Islam and the West

A brief exchange on Not PC's blog has made me realise how ignorant many non-Muslims are about Islam. I wrote a comment saying that Islam has two main tenets - submission (which, of course, is what Islam actually means) and the belief that it is the one final religion for all of mankind. The gentleman who took issue with my comment said that Christianity and Judaism are equally about submission. This illustrates his ignorance about all three religions.

The central tenet of Christianity is faith, not submission - faith in God, faith that Jesus Christ was his Son (and was God at the same time) and faith that belief in Him will redeem your sins.

The central tenet of Judaism is the law, which God gave the Jewish people so that they may live righteous lives.

Christianity and Judaism emphasise the concept of free will, which is almost completely absent from Islam. Free will implies genuine moral choices. In Islam there is only the words of the book - the Koran - and you are meant to follow them without interpretation or ambivalence.

One area in which Islam is not unique is the perpetration of violence in its name. All the Abrahamic religions adhere to the Old Testament, which exhorts violence in the name of God almost to the point of tedium. Christianity at least tempers this with Christ's message of pacifism.

We often hear, usually from non-Muslims, that Islam is a religion of peace. This is perhaps the most misunderstood statement about Islam. It is true in one sense - if you submit to Allah, you will find peace. Islam is like Buddhism in this respect - its adherents seek to find inner peace through their belief. This does not mean Islam is a pacifist religion.

Islam is growing at a rate that will soon make it the biggest religion in the world and there is little doubt that it presents the biggest philosophical challenge to modern Western values since Communism. It is a mistake to regard it from a position of ignorance and prejudice but it is equally a mistake to put our heads in the sand and believe that it has the same values as classical Western liberalism.

Two insights into Islam

In recent days I have read two books on the subject of Islam. The first is popular historian Tom Holland's excellent book In the Shadow of the Sword that examines the origins of Islam in the context of the decline of the Roman and Persian empires. The second is Michael Houellebecq's novel Submission, which is set in France in the near future when a Muslim is elected president, a not entirely fanciful notion.

I am a keen student of history but Holland's book contained a great deal of historical fact of which I was not aware - for example, who knew that a Jewish state (Himyar) existed in Arabia up until the 6th Century? The Himyarites were Arabs not Hebrews, and they dominated the Arabian peninsula until they were defeated by Christian forces in 525 A.D. The Roman and Persian empires were constantly vying for dominance in the region, with the latter overcoming the former to conquer Ephesus, Jerusalem and Alexandria by the early 7th Century.

The accepted modern history would have you believe that Islam started in a world that was still predominantly pagan and it grew to the point where it eventually came up against Christianity, but in reality the region was split between three competing religions - Zoroastrianism, Judaism and a burgeoning Christianity - and Islam is clearly a fusion of all three.

Holland challenges much of the accepted history. He doubts, for example, that Mohammed wrote (or dictated) most of the Koran, and he is certainly not the only historian to credit the book to Uthman, the third Caliph, who ruled the expanding Arab empire a couple of decades after Mohammed's death. He identifies much of the Koran as having its origins in the Jewish Torah, the New Testament and the books of Zoroastrianism. As for the Hadith, the supposed sayings of Mohammed, he rightly identifies these as a mixture of Greek, Roman, Jewish and Persian writings and sayings compiled and culled by scholars such as the prodigious al-Bukhari a couple of hundreds of years after Mohammed's death.  None of this is particularly controversial with even Islamic scholars acknowledging the hybrid origins of their faith, and in fact many Muslim leaders deny that Islam is a separate religion per se but maintain it is the evolution of the monotheistic faiths into a more coherent, final form.

Houellebecq's Submission is in some ways the more informative book on Islam. The name of the book is, of course, a literal translation of the word Islam, and it made me realise for the first time how important is the idea of submission to the Islamic faith. Submission to God, of course, is the central tenet of Islam but it also explains the role of women as being submissive to men. The main character is a professor at the Sorbonne who loses his job when the university becomes an Islamic institution, but then he is offered not just his old job back at a much higher salary, but the opportunity of a lucrative book contract and the prospect of several young wives - in short, everything a slightly inadequate academic could ever aspire to - but, of course, only on the condition that he submits.

Those of us who are atheists have difficulty understanding the appeal of submission to a mythical being, but to many people it is the most attractive part of religion and it is the need to submit that makes Islam so appealing to so many. We like to think of human beings as being rational creatures but the reality is the human mind has always been attracted to mystical explanations and the belief that we are in the hands of something that is greater and wiser than ourselves is comforting, like returning to childhood. It is easier to abrogate responsibility for our lives to a supreme being than to take that responsibility on our own shoulders.

Houellebecq's book made me realise that we cannot counter Islam with rational argument and by appealing to our own desire to be free, independent human beings with natural rights. It is the very lack of these things that attracts people to Islam. I must admit I found this conclusion rather frightening.

Some thoughts on Islam post-Orlando

Recently I wrote about Islam and the insight I had gained into that faith from the books of Tom Holland and Michael Houellebecq. I have thought some more about what I had learned from those books in light of the massacre in Orlando.

It is claimed that Islam is a religion of peace but I think Muslims mean that only in the sense that if you submit to Allah, you will be at peace. The Koran exhorts its followers to holy war - jihad - until all have been converted or killed.

The opposite of submission is emancipation. Having fought for hundreds of years to emancipate every section of Western society, are we going to give it all up in appeasement and submission?

In the hierarchy of victimhood, being Muslim now appears to trump being gay, black or female. Who gets to choose on which of these we compromise?

Islam is not a religion of live and let live, which is the essence of the classical liberalism that led to the freedom and prosperity that we enjoy in the West. Islam is a package deal but it seems that Western liberalism isn't.

We cannot make physical war on a philosophy - only on its agents. We must fight the philosophy philosophically.

Finally, if Islamophobia means fear of Islam - given New York, London, Boston, Paris, Brussels, Orlando and all the other massacres carried out by the fanatics of that religion - is that fear really a bad thing?

Yes, it is Islam (and all the Other Religions)

It is hard to conceive what motivates the minds of men who would take over a school and set out to systematically kill all the children and staff within it over a period of many hours, such as happened this week in Peshawar, Pakistan. The Peshawar massacre was like a monumental rebuttal of the likes of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott who rushed to appease the Islamic community by claiming that the Sydney café attack by an Islamic cleric a day earlier was nothing to do with Islam. 

Abbott's absolution of Islam has been echoed again and again by the likes of Barack Obama, David Cameron and other Western leaders following similar attacks on their soil. But I'm afraid such disavowals are starting to wear a little thin, particularly when the perpetrators of these acts make it abundantly clear (as the Sydney attacker did with his use of an Islamic slogan flag) that they are acting in the name of Islam. I'm sure it will be revealed that the monsters who perpetrated the Peshawar massacre were making some sort of statement about the education of girls and the teaching of non-Islamic disciplines such as modern science, just like the Boko Haram (literally 'books forbidden') group in Nigeria and the man who shot Nobel Peace Prize-winner Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan.

Religion is at the heart of all these acts, as it is at the heart of much of the violence in the world today and throughout history. Fortunately for those of us who live in the originally-Christian West, Christianity has lost its potency as a motivator for violence, but Islam has certainly stepped into its shoes as one of the primary forces for evil-doing in the world.

The problem with religion is that it can justify any extreme of behaviour in the name of its gods. The scriptures of most religions include plenty of material to justify all manner of violent acts. Anyone who is seen as not being a sufficiently doctrinaire adherent to a particular faith can be struck down with little compunction on the part of the perpetrator. There is no compassion, empathy or guilt when you are acting in the name of the supreme being, for what is the worth of the life of child against the majesty of the creator?

Religious people believe they are moral, but really they are completely amoral. They substitute their interpretation of the words of an old book for the rational thoughts of their own mind. True morality is rationalism. True morality is about taking personal responsibility for, and thinking through the effects of, the actions you take. The rational person understands the horrible misery that killing a child brings to everyone who loved or cared for that child and thinks about how he or she would feel in the place of the victim. The religious person thinks only of whether their action will bring them distinction in the eyes of their god. I concede that evil is not confined to the devoutly religious, but religion enables its adherents to escape personal responsibility for their acts and in doing so makes it easier for them to commit evil.

On that rather depressing note, I would like to wish those who have read my blog posts this year a very happy holiday season. I intend to write more next year and hope that some of what I write interests and entertains you.

Thank you for reading and thank you most of all for your rationalism. It is a rare commodity.

Then they came for Richard Dawkins

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

- Martin Niemöller

Universities are not what they used to be. Once they were places where students and faculty enjoyed greater freedom to express and debate their views than in mainstream society. They were sanctuaries where young people could explore the full smorgasbord of opinions and beliefs about politics, religion, morality and social mores without the constraints of traditional norms. Unfortunately this is no longer the case - they have become a different type of sanctuary, a gilded cage where people are protected from exposure to anything other than a narrow set of acceptable views. This is particularly true of the United States where recently we have seen:

• Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali banned from giving a speech at Brandeis University because her views on Islam's oppression of women were deemed offensive to Muslims
• British pro-Trump gay activist Milo Yiannopolous forced to cancel his address at UC Berkeley because of violence protests
• American conservative commentator Anne Coulter disinvited from speaking at UC Berkeley (although later rescinded).

There have been many other incidents that demonstrate that our most fundamental right  - to hold and voice our own opinions, which is surely a prerequisite for all other rights - is now considered less important than the precept that no one should ever be offended by anything.

The latest incident is the cancellation of the appearance at an event hosted by a radio staton in Berkeley of the renown biologist and perhaps the world's greatest science writer, Richard Dawkins, because of his views on Islamist terrorism.

Several years ago I heard Dawkins speak in person and I left the presentation with two main impressions. Firstly, he does not speak as fluently as he writes. This is not unexpected as it is rare that great writers are as eloquent in their spoken words as in those they write, but what Dawkins had to say was riveting in spite of his somewhat awkward delivery style. More importantly, I thought he delivered the most complete and easily understood explanation of the biological basis for evolution by natural selection that I have ever heard or read. 

He described how the cells of all living things are made up of chains of protein molecules that are capable of curling up into an almost infinite variety of shapes, and that these shapes are determined by a digital code that is held in special molecular chains called DNA. He went on to describe what is perhaps the most important discovery in biology - but one that has never occurred to me despite my keen interest in science - that when living things reproduce by replicating from a single fertilised egg cell, they follow the whole of evolution from single-celled organisms to complex higher lifeforms. They are able to do this because all of evolution is stored in the digital code in their DNA and is simply replayed during gestation. In other words, each of us is the output of a computer programme that has stored the knowledge of three billion years of evolution, run over just nine months! This is the reason why the zygotes and early embryos of all animals look so alike - they show the point in evolution when all animals did look alike. 

Dawkins made me see that evolution is not some dry historical fact but is something that plays out in the birth of every baby. I found this fact jaw-dropping and ironically it is perhaps the closest thing I have experienced in my life to a religious revelation. It made me think that every human being needs to hear the story that this man tells so well, and that to ban him from imparting his knowledge to others is to commit a crime against human knowledge.

The political correctness stormtroopers have now come for Richard Dawkins and that makes me ineffably sad because it is precisely their ignorance and intolerance that Dawkins has spent his life trying to overcome. The radio station said it was specifically his criticism of Islam that led them to ban him. Dawkins has been a frequent critic of Christianity and his criticism of Islam is for the most part confined to Islamic extremism, but in the strange world of victim group politics it seems Christianity is fair game but Islam is a no-go area where free speech does not apply.

The size of the space that contains acceptable opinions is becoming smaller and smaller. You may think your views are safe because you are an open-minded, tolerant liberal who celebrates diversity and just wants to live and let live. You are wrong. They are coming for you because it is not so much your views that are under assault as the right to have any opinion of your own.

We all need to speak out in defence of free speech before there is no one left to defend it.

Paris attacks were actually a skirmish in a war of values

The dust has settled around last Friday's Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris and with the perspective of an elapsed week it is interesting to reflect on the responses to the attacks. French President Francois Hollande has conducted himself surprisingly well, I think, with his almost Churchillian comments ("the terrorists [that] are capable of doing such acts...must know that they will face a France very determined - a France united") and his ordering of immediate military retaliation against Islamic State targets in Syria.

However, there were also plenty of the sort of self-indulgence responses we have come to expect after these tragedies (remember Michelle Obama's "#BringBackOurGirls" hashtag following the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram), with the guy who dragged a piano to the street outside the Bataclan theatre to play John Lennon's Imagine perhaps being the lamest. There were the usual futile gestures on social media, particularly the Eiffel Tower-cum-Ban-the Bomb symbol and French flag photo on every second Facebook posting. But I think President Obama's response takes the prize for the most disingenuous. He described the events thus: "an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share."

What universal values? Does he really expect us to believe that all of humanity shares a respect for Western values of individual rights, freedom of speech and religion, the rule of law, etc.?  Of course it doesn't. These values are actually fairly unique to that small section of humanity that grew out of Ancient Greece, survived the fall of the Roman Empire and persisted in small pockets during the Dark Ages to finally flourish in the Enlightenment that took hold in Western Europe. But perhaps Obama didn't mean these Enlightenment values, perhaps instead he meant Islamic values such as submission to their god and the killing of those who reject or blaspheme him. Certainly with the way Islam is growing there's a fair chance that those values will be more universal than the values of the Enlightenment.

In the war of values, the West has declared unilateral disarmament. We don't believe in our values anymore and instead believe in nothing, or more precisely, in everything. This is the religion of cultural relativism - that all cultures and beliefs are equal. The only universal value that the West seems to hold dear these days is that no one should have to be offended by anything. Our values have become as unsubstantial and pliable as a squishy tomato.

The problem with this is that fundamentalist adherents to Islam are not relativistic - they believe that Islam is the last religion and that its teachings in the Koran and the Hadith are perfect and absolute. Their values are like a sharp knife to our squishy tomato, so in a contest for the hearts and minds of some of the disaffected youth of Western cities, it is any wonder that the Islamists increasingly win?

The fight against Islamic terrorism is a fight about values and we can't fight it if we have disarmed ourselves. Our values - our original Enlightment values as expressed by John Locke and Thomas Paine - are the right ones, the moral ones, and if we aren't prepared to re-adopt and defend them then we will never win the battle of ideas against the evil of religious fundamentalism. We must decide what we believe in before we can defend it.

Left's Anti-Semitism is Unsurprising but Abhorrent

The current anti-Semitism scandal that has engulfed the British Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn has finally brought out into the open a particularly nasty trait of the political left-wing - its willingness to compromise any principles it may once have held to advance its cause of cultural relativism and identity politics.

Conservative US writer Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism wrote about how modern so-called liberal politics has common roots with Fascism and Nazism due to its origins in the late-19th/early-20th Century progressivism. The early progressives believed in 'scientific racism' and eugenics, which found their way not only into the writings of Adolf Hitler and but also into the policies of progressive US presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The liberal left today likes to make out that it is antithetical to racism but you only have to go back a few decades to find prominent left-of-centre politicians who were openly racist (e.g. 1972 US Democratic Party presidential candidate George Wallace was a supporter of race segregation policies).

The reason for the current anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party has more recent and prosaic origins - the rise of Islam in modern day Britain. In northern cities like Bradford and London suburbs like Tower Hamlets, the population is increasingly Muslim - and often it is a fundamentalist version of Islam that is practised by the adherents of that faith in their enclaves. You cannot be elected in these areas without being at least anti-Israel and preferably anti-Semitic to boot. The left-wing is fond of explaining that there is a difference between being anti-Israeli and being anti-Semitic and while I agree that is true in theory, in practice it is a distinction that is increasingly hard to make.

The left-wing portrays anyone who warns against the advance of Islam as racist, but of course Muslims are not a race at all but rather adherents of a religion or, more precisely, a theocratic political philosophy. It is a philosophy that is antithetical to Western values such as individual rights, freedom of speech and equality of opportunity, but it is not confined to one particular racial or ethnic group and there is nothing racist about opposing such a philosophy. Jews, on the other hand, are a race in the sense that they almost all share a relatively recent genetic origin (e.g. see this Wikipedia article for information about scientific studies of Jewish genetic ancestry).

I am not a Zionist. I do not believe that Jewish people have any a priori claim on the land that is now the State of Israel or any of its neighbouring territories. However, I do think that Israel has a right to peaceful existence by virtue of the fact that it is (for the most part) a non-aggressive, rights-respecting, democratic state (and, in fact, it is pretty much the only country in the Middle East that has these characteristics).

Left-wingers are the first to promote the cause of indigenous people as part of their identity group grievance-mongering. The fact is that the Jewish people are as close to indigenous to the area of modern Israel as any endemic people anywhere in the world. Other than a few decades in the 1st Century A.D. when the Romans expelled most Jews from what was then called Palestine, there have been ancestors of today's Jewish people in that area since antiquity (and you don't need to buy the whole Moses and twelve tribes mythology to accept this historical fact). So left-wingers who oppose Israel are hypocritical at best.

I believe everyone is entitled to their beliefs and to express those beliefs but I also detest those who for political reasons judge people, favourably or negatively, on the basis of some inherent group trait. The identity politics of the left-wing does precisely that. It is 'groupism' (which incidentally is a literal translation of 'Fascism') and when it comes from the hypocritical left-wing, it is particularly abhorrent.

The problem isn't Islam, it is us.

Another day, another terrorist attack, this time at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. I have the deepest sympathy for those who have lost loved ones and others who will have to nurse broken and maimed bodies back into some semblance of a normal life. 

The Islamic State has claimed credit for the bombing, which was carried out by a 'Briton of Libyan descent', but unlike others I am not going to blame the Islamic faith, even though I have written before about my concerns about the tenets of that religion. The fact that so many of these terrorists are home-grown, often second or third generation descendants of immigrants who came to the West in search of a better life, should tell us something about the roots of the violence. These killers are not the advance guard of an external enemy, they are fifth columnists who want to destroy their own societies from within. The problem is not Islam, the problem is us.

I believe we in the West have incited this wave of Islamic terrorism in our midst at least in part because we have become cringing apologists for our own way of life. We teach our children that Western nations are the cause of every grievance of non-Western people all over the world. We maintain we were responsible for slavery, even though slavery was a universal fact of pre-Enlightenment human society and it was Britain that led the world in stopping the slave trade. We maintain we are racists and misogynists, despite the fact that we have built our modern societies on equal rights for all and have emancipated minorities throughout the world. We maintain that we entrench inequality, despite the fact that it is the Western values of free enterprise, property rights and the rule of law that are responsible for the vast majority of the world's population being lifted out of poverty over the last century.

A few days ago I listened to an excellent interview by Mark Steyn of Hollywood screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd that shed some light on the nature of the problem. Chetwynd served in the Black Watch regiment of the Canadian Army before going on to write dozens of scripts for films and television series and he talked about Hollywood's need to internalise the enemy. Thus, Tom Clancy's novel The Sum of All Fears, which was about Palestinian terrorists getting hold of an atomic weapon, became a film in which the bad guys were neo-Nazis. If you are watching the current Netflix series, Designated Survivor, you'll see a similar transformation. Hollywood is a magnifying lens for our culture and the fact that it always makes us the bad guys simply reflects our societal self-hatred.

If we keep telling ourselves that our society is the root of all the world's evil, is it any wonder that a few of the children and grandchildren of those to whom we are supposed to have done evil will nurture those grievances to the point where they want to destroy us? If we don't believe our society is worth defending, how can we possibly expect them to value it?

I don't think I have ever listened to an Ariana Grande song and I dare say I would find her music a little too saccharine for my tastes, but her concerts are very much part of the culture I value and want to defend. She would never be allowed on a stage in Riyadh or Khartoum and that is an indictment of those societies, not ours. The fact that millions of people from Islamic nations want to come and live in our countries, but not the reverse, is all the proof we need that our society is better than theirs. 

We need to stand up and defend Western society and values. We need to say that Islamic State and the like will never drag us down to their level and will never defeat us. Doing so won't necessarily stop the terrorist attacks, but at least it will make the battle lines clear and people will know what we are paying the price of terrorist attacks to defend. And it might just help a few of those second and third generation potential terrorists figure out who are really the good guys.

Michelle Obama's Pathetic Hashtag Photo Won't Help Kidnap Victims

My teenaged daughter has been invited to attend a protest march against the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamist militant group Boko Haram. The name Boko Haram means 'non-Muslim teaching is evil' and the group believes that Islam forbids the education of women entirely, which is why it targets girls in Nigerian state schools as kidnap victims (although the group's willingness to sell the girls into slavery suggests a more mercenary motive).

The protest will take place at Parliament Buildings in Wellington and has been organised by fellow pupils at her inner city girls school. To her credit, my daughter has decided not to join the protest, not because she doesn't care about the fate of the kidnapped girls - on the contrary, she is very upset by the matter - but because she realises the futility of protesting in New Zealand about the actions of terrorists half the world away. What these protestors want to achieve is unclear, unlike the aims of the kidnappers.

But as futile as the actions of these protestors are, they don't compare to the pathetic frivolousness of Michelle Obama's hashtag photo opportunity shown below. The US president's wife insults the victims of this horrible religious violence precisely because she is one of the few people in the world who has the ability to influence the outcome of this event.

There are only a handful of countries capable of rendering assistance to the kidnap victims. The United States, obviously, is one of these, but don't hold your breath waiting for President Obama to act. The President has shown himself to be a moral weakling where foreign policy is concerned. In Benghazi, he wasn't willing even to go to the aid of his own consular officials when the embassy there was attacked by an Al Qaeda militia on September 11, 2012. His so-called 'red-line' on the use of chemical weapons in Syria has counted for nothing, and his bluster on Ukraine is rightly treated as irrelevant by Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.

The first United States president to take his country to war against an external enemy was Thomas Jefferson, and the enemy in that case was Islamic pirates on the Barbary Coast who were kidnapping and enslaving American sailors. There is much that Jefferson would not admire today about the republic he helped establish but I think the thing he would least admire is the current president's lack of moral courage on matters of foreign policy. President Obama should be guided by the example of America's third president and take the fight to these Islamic extremists, wherever they are hiding, and his wife should drop the social media frivolity and urge her husband to grow a backbone.

US Intervention in Syria Will Fail

You would think the US Government would learn. Just when they are finally managing to extract themselves from Iraq and Afghanistan, they are doing their best to involve themselves in another insoluble conflict in the Middle East. You would think that they would have learned from the events in Libya and Egypt, where the best hopes of the Obama regime for peaceful transitions to democratically elected governments have become completely unstuck, resulting in a great deal of bloodshed and misery for the people of those countries.

America's ill-judged foreign policy produces the most deliciously ironic unintended consequences.

It was recently revealed, for example, that the Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated the 1953 military coup that overthrew the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq.  Of course, that really worked out well for the Americans when, a quarter-century later, Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the US puppet regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and ensured Iran became America's arch enemy for the next three decades.

One could also look to the earlier example of US support for Ibn Saud's conquest of the Arabian peninsular that resulted in the establishment in 1932 of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are the proponents of the particularly extremist Wahhabi form of Islam that inspired the brutal Taliban government in Afghanistan, which gave sanctuary to the Al Qaeda leadership that was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  Long before 9/11, America funded, armed and trained the Afghan Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and it was these rebels that eventually seized control and became the Taliban government.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that America's good intentions to promote its founding principles of individual freedom and human rights around the world has led to the abrogation of those principles at home. Anyone who has been to America in recent years will have seen the deterioration of personal freedom in that country. America has become a surveillance state that in many ways would be the envy of Soviet bloc governments, all in the name of protecting its people from attack by the very people it has armed.

Which brings us to Syria. The Obama administration is planning to bomb Syrian government targets in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons. I say "alleged" because at the time of writing the Americans cannot say with absolute certainty that Assad was responsible. Some commentators have speculated that the Islamist rebels could have used the weapons to provoke exactly the response against Assad that Obama is contemplating. One should not forget that these rebels have admitted committing appalling outrages of their own.  Another scenario, perhaps more likely, is that Assad has lost control of his own military leaders, one of whom chose to use the chemical weapons.

What is clear is that the situation in Syria not clear. If Obama orders cruise missiles launched at Syria, he will be throwing gasoline onto an already incendiary situation. He has admitted that he doesn't have an objective in mind for such a strike against the Assad regime. That being the case, he should not be surprised if the outcome turns out to be very much to the detriment of America's interests in the region and at home. America has done some dumb things around the world but this will surely be one of the dumbest.

The Year of the Deplorables (and some Greats)

Two Thousand and Sixteen will be remembered as the year of the Deplorables. The clever, considerate, right-thinking people that run the governments of Britain and the US had been doing what they always do - looking after their subjects who are too stupid to look after themselves - when the ungrateful hoards turned their backs and voted for Brexit and Trump. This was despite almost the entire news media, the smart people in academia and the bureaucracy, and most of the lovely people in the entertainment industry, telling them how they should vote and how racist, sexist and xenophobic they were to even consider not choosing Remain and Hillary. I mean, how dumb and ungrateful can people get?

The so-called Islamic State organisation claimed responsibility for bombings and terrorist attacks in Brussels, Baghdad, Kabul, Pakistan, Germany, Ohio, Cairo and Turkey (to name just a few) and there was the terrible attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida - but of course the thousands of deaths from terrorism in the name of Islam paled into insignificance against the true horror (if you believe Western governments and the mainstream media) that was Islamophobia, particularly that fomented by Donald Trump.

We had the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro with an opening ceremony that tried to out-propagandise the London one, this time on environmentalism, which was a bit rich considering Brazil has destroyed more rainforest than any other on earth and the host city was so polluted some athletes refused to compete because of fears for their health.

On the subject of sports, Ireland broke an 111-year losing streak by finally beating the All Blacks, the Chicago Cubs overcame the Curse of the Billy Goat to win the World Series (for which I was in North America, so had to take an interest), Novak Djokovic was finally dethroned after 200 weeks as the number one men's tennis player in the world by Andy Murray, and Muhammed Ali, whom I thought truly was The Greatest, died.

We also lost David Bowie, who died just after releasing a last album that presaged his death, followed by Prince and, later in the year, the eloquent Leonard Cohen, and Bud Spencer - the star of spaghetti westerns that I loved in my childhood. On a happier note, the Cuban people finally got rid of their murderous dictator, Fidel Castro, and hopefully his brother Raul won't be far behind.

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature and promptly proved he didn't deserve it by saying the award "was truly beyond words", and all of the rest of United States' Nobel winners were immigrants, demonstrating once again that immigrants usually aren't bludgers and criminals.

At the end of the year an undistinguished New Zealand prime minister (whose name I've already forgotten) resigned to be replaced by...er, the other chap.

And if some of the above depresses you, a Swedish author has a wonderful advent calendar on Twitter that makes you realise that 2016 was one of the best years ever to be alive on Earth (H/T Not PC).

Finally, I would like to thank those of you who read and commented on my blog. I have tried to keep up the regular posts, although overseas travel and some busy periods in my work thwarted my best intentions. As always, I resolve to do better next year. Merry Christmas!

Terrorist Acts by Islamic Radicals

The beheading of British Army drummer, Lee Rigby, in Woolwich, a suburb of London, has horrified people all round the world. It is perhaps the blatant nature of the attack in broad daylight on a busy English street, and the swaggering defiance of the perpetrators, that has made this incident all the more horrifying. The two men involved made it clear that they regarded the butchering of this soldier who had served in Afghanistan and Cyprus as just Islamic retribution for the killing of Muslims by Western governments.

We should not be surprised that young Muslim men commit such acts of violence. Despite the attempts of Western Islamic apologists to deny it, Islam is a religion of violence. The Prophet Mohammed exhorted his followers to slay those who refuse to follow his teachings. The reason beheading is popular as a method of following the Prophet's murderous precepts is that he specifically instructed his adherents  to use it: "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them" (Sura 8 verse 12).  I'm not sure whether the beheadings are usually accompanied by digitectomies, but perhaps the Prophet would have excused that minor lapse in protocol by his followers.

There is another reason why we should not be surprised at such acts of terror by Islamic extremists and that is because Western governments have ceded to the terrorists any moral high ground we once might have had.  It is appropriate that on the day of the killing of Lee Rigby, President Obama should make a speech justifying his use of unmanned drones against people he suspects of being terrorists, irrespective of their nationality and the likelihood of killing innocents.  The president claims the means justify the ends and that the drone strikes are carefully targeted, but of course this is the same argument that the Islamist terrorists make to justify their carefully planned and targeted acts of violence.  I can understand the need to resort to desperate measures in desperate times but there is nothing so desperate about the current state of America that justifies the abandonment of the fine principles on which it was founded.  The use of drones is contrary to the US Constitution, natural justice, the rule of law and international treaties such as the Geneva Convention.

I am not saying the killing of Lee Rigby was in any way justified – it was a despicable act of violence by two cowardly thugs - but we will never put an end to such acts by descending to the morality of the perpetrators.

The killers of Lee Rigby lost their humanity.  We shouldn't lose ours.

Truth in the 21st Century

There has been much made of 'fake news' recently and it is certainly true that we live in an era where there is a Newspeak-like inversion - truth is lies and lies are truth. However, the claims about what is fake news are themselves inverted with the accusations coming mostly from those who are greatest purveyors of fake news - the left-leaning mainstream media.

The fake news phenomenon is just the latest iteration of a culture war that has its origins in Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci's ideas about cultural hegemony. Gramsci believed there was no reality outside of human experience and he believed that only way to establish a Marxist world order was to undermine the existing cultural institutions and to impose a new reality that was conducive to Marxian thought. He cited the Catholic Church as an example of an institution that had so dominated European society that it had defined the way people perceived reality.

This is what George Orwell imagined so well in his novel 1984. The government in that story developed propaganda into such a science that it could change recorded history and nobody could imagine a world where the propaganda wasn't true. The aim was to make people incapable of questioning the apparent reality, such as 'we have always been at war with Eurasia', because every trace of evidence that it wasn't true has been erased. The fake news becomes reality.

We have seen this is in real life with the 97% scientific consensus on climate change. Hardly anyone knows where that claim came from (it was a study by Cook et al, which was been thoroughly debunked) and yet it has gained such currency that it doesn't matter that no one can cite the source and no one questions it. This is classic Gramsci - it is irrelevant that the claim is false because there is no objectively true or false state, and in any event established science is simply part of the cultural hegemony of capitalism. Impose a new cultural hegemony and, hey presto, whatever you want to claim can become true!

Of course there is an objective reality - one plus one does equal two, the Earth does orbit the Sun, and Donald Trump is the duly-elected president of the United States. No one has yet proved the Catholic Church's doctrine of the transubstantiation to be true, so that is not objective reality, however much the faithful might believe it to be so. Neither is much of what passes for news in the mainstream media, such as a rape crisis in US universities, an increase in racial violence under Trump, or that recent terrorist attacks have nothing to do with Islam.

The fact that Gramsci's philosophy is nonsense does not diminish how dangerous it is. It underpins so much of the left-wing's influence on accepted thought in modern Western societies and if it is not understood, it cannot be effectively opposed. The good news is that voters around the world seem to be pretty good at distilling reality from the fake news and making electoral choices in their own interests.

Crusades have had a bad rap

In 2015 President Obama invoked the Crusades in mitigation of modern day Islamic terrorism. One can only imagine why he felt the need to say anything that could be seen as a justification of the present day terrorist threat, but the fact that he had to go back to the 12th and 13th Centuries for an equivalent Christian crime speaks volumes about the relative progression of the two religions.

I have just read two books on the subject of the Crusades - or, more precisely, about people who participated in the those historical events. The first, God's Wolf by Jeffrey Lee, is a biography of Reynald de Châtillon, Prince of Antioch and Lord of Transjordan, who was the crusader knight most feared at the time by the Muslims. The second is Dan Jones' The Templars, an excellent history of the religious-military order that was the most effective fighting force to have participated in the Crusades.

I have always thought the Crusades get a bad rap from present day historians. They are cast as colonial aggression with superior Christian forces slaughtering the more honourable, endemic Islamic armies. Nothing could be further from the truth. The popular view ignores the fact that the Levant was Christian long before its was conquered by Islam in the 7th Century and before that it was Roman and Jewish. The Crusades weren't colonial aggression so much as a reconquest. It is true to say the Crusaders were brutal at times - the sacking of Jerusalem during the First Crusade in 1099 was perhaps the worst example - but the Muslims were no better, often slaughtering the civilians of the cities they overran and only sparing the lives of those they could enslave.

The books deal with two particular examples of the merciless battles that were typical of the Crusades. Reynald de Châtillon's great victory at Mont Gisard in 1177 saw the almost total annihilation of Saladin's army, but the sultan got his revenge at the Horns of Hattin in 1187, defeating the army of King Guy of Jerusalem and settling his grudge against Reynald by personally beheading the great knight (and thereby abandoning the chivalric convention of both sides that the captured leaders would be ransomed). Saladin eventually recaptured most of the Levant and despite several more crusades the Middle East remained Muslim, eventually becoming part of the Ottoman Empire until it was occupied by the Allied forces in World War One.

The need to recast all of history as a fight between Western oppressors and everyone else is just another symptom of the post-modernist, Marxist doctrine that dominates so much of scholarship today. We are told that Europeans should feel guilt for slavery, despite the fact that slavery was common to almost every society throughout human history and that it was the British who outlawed the international slave trade and gave effect to the ban with its naval power. Here in New Zealand we are encouraged to believe that colonial oppression and European diseases led to the decimation of the Maori population in the 19th Century, when in fact it was the intertribal warfare known as the Musket Wars that was the biggest factor in Maori population decline. And our children are taught that the Land Wars of the 1860s were a colonialist-Maori fight, despite the fact that more Maori fought on the side of the colonial government than for the rebel Maori tribes.

Winston Churchill reputedly said that history is written by the victors, but in the West we want to undermine our own history and self-flagellate ourselves in guilt at our civilisational success. We are fortunate that there are still historians such as Jeffrey Lee and Dan Jones who write fair and balanced histories of our culture that are as thrilling as they are informative.

2015 in Review - More Delusion and a Dose of Reality

Two Thousand and Fifteen has been an interesting year.

Internationally, we've seen a shattering of some myths - the most striking example being that terrorist incidents perpetrated by people shouting Allahu Akbar are 'nothing to do with Islam'. This has been asserted ad nauseum by so-called world leaders such as Obama, Cameron and Hollande after every attack by Islamic terrorists in recent years, including following the murders of those who worked for the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and the patrons of a Jewish supermarket in Paris. But by the end of the year the body count from the Islamic terrorist attacks at a Paris sports stadium, a concert venue and several cafés was so large that these dishonest deflections were wearing a little thin even amongst those for whom 'diversity' triumphs any concept of objective morality. France's Socialist president, Francois Hollande, grew a backbone and launched airstrikes on ISIS strongholds in Syria, whereas Barack Obama did a Neville Chamberlain, achieving 'peace in our time' with the evil Islamic regime in Iran.

The only world leader who consistently showed backbone was Vladimir Putin, shrugging off criticism of his support for Ukrainian separatists to take charge in Syria by supporting President al-Assad's fight against ISIS. A bomb that brought down a Russian airliner was ISIS's retaliation and Turkey and Russia nearly came to serious blows after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet in November.

Socialism seemed to be on the rise again around the world. The Greeks voted in a Socialist government led by Alexis Tsipras and subsequently voted 'no' in a referendum on whether they should pay back their debts. Reality dawned later in the year when Tsipras went to the polls again to gain a mandate for his newly-negotiated debt repayment plan. 

Meanwhile in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the Marxist MP who had never held any office in his party, was elected leader of the UK Labour Party, and in the United States, the only credible alternative candidate to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination for the 2016 US presidential race is the former Socialist Party stalwart, Bernie Sanders. The Australian Liberal Government defenestrated Tony Abbott in favour of the oleaginous Malcolm Turnball and Canadian voters followed suit by ousting their sound but uncharismatic prime minister Stephen Harper in favour of the impeccably bien-pensant Justin Trudeau and his left-wing Liberals.  On the other hand, the awful Chauvistas of Venezuela and Kirchner of Argentina were defeated.

Scientifically, we saw some significant advances including liquid water found on Mars and the fly past of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft with its stunning images of that most remote world. There were signs of yet another mysterious particle from the Large Hadron Collider and the human epigenome (the molecular switches that can turn on or off individual genes in DNA) was mapped. But we also saw the triumph of pseudo-science in the signing of a global agreement to limit global temperatures to 2℃. Two hundred King Canutes and tens of thousands of their fellow travellers flew into shell-shocked Paris to delude themselves into thinking they can control the the world's climate. Good luck with that, fools!

I don't follow New Zealand news very much because most of it is of the 'village pump' variety - quaint and unimportant - but the biggest stories here were the Rugby World Cup win by the All Blacks and John Key's quixotic referendum to change the flag. More important in terms of New Zealand's future was our signing of the TPP free trade agreement involving 12 countries including the United States. 

In the blogosphere, while I wasn't personally as regular with my posts as I would have liked to have been, my favourite bloggers were as prolific as usual. I particularly enjoyed Lindsay Mitchell, Peter Cresswell, Mark Steyn, James Delingpole and Thomas Sowell this year. I was sad to see Mark Hubbard signing off this week - I trust this does not mean he has surrendered to the forces of darkness in the Fortress of Legislation. To all of you on the rational side of the debate, keep up the good work.

All that remains is to thank those who read my occasional posts, the few who commented, and those generous folk that linked to me from their blogs. Merry Christmas (in the most secular sense of that phrase) and a very prosperous 2016 to you!

Welcome to Reality, Lefties

I've been slow to start my blog posts for 2015, in part because I have been enjoying a wonderful New Zealand summer holiday with a large number of international family and friends, and partly because I felt that any further comment on the only topic worth writing about - the Islamic terror attacks in Paris - was redundant in view of the screeds that have been written on that subject already. But over the weekend a second, less dramatic but not unrelated international news report got me thinking. That second event was the massive drop in the value of the Euro against the Swiss Franc, occasioned by the decision of the Swiss central bank to stop propping up the Euro through massive buying of the common currency. Now what, you might wonder, do these two events have in common? The answer is that they are both massive reality checks for, and repudiation of, the conventional left-wing viewpoint of world affairs.

For years the political left-wing has been promoting the idea of cultural relativism, that is the view that there is social, scientific, economic or moral equivalence between all cultures. This view says that Western, liberal, democratic, capitalist societies are not in any way better than the most primitive, brutal and oppressive societies. Alongside cultural relativism, the left-wing also favours the notion of group identity, that is that we should not be judged as individuals but rather as a member of a culture, be it race, sex, religion or whatever group they (i.e. those doing the judging) choose to identify us with. Identity politics demarcates us into favoured and unfavoured groups, usually determined by our supposed victimhood. Therefore, African-Americans are favoured because they were once slaves and are still arguably the subject of some discrimination, while European-Americans are unfavoured because they aren't identified as victims (various European genocides notwithstanding). Likewise, women are good, men bad; gays are good, 'straights' bad; and, in the latest cause du jour, Muslims are good, Christians bad.

I'm sure you can already see a contradiction between these two ideas that are held as articles of faith by the left-wing. If there is equivalence between all cultures then how can it make sense to judge people on the basis of their culture?

The shootings in Paris, as dreadful as they were, couldn't have presented the contradictions of left-wing dogma better than if they had been staged to do so. In the Charlie Hebdo shootings, a group of left-wing journalists (the high priests of their social justice religion) were shot for exercising their right to satirize Islam. Cultural relativism came face-to-face with identity group politics and it was amusing (no, actually appalling) watching the contortions of politicians such as Barack Obama and Francois Hollande as they tried to steer a line between condemning the attacks whilst avoiding assigning any blame to the religion with which the perpetrators identified. If there was any doubt about the explicit aims of those responsible, it was removed in the second attack on a Jewish grocery store, a shocking in-your-face repudiation of all the weasel words about the Charlie Hebdo attack that had issued from Western politicians.

Which brings me to the collapse of the value of the Euro against the Swiss Franc. The political left-wing and economists who sympathise with their aims believe in the boundless benevolent power of the state when it comes to economic matters. They believe they can magic money out of thin air, so long as that money is used for government spending that is directed towards 'worthy' consumption. Of course, history teaches us that states cannot just print money without it eventually debasing the value of the currency (i.e. causing inflation). The European Union and the United States have both been making new money in huge quantities to fund their profligate spending. They have got away with it to date because, like the emperor's minions, everyone has turned a blind eye to their monetary nakedness. In the case of the Europeans, the Swiss had agreed to support this economic farce by pretending the Euro continued to maintain its value against their franc. What the Swiss National Bank did last week was to abandon the pretence and the Euro went down by more than 30% in a day. The Swiss did what they did for a very obvious reason - they couldn't afford to keep buying Euros to maintain its value (Switzerland's reserves of Euros amounted to the equivalent of 70% of its GDP prior to the fall). What has just happened to the Euro is a demonstration of what is going to happen to the US Dollar once the world realises that its value is also built on pretence.

Maggie Thatcher is credited with saying that the facts of life are conservative. What she meant is that that sooner or later reality destroys left-wing illusions. You can't pretend every culture is equal and then be surprised when one of those cultures throws out the rule book and destroys everything that you value like free speech. And you can't be surprised when you magic billions of dollars out of thin air and then your currency collapses in value. Welcome to reality, lefties.

A Troublesome Inheritance

I am reading a lot of books at the moment (hence the previous blog post on books about Islam) and one that I have devoured recently is Nicholas Wade's controversial treatise A Troublesome Inheritance - Genes, Race and Human History. Wade's book has been heavily criticised because it rejects the modern politically correct view that race is purely a social construct. In many ways the validity of Wade's basic theory is obvious - through DNA testing geneticists can tell to a very high degree of accuracy a person's race (and in the event they are of recent mixed ancestry, their parents' and grandparents' races), and race is a key indicator of susceptibility to many inheritable diseases such as sickle cell anaemia. Furthermore, it is obvious that race is a strong indicator of intellectual and behavioural characteristics, e.g. people of Jewish descent are far more likely to be in occupations that require strong numerical skills such as banking or physics.

Wade goes further, however, and challenges the assumption of modern sociologists and anthropologists that human evolution stopped with the development of agriculture ten thousand years ago. He turns this view on its head and asserts that the progression from smaller-scale tribal societies to the large nation states that we know today is due, at least in part, to evolutionary factors. The corollary of this is that tribal systems of society that have survived into the modern era have done so because of genetic constraints on their ability to extend trust and cooperation beyond a small social group that has strong kinship ties.

This inevitably sounds a little racist although Wade is at pains to point out that he doesn't contend that any race is superior to another, only that different races have evolved to adapt to their different environments. I don't completely buy all of Wade's theory and some of the evidence he presents seems scant at best. However, it would help explain why tribal societies such as New Zealand's Maori and Australia's Aborigines find it so difficult to make a successful transition to modern, Westernised societies. Maori aspirations to return to more tribal-based forms of government and resource ownership are understandable if tribalism is built into their DNA. The problem is that tribalism is inconsistent with our modern, democratic, liberal social structures. If we assume that evolution, even at its most agile, will take many hundred of years to adapt to a significant environmental change, then that means the conflict between Western and tribal social structures is likely to be with us for a long time to come.