

They’ll take great pride and pleasure in doing it. Have they not been preaching charity for millennia? There they are, well established, thousands of them; organized, tax-exempted, self-dedicated to moral ends. This is clearly the use they must be put to. They’re a perfect fit for it.

Once the churches have permanently taken over all welfare provision, government can shrink, taxes come down, the defense budget be enlarged, and everyone will be happy.

An underground site deep in the Zagrod mountains of western Iran, the Imam Ali Base where Shehab-3 medium-range missile launchers are stored, was struck last Tuesday, October 12, by three explosions.

According to the official report, 18 members of the Revolutionary Guards were killed and 14 were injured.

In its official statement on the incident, Tehran denied it was the result of “a terrorist attack” and claimed the explosion “was caused by a nearby fire that spread to the munitions storage area of the base.” In the same way, the regime went to great lengths to cover up the ravages wrought to their nuclear and military control systems by the Stuxnet virus – which is still at work.

Read more about it here at DebkaFile, whose own “military sources” report:

Iran’s missile arsenal and the Revolutionary Guards have … suffered a devastating blow. Worst of all, all their experts are at a loss to account for the assailants’ ability to penetrate one of Iran’s most closely guarded bases and reach deep underground to blow up the missile launchers.

The number of casualties is believed to be greater than the figure given out by Tehran.

The soldiers’ funerals took place Thursday, Oct. 14, at the same time as Ahmadinejad declared in South Lebanon that Israel was destined to “disappear”.

So far, what with Stuxnet and the explosions, it’s Iran that’s looking sick.

Barry Rubin has written the best piece of satire on the destruction of America that we’ve read since Obama started doing it.

It’s title is How to Kill Americans: A Guide to the Really Effective Ways.

Here are some of Rubin’s sure-fire recommended methods, far more effective than the piecemeal terrorist strikes that al-Qaeda goes in for:

Deny them liberty. Americans thrive on high levels of freedom. For them, the ability to make decisions for themselves is akin to oxygen. Reduce this ability to make their own choices and you have deployed the equivalent of krypton to weaken Superman.

Spend them into oblivion. Increasing deficits will saddle future generations with impossible debt.  Government spending and unfunded pension funds, among other methods, will so demoralize Americans that they will fall over like bowling pins. Increase government regulation. America has thrived on free enterprise, initiative, and entrepreneurship. It’s no accident that people speak of the economy being strangled, one of the most effective and popular ways of murdering people.

Teach kids to hate their own country. …

Read it all. Don’t miss it.