[Rhodes22-list] Politics - The Future

[Brad Haslett]

 Rule number one of dealing with elephants - admit that there is an elephant
in the room.  We're mentally masturbating about the poor, the "middle
class", the WAR, the, yada, yada, yada, and  how we're perceived overseas.
Here's a clue; French waiters are still rude, the food in London is still
mediocre, the Japanese are still pissed that don't control Asia, and the
Germans still hate Joooooooo's (most of my old ex-Nazi acquaintance's are
dead now, same as US WW2 vets) but the Europeans have lurched RIGHT in the
last two years. Even if every citizen in the US has a wide-screen TV and
custom wheels (don't worry about food, being underweight in the US ain't the
problem) the 1300 year war against the GREAT SATAN will still go on.  Is
that fiddle music I hear in the background?  Brad
*
Europe in the house of war*
By Spengler

Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a
broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had
forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent
terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by
Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim
sharia law in Great Britain.

Not since World War II has British opinion been provoked to the present
level of outrage. Writing in the Times of London, the editor of the London
Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona, quoted former British

 Conservative parliamentarian Enoch Powell's warning that concessions to
alien cultures would cause "rivers of blood" to flow in the streets of
England. Times columnist Minette Marin accuses the archbishop of treason.

Coercion in the Muslim communities of Europe is so commonplace that
duly-constituted governments there no longer wield a monopoly of violence.
Behind the law there stands the right of the state to inflict violence, and
the legitimacy of states rests on what German political economist and
sociologist Max Weber once called "the monopoly of violence". Once this
right is conceded to private groups, the legitimacy of government crumbles.
No one appreciates this more than the British, whose tradition of protecting
individual rights under law is the oldest and strongest in the West,
excepting the United States, which inherited English Common Law.

By proposing to concede a permanent role to extralegal violence in the
political life of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury pushed his
phlegmatic countrymen over the edge. No one is better than the British at
pretending that problems really aren't there, but once their spiritual
leader admits to an alien source of coercion and proposes to legitimize it,
they understand that a limit has been reached.

Williams' exercise in what might be termed the Higher Hypocrisy shows how
deeply Europe has descended into the Dar al-Harb, or the "House of War" in
the Muslim terms for all that lies outside the "house of submission", or Dar
al-Islam. Europe's governments refuse to rule, that is, refuse to enforce
their own laws because they fear violence on the part of Muslim immigrant
communities who refuse to accept these laws. "No-go" zones proliferate that
non-Muslims dare not enter. In the United Kingdom, according to evidence
presented by respected journalists and public-interest organizations, Muslim
community organizations, Muslim police officers and medical personnel
collaborate to stop women from escaping domestic violence.

The erring spiritual leader of the Church of England persuades me that
Europe's Man of Destiny is the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who for two
years has lived in hiding under constant police protection for the crime of
criticizing Islam. It is a measure of the degradation of Europe's body
politic that is only one means to expose the motives of Williams and his
ilk, namely to draw fire from Muslims who overtly threaten violence against
any public figure who questions the authority of Islam.

Contrary to his critics, Wilders is not provoking violence. The violence is
already there, a matter of workaday fact in Muslim enclaves throughout
Europe. In an act of great personal courage, Wilders is enticing violent
elements out of the tall grass in order to expose them to public opprobrium.


It is triply hypocritical when Williams, the spiritual leader of the Church
of England, speaks of sharia law as if it were a private matter of
conscience between consenting parties, rather like the use of rabbinical
courts by Orthodox Jews. First, he admits outright that Muslim communities
combine to coerce women but pretends that this is not relevant to sharia.
Secondly, he offers concessions to sharia in the first place to appease the
threat of social violence on the part of Muslims. As a final insult to
conscience, he cites as his authority on sharia Professor Tariq Ramadan, who
notoriously refuses to condemn the stoning of women for adultery, precisely
because Muslim legal rulings specifically endorse such violence.

There is overwhelming documentation that Muslim entities in Britain wield
the threat and fact of violence against dissenters, particularly the most
vulnerable, namely young women. The fact is so scandalous that in his
February 7 address, Williams felt compelled to address it directly, in order
to insist that the subject fell entirely outside the issue of law - a
conclusion he must know to be false.

Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the bishop of Rochester, warned on January 7 of the
spread of "no-go" zones in England that non-Muslims dare not enter. As a
result, Nazir-Ali has received death threats against himself and his family
and requires protection.

The British authorities will take measures to protect bishops from the
threat of violence, but they leave to their own devices thousands of Muslim
women. According to a February 2008
report<http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/pdf/CrimesOfTheCommunity.pdf>by
the Center for Social Cohesion, Islamist groups and individuals
frequently link ideas of honor with the welfare of the Muslim world. By
using words such as *Ird* and *Namus* in a political context, they imply
that by protecting the chastity of Muslim women, the security and collective
honor of Islam and Muslim states and individuals can also be defended. This
politicization of women's bodies helps create an environment where the abuse
and control of women is tolerated.

Muslim communities, the report documents, terrorize women who refuse
arranged marriages or otherwise break with social norms:

Almost all refuges dealing with Asian women report on the existence of
informal networks which exist to track down and punish - with death if
necessary - women who are perceived as bringing shame on their family and
community. In many cases, women fleeing domestic violence or forced
marriages have been deliberately returned to their homes or betrayed to
their families by policemen, councilors and civil servants of immigrant
origin.

Muslim coercion against women extends to psychiatric hospitals, the Times of
London's religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill reported on February 7 (cited
in Rod Dreher's indispensable Crunchy Con
blog<http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/>,
.) Glenhill quoted a women's rights advocate as follows:

The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her
daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts
wearing Western clothes. There can be many reasons. The women are sent for
assessment to a hospital. The GP [general practitioner] referring them is
Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in
these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in
the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to
look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is
sectioned (committed to a psychiatric ward). She is divorced. There are lots
of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don't you people
write about this?

That brings us back to the archbishop of Canterbury, who acknowledged the
fact of coercion of women in his February 7 address, but insisted that
because it belonged to "custom" rather than "religious law", he preferred to
change the subject: *Page 2 of 2

Europe in the house of war*
By Spengler

That makes a lurid lie out of Williams' bland assertion that adherence to
sharia "assumes the voluntary consent or submission of the believer":

Sharia depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or
preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God ...
while such universal claims are not open for re-negotiation, they also
assume the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free
decision to be and to continue a member of the umma.

Williams was lying. His authority in matters of sharia is Ramadan, whom the
Department of Homeland Security prevented from

  <http://goldsea.com/GAAN/adclick.php?n=a923457d>

accepting an American university appointment. Ramadan set off a scandal In
2003 when he refused to condemn violence against women (calling instead for
a "moratorium," that is, a temporary cessation) precisely because Islamic
law sanctions such violence. The Westernized Ramadan will twist himself into
a pretzel rather than disagree with Islamic jurisprudence.

Six million Frenchmen watched Ramadan defend the stoning of women for the
crime of adultery in a televised debate with the present President of
France, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the Interior Minister. As
quoted<http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ah6sxjndq9qq_315dwk7qn>by
Paul Berman in The New Republic of June 4, 2007, the transcript reads
as
follows, Ramadan refuses outright to say that he is against stoning
adulteresses:

*Sarkozy:* A moratorium ... Mr Ramadan, are you serious?

*Ramadan:* Wait, let me finish.

*Sarkozy:* A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a while, hold back
from stoning women?

*Ramadan:* No, no, wait ... What does a moratorium mean? A moratorium would
mean that we absolutely end the application of all of those penalties, in
order to have a true debate. And my position is that if we arrive at a
consensus among Muslims, it will necessarily end. But you cannot, you know,
when you are in a community ... Today on television, I can please the French
people who are watching by saying, "Me, my own position." But my own
position doesn't count. What matters is to bring about an evolution in
Muslim mentalities, Mr Sarkozy. It's necessary that you understand ...

*Sarkozy:* But, Mr Ramadan ...

*Ramadan:* Let me finish.

*Sarkozy:* Just one point. I understand you, but Muslims are human beings
who live in 2003 in France, since we are speaking about the French
community, and you have just said something particularly incredible, which
is that the stoning of women, yes, the stoning is a bit shocking, but we
should simply declare a moratorium, and then we are going to think about it
in order to decide if it is good ... But that's monstrous - to stone a woman
because she is an adulterer! It's necessary to condemn it!

*Ramadan:* Mr Sarkozy, listen well to what I am saying. What I say, my own
position, is that the law is not applicable - that's clear. But today, I
speak to Muslims around the world and I take part, even in the United
States, in the Muslim world ... You should have a pedagogical posture that
makes people discuss things. You can decide all by yourself to be a
progressive in the communities. That's too easy. Today my position is, that
is to say, "We should stop."

*Sarkozy:* Mr Ramadan, if it is regressive not to want to stone women, I
avow that I am a regressive.

"You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things"
such as stoning women, Ramadan insisted, which is to say that were he to
condemn violence against women outright, he would be unable to speak to
Muslim communities.

That is Williams' source. Coming from the leader of a major Christian
denomination, this depth of hypocrisy is satanic, if that word has any
meaning at all.

Unlike his Church of England colleague, Bishop Nazir-Ali, Williams does not
require a security detail. But it appears that every European journalist and
politician who attacks Islam requires personal protection, starting with the
stout-hearted Dutchman Wilders. In the cited New Republic report on Tariq
Ramadan, Paul Berman reported:

When I met Hirsi Ali at a conference in Sweden last year, she was protected
by no less than five bodyguards. Even in the United States she is protected
by bodyguards. But this is no longer unusual. Buruma himself mentions
in *Murder
in Amsterdam* that the Dutch Social Democratic politician Ahmed Aboutaleb
requires full-time bodyguards. At that same Swedish conference I happened to
meet the British writer of immigrant background who has been obliged to
adopt the pseudonym Ibn Warraq, out of fear that, in his case because of his
Bertrand Russell-influenced philosophical convictions, he might be singled
out for assassination.

I happened to attend a different conference in Italy a few days earlier and
met the very brave Egyptian-Italian journalist Magdi Allam, who writes
scathing criticisms of the new totalitarian wave in *Il Corriere della
Sera*- and I discovered that Allam, too, was traveling with a full
complement of
five bodyguards. The Italian journalist Fiamma Nierenstein, because of her
well-known sympathies for Israel, was accompanied by her own bodyguards.
Caroline Fourest, the author of the most important extended criticism of
Ramadan, had to go under police protection for a while. The French
philosophy professor Robert Redeker has had to go into hiding ...

So Salman Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class, a subset of
the European intelligentsia - its Muslim wing especially - who survive only
because of their bodyguards and their own precautions. This is unprecedented
in Western Europe during the last 60 years.

*Postscript:* I had not intended to mention James J Sheehan's silly book on
Europe's postwar conversion to pacifism, *Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?*,
the object of many glowing reviews by soft-headed liberals, most recently by
Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the February 8 New York Times. Sheehan admires modern
Europe for abandoning war; it does not occur to him that Europe also has
abandoned being European. Abysmal non-immigrant fertility rates condemn most
of Europe's peoples to effective extinction during the next century or two.
It deserves a one-word review by Homer Simpson, namely, "Doh." If there are
to be no future generations, what soldier will lay down his life for them?
The word "demographics" does not appear once in Sheehan's plodding account,
which liberal reviewers praised as if it were a roadmap to the millennium.

Sheehan is woefully misguided. Europe may not have war, but it already has
violence: its political authorities cringe and scurry and evade and lie in
the face of actual or threatened violence by its Muslim communities. If its
duly-constituted governments abandon their monopoly of violence to
self-appointed religious leaders, the likelihood is that a river of blood
will flow, just as Powell warned in 1968.