Children in an Adult’s World

Western Cultural Imperialism At Its Most Dangerous

The debate about liberty, free-speech and the stance of Islam rolls on.  The West’s position is, shall we say, conflicted.  The Western Commentariat has been playing a divide-and-rule strategy.  It presupposes that Islam is a broad-church religion, with a wide range of variants, denominations, sects and opinions about Islam.

Simply put, the Commentariat assumes that Islam is just like modern Judaism and modern Christianity–both alike are festooned with multi-form denominations, traditions, beliefs, and expressions–yet these days they all tend to get along in an irenical co-existence.  In Christianity, for example, one has every kind of manifestation imaginable, from those that deny the existence of Jesus Christ right through to those who worship Him as Lord of heaven and earth.  But in both Judaism and Christianity alike there are, from time-to-time, extremist elements that have no legitimate claim to their respective religions.  Some Jews have  become militant zionists who murder innocent Palestinians.  Some Christians have engaged in a fratricidal war in Northern Ireland in recent history.  These extremist elements do not represent either Judaism or Christianity respectively.  Or so the narrative rolls.

The Commentariat believes Islam is just the same.  The terrorists, the suicide bombers are the extremists: the vast majority of Islamic believers are tolerant, peaceful, law-abiding citizens.  The strategic objective is to “reach out” to the mainstream, and isolate the extremists. Ben Shapiro provides us a recitation of with how the Obama administration has systematically and consistently played out this strategy. 

Is this view of the Western Commentariat a gratuitous, fabricated assumption, or is it based in reality?  The answer to the question is to apply a straightforward sociological test.  Mainstream Islam–by definition–can be seen in those countries which are Muslim countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Sudan–and so forth.  In these countries, Islam has become institutionalised.  Its influences can be observed.  Its culture can be studied.  These countries represent mainstream Islam. 

When we apply this canon, it immediately becomes clear that the Western Commentariat is simply engaged in wishful thinking.  Worse, it is engaged in a perverse form of Western cultural imperialism.  The Commentariat is assuming and operating as if the entire world were an extension of Western liberal values and secular mores.  It assumes the whole world is really a Western secularist world. 

We will cite one example, just to make the point–although it is so obvious, only the most wilfully blinded will not grant it.

Amnesty International is calling on Saudi Arabia’s authorities to quash the outrageous sentencing today of Raif Badawi in connection with an online forum for public debate he set up and accusations that he insulted Islam.  Raif Badawi, co-founder of the “Saudi Arabian Liberals” website, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes and a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals (about US$266,631) by Jeddah’s Criminal Court.

This kind of thing is found repeatedly in mainstream Islam. It is a praxis buttressed by teaching, law codes, tradition, and popular support.  Thus, we are on solid ground when we say that those Islamic folk in the West who are tolerant, peace-loving, gracious, respectful of the opinions of others, and who believe in free-speech are at the extreme end of the Islamic spectrum.  They are definitely not mainstream.  Today’s tolerant Muslim is the extremist Muslim, when considered on a sociological spectrum.

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.

USA Today carried a piece by an Islamic cleric,  Anjem Choudary, whom the Commentariat calls an extremist and a hate preacher. He is also a highly educated man–which elicits more than a few genteel coughs amongst the Chattering Classes.  Our point is simple: Choudary is not an extreme Muslim; he is a mainstream Muslim.  It is only the Commentariat’s cultural hegemony and imperialism which prevents it seeing what is blindingly obvious to anyone except the self-duped.  

Here is Choudary’s apologia for Islam’s intolerance.  We defy anyone to prove that it is not the mainstream Islamic position, using the straightforward sociological test we have proposed above.  

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.

Although Muslims may not agree about the idea of freedom of expression, even non-Muslims who espouse it say it comes with responsibilities. In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, “Whoever insults a Prophet kill him.”

However, because the honor of the Prophet is something which all Muslims want to defend, many will take the law into their own hands, as we often see.  Within liberal democracies, freedom of expression has curtailments, such as laws against incitement and hatred.

The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security.  So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

It is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the world’s population was protected.

Anjem Choudary is a radical Muslim cleric in London and a lecturer in sharia.

Anjem Choudary lives in the mainstream real Islamic world.  The Western Commentariat lives in a make-believe world.  Over the next fifty years, as the real, mainstream Islamic world confronts the West’s make-believe, mirage world which do you believe will win? 

We expect it is the world which is self-aware and not living in a childish saccharine, make-believe fantasy world that will make huge strides.  Islam is speaking and living the truth about itself; the West is in hopeless denial, both about itself and about mainstream Islam. 

 

Explaining Isis

Deadly Miasma on the Volga, the Potomac, and the Tigris

When Slate published a carefully reasoned piece on Global Warming recently it was panned and lampooned by everyone in the US whose brain was in gear before their mouth engaged.  The vastly erudite thesis offered by the writer was that Isis and the civil wars in Iraq were caused by global warming. 

To prove the point that idiocy is itself global and not restricted to national borders, the piece was subsequently reproduced in New Zealand’s leading national daily, the NZ Herald.  The piece, by Eric Holthaus was entitled, Is Climate Change Destabilizing Iraq? and the answer was an in the affirmative.  On first reading, one is easily duped into thinking that the article was very clever satire.  But no, the author wants to be read without a scintilla of satire.  Here is the thesis:

This year’s major drought [in Iraq] has coincided with the rise of ISIS, which has already used dams as a weapon of war, threatening downstream agriculture and electricity production during its march to gain control of vast swaths of territory in Syria and northern Iraq.

It appears that Iraq is in the midst of a drought, which–if memory would serve–occurs on a reasonably regular basis in that part of the world.  Isis–a Sunni backed offshoot of Al Qaeda–has emerged to capture towns and ruthlessly execute the captured personnel.  Holthaus argues that this “instability” is caused by global warming.  Folk apparently do reckless and terrible things when it gets hot and dry.  

Unfortunately for Holthaus’s thesis, he apparently skipped his fourth form logic class.  Co-incidence, of course, does not indicate, let alone prove, causation.  Unless you happen to be superstitious.  If you are, then black cats crossing one’s path can cause all kinds of evils.  The sad thing is that the religion of global warming has descended into irrational realms now appealing only gullible superstitious mind.  An even sadder thing is that the idiot editors at the NZ Herald published this piece of nonsense without a shred of irony or satire in sight. 

Let’s just review the possible outcomes of the conflict in Iraq, and see how many could reasonably be ascribed to global warming:

1.  Isis triumphantly takes Baghdad (global warming would have made them fearsome and ferocious and invincible on the battlefield.  Global warming drove them to fury.)

2.  The Iraq army capitulates amidst an eructation of cowardice and incompetence.  (Global warming drove them to distraction, so they could not fight).

3. Isis falls apart in a cluster of inter-necine divisions and squabbles.  (The heat drove them mad.)

4. Russia sends fighter jets to Iraq, enabling the Iraqi forces to bomb Isis into retreat.  (The heat on the Volga made Putin reckless.)

5. President Obama makes the Baghdad sky black with armed drones. (Global warming derangement syndrome lies miasmally over the Potomac).

5. Isis proclaims a Caliphate, anoints a Caliph, and calls all Muslims to rise in support of a global Islamic state.  (Global warming made them insane). 

Woops.  They just did that.  So there.  It proves just how much of a clear and present danger global warming really is.  QED.

Years ago, children used to claim when caught out, “the Devil made me do it”.  Eric Holthaus, Slate and the NZ Herald have apparently never grown up.  

Limping Limpidly

The West’s Double Standards

As we write this the Western world is agog with disgust at the brutality of an insurrection unfolding in Iraq.  People are being lined up and mown down.  Others are subjected to public beheadings because they don’t believe in the peculiar doctrines of the Islamic Sunni sect.  The West decries such behaviour as medieval by which it means, primitive–that is, ibehaviours that belong to an age which has not benefited from the Enlightenment. 

The West, in its preening desire to be inclusive and tolerant towards all has conveniently forgotten that the historical symbol of Islam is the scimitar.  The ardent Islamic Sunni soldiers now operating in Iraq are simply being consistent.  And, we want to ask the chattering classes and the Commentariat in the West, what could possibly be wrong with that?  Upon what high moral stool is the West sitting whence to declaim such behaviour? 

The established religion of the West is secular humanism, and its philosophy of existence is evolutionism.  But the West has conveniently forgotten that secular humanism and evolutionism is morally neutral at best, vacuous at worst.  Yet still the West clings forlornly to notions of morality, of right and wrong.
  In one of the weirdest and most circular circumlocutions ever devised, the Commentariat and the Academy have argued that our moral notions are better than the morality of the Medieval Period because we are more evolved.  We have progressed.  We declaim murder, rape, incest, and even theft sometimes because we have morally developed.  Our public morality is evolved. 

But secular humanism has no morality: it is built upon brute materialism.  Whatever is, is right.  Evolutionism, similarly, has no morality.  It is neutral or amoral–whatever survives is right.  Whatever passes away out of existence and history is wrong–in the sense of inferior, or unfit for purpose.  So, if the active and energetic rebels in Iraq succeed, all power to them.  They are the more evolved species in that land, not the effete chattering classes in the West. 

The problem lies right here: the West hates the God of the Ten Commandments.  But, the West wants to continue believing in the last six commandments–from honouring father and mother to not coveting what belongs to one’s neighbour.  The West wants the Law, without acknowledging nor worshipping the God whose Law it is.  Thus, the West lives an acute contradictory nonsense. 

As historian Christopher Dawson expressed it:

. . . the moral idealism which is still so characteristic of the Western mind is the fruit of an age-long tradition of religious faith and spiritual discipline.  Humanitarianism is the peculiar possession of a people who have worshipped for centuries the Divine Humanity–apart from all that even our humanism would have been other than it is.  It is from this Christian moral tradition that both the older Deist movement and the new movement of evolutionary vitalism have derived whatever positive religious value they possess.  Nevertheless this element cannot continue to exist indefinitely, if it is divorced from the historic religious beliefs on which it is really founded.  [Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945),  p. 242f.]

So, when the Modern Man, the card carrying member of the Academy or the Commentariat, declaims the brutality being perpetrated in Iraq he or she is drawing on a mere echo–and a faint echo at that–of the Law of the Lord of Sinai and Calvary.  In the light of the evolutionary secularism prevailing in the West it comes across as quaint, even foolish. 

In the spirit of Elijah we find ourselves wanting to cry out, “Grow up, and get a life!”  If the Baal of secular humanism is true, stop prattling on about morality and immorality, right and wrong, decency and indecency.  Live before and serve your god with a modicum of integrity and consistency.  But if God be true, then repent and embrace His Law and His Word with fear and reverence. 

The West is both limping and limpid.  It claims both the autonomy of evolutionism, and the righteous decency of the Lord.  It lives in a pathetic joke.  The Sunni warriors no doubt get the punchline.  That’s why they call the West the Great Satan. 

The Rise of the Secular Clerisy, Part II

Will the Secular Clerisy Triumph?

In Part I of “The Rise of the Secular Clerisy”, published here, Joel Kotkin argued that an elite has arisen to  coalesce around a series of propositions and ideas which are now being enforced with regularity.  To espouse a contrary opinion is to enunciate heresy.  The enforcement sanctions used by this new elite have gone beyond mere public opprobrium to sending the guilty to Coventry, and to sacking offenders from their jobs.  Not that their employment had anything to do with the hateful opinions being expressed.  It’s just that what they believe is increasingly seen as an anathema. Witness the case of the CEO of Mozilla forced to resign because he happened to give a small donation several years ago to a political campaign opposing homosexual “marriage”.   It is getting very close to the ancient punishment of exile. 

In the second part, Klotkin analyses the seat of the power of this new clerisy.  Whilst he is analysing the battlefield as it exists in the United States, we are confident the same patterns and nodes of power are to be found in almost all countries in the West.  The first bulwark of influence and power is found in the nation’s bureaucracies, both federal and state. 

America’s Nomenklatura

The Clerisy has thrived during these hard times. Since 1990, the number of government workers has expanded by some five million to some twenty million. That’s four times the number who were employed by the government at the end of the Second World War, a growth rate roughly twice that of the population as a whole.

The upper bureaucracy have been among the greatest beneficiaries—along with Wall Street and the green crony capitalists —of the Obama Administration’s economic policy. The number of workers, particularly at the federal level, continued to rise even at the height of the great recession. Between late 2007 and mid-2009, the number of U.S. federal workers earning at least $150,000 more than doubled. The ranks of federal nomenklatura—combined with a host of related private contractors —- have swelled so much that Washington DC by 2012 replaced New York as the wealthiest region in the country .

The upper bureaucracy has evolved into a privileged and cosseted caste. In California, state workers are allowed such special privileges as having their Department of Motor Vehicle records kept confidential; a sensible precaution for those, like police, who deal with criminals but now expanded to cover a vast array of public servants, including social workers. Naturally, as beneficiaries of an expanded government, public sector unions have been among the strongest backers of regulatory growth and ever increased social services. Their political power has also been on the rise; since 1989, public sector unions accounted for two of the top three top ten donors to political candidates.

More important still is the bureaucracy’s ability to control society through unelected agencies, something that grew even during Republican administrations, but has achieved unprecedented scale under President Obama. Increasingly, agencies such as the EPA and HUD, seek to shape community development patterns—for example on land use policies —- that traditionally fell under local control. With their power, the agencies have harassed unfriendly conservative organizations, as seen by the IRS, and monitored the populace’s private conversations, seen in the case of the NSA. But to some prominent members of the Clerisy, these power grabs haven’t gone far enough.

Leading figures of the Clerisy, like former Obama budget advisor Peter Orszag and Thomas Friedman, argue that power should shift from naturally contentious elected bodies—subject to pressure from the lower orders—to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations. The popular will, according to the Clerisy and its allies, lacks the scientific judgment and societal wisdom to be trusted with power.

Here the naked ugliness of elitism is displayed.  Ordinary people are deemed stupid (unless they think like the clerisy).  They cannot be trusted with government.  The opinions they hold are not just ignorant, they are flat out dangerous to the survival of the planet, at the broadest level, and to civilised society, such as our own country.  The clerisy alone is sufficiently educated, clever and able to protect the interests of all other people–or at least, the interests other people ought to have.   If you think the clerisy treats you with condescension herein lies the reason.  They know you better than you know yourself.  They believe themselves to perceive your interests far better than you do–which is to say that at root you are profoundly ignorant of yourself and what is best for you.

The Real College of Cardinals.

Like the upper bureaucracy, academia has also expanded rapidly in recent decades. In 1958 universities and colleges employed under 370,000 people; by 2014 that number had expanded to roughly 1.7 million. With universities now serving roughly twenty million full and part time students, academics have never exercise more influence over young Americans.

Ironically, despite its patina of egalitarian beliefs, the academic world now epitomizes the new hierarchical class order as much as any major institution. The roughly 1.4 million instructors in the University system, have experienced what one writer calls “the great stratification” between roughly 500,000 largely older tenured “alpha” Professors and a vast “beta” of low-paid teaching assistants, contingent faculty and those working in extension programs.

At the same time, the bureaucracy of the University, like that of the government, has exploded, even more at elite (and tax-favored) private schools than among public ones. Whereas there were about 250,000 administrators and professional staff members in 1975, about half the number of professors, by 2005 there were over 750,000, easily outnumbering tenure-tracked professors. As the University has gained in power, those in control have taken on ever more the trappings of an aristocracy whose primary mission is self-preservation—not unlike the Medieval European clergy.

The Academy sees itself not just as the protector, preserver, and transmitter of our historical culture along with its values, to present and future generations.  It has gone way beyond that.  It now sees its role as redeemer and saviour–ushering in the new world of redeemed men and women.  

The Creative Elite

The final element of the Clerisy’s triumvirate is the culture-based industries and their upper middle classes participants. Arnold Toynbee identified the “creative genius” as the historic leader and savior of society—an apt description of the self image held by many of the new tech and media elites.

Today, this “creative” element has grown ever more pervasive. Artists, writers, fashion designers and actors have achieved enormous status in our society; and a handful has become very wealthy. More important still has been the rise of media oligarchs, some tied to the tech establishment, who now rank among the wealthiest Americans. Indeed of the world’s 25 richest people, a majority come from either the information sector, the fashion industry or media. These new media elites, combined with the tech oligarchy, could well emerge as the dominant economic force of the 21st Century, surpassing fortunes made in energy, manufacturing, or housing.

The media itself is increasingly populated by the children of prominent politicians and by those who come from the ranks of the plutocracy. These include the offspring of the Reagans, GOP stand-bearer John McCain, various Kennedys, and Nancy Pelosi. In Hollywood, meanwhile, some of the new powerful producers come from the ranks of the ultra-rich, including heirs to the Pritzker fortune and the daughter of Oracle Founder Larry Ellison, one of the world’s ten richest men.

The celebrity culture is the creative elite on public display.  The outpouring of adulation, the self-congratulation, the narcissistic preoccupation with oneself, daaarhling, is not just obnoxious, it is contemptible.  By-and-large these folk are tinpot wannabes.  The genuine artists among the media  are far too weighty and serious about their craft to want to have anything to do with celebritism.  

The Clerical Consensus

Today’s Clerisy attempts to distill today’s distinctly secular “truths”—on issues ranging from the nature of justice, race and gender to the environment—and decide what is acceptable and that which is not. Those who dissent from the accepted point of view can expect their work to be simply ignored, or in some cases vilified. In the Clerical bastion of San Francisco, an actress with heretical views, in this case supporting a Tea Party candidate, who was pilloried, and lost work for her offense.

The pattern of intolerance has been particularly notable in the area of climate change, where serious debate would seem prudent not only on the root causes and effects, but also what may present the best solutions. Climate scientists who diverge from the warming party line, even in a matter of degree, are routinely excoriated by the Clerisy as “deniers” of “settled” science even in the face of 15 years of relatively stable temperatures. The media also participates in this defense of orthodoxy. The Los Angeles Timesas well as the website Reddit have chosen to exclude contributions from skeptics.

The stifling orthodoxy from the technocrats and media elite is benign compared to the inquisitional behavior can be seen in institutions of higher education. It is nothing short of tragic, notes civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, that a 2010 survey of 24,000 college students found that barely a third thought it “safe to hold unpopular views on campus.”

Such attitudes seem natural in an environment where, according to various studies, liberals outnumber conservatives by between eight and fourteen to one. Whether this reflects natural preferences among the well-educated or is partially due to institutional discrimination remains arguable. But consider that 96 percent of all Presidential donations from the nation’s Ivy League schools went to Barack Obama, something more reminiscent of Soviet Russia than a properly functioning pluralistic academy. Nor is there any sign that this trend is slowing. Between 2007 and 2010, a University of California study revealed that “far left” and liberal views grew from 55 percent to almost 63 percent of full-time faculty while the conservative segment dropped from roughly 16 % to less than 12%. If the academic left simply waits long enough, it could look forward to a conservative-free faculty on many campuses.

A similar, if less uniform, clerical consensus suffuses the media culture, led by the television networks and the leading newspapers. In fact nearly half of all Americans consider the media too liberal, more than three times as many who see it as too conservative. Overall, reports Pew, the percentage who feel news is tilted to one side has grown dramatically from 53 percent in 1985 to 77 percent in 2011.

To be sure, there remain important exceptions to this rule, notably Fox News and talk radio, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Yet the right’s hold on the major media is demonstrably weak, and likely to decline further once Murdoch himself is no longer on the scene. A detailed ++UCLA study found that of the twenty leading news outlets in the country, eighteen were left of center.

Despite the journalistic embrace of the idea of diversity, a recent Indiana University Study notes that journalists themselves have become increasingly homogeneous.  Journalists are far more likely to be college educated than they were in 1970, and less likely to be a racial minority than just a decade ago. But the biggest change has been an ideological one; barely seven percent in 2013 were Republican, compared to nearly a quarter in 1971.

Even Arnold Brisbane, the former ombundsman of the The New York Times, has noted the group-think that now overshadows objectivity, long cherished by that most important of America media outlets.  Brisbane observed that, “so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism—for lack of a better term—that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.”

These positions are all reflected in almost lock-step media support for President Obama. Over sixteen prominent journalists joined the Obama administration, which was something of a record; in 2012 employees at the major networks sent President Obama almost eight times as much in contributions as they did his Republican opponent.

This consensus of views prevails as well in the electronic media. As the liberal author Jonathan Chait suggests, the media increasingly reflects not just commercial values, but “a vast left-wing conspirary.” He adds: “You don’t have to be an especially devoted consumer of film or television (I’m not) to detect a pervasive, if not total, liberalism.”

What of the future?  What are the prospects for this new clerisy?

Will the Clerisy rule after Obama?

The fact that Republicans continue to maintain considerable power in both Washington and the states suggests that the Clerisy’s power is not yet determinative. And indeed after President Obama leaves office, the Clerisy’s reach may be temporarily diminished, but its ability to set the social and political agenda will likely persist and even grow given their influence to shape perceptions, particularly among the young.

The current atmosphere of ideological unanimity—in academia, the arts and much of the government bureaucracy—set the stage for the outrages of this commencement season, making painfully palpable the growing authoritarian spirit in so many of our leading institutions. They often see themselves as a liberating force in our society, but in their dislike of conflicting ideas and open debate, today’s  Clerisy increasingly resembles the closed-minded dogmatists of the Medieval church.

This article first appeared at The Daily Beast.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

The Rise of the Secular Clerisy

Misanthropic Distrust of Humanity

We have posted several pieces in recent months on the rise of ideological authoritarianism in the West, particularly in the Europe, Canada, the UK, and the United States.  Further in this vein we are going to reproduce an article written by Joel Kotkin, entitled “Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent” that not only calls attention to this phenomenon in the United States, but identifies the nodes of its influence and power.  

We believe Christians, along with all citizens should be not just aware of these developments, but conscious of the implications for civil freedom, liberty, and the threats to the right of dissent.  One of the reasons Christians need to be aware is that common to all the nodes of influence of the new ideological authoritarianism is a disdain, if not outright hatred of the Christian faith, and a despising of Christians and the Church. 

Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent

by Joel Kotkin 

06/07/2014 

New Geography

 

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.

An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy, for for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street.

As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment.

 The “official” pieties are not defined in a creed or other formal statement.  They reflect a world-view which coheres around doctrines such as economic egalitarianism, distributive economic rights, a strong emphasis upon identity politics–both racial, class, and gender–a misanthropic distrust of the human race, along with a deeply held inchoate (as opposed to, reasoned) commitment to the omni-competent regulatory despotic state to create a society consistent with the shared world-view.  

Increasingly, those who dissent publicly and even privately are subjected to discrimination with teeth–so much so that people are now being hounded out of positions and occupations because they do not hold the received view. 

This power has been seen recently in a host of cancellations of commencement speakers. Just in the past few months Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, and former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, have been prevented from speaking by campus virtue squads whose sensibilities they had offended.

The spate of recent cancellation reflect an increasingly overbearing academic culture that promotes speech codes on what is permissible to say and even seeks to provide “trigger warnings” to warn students about the presence of nominally troubling subject matter in readings and discussions so they can avoid the elements of reality they find offensive. 

The emerging mien of the “politically correct” brigade is that it would stand upon the bridge, shouting “You shall not pass”, thereby preventing any heretics or naysayers to enter any academic hall, place of work, or government position, or society in general, lest the heretics do great harm to others by offending them.

The very term Clerisy first appeared in 1830 in the work of Samuel Coleridge to described the bearers society’s highest ideals: the intellectuals, pastors, scientists charged with transmitting their privileged knowledge them to the less enlightened orders.

The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy.

The Clerisy operates on very different principles than its rival power brokers, the oligarchs of finance, technology or energy. The power of the knowledge elite does not stem primarily from money, but in persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society. Like the British Clerisy or the old church-centered French First Estate, the contemporary Clerisy increasingly promotes a single increasingly parochial ideology and, when necessary, has the power to marginalize, or excommunicate, miscreants from the public sphere.

Of course, every society needs a clerical class, to instruct the young and maintain cultural standards. But in the past, at least in modern America, they tended to be a tolerance for fairly disparate views. Today’s Clerisy, by contrast, is increasingly homogeneous in its beliefs- despite pockets of conservative power such as the Heritage Foundation and most notably the media empire controlled by the Murdoch family.

Like all destructive ideologies, it relies not upon reason nor persuasion of the will, but upon the exercise of  social, political, and legal powers, such as ostracism, sending to Coventry, exile, ridicule, mockery, and ad hominem attacks–very much like classical racism. 

The modern Clerisy’s homogeneity springs from their social conditioning. Educated along similar ideological lines at major universities, they tend to be geographically concentrated in wealthy, “progressive” places, where few dissent from the prevailing worldview. As such they breathe, as analyst Walter Russell Mead suggests, “within a cocoon.” Inside their urban cocoons they operate from a thoroughly internalized set of progressive tropes on such issues as the environment, urbanism, gender and race. In practical terms, such as in their support of President Obama and the Democratic Party, they are both broadly allied with centers of power and influence, much as the clergy was in Medieval and early modern times.

When a people come to hold verities which they view as impeccable, but are unable to argue for them in any winning way apart from blackmail, threat, and force, we are confronted with invincible ignorance.  
 

Appalling Kipper Opinions

Arrogant Hoi-Polloi Outrage

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that our attitudes towards our modern political parties oscillate between extreme scepticism to involuntary hilarity.  We have a similar range of reactions to the Commentariat–that loose federation of social powers that support modern political parties in the sense that they want to engage with them and influence them–unions, media, schools and universities, bureaucracies, “big” business (that is, businesses of sufficient size to donate to politicians and political parties), and the chardonnay-swilling hoi-polloi, who fastidiously read the dailies in the desperate attempt to see photographs of themselves.

This cluster of the self-adulating has one thing in common: if any nascent plebeian political party–well beyond the pale of respectability–would dare lift its head above the parapet and venture beyond that pale, the vented outrage of the Commentariat and all “respectable” political parties will be heard as far as Timbuktu.  All of which is exceedingly diverting and amusing.

Which brings us to Ukip–the UK Independence Party.  Sean Thomas has written a piece documenting the discombobulation and outrage of the establishment at this horrid little party–which has left us chuckling with great mirth.  We hope you similarly enjoy it. 

Our political masters are horrified by Ukip. Trouble is, the voters aren’t

The Daily Telegraph

You can almost hear the screams from Westminster, can’t you? Every time Nigel Farage opens his mouth, the combined political classes of Primrose Hill and Holland Park react like a chorus of flashed spinsters, exposed to the hairy buttocks of a drunken navvy. Oh my word, he’s done it again! Someone stop him! Help!

But it’s a funny thing, this metropolitan fainting fit induced by anything connected to Ukip. To me it seems overdone; to me it suggests there are deeper psychological forces at work. After all, Ukip have yet to win a single MP at Westminster. So why do they invoke all these bladder-bursting conniptions in the chatterati?

Opinion formers would have it that Ukip’s opinions are the problem; i.e. the party is a bunch of crypto-fascists, the BNP with polished brogues, a bus-load of “loonies, fruitcakes and closet racists” (according to the PM). Therefore these barely concealed bigotries need to be exposed, by the scandalised elite, so the proles can react with proper aversion, and go back to dutifully voting Lib, Lab and Con.

But what are these appalling Kipper opinions, polices and personalities which so affront the Top Ten Thousand?

First, the people. There’s no doubt that Ukip does attract a few crazies and extremists. But then, all political parties do that, indeed I’d suggest that, for most citizens, the mere act of joining a political party – any party – is the act of a dubious nerd with narcissism issues, so Ukip are hardly unique. Furthermore, Ukip – as Farage ably put it – do not have a monopoly on oddballs. Or extremists.

Here, for instance, is a list of Labour Party notables who used to be communists or Marxist fellow-travellers: Alistair Darling, Jim Murphy, Jack Straw, Peter Hain, John Reid, Peter Mandelson. Now, whatever you think of Nigel Farage or Paul Nuttall, as far as I know they have not called for the overthrow of bourgeois democracy, so let’s toss out that canard about Ukip being uniquely “full of extremists”.

How about their policies then? One Kipper position that Ukipphobes love to cite is their apparent desire to reintroduce the death penalty. And on the face of it that does seem quite “out there”. No EU nation uses the death penalty (it is forbidden by quasi-EU law), virtually no western nations use the death penalty. So this policy is indeed a fringe position, right? Wrong. On the latest polls about 50 per cent of Britons support the death penalty. Half the country. And until Ukip came along, the views of half the country, on this issue, were entirely unrepresented in mainstream politics.

Then what about Europe? You probably know what I’m going to say here but it’s worth saying anyway. All three mainstream parties are intent on remaining within the EU (after some pantomime renegotiation if you are a Tory). That means that the 30-50 per cent of the country that expressly wants to leave the EU has been wholly unrepresented in politics. Until the rise of Ukip.

Then what about immigration? Ukip’s policy is to severely restrict immigration. Again this seems pretty radical, until you look at the polls. Sixty-nine per cent of people actually want zero net immigration. In other words, most Brits, when it comes to immigration, are even further to the right than Ukip.

And so on, and so forth. Ukip are against HS2 (the only party with that position). So are 48 per cent of the British people. Ukip have considered a policy to ban the burqa (the only party to consider that position) – this is a policy supported by 61 per cent  of British voters. Ukip want to cut foreign aid (the only party with that position) – this is a policy supported by 55 per cent of the British people.

Now personally, I’m not a Ukip supporter, but I can damn well read Ukip’s polling numbers. And what they tell me is that virtually all of these “cranky”, “fruitcake”, “loonytoon” positions adopted by Ukip turn out to be opinions shared by large minorities, or outright majorities, of the British electorate. They are also opinions that have, until recently, been ignored and repressed by the liberal elite.

This then, is why the political classes are horrified by Ukip. It’s not because they believe Ukip are really crazy. It’s because they are worried Ukip might be really popular.

The Acme of Christian Witness

In Search of a New Poster-Child

The Westboro Baptist Church has become villainous in the mind’s eye of many, if not most.  Here, apparently, must be a serious threat to the realm.  Westboro is a modern day megachurch albeit with the grand total of 40 members.  Yes, you read that right.  Forty members–most of which are related to one man, its recently deceased founder, Fred Phelps  It is what we Christians refer to as congregation standing firmly on the lunatic fringe.  

But for some reason it is front and centre–a major concern–for the chattering classes, the Commentariat and the media. Just Google Westboro to gain some appreciation of its notoriety.  It’s claim to ignominy is its public protests against homosexuals and homosexuality and any other public issue that can be remotely connected to homosexual promotion, even when drawn by a very, very long bow.  What an impact forty misguided febrile people have had. 

It is true that the Christian Church has always had its wacky outliers.
  Things like that happen in a fallen world.  After all, right from the very beginning there was a chap called Cain who sought to go into the presence of God with an offering and act of worship which God rejected and for which He had no regard.  This so incensed the hate filled heart of Cain that he murdered his brother out of spite, envy, and hatred.  We think of Simon Magus who sought to buy the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, forever after memorialised in the neologism, simony.  Time does not permit recounting the exploits of legions of charlatans, pretenders, hucksters of relics, snake handlers, leg-lengtheners, and other curiosities–suffice it to say that the Church has always had wacky outliers.  The Westboro Baptist Church is just one such. 

Yet the fascination and hunger for what this group is up to implies that it represents the heart and soul of the Christian faith.  Which leads to an hypothesis that its notoriety is actually a creation of the Commentariat and the media.  Westboro is notorious, but its scandalous brand has been forged and nurtured by the media in some pathetic attempt to slur Christians and to impute guilt by association to the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Which is to allege that the media and the Commentariat need Westboro for their narrative about Christians and the Christian faith.  The way the Commentariat would have us all understand Westboro is that it represents the vanguard of the Church and of Christians.  They are proclaiming what all Christians really believe and practice in their closets–hatred for mankind.  The ancient Roman interdictions against Christian were right on the money: these misanthropes have always been haters of the human race.  Thus, Westboro congregants have been made the poster boys for Christendom.  All forty of them.  The rest of the Christians skulk in their closets, but we, the cognoscenti, the erudite, and the media talking heads, we see them as they really are.  And Westboro is the peep hole into their dirty, hate-filled, dark, back room closets. 

How else can one understand the prurient fascination and lionising (in a negative sense) of these descendants of Cain?   Like Falstaff, they are useful to make a point. 

But now the founder has died, the group appears to be on the verge of splintering apart.  What then?  To whom will the media turn to portray the pop conception of Christianity?  They risk needing a new poster-child.  To whom and to what will they turn?  End timers?  Snake handlers?  No doubt they will find someone who would do the job creditably. 

Minatory Chorus

The Centre Will Not Hold

One puzzling thing about Islam is what we call the Rushdie Syndrome.  Whenever negative opinions or views are expressed about Muhammad, Islam, or the doctrine of Allah, the purveyor can end up with death threats–and in some cases, actual martyrdom.  In the West people are encouraged to hold some respect for the opinionated, even if one finds their opinions objectionable. Not so in Islam.  

We would argue that the Western tradition only abides if the centre holds.  The historical centre of the West has been the Christian faith.  We say “has been” because for over 150 years that philosophical and religious core has been gradually replaced by humanism (a doctrine of the ultimacy of man).  Humanism ends up proposing that some humans are more equal than others, and the abuse begins.  The centre no longer holds.  First to go are the most vulnerable–defenceless, silent babies in wombs which become death chambers, the aged, the infirm, then women trafficked into bondage as sex-slaves, and so forth.  In this devolutionary process  respect for one’s ideological opponent dissipates.  One only has to spend a few minutes reading a mere fraction of the the vituperative rantings sizzling electronic communication devices to have the point both illustrated and demonstrated. 

But for Islam, the centre has always been wrong.
  Consequently, throughout most of its history, Islam has been characterised by hatred of opponents.  We say “characterised” because of course many individual Muslims may be easy-going and quite laid back when exposed to negative criticisms of their religion.  But an easy-going tolerance has not characterised Islamic theology and practice throughout the centuries.  One major reason is the Islamic concept of shame.  This doctrine is derived from the proposition that Allah must be respected by all; therefore, his people also.  To disrespect Islam or its followers is to blaspheme Allah and his prophet.  Such behaviour is not just offensive, it is intolerable and must be punished.  Devotion to Allah requires it. 

Patrick Sookhdeo comments:

Shame is to be avoided at all costs, and honour, which includes the concept of pwer [sic] for the Muslim community, is to be sought and safeguarded.  True faith–Islam–based on God’s final revelation must be protected from insult and abuse.  (Other faiths, being false or incomplete in Muslim opinion, have no right to such protection.) [Patrick Sookhdheo, Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam. (McLean, VA: Isaac Publishing, 2007), p.331.]

All religions have a core which is regarded as holy, in contrast to the profane or literally, that which lies outside the temple.  For Islam, all of Islam is holy and the profane must be finally eradicated.  Therefore, it is the duty of every Muslim to take holy offence whenever and however Islam is defamed or disregarded.  It is the duty of Islamics to take revenge in Allah’s name.

Shame and humiliation cannot be borne and are considered legitimate justification for a violent response.  Muslim statements of outrage concerning the imposition of non-Muslims on their territory or rights are often phrased in terms of “humiliation”, with the unspoken assumption that this is the greatest grievance possible.  Many Islamic terrorists and suicide bombers see their task as contributing to the vital process of redeeming Islam’s honour from the humiliation imposed on it by the West. 

In the words of Osama bin Laden,

The walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets. . . . Death is better than life in humiliation!  Some scandals and shames will never be otherwise eradicated.

[Sookhdeo, ibid., p. 331.]

This explains why when the planes smashed into the Twin Towers and innocent people died, observers in the coffee bars in Egypt and other Islamic nations cheered and celebrated.  Much to the consternation of the West, it was a sacrifice worth celebrating because it helped removed the shame of Islam arising out of Western “insults” to Allah and his followers.

The fatwa calling for the death of Salmon Rushdie fits into this perspective.  As does the outrage over the depictions of Muhammad by the Danish cartoonist.  As does the murder of Dutch film-maker, Theo Van Gogh.  All have been judged to dishonour Muhammad.  That is why it is perfectly accurate to characterise Islam as a religion of hate and bloodshed.  It cannot tolerate dissent.  It cannot tolerate unbelief.  If a conquered people will not convert, they must either be humiliated publicly and perpetually, or they must be killed.  Allah’s honour requires it.  

Faced with such implacable fanaticism, the West’s Commentariat usually quails in a supine, cowardly manner.  Do not offend them.  Do not upset them.  Do not publish those cartoons. 

Secular humanism has a soft centre. It cannot hold.  Men are weak–as Elrond observed in the Lord of the Rings.  Humanist man may strut the stage, proclaiming his momentous importance.  But when asked to die for such a belief, his faith cannot hold.  Beyond life there is nothingness.  Life on this planet is all there is.  Better one day of life, than an eternity of non-being and of nothingness.  “How deeply should I bow?” is the reflexive response of Western humanism to Islamic vengeance for shame and humiliation. 

Or–there is another possible–but less likely–secular humanist response to Islamic offence: kill them, all of them.  Make them go out of existence first, whilst we cling to the tenuous as long as we can.  And that response to Islamic aspirations for vengeance has certainly been voiced in “unofficial” circles in the West.  Not by the Commentariat, but in the pubs and the sports clubs and the neighbourhood barbecues.  Either way, the centre is lost, devolving into perfidy. Either way, secular humanist civilisation will progressively become an oxymoron in the face of Islamic militancy.  The secularist Ideal Man is not big enough to hold the centre. 

But the centre of Christian civilisation will hold.  Jesus Christ is its centre, and there is no doubt about Him holding, standing firm.  And so the West finds itself in the Valley of Decision.  The risen Christ or Idealised Man?  As we ponder that, let the words of Elrond echo like a minatory chorus.

A Liberated Fourth Estate

Breaking Down the Established Commentariat

Back in the day, political pamphlets were a big deal.  One only has to think of the Federalist Papers to evoke a reminder of how significant the happy convergence of the printing press with short, sharp, pithy political argumentation became.  One could go further back and argue that the German reformation owed a great deal to a controversial pamphleteer, one Martin Luther, whose mass produced pamphlets did much to carry the Reformation into villages, hamlets, and city back alleys, thereby capturing the popular imagination.

It seems that blogs have become a modern form of pamphleteering–now an influential media in their own right.  Some newspapers have presciently caught the wave and surfed it well.

Blogs changed everything – if not in the way we expected

Daniel Hannan  
The Telegraph 
March 7, 2014

It’s a bit of a shock to realise that this blog has now been going for seven years. In the dog-year world of blogging, that makes it almost geriatric. A few are more venerable yet, standing like oaks among the crocuses: Guido, Cranmer, ConHome. But this is a frantic and ephemeral business, and it’s an unusual blog that lasts more than twelve months.

Back in the pioneering days, blogs were seen as a challenge to the established media. And, in one sense, they were. When Guido scalped his first minister, Peter Hain, in 2008, something changed, though the newspapers were slow to notice. When, the following year, he aimed his tomahawk at Derek Draper and Damien McBride, old-style pundits were still laboriously explaining to their readers what these blog thinggies were. By the time Tim Yeo became Guido’s latest victim, no one needed to ask any more.

One of the perverse characteristics of the incumbent establishment media (whether electronic or print) has been its conspiracy of silence. The establishment media, representing a vast semi-official Commentariat elite, had developed an “establishment view” of what constituted news and what did not.  It had become an organ of Groupthink, if not Newspeak.

When a dozen dead tree newspapers determined the agenda, the media’s chief power lay in not reporting a story – not through conspiracy, but from shared assumptions about what constituted news. Take the leak of the “hide the decline” emails from climatologists at the University of East Anglia in late 2009. At first, the astonishing trove was reported only by bloggers. It wasn’t that environment correspondents were meeting behind drawn blinds and vowing to repress the discovery; it was that, being uncomplicated believers in the AGW orthodoxy, they couldn’t see why the emails were a story. Only when repeatedly needled by online commentators were they were eventually forced to report perhaps the biggest event in its field of the century.

The key moment came when the story was picked up by James Delingpole, whose post attracted 1.6 million hits. Tellingly, that post appeared here, on Telegraph Blogs. Blogs were now part of the established media. 

We have entered the age of the citizen journalist.  Well, actually, we have seen instances of the same thing in the past–think again of the Federalist Papers and Luther’s pamphlets.  But, said the Commentariat, this would open the door to hucksters, rabble rousers, demagogues, and liars.  Irresponsibility, uncurbed by establishment guilds, would burst forth to the detriment of all. 

But freedom has its own in-built corrective.  It’s called competition.  Propaganda in fact flourishes where liberty of expression is curtailed and controlled.

. . . . The separate categorisation of columnists, reporters, bloggers and interested readers is becoming meaningless. Every citizen is now a potential journalist. News and opinion are a conversation. We still hear occasional complaints from Leftie pundits that online media “lack quality control”. In fact, the dialectic element of blogging ensures a higher standard of accuracy than before. Mistakes are ruthlessly exposed and, because of the sheer number of outlets, a plausible new theory can spread with previously unimagined speed.

Blogs have improved veracity, quality and diversity. They have not led to the segregation by opinion that many predicted: Leftists and Rightists argue online in a way that never happened when people took just one newspaper. It’s true that bloggers, being human, are as prone to cruelty, stupidity and error as anyone else. But it has never been easier to go elsewhere: more people are reading more news and comment than at any time in history.

Instead of fomenting and facilitating wacko conspiracy theories, for example, the new pamphleteers have been subjecting such inanities to more critical scrutiny than ever before.  Blogging has facilitated bringing opinions and arguments out into public view along with a consequent critical scrutiny.  Freedom of expression along with media which enable public dissemination will produce better, more accurate, and more informed public discourse over time.  As in any free market, the competition of ideas has increased their quality over time.  The crucible of criticism is a refining fire.

By contrast, unchallenged establishment views deteriorate to become progressively dumb, parroted by pavlovian minds.  “Everybody agrees. . . ” rapidly becomes elevated to the faux-status of a winning argument. 

Political Correctness In the Dock

Norway on Trial

Anders Breivik  is on trial in Norway for mass murder.  The court will decide his guilt–which is a pretty straightforward affair, since Breivik admits setting off the car bomb which killed eight people, and executing a massacre of young campers, murdering sixty-nine.  The trial is supposed to last ten weeks.  Since his guilt is straightforward, the only other question is his sanity.  Ten weeks to determine the sanity of Anders Breivik.  How bizarre.

What has led Norway into such a fix?  We suspect it has something to do with political correctness.
  The Commentariat–the dominant axis of politicians, intellectuals and media–has a shared view of reality.  All that conforms to the group-think is considered rational, sane, normal.  Anything which is not politically correct–that is, all which fails to conform to group-think–is suspect.  Extreme violations of the “code” imply a person may well be insane. 

Clearly Breivik is not a babbling, incoherent idiot.  He is not delusional.  He does not think that trees talk Swahili to him.  He has a world view, which he has followed through with cold logic and a ruthless, deadly precision.  Is the Islamic terrorist mad?  Of course not.  By the lights of their perverted religious ideology they are perfectly rational and consistently sane.  Was Stalin mad?  Of course not.  Once again, by his ideological and political principles, he was the sanest man in the Soviet Union.  Utterly depraved, to be sure–but sane and rational, nonetheless. 

Norway’s problem is that the Commentariat is so oppressively powerful it has got to the point of thinking that anyone who does not likewise believe the Catechism of Political Correctness is mentally unstable and delusional.

We have always found it particularly chilling to read of regimes (usually Communist) which consign their  malcontents to mental asylums, or re-education camps.  North Korea has, at present, thousands upon thousands of its citizens so incarcerated.  You will either learn to think as we do, or you will die: probably, for many victims, both will transpire.   Norway, apparently, has its own “soft” version of the same regime.  If you hold views which lead you to murder innocent people, you are probably insane.  Not wicked.  Not depraved.  Not degenerate.  Mad.  Not guilty by reason of insanity. 

Noway prides itself on its PC tolerance.  Evil is always environmentally and circumstantially caused in that country.  Total depravity and Adam’s sin skipped over that Scandinavian paradise.  The Commentariat insists upon it.  Evil is not native to the human soul.  Sweet love and tolerance will free people from the fleeting darkness of the human conscience.  No Conradian Heart of Darkness there. Dostoevsky would already be in the asylum in Breivik’s land.   It is part of what makes Norway so sophisticated, so enlightened, so European.

So, now Norway needs to take ten weeks to determine if Breivik is sane.  Either way, guilt and doubt will now leech through the Commentariat as never before. If Breivik is judged sane and guilty of his crimes, how could such evil seep from Norwegian society into his soul?  If he is judged insane, how could the system have failed this soul so comprehensively?

By the peculiar, stupid blindness of that place, it is not Breivik who is on trial–it is Norway itself.

Strict Islamic Orthodoxy

 By Their Fruit You Shall Know Them

A murderous Islamic shoots down Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse. He also murders French paratroopers.  He calls a radio station to boast of his crimes and expresses regret that he has not done “more”. 

The supine western media, always fearful of Islam’s long reach against them (death threats, etc.) quickly move to assure us all that killing is not part of Islam.
 

Instead, they (the media) went into full-on Islam whitewashing, citing the usual liberal bromide that poverty causes Islamists to murder Jews. The Telegraph’s Ed West wrote: “Islam is not to blame for the Toulouse killings … It is not religion that turns some young Muslim men in the West violent, but the sense of alienation and frustration that inevitably comes from being a second-generation immigrant.”

OK, so immigration is the problem and the cause.  Alienation of second generation immigrants does that, don’t you know.  Unfortunately, the pattern of this poor chap’s alienation is all too familiar.  According to the NZ Herald:

A stand-off between French police and a gunman suspected of a spate of killings in the southwestern city of Toulouse is entering its sixteenth hour. It’s has been revealed the suspect, Mohamed Merah, had been under surveillance for years for having “fundamentalist” Islamic views following visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The wider family of the murderer has also been involved.   These recent atrocities are not an act of spontaneous rage, but follow a long considered, long planned course.  There is a trail of conspiracy to murder and actions consistent with those plans. 

Prosecutor Francois Molins said the gunman was a self-taught radical Salafi who had been to Afghanistan twice and had trained in the Pakistani militant stronghold of Waziristan.  Molins said the gunman’s brother Abdelkader had been implicated in a 2007 network that sent militant fighters to Iraq.

An Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Merah has been under surveillance for years for having “fundamentalist” Islamic views.

But, we are assured that Salafi teachings and Islamic terrorist groups are not responsible in any way.  It’s only the alienation of a second generation immigrant, don’t you know.  This, despite Salafi orthodoxy advocating murderous jihad against civilians not just as a legitimate expression, but a required act, of Islam itself.  This, also despite the fact that salafi’ism is at the very centre of Sunni orthodoxy. 

So how is that alienation thing working out in non-immigrant land?  Let’s go to Iraq.  According to Al Jazeera: 

Al-Qaeda’s front group in Iraq has claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks that killed 46 people across the country this week, and said the violence exposes how weak government security is ahead of the upcoming Arab League summit in the capital, Baghdad.

The statement by the Islamic State of Iraq, posted on a website on Wednesday, said its “Sunni lions” targeted the plan of the “fool government preparing” for the summit. Attacks on Tuesday struck Shia pilgrims in the holy city of Karbala, set cars on fire near a police headquarters in Kirkuk and targeted security forces and government officials in Baghdad.

In all, the extremist groups struck eight cities in just under six hours, killing 46 people and wounding 200.  “Within a few hours, all the security measures adopted by the Shia government have collapsed and the enemy was taken by surprise,” the statement said. “Several government and security headquarters were attacked.”

But Islam is in no way responsible.  Its all those second generation immigrants in Iraq–disaffected, alienated, poor, Sunni Muslims. They oh-so-understandably vent their frustration and alienation by killing other (Shia) Muslims. 

The supine, guilt-ridden Commentariat in the West overlooks one big fat reality.  All these “extremist” Muslim groups (Salafi’s, Wahhabi’s, Al Qaeda) have a common theme: each claims to be strictly following the teachings of Mohammed himself as they kill and maim.  This is not to be compared with, say, nominal Jews who joined Stalin’s cause.  Not for one moment did they claim that their communist ideology was due to their strict following of the Torah.  They were lapsed Jews, liberal Jews, apostate Jews–and everyone knew it, including they themselves. 

Islam is a violent, oppressive, bloody false religion.  That is not to say all Islamic people are thus violent, oppressive or bloody.  It is to say that those who seek to follow its teachings strictly inevitably are. 

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck . . .

Tolerable Opinions

The Creed of the Commentariat

Often times we have referred to the Commentariat.  Some folk have inquired as to what this is.  Is it a club?  A secret society? 

Not at all.  It is an informal college of institutions and people who presume incessantly to tell us who we are, what we should be like, proclaim what ought to be done and declaim what ought not to be.  This loose collective is a self-reinforcing group who see themselves as leaders and intellectuals, a cut above the ordinary Joe.  The appellation “Commentariat” refers to the tiresome fact they these folk are always commenting  upon public issues, deigning to tell us what we should think, how we should act, and what we should be like.  Needless to say, the Commentariat reflects Orwellian “group-think”.

David Farrar has made reference to a publication by the Centre for Independent Studies which has put out a number of essays on the erosion of free speech in the West and the growing group-think which we often call “political correctness”.  One of these essays by  Thilo Sarrazin, a German politician describes how the Commentariat can be identified. 

The code of conduct in a society, which is not laid down by law, changes over time. It is to a large degree implicit and not subject to formal—or even openly discussed—rules. But those members who do not observe the code run the risk of being excluded from ‘the good society.’

Having and expressing the ‘right’ set of opinions about certain scientific, social and political questions is an important part of this code of conduct. Most people want to observe the prevailing code of conduct, but being busy with jobs and families they have no informed opinion of their own on most matters. So they think and believe what the media say they should think and believe. Politicians, on the other hand, read public opinion solely based on media opinions. Most politicians sincerely believe that voters think what the media write or say.

Media are made by people, and media people recruit themselves in a process of self-selection, much as lawyers, doctors or engineers do. Polls show that media people mainly listen to other media people. Endorsed by this self-selection, media people on the whole have a set of opinions that tend to be on the left of mainstream society.

Media people listen to other commentators, which more often than not, are other media folk.  And politicians. And intellectuals.  This self-reinforcing network presents a view of life and of society which the Commentariat believes is self-evident simply because “everybody” agrees and thinks the same way.  It represents the group-think mindset of a self-serving, self-identified, self-perpetuating elite. 

Sarrazin summarises the Commentariat creed as he has experienced it in Germany:

Here is the list of political correctness in Germany. I think it describes the truth, but it takes some irony or humour to fully appreciate the list. The problem lies not in any single item on this list but in their combination and rigid application to political thinking:

1.     Inequality is bad, equality is good.

2.     Secondary virtues like industriousness, precision and punctuality are of no particular value. Competition is morally questionable (except in sports) because it promotes inequality.

3.     The rich should feel guilty. Exception: Rich people who have earned their money as athletes or pop stars.

4.     Different conditions of life have nothing to do with people’s choices but with the circumstances they are in.

5.     All cultures are of equal rank and value. Especially, the values and ways of life of the Christian occident and Western industrialised nations should not enjoy any preference. Those who think differently are provincial and xenophobic.

6.     Islam is a religion of peace. Those who see any problems with immigration from Islamic countries are guilty of Islamophobia. This is nearly as bad as anti-Semitism.

7.     Western industrialised nations carry the main responsibility for poverty and backwardness in other parts of the world.

8.     Men and women have no natural differences, except for the physical signs of their sex.

9.     Human abilities depend mainly on training and education; inherited differences hardly play any role.

10.   There are no differences between peoples and races, except for their physical appearance.

11.   The nation-state is an outdated model. National identities and peculiarities have no particular value. The national element as such is rather bad; it is at any rate not worth preserving. The future belongs to the global society.

12.   All people in the world not only have equal rights, they are in fact equal. They should at least all be eligible for the benefits of the German welfare state.

13.   Children are an entirely private affair. Immigration takes care of the labour market and of any other demographic problems.

That’s the list. In this condensed form, it sounds like a joke. But it’s not a joke. These are the hidden axioms of political correctness in Germany (and probably elsewhere) as I see them.

Every item on the list has a high emotional value for those who believe in it.  The core of the problem is that partly moral and partly ideological attitudes are taken at face value and mixed with reality.

We could add to the creed.  The Commentariat believes that religious people are feeble minded, credulous, anti-rational fools.  It believes that state actions are always morally superior and efficacious than private actions.  It believes in principle that the state is omni-competent; when the state is ineffective it is due only to resource constraints such as technological limitations or a lack of money.   These can (and must) be overcome.

The Commentariat believes that the God revealed in Scriptures of the Old and New Testament does not exist.  It believes that evolution is infallibly true.  And so forth. 

Contradict or argue against any of  these statements of faith and you have become politically incorrect.  It is only a matter of time before the Commentariat calls for “re-education camps” for the truculent and the stubborn. 

God is a jealous God.  It is far more only a matter of time before the house of the Commentariat is left to it desolate.