Category Archives: Democracy

Update II: The Dilemma Of The Dhimmi

Britain, Democracy, EU, Europe, Feminism, Islam, Jihad, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, The West

To condemn or not to condemn a “man [who is] behaving … just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six-year-old girl Aisha”—that is the question. An NIS News Bulletin, Via Jihad Watch, reports that the heroic Dutchman Geert Wilders—one of the few political leaders in the West to reject dhimmitude— “has compared the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.” What prompted the fearless leader of the ascendant Party for Freedom (PVV) to pipe up recently?

Over to NIS News:

Geert Wilders has seized on a news report from Saudi Arabia for peppery [sic] written questions to the cabinet. In these, he compares the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.

Wilders has requested clarification from Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen on a marriage in Saudi Arabia between an 80-year-old man and a 10-year-old child. The child had run away from her elderly husband, but was brought back to him by her father, the English-language website Arab News reports based on a Saudi newspaper.

Wilders asks the minister if he shares the view that “this man is behaving like a pig, just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six year old girl Aisha.” The PVV leader wants Verhagen to summon the Saudi Arabian ambassador to express his repugnance.

ROBERT SPENCER ponders the dhimmi’s dilemma:

[T]his puts those who will condemn Wilders in a peculiar position. If they take issue with his characterization of Muhammad, they will either be excusing the Muslim prophet’s marriage to a six-year-old and declining to condemn those Muslims who imitate their prophet by taking child brides, or, if they say that Muhammad didn’t actually marry a child, they’re in the position of denying evidence that is in the sources Muslims consider most reliable. Yet as this incident with the 80-year-old and his 10-year-old bride demonstrates ( “my marriage is not against Shariah,” said the codger), many Muslims take that evidence quite seriously.

Update I (August 31): JP writes: Jamie, you cannot try an Arab in his homeland based on Western Laws.

This is a point well taken and worth making. It is clear to me that unlike, say, an America leader, whose admonitions to the Arab world may carry the threat of an invasion, Wilders is merely being provocative. His intention and consistent modus operandi are to expose the West’s self-immolating left-liberalism. I believe the same is the case here. Where are the Hildebeest-type feminists on this?

My mention of Daniel Hannan, the new-found darling of American conservatives and libertarians, in this context, is only tangentially related. Nevertheless, I’ve been meaning to bring Hanna up. Here’s what he had to say about Wilders:

It’s true that Geert Wilders is a controversialist, who takes pleasure in causing offence. He needs 24-hour protection, so serious are the death-threats he has attracted from jihadis. He revels in offending liberals as well as Muslims: his call for the Koran to be banned struck me as rather inconsistent with his stated commitment to civic freedoms. I wouldn’t vote for him if I were Dutch.

My Netherlands-based family are proud supporters of the heroic Wilders, the only man to understand the stakes. Hannan here is very much in the sneering mode of Mark Steyn, who lauds the manner in which America has dealt with fractious immigrant populations, and distinguishes between the American and European melting pots. I don’t know if he is one, but neoconservatives of the deepest dye do not allow for the questioning of immigration policy with respect to the future of western liberal societies.

In “Get With The Global Program, Gaul” I noted:

“When America’s news cartel woke up to one of 2005’s biggest stories—Muslims running riot across France—the response from many a neoconservative was to gloat.

The Schadenfreude was tinged with a sense of American superiority. It’s not happening here because we’re better. And why are we superior? To listen to their accounts, it’s because we’ve submerged or erased aspects of the American identity. …

Perhaps the threat to both homelands is overplayed. I sincerely hope so—for the French and for us. But even if France isn’t the proverbial canary in the coal mine, shouldn’t Americans be rooting for this once-magnificent European country?

Not according to some prominent neoconservatives, for whom the destruction of 8,400 vehicles, dozens of buildings, and at least one life by the Muslim community of France has served to focus attentions on… the ‘bigoted’ French.” …

[SNIP]

Hannan has generally condemned the hard-right parties of Europe and the UK as “fascist,” which is vintage neoconservatism. (It is possible that this “turn” in Hannan’s politics came about after the savaging he endured for citing “Powell, the Conservative minister who was cast into the political wilderness after warning that open immigration would lead to ‘rivers of blood,” as a major political influence.”) And although I too dislike the protectionism and economic socialism of said parties, they do address the indispensable immigration issue.

Undeniably “exceptionally intelligent,” the man speaks a superb English, something that seduced me initially too. However, I soon discerned that even Hannan’s pronunciations about American liberties sundered under Obama were somewhat shallow, or strategically tailored to his role as a star among Republican TV hosts.
Yes, he knows well and repeats often the principles of dispersion and decentralization of power inherent in the American system. But, like so many neocons, he conveys the false idea that up until recently those principles had been respected. Hogwash. Obama is continuing on the path of his predecessor, and Bush built on the wrecking Clinton did. And before that… well you know the story.

Update II: Via Jamie. It would appear that Hannan does subscribe to the neoconservative concept of a propositional nation. Accordingly, and to quote from my upcoming book, a nation is nothing but a notion (the last is Buchanan’s turn of phrase), “a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.”

Updated: Doctor Distribution

Affirmative Action, Constitution, Democracy, Economy, Healthcare, Regulation, Socialism, The State

THE AMERICAN AFFORDABLE HEALTH CHOICES ACT OF 2009, the shamelessly euphemized title of Obama’s unaffordable, choice-limiting, health care takeover, makes no attempt to conceal its radical, energetic, race-based distributive impetus.

The following initiatives come under the PREVENTION AND WELLNESS (IV) and the WORKFORCE INVESTMENTS (V) sections of the Act’s Summary:

—A focus on community-based programs and new data collection efforts to better identify and address racial, ethnic, regional and other health disparities.
—Greater support for workforce diversity.

With state takeover of 20 percent of the economy, more massive, racially-based transfers of wealth and resources are in the offing.

Understandably the ACT is not easy to locate. The White House’s promises of transparency notwithstanding, I hunted high and low for the accursed thing, finally finding a link on the Heritage Foundation’s website to the Act.

As shamelessly does the ponce in power speak of taxing the “rich” so as to be able to pay for his profligacy. Was it those earning more than a million or half a million? Is this equality under the law? As Peter Schiff has pointed out, “While the government has the constitutional power to tax to ‘promote the general welfare,’ it does not have the right to tax one group for the sole and specific benefit of another. If the government wishes to finance national health insurance, the burden of paying for it should fall on every American. If that were the case, perhaps Congress would think twice before passing such a monstrosity.”

Not once will you hear the following question from the pols and their media support system:

Is it constitutional?

All you’ll hear is:

How many Americans want it?

A nation of laws? Who are we kidding. This is a tyranny of the mindless, wayward majority.

Update (July 26): I understand “Moon Man’s” justified passions, but, at times, the Fed issue becomes a blanket charge. Who exactly are those earning half a million to a million depreciated dollars? Small business owners. Those of you who work in the corporate world, outside Wall Street, know that few and far between are the high-ups who garner such wages. The rich, middle-class entrepreneur: that’s who Obama is looking to filch without flinching.

Update II: The Din For Democracy

Affirmative Action, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, Iraq, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Republicans, South-Africa

After visiting South Africa, Eli Kedourie, “noted student of nationalism,” wrote in the South Africa International:

“If majority and minority are perpetual, then government ceases to have a mediatory or remedial function, and becomes an instrument of perpetual oppression of the minority by the majority. … The worst effects of the tyranny of the majority are seen when parliamentary government on the unalloyed Westminster model is introduced into countries divided by religion or language or race. Such for example was the case of Iraq … where an extremely heterogeneous society came to be endowed with constitutions which made no provision for diversity, and where the result was tyranny of one groups over the other groups in the society.”

Kedourie was not the only sensible scholar who pointed out the obvious. But that’s history—South Africa is history.

Why are such voices not heeded today? America’s make-up is changing. Through mass immigration, it too is moving toward becoming a racially and ethnically stratified country, in which democracy will be ever ruthlessly wielded as a weapon of the usurping majority. Yet the din for democracy grows among the conservative and neoconservative cadre.

From “Exporting Democracy”:

Political democracy on the other hand, is a “leftist” idea. Why? Because it inevitably leads to a massive consolidation of power, centralized especially in the national government.

Democracy, like leftism, is un-American. It is, in fact, a foreign pollutant that wafted over the Atlantic from the French Revolution. And like a wild weed, it took root in the republic’s soil, growing out of control.

Update I (July 2): The post addresses a specific aspect that makes democratic mass-society unworkable. The premise of Mr. Kraus, hereunder, is that all cultures are equally prone to the principles of the Enlightenment. Nothing a little show of Western pride won’t fix. I vehemently disagree. The historical population of America is becoming progressively more ignorant of the principles of freedom by the day. But dissolving the American people and electing another—which is what America’s centrally planned immigration policy aims at—will ensure freedom is never revived, as immigration policies privilege Third World immigrants. Please refer to my immigration archive. Democracy, for what it’s worth, works in small, relatively homogeneous societies, like Denmark (although that country too is becoming too riven by religious and racial strife to work).

Update II: Mr. Kraus, there is nothing “unorganized” about the “multicultural noise machine.” Identity politics is highly organized and emasculating. If the latest affirmative action case tells you anything it is that by nature, the Anglo-American WASP tends to go quietly into that good night. He is expected to so do. (In fact, others of their ilk on this blog have reprimanded Ricci for daring to seek redress, instead of doing what WASPS do; hunker down and get used to losing.)
Empires have been decimated by the barbarians from within and without. You can’t do much about your own barbarians, except try and educate them. But why import more?

Update II: 'The Narcissism Revolution'

America, Democracy, Foreign Policy, History, Intelligence, Iran, Old Right, Propaganda

Richard Spencer of Taki’s Magazine makes astute observations about the cloying American coverage of what he dubs “The Narcissism Revolution.” “The blogosphere has been far worse. If Republicans are saying, ‘We’re all Iranians now!’ then with the bloggers it’s, ‘The Iranians are all Americans now!’ It’s the Narcissism Revolution, and everything that happens in Tehran is, pretty much, all about us.”

Richard captures the self-absorption madness. To apply his whipping words to McCain (they were meant for Jonah Goldberg): “Hate to break it to [you], but [Iranians] don’t like you, they really don’t like you.”

Does anyone think Iranians are hanging on the words of the sanctimonious moron who let loose with the ditty, “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran”? I don’t think so.

I don’t get the National Geographic Channel. My impression is that it’s stacked with skirts such as Lisa Ling, transmitting the propaganda du jour, as they travel through “dying” forests and straddle “dissolving” icecaps.

Now that Ling is preoccupied getting her sister free after the latter was caught nosing around in North Korea, they’ve allowed an intelligent man, in-the-know, to impart to a mind-numbingly ignorant people something of the history of American interference with Iran.

I believe Michael Scheuer is associated with “Iran and the West,” although I can’t see his name among the list of credits.

It should be worth watching.

Update I (June 22): “The Narcissism Revolution” is in full swing. Glenn Beck, indistinguishable from the neocons on foreign affairs, entertained a guest on his show, from one of the Spread Democracy think tanks. The man said, and I paraphrase, “the Iranians are holding up signs in English; they are speaking to us.” As Spencer observed, “It’s all about us.” The same contention I’ve heard made repeatedly by the Republican Mullahs.

Update II (June 23): A good post by Prof. Bainbridge, who conjures Russel Kirk in support of the paleo-libertarian, in my case, (paleo-conservative in Buchanan’s case) mitts-off approach to Iran:

Of Bush 41’s war on Saddam, Kirk wrote that: “Now indubitably Saddam Hussein is unrighteous; but so are nearly all the masters of the “emergent” African states (with the Ivory Coast as a rare exception), and so are the grim ideologues who rule China, and the hard men in the Kremlin, and a great many other public figures in various quarters of the world. Why, I fancy that there are some few unrighteous men, conceivably, in the domestic politics of the United States. Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? Just that is what happened in the Congo, remember, three decades ago; and nowadays in Zaire, once called the Belgian Congo, we zealously uphold with American funds the dictator Mobutu, more blood-stained than Saddam. And have we forgotten Castro in Cuba?” To which one might now add Hamas in Gaza.

Kirk pointed out that the policies of Bush 41 resulted in a situation in which, “in every continent, the United States is resented increasingly as the last and most formidable of imperial systems.”

Bush 43 made that situation even worse by trying to impose democracy by military means.

And that’s what paleos despise.

Concludes Bainbridge: “I’ve changed my mind in recent days about Obama’s handling of this issue. On this issue, I think he’s being remarkably prudent in Kirk’s sense of the word.”